#347: Stan Grof, Lessons from ~4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond

"I realized people were not having LSD experiences; they were having experiences of themselves. But they were coming from depths that psychoanalysis didn't know anything about." — Stanislav Grof Stanislav Grof, M. D., (stanislavgrof.com http://stanislavgrof.com/) is a psychiatrist with more than 60 years of experience in research of "holotropic" states of consciousness, a large and important subgroup of non-ordinary states that have healing, transformative, and evolutionary potential. Previously, he was Principal Investigator in a psychedelic research program at the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague, Czechoslovakia, Chief of Psychiatric Research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, and Scholar-in-Residence at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA. Currently, Stan is Professor of Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies https://www.ciis.edu/ (CIIS) in San Francisco, CA, and conducts professional training programs in holotropic breathwork and transpersonal psychology, and gives lectures and seminars worldwide. He is one of the founders and chief theoreticians of transpersonal psychology and the founding president of the International Transpersonal Association http://www.transpersonalassociation.com/ (ITA). His publications include more than 150 articles in professional journals and books like Psychology of the Future https://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Future-Consciousness-Transpersonal-Humanistic/dp/0791446220/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&qid=1542321206&sr=8-1&keywords=Psychology+of+the+Future&linkCode=ll1&tag=offsitoftimfe-20&linkId=6614cd89bfdd0ea051413a9aa0964e04&language=en_US, The Cosmic Game https://www.amazon.com/Cosmic-Game-Explorations-Frontiers-Consciousness/dp/0791438767/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&qid=1542321299&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Cosmic+Game&linkCode=ll1&tag=offsitoftimfe-20&linkId=47146a9f1181483f3e5a3b9ecee3028d&language=en_US, and Holotropic Breathwork https://www.amazon.com/Holotropic-Breathwork-Self-Exploration-Transpersonal-Humanistic/dp/1438433948/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=1542321345&linkCode=ll1&tag=offsitoftimfe-20&linkId=a3fc2e954d870144cff563602b837568&language=en_US, among many others https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/entity/author/B000APUAY6/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&node=283155&offset=0&pageSize=12&sort=author-pages-popularity-rank&page=1&linkCode=ll2&tag=offsitoftimfe-20&linkId=2d12c1d7c3e80b7cf8d553c0fb5b6a31&language=en_US. In this wide-ranging interview, we cover many topics, including: Some of his main takeaways after supervising or guiding ~4,500 LSD sessionsThe place and role of "wounded healers"Limitations and uses of traditional psychoanalysis and talk therapyHolotropic breathwork and some similarities to MDMAStories of odd synchronicities and the seemingly impossibleStan's strangest personal experiences on psychedelicsWhat Stan believes humanity most needs to overcome: division and destructionI hope you'll enjoy this in-depth conversation with Stan Grof! This episode is brought to you by Peloton https://www.onepeloton.com/, which has become a staple of my daily routine. I picked up this bike after seeing the success of my friend Kevin Rose, and I’ve been enjoying it more than I ever imagined. Peloton is an indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right to your home. No worrying about fitting classes into your busy schedule or making it to a studio with a crazy commute. 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• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

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  No, we're just seeing an appropriate time.

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  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:24Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Peloton, which I've been using probably for about a year now. Peloton is a cutting-edge indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right into your home. You can also do on-demand, which is what I do, we'll come back to that. So you don't have to worry about fitting classes into a busy schedule or making it to a studio or gym with a hectic or unpredictable commute. I, for instance, have a Peloton bike right in my master bedroom at home, and it's one of the first things I do many mornings. I wake up, I meditate for a bit, then I knock out a short 20-minute ride in my undies, hard to do that at the gym, take a shower, and I'm in higher gear for the rest of the day. It's really convenient and has become something that I look forward to. So you have a lot of options. For one, if you like, you can ride live with thousands of other riders across the country

• 1:08Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:49Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:34Tim Ferriss?

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• 3:01Tim Ferriss?

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• 4:28Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job each episode to interview and deconstruct world-class performers and/or people who are the best at what they do, to tease out the life lessons, habits, tools, and so on, that you can hopefully apply to your own lives. And this episode was such a treat for me. I had so much fun, and I was able to interview a living legend, someone I have wanted to interview on this podcast for many years, Stanislav Grof. And we went deep, we went long, we went wide. It was everything I hoped it to be. Stanislav Grof, M.D., otherwise known as Stan Grof. Stanislav is spelled S-T-A-N-I-S-L-A-V,

• 5:13Tim Ferriss?

  is a psychiatrist with more than 60 years of experience in research of holotropic states of consciousness. And we'll define what that means in the interview. But suffice to say for now, it is a large and important subgroup of non-ordinary states that have healing, transformative, and evolutionary potential. And we will explore all of that. Previously, he was principal investigator in a psychedelic research program at the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague, Czechoslovakia, chief of psychiatric research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and scholar in residence at the Esalen Institute. In this very wide-ranging conversation, we cover a whole lot of things, including some stuff that he has not gone

• 5:56Tim Ferriss?

  over previously. So, among others, some of his main takeaways after supervising or guiding roughly 4,500 LSD sessions, that is, LSD-assisted psychotherapy sessions. The place and role of so-called wounded healers. Limitations and uses of traditional psychoanalysis and talk therapy. Similarities, or some similarities, between holotropic breathwork and MDMA use, or the applications of MDMA. Stories of very odd synchronicities and the seemingly impossible. We get into some very, very hard-to-explain

• 6:33Tim Ferriss?

  Reports and phenomena, to put it very, very lightly. Stan's strangest personal experiences on psychedelics and what Stan believes humanity most needs to overcome division and destruction. Currently Stan is Professor of Psychology at CIIS, that's the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, and conducts professional training programs in holotropic breathwork and transpersonal psychology, as well as gives lectures and seminars worldwide. He is one of the founders and chief theoreticians of transpersonal psychology as a field, and the founding president of the International Transpersonal Association, ITA. His publications include more than 150 articles in professional journals and books like Psychology

• 7:14Tim Ferriss?

  of the Future, The Cosmic Game, and Holotropic Breathwork, among many others. You can find him online, and I will link to this and everything in this episode in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. You can find him online at stanislavgrof.com. Now, one more thing before we get to the interview, and I'll try to keep this short. Please, please, please, if you're a listener of this podcast, if you like what you hear, I invite you and ask you, please, to subscribe to the podcast, and you will get notified whenever I release a new episode. For many reasons, and a lot of technical reasons, this is very, very helpful to me and my podcast team. It helps us to get hard-to-reach guests and do much more. Takes 10 to 30 seconds.

• 7:57Tim Ferriss?

  So, all you have to do is search for The Tim Ferriss Show, you can misspell it, doesn't matter, in iTunes or on your phone, in the app you use, like Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Stitcher, Castbox, whatever, when you see my face and The Tim Ferriss Show, click on it and click Subscribe. That's it, super easy. If you can spare the 10 to 30 seconds, thank you for pausing this episode briefly to do that. It really helps us to do bigger and better things for you all. And with that said, please enjoy this interview, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, with the one and only Stan Grof.

• 8:32Tim Ferriss?

  Stan, bienvenido al programa.

• 8:35Speaker 03

  Muchas gracias, Tim. Gracias por invitarme.

• 8:39Tim Ferriss?

  Es un honor.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  Y antes de empezar, me gustaría agradecerle por todo lo que ha estado haciendo, por levantar la conciencia en este planeta. Ha sido increíble, y es un gran honor y placer para mí estar en su programa.

• 8:52Tim Ferriss?

  Muchas gracias. No podría estar más emocionado de estar hablando contigo ahora mismo. Nos saludamos a través de video hace unos pocos segundos. Y ciertamente he solo become más emocionado de tener esta conversación debido a nuestra introducción, Jack Kornfield, uno de los humanos más dulces que conozco. Y tengo muchas preguntas y muchos temas, así que gracias, por supuesto, a Jack por hacer la introducción. Y a esta hora la gente habría escuchado algunos de tus información biográfica que habría leído.

• 9:28Tim Ferriss?

  Pero supongo que deberíamos empezar tal vez en el principio y preguntarte cómo te enamoraste de los psicodélicos.

• 9:40Speaker 03

  Bueno, la situación fue que me enamoré inicialmente de la psicoanálisis. Y como resultado de ello, fui a la universidad médica. Y en mi cuarto año de universidad, estaba yendo al departamento de psiquiatría ya como voluntario para obtener algún, ya sabes, algún beneficio por la disciplina. Y esto es donde obtuvimos de la oferta de Sandoz de impulsos de delisid, de LSD. Y vinieron con una carta hablando de la historia, de la famosa experiencia, experimento de Albert Hofmann en la bicicleta y todo eso.

• 10:24Speaker 03

  Y nos preguntaban si queríamos experimentar con esa sustancia y les contamos si había algún uso legítimo de ella en psiquiatría y psicología. Y mi preceptor, Notzen Robiczek, que estaba muy interesado en LSD, pero no tenía tiempo para sentarse, ya sabes, por seis o ocho horas con su...

• 10:52Speaker 03

  Patients with the experimental subjects. So he was using several of us as kind of gophers. We were sitting in these sessions and we were keeping the records. So I actually started my exposure to LSD already nineteen fifty-four. But unlike at Harvard, students were excluded. So I couldn't have my own session until I graduated from the medical school. And by that time, you know, my appetite was whetted. So I was sitting in these sessions of psychologists, psychiatrists, artists, and, you know, hearing all these fantastic stories about the experiences that they had. But I had no, really no access to it.

• 11:35Tim Ferriss?

  What application were you looking at initially? What was, what was the, the structure?

• 11:41Speaker 03

  You know, initially, it was just, just a kind of a, it was just a phenomenological research, just giving it to different people and seeing what it does. You know, I don't know if you can imagine now when there are a lot of publications and, you know, other kinds of publicity, what it was like for us when this substance fell into our laps. We had absolutely no idea what it would do, you know, from session to session. I mean, we didn't know where it would be going, you know, with our patients and, and in our own sessions. So it was, it's quite an exciting adventure. I spent several years actually doing two sessions a day. I would get up early.

• 12:22Speaker 03

  I'd do a session and at about two, two o'clock, you know, I started another one. And I had a department where I had eighteen beds. And all the patients were getting LSD. So they were really familiar with the states and all our nurses had training sessions. So by two o'clock, I could pass the, the person who was coming down from an LSD session to this team of nurses and, and patients, and I could start another one. And I was sitting in all of those sessions, you know, all, the whole time. Unlike some other places where, for example, Hans Karl Loehner, he was actually leaving

• 13:04Speaker 03

  the experimental subjects alone and they just had a bell where they could call the nurse when they were in trouble. But I was so excited about what was coming on. I realized this was, this is going to change psychiatry, psychology.

• 13:20Tim Ferriss?

  What was it about those early experiences that led you to that conclusion, that it would change psychiatry and psychology? And maybe just before we get to that, and I want to talk about your first experience as well, but how many total sessions have you directly or indirectly been a part of or supervised in your life, would you say?

• 13:42Speaker 03

  At this point would be like four and a half thousand of LSD sessions, but I had also, I was working with psilocybin also. We were working for a while with the tryptamine derivatives, which actually came from Budapest, from our neighbor, Dr. Zara, Steven Zara and Dr. Bursaraman. They were the ones who actually developed the whole group of the tryptamine derivatives, DMT, DET, DPT. I don't think they had at the time the methoxy DMT, which seems to be the most interesting one.

• 14:17Tim Ferriss?

  And the initial feeling that you had, or the initial, I suppose, excitement that you felt this could change psychology and psychiatry, why was that? What did you see that made you come to that conclusion?

• 14:33Speaker 03

  Well, the initial was this approach, which could be called search for toxin X. The way LSD came to us was that this is a substance that can mimic somehow psychosis. We call the initial sessions experimental psychosis, you know, it was called hallucinogens, psychotomimetic. And so the excitement was that we have a model of something like schizophrenia or other kinds of psychosis. And this made a possibility of creating a model, which is always great to have a model in science. So give LSD to quote unquote "normal" subjects and they would spend six to eight hours in

• 15:18Speaker 03

  a world that seemed to be like the world of our patients.

• 15:24Speaker 03

  And so the initial, my initial research actually was laboratory. I wrote one of the early papers on the role of serotonin in psychiatry. And the initial research was, we had a group of forty people, including ourselves, mostly professionals, psychologists, psychiatrists, biologists and so on. And we had a protocol, we would invite these people for a day to the research institute. We would do really scientific work, you know, drawing blood every hour on the hour,

• 16:02Speaker 03

  collecting samples of urine, doing psychological tests and electrophysiological investigations. And then we had, one day when we brought schizophrenic patients who were matched by age, by gender, by IQ and so on, with our experimental subjects. And we were looking if these values of this psychological and physiological biochemical tests would sort of converge with the values in schizophrenics. And then something amazing happened. I found that there was incredible, I would say, inter-individual, intra-individual variability.

• 16:44Speaker 03

  So you give the same substance in the same dosage, under the, you know, same circumstances, under the same lousy set and setting which we had. And each of those people would have different experiences, to the point that some of them called it like, the moments that they get between the tests, it was like a self-analysis, like a, you know, drug-assisted psychotherapy. Others were just unpleasant physical symptoms. Some of them had, you know, paranoid episodes or became hypomanic.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  And for some of them, it was that even under those circumstances, they got glimpses of ecstatic states that were very mystical. And the same intra-individual variability. If we took the same substance at different times, this phenomenology was completely different. And at that point, I realized, this was not psychopharmacology. We were not doing pharmacology. Because if you do pharmacology, you have to have some idea what you are getting. You know, if you give people apomorphine, you expect that a lot of them will be vomiting. If you give them hypnotic, you expect them to sleep.

• 18:09Speaker 03

  Whereas here, we had no idea what would happen. So I realized, we were doing something much more interesting. We had a catalyst that made it possible to explore the depths of the human psyche. I realized, people were not having LSD experiences, they were having experiences of themselves. But they were coming from depths that, you know, psychoanalysis didn't know anything about. And so at that point, I just lost completely interest in this laboratory approach, and I took it to clinical work. And I started giving to my patients, you know, in a psychotherapeutic context.

• 18:48Tim Ferriss?

  When did you have your first personal experience?

• 18:51Speaker 03

  It was...

• 18:52Tim Ferriss?

  And how much, and what did you take, and how much did you take, if you recall?

• 18:56Speaker 03

  This was actually 100 micrograms. It was on the 13th of November 1956. So I was from 54, 56, I was sitting for people. But it was a little more complicated, because my preceptor, whom I mentioned earlier, he was very interested in electroencephalography.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  And at the time when LSD came, he was the one who received it from Sandos. So at the time when it came, he was interested in something that's called driving the brainwaves or and training the brainwaves. This is using EEG? Uh, well, it was exposing people to a very powerful stroboscopic light Oh, that's right. of different frequencies. And finding out if the brainwaves in the suboccipital area, which is the visual cortex, if the brainwaves would pick up that frequency, if you can drive the

• 19:59Speaker 03

  or train the brainwave. So the condition for us having the session with him, we had to agree that we would have EEG, you know, before, during and after, and that we also will have our brainwaves driven in all those sessions. So what happened that, you know, between the third and the fourth hour, when the session usually culminated, the Dr. Robicek's assistant came and she said, "It's time to drive the brainwaves." So she took me to a little room. I laid down, she pasted all these electrodes on my head

• 20:41Speaker 03

  and then brought this gigantic straw, put it above my head, and then turned this thing on.

• 20:48Speaker 03

  And in the next moment, there was light like I had never seen. I couldn't even imagine existed. My only concept there was, this is what it must have been like in Hiroshima, where the thing went off, you know.

• 21:01Speaker 03

  Today, I think it was more like Dharmakaya, the primary clear light from Bardot Turo, from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, that we see at the moment of our death. But what happened is my consciousness was catapulted out of my body. I lost the research assistant, you know, I lost the clinic, I lost Prague, I lost the planet.

• 21:27Speaker 03

  And I had the feeling that I actually still extinguished in the form that I knew myself, but also the sense that I somehow became everything there was. I became all of existence. As you know, we must have heard it quite a few times, that these states are considered ineffable. When you start trying to describe them, you find out that we just simply don't have don't have language, our language is developed, you know, to communicate about things from everyday life. And in my later experiments, some of the sophisticated patients actually tried to use a language

• 22:09Speaker 03

  from cultures that knew something about consciousness, like using, you know, from Hinduism, from, you know, Tibetan Buddhism, from Taoism. So they were talking about, you know, Nirvikalpa Samadhi, Samikalpa Sabhadi, Kensho, Satori, you know, using terms like Maya and so on. Because we simply don't have, you know, technical terms for these states. So these experiences of mystical states are full of paradoxes. Paradoxicality is one of the characteristics. So you can have the feeling that you became nothing, but by becoming nothing, you actually became of existence.

• 22:54Speaker 03

  So I was in this incredible state and then as she was continuing working with me, it was unfolding. She had a protocol, so she started from two hertz, which is, you know, two frequencies per second, took it up to sixty, and then she kept it for a while in the alpha range and the theta range, the delta range, and then she turned it off. And why she was doing this, at a certain point, I actually went from this sense of being everything, of being in the universe, in the astronomical universe, or actually being the universe.

• 23:35Speaker 03

  There were things happening for which at the time I didn't have names. But then later I read about, you know, the Big Bang and the black holes and the wormholes. And so this was something in that category that was happening to me. I actually had the feeling again that I not was not only in the universe, but that I actually was the universe. And then, you know, as she turned it off, then my world started shrinking again. I found the planet, I found Prague, I zoomed in on my body.

• 24:13Speaker 03

  But there was a major problem because my consciousness was actually kind of circling around my body. And I had difficulties aligning my consciousness with my body. So at that point, it became clear to me that what they were teaching at universities about consciousness as a product of the brain simply was nonsense. That, you know, consciousness was something cosmic and that the brain somehow is a moderator for that, but it's not generated in our skull. And then finally, I managed to align that. And I came down in a very ecstatic state, very impressed with what just happened.

• 24:58Speaker 03

  And right there, I decided if I'm a psychiatrist, you know, this is by far the most interesting thing I can do working with these states. It just overshadowed psychoanalysis, like, you know. I was not interested in psychoanalysis anymore. I was interested in exploring the psyche using these states.

• 25:21Tim Ferriss?

  So you've at this point dedicated more than six decades to studying non-ordinary states of consciousness, which is, I think we'll probably talk about this, that is a term or a phrase you prefer over altered states of consciousness. But you're alluding to perhaps a definition of consciousness or how you think about it now. How do you think about consciousness? Consciousness at this point, you said that it's, I think mediated or moderated by the brain but not generated by it. Based on these experiences, the experiences of others, you've supervised everything you've seen and experienced and studied up to this point, how do you think about consciousness

• 26:06Tim Ferriss?

  now? Are there any other aspects of it?

• 26:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, you know, I'm very close now to Erwin Laszlo, who is this brilliant systems theorist and philosopher of Hungarian origin, but living in Pisa in Italy. And he has a series of books where he is really addressing these problems. He's the only one that I think found some way of scientifically describing what is happening to us. And he has a book called What is Reality, where he actually goes through these different experiments that we have related to consciousness and argues, you know, what are the observations

• 26:51Speaker 03

  that we have against the idea that consciousness is local, that is inside of our brain? And he moves to that consciousness is more transpersonal, that it, in non-ordinary states, you can have experiences of consciousness of other people, you can have experiences of becoming members of a different species, you know, and not just animals, but also plants and so on. So he moves from that, from the consciousness being local to consciousness being transpersonal. And then he brings even arguments against that and concludes that consciousness is cosmic. And, you know, that would be, that would be my present understanding.

• 27:36Speaker 03

  Consciousness is simply a part of, integral part of existence. It cannot be reduced to anything as let alone the neurons in the, in the brain. So this also supported now, of course, by many people from quantum relativistic physics. And for example, Stuart Hameroff initially thought that maybe it's the so-called tubules in the mitochondria in the, in the brain that might be the place where quantum processes generate consciousness. And then later, he sort of took it back and he says now, according to him,

• 28:15Speaker 03

  consciousness is simply a property of the universe that can be traced back to the Big Bang in the form of proto-consciousness.

• 28:24Tim Ferriss?

  There's a term that people often associate, of course rightly, with you in association with consciousness, and that is holotropic states of consciousness. And I'd love to to jump into that because, and also just as a side note for people listening who are wondering what the applications of these these non-ordinary states might be, or how they've been utilized, there are men, it appears to me that there are many, many different ways to utilize this. There are certain multiple Nobel Prizes associated with it, Carey Mullis, Francis Crick, and the co-discovery of the double helix. And then there are, you know, well-known entrepreneurs and so on like Steve Jobs.

• 29:09Tim Ferriss?

  But what does holotropic refer to, a holotropic state of consciousness?

• 29:14Speaker 03

  Thank you. Great, great question. Well, I have so far been, or we have been using the term non-ordinary states of consciousness, which is better that what psychiatrists, British and American psychiatrists are doing, calling it altered state. You know, I really dislike that term, although it was coined by a good friend of mine, Charlie Tarratt, because it suggests somehow that there is a correct way of experiencing ourselves and the world, and that's somehow disturbed. You know, I always have to think about veterinary medicine. We talk, we had our dog altered. So I feel too much respect for these states to call them altered.

• 29:55Speaker 03

  And even the state non-ordinary is really not accurate, because there are many non-ordinary states that have not the properties that the holotropic states would have. So I use that term holotropic for a special, large subcategory of non-ordinary states that have healing potential, therapeutic potential, that have, according to my experience, transformative potential. That have what we call heuristic H E U R, which means when you work with these states, you run into a lot of paradigm-breaking observations that challenge the whole way of thinking, not just in psychiatry, but in deterministic science. And then I believe they also have evolutionary.

• 30:39Speaker 03

  In other words, they would, I think they would, if people would systematically use them, I, I, I think we would almost become another, another species, you know? People work through a lot of aggression, it's replaced by compassion. They have the experience of tremendous ecological sensitivity. They, they discovered that we are deeply embedded in nature and that we cannot do anything to nature that doesn't damage us. They start seeing violence as an unacceptable way of, of solving problems. You know, they have a sense of being actually global citizens rather than being Czechs or Russians or Americans.

• 31:24Speaker 03

  They start seeing themselves very much the way it happened to the astronauts, who had the possibility of actually seeing the, the planet from, from the moon or from space. So this is my term that I coined because I realized psychiatry does not have that kind of distinction. So I coined it myself. It's a kind of a verbal hybrid. It's a neologism, as we call it, that comes from the Greek language, where holos means whole and trepo trepan means moving in the direction of something. I usually refer to the word heliotropism.

• 32:09Speaker 03

  Helios means sun and heliotropism is the property of plants to always orient themselves towards the sun, always follow the, the sun. So literally this means moving toward wholeness.

• 32:25Speaker 03

  You know, when I, when I use that term, there's usually somebody who say, "What do you mean moving toward wholeness? Aren't we whole already, the way we function in everyday life?" And I would have to say, "No," on the basis of my experiences. We have, we're using only small fraction of our experiential potential when we are in the ordinary states. So maybe I just give a few examples of holotropic states so people have a sense what I'm talking about. Yes, please. So, one category when you would find states that I call holotropic would be the initiatory crisis of shamans. You know, the carrier of most shamans begin by a spontaneous experience of traveling into the visionary experience

• 33:08Speaker 03

  of traveling into the universe, being, traveling into the underworld first. They have the experience of being exposed to some ordeals. They experience a lot of emotional, physical pain, and they experience annihilation, and then experience of psychospiritual death rebirth, that's followed by this journey into the supernal realms. And in this initiatory journey, they heal themselves typically. Anthropologists call shamans the wounded healers, and they also learn how to heal. So when they then manage to come back and they ground the session, they use holotropic states in their healing.

• 33:54Speaker 03

  When they heal, they either go into a non-ordinary state, or they induce them in their clients, or both shamans and clients get into this holotropic state. So that's a major category. The second one is what you see in so-called rites of passage. This is the term that was coined by a Dutch anthropologist, Arnold van Hennep. That's G E N N E P, who studied many native cultures, and he found out that they all,

• 34:24Speaker 03

  you know, at the time of important biological or social transitions, perform very powerful rituals.

• 34:33Speaker 03

  But they also induce these holotropic states in different ways. Many of those cultures, even with psychedelic plants or psychedelic materials, in some others using sonic technology, drumming, rattling and so on. Physical pain, stay in the desert, stay in the high mountains, stay in a cave in the Arctic ice and so on. And if you study these, the people experience psycho-spiritual death rebirths, very much like the shamans in their spontaneous initiatory journey.

• 35:14Speaker 03

  Now, the third important category were the ancient mysteries of death rebirths, like the Eleusinian mysteries or the Isis-Hosiers mysteries in Egypt or the Sumerian mysteries of Inanna and Dumuzi. And also, you know, they were Mesoamerican mysteries of Shibalba, the Mayan and so on. So, all these were inducing these holotropic states for healing and transformation. And then also, all the major religions developed what I call technologies of the sacred, you know, different forms of yoga, different schools of Buddhism,

• 35:58Speaker 03

  from Theravada to Zen and Vajrayana Daoist exercises. In the Christian tradition, Hesychasm, the Jesus prayer, or the exercises of Ignatius, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the various Kabbalistic exercises. So those were all methods that were designed to take people into these holotropic experiences for the purpose of having a mystical experience, having a spiritual experience. And of course, we have now modern technologies of the sacred to induce holotropic experiences.

• 36:43Speaker 03

  We have now pure alkaloids from the psychedelic plants. You know, we have escalin from Pejote. We have psilocin and psilocybin from the magic mushrooms of the Mazatecs. We have now...

• 37:01Speaker 03

  The ibogaine from the African bush and so on. And we also have now the tryptamine derivatives, DMT, DPT, and then methoxy DMT. Those are active in ayahuasca and in the different snuffs from the Caribbean. And also from this toad that's now becoming very famous, Bufo alvarius. These are secretions from the parotid glands and from the skin of these toads. Very, very powerful, very important psychedelics.

• 37:43Tim Ferriss?

  So let me pause for one second. I have many, I'm not going to lose track of the train, and I have a number of different questions. But since you brought it up, a mutual friend of ours, different mutual friend, had suggested I ask you about toad. And you just mentioned that it could be or is important. And you mentioned methoxy DMT, which, you know, in this case, often referred to as a five MEO DMT. What are your thoughts on this particular, this particular compound? And then why is it important, if it's important?

• 38:22Speaker 03

  Well, the thing is, it has not really been explored scientifically, unlike psilocybin or LSD. But we have enormous amount of information from either semi-illegal or illegal, you know, underground experiments, which were happening during those years when psychedelics were not really explored scientifically. But we have an amazing book by Ralph Metzner, which is called The Toad and the Jaguar. Ralph traveled all over Europe and in the United States, visiting these groups that were using it, you know, either using some legal loopholes or, you know, doing a kind

• 39:07Speaker 03

  of an underground research. And he wrote this book where he collected that information in a, in a way that could become a basis of scientific research. Now, what is fantastic there is...

• 39:25Speaker 03

  That this substance creates a very short, you know, within an hour, which is within the time of one psychoanalytic session, you can experience significant transformation, even spiritual opening. And the substance is methoxy, DMT. I have in my book, When the Impossible Happens, a chapter, which is called The Secret of the Toad of Light. There are churches in the American Southwest that are actually using it as a sacrament, called, you know, Church of the Toad of Light.

• 40:04Speaker 03

  And I took fairly large doses, which is not, just more than is usually used. This was my first time, when we really didn't know, I didn't know the dosing. And it was estimated 25 milligrams. Today you would use like five or 10. And this was by far the most powerful psychedelic experience I've ever had. And within seconds, you know, it took me out of my body. There were no, there's nothing biographical, no, no birth experiences, no, nothing archetypal.

• 40:40Speaker 03

  I was just facing this incredible, I mean, source of light, for the, for the lack of a better description. It was like beyond anything I could imagine in terms of the brilliance, the incandescence that it had. But also sense that this, there was incredible intelligence, creative intelligence, going beyond any dichotomies, I couldn't say if it was demonic or divine. You know, there was just off the scales that I had. And then coming down from that experience, I actually had the feeling I was dying.

• 41:22Speaker 03

  But the feeling that I was, not from life into dying, but from a place beyond death, into a dying body. And then after a while, it became clear that this was not really dying. It was just the experience of dying. And for quite a while, I was in a situation where I was in an absolutely blissful kind of state. And I was having visions of streams of my past life experiences, where I had feeling of, you know, dying and being killed in different situations.

• 41:58Speaker 03

  My body was kind of acting out, the agony was shaking, twitching. By, you know, psychologically, emotionally, I was in absolute bliss. And then, coming down for a week, I was in a state in which I would like to live. We were at the time, uh, living at Esseland. We had a deck overlooking the ocean. And this was the time when I was handwriting my manuscripts and giving it to a secretary and then having to edit it. And I was, in that week, I was doing editing of my manuscript, which I could do perfectly, lying in the sun there. And then I felt I would take a little break. Again, within seconds, I had the feeling of just oneness with the whole environment,

• 42:43Speaker 03

  oneness with the world. And then I would open my eyes and I could continue editing. But then, of course, you know, the, sort of, the consciousness of the industrial civilization came back. You know, had to do workshops, travel, you know. So I didn't stay in that, in that state. But my meditations became much, much, much deeper. And it was not difficult to get into some version of that state, you know, just through meditation. So I think this would be an amazing, amazing substance to try

• 43:23Speaker 03

  for practical reasons, because you will not find psychiatrists like myself in the, you know, in the sixties and so on, sitting for six hours with their patients. But they could certainly do a one-hour session with the MetoxidMT.

• 43:45Speaker 03

  And I think significant therapy could be done, you know, within these very short short terms. It's also according to Ralph Metzen's observations, it's a substance where the experience ends very cleanly. There is no sort of lingering on. So there is a very powerful experience, but also a good, good closure. So anyway, so this is my experience with methoxy D M T. Now, it's very, very popular. For example, we had the transpersonal conference in Prague, you know, and there were lectures about it. And of course, there

• 44:25Speaker 03

  were, there were people who had access to the, to the toward material, to the excretions or secretions of the glands. So it's becoming a very, very popular, popular substance right now.

• 44:41Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned therapy a few times in describing your experience with five M O D M T and the potential, say, within a one hour window or something like that to provide therapy if someone were sitting for someone experiencing this. And I want to tie that into a comment that you're very famous for having made. And I think it was in your first book in 1975, Realms of the Human Unconscious, in which you mentioned that LSD could become for psychiatry what the microscope was for biology and, and medicine and what the telescope is for astronomy. What I'm curious about is, I suppose, A, why you say that, but then B, is there still

• 45:26Tim Ferriss?

  a place for psychoanalysis, you know, traditional psychoanalysis or psychotherapy in combination with some of these psychedelic compounds? Because it's, it seems to me that the, perhaps some of the value that people derive from these experiences or don't derive from these experiences is dependent quite a bit on what happens beforehand and what happens afterwards. But I just, I just love to hear you, I suppose, clarify what you mean by LSD becoming for psychiatry with the microscope is for biology and the telescope is for astronomy. And then B, If therapy still has a place in combination with these experiences.

• 46:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, another wonderful question. So let me tell you what happened when I lost interest in this laboratory research and took it to the clinic. We were, you mentioned in the, in your interview with Michael Pollan, there are these two forms they've been using LSD and other psychedelics, the psycholytic and the psychedelic. The psychedelic is the, you know, using large dosages, fully internalized with headphones, eyeshades. And the method that was used mostly in Europe, but also by some American therapists, it's called psycholytic, which is sort of dissolving the psyche, dissolving the tensions, conflicts

• 46:55Speaker 03

  in the psyche and so on. From, from the, leucis means dissolution. And so I started it with using sort of medium dosages, maybe, you know, 150, maybe up to, up to 200 at the beginning. And what happened was absolutely fascinating because I saw intensification of the symptoms that the patients were having. But then the process automatically took us to the different layers of traumatic experiences that were actually underlying that disorder. And layer after layer, then I came up with the concept of COEX system, system of condensed

• 47:37Speaker 03

  experience, where each symptom had like a, a history, you know, has a, a series of layered experiences behind it. And so it was a process of exploring the different layers of the psyche. Uh, one of my patients called it uh onion peeling of the of uh the psyche. Another one called it uh chemo archeology. So you could really explore the different layers of the postnatal biographical level. This is what what Freudian analysis is about. But the problem is it didn't stop there.

• 48:16Speaker 03

  Then each of those uh coexist systems also had a contribution from the trauma of birth. It was so even if we're using these lower dosages, uh as we were going on, it took us to birth. And that point suddenly people started experiencing uh that they are trapped, they're caught. Uh, they are in a situation of no exit. Uh, they had the feeling they're getting crazy, uh, you know, they are dying and so on. And um, you know, my psychiatry and my uh my uh psychologic training did not prepare me for that kind of thing. And it took a while, including my own experiences, to realize there was a powerful record of biological birth in there.

• 49:02Speaker 03

  So um, what we activated actually uh in the psyche was what I call now self-healing intelligence of the psyche. You see, the the process spontaneously was talking, uh was taking us to the sources of uh of uh these emotional and psychosomatic symptoms. It also created automatically a mapping of the psyche. So um, for a while I was just collecting these uh um reports from the patient, my my own records and and people's uh s- um, you know, descriptions of their sessions.

• 49:41Speaker 03

  And I was putting it on a map, creating a, what I thought was a new map for psych- uh for psychology. Um, which would be um, and the result of the fact that we had absolutely new tool. Like a microscope opened up, you know, this whole underworld which we, or micro world, which we didn't know existed and telescopes discovered new, new galaxies that the astronomers didn't know about. So, uh, you know, I felt we were discovering, uh, uh, the depths of the, uh, of the psyche. So in that sense, it was like a microscope or a telescope, but it also was the self-healing intelligence that, that sort of, uh, emerged out of it.

• 50:26Tim Ferriss?

  And, and do you find?

• 50:27Speaker 03

  Now, when I finally got the map together. Yeah.

• 50:32Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, no, I was just going to say, uh, please continue. I was just going to, um, just going to ask about if there are adjunct therapies or things that you would add to the beginning, the, the pre psychedelic experience or post psychedelic experience, but I don't want to interrupt your train of thought.

• 50:48Speaker 03

  Well, just, I just, a couple of sentences. So the, the new map, which I created, which I thought was new, had the biographical level, which it shared with psychoanalysis and current psychiatry, because, uh, you know, however much Freud was criticized, psychiatry accepted his, uh, idea that the newborn is a tabula rasa, is a clean slate, that there's nothing of interest, uh, for psychologists, psychiatrists that precedes birth. And this was a major discovery. There is a powerful, powerful record of birth. And, uh, when you become of, uh, aware of that fact, you have to radically change, transform, uh, thinking in, in psychiatry.

• 51:30Speaker 03

  So this new, new map or map that I thought was new, had the biographical level that it shared with, uh, with, uh, current psychiatry, but then I had to add the level which I call perinatal, which is related to birth, it's a record of birth. And then it opened up further into, uh, the level that I call, uh, transpersonal now.

• 51:54Speaker 03

  There's a greater overlap with what Jung described as the collective unconscious, the historical and the archetypal unconscious. But you see, when I had the map, I realized this was not a new map at all. Actually, a map that in different forms has been around for, not for centuries, but for millennia. I started seeing the connection to the great spiritual philosophies of the East, of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Sufism and so on. And even the shamanic maps, there was a lot of overlapping with the shamanic cartography.

• 52:35Speaker 03

  So I haven't forgotten your original question about psychoanalysis. Now, the problem is that psychoanalysis has this very narrow map, limited to postnatal biography and to the individual unconscious, which is just barely scratching the surface of what psyche really is. So if you would do psychoanalysis, you would have to expand the conceptual framework very radically. Because otherwise, if you would get to something like perinatal experiences or transpersonal experiences, you would not have any map if you use just Freudian psychoanalysis.

• 53:18Speaker 03

  So it's not the question of the technique. I think, in my understanding, Freud was actually on the right track. He was asking questions like, "Why do we have hysteria? Why do we have phobias? Why do we have obsessive-compulsive neurosis? Why do we have perversions?" and so on. He was tracing it back, but unfortunately, his map was very superficial. He did not have access to the perinatal level, to the transpersonal level. So he ended up with conclusions that then sometimes seemed absurd,

• 54:00Speaker 03

  you know, like suicide is killing the interjected bad breast of your mother and so on. And then there was a tendency just to move away completely and not ask the questions about etiology. That Freud's genius was trying to understand, you know, why do we have certain kinds of symptoms? Why do we have anxiety? Why do we have depression? Why do we have suicidal tendencies and so on? And was looking for rational understanding for this. But he took it only, not even halfway. Had he had access to the perinatal level, he would have gotten much more convincing understanding.

• 54:45Speaker 03

  Why do we have depression? Different forms of depression? Why? What does it mean when people want to kill themselves in a way that is nonviolent? As compared to people who have the tendency to commit violence, suicide and so on. So if you expand the cartography and you add the perinatal level and the transpersonal level, you can continue this psychoanalytic work actually and get, you know, some reasonable, quite convincing answers. Why do we have certain kinds of symptoms? Why do they cluster in what we call syndromes and so on? And it also opens up new radically different approaches

• 55:29Speaker 03

  to psychotherapy, which would have to be experiential. If the roots of emotional problems are not just postnatal, but also perinatal and transpersonal, you cannot reach it by talking. You would have to actually use experiential psychotherapy, of the kind that started in the 60s, developed within humanistic psychology.

• 55:54Tim Ferriss?

  Well, let's go directly to that. And I certainly have, we're going to come back to, when the impossible happens, we're going to come back to many different pieces of your past experience and more recent projects. But this experiential psychotherapy in an ideal world, based on all of your experience, what would that look like? What would the format look like?

• 56:19Speaker 03

  Well, we are talking about psychedelics. So one would be psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. When, you know, people would have sessions and then you would use talking, helping them to integrate, helping them to understand.

• 56:36Speaker 03

  So there would be, you know, focus on the, on, in the therapy would be on the experience, but also, um, it would be so, uh, at the same time, very much what it was for Freud, it would be exploration of the psyche, getting to know the dimensions of the psyche, the, the different, uh, levels of experiences and so on. Uh, but now we have powerful, uh, non-drug experiences that can actually take you to those levels, to the perinatal level, to the, uh, transpersonal level. So, um, my late wife Christina and I developed what we call holotropic, uh, breath work, where you use very simple means, which is, uh, faster breathing, uh, some powerful

• 57:20Speaker 03

  evocative, uh, music, a certain kind of, uh, body work, uh, and then we also use, um, art, we use mandala drawing and sharing groups. And people have access to, uh, not just to the postnatal, uh, biographical level, but also to the perinatal and to the transpersonal level. Uh, so there are, you know, there are both pharmacological and non-pharmacological weights of, of, uh, accessing these levels, uh, that have, uh, the deepest roots of, uh, emotional and psychosomatic problems.

• 57:59Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm really glad you brought up holotropic breath work, uh, which is, as you mentioned, a non-pharmacological or non-exogenous way of, of inducing these, uh, holotropic states, uh, which, which I've, I've experienced three times in different, uh, workshops for holotropic breath work. And, uh, I, I, I went into it, I'm not gonna lie to you, skeptical as someone with psychedelic experience, that it could achieve anything comparable. And I was really stunned, uh, by just how, uh...

• 58:37Tim Ferriss?

  How powerfully you can induce these non-ordinary states using breathwork and what I observed in other people in the rooms as well, who, many of which were skeptical, as I was at the time. So two questions to dig into both the psychedelic or entheogen assisted and then the holotropic breathwork approach. What psychedelic materials in what dosages would you potentially be using, with what frequency? Would it be once a week, twice a week? Would it be determined by the patient? Would it be psycholytic dosing or would it be psychedelic dosing? How would you think about that piece of the puzzle?

• 59:21Speaker 03

  I wouldn't do psycholytic therapy, although I very much value the information that I got from it. You know, the self-healing intelligence of the psyche, the coex systems and just discovery of the dimensions that are on that expanded map, being taken to the perinatal level and then to the transpersonal level. I also have a lot of interesting observations. If you read The Realms of the Human Unconscious, there's a lot of it is about trying to understand how and why the world is changing under the influence of LSD or some other psychedelics.

• 1:00:03Speaker 03

  I became fascinated, you know, the people saw me at different periods of their session as different things. They saw me as a Jaguar, they saw me as Hitler, they saw me as Angel, they saw me as a Supreme Judge. They look around the treatment room and sometimes they had the feeling that they are on the death road, sometimes cabin in the Pacific, sometimes it was the bordello and so on. So I did the kind of Freudian work on it, trying to understand how it condensed, you know, different levels of the material. So I got a good understanding of the dynamics of the postnatal biography, but I also found out that it was not the most effective way of getting therapy.

• 1:00:50Speaker 03

  therapeutic results. So then, already in Prague, I increased the dosages. I started using music and, and the headphones, eye shades. And this is how we did the whole research at Spring Grove, the American research when I, when I came to the United States. There you can very, very powerful transformation, you know, within, within six, eight hours of the high dose. But you don't have any idea why that happened. You don't understand the mechanism of the change. It resembles the material that John Rosen described when he studied the experiences

• 1:01:31Speaker 03

  of people who did two-sided jumps from Golden Gate Bridge and, and the Bay, the Bay Bridge. He found that people who survived it, which is about 1%, they usually survived it unscathed and they experienced powerful transformation within the three seconds that it took to get from the, fall from the railing to the surface of the water. And then maybe about eight minutes in cold water before they were rescued. Again, powerful, powerful changes that, you know, you wouldn't achieve by years of psychoanalysis, but there was no understanding what, what happened.

• 1:02:15Speaker 03

  Now with this history of the psycholytic therapy, I have now some idea about what is happening in these high dose sessions, but in a very condensed, very rapid, rapid way.

• 1:02:27Tim Ferriss?

  So by high dose, what does that generally mean?

• 1:02:32Speaker 03

  Say it once more.

• 1:02:33Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, by high dose, how many micrograms would you generally be using?

• 1:02:37Speaker 03

  Okay, I would probably use now a dosage just like, you know, 300 or even 400, 400 micrograms.

• 1:02:46Speaker 03

  Which, you know, might be in some instances, not very frequently, might be a challenge, management of the, of the session, but you generally get much more powerful transformation, also cleaner. Actually, if you use smaller dosages, there is a tendency sometimes to actually activate what happens and people have more of a chance to, to resist it if there are areas that they don't want to go into. So I consider the high dosages, if it's proper management, to be more effective therapeutically.

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:03:19Speaker 03

  So I would use now the smaller dosages if we continue the, the exploration of the psyche, you know, that's, that's where lower dosages are certainly very useful. And I'm very sorry that this is not happening with, with psychedelics in this new renaissance, that we don't continue the Freudian work where we are trying to, to go to, to find what the roots are, trying to understand the etiology. Now, in this, in this later DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, they moved completely from any question of etiology, you know, they now just describe the, the symptoms.

• 1:04:02Speaker 03

  They use what they call neo-Crepelian approach. Emil Creppelin was the, the person who did the first diagnosis in, in psychiatry at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. These dementia, precogs, which was the original name for schizophrenia and manic depressive disorder, those were the, the first two diagnoses in psychiatry. And what he did, he just simply described the symptoms that these patients have. And now the tendency in psychiatry is to go to the neo-Crepelian, like in the DSM, you don't ask the question, why do we have depression, why do we have suicidal tendencies, you know? Why do you have different psychosomatic disorders?

• 1:04:47Speaker 03

  It's just simply describing the the symptoms. And I think there is tremendous field of discovery, which would be doing individual cases. Like initially in psychoanalysis, you had, I think, about fifteen hundred psychoanalysts all over the world, who were seeing their patients and they were they were describing what they observed. And it was published in journals and so on, until they ended up with the psychoanalytic understanding of emotional psychosomatic disorders. You find in Otto Fennec's book, the Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis.

• 1:05:26Speaker 03

  So we need we need to continue that kind of work. This would be something for psychoanalysts to do, you know, to continue Freud's exploration of the psyche, trying to understand the psyche, understand why we have symptoms and syndromes, but not keeping it just on the on the postnatal level.

• 1:05:48Tim Ferriss?

  In the by etiology, I think that was the word that I heard earlier. Is that the exploration of the why we experience these things?

• 1:05:55Speaker 03

  Yes, the causes. Why do we have that? You know, so Freud Freud had the the concept of the development of the libido, the oral phase when the sensual feelings are associated with nursing. And this was the passive oral. And then the active oral, when the the infant starts biting his teeth and so on. And then it moved to the anal phase, the time of toilet training, and then refined toilet training, which had to do with urination. That was the urethra stage. And then he talked about the phallic stage, which was the stage where the focus is on the on the genitals, on the on the clitoris in girls and the penis of the boys

• 1:06:39Speaker 03

  and where you have the urdipal complex and, you know, the castration complex and all those things. Which was very, very interesting way of thinking, but it didn't go deep enough. So you ended up with very unconvincing interpretations. But I have tried in my books to continue and see how you would understand in a much deeper way. Why do we have these things? Why do we have depression, different types of depression, suicidal tendencies? You know, why do we have symptoms like headache? And many, many neurotic patients have problems breathing and so on. Where does that come from?

• 1:07:23Speaker 03

  Why do we end up with psychosomatic pains for which there is no organic finding? So if you expand the cartography, you can really get a much fuller understanding. You know, Freud, at a certain point, when he discovered the individual unconscious, he compared the psyche to an iceberg. He said, what we thought the psyche was, it's just the surface, like the part of the iceberg that's showing above the surface. And psychoanalysis shows you also the submerged part of the iceberg. Now, if you now bring psychedelics, you have to change the simile or the metaphor.

• 1:08:03Speaker 03

  You would have to say, what classical psychoanalysis discovered, it's just barely the surface. It's the part of the iceberg that's showing for psychoanalysis. And there is this enormous part of the psyche that remained hidden even for traditional psychoanalysis. So let me ask you this. Joseph Campbell, just let me just say one sentence which I cannot resist. Joseph Campbell, you know, the wonderful mythologist, this incredible Irish humor, he put it differently. He said Freud was fishing while sitting on a whale.

• 1:08:44Tim Ferriss?

  You have seen so many things, experienced so many things. Let's just call it roughly 4,500 different sessions. You've thought of all these different modalities. Looking at my very, very limited personal experience and what I've observed in other people, I've certainly seen, as you have, some incredible examples of transformation. People who have seemingly resolved chronic depression or anxiety disorders, eating disorders, and experienced incredible healing that seems to have a persistent effect after experiencing

• 1:09:28Tim Ferriss?

  these deep psychedelic states. I've also observed not a small number of people who collect interesting drug experiences or psychedelic experiences but don't seem to experience or resolve any deeper healing. What do you think separates those two groups? And how can you increase the likelihood of real deep healing occurring?

• 1:09:57Speaker 03

  Well, extremely significant is the concept of set and setting. That means who gives it to whom, under what circumstances, for what purpose? You know, that makes a big difference. I have seen people who have taken LSD hundreds of times and they didn't discover that it had something to do with their own psyche. It was like going to the movies. They kept their eyes open and, you know, things were floating around. People were making funny faces, like a curious kind of interesting experience. But they had no idea that the way they perceive the environment is actually a result of the projection from their own unconscious. So the one major difference is do you keep your eyes open or walk around, let alone driving cars, what people have been doing and so on, you know?

• 1:10:42Speaker 03

  Or doing it in raves where it's an open place where people don't know what they are taking and the police might, they know they do something, forbidden police might show up. This is the worst possible set and setting. So you increase tremendously the risk of these experiences and you reduce the potential.

• 1:11:05Speaker 03

  Uh, so that's, that's important. Uh, so if you come, if you come with an intention, the self-exploration, healing, for me, for my first LSD session, it became a spiritual quest. But every, every one of my experiences, uh, I had about maybe, you know, a hundred forty idos psychedelic sessions over the years. It might seem like a lot, but it's expanded over, extended to a period of sixty, sixty years. So if you look at it that much, you know, it's not that much. Uh, so, uh, that is extremely, extremely important. But what is your intention? Do you, is this serious intention for self-exploration, self-healing?

• 1:11:50Speaker 03

  Is it part of your spiritual quest? Or are you doing it for, for kicks, you know, because it's sort of a, a funny, weird, uh, weird experience? Uh, there's also, uh, something that Euston Smith said, which was very interesting. Uh, there was this whole discussion about instant or chemical, uh, mysticism. When we saw in the early LSD sessions that people had mystical experiences, then this whole question of, uh, chemical mysticism came up. What, what is it? What are we watching? And there was one group of people who was, uh, where these sort of hardcore, uh, uh, materialistic scientists says, well, here you have it. What

• 1:12:32Speaker 03

  this mystics thing are some kind of deep, uh, insights into ontology and cosmology? It's nothing else but, uh, aberrations of body chemistry. So so much for, uh, mysticism, so much for spirituality. It's all chemistry. And there was another group that was saying, uh, no, what is happening? There is a very special group of, uh, chemicals that can induce, uh, mystical experiences. Those are sacred substances. Those are sacraments. Those are sacred medicines and so on. So they took basically the position that the shamans of, uh, native cultures took who were using psychedelic plants like your teanana kattal, you know,

• 1:13:14Speaker 03

  the flesh of the gods and so on. The, the plants either were deities or they had, they mediated access to, to deities.

• 1:13:24Speaker 03

  And there was this position also, the third position, was the mystical experiences induced by psychedelics are phenomenologically indistinguishable from those that are described in spiritual literature, but they don't have the same value to have really valuable mystical experience. It has to be a result of prayers, of meditation, or it has to come as a grace. There's no way you can take a pill and experience God. So people like Meher Baba and so on, you know, very, very negative.

• 1:14:02Speaker 03

  A guy called Zheir, a British theologian and so on. So this put it sort of in the court of spiritual teachers to say, are these valuable or not? And there was disagreement. All the Tibetans, for example, that I've known and actually been in, around some of them when they had sessions, they all valued it very much as something that is accelerating your spiritual development. But just caution that this is very, this is very powerful, that this has to be done

• 1:14:46Speaker 03

  very, very carefully.

• 1:14:51Speaker 03

  On the other hand, Zen Buddhists usually had difficult experiences with psychedelics because you are not supposed to pay attention to what's happening. It's called makiyo. If you just talk your past life experiences, you're supposed to sit through it and cut into the no mind place. It's very difficult to have 300 micrograms and not to pay attention to what is, you just cut through it, you know, to a no mind place. And then, this is, I'm back now to Euston Smith. Euston Smith had, unlike Meher Baba, Alzena, had actually experiences. He came to us to Baltimore, you know, for a session.

• 1:15:34Speaker 03

  We had the possibility of giving sessions legally to people who were ministers doing pastoral counseling and so on. I actually was in one of his sessions. So he knew what he was talking about. And he said the chemically induced mystical experiences are phenomenologically indistinguishable. This was already shown in Panki's Good Friday experiment in the Marsh Chapel, the Boston University, very famous experiment.

• 1:16:09Tim Ferriss?

  The Good Friday experiment.

• 1:16:10Speaker 03

  That you, I know you talked about in your discussion with Michael Pollan.

• 1:16:15Tim Ferriss?

  And just to define very quickly, I apologize for people who are listening, phenomenal, phenomenological or phenomenology, that's the subjective reporting of experience.

• 1:16:24Speaker 03

  If you look at the subjective experiences of people who had them through LSD or psilocybin, and you compare it with what you read about in spiritual literature. So that's phenomenologically indistinguishable. But he said, but the value would be very different depending on the set and the setting. He said, if, let's say you have a situation, there is a party in Berkeley, and the way it was done, and there would be a fruit punch, and a joker comes with a handful of sugar cubes laced with LSD, people think they are drinking punch, and then, you know, they're

• 1:17:07Speaker 03

  out of their gourds, and there's nobody who's holding the kite string and so on. Even under these lousy circumstances, sometimes it can happen that people would have mystical experiences. But it would be completely out of context. They would not know what to do, would have difficulties to integrate it and become a kind of, very likely, alien enclave in their, in their life. If it is somebody who is a spiritual seeker, who reads literature, who is doing systematic meditation, and then now hears that this could accelerate, and he would do the sessions, you know, in a proper set and setting, the context, in some kind of a reverential attitude,

• 1:17:51Speaker 03

  and would do then afterwards, after the sessions, some, some reading, and continue working on it in meditation, this could become really a powerful catalyst of spiritual journey.

• 1:18:03Speaker 03

  And I think that's the, that's the correct answer, you know.

• 1:18:06Tim Ferriss?

  See, you've mentioned seekers and a number of names. A friend of mine recommended, I don't even know this name and I may be ashamed that I don't, but recommended that I ask you about your experiences with Swami Mukhtananda. And I don't recognize that name, but I thought that this is as good a time as any to perhaps bring it up, if you, if you can answer that.

• 1:18:32Speaker 03

  Yes, he became kind of quite important figure in, in our lives. I met him first about 1965, when he was on his second tour around the world. He was the head of the, of the Sida yoga movement. During the first trip around the world, he was actually accompanied by Ramdas and by, by Werner Erhard. And again, my, my late wife Christina, she came to one of his early sessions, he came

• 1:19:14Speaker 03

  to Onolulu and she became a devotee of his. And so when we, when we connected, she wanted me to meet Mukhtananda and arrange this, this darshan with him in, in Oakland. And I described this experience and some later experience again in a couple of chapters in the book, When the Impossible Happens. And it was very interesting. I was very reluctant, you know, to go, I was not a guru person. I was not sort of somebody who'd be, you know, at the feet of somebody. I had the feeling that ultimately it was between me and the, the cosmos and so on. But we had about 20 minutes waiting for, for that darshan.

• 1:19:58Speaker 03

  And at that point, she told me that he was a shavite. This is a, you know, a follower of Shiva. And I had some of my most powerful experiences in my sessions with the, the archetype of, of Shiva, sort of various ways. And this sort of changed my feeling about this, to be interested, find somebody. I knew that Shivaites are using all kinds of means, including Bang, you know, Hashish and so on, and also Datura. So they have, it's a very highly experiential group. And so this changed suddenly my attitude to this, for this interview.

• 1:20:41Speaker 03

  And I walked in and he was sitting there, you know, with a red ski cap with dark glasses, holding a wand of peacock feathers, sent it with sandal oil. And as I have told, loongi, which is, looked like a night shirt. And he sort of beckoned me, you know, to come, "You sit here," to the chair just by him. And he turned my head and was sort of, took off his, took, or sort of shifted up his dark glasses, which he very seldom did. And he sort of looked into my eyes like he was an ophthalmologist, you know.

• 1:21:25Speaker 03

  And the first thing that he said is, "You're a man who has seen Shiva." He says, "This is very good." And this just blew my mind. I just finished, you know, describing my experiences with Shiva and the fact that this was a very important figure. And the first thing that he says is, you know, "I can tell you have seen Shiva."

• 1:21:47Speaker 03

  And so we had, we had this long interview where I actually asked him about soma, which I was fascinated by. This is the psychedelic plant that was used, you know, in ancient India and was described in Rigveda. But hundreds, over hundreds stances in Rigveda are dedicated to soma. It was a plant and it was a beverage that was produced. And some of the descriptions show that those were powerful psychedelic, you know. Half of us is on earth, half of us in heaven, we have taken soma. So we knew that there was a powerful psychedelic, but the secret was lost.

• 1:22:32Speaker 03

  And so I asked him and I said, "Oh yeah, you know, on my birthday, uh, the uh, Vedic priests come down to Ganeshpur and they do a soma ceremony. Uh, you can come as my gift, uh, guests, you know, uh, I will introduce you." And then he, he died before we could actually do it.

• 1:22:51Speaker 03

  So, uh, to make a long story short, then we were walking out of, uh, this, his room and we're standing at the door and he looked at us and says, uh, "You come to, uh, our intensives. We have two intensives of Kashmir Shaivism,

• 1:23:10Speaker 03

  uh, which is a, this, um, kind of a, um, um, Mahayana, uh, branch of, of, uh, Buddhism, uh, that, uh, started in Kashmir when in the eighth century, uh, Rishi had a vision of, uh, some rocks near Srinagar and he went there and, uh, exposed some, uh, uh, cover,

• 1:23:35Speaker 03

  vegetable cover and there were, uh, inscriptions carved in the rock that became then the Shiva Sutras. This was like the Bible of, of Kashmir Shaivism. So he said, "Come, this is on Kashmir Shaivism." He looked at me and says, "This will be very important, very interesting for you." And so, of course, we did. And when I listened to the swami who started describing what Kashmir Shaivism, uh, was, I had the feeling that he was stealing, uh, you know, sentences and, and paragraphs from, uh, uh, an article which I had, uh, written, I think, nineteen sixty-nine, which was called, uh, "Psychiatric Ontology and Cosmology: Observations from LSD Sessions."

• 1:24:19Speaker 03

  So, the interesting question, what, you know, what is the common denominator between experiences that people have with LSD, this strange substance that Swiss chemists discovered in, in Switzerland and something that was found, written, uh, on the, on the rock in Srinagar in the eighth century? And so then we, we started sort of, uh, going to, um, uh, these intensives whenever we were, uh, we were near to Moktananda. And then we actually did a large, uh, transpersonal conference, uh, in, uh, in, um...

• 1:24:56Speaker 03

  Bombay or Mumbai, this was 1982, which was on Ancient Wisdom and Modern Science, bringing together spiritual teachers and people from the new paradigm circles like Fritsch of Capra and, you know, others. So that was our, that was our history.

• 1:25:16Tim Ferriss?

  Well, we've mentioned, we've mentioned the title, you know, When the Impossible Happens a few times. I figure we might as well jump into it and discuss certainly perhaps the reasons for writing the book, but also some of the stories. I would imagine, well, I would love to hear some of the stories and I would imagine people listening would love to hear some of the stories as well.

• 1:25:36Speaker 03

  Well, Tim, what happened to us that our house in Mill Valley burned down in, in 2001 and I lost my whole referential library. So it was difficult to write books like I used to where you have to refer to people's work and take passages of it and so on. And so I decided to write a biography, but you know, my life has been pretty, pretty intense, pretty rich. So the question was, you know, what do I select? And then I decided to select observations and experiences from my life that current materialistic science would consider to be impossible.

• 1:26:17Speaker 03

  This, this is not, not possible if the materialistic paradigm is, is accurate. So I selected them. So it's a selected of, selection of these stories. And about one third of this is dedicated to amazing synchronicities that I have experienced in my, in my life. And some of the synchronicities were actually related to Mokta Nanda. So there are two chapters of it describing what happened between us and, and Mokta Nanda.

• 1:26:49Tim Ferriss?

  What is a synchronicity?

• 1:26:53Speaker 03

  Well, synchronicity is something that Carl Gustav Jung brought into the, to the attention of Western scientists after hesitating for twenty years, collecting for twenty years observations, because he realized this is against, this is undermining the cornerstone of materialistic science, where the basic principle is linear causality, you know, the, what we experience is a chain of linear causality, everything that happens has a cause and has an, as an effect. And this works in Western materialistic science with the exception of the, the cause of causes, you know, what, what caused the beginning of the universe, that we, we don't go there

• 1:27:37Speaker 03

  very frequently because we don't have any, any good answers for that. Uh, now, what he showed up, that there are situations where, uh, there's a meaningful correlation or connection between something that's an intra-psychic event, like, like a dream, or a vision, or a psychedelic experience, and something that happens in material uni- in the material universe, or what we call, so-called, objective reality, consensus, uh, uh, reality. Now, this should not be happening, I mean, our psyche should be reflecting the material universe which is out there, it should not get into a kind of playful interaction with it, okay?

• 1:28:20Speaker 03

  So, let me, let me just give you a couple of major examples from, from, from that book. Uh, I am referring to the experience that I had with Joseph Campbell, again, you know, great, great, uh, mythologist, greatest mythologist of the twentieth century, probably, of, of all time, and he used to come regularly to Esselin and do workshop, and he went to our workshop, months-long workshops and so on, and we were doing some workshops with him. And in one of these workshops, he was talking about Jung. He was, you know, a great supporter and very enthusiastic about Jung. And he mentioned synchronicity.

• 1:29:02Speaker 03

  And somebody didn't understand it and said, Joe, could you explain what synchronicity is? And he first gave this official definition of Jung's. You know, this is a meaningful connection across time or space between an intrapsychic event and something that happened in the material world. But he says, I will give you an example. He said, you know, we were living in downtown Manhattan on the fourteenth floor of a high-rise building. And my office had two sets of windows. One was overlooking Sixth Avenue, which was, you know, not nothing interesting like many streets in Manhattan. But the other set was overlooking the Hudson River.

• 1:29:47Speaker 03

  And that was a beautiful view. So these two windows were open all the time. The others were open just for cleaning. Nobody was bothered to open those windows. And then he said, and at the time I was working on the first volume of what was supposed to be World Mythology. And it's called The Way of the Animal Powers. And that first volume is about shamanic mythologies of the world. And then Joe said, and I was working on the chapter about Kalahari bushmen. This is a bushman, you know, living in the Kalahari Desert.

• 1:30:27Speaker 03

  And he said, in their mythology, a major heroic figure is praying mantis. And so my desk was covered with papers and pictures related to the mantis and the Kalahari bushmen. And there was Lauren Vanderpoos' book about his childhood when he had a bushman nanny. And Lauren Vanderpoos described how this nanny was seemed to be communicating with the praying mantis. That they were having sort of conversations and, you know, with the movements, the praying mantis seemed to be responding to him, to her.

• 1:31:13Speaker 03

  And then said, "In the middle of this work, I suddenly had this totally irrational impulse to go and open one of the windows that we never opened." And I stuck my head out and turned it automatically to the side. And there, on the fourteenth floor of a high-rise building on Manhattan, there was a great specimen of a praying mantis, sort of climbing up the building and turned her/his head toward Joe. And he said, uh, I took a close look and the way Vanderpoel described it was true.

• 1:31:54Speaker 03

  There was something that made the praying mantis look like a bushman. So anyway, so that's his story. So, you know, it's possible to imagine that somehow praying mantis got into Manhattan. Somebody has it as a pet or whatever and it, you know, it got to that place. So, but that in itself is not very probable happening. But the fact that it happened, you know, in such a way that at the time when Joe's head was filled with thoughts about praying mantis and so on, and he had this irrational impulse to go and open the window that he never opened and he looks out and, you know, there is a, right there is a praying mantis

• 1:32:37Speaker 03

  and actually turns toward him and gives him what he felt was meaningful look. That's pretty mind-blowing synchronicity. So, you know, Jung hesitated. Twenty years before, he presented it, 1951, in one of the Aranost conferences. And it was presented together with a talk by Wolfgang Pauli, one of the founders of quantum physics, who was first Jung's patient and then a very close, very close friend. Let me just quickly give you another example, which is the most mind-blowing synchronicity from my life. Yes, please.

• 1:33:22Speaker 03

  This happened during our first trip to China, where we were bringing transpersonal psychology and holotropic breathwork to China.

• 1:33:31Speaker 03

  And we did a workshop, a Holotropic Breathwork Workshop, in Jinan, which is the birthplace of Confucius. And we were having dinner, and one of the participants came to me and said, "Stan, I had an experience about you in my dream last night." And I said, "What was it?" And she said, "It was my great-grandmother, who showed up and told me that we have an important stone in our family for generations, and that stone should go to Dr. Grof."

• 1:34:16Speaker 03

  So she actually brought it. She was holding a beautiful, beautiful, blue velvet bag, and opened it, and it was a fossil nautilus, the ammonite, you know, which are the ancestors of the nautilus. Very, very beautiful fossil. Now, the interesting thing was that it was picked up at the top of Mount Everest. I didn't know at that time that it's possible that... This is a marine mollusk, you see? So it comes from the bottom of the ocean, and it got during the creation of Himalayas, got to the top of Mount Everest.

• 1:35:00Speaker 03

  Now, what is interesting about this, that when I started Transpersonal Psychology, International Association of Transpersonal Psychology, and the series of international conferences, we were thinking, what would be the proper logo for the International Transpersonal Association? And we came up with the chambered nautilus, you know, which is a beautiful piece of sacred geometry. So for decades, we were using it on the stationery. It was on all the programs of transpersonal psychology. So, you know, here we are bringing transpersonal psychology to China. And a great-grandmother shows up in the dream

• 1:35:44Speaker 03

  of a woman who actually was called Meng, which is the Chinese name for dream. And tells her to bring me this fossil nautilus, you know, which was taken from the bottom of the ocean to the top of the, of the highest mountain in the world. According to the estimates, the Himalayas were born about, about fifty million years ago during the collision of the, of the tectonic plates. So this was, you know, at least fifty million years old, the fossil nautilus, you know, symbol of the International Transpersonal Association.

• 1:36:26Speaker 03

  So of course, the Chinese press, you know, didn't describe how great that holotropic breath work was, but they all focused on this incredible synchronicity, you know.

• 1:36:37Tim Ferriss?

  Are there, are there any other stories or phenomena experiences that are difficult to explain in that book or outside of When the Impossible Happens that are related to psychedelic sessions?

• 1:36:54Speaker 03

  Well, there are, of course, experiences of the, out of body experiences in near-death experiences, you know, where people who are in a state of clinical death, cardiac death, or even a flat EEG have experiences. They might be watching the procedure from, from the ceiling, so that when they're brought back to consciousness, they are able to describe the, the procedure. There's one case where this was happening to a woman who had to be frozen because they needed to get to the tumor at the base of the skull. And so she had flat electrocardiogram, flat electroencephalogram.

• 1:37:38Speaker 03

  And at the same time, this is the most detailed description of the, of the surgical procedure that we have, where she was able to, to draw the instruments that they were using and so on. So there are many, many of these, and we had, we had a couple of those experiences with our own cancer patients. So this, one of them is described in the book.

• 1:38:03Speaker 03

  There is, there is one chapter which I called Unorthodox Psychiatry, where people experience healing in connection with experiences that, you know, wouldn't make any, any sense to current psychiatrists.

• 1:38:17Tim Ferriss?

  What, what would be an example of that?

• 1:38:19Speaker 03

  So, there was one situation where we had a five-day workshop at Esselen, and a woman came who had for the last two years had had a very bad depression, which psychiatrists would consider to be what's called endogenous, which of course doesn't mean anything. Endogenous means generated from within.

• 1:38:45Speaker 03

  But the characteristic is that it's worse in the morning. So she got out of the bed and it took her like a couple hours before she managed to brush her teeth and, and, you know,

• 1:38:57Speaker 03

  get dressed properly and so on. So she had two sessions with us, which we had in the five days at Esselen. And, you know, they were pretty powerful things from childhood and she was reliving her birth. But Friday in the morning, which was the last day she came, and she actually experienced some intensification of these feelings. So we asked her to lie down. We had a different, different program for that morning, you know, the conclusion of the five days. But it was clear that we had to do something.

• 1:39:40Speaker 03

  So she lied down in the, in the middle of the room. And we just told her just to go with the experiences. She didn't even do more breathing. And she again completed a little something about the experience of birth, biological birth. And then went into this very strange series of movements where it looked like sort of a praying or worshipping something. She ended up in a, in a sitting position. And then this monotonous chant, repetitive chant came in a language that, that we did not understand. And this was going for quite a while and then it ended.

• 1:40:25Speaker 03

  And she laid back and she was just completely blissed out, you know, in a, in an ecstatic state. Uh, the group was reacting in a strange way. People were ending up in their lotus positions. Uh, you know, uh, some of them crying for, for unknown reasons. And we had a, a Jewish psychoanalyst from, uh, Buenos Aires participating, uh, in this, uh, uh, particularly, uh, five day workshop. And he came to us and he said, "This is fantastic. Do you understand what happened?" We said, "No."

• 1:41:06Speaker 03

  Uh, he said, "She was, she was chanting in perfect Sephardic language, the, the Latino, which is a medieval mixture of, of, uh, Spanish and, and Hebrew. And it happened to be his hobby. You know, he, he knew the Sephardic, uh, language." And we say, "Wow." He says, "We asked him, "What, what was she singing?" He said, "What she was singing? 'I am suffering and I will always suffer. I am crying and I will always cry. I am praying and I will always pray.'" Now, this episode finished this two years of the exogenous depression. We saw her then a couple of times at, uh, uh, conferences

• 1:41:49Speaker 03

  and the depression never came back, back. So the idea of, you know, healing, uh, depressions, pretty, pretty bad depression by singing a Sephardic prayer. It's, it's a pretty unusual sort of, uh, therapeutic, uh, uh, mechanism.

• 1:42:07Tim Ferriss?

  Is, what do you, what do you make of that? Yeah, what do you, how do you explain that for yourself?

• 1:42:14Speaker 03

  We, we've seen a lot of this kind of thing. That, that, uh, healing happens, powerful healing happens in the holotropic breathwork through mechanisms that we don't understand.

• 1:42:27Speaker 03

  I saw before, you know, working with people who were in psychoanalysis, so on, the opposite, that people, after years of psychoanalysis, they got to the point where they can give you lectures, why they have the problems, how is it related to early cannibalism and the, you know, the toilet training and herpes problems, only the problems don't change very much. So you are, you have the option, either have very little result with what seems to be intellectual understanding, or a result where you have no clue what's happening.

• 1:43:03Tim Ferriss?

  And that particular experience with the sephardic chanting, that was with, that was following breathwork, but not using any type of dosing of any type of material?

• 1:43:18Speaker 03

  No, we were, we were careful not to bring, not to bring anything into the, you know, the holotropic breathwork sessions, because it's, the structure is completely different, the timing of the breathwork is different, it's about three hours, and the type of music that we use, so it would not be, it would not be great set and setting, it's not, it's not structured for a psychedelic experience, and actually, this would, you know, disturb, we had one situation, actually, where somebody who had a black belt, took

• 1:43:58Speaker 03

  it, going into our, our workshop at SLN, without telling us, and ended up, you know, in a pretty aggressive situation, and it just really disturbed the whole, the whole session, we had a hard time sort of, you know, bringing him, bringing him down.

• 1:44:19Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds terrifying.

• 1:44:21Speaker 03

  It's just a matter of principle, you know. Was it illegal, but it just does not, does not work well in a context that's, that's created for holotropic breathwork.

• 1:44:34Tim Ferriss?

  If, if you had to answer the question, and there might not be an answer to this, or there might not be an affirmative answer, and to the question that someone posed to me, which was, they hadn't experienced holotropic breathwork, and they asked, but they did have a lot of research experiment, experience with psychedelics, and they asked, what psychedelic at what dose is most similar to, to the effects or the experience of holotropic breathwork?

• 1:45:01Speaker 03

  Well, it would be more something in the category of MDMA in that the holotropic breathwork can create visions, you know, visual experiences, but it not that common as it is in, in LSD or in mescaline, where you have, can have, you know, really fantastic fractal displays of colorful images and so on, and the whole session could be, could be very, very visual. In the breathwork is more like MDMA, where you have something that's almost like on the interface between vision and a vivid thought and so on.

• 1:45:44Tim Ferriss?

  And if, if we were to look at another subjective experience that's reported with, with decent regularity with psychedelics, specifically entity encounters, and this seems to be frequently reported with, say, ayahuasca or smoked-

• 1:46:08Speaker 03

  Say it once more.

• 1:46:09Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, entity encounters, encountering entities that, that one believes to be separate from themselves, seems to be quite common with ayahuasca or smoked DMT, NNDMT specifically. What is, have you seen this in breathwork? And also, do you make any attempt to interpret what these things mean? Or is it really left to the person experiencing it to integrate it or to heal through such a perceived encounter or something that exists independently?

• 1:46:45Speaker 03

  Uh, well, this, you know, this was described, of course, with, uh, with, uh, Peyote, the Mescalito.

• 1:46:52Tim Ferriss?

  Right, Mescalito.

• 1:46:52Speaker 03

  And then also very common with ayahuasca, and the Pachamama.

• 1:46:57Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:46:58Speaker 03

  The mother, you know, mother, uh, and so on. The only time I had it was in an ayahuasca session, uh, where there was a sense of... Actually, it's not true. I had it once in, uh, in an LSD, early LSD session, uh, where there was a presence. There was a, um, energetic presence. I didn't see, you know, a figure. Uh, but there was also communication which was, uh, telepathic, which was without words. Uh, this was, uh, very strange because, uh, this was at a time when, uh, we had closed boundaries. We, we couldn't even, uh, initially travel to Russia, let alone to, to the West.

• 1:47:42Speaker 03

  And there was this kind of entity appearing in my LSD session. Uh, it was like a genie, almost, like asking, you know, uh, what would you like, uh, uh, your, your life to be like? And I said, "I would like to see the world. I would like to understand, uh, psychosis." This was the place I was in. "And I would like to have a job." Uh, that's not a kind of a nine-to-five job. I would like to have some kind of a freedom. And the answer was, uh, "Okay, but your task is to bring spirituality to Eastern Europe and to Russia." I said, "Now I really did it." You said, "Now I'm flipping out. I can't, you know, I can't even travel to, to Poland."

• 1:48:25Speaker 03

  Uh, uh, and this is promising me I can see the world. But then, of course, it, it happened, you know, then, uh, uh, this is developing transpersonal psychology. It became very, very popular, um, in, in Russia. And then 25 years ago, bringing transpersonal psychology to, to Czechoslovakia, actually. So, so that was a fascinating synchronicity again. Uh, and then I had one, uh, in the ayahuasca session, but also this was a, this was a very, uh, uh, intense. But, but it was guiding my session, was, was sort of telling me what I should look, look, how I should handle it.

• 1:49:11Tim Ferriss?

  And that's not something that you observe in breathwork very often?

• 1:49:15Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:49:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:16Speaker 03

  No. You know, I actually wrote, initially I wrote that I consider psychedelics to be non-specific amplifiers.

• 1:49:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yes.

• 1:49:26Speaker 03

  When I, and it would have to be modified. I, actually, all psychedelics can take you to the areas which I described in that cartography. You can experience something from, from a child sufficiently important emotionally. You can relive your birth, you can have prenatal experiences, even, this is, I almost hesitate to say that, reliving your conception, you know, identifying with, on a cellular level with the sperm and the, and the ovum. You can have past life experiences, you can have archetypal experiences, you can, it can take you to, to the collective unconscious and so on.

• 1:50:07Speaker 03

  So the cartography applies to all of them, but there is a different style in which it's coming.

• 1:50:14Speaker 03

  You know, let's just talk about more, more visual, less visual and so on, more emphasis on, on physical feelings or on the emotions. In certainly MDMA or some, some of the other antigens, they shift that whole spectrum towards the positive. There are very few people who have bad trips or MDMA. MDMA is very dangerous physiologically, but very, very easy for most people to, to handle psychologically, emotionally.

• 1:50:47Speaker 03

  But then I discovered this, this element in ayahuasca that there is very frequently the imagery of the Amazonian jungle or the anaconda snake is coming, the kind of a rotor rotor, you know, cleansing, jaguar, images of jaguar. So there is some kind of a selectivity, what from the collective unconscious is actually prevalent in, in those sessions.

• 1:51:18Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any opinion or opinion of or experience with microdosing of different psychedelics?

• 1:51:27Tim Ferriss?

  Is that something you've administered to people? Or I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. It's become a topic.

• 1:51:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, I had quite a few of like the 25 micrograms, you know, for hiking or swimming in the ocean or something. They're just enhancement of the perceptual experience of the world.

• 1:51:49Speaker 03

  But I haven't experimented with the small. I had lots of very interesting experiences inside of the sessions. And then particularly coming down from the sessions when I was in a kind of a state that you might be experiencing at lower dosages. But it was at the end of a high dose session rather than an experience per se.

• 1:52:15Tim Ferriss?

  What did you experience at the tail end of those sessions?

• 1:52:21Speaker 03

  What were they?

• 1:52:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, what were those experiences at the tail end of those high dose sessions that were interesting?

• 1:52:30Speaker 03

  Well, there were, you know, all kinds of psychological insights. I mean, a lot of the things that I've been writing about, you know, were combinations of what I saw in the patients and then getting insights and understanding.

• 1:52:43Speaker 03

  Even in the high dose as parts of the sessions, when I hit some difficult places, like for example existential despair feeling, you know, there's no meaning in life, absurdity of life and so on, which very frequently happens during reliving of birth, when you get to what I call the second perinatal matrix, which is the stage of birth where the uterus contracts, but there is no opening. The cervix is not open. So you have the feeling of a total existential despair, total bummer. There's no meaning, everything's absurd. We go from nowhere to nowhere.

• 1:53:25Speaker 03

  We come to this world naked, crying, in pain, you know, without any possession, and this is how we're gonna end, no matter what you do in your life or with your life. Those are really heavy kind of experiences. So I had some of those experiences when either there is a suicidal impulse, or even suicide, even suicide would not be solution of trying to get out of that state. And so when I was hitting some of these places in my own sessions, I would have like a parade of my patients, where I would suddenly say, "Oh, this is where he was, or this is where she was." When I was, when I was bringing just my training as a psychiatrist and things that I've read,

• 1:54:10Speaker 03

  I realized I was sitting there, listening to what they were saying. I had no clue what, what they were talking about. And but I got really full experiential understanding by finding those places in myself. And this is also interesting about this, this large map of the psyche, you know, that each of us has all those things. It's not the question of whether you are a psychiatric patient or no. If you go deep enough, you, you find all those elements within yourself.

• 1:54:39Tim Ferriss?

  So this, this...

• 1:54:41Speaker 03

  If, if you, if you are dealing, you are processing the hours in the birth canal, you find the whole psychopathology there, all the emotional problems, all the psychosomatic symptoms, the choking, the, the nausea, the, the headaches, the, the pains, the psychosomatic pains in the body. You know, people frequently tell me they found Hitler inside, they found Stalin. I mean, you, you discover the shadow aspect. So, so the, the human personality is a little different from what's described by mainstream psychiatry.

• 1:55:14Tim Ferriss?

  You, you and your late wife Christina coined the term spiritual emergency. And she founded, I guess, in 1980, the Spiritual Emergence Network, SEN. Now, I'd love for you to explain what that means, but then also, if you could also, if you could touch on the difference between, or differences, if there are any, between spiritual emergencies that are naturally occurring, let's just say, or what people might view as, say, the onset of schizophrenia in the late twenties or something like that.

• 1:55:48Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:55:48Tim Ferriss?

  Versus those precipitated by psychedelics.

• 1:55:52Speaker 03

  Well, that concept came from the work with psychedelics and with the breath work. You know, when you realize that people in these situations would have experiences like of death, rebirth, destruction of the world, recreation of the world, past life experiences and so on. And I very early discovered that if you have a bad trip, there is no way, no good way of terminating it. The worst thing that you can do is what's done routinely, which is come with tranquilizers. When you give tranquilizers to people who are on a bad trip and then keep them on maintenance

• 1:56:34Speaker 03

  dosage, this prevents any kind of resolution. If somebody has a bad trip, that means that they are dealing with a difficult aspect of their unconscious. And when it's coming up, it's coming up for healing. It's not just that the drug created this horrible, horrible experience. So the way you do it, you have to tell people, you know, you are in an LSD session, this is a time limited thing, I'm gonna be here. And then when something remains unresolved, we do some body work and some emotional work to bring it to a good closure. People can benefit from these bad trips. So I realized very early that when people had difficult experiences, the last thing

• 1:57:18Speaker 03

  I would do is to combine with tranquilizers, you know. And so I saw many of those situations where people experienced what they would be hospitalized for in the psychedelic session. And if we stayed with it, it actually was a major healing, major transformation. So then the obvious answer was, you know, should we treat it differently just because it happened without breathing or fast breathing or because it happened without psychedelics? No, we just, you know, apply it to that other category of spontaneously emerging experiences of this kind. Now, what is necessary for having this kind of understanding?

• 1:58:03Speaker 03

  You have to have the large map. The psyche is not just the postnatal biography and the Freudian individual unconscious, there is the record of these hours of birth, of the anxiety, of the of, you know, the physical discomfort and also the amazing aggression, the fury that is generated in the fetus who cannot breathe and is is subjected to all those tortions and so on. So if you have a, if you have a map that includes that and if you have the map that includes the collective unconscious,

• 1:58:45Speaker 03

  which psychiatry has not accepted, the Jungian idea that we have also the collective unconscious as a regular kind of germane part of our unconscious, both the historical part of the collective unconscious and the archetypal. So having visions of archetypal beings are being taken to archetypal domains like hell or paradise. Those are common experiences in the breathwork or in psychedelic sessions. So this just gives you an idea, this stage that you can work with, the way you would work with people in a psychedelic session.

• 1:59:24Tim Ferriss?

  So that's a perfect segue. Let's take as a hypothetical situation and an alternate world where the psychologists and psychiatrists have accepted the collective unconscious and have this larger map. Someone is brought to a hospital by their family because they seem to be having what the family believes to be a psychotic break, whether it's schizophrenic or however it might be diagnosed currently. They're brought to the hospital. If a practitioner, if a doctor or psychologist had this larger map, what would the intervention or diagnostic process look like potentially?

• 2:00:09Speaker 03

  Well, people, people usually ask me, when, when I say that the concept spiritual emergency, if there are any professional psychiatrists, psychologists, they say, "Can you give me differential diagnosis?" You see? This is what we did in somatic medicine, differential diagnosis. If people have, you know, infection, you want to find out which infection, what is the differential diagnosis? What is the differential diagnosis between different kinds of diabetes and so on? So they would like something like that for spiritual emergency, which you cannot do, because, you know, psychosis is not, this is not a medical diagnosis. We, we can't, in the exception of the organic psychosis,

• 2:00:53Speaker 03

  we cannot really make the diagnosis. We don't have any findings in the cerebrospinal liquid. We don't have any findings in the blood. We don't have any finding in urine, where we can, you know, have a litmus paper put it in the sample of urine, since it comes out, you know, green, it's schizophrenia. Right. You basically diagnose these different psychos, so-called psychotic states by the fact that people have experiences and behaviors that current model cannot. But, but part of those symptoms, which are, which are used as being important,

• 2:01:35Speaker 03

  you know, diagnostic tools for, for psychiatry could be, for example, people have the experience of, of death, rebirth, the destruction of the world, recreation of the, of the world. They have experiences that seem to be past-life experiences. So those are all absolutely normal elements in the human unconscious, but understood really in, if you want, in the Grofian-Jungian way. The psyche is infinitely larger than...

• 2:02:11Speaker 03

  than mainstream psychiatry ever considered. It's more like the description that you find in the great spiritual philosophies of the East, in Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism. They have the real maps of the psyche, because they were focusing, you know, for centuries on systematic exploration of the psyche in a very similar way in which we do science. You know, people, they were describing certain procedures that you have to follow, certain forms of meditation. They would collect the descriptions of those experiences, discuss, write about it, and so on. So it's a systematic exploration of the human psyche.

• 2:02:54Speaker 03

  These cultures were not interested in technology, so they are nowhere close to what we are in terms of the understanding of the material world, but they are way ahead of us in terms of understanding of consciousness and the psyche. And it's very, you know, it's very humbling for somebody like myself having, you know, professional training and being through a stage when I thought, what the shamans are doing, these are the primitives in the jungle somewhere, you know, illiterate and so on. We have our scientific approach, which is behaviorism or psychoanalysis. If you have the experience of these tools that the shamans have available,

• 2:03:36Speaker 03

  you develop a lot of respect to that.

• 2:03:40Tim Ferriss?

  So related to that.

• 2:03:42Speaker 03

  But the question is, it has to be harnessed, you know, and that's not an easy task in the industrial civilization. You would have to change, first you would have to change the paradigm, which is a difficult thing. You probably know that the shift from the geocentric system to the heliocentric system after Copernicus, you know, published this about the revolutions of the planets, it took over hundred years. And the resistance, it was not just the church. The resistance was coming also from the universities, where there are all kinds of arguments

• 2:04:24Speaker 03

  why the, you know, why the Earth cannot be around and rotate and, you know, around the Sun and so on.

• 2:04:36Tim Ferriss?

  For you personally, how has your experience of your inner world changed over the last, say, sixty years or after you had your first psychedelic experience? So you have that experience and you go on to have all these experiences. What does your inner, your experience of your inner world look like?

• 2:04:56Speaker 03

  Well, I, you know, I was an atheist. This goes back to a little scandal in our family when my parents got, fell in love and wanted to get married. It was in a small check down and my father's family was, had no religious affiliation and my mother's family was strictly Catholic. And so the church refused to marry them because my father was taken by their definition. And this was created a lot of turmoil. It almost seemed like it would not happen until the solution came.

• 2:05:34Speaker 03

  My mother's parents made a major donation to the church and then suddenly they relaxed their standards and they allowed that. And they had a business on the main street. And so when, when the wedding happened, they could roll out carpets across the street, stop the traffic and to take the carpets to the, to the altar so the guests could go from the altar all the way to the house and have a banquet there. And my parents got so upset by this that they decided not to commit me or my brother to any religion. We should make our own decision when we come of age.

• 2:06:16Speaker 03

  So we actually had classes of religion, but for me it was always a free hour. I would go for a walk or read a book or if they were sort of playing soccer somewhere, I would join them, you know, being glad that I had this extra time. But also I was a very curious creature. I was, I was also missing, this was called, I think, Paradisi and morale or something like this were the classes and they were they were being taught something that I was missing, so I was kind of a little ambivalent about it. But then from this kind of background, I went to medical school at a time when in the Marxist regime, we were controlled by the Soviet Union. So we really got the pure materialistic doctrine. You can't, you can't get, you know, more materialistic than that.

• 2:07:01Speaker 03

  So it was my first LSD session that just changed that. And, you know, I was one kind of person in the morning and another person walked out of there. In the evening, I was really basically open to the mystical world. I saw that, you know, that was a much deeper understanding that anything that that my formal training provided. So, so this, the paradox, which I was aware of it when I was coming down as a, as a belief, sort of a, not believing, but a mystical, you know, mystical person. I differentiated quite a bit spirituality from religion. I never became religious in any way, I became very spiritual.

• 2:07:47Speaker 03

  And I realized the paradox, you know, it's the divine sort of comes to me in an experiment in a Marxist country, you know, induced by this substance from a Swiss chemist.

• 2:08:03Speaker 03

  But I knew, I felt I was stuck in psychiatry and I was at that point not very excited about psychiatry. But I felt, coming down from the session, I felt if I am psychiatrist, this is by far the most interesting thing I can study. So if you look at my professional career, there's nothing, those years, sixty years, you know, that I have done that would not be in one way or another related to these holotropic states. That became what I said was my, my passion, my vocation, my, my profession.

• 2:08:42Tim Ferriss?

  Is there any particular synchronicity or experience in any of the holotropic states that you've experienced yourself that you find the hardest to explain or the most unusual slash remarkable? Does anything come to mind?

• 2:09:02Speaker 03

  I don't know. I have so many, so many of them. I think one of the wildest-

• 2:09:07Tim Ferriss?

  You don't have to pick one. You can choose more than one, too.

• 2:09:10Speaker 03

  One of the wildest one was actually the first session that I had when I came to Baltimore from Prague. It was a process where my request for the scholarship was first turned down and then I appealed and then I had a very powerful psychedelic session with a colleague of mine, a psychiatrist. And this was a major, major death rebursts opening and what I experienced, like, you know, kind of Atman Brahman experience. And I came back home and in the mailbox was

• 2:09:52Speaker 03

  a positive response. I can go to the United States. So within very short time, I packed, I ended up, you know, forty pounds of my luggage. I took all my records with me, twenty-five pounds, fifteen pounds of personal belonging, and I was going to Baltimore. And in Baltimore, we had the permission to give sessions to professionals and collecting the information from that. And so I had a session. You know, we qualified for that ourselves. And in that session, I suddenly had the feeling that I was not bound by space and time, that I somehow

• 2:10:33Speaker 03

  could get to other places in the world if I decide to. And I wanted to put it to a test. I said, can I, for example, get to Prague? Into into the apartment of my parents. And so I imagine, you know, which direction was Prague and how far and imagine myself sort of flying in that direction. And I experienced a flight, but I was not getting anywhere. So I felt there was a problem there. And I was thinking about it and then I realized that I was limited by this, by the concept, this, the coordinate spatial, temporal coordinate that

• 2:11:14Speaker 03

  I believe that Prague is in this direction, you know, and a certain kind of distance that I have to overcome and just imagine that I'm, I'm in Prague. And what happened the next time, I was suddenly trapped in some kind of very strange space where there were like circuits or transistors and stuff.

• 2:11:38Speaker 03

  And I didn't know what was happening. And then I realized I was inside of the television of the, you know, television set of my, of my parents. And I was thinking about it and I had to laugh because I was still holding on to the next element of the materialistic world. The only way you can really see what's happening in other places, you, you need a television, you need, you need a camera and a satellite, you see. So I realized I'm not even bound by that. I'm, I'm in a, in a, the world of spirit. I can just, has to say, now I am there and I am there. And then in that, at that point, it turned kind of inside out and I was walking.

• 2:12:23Speaker 03

  I, I felt straight. I, I didn't feel, I didn't feel I was in a session. And I was walking in that apartment. I, I heard my parents breathing. And I went to the, to the window and there, there on the corner was a clock. And it was showing the six hour difference.

• 2:12:45Speaker 03

  Which I thought for a while and I said, not, not the proof, you know. I, I knew it that there was a difference, that my mind could fabricate that. So how do I prove that this really happened? And I said, I would go and take a picture of the wall. And then check with my parents and they would say, something strange happened, you know, we found this painting on the, you know, on the floor and the nail was still in the wall. And so I started walking to the, and reaching for that. And then suddenly I had the feeling that I was gambling, I was, I was playing like a roulette with my, with my soul. That was, this was very dangerous, the feeling that

• 2:13:30Speaker 03

  I was getting sort of under the influence of some evil forces. And then I realized how much they warn you if you are on the spiritual quest from that, that period where you start playing with this mind over, you know, the CDs and so on. And I started seeing, I started seeing images, what, what I could do if I really had that possibility. I could go and eavesdrop and political meetings in the world, you know. I could get access to scientific secrets and so on. I could go to a casino, I could beat the casino and so on. And I realized there was a, there was a real danger from the ego to, to start playing with the

• 2:14:16Speaker 03

  the possibility of having this power. So I finally sort of didn't have the courage to do that. And also didn't want to be in a world where this would be possible. Because if I had the power, then other people had the power. And then the, the doors don't protect me, in a world sort of, you know, this kind of wild western. And I didn't, didn't want that proof that this is, this was really possible. And I went, I lied down on a couch where actually I was coming down from a session before going to Baltimore.

• 2:14:54Speaker 03

  And I was lying then, and then this horrible thought came to me. Uh, maybe I never got to Baltimore. I am just, I fabricated that trip to, to the United States in my LSD session. I'm now coming down, uh, from, from that session. I never left, you see? So I was like the Trang Su in that situation, you know? Am I a butterfly having the dream of being a human? Or a human having the, um, the feeling that I'm butterfly? Uh, so, uh, I was stuck in that place for a while where I was not sure whether I was having astral projection from Baltimore or whether I was, I was coming down from that session. So that was the wildest one probably.

• 2:15:36Speaker 03

  And of course, then coming back, I was cursing myself, you know, what a wasted opportunity for a great experiment, you know, to prove astral projection. Uh, and, uh, but the fear and the metaphysical fear that I was really sort of, uh, you know, losing my soul in that, since I started playing with these kinds of forces.

• 2:15:58Tim Ferriss?

  That, that last part of that experience in particular sounds terrible. The, uh, the laying down, or terrifying, I should say, laying down on the, on the couch in Prague and wondering, like you said, if the entire trip to the United States had been a fabrication. When you came out of that experience, how quickly did it take or how long did it take for you to realize that in fact you were back in the United States?

• 2:16:23Speaker 03

  Oh, like, you know, that probably was in eight hours or so. I was, uh, it was absolutely clear, you know?

• 2:16:30Tim Ferriss?

  Re back to calibration.

• 2:16:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:16:33Tim Ferriss?

  If, if you were starting your career, just, just a few more questions. I, I, I've, you've been so generous with your time, but if you were starting again right now and you were a promising young scientist, you could research anything you wanted, let's assume that all of these compounds are legal, uh, what would you focus on? What type of studies would you want to do or what type of research would you want to do?

• 2:16:58Speaker 03

  Well, you know, one of the problems with this Renaissance, that a lot of it is repeating things which were already done. Like the cancer projects are great, but we did it to the point when, that when we ask for more money for continuing the research, they say, "You have already proved it, now it has to go to the hospitals, now it has to be used." And so, you know, also that wonderful study at Johns Hopkins is just a more sophisticated and methodologically better, you know, Walter Panki experiment, which had some flaws certainly.

• 2:17:38Speaker 03

  But I would love to see this now going to the research of creativity, to bring people, you know, biologists, quantum relativistic physicists, and see what they can do. As you know, we have indications that the whole development of computers was closely connected with use of psychedelics. You know, people like Doug Engelbart and even, you know, Steve Jobs and all these people made it absolutely clear. There was a statement that all the people, to men and women, who developed virtual reality were acidheads.

• 2:18:19Speaker 03

  So, and this is now, you know, understood, there is a possibility of sort of loosening somehow the blocks that we have in problem solving, because we are stuck with a paradigm. You know, Thomas Kuhn wrote that fantastic book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, showing that the history of science is not a linear development, where we started from not knowing anything, and then each generation added a little of the observations, and there were, you know, more and more accurate hypotheses and theories created, so that what we have now, the understanding of the universe, is the best understanding that has

• 2:19:00Speaker 03

  ever been in, you know, in any, at any time in any society. And it showed that it's a joke, that the development of science breaks into this... Distinct periods and each of them is governed by what he calls a paradigm. You know, a way of looking, looking at the world, you know, certain basic metaphysical assumptions, beliefs, ways of what are relevant areas to research, how do you do research, how you evaluate it, this is all paradigm tied. So the examples, of course, I already mentioned the shift from the geocentric to the heliocentric system.

• 2:19:43Speaker 03

  There was a one revolution in chemistry where they had flogiston chemistry, where there was this royal substance of flogiston. And then when people like, like Dalton or Lavoisier came with the idea of atoms, you know, people had problems because they didn't believe in, in flogiston anymore. Now we laugh when you hear that. And then, of course, the, the first three decades in the 20th century, the physicists had to go through this incredible conceptual cataclysm, moving from Newton first to the theories of relativity and then to quantum physics that even Einstein, who initiated

• 2:20:26Speaker 03

  it, couldn't accept until his death. So this is, this is the question of paradigm. So I believe that we are now in the period of paradigm shift in relation to consciousness and the human psyche that's comparable in nature and scope to what the physicists had to experience in the first three decades of the 20th century. And then, in a sense, it can be seen as being complementary to the changes that already happened in the understanding of matter, you know. The quantum physicists who are my friends had no, no problems relating to my observation.

• 2:21:10Speaker 03

  It was mostly the resistance of psychiatrists and psychologists.

• 2:21:16Speaker 03

  Would you... So, one more thing, one more thing that... Of course. Yeah, I had... So, there is the situation that Kuhn described, that during the time when you have the science dominated by a paradigm, the scientists do what he called a normal science, which is problem-solving within the context of a given parameters. It's like playing chess. If you play chess, you have to follow the rules. You can't suddenly take an inconvenient figure and throw it out of the chessboard, you know. And then he describes what happens when observations come that challenge the paradigm,

• 2:22:00Speaker 03

  how it's rejected initially. People are called crazy, or it's called fraud, or whatever. And then, when it keeps coming, then finally, realization, there is a problem. And then the wilder theories come, and first they are sort of rejected. And then, after a while, the new paradigm emerges and is accepted by the scientific community. And then, history is rewritten, because now you have new heroes, people who already saw it, you know, centuries ago, the way we see it now. But what I would like to add was then Gregory Bateson added another thing. It's the... Not only do the scientists believe in that paradigm, are committed to it,

• 2:22:45Speaker 03

  but they believe that it's an accurate and exhaustive description of reality per se, not a map, not the best way we can sort of currently organize the observation that we have. It is a definitive description of how things are. And this is called the confusion between the map and the territory. People like Arthur Korzipsky, and then Gregory Bateson was very, very big about it. And Gregory was laughing about it. He says, "If scientists make errors like that, it can happen that one day they come to the restaurant and they eat the menu instead of the dinner." The relationship between a paradigm, you know, and the territory that he described is very much like reading the menu.

• 2:23:34Tim Ferriss?

  So I've had this question I've wanted to ask this entire conversation since we first started speaking. And let me just get my facts straight before I ask it. Are you currently eighty-seven? Is that accurate? What is your current age?

• 2:23:49Speaker 03

  I just wanted, first of July, I just was eighty-seven.

• 2:23:54Tim Ferriss?

  Eighty-seven. Well, happy belated birthday.

• 2:23:57Speaker 03

  Thank you. Thank you very much.

• 2:23:59Tim Ferriss?

  You are remarkably, incredibly sharp, incredibly energetic, I mean, more so than some twenty-somethings I know. What do you attribute that to? I mean, and to what factors? I mean, are both, were both of your parents sharp their entire lives? I mean, I aspire currently, I'm forty, I'm forty-one, and I would love to have half the energy that you do. So to what do you attribute that? It's really just, I mean, mind-blowing to me. I'm so inspired, just trying to absorb some of the enthusiasm and energy that you have in this phone, in this phone call.

• 2:24:42Speaker 03

  I think, you know, part of it is that I'm really, really, very, very deeply committed to this, to this idea of these holotropic states, to bring them into psychiatry, to bring them into society. I had a lot of, you know, meetings with Albert Hofmann, who was talking about the new Eleuthys, to create a situation where these are integrated into social fabric. They are socially sanctioned, that we can sort of use it the way ancient Greeks, the Eleuthys mysteries. You know, you probably know, this was done for 2,000 years in Eleuthys.

• 2:25:25Speaker 03

  So they had to offer something pretty impressive to keep the attention of the ancient world. And the list of people who have been initiates in these mysteries, it reads like who is who in antiquity. I mean, it includes Plato, Aristotle, Cicero wrote about it, you know, Marcus Aurelius, Pindaros, all these people.

• 2:25:49Speaker 03

  So we all sort of say, you know, the Greeks are very talented, beautiful art, beautiful science and great ideas. Now, the fact that so many people every five years had some powerful experiences puts it into some different perspective. And Albert Hofmann and Gordon Watson, the one who brought the mushrooms from Mexico, from the Mazzatek Indians, and Karl Rau, a Greek scholar, they wrote the book, Road to Eleusis, when they found out that the key to this mystery was Kykeon, K-Y-K-E-O-N.

• 2:26:29Speaker 03

  And they found out that this was a psychedelic potion which was made of ergot, very similar to LSD. So you can imagine, if so many people every five years in that small world had psychedelic experiences, that it could have had some impact on the culture. You know, the last time when we were in Eleusis, there was a guide, and there are the ruins of the Telestrion, which is the building where this was happening, and it's a gigantic building. And I asked how many people were having these experiences here at the time.

• 2:27:12Speaker 03

  He said, at least, you know, in the last stage, 3,000 people every five years were getting this dose of this. So when I read Plato now, I don't see him like pacing in the academy and saying, let me see how the world works, you know, we have not that this, but there's this level of the archetypes and so on. This is something that you can experience, archetypes in psychedelic sessions. So this is all, the philosophy was inspired by psychedelic experiences.

• 2:27:44Tim Ferriss?

  What do you think humanity needs most right now, in your opinion?

• 2:27:52Speaker 03

  What humanity?

• 2:27:55Tim Ferriss?

  Big question, yeah. What do you think humanity needs most right now?

• 2:27:59Speaker 03

  What we need?

• 2:28:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. If there's any particular type of change or shift that you haven't mentioned.

• 2:28:08Speaker 03

  Well, I think, you know, the monoistic-materistic paradigm, I think, is really destroying this this planet. And we have, you know, we have lost experience of spirituality. That people have really the experience to have spiritual experiences which are non-denominational, which are non-chauvinistic, non-sectarian, which are universal, all-inclusive, all, all embracing. So people who have these direct spiritual experiences, they don't experience division in the world.

• 2:28:53Speaker 03

  You know, what happened with the great organized religions is that they unite people who are willing to see it the same way and worship the same way, but at the same time divide the world because they set it against another group which have taken sort of different archetypes and different ways of worshipping. So then you have a situation where, you know, we are Christians, you all other guys are pagans, and we really have to convert you, or there's really not a good place for you here. Or we are Muslims, and you guys all are infidels. Let go, let have sacred war against the infidels. You know, we have Jews, you are going, and so on.

• 2:29:37Speaker 03

  And then you have even these kinds of divisions within the same religion. There's centuries of bloodshed between Protestants and Catholics. And you have the same with the Sunnis and the Shia, they're killing each other, destroying their own temples. Now, these are not religions that will help us in the situation in the world. But this is very different with spirituality, which is really taking, taking everything in and it changes, changes, you know, consciousness in a way that people embrace the ecological movement. They realize we have to treat nature in a different way because we are so vitally

• 2:30:18Speaker 03

  embedded and entangled in nature that we would not use nature as commodity, you know, something that should serve us and the expense of, you know, destroying, destroying our environment. This, you know, nothing that's more important for us. We are biological creatures. We need air, we need water, and we need clean soil where we are growing our food. It's, it's so, so suicidal, so self-destructive to destroy the basis on which we depend. You know, there should not be anything keeping the environment, supporting life. No, no, you

• 2:31:01Speaker 03

  know, economic profit, no, no political, no, no military either. We should really realize that we are in the same boat. And, you know, whoever is destroying the environment is destroying us.

• 2:31:15Tim Ferriss?

  And there are many places people can find, of course, your writing and more about you, stanislavgrof.com. I'll link to all of this in the show notes for people, so they'll be able to find that at tim.blog/podcast. And I certainly recommend that people check out your books, including When the Impossible Happens. A friend of mine who's involved in scientific research recommended I read The Cosmic Game. And I'm wondering if, before we wrap up, maybe could you share one more story, any story that, to folks out there who are wondering if there might be more to the story than just the purely material,

• 2:31:56Tim Ferriss?

  sort of hyper-rational, materialistic worldview, there might just be more to the story. I'm wondering if there's anything else that you can share. I remember the, coming across the pig goddess story. I mean, there are so many to choose from, but I don't know.

• 2:32:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. Let me, let me do one that's kind of, I think is, you know, has a larger kind of importance than, than just mentioning one, one clinical story.

• 2:32:22Speaker 03

  It's also a story from when the impossible happens. And it has to do with the experience that I had in a pejote ceremony. So when I came to the United States, you know, I heard about pejote and so on. I never had a chance being in, in Czechoslovakia and not having the possibility of, of traveling to have the pejote experience. So I was very, very interested in that. And we had this program for professionals. One of the programs at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. And one of the persons who came was Ken Godfrey, who was the psychiatrist at the VA Hospital in Topika, Kansas.

• 2:33:05Speaker 03

  He was himself, you know, Native American and his wife was Native American. And he was running a psychedelic program in, in, in Topika. But he didn't have anybody to sit for him, so he came for his own session. And I sat in his three psychedelic sessions. So, you know, we became very, very close. And so when, after his last session, we were talking, I said, Ken, is there any possibility you can get me into a Native American church ceremony? And he said, I will try. And then he called in a few days and say, you know, I talked to the road chief and you can come and you can bring four of your friends.

• 2:33:49Speaker 03

  So anyway, we sort of got into the airplane and flew to Topika and then drove into the middle of the, you know, Kansas prairie there. And there were these teepees and this ceremony was being prepared. And we had to go through kind of a clearance that they wanted to find out what kind of people we were. We had to tell them about ourselves. And we got just a lot of aggressive comments from them about how, you know, white people came and they have, they have taken their land. They have killed their buffalo, they have killed their warriors. They have raped their women and so on. And so there was a sort of almost like an encounter group.

• 2:34:31Speaker 03

  And as we were going on, they were sort of finding out that we were okay. And one after another that we can participate. And at the end, there was just one very sort of dark, sullen man who wouldn't have any of us. We had, we were like pale faces and that was it, you know, is not gonna have us in the sacred ceremony. And then he get into a lot of peer pressure. It was time to start and people say, come on, you know, let it go. And so he did say, yes, but it was really no. And I was in the TP, I was sitting across him. And then the buttons, peyote buttons were passed. And then it started coming on and he sort of was really like radiating like a laser beam toward me.

• 2:35:16Speaker 03

  You know, the hatred was kind of, and everything was amplified, of course, by the, by a peyote. And we were doing the rounds when you pass a staff and a drum. And every time you get it, you can say something, you can sing a song or invite people to do something or make a confession or whatever. But you can also pass. And every time it came to him, he would grab it and push it and he just would not participate. And so we were all these rounds and we were going through the last, last round. Um, where everybody can say something. And Bob Lehigh, who was a, another LSD therapist from, from Maryland, working with us. Helen Bonney, uh, and her sister, Helen Bonney was our music therapist.

• 2:36:00Speaker 03

  And Walter Houston Clark was very famous professor of religion. And so as we were doing the last round, uh, Walter Houston Clark gave this, you know, almost like masochistic kind of a speech. He said, how wonderful it was from your, you know, brothers and sisters to take us into this sacred ceremony. After what we have done to you, we have killed your buffalo and your warriors and raped your women and taken your spirituality. And then somehow, I don't remember exactly the context, he mentioned me and said, especially Stan here, who is so far from his native Czechoslovakia. And suddenly, when he mentioned that, it was like a lightning hit this guy.

• 2:36:46Speaker 03

  And he started shaking, he got up, he threw himself into my lap, uh, put, put his head into my lap. Uh, sort of snot was, tears were running out of his eyes and, and, you know, snot out of his nose. It became like one of our workshops, doing sort of close work with people. And everybody was watching, nobody knew what was happening. And this was happening for a while. And then he got up and went back to his place, sit down, and then not, not talking, just sitting there. And there was like a lot of, lot of pressure, you know, psychological pressure, people, people wanting to know what was happening. And then he said, you know, I have to say something horrible. I thought you were all Americans.

• 2:37:31Speaker 03

  I didn't know Stan was from Czechoslovakia. You know, the Czechs are not known as your archetypal raiders of the Wild West exactly. So his, I, I treated him, uh, as, as if he were an American. And I hated him through the whole ceremony. And, uh, it's just more, more than I can, I can take, you know, and, uh. Then was sitting there and it was clear that something more was coming. And then he said, but it's worse than that. During the Second World War, I was drafted in the American Air Force and I was personally present in, uh, the air raid on his city. There was five days before the end of the war, there was an American, uh, attack on Pilsen

• 2:38:16Speaker 03

  that destroyed the automobile factory there and damaged Pilsen. So I said, he stayed home, but I went and I killed his people. Our roles were reversed and that's just too much for me. And then he got up and he went to the four Americans there and embraced them. He says, uh, you are not my enemies, you are, you are my friend. He says, we are all in the same boat. We, if we, if we hold the old grudges, uh, we, we all die. We have, we are all, you know, uh, children of, of, uh, mother earth and we have to, we have to sort of, uh...

• 2:38:58Speaker 03

  Really sort of learn how to, how to live with each, with each other and how to love each other. And then he ended in his, well, they believe in reincarnation, so it says, well, and for what I can say, when this was happening, I might have been on the other side. And, you know, we were still, still under the influence of peyote, so we were all crying and sort of embracing each other. And that, that was fear of reconciliation was amazing. I actually told that story at, at the end of the International Transpersonal Conference in Prague, when I was bringing transpersonal psychology back to Prague, because we had

• 2:39:39Speaker 03

  all these, you know, European nations that had all kinds of grudges and really didn't like each other, like we were occupied by Nazi Germany for six years, you know, a lot of people killed, ended up in concentration camps. Then we had years of communists, so nobody liked Russia, none, none of the people from the Eastern European countries liked either Russia or, or Germany. We had sort of German and Jews there. And what was amazing that we did a large holotropic breath work, you know, that before the conference, as a, the pre-conference workshop.

• 2:40:18Speaker 03

  And it was amazing how within, within two days, I mean, some of these boundaries were, were melting and, you know, people embracing each other and sitting for each other. And when people were owning their own emotional problems, they actually activated the best in, in other people. And in spite of language difficulties and so on, there was really a change of the, of the atmosphere from, you know, all these antagonisms that were certainly in the air at the beginning.

• 2:40:52Tim Ferriss?

  What a wonderful story.

• 2:40:53Speaker 03

  So anyway, that's my story.

• 2:40:55Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you so much.

• 2:40:56Speaker 03

  I call it lesson in forgiveness.

• 2:40:59Tim Ferriss?

  I think we could all use lessons in forgiveness, not only towards others, but towards ourselves. And I really want to express gratitude and thanks certainly for the experiences that I've had, which have been informed by your writing and people who have indirectly or directly been trained by you in some respects. And to thank you on behalf of no doubt many people who are listening, who have had similar experiences. And I'm very cautiously optimistic about this renaissance that we're witnessing and hopefully we won't repeat some of the same mistakes that appear to have been made.

• 2:41:44Tim Ferriss?

  But the social circumstances are so different and I really appreciate you taking the time today. I certainly hope this isn't our last conversation, but I want to be respectful of your time. And we've gone for quite a bit already today. Is there anything else that you would like to say to the people listening or ask of them before we end this particular conversation?

• 2:42:08Speaker 03

  Well, maybe repeat, you know, what Carl Gustav Jung said, and that I would really certainly endorse, that it's important that we live our life not just sort of by responding to what is happening outside of us, but spending some time in some kind of focused self-exploration. And that can lead to inner transformation. So we live our life as a synthesis of what we see outside and what comes from within. You would say you get lessons from what he called the self, the higher aspect of our personality. So, you know, part of the problem of the industrial civilization, we lost this tradition of,

• 2:42:52Speaker 03

  if you want, of psychonautics. All the other groups of humanity way back probably into the Paleolithic, they were using these holotropic states for healing, for, you know, transformation, for the main vehicle for ritual, spiritual life. They were using it for a lot of practical things, as an inspiration for art and so on. So...

• 2:43:21Speaker 03

  I see this tremendous renaissance that is happening now, not just as correcting of these, you know, really terrible administrative legal mistakes that were done, that stopped the research for forty years, return to the research. I see it also as the possibility of the industrial civilization to join the rest of humanity that always was combining somehow the spiritual, inner spiritual experiences with whatever they were doing in the external world.

• 2:44:01Tim Ferriss?

  Well, thank you so much, Stan.

• 2:44:03Speaker 03

  Again, Tim, thank you so much for everything you have been doing and thank you for this opportunity to, you know, share some of my life with your listeners.

• 2:44:19Tim Ferriss?

  It's such a pleasure and I can only aspire to contribute in some small way and I'm excited to see what you do from this point forward and you seem to have as much energy as ever, traveling around the world, doing what you do and I hope we can have many, many more conversations and, but for today, I want to be respectful of your time since you do have so many things going on and I will certainly, in the show notes to everybody listening, link to everything we've discussed, all of the books, the different websites, foundations

• 2:45:00Tim Ferriss?

  and so on, and you can find all those at tim.blog/podcast. Stan, thank you so much, I really, really appreciate it.

• 2:45:09Speaker 03

  Again, wonderful, it's great to have an interviewer, you know, who knows what we are talking about. It doesn't always happen. This was one of the great ones, thank you so much.

• 2:45:22Tim Ferriss?

  I really, really appreciate it and to everybody listening, keep your mind open and look outside but also look inside, as Stan mentioned, and until next time, thank you for listening.

• 2:45:36Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

• 2:46:19Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by LegalZoom, which more than 2 million Americans have used to help start their businesses. Past guests even, such as WordPress lead developer, CEO of Automattic, Matt Mullenweg, now valued at more than $1 billion, have used LegalZoom to help with their business needs, specifically in his case, to form his company. But LegalZoom isn't just for launching your business. Their services include everything from helping you to manage changing tax laws, reviewing

• 2:47:04Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:47:49Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:48:02Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:48:47Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:49:28Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:50:13Tim Ferriss?

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