Psychedelics and Accessing Consciousness

This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended to substitute the advice of a physician, professional coach, therapist, or other qualified professionals. This show will discuss psychedelics, which are illegal in many countries, including at the federal level in the United States, consult with your physician or other qualified medical professionals regarding the use of psychedelics. And any use should only be conducted in a safe and legal way. This episode also mentions suicidal ideation. Listener discretion is advised. Hi everyone, this is Kai Dickens, and you're listening to the Telepathy Tapes podcast. In season one, non-speakers showed us that telepathy is possible, shattering our assumptions about the world itself. This season, we're turning to others who've also been dismissed, doubted, or mocked for the ways they claim to know, see, heal, or create. What if only by listening to those who've been ignored? We could unlock the deepest mysteries of who we are, where we come from, and where we're going. This is the Telepathy Tapes, and we're opening up the next channel. Sometimes I get asked, how do we support our kids' curiosity without burning everyone out? And that's why I love Time for Learning. It's an all-on-one online curriculum for pre-K through 12th grade that supports a flexible, personalized, home-school experience for your family. With Time for Learning, families can move at their own pace, follow their kids' interests, and still cover all the core subjects you'd expect from a traditional school. Plus electives. And for older kids, their cinematic, story-driven courses really bring learning to life in a way that feels engaging and not forced. What's most amazing is the flexibility, whether your family travels or learns best and bursts or wants to dive deeply into one subject at a time, Time for Learning adapts to you, not the other way around. And for parents, their planning tools, transcripts, and grade templates make staying organized and compliant incredibly easy. Curious of Time for Learning is right for your family? Visit TimeForLearning.com. To explore their curriculum and find the perfect plan for your student, you can get started with a monthly subscription to see just how much your kids love learning on their own terms. Last week, we followed consciousness into the forest, exploring how plant communication can move through roots, through ancestors, and through the quiet language of the natural world. As Nina said last week, plants are not dead matter, but are animate, alive, and ever loving. Today, we follow that thread into the world of psychedelics, plants that have been used for thousands of years to widen consciousness, sharpen intuition, and reveal what lies beyond ordinary perception. And to start, a story that reveals just how powerful that connection can be. The Colombian Armed Forces have been using dogs to search for the children. The plane had taken off from the remote area of Araracuara, bound for San Jose del Gawiré. In 2023, the world was gripped by a heroing story involving four missing children, the Amazon rainforest, and a plane crash. And while three adult bodies have been recovered from the crash site, officials believe that the children could still be alive. The army has found footprints. Officials believe one of these human footprints found Monday belongs to one of the missing little girls. They thought we got put in little trash or fresh and had hint that the children are still alive. The search dragon, two weeks, and then three weeks. Colombia throwing every resource that is disposed, allows the frantic search to locate the four missing indigenous children in the Amazon rainforest, carries on around four weeks, and then five. Colombia's military has deployed more than a hundred survival kits in the Amazon where the rescue operation was just the beginning of something that revealed how intrinsically connected we are to something bigger and beyond ourselves. This whole entire nation is still holding its breath. Time was running out, and then finally, a break in the case came when indigenous elders stepped in. The children were killed by the fire of the Amazon. He said that when you take ayahuasca, you begin with intention. You ask permission. You focus your mind on what you are seeking. Don Rubio entered the ceremony with only one intention to find the children. I became the consciousness of the jungle. I could see through the eyes of the jaiwar and animals. And from them I knew exactly where the children were. He said he became the consciousness of the jungle. And even though he was miles from where the children were lost, he said he could see through the vision of the animals in the forest. And that's how he knew where the children were. I told the authorities the exact area of the jungle to circle. And the very next day the children were found. It's been called a miracle. Four siblings between the ages of one and thirteen found a lie after forty days alone in the Amazon jungle. Surviving a plane crash that killed their mother and two others. The president of Columbia called it a miracle. But for the indigenous communities who searched for the children, it was something deeper. It was validation that their knowledge, their ceremonies, and their connection to the natural world still hold extraordinary power, offering a way of knowing that seas consciousness is something shared between humans, animals, plants, and the forest itself. For Don Rubio, this was not an accident. It was Ayahuasca or the medicine speaking. And just to summarize how profound the natives see the Ayahuasca, I wanted to bring back in Haru, the chief and leader of the Kuntanawa Nation, based in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, who's joined by a translator. You were introduced to him last episode. Haru refers to Ayahuasca as the tribe's technology. And Sustral technology is a much more powerful than even today's technologies, for example, like the internet. And this biological connection that we have with nature, with the people with the forest, allows us to also connect with other realms, with the spiritual realms as well. In addition to being the chief, Haru is an elder and a shaman. And he said that Ayahuasca does not just help his people connect to greater consciousness. It was also a gift from the creator, dating all the way back to the tribe's origin story. In the past, we didn't have death. People came to Earth to live, to experience. We didn't come to die. But because of what we have provoked us humans, there was, let's say, a reaction that brought death to us. So we were pretty much condemned to death. But the creator is very giving in the sense that Ayahuasca was given to us so we can connect with those that die. We can still see our ancestors. And that's why Ayahuasca is a cosmic plant. It's a plant that elevates us into other realms and to other dimensions. And this is where we're going. Today, we're exploring psychedelics. And whether they can help us to access the intuitive, the ancestral, the unseen, even the divine, can psychedelics reconnect us to the collective field that so many cultures describe, but that science is only beginning to take seriously. And I think to begin, we need to acknowledge that most people imagine psychedelics in a shamanic or indigenous setting. But many scholars point out that the ancient Western world, including Greece, one of the epicenters of Western civilization, was also steeped in sacred plant and psychedelic traditions. And the Greek god Dionysus, who's remembered now as the god of wine, may have actually represented a doorway into altered states, suggesting that sacred plants and psychedelics may have shaped the spiritual imagination of the Western ancient world as much as it did the indigenous one. When you think of the word Dionysus, you're probably thinking of the god of wine. And in addition to the god of wine, he is the god of theater. And I would say ritual ecstasy. That's Brian Mirrescu. He's a lawyer and author of the incredible book, The Immortality Key, the secret history of the religion with no name. Wine at the time was not prized or cherished because of its alcoholic value. So the Greeks had no word for alcohol. That wasn't the thing that motivated their passion for wine. So if wine was special but not valued for its alcohol content, then what was in it back then? Wine was a mixed beverage, was a potion traditionally. That could be spiked with all kinds of plants or herbs, Bices or toxins, it could be at once a medicine, also something extremely lethal. It was a mechanism for the delivery of a number of different botanical compounds. So this notion of a wine god, for example, in the ancient Greek world, the blood of Dionysus was seen as this all-consuming transformative potion. Just like the blood of Christ would be referred to later in the early centuries after his death and instantiated at the last supper. So this notion of like consuming the god to become the god, right? Like eat my flesh and drink my blood. It's called theology. I mean, it's a very, very old idea. For millennia, people have turned to plants and potions to feel closer to the sacred. And in the ancient Mediterranean, wine was often more than wine. It was sometimes blended with herbs or fungi to shift perception, heightened emotion, or open the heart and ritual settings. Archaeologists have found traces of cannabis, opium, and urgott on wine vessels from early Jewish, Greek, and Roman sites. Urgott is a naturally occurring fungus that grows on things like barley and rye, and its compounds are chemically similar to what we know as LSD or acid. The notion of our ancestors engaging in visionary ritual through the use of mind-altering plants and fungi, for example. That was not a controversial idea when it came to so-called traditional societies across the Americas or Africa or Asia. For millennia, around the world, humans have turned to psychoactive plants and fungi as teachers, healers, and portals into the unseen. And when you look at the global map of these medicines, you start to realize how entwined psychedelics were with our human past. In central West Africa, there's something called Uboga. Across southern Africa, people used Kana. In Siberia and northern Asia, shamans worked with Aminita Muscarria, which looked like the red and white mushrooms you see in fairy tales and cartoons. In India and Persia, sacred texts describes Soma and Helmoth, psychedelic bruise, whose identities have been lost to time. And throughout Egypt, people revered the blue lotus. And across the Americas, the landscape was rich with plants, from ayahuasca to peyote, to watchuma and psychedelic mushrooms. And in the ancient Mediterranean, Greeks and Romans worked with things like Hennbain, Mandrake, and Urgot. But for some reason, people seem to clutch their pearls when they hear about Western thinkers like Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato engaging with psychedelics. - The notion that the founders of Western civilization, like indeed the best and brightest among them, were somehow doing drugs to find God. That notion was seen as forbidden for some reason. - But whether or not people are ready to accept that, there is substantial evidence that psychedelics played a major role in ancient spiritual life throughout the Greek and Roman empires. And one site for this was called elucius, less than 15 miles from Athens Greece. - Elucius is a modern day Elefcina in Greece. And in the ancient world, I sometimes refer to this as like the spiritual capital of the Mediterranean. It precedes Jerusalem, it precedes Mecca, it precedes Rome. - Elucius was the spiritual capital of the ancient Greek world, a sacred sanctuary just outside of Athens, where people came for nearly 2,000 years to experience, quote unquote, the mysteries. Everyone from farmers to philosophers to emperors made the pilgrimage because the rights or the ceremonial practices at Elucius promised something extraordinary, a vision that dissolved the fear of death. At the center of the ceremony was the Kikian, a sacred potion that many scholars now believe in psychedelic properties, whatever unfolded inside that temple. Initiates described it as a moment when the veil lifted, when the soul could see and when life and death were revealed to be intertwined. - So it's a holy place, it's a place of pilgrimage and people would come there from all over the Greek speaking world to have this life-changing experience. And the little testimony that survives again, because this was all secret, it just speaks to this once in a lifetime event where the eyes of the initiate are opened and they transcend the physical confines of the mortal body. And indeed they defeat death. - I've always loved studying the world religions and I'm just as fascinated by the people who've stepped away from them. And one thing I hear often from this group is if God is real, why did He stop speaking to us? Why did visions and burning bushes and revelations and direct encounters with the divine seem to happen so often in the ancient world while today many feel cut off from that connection. But as Brian spoke, something dawned on me. Maybe the divine hasn't stopped trying to engage with us. Maybe we've just forgotten an outlawed and erased the tools that made it possible to effortlessly interact with the other side. - It would said that in the absence of a loses, not just Greek life, but human life would suffer. That somehow, if these mysteries ever disappeared, which they did under the Christianized Roman Empire in the fourth century AD, that once they disappear, our connection to the divine somehow disappears. And that's the world that we were left with. (soft music) And that is the world we're left with. If that doesn't keep ringing your ears. - Plato referred to his experience there potentially as a blessed site and vision. We have other writers from the ancient world who talked about it as this visionary experience. And so we know that something visual was happening and it was unclear if that was something in the external world or if it was something within the sight of the mind, maybe through the administration of a sacred potion that could have drawn initiates into this journey to the underworld where it was said that they lost the fear of death and they were forever transformed. - All of this raises a pretty simple question. Is there any evidence that these potions truly involve psychedelics? Scholars have been trying to answer that for decades and the trail leads to an ancient recipe, a potion described in one of the oldest hymns we have. - So Kukion is this potion that's mentioned in the hymn to Demeter. - The hymn to Demeter is an ancient Greek poem that was likely composed between 607 and 700 BC. - It talks about this potion having basically three ingredients, water, mint and barley. So it kind of seems like a minty beer or a minty porridge, but the hypothesis put forward in the 1970s is that this was no ordinary barley. This was barley that had been infected with ergot. - Kukion was one of the most ancient ritual potions of the Greek world and there's a variety of artifacts, the point to the fact that it was used at allucius as well. But to answer whether or not the Kukion potion was like a delic, scientists had to figure out if the barley was indeed affected with ergot, which has compounds similar to LSD. And the answer may have been uncovered in Spain. - This old farm said, I was called Mascaste Jardé Pontos that had been completely almost forgotten by the scarly world. And a number of miniature chalices had been excavated back in the 1990s and in one of those chalices, an archaeopotnist named Jordi Trecerras using optical microscopy and modern scientific instruments had detected the presence of ergot. And so if we have the first physical forensic evidence for the notion of an ancient potion spiked with ergot and so it really lend it credence to this notion that maybe these tall tales of ancient psychedelic potions has more meat on the bone than we've been led to believe. - Wow. - What people report that maybe these compounds really do unleash the God within. People perhaps for the first time get the sensation that they are not their physical body, that there may be something more to their consciousness than they've previously been led to believe. It just somehow has this sense of authenticity about it. And that's really hard to explain. (gentle music) - These days I'm all about quality over quantity, especially in my closet. If it's not well made in versatile, it's just not worth it to me. That's honestly why I love quints. The fabric feels elevated, the cuts are thoughtful and the pricing makes sense. 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And today we're gonna look at how some of this ancient wisdom is starting to be incorporated back into mainstream modern society and not just strictly for spiritual ends, but to help address and heal some of the complex traumas of contemporary life. In the last few decades, research has surged, showing that certain psychedelics can help relieve conditions that are notoriously hard to treat, like depression, OCD, addiction, and post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD. And because of that, some of the people who stand to benefit the most are veterans. And one of them is Juliana Mercer. I'm Juliana Mercer. I am from the Huananmehiko and now currently live in San Diego, California. Juliana was a very religious child and she actually wanted to go to Bible school so her family could have never anticipated that she'd make the brave decision to join the Marine Corps right after high school. We can understand how shocked my parents were when I came home and told them that I had already signed my name on the dotted line and there was not gonna be any discussion about it. So I graduated bootcamp two weeks before 9/11 and was attached to a unit that focused on civil affairs and it's working with the governance of the communities where you are deployed. And so what that looked like for me in both the rock and Afghanistan was working when. with whatever type of leadership was there with the overarching mission to win the hearts and minds. And that was twofold. We paid reparations when damage occurred. We had a guidebook that told us how much to pay them for their friends and for their goats. And that was everything from goats to human lives. And the other part of that was working with the community leaders and creating projects that were helpful to that community. And between my two deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan where I did civil affairs, I had the opportunity to be at the Naval Hospital in San Diego at the Wounded Warrior Battalion where we were receiving those that were wounded coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. And my job was to liaison between the community and the Marine Corps to provide support for those Marines that were coming home with injuries. But this work of seeing injured veterans and their scars both physical and mental and the true cost of war on the ground took its toll. My PTSD was definitely cumulative. There wasn't one grand event that caused it. It was a collection of things that I saw that I experienced. That year I was in Afghanistan. We suffered the highest level of loss that any Marine Corps unit had suffered since Vietnam. One of the poignant moments for me was whenever we would be sending home Marines that had been killed in action, we'd go out to the flight line and we'd pay our last respects to the flag covered coffins. And we weren't able to cry. We were in uniform. We were saluting very serious in solemn, but there was no time to actually grieve. All you could do was swallow it. Turn around and go right back to work. In the military, there's no space to fall apart. You keep going, you keep serving and the pain gets buried under routine and duty. Until one day you stop, even for a moment and everything you packed away comes rushing back in. Trauma compounds and if it's not processed, it becomes a weight that pulls you into a place you cannot climb out of alone. Since 9/11, we've lost over 6,000 veterans a year to suicide here on American soil. I focused on getting veterans connected to everything and anything that may help them from falling into that black hole and found myself in that black hole eventually. Juliana decided to seek help. There's a nonprofit called Heroke Hearts Project and they help veterans connect to psychedelic therapy outside of the US in places where it's not illegal. And within a month, I was able to leave the country and have a psychedelic experience in Costa Rica through a vetted retreat center. And I spent a week down there. They have shaman that work with the medicine and help guide people through those experiences. I was able to work with a Peruvian tradition, which is called the Shapibo tradition, and drank ayahuasca and it tastes very like earthy and bitter. This is the same psychedelic that Don Rubio used in helping to find the children lost in the Amazon. And within an hour, you start to feel the psychedelic effects of this. And the shaman are there providing support. They're singing songs, which are called ikados. And through those songs, they're guiding you spiritually through the process. I went outside and worded the jungle and the monkeys are hailing and you can hear the birds and I see the moon just glowing. And I can feel the spirit of the jungle and the spirit of ayahuasca just swirling around me and I look up and start talking. And then I go, oh, what am I doing? I don't believe in God anymore. And this voice says, it's okay, you can still talk to me. We've always been connected. You've always talked to me. You just used to call me by a different name and I'm the same. And you know, I used to call it God. And now I call it the universe. And it reconnected me to what I always knew and what I had pushed away while I was trying to make sense of the horrors of the world. I had told myself that there was no way that there was a God with all the things that I witnessed and I was reconnected to that spirit. Juliana now works for healing breakthrough. Whose mission is to drive equitable access to evidence-based mental health treatments through the Department of Veteran Affairs. I've supported many retreats and one of the things that I think is wild is the physical change that happens. So when you see someone pre-retreat, like if you would take it before an after picture, there's just a completely different visage. Their eyes are different, like your shoulders are different. Some people are almost unrecognizable from the beginning of their psychedelic experience to the following day. I have so many stories of veterans' lives who have been changed and saved. That experience opens me up to be ready for my second psychedelic experience. That was with psilocybin mushrooms. And overnight I was able to experience that 20 years of collected trauma and grief. I was able to actually feel it for the first time and let it release from my body and from my soul and my spirit. And when I woke up, that experience was clearing up what it would have taken to deal with 20 years of grief through therapy. That happened in one night. Juliana is talking about something groundbreaking, healing years of trauma in one controlled session. These modalities aren't a silver bullet. They come along with a lot of really hard work that has to be done, which is why I think it's important to point out that it wasn't just me doing psilocybin, it was me doing it with the help of a therapist before and after, and also with a psychedelic coach that was helping me to navigate and explore everything that came up. I think without those things, it's just a psychedelic experience and you don't get the healing benefits from it in a major way. Who's mission is to drive equitable access to evidence-based mental health treatments through the Department of Veteran Affairs? I started advocating in DC and educating our legislators on the truth that this medicine was something that could solve a problem that we've been trying to solve for quite a while. And not just lawmakers, but scientists, doctors, clinicians have all taken note. Across the country, universities and medical centers are beginning to study psychedelic treatments in carefully controlled settings. They happen under the care of trained clinicians, psychologists, or medical doctors who guide people through preparation, dosing, and integration. One person working to better understand the medical benefits of this magic mushroom or psilocybin is Ben Kelmendi. He's a doctor at Yale and for years he's looked at the different ways we can apply psychedelics to mental health. So at Yale, we're investigating how psychedelics can fundamentally transform treatments for psychiatric conditions that have been remarkably resistant to conventional approaches. What ultimately pulled him into this field was a combination of two things. The first was the sheer number of patients living with depression, OCD, and PTSD who were not finding relief. And the second was the growing evidence that psychedelics work in a completely different way than traditional treatments, offering a path forward when nothing else is helped. When you see patients who have tried everything, years of different medications, various types of therapy, even considering brain surgery, for example, for severe OCD. And then you read about studies where a single dose of psilocybin or other psychedelics creates these lasting profound changes. And that really gets your attention as a clinician scientist. And here we're not talking about marginal improvements. We're seeing people describe fundamental shifts in how they relate to their symptoms, compare this to our standard care treatments. Traditional SSRIs or other pharmacological treatments are currently available. SSRIs are one of the most common pharmaceutical treatments for depression and anxiety. They're medications like Prozac and Zolof, Laksopro. Drugs that work by increasing their tonal levels in the brain. The analogy that I come up with is like SSRIs are trying to change a river's flow by adding more water. Whereas psychedelics are more like the spring melt that breaks up ice jams. They don't just add volume. They fundamentally restructure the river bed itself. And this particularly relevant in OCD. It's as if OCD imagine is like a record player where the needle keeps jumping back to the same groove. It's this recursive loop. And traditional treatments try to lift the needle carefully. Whereas psilocybin is more like briefly liquefied the vinyl itself. And when it resilitifies the obsessive groups are still there, but the no longer captures the needle with the same inevitability. Psychedelics, they seem to create windows of neuroplasticity where the real change becomes possible. Neuroplasticity is a critical part of the conversation around the benefits of psychedelics in general. The data is quite clear that psychedelics induce new plasticity across brain networks. Neuroplasticity is the brain's ability to change, to learn, to adapt, and to form new pathways. And psychedelics aren't the only thing that can do this. Meditation can do it, running can do it. Anything that pushes the mind, be it is usual rhythm, forces the brain to grow. So instead of targeting one specific illness, neuroplasticity supports the entire system, the way boosting your immune function supports overall health. And that's part of why psychedelics are so promising. They open up a window where the brain becomes more flexible, more open to change, and more capable of making meaning. The changes are in great fragile like with SSRIs. People describe certain insights or shifts in perspective that fundamentally alter their relationships with their symptoms. It's not like that the obsessive thoughts completely disappear, but they're grip loosens. The fact that mainstream solutions simply aren't working well enough is what's driven this current explosion in research. Our standard of care treatments have not been able to keep pace with the rise in suicidality, mental health conditions, economic burden on the system. There's a social cyber revolution, a mushroom revolution sweeping the planet. There's 255 clinical studies at clinicalchirials.gov, registered on social cyber. 20 years ago there was one. This is famed myologist Paul Stammett's, the man at least partially responsible for bringing psilocybin back into the mainstream. I'm a myologist and that means I'm a scientist who studies fungi. psilocybin was also famous for popularizing psilocybin mushrooms. And for him these mushrooms are here to help change society undeniably for the better. psilocybin makes nicer people. They're less aggressive, they're more empathetic, they're kinder. It reduces the excitement for aggression and makes people more contemplative or respectful. psilocybin just turns down the dial, so you're more reflective and conscious of what you're saying and doing. Paul speaks from a deeply spiritual place and research is starting to validate much of what he's saying. psilocybin appears to quiet the brain's rigid loops and increase neural flexibility, making it easier for people to access empathy, self-reflection and emotional insight. And what fascinates me is that there seems to be two parallel conversations happening in our society around psychedelics. One conversation focuses on healing, helping people process memory, emotion and trauma. In the other leans into something more expansive, the possibility that these substances offer a window or connection into a larger field of consciousness. I've never been a smart person until I did psilocybin. And then it's not my intelligence, it's some sort of reservoir of a naïve intelligence that speaks through me. And I feel for my journeys the voices of ancestors, of indigenous people from Europe to Mesoamerica, as a chorus of ancestors saying, "This is information the world needs to have. I'm just a voice, a portal for that information. There is a giant intelligence in the universe and we are so naïve. Where deanderthals with nuclear weapons, whatever metaphor you want to use. But looking at the enormity of the intelligence of the universe that we're discovering, I am so hopeful. I am so optimistic." And what fascinates me is that even though this new research is framed as medicine, it keeps brushing up against something deeply spiritual. And this is exactly where the two conversations around psychedelics, one about mental health and one about spiritual connection begin to merge. Here's Ben Calmendi from the Yale School of Medicine again. What's interesting that even in our medical context with clinical language and scientific protocols, the spiritual dimensions emerge naturally. People describing encounters with a deceased loved ones, feeling of connection to something greater, experience of unity, sense of oneness or transcendence. And these types of explanations have been dismissed because our medical models have not developed to actually integrate these sorts of languages. Even inside control lab settings, with eye masks and heart monitors and medical checklists, people report experiences that sound deeply spiritual, a sense of dissolving into something larger, encounters with loved ones who've died, moments of overwhelming unity or peace that feel more real than ordinary consciousness. So much of it actually reminds me of the near death experiences we explored in episode 1. They almost allow you to touch or visit another place. And when you come back from it, you're transformed. And scientists aren't ready to claim that these experiences prove anything metaphysical. But they do acknowledge that these events are considered measurable and often life changing. When people have experiences of profound connection, whether they interpret as a spiritual, psychological, it directly addresses these core issues, like feeling connected to something greater than yourself is inherently anti-depressant, if you will. Experience yourself as a part of a larger whole, connoisse the isolation of trauma. These experience remind people that there's more to life than they're suffering, more to them themselves than their symptoms at a macro level. But it's not being delivered in a particular spiritual framework. And of course they're not. These trials are happening at places like Johns Hopkins and Yale. But it does make me wonder if something essential has been left out. Because for most of human history, psychedelic brews were taken in temples around fires and at holy sites, with songs and prayers and intention, where the sacred was just assumed. Today, we measure doses and outcomes and what this is doing to the brain. But we rarely pause to ask what in a world people are stepping into or what language we even need to make sense of it. And here's author Brian Murerscu again. The fact that within medical settings, this can happen in more controlled environments, I think is a great step forward. But I don't think our allopathic medical model in the West is necessarily the best to handle and experience that seems very existential, very ontological raises questions that most physicians or psychiatrists or even psychologists are not trained to answer. What I take from Brian's wisdom and everything we've heard here is that the data shows that psychedelics can make a profound difference in people's lives. And they're guided responsibly. And a growing number of doctors and researchers believe that we should decriminalize these medicines due to their profound promise for the mental health crisis. But at the same time, we need to be ready to address the other side of the coin. Because we cannot use a purely medical framework to guide people through experiences that are not purely medical, they are intrinsically metaphysical. And as a culture, we've lost the language, the tools, the rituals, and even the humility that once helped humans navigate these realms. But the word psychedelic means that which manifests the soul. And when I read ancient authors, when I study ancient mythology, that their world is suffused with the paranormal, their world is suffused with the universe of gods and goddesses with whom they daily interact or spirits or muses that communicate with them on a daily basis. And our materialistic world in the wake of the scientific revolution just over the past few hundred years is very, very different from the worldview of the ancients. If you look across history, and I'm talking about tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, the traditions that I was uncovering were all related to death, this notion of communion with the ancestors. And you can go back many thousands of years to a neolithic site like Gobekli Tepe, where they seem to have uncovered, you know, ambiguous evidence for the ritual consumption of something like a cultic beer going back many, many millennia. For the purpose of ecstatic communion with these same ancestors, and at that site that I mentioned in Spain, it was often interpreted as a place where the living commune with the dead. And so, you know, as you look across the ancient classical world, as you look into traditional societies, this notion of using psychedelics, either like for divination or prophecy, right? So stepping out of time and space or communing with ancestors seems to be like a recurrent theme that pops up again and again. Here's Ben Kelmendev again. Right now, integrating psychedelics into healthcare is like trying to introduce a three-dimensional being into the flat land. The existence systems really don't have the dimensions to comprehend what's happening. We're not just adding a new treatment. We're asking a system built on symptom suppression to accommodate transformation, transcendence, if you will. So, it's an architectural issue rather than a procedural. And I see that we're moving towards a model that integrates biological, psychological, social, and spiritual dimensions of health. There are so many threads to the psychedelic conversation. These experiences can be profoundly healing, but beyond the medicinal uses, I really want you to feel this deeper truth. That the history of being human has always been braided with these plants and substances. For thousands of years, they were a doorway, teacher, bridge, and somewhere along the way we shamed and criminalized the very tools that once connected us to universal consciousness. We buried the bridge, and so psychedelics aren't some modern new thing. We are just slowly remembering what our ancestors always knew. Connection to the other side, to knowledge, to the sacred, present, and woven throughout this world, and we actually have the tools to access them. Here's Brian Mirascu again. The notion is that, well, maybe humans have been doing this forever, and that this notion of seeking the divine in nature, like through naturally occurring plants and compounds, was a tradition that we may have even inherited from species that precede our own. There are abundant examples of animals who seek out altered states of consciousness in the natural world. Baboons craving tobacco or bees snacking on rododendrons, goats foraging for coffee cherries. There's no shortage of examples in the animal kingdom, in that quest to alter consciousness, and so we're really just following in their footsteps. We may not have invented any of these rituals. The tulip of the tapes is about shifting paradigms. About realizing the world you woke up in was shaped long before you took your first breath. And when it comes to psychedelics, we were born into a paradigm that tried to bury anything that felt too mysterious or too powerful or too ungovernable, and that erasure goes back far. The tracers all the way back to the moment the Roman Empire began outlawing the ethyogenic rights that connected humans to the divine for millennia, and these traditions were already fragile, past orally protected by secrecy, and once they were targeted, they had almost no chance of surviving. Why is the temple of a leucis destroyed? It's a reason why a lot of pagan sites are destroyed after the Roman Empire becomes Christianized, right? This illegal cult becomes the official religion of Rome. And as a result, you know, by the end of the 4th century, the pagan shrines and temples and their libraries too come under suspicion. While these ancient psychedelic traditions in the West were shattered, erased by Empire and secrecy and fear, they didn't vanish everywhere. Across the world, in indigenous communities, these practices were carried forward with courage and precision. And it's not that they weren't touched or what unchallenged, but they were protected, held in ceremony, and passed on generation after generation. And while colonization and war and progress swept across continents, these traditions endured because people risked everything to keep them alive. And when we look at those surviving lineages today, shamans of the Amazon and the current derives of Mexico and the iOS caros and pale taros and plant teachers across the globe, we're not looking at something exotic or other. We're looking at a mirror, a glimpse of what the Western world might have looked like if our own bridges to the sacred hadn't been burned or buried or outlawed. If anything at all, these traditions show us that psychedelic practices were never fringe, they were never reckless. It was medicine, ritual, community. It was a way of knowing the world and knowing ourselves. I sometimes say that these secrets died under the weight of their own secrecy. And I think that's something to take very seriously. Some of these potions, some of these formula, some of the ancient pharmacology itself. That was all kept secret. I mean, the odds are, if it's not being written down, it'll get lost to time. And there is concerted effort to make them disappear and to exclude women from positions of power and authority. Throughout much of the Western world, it was usually women who prepared these wines and herbs and potions that made these psychedelic rituals possible. The brewers of the magical beer, for example, ancient Sumerian Egypt, that was women. And as you go forward in time, women are also mixing these sacred wines. We have any number of artifacts that specifically show women literally throwing herbs into different crat terraces and mixing bowls as holy wine. It shows up in the literature too. If any part of the old Western psychedelic traditions survived, any scrap of the plant knowledge, the formulas, the rituals, it was almost certainly carried forward by women. Women are often excluded from the continuation of some of these traditions to the point where they go underground. Maybe some of these female healers become the folk healers, or the witches, or the wise women of the dark ages, the middle ages, and the Renaissance, which, if anything, is known for prowess over the natural world. She has the ability to harm or to heal. She is the expert of the pharmacopea. For generations, we've held this image of a woman bent over a cauldron. And it's felt like nothing more than superstition or fairytale meant to frighten children. But when you look at the historical record, you start to realize that maybe those stories were a distorted echo of something real. Women were the keepers of sacred wines and herbal brews for thousands of years. So if even one recipe survived the Roman crackdown, it would make sense for Terea's surface centuries later, carried forward by the women who refused to let that knowledge die. In the Vatican archives, I target it one specific file from the late 16th century, in 1590, that talked about this witch named Lucretia, and it's all recorded in this archaic Italian, what I found in there through the help of an Italian scholar was mentioned of a special wine that Lucretia herself had been concocting, mixed with various herbs, and it even talked about a magical ointment that she concocted out of lizards. And I remember seeing that on the page from 1590, and just thinking straight back, 1500 years, to the same kinds of things that had been physically discovered outside Pompeii, witchy wine of henbane and black night shade and opium and cannabis mixed with lizards. If a lizard-infused potion is found in ancient Pompeii and is described again in a witch trial, 1500 years later, it's hard not to wonder did that knowledge really disappear or was someone keeping the life underground for generations. And so, something about knowledge of the pharma capia and these magical wines and this forbidden, heretical knowledge survived. It seems to really have really survived into the record to the point where church inquisitors are writing about this during the trials and prosecutions of these medieval witches. And that is the devastating irony. It was those women that were trying to preserve those doorways to the divine that were once later persecuted the most. Through the inquisition and the witch trials, the last custodians of western and theogenic knowledge were silenced. And when they were gone, so much of the West's spiritual technology vanished with them. But here's the good news. The impulse behind those ancient traditions, the desire to heal, to shift consciousness, to work with forces bigger than ourselves. Those impulses did not die. You can outlaw the rituals and burn the libraries and bury the practitioners. But you just can't extinguish the human instinct to reach beyond the material world. And while the West lost much of its plant wisdom, these medicines are still alive and intact in lineages around the world. And even when these plant-based rights were pushed into the shadows in the West, the deeper insights behind them, the knowing that the metaphysical world is real, present, and trying to work with us, lived on in many other traditions, and not just through psychedelics, but through practices that work with the body and the field around it, which brings our journey to its next chapter, energy healing. These cultures and continents, people believe the body was animated by subtle life force that could be balanced, directed, or strengthened. There have been different names for it in different languages, but the same idea stretches back millennia, that we can heal one another by harnessing an invisible force that seems to know exactly what to do. We started season 2 in the heavens, exploring consciousness far beyond us, and we've slowly been working our way back toward the powers that live within our own flesh. Maybe even inside each and every one of our cells. So next week we ask if consciousness can heal itself? Join me for a two-part journey into energy healing. A world where people describe heat moving through their bodies, pain dissolving in minutes, and recoveries a defy explanation. A world where the unseen becomes undeniable, and where emerging science may finally offer evidence of the metaphysical. Psychedelics carry risks and are illegal in many places, consult with your physician or other qualified medical professionals regarding the use of psychedelics, and any you should only be conducted in a safe and legal way. It takes a village to make this podcast, and I want to thank our producers, Jesse Steed, Jill Pichasnik, and Catherine Ellis. A special thanks to our contributing producers Anne De Solar and the Laynault-Koroystrepo, who are essential to this whole episode, but extremely helpful in fixing the interviews in the Amazon. Original music is by Rachel Cantu, Mixed, Mastering, and Additional Music is by Michael Orbino, our associate producer, Isalena Kennedy. Original artwork is by Ben Cantu or Design, and I'm Kai Dickens, your executive producer, writer, and host.