Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Brian Miorescu, author of The Immortality Key,
00:00:05 The Secret History of the Religion with No Name, a book that reconstructs the forgotten history of
00:00:10 psychedelics in the development of Western civilization. To support this podcast,
00:00:16 please check out our sponsors, Insight Tracker, GiveWell, NI, Indeed, and Masterclass. Their links
00:00:24 are in the description. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here’s my conversation with Brian
00:00:31 Miorescu. Who or what do you think God is? How has our conception, maybe put another way,
00:00:39 of God changed throughout history? We’re starting with an easy one, Lex.
00:00:43 Yep. So, what is God? Well, God is a thought. God is an idea, but its reference is to that which is
00:00:55 beyond thinking, beyond our ability to even conceive, beyond the categories of being and
00:01:02 nonbeing. So, how do we talk about that? To talk about it is almost to get it wrong, right? So,
00:01:07 Joe Campbell famously said that any God that is not transparent to transcendence is like an
00:01:14 idolatry because it’s just a mental construct, and it can’t possibly speak to the incomprehensible.
00:01:20 So, we use poetic language. We say the being of beings, the infinite life energy of the universe,
00:01:28 the mystery of transcendence, boundless life, unqualified isness, but it doesn’t quite get to
00:01:35 the point. I think that if there’s any great insight from mysticism, it’s that you and I
00:01:41 participate with God in a very real way, Lex Friedman, here in Austin, Texas, that in the here
00:01:48 and now to touch that eternal principle, another way to refer to God, to touch that eternal principle
00:01:54 within ourselves is to participate with divinity in some way. So, not an external force, but
00:02:02 that divine sense within. So, there’s some aspect in which God is a part of us. So, one, it’s the
00:02:07 thing we can’t describe. It represents all of the mystery around us. It’s outside our ability to
00:02:13 comprehend, and at the same time, it’s somehow the thing that’s inside of us also. The ultimate
00:02:19 paradox. Mechthild of Magdeburg, 13th century German mystic, maybe the first German mystic,
00:02:25 says that the day of her spiritual awakening was the day that she saw and knew that she saw God
00:02:32 in all things and all things in God. And so, we can say this, by the way, without apology or
00:02:37 lightweight theology or vapid speculation or even heresy. We can talk about this,
00:02:45 including within the Abrahamic faiths. The mystical core of these faiths all talk about
00:02:49 the encounter of divinity within. That’s what I explore in the immortality key, this notion of
00:02:56 techniques, archaic techniques in some cases, of ecstasy, that allow that experience of the
00:03:02 eternal principle to actually rise up in our consciousness when we’re still here as flesh and
00:03:07 blood beings. There’s some sense in which our conception of God, though, is conjured up by
00:03:15 our own mind. And so, aren’t we creating God? Aren’t we the gods that are creating the idea of
00:03:26 God? When we talk about God, aren’t we playing with ideas that are created by our mind and
00:03:36 thereby we are the creator, not God? This is a very kind of cyclical question, but in some sense,
00:03:46 I mean that if God is the thing that represents the mystery all around us, contrast that with
00:03:55 our conception of God, the way we talk about him, is more a creation of our minds. It’s not the
00:04:01 mystery. It’s our struggle to comprehend the mystery. And therefore, we’re creating the God
00:04:07 in terms of the God that we’re talking about in this conversation or in general, if that makes any
00:04:12 sense. It makes no sense whatsoever. Great. This is wonderful. But this is the eternal mystery.
00:04:21 This is why it’s so difficult to talk about, and yet it could be the very center of our beings.
00:04:27 The Upanishads speak about us as the creators, about us as gods. It’s a very different creation
00:04:33 myth, but the God of the Upanishads in this great verse talks about pouring themselves into
00:04:41 creation. Indeed, I have become this creation, says God. And there’s a great line, verily he or
00:04:48 she who knows this becomes in this creation a creator. So, yeah, I mean, just our ability to
00:04:56 engage in mentation, our ability to think about this stuff is partly our divine nature. This is
00:05:02 what the humanists were talking about in the Renaissance, by the way. And that it’s not so much
00:05:08 learning, putting dots together, having arguments with each other over learned books. It’s a
00:05:15 process of unlearning, is what some of the mystical traditions talk about. Unlearning all these
00:05:21 thoughts, emotions, traumas, and experiences that have gone into the false construction of our false
00:05:27 self, that behind all these layers, like peeling back the onion, is a part of us that once you can
00:05:34 identify that, begins to look a little bit different. In other words, it’s one thing to
00:05:40 foster a relationship with God. It’s a very different thing to identify as God. And I mean
00:05:47 that quite literally, without being heretical. You can find this in the mystery traditions.
00:05:52 Can you expand on this? You mean a human being can embody God?
00:06:00 That is textbook incarnational theology that you can find in any Christian mysticism.
00:06:07 But you can find it in the mystical tradition of Islam and Judaism as well. So, Rumi, for example,
00:06:14 the great Sufi mystic talks about, if you could get rid of yourself, just get rid of yourself just
00:06:22 once, the secret of secrets would open to you. That the face of the unknown would appear on the
00:06:28 perception of your consciousness. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, a modern day Christian,
00:06:33 of your consciousness. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, a modern day contemporary mystic,
00:06:38 talks about, because this stuff does continue, there’s a continuity to it.
00:06:42 The poetry here is incredible.
00:06:44 So, well, listen to Rabbi Kushner. He says that the emptying of selfhood
00:06:50 allows the soul to attach to true reality. And in Kabbalism, the true reality is what’s called
00:06:56 the divine nothingness, ayin. And so, I like the adage that atheists and mystics both essentially
00:07:03 believe in nothing, except that the mystics spell it with a capital N, the divine nothing.
00:07:10 And then I’ll give you Meister Eckhart, another medieval Christian mystic. He says that
00:07:16 if you could not yourself, the same concept, if you could not yourself for just an instant,
00:07:22 indeed, I say less than an instant, you would possess all. So, again, you’re seeing the same
00:07:27 thing in Sufism, Kabbalism, Christian mysticism. The way to identify with the divine is to peel
00:07:33 back these layers and attempt to discover pure awareness.
00:07:38 If we look at the universe from a physics perspective, or, you know, I’m a computer
00:07:41 science person, so if the universe is a computer, there’s some sense that God, the creator of the
00:07:53 universe, or just the computer itself, doesn’t know what the heck is going to happen. He just
00:07:58 kind of creates some basic rules and runs the thing. So, there is some element in which you
00:08:05 can conceive of humans or conscious beings or intelligent beings as a tool that the creator
00:08:13 uses to understand himself. Do you think that’s a perspective that we could or is useful to take on
00:08:24 God that is basically the universe created humans to understand itself? He doesn’t actually know
00:08:33 the full thing. He needs the human brains to figure out the puzzle. So, that’s in contrasting
00:08:39 to the unlearning to getting out of the way that we’ve talked about. It’s more like, no,
00:08:43 we need the humans to figure out this puzzle. Well, we have no answers to this, which is why
00:08:48 philosophers still have jobs, if they have jobs at all. But, I mean, so the physicists take a look
00:08:53 at this. Have you seen the article that came out, I think it was this month, in the Journal of
00:08:58 Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Robert Lanza, the biocentrism theory, the idea that the universe
00:09:04 comes into being through our observation, right, the whole, the God equation. So, not just in
00:09:10 quantum mechanics, but in general relativity, the idea that we make the universe moment by moment,
00:09:15 which is kind of mind blowing, gets into ideas of simulation. Okay, so that’s how the physicists,
00:09:21 at least some of them might look at it. You could also look back to the medieval Christian mystics,
00:09:26 Meister Eckhart, once again, says that the eye with which I see God is the same eye that sees me,
00:09:34 right? So, one sight, one knowledge, one love, another mind blowing concept. But this is why
00:09:42 the arts and poetry and music are so important, because although I love astroparticle physics,
00:09:47 it’s another to kind of hear this, the same message across time.
00:09:51 Yeah, the simulation thing. I was actually looking this morning at video games, just the statistics
00:09:58 on video games. And I saw that the two top video games in terms of hours played is Fortnite and
00:10:05 World of Warcraft. And I saw that it’s 140 billion hours, billion hours have been played of those
00:10:13 games. That’s a lot of video games. Yeah, but that’s very sophisticated worlds being created,
00:10:22 especially in the World of Warcraft. It’s a massive online role playing game. So you have
00:10:27 these characters that are together sort of creating a world, but they in themselves are also
00:10:33 developing, they have all these items, and they’re like, they’re little humans. Like there’s
00:10:37 complicated societies that are formed, they have goals, they’re striving and so on. And it’s,
00:10:41 we’re creating a universe within our universe. And for now, it’s a kind of, it’s a basic sort
00:10:48 of constraint version of our more richer earth like civilization. But it’s conceivable that,
00:10:55 you know, that we are this thing on earth is a kind of video game that somebody else is playing.
00:11:02 It’s like you can see sort of video games upon video games being created.
00:11:05 That, and this is something I think a lot about, not from philosophical perspective, but practically,
00:11:12 how fun does this video game have to be for us to let go of the silly pursuits in this meat space
00:11:19 that we live in and fully just stay in wow, stay in World of Warcraft, stay in the video game for
00:11:27 full time. So I think about that from an engineering perspective. Like is there going to be a time
00:11:32 when this video game is actual real life for us, and then the creatures inside the video game,
00:11:40 they’ll be just borrowing our consciousness, sort of to ground themselves will refer to us as the
00:11:46 gods. Right? Like, won’t we become the gods? This conversation is not going how I expected.
00:11:55 But I think about this a lot from, you know, because I love video games, and I wonder more
00:12:00 and more of us, especially in COVID times, are living in the digital world. You could think about
00:12:06 Twitter and all those kinds of things. You could think about clubhouse people using just voices to
00:12:10 communicate with little icons, sort of in the digital space, you could see more and more will
00:12:15 be moving in the digital space and let go of this physical space. And then the remnants of the
00:12:23 ancients that created the video games, that nobody centuries from now will even remember,
00:12:29 those will be the gods. And then there’ll be gods upon gods being created. This is the kind of stuff
00:12:34 I think about. But is that any at all useful to you to this thought experiment of a simulation?
00:12:40 Basically, the fabric of our reality, how did it come to be? What is running this thing? Is that
00:12:46 useful? Or is it ultimately the project of understanding God, of understanding myth,
00:12:52 is the project that centers on the human, on the human mind, for you?
00:12:58 Hmm. We seem to be at the center of this divine dance, which sounds awfully anthropocentric.
00:13:05 But the ancients thought about this too. I mean, the concept in Sanskrit of lila, that the point
00:13:11 behind existence is this play, right? It’s ultimately playful, this divine dance. It gets
00:13:17 awfully complicated in the Gnostic and Neoplatonic schools, these chains of being from God head down
00:13:25 to us, right? Some invisible, right? And we’re gonna get into Terence McKenna territory later
00:13:31 on, but we can start now by talking about discarnate entities and archons and aliens
00:13:37 and archetypes. I mean, there is a world where Terence McKenna does meet Plato and Gnosticism
00:13:43 quite kindly, and that’s in this invisible college, right? The invisible world with which we seem to
00:13:51 have some kind of symbiosis that has a higher intent, maybe even a purpose or a plan in mind
00:13:58 for us. So, I mean, these ideas come across when you’ve had a heroic dose of mushrooms.
00:14:03 They also pop up in the ancient philosophical literature, this idea of archons who, you know,
00:14:08 the puppet masters controlling us flesh and blood beings. It’s all a cosmic dance, and there are no
00:14:16 answers to this. First, who are the archons? And second, what is this world where Terence McKenna
00:14:20 meets Plato? Do you mean in the space of ideas, or are we talking about some kind of world that
00:14:25 connects all of consciousness throughout human history? I think through different techniques,
00:14:29 it is, you know, I think a lot about, I think Gordon Wasson is the meeting point of the two.
00:14:33 So, Gordon Wasson, who I do talk about in the book, was this J.P. Morgan banker turned
00:14:39 ethnomycologist, and he’s largely credited with the rediscovery of psilocybin containing mushrooms,
00:14:46 which kind of gave rise to the pop psychedelic revolution of the 1960s. He visited Maria Sabina
00:14:52 down in Mexico. In his wake went Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, the Stones, and everybody else.
00:14:58 And the way he describes his psilocybin experience is a bit strange because he thinks of
00:15:03 Plato, right? And he says that, you know, whereas our ordinary reality is kind of this imperfect
00:15:09 view of things, Gordon Wasson felt that on mushrooms, he was spying the archetypes.
00:15:15 And he talks about Plato, and he writes about the archetypes in this famous article that’s
00:15:19 released in 1957 in Life magazine. And so, a well read individual from the mid 20th century has his
00:15:26 his premier psychedelic experience, and out comes Plato because what he was witnessing was so sharp,
00:15:33 so brilliant, so detailed, in some sense, more real than real, this noetic sense that William
00:15:40 James talks about, that when you confront something more real than real, these discarnate
00:15:45 entities, these images, these visionary motifs, you’re tempted to believe that you’ve tapped into
00:15:52 the truest nature and the underlying structure of the cosmos. And that’s difficult to escape from,
00:15:57 whether you’re Plato or Terence McKenna or Gordon Wasson caught in between.
00:16:02 Can we talk about this being in touch with something that is more real than real?
00:16:07 And let’s just go straight there to McKenna before we return to the bigger picture.
00:16:11 So he’s talked about the, what is it, self healing machine elves?
00:16:16 Self transforming.
00:16:17 Self transforming machine elves during his DMT travels. And I just talked to Rick Doblin,
00:16:25 who also had different travels to this hyperspace. But they all seem to be traveling on the same
00:16:32 spaceship, just the different locations. And there is a sense in which they seem to be traveling
00:16:38 through whatever, I don’t know if it’s through space time or something else,
00:16:42 to meet something that is more real than real. What can you say about this DMT experience,
00:16:48 about Terence McKenna, about the poetry he used, but maybe more specifically about
00:16:54 this place that they seem to all travel to?
00:16:57 So the big question is, is it real? Is it really more real than real? The ancient philosophers
00:17:01 were asking the same question and their means of attempting to answer that was by dying.
00:17:06 And so if you ask Plato the definition of philosophy, he will say that to practice it
00:17:12 in the right way is to practice dying and being dead. And many people describe the psychedelic
00:17:19 experience in sort of near death experience terms. And the encountering of all this visual
00:17:25 imagery tends to be something that is often described as more real than real. So how does
00:17:30 Terence talk about this? So I was just listening to the triologues, which folks should look up
00:17:35 somewhere between 1989 and 1990. Terence sits down with his friends, Ralph Abraham and
00:17:42 Rupert Sheldrake at Esalen. And they’re trying to figure out the meaning of these
00:17:48 discarnate entities and these nonhuman intelligences. And Terence develops a taxonomy
00:17:54 for how to analyze this. And he says that number one, they’re either semi physical,
00:18:01 but kind of elusive. So think of the Bigfoot or the Yeti or things like this. Beings that exist
00:18:07 somewhere between mythology and zoology, which isn’t really appropriate here. So option number
00:18:14 two, he says, is the mental. You’re dropping so many good lines. It’s so good. I apologize.
00:18:23 Somewhere between mythology and zoology. This is all Terence McKenna. I take no credit for this.
00:18:28 But you’re combining, you’re like, Jimi Hendrix only used the blues scale,
00:18:34 but he still created something new in the music he played. Anyway, go ahead.
00:18:39 We’re going into Mixolydian right now. So option number two, and this is what Terence calls sort
00:18:48 of the mentalist reductionist approach. And this is pure McKenna poetry. He says that these beings
00:18:55 could be autonomous fragments of psychic energy that have temporarily escaped the controlling
00:19:02 power of the ego. So in Jungian senses, these would just be pure projections, the projections
00:19:09 of schizophrenics in some cases. So they’re essentially unreal. And the third option,
00:19:13 the most tantalizing, is that they’re both nonphysical, but autonomous. In other words,
00:19:19 they actually exist in some kind of real place, in some kind of real space, and that we can have
00:19:25 Congress with them. There is communication. He talks about the whisperings of the demon artificers,
00:19:32 and that it’s just possible that our meetings with these beings have coaxed the human species
00:19:38 into self expression in a very real way, that at different times in history, our relationships with
00:19:44 these semi autonomous beings may actually guide the species. Now, this is high speculation,
00:19:52 and Terence and Ralph and Rupert wind up talking about the early modern period and the scientific
00:19:59 enlightenment, and that even someone like Descartes reports a dream in which he came face
00:20:04 to face with an angel who said that the conquest of nature is to be achieved through measure and
00:20:11 number. So even the hard minded materialist like Descartes is confronting these discarnate entities.
00:20:19 John Dee in the 16th century, the high magician of the Elizabethan court,
00:20:25 he reports decades worth of what we would say is extraterrestrial communication,
00:20:30 or interdimensional communication. And you can find instances of this throughout history,
00:20:37 including among the pre Socratics. And Peter Kingsley writes quite a bit about this, but I’ll
00:20:42 save that until your next question. Well, first of all, we don’t seem to understand from where
00:20:47 intelligence came from. We don’t understand from where life came from on Earth. But that we can
00:20:53 kind of intuit because it’s the space of chemistry and biology have good theories about the origins
00:20:57 of life on Earth. But the origins of intelligent life, that is a giant mystery. And there’s some
00:21:05 sense in which, I mean, I don’t know if you know the movie 2001 Space Odyssey. But it does seem
00:21:11 that there’s like important throughout human history, throughout life on Earth, there’s
00:21:17 important phase shifts of it feels like something happened, where there’s big leaps. It could be
00:21:26 something coincidental, like fire and learning how to cook meat and all those kinds of things.
00:21:31 But it feels like there could be other things. And I think that’s at the core of your work is
00:21:36 exploring what those things could be. Is there, is it possible? Talked about Joe Rogan off line.
00:21:44 Is it entirely possible? Is it possible that psychedelics have in fact contributed of being
00:21:52 an important source of those phase shift throughout human history of the intellect, basically steering
00:21:59 the intellectual development and growth of human civilization. It’s a hypothesis worth
00:22:06 investigating. How about that? Beautiful. And maybe not psychedelics in and of themselves,
00:22:11 but I think our whole conversation is kind of wrapped up in these non ordinary states of
00:22:17 awareness. We start by talking about God, which is something unordinary and expansive. And I think
00:22:23 that as you trace the intervention of divinity, if that’s the case, throughout human history,
00:22:31 you have to bump up against the irrational. And Mursi Eliade, the great scholar of religions and
00:22:38 fellow Romanian said that the history of religions essentially constitutes the point of intersection
00:22:44 between metaphysics and biology. So that we are biological beings who do interact with our planet,
00:22:51 with the natural kingdom. And you would think that as, you know, early archaic ecologists,
00:22:57 we would have figured out what plants work, which fungi don’t and developed maybe language around
00:23:04 that. And so this is another one of McKenna’s speculative, but very interesting hypotheses,
00:23:11 the stone and ape theory. Is it possible that psychedelics were involved in one of the several
00:23:17 leaps forward? You mentioned the word leap. Jared Diamond talks about the great leap forward 60,000
00:23:23 years ago. The species had been around for a couple hundred thousand years. All of a sudden,
00:23:28 the cave painting appears. All of a sudden there’s a phase shift. Did something like that happen
00:23:34 millions of years ago? And I love the way Paul Stamets talks about this. It would be the ingestion
00:23:39 of perhaps psilocybin containing fungi millions and millions of times over millions and millions
00:23:47 of years. So it’s not just a one time event that cascades, but it’s the accumulation
00:23:52 of psychedelic experience. It’s really difficult to test that hypothesis. But I’ve been talking
00:23:59 with a paleoanthropologist in South Africa, my friend Lee Berger, about ways that we might test
00:24:06 for this. And so Lee, amongst many things, is this national geographic explorer. He’s the
00:24:12 paleoanthropologist’s paleoanthropologist at the University of Witwatersrand. He’s famous,
00:24:18 amongst other things, for the discovery of previously undiscovered hominids like Homo
00:24:22 naledi. And there’s an interesting point. So naledi is this archaic hominid, morphologically
00:24:33 archaic, but it dates to about 300,000 years ago, which is very strange. What’s even more
00:24:39 strange about Homo naledi at the Rising Star cave system there in South Africa is that Lee
00:24:44 believes he’s discovered the first bipedal ape deliberately disposing of its dead.
00:24:51 So there is a recognition of self mortality and the practicing of rituals around death. We’re
00:24:58 talking about burials. And if you have burials, says Lee, in an archaic hominid 300,000 years ago,
00:25:05 maybe you have language. And I mentioned that because Terence McKenna was obsessed
00:25:10 with language in the stoned ape theory, that the ingestion of psilocybin in addition to enhancing
00:25:16 visual acuity, perhaps facilitating sexual arousal, leads to proto language.
00:25:23 Now, isn’t it interesting, this could be entirely a coincidence, that the largest sound inventory
00:25:30 of any language is the Khoisan of Botswana and Namibia. They have something like 164 consonants
00:25:37 and 44 vowels. English, by comparison, has about 45. So I don’t know what to make of this, but what
00:25:43 you find in that part of the world is very, very complex language. Language that could be an
00:25:50 inheritance, language that could be incredibly archaic, together with this recognition of self
00:25:56 mortality. And when I talk to Lee Berger, we say, when you’re looking at universals like that,
00:26:01 language around all human populations, the recognition of self mortality, the contemplation
00:26:07 of death, just maybe you have pharmacology. And so maybe we can go out and test for this
00:26:13 using gas chromatography, mass spectrometry, proteomics, technology that doesn’t even exist,
00:26:18 but maybe we can actually test the stoned ape theory to figure out once and for all,
00:26:23 if there’s any merit there. Can you just linger a little bit on the pharmacology tools?
00:26:27 Like how would it be possible to say something about what was being ingested so, so long ago?
00:26:34 That’s what I asked Dr. Berger. So Lee has discovered in the dental calculus of archaic
00:26:43 hominids. Dental calculus. I like this. Evidence of their diet. And you might not believe how old
00:26:50 this was, but in sedeba, Australopithecus sedeba, they found evidence of sedeba’s diet going back
00:26:57 two million years. So through things like phytoliths, which are essentially fossilized
00:27:04 plant tissue, they found evidence that sedeba was eating bark and leaves and grasses and fruits and
00:27:12 palm. So no psychedelics to speak of, but it just goes to show that through things like dental
00:27:18 microwear analysis and other techniques that we’re still developing, we can actually figure out what
00:27:23 the diet was at the time. I’ll fast forward to 50,000 years ago. There was another study out of
00:27:29 El Cidrón Cave in 2012, which found that Neanderthals, again, preceding our species
00:27:34 50,000 years ago, were ingesting yarrow and chamomile, which had been identified as medicinal.
00:27:41 So again, not psychedelic or psychoactive, but we kind of have the beginnings of the technology,
00:27:47 and that was nine years ago, to begin figuring out the ancestral diet of these hominids.
00:27:53 Presumably there could be a way to figure out, it’s not just diet, but which have psychoactive
00:27:59 elements to them. So whether you’re chewing it, whether you’re smoking it, whether, I mean, I don’t
00:28:03 know, licking it. I don’t know if there’s any kind of ways through the dental calculus to figure out
00:28:09 what exact substances were being consumed. Is it possible to figure out whether psychedelic
00:28:15 substances are being consumed by looking at human behavior, like you said, organized burials
00:28:22 or cave paintings? No, but so that’s a little bit of a stretch to say, like, where did this
00:28:28 leap come from? But it’s not. It’s not. So just last fall, as a matter of fact, so that notion
00:28:34 has been out there for a while, the idea that hallucinogens and the ritual consumption of
00:28:38 hallucinogens were somehow related to the great leap forward, were somehow related to the initial
00:28:43 cave painting. Graham Hancock wrote a beautiful book about this called Supernatural, which in
00:28:48 many ways like sent me down this rabbit hole back in 2007. But even at the time when he was writing
00:28:53 that and the year subsequent, it was still kind of seen as a kooky idea. Last fall, interestingly
00:29:01 enough, the first archeochemical data for the ritual consumption of psychedelics associated with
00:29:08 cave art was finally published. It’s not that ancient. It’s only about 400 or 500 years ago,
00:29:13 but it came from the Pinwheel Cave, a Chumash site in California. And what they found were
00:29:19 datura quids, like these chewed up, you mentioned, how did they ingest it? These chewed up quids,
00:29:24 like these bunches of datura, which contain these very powerful tropane alkaloids and what was
00:29:31 believed to be some kind of Chumash initiation site. So we can say that there is initial
00:29:37 archeochemical data for the consumption of psychedelics and cave art. And so where else
00:29:42 might we find this? Are there a lot of archeochemists in the world? Is this fascinating? Is through
00:29:50 chemistry, through biology, through physics, whatever, like all the disciplines, perhaps one
00:29:56 day computer science, we apply those tools to study not the data of today, but the data of the past.
00:30:04 But are we talking about dozens here? Like how hard is this problem relative to how many people
00:30:09 are taking it on just as a side little tangent? We’re probably talking more dozens than hundreds.
00:30:16 I spent many years trying to track down an archeochemist who would talk to me. There were
00:30:21 a couple, Pat McGovern at the University of Pennsylvania, and then my friend Andrew Ko at MIT,
00:30:27 which you might know something about. Andrew really, you know, on his own time, on his own
00:30:33 dime, has been gathering the data for this organic residue analysis. He has what’s called the Open
00:30:41 Archem Project, which is this online open source repository for this data. But there’s never been
00:30:46 a center for this. No university has stood up a dedicated center, a team really, which is what you
00:30:52 need of archeochemists looking at this stuff. But I mean, even despite that, there have been some
00:30:57 remarkable discoveries over the past 10, 20 years. It’s still a discipline very much in
00:31:02 its infancy. Maybe it’s becoming a toddler. But as the technology gets better and cheaper, I hope
00:31:09 you’ll see more and more archeochemists joining the fight.
00:31:12 Yeah. And Andrew is fascinating. His work is fascinating. But also, just because of your work,
00:31:18 I came across and exchanged a few emails with Patrick McGovern, who’s basically, what would
00:31:24 you call him? So, he has a center, I guess, that does biomolecular archeology at UPenn.
00:31:30 And he’s the author of a bunch of books, one of which is Ancient Brews. So, he’s a scholar of beer
00:31:36 and wine and like ancient alcohol, which is fascinating. They influence, even just alcohol,
00:31:42 but he has like alcohol with hallucinogenic properties as well. But as a Russian, it’s
00:31:50 fascinating to think about the influence of alcohol on the development of human civilization
00:31:58 throughout its history. Is there something you can comment on alcohol or in general,
00:32:07 Patrick’s work that was informative to you, inspiring, or kind of added to your conception
00:32:13 of human history?
00:32:15 His work was some of the first hard scientific data that I saw for the ritual consumption
00:32:20 of these intoxicants. I don’t think he’s ever found the hard and fast data for psychedelics.
00:32:27 But what he turned me on to was this idea that alcohol or beer and wine specifically
00:32:33 could have been used as vehicles for the administration of psychedelics. That’s where
00:32:37 it all started for me. Just the notion that ancient beer and ancient wine is very, very
00:32:43 different from what we drink today, that typically they were cocktails. They were often fortified
00:32:48 and mixed with different fruits, berries, herbs, plants, maybe even fungi over time,
00:32:55 because this was all in the absence of distilled liquor. There is no hard alcohol, even in
00:33:00 Russia, before maybe the 12th century it was in Europe, maybe a bit earlier. But the concept
00:33:08 of distillation just didn’t exist. And so, to pack a punch, rather than just drink a
00:33:15 kind of watered down Budweiser, these people were interested in fortifying these beverages
00:33:20 with whatever they could find in nature. And Pat, to his credit, found some of the initial
00:33:25 data for these, you could say, spiked wines and spiked beers. Not with anything overtly
00:33:31 psychedelic, but just the fact that in the 16th century BC, at grave circle A in Mycenae,
00:33:38 there’s this Minoan ritual cocktail of beer mixed with wine, mixed with mead, is very
00:33:43 interesting. It’s even more interesting that you find that across the Aegean, in Gordium,
00:33:48 at King Midas’s tomb, right? The same kind of ritual cocktail, which Pat and Sam at the
00:33:54 Dogfish Head Brewery resurrected as the Midas touch. So, I mean, the notion that we can
00:33:59 go back, find this data, resurrect it, in some cases, 2800 years later, I found pretty
00:34:05 exciting 10 years ago. Yeah, bring it back for research. But that’s fascinating that
00:34:11 people are playing with these ideas. And we’ll return to, we’ll return to our
00:34:16 ideas of psychedelic infused wine, which is pretty fascinating. But can we step back and
00:34:22 just kind of look at your work with the book Immortality Key? What is the story that you
00:34:27 tell in this book? I knew we’d get there eventually, Lex. It’s a nonlinear path. Somehow
00:34:35 we were talking about simulation and the universe is a computer that’s creating video games
00:34:40 and WoW and Fortnite. But we got there and we’ll return, always, to the insane philosophical.
00:34:48 But your book Immortality Key, what’s the story that you tell in this book? Which part
00:34:53 of human history are you studying? Right. So that’s the way to phrase it. So it’s, you
00:34:57 know, it’s my 12 year search for the hard scientific data for the ritual use of psychedelics
00:35:04 in classical antiquity. So we’re talking about amongst the ancient Greeks and Romans.
00:35:09 And the paleo Christians. So the generations that would give birth to the largest religion
00:35:15 the world’s ever known. Christianity today was two and a half billion people. The big
00:35:20 question for me is, you know, were psychedelics actually involved? There was a lot written
00:35:23 about this in the sixties, John Marco Allegro. The book that I follow was published in 1978
00:35:29 before I was born. The Road to Eleusis by Gordon Wasson, who we talked about already,
00:35:35 Albert Hofmann, who famously discovers LSD or synthesizes it from ergot, and Carl Ruck,
00:35:41 who is still a professor of classics at Boston University, the only surviving member of that
00:35:48 renegade trio and now 85 years old. So this all predates us. But what was lacking in the 60s,
00:35:55 70s, 80s, 90s, I think was some of this technology and the hard scientific data.
00:36:01 Now, for years and years, I went out to the archaeobotanists and the archaeochemists around
00:36:05 the world and I asked a very basic question. Is there any evidence for psychedelics in classical
00:36:11 antiquity? And the answer would almost invariably come back no. I’m talking to, in addition to Pat,
00:36:17 he put me in touch with Hans Peter Sticke in Germany, Tania Valamotti in Greece,
00:36:22 Assunta Florenzano in Italy. I went all over the place asking one question and getting the same
00:36:26 answer back time and again. And so the book is essentially my search for that data and
00:36:32 the eventual uncovering of two what I think are key pieces of data. One data point shows the ritual
00:36:41 use of a psychedelic beer in classical antiquity in Iberia, what today is Spain. And the other
00:36:48 shows what looks like a kind of psychedelic wine just outside Pompeii from the first century AD,
00:36:55 at the right place at the right time when the earliest Christians were showing up in Italy.
00:37:01 Again, these are early steps in the search for evidence in the space. But
00:37:07 speaking of early Christians, what role do you think psychedelic infused wine could have played
00:37:15 in the life of Jesus Christ? I’ve been saying recently that, and I hope this doesn’t sound
00:37:28 obscurantist, but I think it’s impossible to understand Jesus and the birth of Christianity
00:37:36 in the absence of ancient Greek. And I’ll give you a very specific example of why I think that’s the
00:37:40 case. You can read the entire New Testament in ancient Greek and not once will you ever find
00:37:49 a reference to alcohol because there was no word in ancient Greek for alcohol. The way the word
00:37:55 sounds alcohol, it’s Semitic, it comes from the Arabic. Kehela means to enliven or refresh. It
00:38:01 probably comes from kohl, K O H L, sort of these powdered metallics that were used in alchemical
00:38:07 experiments and cosmetics. So again, that’s much later in time when we’re using alchemy,
00:38:13 distillation, et cetera. In the first century AD, the power of wine wasn’t necessarily tied to
00:38:21 alcohol, fermented grapes, the way we think about wine today. So Pat McGovern found some of that
00:38:26 early organic data for wine being mixed with beer and with mead. But if you look at the literature
00:38:34 from the first century AD, Dioscorides, for example, he writes this massive treatise at the
00:38:39 exact same time the gospels are being written. And Dioscorides in just one of his books talks about
00:38:45 56 detailed recipes for spiking wine with all kinds of things like salvia and hellebore and
00:38:53 frankincense and myrrh, these spice perfumes, but also more dangerous things like henbane
00:38:58 and mandrake, which he says in Greek can be fatal with just one cupful. And in book 474 of his
00:39:05 Materia Medica, he talks about black nightshade producing fantasias u aedais, not unpleasant
00:39:14 visions, what today we would say is psychedelic. So just looking at the literature and the kind of
00:39:20 literature that even most classicists, I didn’t really learn it in undergrad, I came across
00:39:25 Dioscorides later, but just a basic look at the literature supports what McGovern has been testing,
00:39:32 which is the fact that wine was routinely mixed with different compounds. It’s fascinating,
00:39:38 by the way, that language affects our conception of the tools we use to understand the world. So
00:39:44 like you can see wine, you can see psychedelics, if they’re not called drugs, you can maybe reframe
00:39:57 how you see them in terms of their role in us thinking about the world, understanding the
00:40:02 world. That’s really interesting that language has that power, but what language was used to
00:40:06 understand wine at the time? So we’re talking about a Greek speaking world, right? So Jesus
00:40:11 is born and does his public ministry in the Holy Land, but think about the early church,
00:40:16 think about where the church takes root. Paul, the greatest evangelist of the time, writes basically
00:40:22 half the New Testament, he’s writing letters in Greek to Greek speakers in places like Corinth
00:40:28 in Greece, or Philippi, a defunct city just north of the island of Thassos, or he’s writing to folks
00:40:35 in what today is Turkey, the Colossians, the Galatians, he writes letters to the Romans.
00:40:40 These are Greek speakers in these pockets, these Hellenic pockets all around the ancient
00:40:46 Mediterranean. And for them, again, ignore Dioscorides, ignore Pat McGovern’s work,
00:40:51 to them to think about wine was to think about a mixed potion. And so the word oinos in ancient
00:40:58 Greek does show up in the New Testament, but there was another word to describe wine,
00:41:02 and it exists for like a thousand years before, during, and after the life of Jesus. The word
00:41:08 used for wine is pharmakon, which obviously gives us the word pharmacy, it means drug.
00:41:14 So in Greek, a Greek speaker would actually use the word drug to refer to wine. Ruth Skodel,
00:41:20 the classicist, talks about this as a ritualistic formula. They understood wine as this compound
00:41:27 beverage, a drug against grief, a medicinal elixir that could either harm or heal, or just maybe a
00:41:35 sacrament to put you in touch with wine gods old and new. Clearly, religion and myth, but religion
00:41:45 very much so has sort of a, much like dreams, has like an imagery component. Like you’re kind of
00:41:55 going outside the visual constraints of physical space where you kind of have very specific
00:42:04 conceptions of what things look like, and you kind of use your imagination to stretch beyond
00:42:11 the world as we know it. Things that are trying to get in touch with things that are more real
00:42:16 than real. What role do these tools, do these pharmakons have in trying to stimulate the imagery
00:42:26 of religion? Do you have a sense that they have a critical role here, or is it just a bunch of
00:42:32 different factors that are utilized, a bunch of different tools that are utilized to construct
00:42:36 this imagery? Or is this not even, or is imagery the wrong terminology? Is it more like space of
00:42:41 ideas that’s core to religion? No, I think the wine is absolutely essential. And so, if it’s
00:42:48 impossible to understand paleo Christianity in the absence of ancient Greek, I think it’s equally
00:42:53 difficult in the absence of the sacred pharmacopeia or wine itself, right? Just think about wine
00:43:00 at the time. I think that the ancient Greek audience would have heard that in a very different
00:43:05 way from us. And so, they’re referring to it maybe as a pharmakon, but the followers of Dionysus,
00:43:11 which precedes Jesus. And in some cases, the story of Jesus is kind of a recapitulation of the
00:43:18 mysteries of Dionysus. But when you think about Dionysus, maybe from your high school mythology,
00:43:23 you think about him as the god of theater, or the god of wine, which is typically what it is,
00:43:28 or the god of ecstasy. Again, Dionysus is not the god of alcohol. There’s no concept of fermented
00:43:38 grapes. The power of Dionysus and the ability to commune with Dionysus through his blood.
00:43:43 And before Christianity, the blood of Dionysus is equated to his wine. The sacramental drinking of
00:43:49 the wine was interpreted, and classicists write about this, including Walter Burkert. It was
00:43:55 it was interpreted as consuming the god himself in order to become one with the god. This is where we
00:44:00 get the idea of enthusiasm, because the language matters. Enthusiasm to be filled with the spirit
00:44:06 of the god, so that you became identified with Dionysus and acquired his divine powers.
00:44:11 Now, how does that happen? Again, he’s not the god of alcohol. He is the god of wine,
00:44:16 but he’s really the god of madness, and delirium, and frenzy. And his principal followers are women.
00:44:22 They’re called the minads. And the way they get in touch with him is through the consumption
00:44:27 of this sacramental wine. Even at the theater of Dionysus, separate from his outdoor churches,
00:44:34 there was a wine served there called drima. And this is the wine that gives birth to Hollywood.
00:44:40 I mean, the ancient Hollywood was there at the theater of Dionysus. This is where
00:44:44 comedy, and tragedy, and poetry, and music come from. But rather than a hot dog and a beer,
00:44:48 what they drink at the theater of Dionysus was this wine called drima, which means
00:44:53 pounded or rubbed. And Professor Ruck talks about maybe it was the drugs
00:44:58 that were rubbed into this theatrical beverage to help the play come alive.
00:45:04 So madness is seen as a positive thing, as like a creative journey. It’s not, what is it,
00:45:13 the unlearning, getting out of the way kind of thing. Is that how it’s seen? Or is it more like
00:45:20 entertaining escape from life that is suffering? I gotta inject a little modern Dostoevsky into the old.
00:45:31 Existential despair. Maybe it’s a bit of that. We can’t say that there wasn’t
00:45:39 recreational drinking happening. The Greeks also had the symposium. And they also were just
00:45:46 getting hammered in some cases. But when it comes to the rites of Dionysus, what you see there is
00:45:54 the creation of these states of awareness in which, again, you identify with the God to become
00:46:00 the God. There’s theophagy. There’s the consumption of divinity in order to become divinity. Right
00:46:06 back to how we started the conversation, right? So if we stop conceiving of God as something
00:46:12 exterior to us, but that the mystery of being itself is the mystery of your being and the
00:46:18 mystery of my being, that the way to encounter that is through the sacramental theology, that
00:46:24 you drink the actual blood of this Greek God to become that God. And there was a place for this
00:46:31 in ancient Greek society. So drinking the wine and drinking the blood of Dionysus, do you think Jesus
00:46:38 is an actual physical person that existed in history? Or is he an idea
00:46:47 that came to life through the consumption of wine and those kinds of rituals?
00:46:54 So this is where I face my excommunication, depending how I answer this.
00:46:57 I mean, you’re playing with fire and wine.
00:47:03 A good combination, by the way.
00:47:08 So I shy away from that controversy in the book. I’m perfectly willing to accept Jesus
00:47:14 as a historical personage. We have the multiplicity of sources, although it’s a
00:47:19 generation after his death. But we have the Eucharist being described in the four gospels.
00:47:25 We have it being described by Paul in 1 Corinthians. But when you read John,
00:47:31 it does read a bit differently than the other gospels. And in my book, I rely a lot on the
00:47:35 scholarship of Dennis McDonald, who writes a fabulous book called The Dionysian Gospel.
00:47:40 And this is, again, why the Greek matters, because once you start to analyze the Greek of John’s
00:47:45 gospel, it seems to be a presentation of Jesus very much in the guise of Dionysus. The most
00:47:51 obvious example is the wedding at Cana, right? That only occurs in John’s gospel, the famous
00:47:57 transformation of water into wine. Now, again, to any Greek speaker of the first century,
00:48:02 they would have known about the Greek district of Elis on the Peloponnese. And in Elis,
00:48:07 around the epiphany, every January, the priests of Dionysus would deposit these water basins,
00:48:14 empty basins in the temple of Dionysus. They’d return the next morning and find them magically
00:48:19 filled with wine. Now, on the island of Andros, it’s even more interesting. Around the same
00:48:25 epiphany date, the God’s gift day, Dies Theodosia, the wine would emanate from the temple and run
00:48:31 like a river for a week. And you can Google the Bacchanal of the Andrians, a wonderful painting
00:48:37 by Titian, which hangs in the Prado, and you’ll see a river of wine behind these people having
00:48:42 a great time. This exists for centuries and centuries before the wedding at Cana and before
00:48:47 Jesus begins his public ministry with what these scholars call the signature miracle of Dionysus.
00:48:55 It would not have been lost on the Greek audience that something very specific is being communicated
00:49:00 here. What’s being communicated? That you just might find in early Christianity what you hold
00:49:07 strong to in these mysteries of Dionysus that you may have inherited from your parents, your
00:49:11 grandparents, your great grandparents for centuries. There was a perfectly good religion.
00:49:16 There were perfectly good mystery cults in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds.
00:49:20 And here comes this new, untested, illegal cult, illegal, of a dozen or so illiterate
00:49:27 day laborers that go on to convert the empire in a few hundred years. The answer to that
00:49:33 extraordinary growth is not psychedelics, but I do think it’s visionary experiences,
00:49:38 and I do think it’s this continuity from the pagan world into early Christianity.
00:49:42 So what part, you mentioned this idea that’s really interesting with, I think you said Paul
00:49:47 Stamets, of I guess millions of people over millions of years kind of consuming, really
00:49:56 practicing a ritual or a habit of some sort. This idea of rituals is kind of interesting.
00:50:02 Again, you mentioned cult. What’s the role of ritual consumption of some of these substances
00:50:08 or just ritual practice of anything in the intellectual growth of particular groups of
00:50:15 people or societies? So again, I would say it is the centerpiece of ancient life, not just the
00:50:22 mysteries of Dionysus, which we’ve only talked a bit about, but the mysteries of Eleusis were
00:50:27 probably the most famous and longest lasting of these Greek mystery rites. And I mean, just to
00:50:32 put it in simple terms, the best definition for a mystery religion, as the name implies,
00:50:37 is something secret, right? Muo from the Greek means to shut the eyes or to shut the mouth,
00:50:42 to keep quiet about this stuff. We’re always teasing details from the archaeological and the
00:50:49 literary record, and we’re kind of just grabbing at these secrets. But Eleusis, which survives for
00:50:56 like 2,000 years into the Christian period from about 1500 BC to the fourth century AD,
00:51:02 it’s kind of this centerpiece of Greek life. Cicero, the great Roman statesman, calls what was
00:51:08 happening at Eleusis the most exceptional and divine thing that Athens ever produced. So not
00:51:15 democracy, the arts and sciences, or philosophy, but the vision that was encountered at Eleusis,
00:51:21 perhaps through the ritual consumption of a potent psychedelic over hundreds and hundreds of years,
00:51:27 hundreds and hundreds of years, thousands and thousands, if not millions of initiates, pilgrims,
00:51:32 who would walk from Athens to Eleusis to encounter this vision. It seems to have been
00:51:39 not just an important part of Greek life, but the thing that made life livable,
00:51:43 such that as these mysteries are about to be exterminated by the newly Christianized
00:51:49 Roman Empire, there’s this passage in the ancient literature that talks about these,
00:51:53 you know, in the absence of these mysteries, life becomes unlivable. Abiotos.
00:51:58 Is there ways you can, I mean, you write about the mysteries of Eleusis, and is there ways you
00:52:03 can convert that into words? Why those are so important to them, more important than any other
00:52:11 invention to them? Why is it such a source of meaning to life? So from what we can reconstruct,
00:52:19 they would make that pilgrimage 13 miles northwest of Athens to confront their mortality. Remember,
00:52:25 we were talking about Homo Naledi, and in South Africa, this recognition of self mortality,
00:52:31 the deliberate disposal of the dead. Plato talks about the real practice of philosophy being the
00:52:38 death and dying process. So in some senses, you went to Eleusis to die and to experience a death
00:52:45 before your death. We talked about this with Terence McKenna as well, on this, how the
00:52:50 psychedelic state seems to share something in common with the near death or out of body experiences
00:52:55 or these ecstatic experiences, whether through wine or beer or otherwise, you went to Eleusis
00:53:01 to die. And it was said that only those who had witnessed this vision, whatever vision was to be
00:53:07 witnessed in Demeter Sanctuary, it essentially vouchsafed you the afterlife, that only those who
00:53:14 went there became immortal. And Cicero says that at that point, you essentially live with more joy
00:53:21 and die with a better hope. Can I ask you a question about this human contention with death,
00:53:27 this confrontation of death that seems to be at the core of things? I don’t know how deep to the
00:53:34 core, but it seems to be a central element of the human condition. What do you think about Ernest
00:53:41 Becker and those guys that put death at the, what is it, the warm of the core, which as the main
00:53:51 thing, the main, like this confrontation of our own mortality, first of all, being understanding
00:53:58 that we’re mortal and then confronting the terror of it, the fear of it as the creative, like trying
00:54:06 to escape the fear of death as the creative force of human society. It’s like the reason we do
00:54:13 anything is because we’re just running away from our death, scared. Do you find some of that to be
00:54:21 true, first of all, as somebody who looks in the mirror, looks at yourself and your own as a human
00:54:27 being, two, just looking at society today, and three, at this whole big spread of human history
00:54:34 and all the cool stuff we’ve created, including the mysteries of Eleusis? I wonder what life would
00:54:39 look like in the absence of the fear of our mortality. I wonder how we’d interact with one
00:54:46 another if there was relatively little or no fear of death. I really do when it comes to Becker’s
00:54:52 work and others. If the ancients were known for anything, it was running to death. It was the
00:54:58 opposite. In fact, dying before dying, which is the immortality key, by the way, it’s not
00:55:02 psychedelics. When I refer to this key, I’m referring to this notion that’s preserved in
00:55:07 Greek, anpethanis, prinpethanis, denthapethanis, otanpethanis. If you die before you die, you won’t
00:55:15 die when you die. For some reason, the ancients prized that experience. And we talked about the
00:55:22 mystics of Sufism and Kabbalism and Christian mysticism, where you have this same self nodding,
00:55:29 this death before death, the divine nothingness, right? For some reason, the mystic saints,
00:55:34 visionaries, and ancient philosophers, they ran to death. And the one message I wanted to try and
00:55:40 communicate with this book is how they viewed life, that it can only be fully experienced,
00:55:46 fully embodied in the wake of a really intense, perhaps terrifying, but utterly transformational
00:55:55 encounter with death. So running to death, not running away from death. You talk about Aldous
00:56:02 Huxley and mind changers. So if we look at the history where the ancients were running to death
00:56:13 and maybe using some performance enhancing permacons to run more effectively towards death,
00:56:23 and now we’re using tools of modern society, whether they’re psychological, sociological,
00:56:31 or in case pharmaceutical to run away from this conception. So what do you see as a hopeful future
00:56:39 for human civilization? If all of these kinds of societies are ice cream flavors,
00:56:48 how do you create the perfect ice cream flavor? What is the future of religious experience,
00:56:53 of psychedelic experience, of intellectual journeys, of facing death, running away from death?
00:57:00 What do you hope that looks like and what kind of ideas should we look to?
00:57:05 My next book will be entitled Performance Enhancing Pharmacon. You get full copyright.
00:57:11 Yeah, I like it. But that’s a historical view. What in that book would you suggest
00:57:22 in one of the last chapters about the future of this process?
00:57:27 Well, Huxley has to stop you. He stopped me in my tracks, Aldous Huxley. So in 1958,
00:57:34 he pens this op ed of sorts, and it reads incredibly prescient because I really do think
00:57:43 in many ways as the fog of the war drug is ending and finally lifting that we’ve kind of come full
00:57:51 circle back to the late 1950s, which might sound strange. It’ll make more sense when you hear what
00:57:57 Huxley said about psychedelics. And so he was looking forward to a revival of religion, which
00:58:02 is why I subtitled the book, The Religion with No Name. And to him, to Huxley, this revival wouldn’t
00:58:12 come about through televangelistic mass meetings or photogenic clergymen, as he says, but he points
00:58:18 to the biochemical discoveries such as we have today that would allow for large numbers of men
00:58:25 and women to achieve a radical self transcendence and a deeper understanding of the nature of things.
00:58:31 In other words, that this revival of religion, he says, would be a revolution. Alan Watts comes
00:58:36 along and says that there’s nothing more dangerous to authority than a popular outbreak of mysticism.
00:58:44 But I think this is what Huxley was pointing to. And he talks about religion in these terms about
00:58:50 being less about symbols and returning to a sense of experience and intuition. And Huxley says that
00:58:57 he envisions a religion which gives rise to everyday mysticism. And he talks about something
00:59:04 that would undergird everyday rationality, everyday tasks and duties, and everyday human
00:59:11 relationships. In other words, religion has to mean something. And these altered states of
00:59:17 awareness that we seem to be able to produce quite easily inside the lab at Hopkins, NYU,
00:59:23 and elsewhere with psilocybin. I think this is kind of part of Huxley’s prediction about a time
00:59:31 when we would have legal access, safe access, efficacious access to this material that would
00:59:37 allow for insight in an afternoon. And what do you do when millions of people can become mystics in
00:59:44 an afternoon? So psychedelics, psilocybin might be sort of the practical way of having these kinds of
00:59:55 maybe could be termed religious experiences. And then many people partaking in those experiences
01:00:01 and then like evolving this collective intelligence thing we’ve got going on,
01:00:06 that’s sort of the practice of religion that we should be striving for as opposed to kind of
01:00:10 operating in the space of ideas, actually practicing it. You mentioned, and that’s the
01:00:19 religion with no name, the use of these tools. Is there a simple way to summarize religion for our
01:00:27 previous discussion about God, basically discovering the God inside? What if I give you a very
01:00:33 complicated definition of religion and then we talk about a more simplified? Let’s do it. So
01:00:39 the most complicated we can get on this is the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. But I think it’s
01:00:44 worth defining our terms when we’re talking about God and religion. So religion religio from the
01:00:49 Latin means to bind back. So to bind us back to some meaningful tradition, to bind us back to the
01:00:55 source. Here’s a mouthful from Clifford Geertz. Religion, he defines as a set of symbols which
01:01:03 acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long lasting moods and motivations by formulating
01:01:09 conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions in such an aura of
01:01:14 factuality that those moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic, which is complex. What does
01:01:23 that mean? That religion has to make you feel something, these moods and motivations. But it
01:01:29 can’t just do that in the way that sex does that for us or sports or ultimate fighting or the World
01:01:35 Cup or going to a concert. So we get all that emotion in these experiences like that. But that
01:01:41 emotion has to be concomitant to a deep existential insight that answers this question for you in the
01:01:47 morning. I know why I’m here. I know why humans are here. I think I know what the meaning of life
01:01:53 is. That’s what religion is. And if you find that meaning in science, then that’s your religion and
01:01:59 that’s fine. But we need to be more honest about that. If your epistemological model is weighing
01:02:05 facts and figures and you think that’s why you’re here on this planet and you find deep meaning,
01:02:10 that’s okay. Religion is the thing that makes you feel, right? It has the aura of factuality. It
01:02:15 just makes you feel like you know the point behind existence. In other words, I think it can be
01:02:22 in other words, I think it comes down to experience. Like Joe Campbell was talking about,
01:02:25 like Aldous Huxley mentions about experience and intuition. I think this is how we connect to God.
01:02:32 Make you feel like you understand the world. I mean, so that’s kind of bigger than science.
01:02:38 That includes science, but it’s bigger. Do you think, what is real? Like do you think there’s
01:02:47 an absolute reality that we’re kind of striving towards understanding or is it all just conjured
01:02:53 up in our minds? And that’s the whole kind of point. We together create these realities and
01:03:00 play with them and dance to somehow derive meaning from those realities. And it’s ultimately not like
01:03:08 like very deeply integrated into what’s like into atoms of space time. Another easy question, Lex.
01:03:20 Well, I mean, you have to kind of, when you’re thinking about
01:03:25 emotion and making it concrete into something that feels real, you have to start asking,
01:03:32 like, what is real? It’s something that Ben Shapiro has this saying of facts don’t care
01:03:40 about your feelings. I was always uncomfortable with this. I mean, he’s just being spiffy or
01:03:46 whatever, but I was always uncomfortable with somehow first that the hubris of thinking that
01:03:53 humans can have, like arrive at absolute truth, which is what I assume he means by facts,
01:04:03 like things that are uncontrovertible. And then somehow deriding feelings, like feelings are not
01:04:09 important. To me, like the whole thing is reality. The facts don’t even, like facts is reality,
01:04:18 feelings are reality, like the entirety of human experience is reality. All these
01:04:24 consciousnesses somehow interacting together, making up random crap and together agreeing
01:04:29 they’re all going to wear the same colors, rooting for one football team or the other football team
01:04:34 or countries, all those things, that’s real because we’ve agreed that it’s real.
01:04:40 And in the same way, it gives us meaning in that same way religion is a set of ideas that
01:04:45 gives us meaning, but real, it’s really difficult for me as a scientist that finds comfort in the
01:04:58 physical understanding of the universe of physics. I love physics. I love computer science.
01:05:05 It makes me feel like everything is perfectly understandable. And then I look at humans,
01:05:11 humans, they’re totally not understandable. It’s like a giant mess, but that’s part of the beauty.
01:05:17 Like what is love? Like what the hell is love? It’s certainly not like a weird hack to convince me
01:05:26 to procreate because it feels something bigger than that. So like taking a purely evolutionary
01:05:32 biologist perspective, it’s missing the, it’s not missing, it’s only capturing a part of the picture.
01:05:37 And so it just keeps making me ask, what is real? Because as a human, it’s very human centric.
01:05:44 It does certainly feel like a part, a big part of what is real is all the fake stuff my mind makes up.
01:05:57 I mean, okay, I guess, is there something you could say
01:06:01 from our discussions about the tools of psychedelics, about our discussion about
01:06:06 religion, of what is real, of what is reality?
01:06:11 These are largely unanswerable questions.
01:06:15 But we should nevertheless strive to answer them. That’s the whole point of the human experience.
01:06:19 And I think science is one way and religion is another. And I think there’s actually a sphere
01:06:24 where they intersect, you know, there’s a way for religion to be a big part of the world.
01:06:30 Religion to be observable, testable, repeatable, falsifiable. When I look at the ancient mysteries,
01:06:35 that’s what I find. I find people exploring alternate states of consciousness and arriving
01:06:41 at conclusions based on that exploration and deriving deep meaning from that, which yes,
01:06:46 are feelings and emotions and very hard to quantify. But nonetheless, these are the things
01:06:51 that govern our lives. I mean, I don’t know a parent who isn’t motivated by the love of their
01:06:56 children. Everything I do at 40 years old now is pretty much inspired by my love for my two
01:07:03 daughters. And I can’t prove to you that I love them. I can say it, I can show you behavior,
01:07:08 but it’s very hard for me to weigh and measure that. So not everything is so reducible to this
01:07:15 quantifiable reality. And yet, I also love science. And I love the historical process of weighing this
01:07:23 data. I love the chemistry. I love the biology. And for me, I think this was the message of the
01:07:29 ancient Greeks. And I think this is the world in which paleo Christianity was born. I think there
01:07:34 is this meeting ground between science and religion, which allow for the, if not the discovery,
01:07:43 then at least the near identification of the ultimate reality, which is another way to describe
01:07:50 God, right? This being of being is the transcendent mystery. So speaking of God,
01:07:56 you mentioned to me offline, you’re wearing the most sophisticated clothing choice of the elite
01:08:03 intellectuals. Like you mentioned, Sam Harris was wearing a hoodie. This is the Sam Harris hoodie.
01:08:08 He’s starting a trend. He’s starting a trend. This is a new religion, you could even say. It’s
01:08:14 a ritual. It’s a ritual practice of intellectuals of searching for meaning. So there’s quite a
01:08:22 fascinating debate. So he was for a time still known as one of the sort of new age atheists.
01:08:30 So he was kind of trying to explore the role of religion in society and the role of science.
01:08:35 And then on the other side, another kind of powerhouse intellectual is Jordan Peterson,
01:08:40 who in sometimes, for my taste, a bit too poetic of ways is exploring the ideas of religion.
01:08:49 And they had these interesting debates that I think will continue about the role of religion
01:08:54 in society. For Jordan, there’s all these flaws with religion, but there is a lot of value to be
01:09:05 discovered amidst the rituals, the traditions, the practice, the way we conceive of each other
01:09:12 because of the ideas that religion propagates. And then for Sam, it says that everything about
01:09:20 religion basically gets in the way of us fully realizing our human potential, which is deeply
01:09:29 scientific and rational and sort of like we’re surrounded by mystery. Calling that mystery God
01:09:39 is getting in the way of us understanding that mystery. What do you think about this debate
01:09:45 about the role of religion in society?
01:09:48 We should continue having this debate. I talked to Jordan a couple of weeks ago, as a matter of fact.
01:09:52 Excellent. On his podcast? Public? Excellent.
01:09:55 Yes. It’ll be out soon. And so, he and I…
01:10:00 How did that go, by the way?
01:10:02 It was incredible. Carl Ruck, the professor, joined us, as a matter of fact, for one of his
01:10:06 rare public appearances. We went deep. And Jordan is very well read, obviously, on the psychedelic
01:10:13 literature. He had just had Roland Griffiths from Hopkins on the podcast. And it’s one of
01:10:18 Roland’s figures that Jordan and I, again, just like the language of Aldous Huxley, it’s hard to
01:10:23 move past the following statistic. Over the past 20 years of the modern study of psilocybin, Roland
01:10:30 will tell you that about three in four of their volunteers walk away from their single dose of
01:10:36 psilocybin, high dose, saying it was among the most meaningful experiences of their entire lives,
01:10:43 if not the most meaningful. And Jordan says, what do you do with that? How do we synthesize that?
01:10:55 Here we are quantifying the qualifiable, the unqualifiable. And yet, these compounds have
01:11:02 dramatic effects on people’s lives, and they walk away feeling like they’re more loving,
01:11:08 more compassionate. The science of all talks about the welling up of cooperation and resource sharing
01:11:16 and kindness and all these strange things from this single chemical intervention, which seems to
01:11:22 reduce us to automata, as if enlightenment can be flipped on like a switch. And yet, there it is,
01:11:28 there’s the data. And I don’t see how you walk away from that. I mean, I completely understand
01:11:33 Sam’s position. But I think there’s a reading of religion, particularly the mystical core
01:11:40 of the big faiths, and especially these ancient mystery cults, which do speak, again, to those
01:11:45 moods and motivations, creating this aura of factuality that these volunteers never walk away
01:11:52 from, permanently transformed, just like the ancient mysteries. And part of that is perhaps
01:11:57 language, that we need to continue to evolve language in how we conceive of these processes.
01:12:06 Maybe religion has a bunch of baggage associated with it that is good to let go of,
01:12:14 or perhaps not. I don’t know. This is connected to our previous part of our conversation is the
01:12:20 importance of language in this whole thing. Well, that’s how I start my book with one of
01:12:23 these volunteers from the NYU psilocybin experiments, this woman, Dina Dina Baser,
01:12:27 who’s an atheist. And she still describes herself as an atheist. And yet, as one of these three and
01:12:34 four people who walked away from this experiment transformed, she says that her experience of
01:12:39 psilocybin was like being bathed in God’s love from an atheist. And I asked her why she uses
01:12:45 the word God, why not the love of the cosmos or the universe or mother nature? And she says,
01:12:51 well, frankly, we don’t know about any of this stuff and that God makes sense to me. She’s still
01:12:56 an atheist, but it’s the way she describes that as kind of like the way your mother’s love must
01:13:03 have felt when you were a baby. Yeah. There’s a kind of, I like the way Einstein uses God. God
01:13:08 doesn’t play dice. There’s a poetry. There’s a humility that you don’t know what the hell is
01:13:13 going on. There’s a humor to it. I’m a huge fan, especially like more and more of just kind of
01:13:19 having a big old laugh at the absurdity of this world and this life as represented nicely by memes
01:13:27 on Twitter kind of thing. I mean, there’s a sense in which we want to be playing with these words
01:13:34 and not take them so seriously and being a little bit lighthearted and explore. Let me ask you about,
01:13:41 because you mentioned NYU, what I find fascinating is how much amazing research, speaking of science,
01:13:50 right? Studying the effects of psilocybin, studying the effects of various psychedelics, MDMA,
01:13:58 on the human mind right now for helping people. But I’m hoping there’ll be studies soon at Hopkins
01:14:05 and elsewhere that allow people that are kind of more quote unquote creatives or regular people
01:14:12 that don’t have a particular demon they’re trying to work through, a problem they’re trying to work
01:14:18 through, but more like to see what can I find if I utilize psychedelics to explore? Is there something
01:14:25 you could say that is exciting to you, that’s promising about the future? What currently is
01:14:31 going on but also the future of psychedelics research at Hopkins and elsewhere? The healthy normals.
01:14:38 I was looking for the right words because healthy doesn’t feel like a good term and
01:14:43 normal doesn’t feel like a good term because we’re all pretty messed up and we’re all weird.
01:14:47 Well, those with ontological angst in that case. Maybe there’ll be a future DSM qualification.
01:14:54 There’s no doubt that things like psilocybin, MDMA are useful for things like anxiety,
01:15:00 depression, end of life distress, PTSD, alcoholism, you name it. And it’s largely because of the
01:15:06 clinical research that MDMA and psilocybin will probably be legal in some FDA regulated way in
01:15:13 the next five years. But again, I start the first page of my book with this question, why do
01:15:19 psychedelics work across all these different conditions? And the best that I could find is
01:15:25 is the meaning, right? Tony Bosse at NYU talks about psilocybin, for example, as meaning making
01:15:32 medicine, which is interesting because it puts it somewhere between a therapeutic and again,
01:15:38 this ontological instigator. What is it about psychedelics that creates these mystical
01:15:45 experiences or mystical like experiences? You can call them emotional breakthroughs,
01:15:50 you can call them moments of awe. I do think we get locked up in the language and we’re
01:15:54 somewhere between science and religion here, including legally. So the FDA is one route to
01:16:00 this. What excites me about psychedelics is the first amendment. What is this going to mean for
01:16:04 religion? The freedom of religion being the first thing that’s mentioned in the first amendment
01:16:09 before freedom of speech, freedom of assembly. If America is known for anything, it’s a refuge
01:16:15 for religious pioneers. And so we already have the native American church, Brazilian spawn churches
01:16:21 that are using psychedelics. But what would happen if Judaism or Christianity or Islam were to begin
01:16:28 incorporating the very ritual, very sacred and discreet use of psychedelics as part of their
01:16:35 liturgy? So not replacing the Sunday Eucharist in the case of Christianity, but part of the extra
01:16:42 credit dimension of the faith. And then we can, through practice, figure out how essential it is.
01:16:49 It could be a minor thing. It could be a major thing. That’s another thing I wanted to kind of
01:16:53 ask you is, I recently, despite the fact that I’m eating a huge amount of meat, I’m getting fat.
01:16:58 I’m loving it. This is actually, as of two days ago, I started this long road to training for David
01:17:07 Goggins, to training back, to getting back to competing in jiu jitsu. So the fun is over. But
01:17:13 I also partook in fasting and there was a very strong, there’s an almost like a hallucinogenic
01:17:21 aspect of fasting, because it was, especially because it was a 72 hour fast versus a more common
01:17:27 fast that I do, which is 24 hours. And a bunch of people talk about throughout history about the
01:17:34 value of fasting in having these kind of visual, these kind of intellectual experiences. Also,
01:17:42 there’s meditation, Sam Harris with the hoodie. Do you have a sense that those other rituals of
01:17:51 fasting, of meditation, and maybe other things could be as essential or more essential to the
01:17:59 religious experience as psychedelics? Yes, if not, and this is going to sound weird, but maybe not
01:18:05 if more so. I look at psychedelics as a catalyst for spiritual investigation, not as the superficial
01:18:13 means to an end. I think their value is in kind of serving as a Google Maps for the Kingdom of Heaven.
01:18:21 All right, I like this. Well, so Ram Dass’s teacher said that when he was offered psychedelics that
01:18:31 it’ll get you in the room with Jesus, but it won’t keep you there. And I think that’s all well and
01:18:37 good, but what if you don’t know where the house is in the first place? What if you’ve never had
01:18:41 a mystical experience? What if religion is anathema to you? What if you hate God? What if all
01:18:47 these words mean nothing to you? And they probably do for many, many people, and it’s perfectly
01:18:51 understandable. I think that we’ve lost the coordinates to these irrational states, again,
01:18:57 that were prized throughout antiquity and that continue to be prized by the mystical communities,
01:19:03 even in big organized religion, it just doesn’t filter out that much. And so psychedelics, in my
01:19:08 mind, help orient our minds, bodies, and souls towards the irrational, right? We talked about
01:19:16 McKenna’s invisible world that seems to have this symbiosis with our own and perhaps has this higher
01:19:23 intent for us. You could very well just, you know, take catalog of your dreams, right? And that would
01:19:30 do it too. But psychedelics seem to be particularly fast acting, particularly potent, and very
01:19:37 reliable, especially in the clinical studies. And so I looked at them as biochemical discoveries,
01:19:42 like Huxley did. Maybe it’s once in your life or infrequently, right? But maybe that’s the beginning
01:19:49 of a genuine introspection and a life well examined, as the ancients always instructed us.
01:19:55 Yeah, it does seem like in the research, the effectiveness of psychedelics always comes with
01:20:00 the integration, where you use it, just like you said, as a catalyst for thinking through stuff.
01:20:07 It’s not going to be, I don’t even know if Google Maps, maybe Google Maps is the right analogy,
01:20:15 but it doesn’t do the driving for you. You still have to do the driving. It just kind of gives you
01:20:22 the directions. So after you come down from the trip, or whatever, you still have to drive.
01:20:29 There’s other tools that are kind of interesting. We’ve been talking about this at the psychological
01:20:34 level, but there’s also a neuroscience perspective of it. If you kind of like go past the skull into
01:20:39 the brain with the neurons firing, there’s ideas of brain computer interfaces,
01:20:43 there’s ideas of brain computer interfaces. First of all, there’s a whole field of neuroscience
01:20:48 that’s kind of zooming in and studying the firing of the brain, the firing of the neurons in the
01:20:52 brain, of how from those neurons emerges all the things that we think that makes us human. That’s a
01:21:00 fascinating exploration of the human mind. That’s of course where the psychedelics have the chemical,
01:21:06 the biochemical effects on those neurons. There’s ideas of brain computer interfaces,
01:21:13 which if you look at, especially what Neuralink is doing with this long term vision,
01:21:18 with Elon Musk and Neuralink, they hope to expand, he calls it a wizard hat.
01:21:32 This is back to the humor on the internet thing. The wizard hat that expands the
01:21:38 capabilities, the capacity of the human mind. Do you think there’s something there or
01:21:47 is the human mind so infinitely complex that we’re quite a long way away from
01:21:55 expanding the capabilities of the human mind through technology versus something like psychedelics?
01:22:02 I wonder how Terence McKenna would answer that question. He looked to shamans as kind of the
01:22:10 scientists, the high magicians of the high archaic past and the far flung future.
01:22:17 You know more about AI than I do, so I’m not going to discount it. But
01:22:21 I do think that AI paired with the sacred recovery, the archaeology of consciousness
01:22:31 and these states, these archaic techniques of ecstasy that were practiced across time. I think
01:22:37 that’s a winning combination. Part of what I do in the book is just I try and lay out the set
01:22:44 and setting. That’s often talked about with psychedelics. So maybe psychedelics in the
01:22:48 right AI environment is going to work. I think it’d probably work a lot better with that myth
01:22:53 and ritual incorporated. So the reason Eleusis worked for 2000 years and let’s assume the
01:23:00 psychedelic hypothesis has some merit to it. But I think the reason it worked is because you were
01:23:05 born into a mythology. You were born into a story about Demeter and Persephone and you waited your
01:23:11 entire life to meet them in the flesh. So you weren’t just preparing for a few months. It was
01:23:17 a lifetime of expectation, anticipation, ritual preparation. In fact, some of the early church
01:23:24 fathers made fun of the Greeks for essentially just piquing people’s curiosity and revving up
01:23:30 the anticipation, which has something to do with the outcome, by the way. But in other words,
01:23:34 I think we need to create a new mythology around this. I don’t think you pop into a laboratory.
01:23:39 I don’t think you pop into a retreat center from one day to the next. I think that in my own case,
01:23:45 I think that in my own case, I feel like I’ve been preparing 12 years for psychedelics and I’m still
01:23:50 preparing, including in today’s conversation. I’m learning new things and I’m willing to explore it
01:23:57 together with the computer interface. But I do think ritual is a gigantic part of this. And even
01:24:04 McKenna would say that. I’ll paraphrase him by saying that if you’d met someone who didn’t know
01:24:11 where they were between the years 1995 and 2005, you would describe them as a fairly damaged person.
01:24:18 And yet who among us knows what was happening in Western civilization between 900 and 1300,
01:24:23 let alone 2,500 years ago. So this is in many ways the prophet of the psychedelic renaissance saying
01:24:28 that history has lessons. And I don’t think they’re superficial lessons. I think it cuts to
01:24:34 the very core of how and why Western civilization came to be born. Yeah, but that history can be
01:24:42 loaded into AI systems. And I do love the idea of whether it’s to bring computer interfaces or without
01:24:52 intrusive, sort of without direct reading of the neurons and more sort of interactive experience
01:24:57 with the robot that you can have an AI system that steers your psychedelic experience.
01:25:03 That helps you sort of, when you take a heroic dose of psilocybin, for example,
01:25:11 helps steer you, steer your mind, say just the right things. I mean, you could say that kind
01:25:16 of thing with, it’s a totally open problem, I would say. You talk about set and setting.
01:25:25 This is the interesting thing about Johns Hopkins is you create a comfortable environment,
01:25:31 a safe environment for allowing, then if you take a heroic, like a large dose of psilocybin,
01:25:38 that you could trust that everything would be safe and you can really allow the exploration
01:25:43 of your mind. But then you don’t know from a psychotherapy perspective of like during that trip,
01:25:50 what a human should say to steer that trip. Like that’s a totally open set of problems.
01:25:55 And in some sense, probably throughout history, those rituals, you figured out what are the
01:26:00 right things to say to each other, how to collaborate. And maybe if you can turn that
01:26:05 into an optimization problem, AI could figure that out much, much quicker.
01:26:11 I’m with you. So, Eleusis was known for three things, the legomena, the dromena,
01:26:15 the decnumena, the things said, the things done, the things shown. If you can pack that
01:26:21 all into your AI interface, I’m in, Lex Friedman. I’m going to write a proposal and then try to
01:26:26 get it through the IRB at MIT. I mean, there is a certain sense in which I definitely wanted
01:26:34 to explore psychedelics, I mean, in my personal life, but also more rigorously as a scientist
01:26:42 and to push that forward and especially in the AI space. And it is difficult how to do that dance
01:26:52 when there’s gray areas of legality and all those kinds of things. And we’re dancing around them.
01:26:58 And some of that is language and some of that is what we socially conceive of as drugs or not.
01:27:05 And you’re right that perhaps we can reframe it as religious experiences, all those kinds of things.
01:27:11 I mean, it’s fascinating because it feels like there’s a bunch of tools before us that were
01:27:16 used by the ancients that we’re not utilizing for exploring the human mind, that we very well could
01:27:23 be in a rigorous scientific way, in a safe way. And that’s fascinating. There’s this interesting
01:27:29 period in the 20th century of LSD use that many of the people doing research on psychedelics now
01:27:40 kind of have their roots in that history. I mentioned that Dr. Rick Doblin, he is one of those people.
01:27:48 And there’s this interesting story of a bunch of creatives that used LSD or other drugs to help them.
01:27:56 What do you make of the idea of somebody like Ken Kesey who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
01:28:00 in part under the influence of LSD? What do you make of the use of psychedelics to
01:28:13 maximize the creative potential of the human mind? Is this a crutch or is this actually
01:28:22 an effective tool that we should explore? One person’s crutch might be another’s
01:28:31 bungee cord. It depends on that mind. Think about Paul McCartney. I mean,
01:28:40 we might not have some of the better Beatles music in the absence of LSD.
01:28:44 And what did Sir Paul say in 1967 when he was asked about his use of LSD? He said that he
01:28:50 recognized the dangers inherent in it, but that he did it with a very specific, very deliberate
01:28:57 purpose in mind. He wanted to find the answer to what life is all about. And I’m not sure what Sir
01:29:03 Paul is doing this week, but he’s probably not doing LSD. Speaking back to my theory about these
01:29:10 substances being catalyzers of spiritual introspection, it came along at a time in
01:29:16 their life when I think they were ripe for it, especially George Harrison. I highly recommend
01:29:22 the Martin Scorsese documentary about George Harrison. For them, I think it was exactly
01:29:30 the way we ought to investigate it, which is, well, mind expanders. This is what psychedelics
01:29:36 do, right? That which makes manifest the contents of the mind. In the absence of an experience like
01:29:42 that, and it can be in a three day fast, it can be laying down in a cave, it can be in ritual
01:29:48 chanting, it can be in a sun dance, but in the absence of that kind of experience at the right
01:29:52 time in your life, it may otherwise be very difficult to find entrance to that kingdom of
01:29:58 heaven, which I do think is here and now, getting right back to the very beginning. If we are
01:30:03 actually to participate in that eternal principle, how and when? What do you think Nietzsche meant
01:30:10 when he said that God is dead? So, there’s a sense that religion is fading from society,
01:30:17 and there’s a cranky German that kind of wrote about it. What do you think he meant?
01:30:23 He was a cranky German who knew a lot about Dionysus, by the way, which is why I like him.
01:30:30 So, certainly there’s some truth to the mortality of God. I think Gallup put out a study only a
01:30:38 couple of months ago where church membership is now officially in the minority in the United States
01:30:43 at 47%, according to the most recent poll. That number was closer to 70% only 20 years ago.
01:30:49 Wow.
01:30:50 So, we’re living through something, and we’re living through the unchurching
01:30:54 of America, and it’s the rise of the spiritual but not religious,
01:30:59 the inheritor of all traditions but the slave to none. There’s a rise in the unaffiliated,
01:31:03 the nones. I think it was like one third of millennials. It’s probably much higher now
01:31:08 that don’t affiliate with any religion. So, in that sense, God is absolutely dead,
01:31:14 but maybe not the God that we were trying to define at the very beginning. So, Nietzsche
01:31:19 also looked forward to the Übermensch, which would be a fully realized human being that,
01:31:24 despite the death of God, did not fall into nihilism and amorality, existential despair,
01:31:32 all that great German stuff. And there are some commentators who talk about this eternal
01:31:38 recurrence that just maybe by incorporating some of these techniques, not necessarily doctrine and
01:31:44 dogma, but I would say the techniques of antiquity. And again, Nietzsche writes a lot about the
01:31:49 rationality of Dionysus having its place in society. If anything, these biochemical discoveries,
01:31:56 I think, point us back. They point us back to Dionysus and their responsible incorporation of
01:32:02 the irrational into our otherwise society of rational people and our kazoo history.
01:32:11 I have a sense that there will be kind of, just kind of as you’ve implied, that there will be
01:32:19 maybe the God of old is dying and there’ll be a rebirth of different kind of God and it’ll just
01:32:24 keep happening throughout history. I do think there will be a time where AI will be the gods
01:32:29 we look to, the other, the super intelligent, those kinds of things. There’s a little bit of an
01:32:36 inkling of religious longing for meaning in the way people conceive of aliens currently.
01:32:46 I mean, I talked to a bunch of people about UFOs, the EPs and aliens. And so to me,
01:32:51 it’s very interesting for perhaps different reasons, because I’m just, I look up to the stars
01:32:56 and it’s incredibly humbling to me to think that there’s trillions of intelligent alien civilizations
01:33:02 out there, which to me seems likely, or perhaps not intelligent, perhaps just alien life. And
01:33:09 actually, also that we don’t even understand what it means to be intelligent, or do we understand
01:33:14 what it means to be alive? The time scale, the spatial scale, which patterns of atoms can form
01:33:23 in a way that you can call life, it just could be way weirder than we can imagine. And certainly
01:33:31 way different than human life. Anyway, that to me is humbling. And so it’s almost like the
01:33:38 simulation, conceiving of the world as simulation, thinking of aliens to me is a useful thought experiment
01:33:44 of like, what would aliens look like if they visited? How would we know? How would we communicate
01:33:50 with them? How would we send signals to them? If they’re already here and we don’t see them,
01:33:58 how’s that possible? That seems to me actually likely that we would just be too self centered
01:34:03 and too dumb to see them if they’re already here. Anyway, so that’s kind of the almost the
01:34:11 pragmatic, the engineering, the physics sense of aliens. But there’s also kind of a longing
01:34:18 to connect with other intelligent beings out there, both the fear and the excitement of that,
01:34:24 that has kind of a religious aspect to it that I find fascinating. And in the right context,
01:34:30 when you remove the skepticism of government from that, it’s actually a hopeful longing.
01:34:36 Do you see this kind of interest in aliens as at all connected to your study of religion?
01:34:44 So you’re the first person to ask me about aliens in eight months. So it looks like I’m going on the
01:34:48 record. Let’s go. I’ll drop some J. Allen Hynek on you. So Hynek involved in Project Blue Book
01:34:59 famously says in 1966, when the long awaited solution to the UFO problem comes, and we’re
01:35:06 assuming that UFOs have something to do with aliens, but when the long awaited solution comes,
01:35:12 I believe it will prove to be not merely the next small step in the march of science,
01:35:17 but a mighty and unexpected quantum leap. In other words, I do not think that we’re dealing with
01:35:24 flesh and blood beings in nuts and bolts crafts. I think it’s way, way more complicated than that.
01:35:30 And if anything, it takes me back to the ancient world. It takes me back to this invisible college
01:35:36 of beings of apparent higher intent. It takes me to the geniuses and the muses. So the first
01:35:42 document in Western civilization, Homer’s epics, they begin by invoking an alien. They invoke a
01:35:49 muse. Tell me O muse about the man. So Homer isn’t inventing poetry. He’s channeling poetry, epic
01:36:01 poetry from an alien intelligence. Maybe that intelligence has felt a little unrecognized in
01:36:09 recent years. Trying to show up in human recognizable forms. The muse is trying to give
01:36:16 a little hints of its existence. Yeah. I mean, I have a, I’ve been saying, I honestly sort of,
01:36:22 I don’t believe this, but I think about this, whether alien, like muse is a great example,
01:36:30 whether aliens could be thoughts. Ideas we have are the aliens or consciousness itself
01:36:39 is the methods by which aliens communicate with us. Like I find this very kind of liberating to
01:36:47 expand our conception of what intelligent beings are. You would like Julian Jaynes. Julian Jaynes
01:36:54 writes a great book, the origins of consciousness and the breakdown of the bicameral mind. It’s this
01:37:00 theory that the ancient Greek mind was very different from ours. And that when they heard
01:37:06 the muses, they heard, or the gods and goddesses for that matter, they would hear them as voices
01:37:10 in the head and hear it as an internal God figure offering commands, which they couldn’t ignore. So
01:37:18 were they walking schizophrenics? It might be one way to talk about it before the breakdown of the
01:37:22 bicameral mind, but it’s a provocative theory, largely untestable. But when you’re reading
01:37:28 ancient Greek and Latin for that matter, you can’t read it very long without bumping up against these
01:37:33 discarnate entities. They’re everywhere. And they survived. They persist across time, which is even
01:37:40 stranger, not just in the form of all the things my daughters like, like fairies and gnomes and
01:37:45 elves. And McKenna loves this, the sylphs and the boulder grinders and the sprites and the gins and
01:37:52 elementals, every society has them. It seems to be fairly universal. And they largely exist in
01:37:58 folklore, mythology. This is what Jacques Vallée writes about so wonderfully. We’ve kind of been
01:38:04 sneaking around it, but let me ask you from everything we’ve been talking about, how do you
01:38:11 think about consciousness? Is it a fun little trick that the human mind does or is it somehow
01:38:19 fundamental to this whole thing? So this three pound lump of jelly inside our craniums,
01:38:27 that can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space, it can contemplate the meaning of infinity,
01:38:34 and it can contemplate itself contemplating on the meaning of infinity, that peculiar self
01:38:40 recursive quality that we call self awareness. So this is the hard problem, right? This is the
01:38:47 unknowable, the unknown at least. I don’t know. I have no good answer for that.
01:38:53 Did you think it’s somehow deeply fundamental to the human experience or is it just a trick? So
01:38:58 you have like, I mean, Sam Harris has really been making me think about this. So, you know,
01:39:05 calling free will an illusion. The interesting thing about Sam is it’s not just a philosophical
01:39:13 it’s not just a philosophical little chat with him about free will. He really says he experiences
01:39:23 the lack of free will. Like he’s able to, you know, large parts of the day to feel like he
01:39:29 has no free will. In that same way, now he thinks that consciousness is not an illusion. It is,
01:39:40 you know, it’s a real thing. But at the same, I’m more almost like, I’m almost more of like
01:39:46 consciousness seems to be a little bit of an illusion in the sense that like, it feels like
01:39:51 maybe this is a robotics AI perspective, but it feels like in that same way that Sam steps outside
01:39:57 of feeling like he has an agency, feeling like he has a free will, I feel like we should be able to
01:40:04 step outside of having a consciousness. So that, from my perspective, maybe that’s a hopeful
01:40:12 perspective for trying to engineer consciousness. But do you think consciousness is like at the core
01:40:17 of this? Or is it just like language? Or almost like a thing we build on top of much deeper human,
01:40:28 the things that makes us human? I don’t know. I am attracted to Lanz’s notion of biocentrism.
01:40:33 I mean, it’s difficult to walk away from the double slit experiment, not wondering
01:40:38 why we seem capable of collapsing that quantum wave function. It’s very, very weird, giving rise
01:40:45 to even weirder ideas about superposition and spooky action at a distance and things that MIT
01:40:51 guys know a lot better than me. But it seems to me fundamental. I mean, maybe consciousness is
01:40:56 the fundamental thing. I mean, weirdly, some of these ancient incubatory practices, I talked about
01:41:02 Peter Kingsley before. So he’s not a proponent of ancient psychedelic use, but is a proponent of
01:41:08 these ancient rites of incubation that were practiced by Pythagoras, Parmenides, Empedocles,
01:41:14 other Presocratics. And so what were they doing? They were trying to get in touch with consciousness.
01:41:18 They were entering into suspended states of animation in these cave like settings. Pythagoras
01:41:25 had built one in his basement and would lie down motionless, apparently, for long periods of time.
01:41:30 And what I think they were trying to do was tap into and trying to answer this question in their
01:41:36 own, you could call it a scientific way, actually, less religion than science. And what they would
01:41:42 discover or try to discover was a state of awareness that is somehow beyond life and death,
01:41:47 beyond waking and dreaming, where you can be aware of the senses, but also in touch with another
01:41:53 reality at the exact same time, what Kingsley calls sensation. That, I think, is definitely
01:42:00 worth exploring. Well, and the way I hope to explore is by trying to build it. Everybody uses
01:42:08 the tools they have. Well, no, I do also hope psychedelics can help. So how do you build that?
01:42:13 I’m curious. That’s a whole other discussion. There’s a lot of things I could say here, but
01:42:19 let me put simply is I believe that you can go a long way towards building consciousness
01:42:32 by trying to fake consciousness. So fake it till you make it. As an engineering approach,
01:42:40 I think will work for consciousness. You seem satisfied with that.
01:42:46 I’m satisfied with that because I know how deeply unsatisfied others are, but just wait.
01:42:55 So, I mean, I don’t know what to. So the topic of consciousness is mostly handled by
01:43:04 philosophers currently. And that’s great. And their philosophers are wonderful and good at
01:43:12 what they do. I’m not a philosopher. I’m an engineer. And I think the approach there is
01:43:18 quite different. I think falling in love is different than trying to have a podcast conversation
01:43:29 about what is love. I think the engineering effort is just fundamentally different than
01:43:38 the philosophical effort. And I have a sense that consciousness can be engineered even before it is
01:43:45 understood by the philosophers. So I think there’s a bunch of things like that in this world that
01:43:50 could be engineered before they’re understood. I think the intelligence is one such thing.
01:43:55 I think we’ll be able to engineer super intelligent beings before we’re able to understand
01:44:01 the human mind. There’s a lot of intuition to unpack there of why that is. But
01:44:12 as it stands, that’s perhaps my engineering optimism and engineering ethic under which I operate.
01:44:21 Consciousness is easy to build, hard to understand.
01:44:23 Okay. Are there books or movies in your life long ago or recently that had a big impact on you?
01:44:37 Immortality Key is exceptionally well researched. The amount of books you read is I cannot even
01:44:44 imagine. So is there something in your travels through the land of language that stuck with
01:44:53 you that was especially impactful? I mentioned a couple of them. So I knew nothing about
01:44:59 psychedelics before 2007. And it was in hearing about some of the first psilocybin experiments
01:45:06 at Hopkins. And then shortly thereafter, I went down this rabbit hole. And so the first set of
01:45:11 recommendations all kind of fit in that time period of my life, 2007, 2008. It started with
01:45:17 Jeremy Narby, The Cosmic Serpent, DNA and the Origins of Knowledge. It was a total impulse buy
01:45:25 at the Barnes and Noble on Sixth Avenue in New York and wound up introducing me to Supernatural
01:45:31 by Graham Hancock. That convinced me that there was a long story to psychedelics that
01:45:40 he tried to prove in that book and that we’re still trying to prove. I mentioned
01:45:44 the connection between ritual psychedelics and cave art. This is the neuropsychological model
01:45:51 that was first proposed by David Lewis Williams at the University of Waterstrand, the same university
01:45:57 where Lee Berger is, by the way, in South Africa. So these ideas are old. But what Graham did in
01:46:02 that book is just it’s well worth your time. It’s well worth a few reads actually. Because it was
01:46:08 after that that I discovered Breaking Open the Head by Daniel Pinchback and a lot of other books
01:46:15 that just kind of blew my mind. What is Breaking Open the Head about? So it’s Daniel’s romp through
01:46:23 contemporary shamanism. And it’s his very well told experiences with everything from psilocybin
01:46:30 to iboga being initiated by the Buites. And it was the first time I’d read any firsthand accounts,
01:46:38 aside from Jeremy Narby, any firsthand accounts by a New Yorker, by the way, about the potential
01:46:45 for these compounds that I’d been ignoring for far too long, obviously. And so that’s when I
01:46:51 started revisiting the Road to Eleusis and looking through the anthropological literature, reading
01:46:57 everything Gordon Wasson had ever written, that Carl Ruck had written. And it sent me down a
01:47:02 pretty weird rabbit hole until I found Peter Kingsley, which is my second recommendation.
01:47:06 So Peter, again, he’s not a fan of the psychedelic hypothesis. But what he does is I think expose
01:47:14 the value of the irrational to the ancient Greeks, especially the pre Socratic. Here we are talking
01:47:20 about AI and God and these entangled philosophical questions. The best I can read Kingsley is that
01:47:30 Western civilization is a product of a gift from the goddess Persephone. And this is not a hippie.
01:47:36 This is a pretty gold standard classicist who went on to write a couple of books. One is In
01:47:43 the Dark Places of Wisdom, and the other is Reality. What better way to title your book?
01:47:48 Where he talks about these ancient techniques for exploring the irrational. The same thing Carl Ruck
01:47:54 was talking about. After compiling all this data in the Road to Eleusis, Ruck says that the biggest
01:47:59 challenge is trying to convince his colleagues in the late 1970s that the ancient Greeks,
01:48:05 and indeed some of the most famous and intelligent among them, could enter so fully into irrationality.
01:48:12 Same thing Nietzsche is talking about in his exploration of Dionysus. And so I think
01:48:16 Kingsley just stands apart as one of those books, Reality, that my life was never quite the same
01:48:24 after reading that. We talked about the three pound
01:48:31 jelly that is able to conceive of the entirety of the fabric of reality in the universe
01:48:40 and everything, and also of its own mortality. What do you think is the meaning of it all?
01:48:50 What’s the meaning of life? Is a three pound jelly able to answer that one?
01:48:59 No, but I can plagiarize Joseph Campbell, which is good enough. Joe Campbell says that I don’t
01:49:06 think what we’re looking for is a meaning of life. I think what we’re looking for is an experience
01:49:12 of being alive so that the experiences we have on the purely physical plane will have resonances
01:49:19 within that are those of our innermost being and reality. You talked about the true reality,
01:49:23 absolute truth. These are all constructs. And I think they’re constructs that are made day by day
01:49:31 and acquire this aura of factuality, remembering Clifford Geertz’s definition of religion. We’re
01:49:37 all just faking it until we make it. And I think a lot of that has to do with moods and motivations
01:49:42 and feelings and emotions, which is not to discredit facts and figures. But I think that
01:49:48 meaning, meaning making is a very subjective process that is not only difficult to talk about,
01:49:56 but difficult to quantify. And experience is a primary in that versus, so like the actual
01:50:02 subjective experience is primary to the meaning making process versus like some kind of rigorous
01:50:09 analysis of like having an algorithm that runs and computes and then finally spits out 42.
01:50:18 Well, this is how families are created. Tell me more about this. Well, my wife and I fell in love
01:50:24 and made babies. We didn’t type up an Excel sheet and figure out the best way to go about this.
01:50:29 That’s what I’ve been doing all these years. That’s why I’m single.
01:50:36 Too many Excel sheets. Well, we say falling in love, right? We say fall in love. What does that
01:50:41 mean to fall in love? You are surrendering to an intelligence that is beyond us. You could say a
01:50:50 Godlike intelligence. Richard Rohr, the Franciscan friar I mentioned, in the Universal Christ,
01:50:54 he writes a lot about how the divine for you is often encountered in the other. In fact,
01:51:02 how could it be otherwise? This is bedrock sacramental theology that you find the God in
01:51:07 the things in your life as well you should. That’s the proving ground for identifying as God rather
01:51:14 than creating a relationship with God. And so I think that these irrational states play a big role
01:51:19 in that. Irrational. Well, I don’t think there’s a better way to end it than on the topic of love.
01:51:24 Brian, thank you so much for a brilliant exposition of history and the poetry.
01:51:32 I really appreciate you talking with me today. I love you, Lex. I love you too, Brian.
01:51:39 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Brian Muirrescu. And thank you to Inside Tracker,
01:51:44 GiveWell, Ni, Indeed, and Masterclass. Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
01:51:52 And now, let me leave you with some words from Terrence McKenna about psychedelics.
01:51:57 Part of what psychedelics do is they decondition you from cultural values. This is what makes it
01:52:04 such a political hot potato. Since all culture is a kind of con game, the most dangerous candy
01:52:09 you can hand out is one which causes people to start questioning the rules of the game.
01:52:14 Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.