S2E7: Psychedelics and Accessing Consciousness

For millennia, humans have turned to psychedelic plants to expand perception and access realms beyond ordinary consciousness. This episode follows that lineage, from Indigenous ayahuasca ceremonies in the Amazon to the secret rituals of ancient Greece, revealing how these substances once served as powerful spiritual technologies. We begin with the extraordinary story of Don José Rubio, the Colombian elder who used ayahuasca visions to help locate four missing children in the jungle, and we hear from author Brian Muraresku, whose research suggests that the foundations of Western spirituality, like other belief systems around the globe, may have been influenced by psychedelic sacraments. We then turn to the modern moment, where psychedelics are reemerging as tools for healing. Marine Corps veteran Juliana Mercer describes how guided sessions with ayahuasca and psilocybin helped her process decades of trauma, while Yale researcher Dr. Ben Kelmendi explains how these substances open windows of neuroplasticity that can transform mental health when nothing else has worked. Throughout, a deeper theme emerges: psychedelics don’t just heal. They reconnect us to an ancient way of knowing, one that blurs the boundary between medicine and the mystical, and invites us to remember what humanity once understood. _______ Join The Telepathy Tapes Backstage Pass https://thetelepathytapes.supercast.com/ to get ad-free episodes, never-before-heard interviews, behind-the-scenes documentary footage, and access to our private Discord community. This is your invitation to come closer. To help shape what’s next. To be more than a listener… to be a co-creator of this paradigm shift. So if you’ve felt moved, if you’ve felt seen, if you’ve felt the call, subscribe today and join us: thetelepathytapes.com. https://thetelepathytapes.com/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ky Dickens?

  This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended to substitute the advice of a physician, professional coach, therapist, or other qualified professional. This show will discuss psychedelics, which are illegal in many countries, including at the federal level in the United States. Consult with your physician or other qualified medical professional regarding the use of psychedelics, and any use should only be conducted in a safe and legal way. This episode also mentions suicidal ideation. Listener discretion is advised. Hi, everyone. This is Kai Dickens, and you're listening to the Consciousness Cassettes from TTT Media.

• 0:34Ky Dickens?

  In our first series, The Telepathy Tapes, non-speakers showed us that telepathy is possible, shattering our assumptions about the world itself. In this series, we're turning to others who've also been dismissed, doubted, or mocked for the ways they claim to know, see, heal, or create. What if only by listening to those who've been ignored, we could unlock the deepest mysteries of who we are, where we come from, and where we're going? This is the Consciousness Cassettes, and we're opening up the next channel.

• 1:07Speaker 01

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• 1:37Ky Dickens?

  Last week, we followed Consciousness into the Forest, exploring how plant communication can move through roots, through ancestors, and through the quiet language of the natural world. As Nina said last week, plants are not dead matter, but are animate, alive, and ever-loving. Today, we follow that thread into the world of psychedelics, plants that have been used for thousands of years to widen consciousness, sharpen intuition, and reveal what lies beyond ordinary perception. And to start, a story that reveals just how powerful that connection can be.

• 2:06Speaker 02

  The Colombian Armed Forces have been using dogs to search for the children. The plane had taken off from the remote area of Araraquara, bound for San José del Gaviare.

• 2:15Ky Dickens?

  In 2023, the world was gripped by a harrowing story involving four missing children, the Amazon rainforest, and a plane crash.

• 2:23Speaker 03

  And while three adult bodies have been recovered from the crash site, officials believe that the children could still be alive. The army has found footprints.

• 2:31Speaker 04

  Officials believe one of these human footprints found Monday belongs to one of the missing little girls. Tracks are fresh and hint that the children are still alive.

• 2:42Ky Dickens?

  The search dragged on, two weeks, and then three weeks.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  Colombia threw in every resource at its disposal as the frantic search to locate four missing indigenous children in the Amazon rainforest carries on.

• 2:55Ky Dickens?

  Then four weeks, and then five.

• 2:57Speaker 05

  Colombia's military has deployed more than 100 survival kits in the Amazon where...

• 3:02Ky Dickens?

  This massive rescue operation was just the beginning of something that revealed how intrinsically connected we are to something bigger and beyond ourselves.

• 3:09Speaker 02

  This whole entire nation is still holding its breath.

• 3:12Ky Dickens?

  Time was running out, and then finally, a break in the case came when indigenous elders stepped in. Here's Jose, or Don Rubio, a respected Huittoto elder and shaman from the Colombian Amazon with his translator.

• 3:23Speaker 06

  I was driving. I told my grandfather, "I'm going. I'm going to look for the children." And he said, "Son, it's very hard. It's rough, very rough, because it's a virgin forest."

• 3:39Ky Dickens?

  As the search dragged on through heat, rain, and sickness, the military began to lose hope. But Rubio refused to give up because he trusted that indigenous ways of knowing could find with the army, even with all of its resources could not. And he decided that it was time to call on their most powerful spiritual tool.

• 3:58Speaker 06

  Let's begin, I said. "Hey, boys, tomorrow is the day because I'm going to get to work. It's the little old man's turn to take the potion."

• 4:06Ky Dickens?

  The potion Don Rubio was talking about is ayahuasca, which he calls yahé. It comes from a vine deep in the Amazon, and it's brewed into a tea, often with one or more other plants, and used in sacred ceremonies led by elders like him. For thousands of years, it has opened perception, expanded consciousness, and connected entire communities to the living world around them. It's classified as a psychedelic in Western science, but to indigenous communities, it's considered medicine and a profound spiritual tool, a way to plug into the informational field or collective consciousness.

• 4:38Speaker 06

  I'm preparing the yahé, and I'm concentrating on talking with Papa Yehé. It's a prayer. I mean, when it comes down to what I did, it's a prayer. After the ceremony, I'm there, talking about everything in song.

• 4:59Speaker 06

  That's the best way to do it. When I'm singing, I'm talking about earth, air, God, all of nature, man. I'm asking for permission to come in. I'm not here to hurt anything. Jungle, stone, water, all that, I'm coming. I'm not going to betray you. I've come to get my own, my children. I told them, tomorrow I will find the children. I'm already visualizing it. That's why when you want to take Yagüe, you have to literally think of what you want.

• 5:29Ky Dickens?

  He said that when you take ayahuasca, you begin with intention. You ask permission. You focus your mind on what you are seeking. Don Rubio entered the ceremony with only one intention, to find the children.

• 5:40Speaker 06

  I became the consciousness of the jungle. I could see through the eyes of the jaguar and animals. And from them, I knew exactly where the children were.

• 5:51Ky Dickens?

  He said he became the consciousness of the jungle. And even though he was miles from where the children were lost, he said he could see through the vision of the animals in the forest. And that's how he knew where the children were.

• 6:02Speaker 06

  I told the authorities, the exact area of the jungle to circle.

• 6:06Ky Dickens?

  And the very next day, the children were found. It's been called a miracle. Four siblings between the ages of one and 13, found alive after 40 days alone in the Amazon jungle, surviving a plane crash that killed their mother and two others. The president of Colombia called it a miracle. But for the indigenous communities who searched for the children, it was something deeper. It was validation that their knowledge, their ceremonies, and their connection to the natural world still hold extraordinary power, offering a way of knowing that See's consciousness is something shared between humans, animals, plants, and the forest itself. For Don Rubio, this was not an accident. It was ayahuasca, or the medicine speaking. And just to summarize how profound the natives see the ayahuasca, I wanted to bring back in Horu,

• 6:51Ky Dickens?

  the chief and leader of the Cuntinawa Nation, based in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, who's joined by a translator. You were introduced to him last episode. Horu refers to ayahuasca as the tribe's technology.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  Ancestral technology is much more powerful than even today's technologies, for example, like the internet. And this biological connection that we have with nature, with the people with the forest, allows us to also connect with other realms, with the spiritual realms as well.

• 7:20Ky Dickens?

  In addition to being the chief, Haru is an elder and a shaman. And he said that ayahuasca does not just help his people connect to greater consciousness. It was also a gift from the creator, dating all the way back to the tribe's origin story.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  In the past, we didn't have death. People came to earth to live, to experience. We didn't come to die. But because of what we have provoked as humans, there was, let's say, like a reaction that brought death to us. So we were pretty much condemned to death. But the creator is very giving in the sense that ayahuasca was given to us so we can connect with those that die. We can still see our ancestors. And that's why ayahuasca is a cosmic plant. It's a plant that elevates us into other realms, into other dimensions.

• 8:07Ky Dickens?

  And this is where we're going. Today, we're exploring psychedelics and whether they can help us to access the intuitive, the ancestral, the unseen, even the divine. Can psychedelics reconnect us to the collective field that so many cultures describe, but that science is only beginning to take seriously? And I think to begin, we need to acknowledge that most people imagine psychedelics in a shamanic or indigenous setting. But many scholars point out that the ancient Western world, including Greece, one of the epicenters of Western civilization, was also steeped in sacred plant and psychedelic traditions. And the Greek god Dionysus, who's remembered now as the god of wine, may have actually represented a doorway into altered states, suggesting that sacred plants and psychedelics may have shaped the spiritual imagination of the Western ancient world as much as it did the indigenous one.

• 8:51Ky Dickens?

  When you think of the word Dionysus, you're probably thinking of the god of wine. In addition to the god of wine.

• 8:56Speaker 04

  God of wine, he is the god of of theater and I would say ritual ecstasy.

• 9:02Ky Dickens?

  That's Brian Muraresku. He's a lawyer and author of the incredible book, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion With No Name.

• 9:10Speaker 04

  Wine at the time was not prized or cherished because of its alcoholic value. So the Greeks had no word for alcohol. That wasn't the thing that motivated their passion for wine.

• 9:21Ky Dickens?

  So if wine was special, but not valued for its alcohol content, then what was in it back then?

• 9:26Speaker 04

  Wine was a mixed beverage, was a potion traditionally, that could be spiked with all kinds of plants or herbs, spices or toxins. You know, it could be at once a medicine, also something extremely lethal. It was a mechanism for the delivery of a number of different botanical compounds. So this notion of a wine god, for example, in the ancient Greek world, the blood of Dionysus was seen as this, you know, all-consuming transformative potion, just like the blood of Christ would be referred to later in the early centuries after his death and instantiated at the Last Supper. So this notion of like consuming the god to become the god, right? Like eat my flesh and drink my blood. It's called theophagy. I mean, it's a very, very old idea.

• 10:10Ky Dickens?

  For millennia, people have turned to plants and potions to feel closer to the sacred. And in the ancient Mediterranean, wine was often more than wine. It was sometimes blended with herbs or fungi to shift perception, heighten emotion, or open the heart in ritual settings. Archaeologists have found traces of cannabis, opium, and ergot on wine vessels from early Jewish, Greek, and Roman sites. Ergot is a naturally occurring fungus that grows on things like barley and rye, and its compounds are chemically similar to what we know as LSD or acid.

• 10:39Speaker 04

  The notion of our ancestors engaging in visionary ritual through the use of mind-altering plants and fungi, for example, like that was that was not a controversial idea when it came to so-called like traditional societies across the Americas or Africa or Asia.

• 10:57Ky Dickens?

  For millennia around the world, humans have turned to psychoactive plants and fungi as teachers, healers, and portals into the unseen. And when you look at the global map of these medicines, you start to realize how entwined psychedelics were with our human past. In Central and West Africa, there's something called iboga. Across Southern Africa, people used cana. In Siberia and Northern Asia, shamans worked with amanita muscaria, which looked like the red and white mushrooms you see in fairy tales and cartoons. In India and Persia, sacred texts describe soma and hauma, psychedelic brews whose identities have been lost to time. And throughout Egypt, people revered the Blue Lotus. And across the Americas, the landscape was rich with plants, from ayahuasca to peyote to wachuma and psychedelic mushrooms. And in the ancient Mediterranean, Greeks and Romans worked with things like henbane,

• 11:41Ky Dickens?

  mandrake, and ergot. But for some reason, people seem to clutch their pearls when they hear about Western thinkers like Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato engaging with psychedelics.

• 11:50Speaker 04

  The notion that the founders of Western civilization, like indeed the best and brightest among them, were somehow doing drugs to find God, that notion was seen as forbidden for some reason.

• 12:01Ky Dickens?

  But whether or not people are ready to accept that, there is substantial evidence that psychedelics played a major role in ancient spiritual life throughout the Greek and Roman empires. And one site for this was called Eleusis, less than 15 miles from Athens, Greece.

• 12:14Speaker 04

  Eleusis is a modern-day elefina in Greece. And in the ancient world, I sometimes refer to this as like the spiritual capital of the Mediterranean. It precedes Jerusalem. It precedes Mecca, precedes Rome.

• 12:28Ky Dickens?

  Eleusis was the spiritual capital of the ancient Greek world, a sacred sanctuary just outside of Athens, where people came for nearly 2,000 years to experience "the mysteries." Everyone, from farmers to philosophers to emperors, made the pilgrimage because the rites or the ceremonial practices at Eleusis promised something extraordinary, a vision that dissolved the fear of death. At the center of the ceremony was the kikion, a sacred potion that many scholars now believe had psychedelic properties. Whatever unfolded inside that temple, initiates described it as a moment when the veil lifted, when the soul could see, and when life and death were revealed to be intertwined.

• 13:03Speaker 04

  So it's a holy place. It's a place of pilgrimage. And, and people would come there from all over the Greek-speaking world to have this life-changing experience. And the little testimony that survives, again, because this was all secret, it just speaks to this once-in-a-lifetime event where the eyes of the initiate are opened and they transcend the physical confines of the mortal body. And indeed, they defeat death.

• 13:28Ky Dickens?

  I've always loved studying the world religions, and I'm just as fascinated by the people who've stepped away from them. And one thing I hear often from this group is, if God is real, why did he stop speaking to us? Why did visions and burning bushes and revelations and direct encounters with the divine seem to happen so often in the ancient world, while today, many feel cut off from that connection? But as Brian spoke, something dawned on me. Maybe the divine hasn't stopped trying to engage with us. Maybe we've just forgotten and outlawed and erased the tools that made it possible to effortlessly interact with the other side.

• 13:58Speaker 04

  It would said that in the absence of a lusus, not just Greek life, but human life would suffer. That somehow, if these mysteries ever disappeared, which they did, under the Christianized Roman Empire in the 4th century AD, that once they disappear, our connection to the divine somehow disappears. And that's the world that we were left with.

• 14:21Ky Dickens?

  And that is the world we're left with. If that doesn't keep ringing in your ears.

• 14:25Speaker 04

  Plato referred to his experience there, potentially, as a blessed sight and vision. We have other writers from the ancient world who talked about it as this visionary experience. And so, we know that something visual was happening. And it was unclear if that was something in the external world or if it was something within the sight of the mind, maybe through the administration of a sacred potion that could have drawn initiates into this journey to the underworld, where it was said that they lost the fear of death and they were forever transformed.

• 14:54Ky Dickens?

  All of this raises a pretty simple question. Is there any evidence that these potions truly involve psychedelics? Scholars have been trying to answer that for decades, and the trail leads to an ancient recipe, a potion described in one of the oldest hymns we have.

• 15:07Speaker 04

  So, koukian is this potion that's mentioned in the hymn to Demeter.

• 15:11Ky Dickens?

  The hymn to Demeter is an ancient Greek poem that was likely composed between 600 and 700 B.C.

• 15:16Speaker 04

  It talks about this potion having basically three ingredients: water, mint, and barley. So, it kind of seems like a minty beer or a minty porridge. But the hypothesis put forward in the 1970s is that this was no ordinary barley. This was barley that had been infected with ergot.

• 15:34Ky Dickens?

  Koukian was one of the most ancient ritual potions of the Greek world, and there's a variety of artifacts that point to the fact it was used at Eleusis as well. But to answer whether or not the koukian potion was psychedelic, scientists had to figure out if the barley was indeed affected with ergot, which has compounds similar to LSD. And the answer may have been uncovered in Spain.

• 15:52Speaker 04

  This old farm said, it was called Mas Castellar de Pontos, that had been completely almost forgotten by the scholarly world. And a number of miniature chalices had been excavated back in the 1990s. And in one of those chalices, an archaeobotanist named Jordi Treseras, using optical microscopy and modern scientific instruments, had detected the presence of ergot. And so, we have the first physical forensic evidence for the notion of an ancient potion spiked with ergot. And so, it really lended credence to this notion that maybe these tall tales of ancient psychedelic potions has more meat on the bone than we've been led to believe.

• 16:36Ky Dickens?

  Wow.

• 16:36Speaker 04

  But people report that maybe these compounds really do unleash the god within. People perhaps for the first time get the sensation that they are not their physical body, that there may be something more to their consciousness than they've previously been led to believe. It just somehow has this sense of authenticity about it. And that's really hard to explain.

• 17:02Ky Dickens?

  Sometimes you have an idea you really believe in, but figuring out how to bring it into the world is what stops you. You know what you want to create, but building a website, setting up payments and actually getting it into other people's hands can feel like a whole nother job. That's why I love Shopify. We use it for the Telepathy Tapes merch store, where every cent we make supports nonprofits who are serving non-speakers. It makes it easy for our listeners to support our community, and I believe that doing good should be as simple as possible. For anyone getting started, Shopify's pre-built themes and AI site builder help you create a professional-looking store without touching a line of code. And its mobile app lets you manage inventory, customer support and payments from anywhere. That kind of flexibility matters when your business is one of several things you're pouring your energy into. With Black Friday approaching, launching now means you can take advantage of the extra online traffic.

• 17:47Ky Dickens?

  Give yourself time to get comfortable with your store before the holiday rush. Give that idea that you've been carrying around a place where people can find it. If you're ready to launch your business before Black Friday, go to Shopify.com/tapes to start your free trial. That's Shopify.com/tapes. Go to Shopify.com/tapes today to hear your first...

• 18:08Ky Dickens?

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• 18:53Ky Dickens?

  I wear it with everything. It can be dressed up, it can be dressed down, it can be layered with other necklaces. I love it, and you'll see it in a lot of our video podcasts. Find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was the Telepathy Tapes. It's the best way to support our show.

• 19:23Ky Dickens?

  And today, we're going to look at how some of this ancient wisdom is starting to be incorporated back into mainstream modern society, and not just strictly for spiritual ends, but to help address and heal some of the complex traumas of contemporary life. In the last few decades, research has surged, showing that certain psychedelics can help relieve conditions that are notoriously hard to treat, like depression, OCD, addiction, and post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. And because of that, some of the people who stand to benefit the most are veterans. And one of them is Juliana Mercer.

• 19:53Speaker 07

  I am Juliana Mercer. I am from Tijuana, Mexico, and now currently live in San Diego, California.

• 20:01Ky Dickens?

  Juliana was a very religious child, and she actually wanted to go to Bible school. So her family could have never anticipated that she'd make the brave decision to join the Marine Corps right after high school.

• 20:10Speaker 07

  We can understand how shocked my parents were when I came home and told them that I had already signed my name on the deadline, and there was not going to be any discussion about it. So I graduated boot camp two weeks before 9/11, and was attached to a unit that focused on civil affairs, and it's working with the governance of the communities where you are deployed. And so what that looked like for me, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, was working with whatever type of leadership was there, with the overarching mission to win the hearts and minds. And that was twofold. We paid reparations when damage occurred. We had a guidebook that told us how much to pay them for their fence and for their goats.

• 20:54Speaker 07

  And that was everything from goats to human lives. And the other part of that was working with the community leaders and creating projects that were helpful to that community. And between my two deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, where I did civil affairs, I had the opportunity to be at the Naval Hospital in San Diego at the Wounded Warrior Battalion, where we were receiving those that were wounded. Were wounded coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. And my job was to liaison between the community and the Marine Corps to provide support for those Marines that were coming home with injuries.

• 21:32Ky Dickens?

  But this work of seeing injured veterans and their scars, both physical and mental, and the true cost of war on the ground took its toll.

• 21:39Speaker 07

  My PTSD was definitely cumulative. There wasn't one grand event that caused it. It was a collection of things that I saw, that I experienced. That year I was in Afghanistan. We suffered the highest level of loss that any Marine Corps unit had suffered since Vietnam. One of the poignant moments for me was whenever we would be sending home Marines that had been killed in action, we'd go out to the flight line and we'd pay our last respects to the flag-covered coffins. And we weren't able to cry. We were in uniform. We were saluting very serious and solemn, but there was no time to actually grieve. All you could do was swallow it, turn around and go right back to work.

• 22:24Ky Dickens?

  In the military, there's no space to fall apart. You keep going, you keep serving, and the pain gets buried under routine and duty until one day you stop, even for a moment, and everything you packed away comes rushing back in. Trauma compounds, and if it's not processed, it becomes a weight that pulls you into a place you cannot climb out of alone.

• 22:43Speaker 07

  Since 9/11, we've lost over 6,000 veterans a year to suicide here on American soil. I focused on getting veterans connected to everything and anything that may help them from falling into that black hole and found myself in that black hole eventually.

• 23:00Ky Dickens?

  Juliana decided to seek help.

• 23:02Speaker 07

  There's a nonprofit called Heroic Hearts Project, and they help veterans connect to psychedelic therapy outside of the US in places where it's not illegal. And within a month, I was able to leave the country and have a psychedelic experience in Costa Rica through a vet Retreat Center and I spent a week down there. They have shamans that work with the medicine and help guide people through those experiences. I was able to work with a Peruvian tradition, which is called the Shipibo tradition, and drank ayahuasca and it tastes very like earthy and bitter.

• 23:45Ky Dickens?

  This is the same psychedelic that Don Rubio used in helping to find the children lost in the Amazon.

• 23:50Speaker 07

  And within an hour, you start to feel the psychedelic effects of this. And the shamans are there providing support. They're singing songs, which are called Icarus. And through those songs, they're guiding you spiritually through the process. I went outside and we're in the jungle and the monkeys are howling and you can hear the birds. And I see the moon just glowing and I can feel the spirit of the jungle and the spirit of ayahuasca just swirling around me and I look up and start talking. And then I go, oh, what am I doing? I don't believe in God anymore. And this voice says, it's okay, you can still talk to me. We've always been connected. You've always talked to me.

• 24:34Speaker 07

  You just used to call me by a different name and then I'm the same. And, you know, I used to call it God and now I call it the universe. And it reconnected me to what I always knew and what I had pushed away while I was trying to make sense of the horrors of the world. I had told myself that there was no way that there was a God with all the things that I witnessed. And I was reconnected to that spirit.

• 25:02Ky Dickens?

  Juliana now works for Healing Breakthrough, whose mission is to drive equitable access to evidence-based mental health treatments through the Department of Veteran Affairs.

• 25:11Speaker 07

  I've supported many retreats and one of the things that I think is Wild is the physical change that happens. So when you see someone pre-retreat, um, like if you would take a before and after picture, there's just a completely different, um, visage. Their eyes are different, like your shoulders are different. Some people are almost unrecognizable from the beginning of their psychedelic experience to the following day. I have so many stories of veterans' lives who have been changed and saved. That experience opened me up to be ready for my second psychedelic experience, and that was with psilocybin mushrooms. And overnight, I was able to experience that 20 years of collected trauma and grief.

• 25:55Speaker 07

  And I was able to actually feel it for the first time and let it release from my body and from my soul and my spirit. And when I woke up, that experience was, you know, clearing up what it would have taken to deal with 20 years of grief through therapy. And that happened in one night.

• 26:15Ky Dickens?

  Juliana is talking about something groundbreaking, healing years of trauma in one controlled session.

• 26:21Speaker 07

  These modalities aren't a silver bullet. They come along with a lot of really hard work that has to be done, which is why I think it's important to point out that it wasn't just me doing psilocybin. It was me doing it with the help of a therapist before and after, and also with a psychedelic coach that was helping me to navigate and explore everything that came up. I think without those things, it's just a psychedelic experience and you don't get the healing benefits from it in a major way. I started advocating in DC and educating our legislators on the truth that this medicine was something that could solve a problem that we've been trying to solve for quite a while.

• 27:05Ky Dickens?

  And not just lawmakers, but scientists, doctors, clinicians have all taken note. Across the country, universities and medical centers are beginning to study psychedelic treatments in carefully controlled settings. They happen under the care of trained clinicians, psychologists, or medical doctors who guide people through preparation, dosing, and integration. One person working to better understand the medical benefits of this magic mushroom, or psilocybin, is Ben Kelmendy. He's a doctor at Yale, and for years, he's looked at the different ways we can apply psychedelics to mental health.

• 27:33Speaker 02

  So at Yale, we're investigating how psychedelics can fundamentally transform treatments for psychiatric conditions that have been remarkably resistant to conventional approaches.

• 27:45Ky Dickens?

  What ultimately pulled him into this field was a combination of two things. The first was the sheer number of patients living with depression, OCD, and PTSD who were not finding relief. And the second was the growing evidence that psychedelics work in a completely different way than traditional treatments, offering a path forward when nothing else has helped.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  When you see patients who have tried everything, years of different medications, various types of therapy, even considering brain surgery, for example, for severe OCD, and then you read about studies where a single dose of psilocybin or other psychedelics creates these lasting, profound changes. And that really gets your attention as a clinician scientist. And here, we're not talking about marginal improvements. We're seeing people describe fundamental shifts in how they relate to their symptoms, compare this to our standard of care treatments, traditional SSRIs or other pharmacological treatments that are currently available.

• 28:41Ky Dickens?

  SSRIs are one of the most common pharmaceutical treatments for depression and anxiety. They're medications like Prozac and Zoloft, Lexapro, drugs that work by increasing serotonin levels in the brain.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  The analogy that I come up with is like SSRIs are trying to change a river's flow by adding more water, whereas psychedelics are more like the spring melt that breaks up ice jams. They don't just add volume, they fundamentally restructure the riverbed itself. And this is particularly relevant in OCD. It's as if OCD, imagine, is like a record player where the needle keeps jumping back to the same groove. It's this recursive loop. And traditional treatments try to lift the needle carefully, whereas psilocybin is more like briefly liquefying the vinyl itself. And when it...

• 29:32Speaker 02

  Resolidifies, the obsessive groups are still there, but then no longer captures the needle with the same inevitability. Psychedelics, they seem to create windows of neuroplasticity, where the real change becomes possible.

• 29:47Ky Dickens?

  Neuroplasticity is a critical part of the conversation around the benefits of psychedelics in general.

• 29:52Speaker 02

  The data is quite clear that psychedelics induce neuroplasticity across brain networks.

• 29:58Ky Dickens?

  Neuroplasticity is the brain's ability to change, to learn, to adapt, and to form new pathways. And psychedelics aren't the only thing that can do this. Meditation can do it, running can do it. Anything that pushes the mind beyond its usual rhythm forces the brain to grow. So instead of targeting one specific illness, neuroplasticity supports the entire system, the way boosting your immune function supports overall health. And that's part of why psychedelics are so promising. They open up a window where the brain becomes more flexible, more open to change, and more capable of making meaning.

• 30:27Speaker 02

  The changes aren't gradual, like with SSRIs. People describe sudden insights or shifts in perspective that fundamentally alter their relationships with their symptoms. It's not like that the obsessive thoughts completely disappear, that their grip loosens.

• 30:44Ky Dickens?

  The fact that mainstream solutions simply aren't working well enough is what's driven this current explosion in research.

• 30:49Speaker 02

  Our standard of care treatments have not been able to keep pace with the rise in suicidality, mental health conditions, economic burden on the system.

• 31:01Speaker 07

  There's a psilocybin revolution, a mushroom revolution sweeping the planet. There's 255 clinical studies at clinicaltrials.gov registered on psilocybin. 20 years ago, there was one.

• 31:13Ky Dickens?

  This is famed mycologist Paul Stamets, the man at least partially responsible for bringing psilocybin back into the mainstream.

• 31:19Speaker 06

  I'm a mycologist, and that means I'm a scientist who studies fungi.

• 31:24Ky Dickens?

  Paul Stamets became famous for popularizing psilocybin mushrooms. And for him, these mushrooms are here to help change society, undeniably for the better.

• 31:31Speaker 06

  Psilocybin makes nicer people. They're less aggressive, they're more empathetic, they're kinder. It reduces the excitement for aggression and makes people more contemplative or respectful. Psilocybin just turns down the dial, so you're more reflective and conscious of what you're saying and doing.

• 31:53Speaker 01

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• 32:28Ky Dickens?

  Paul speaks from a deeply spiritual place, and research is starting to validate much of what he's saying. Psilocybin appears to quiet the brain's rigid loops and increase neural flexibility, making it easier for people to access empathy, self-reflection, and emotional insight. And what fascinates me is that there seems to be two parallel conversations happening in our society around psychedelics. One conversation focuses on healing, helping people process memory, emotion, and trauma. And the other leans into something more expansive, the possibility that these substances offer a window or connection into a larger field of consciousness.

• 33:01Speaker 06

  I've never been a smart person, until I did psilocybin. And then, it's not my intelligence, it's some sort of reservoir of innate intelligence that speaks through me. And I feel from my journeys, the voices of ancestors, of indigenous people, from Europe to Mesoamerica, as a chorus of ancestors saying, "This is information the world needs to have." I'm just a voice, a portal for that information. There is a giant intelligence in the universe, and we are so naive. We're Neanderthals with nuclear weapons, whatever metaphor you want to use. But looking at the enormity of the intelligence of the universe that we're discovering, I am so hopeful. I am so optimistic.

• 33:42Ky Dickens?

  And what fascinates me is that even though this new research is framed as medicine, it keeps brushing up against something deeply spiritual. And this is exactly where the two conversations around psychedelics, one about mental health and one about spiritual connection, begin to merge. Here's Ben Kelmendi from the Yale School of Medicine again.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  What's interesting, that even in our medical context with clinical language and scientific protocols, the spiritual dimensions emerge naturally. People described encounters with deceased loved ones, feeling of connection to something greater, experience of unity, sense of oneness or transcendence. And these types of explanations have been dismissed because our medical models have not developed to actually integrate these sorts of languages.

• 34:30Ky Dickens?

  Even inside control lab settings with eye masks and heart monitors and medical checklists, people report experiences that sound deeply spiritual. A sense of dissolving into something larger, encounters with loved ones who've died, moments of overwhelming unity or peace that feel more real than ordinary consciousness. So much of it actually reminds me of the near-death experiences we explored in episode one. They almost allow you to touch or visit another place. And when you come back from it, you're transformed. And scientists aren't ready to claim that these experiences prove anything metaphysical, but they do acknowledge that these events are considered measurable and often life-changing.

• 35:06Speaker 02

  When people have experiences of profound connection, whether they interpret it as a spiritual, psychological, neurological, it directly addresses these core issues. Like, feeling connected to something greater than yourself is inherently antidepressant, if you will. Experience yourself as a part of a larger whole counters the isolation of trauma. These experiences remind people that there's more to life than their suffering, more to themselves than their symptoms, at a macro level. But it's not being delivered in a particular spiritual framework.

• 35:40Ky Dickens?

  And of course they're not. These trials are happening at places like Johns Hopkins and Yale. But it does make me wonder if something essential has been left out. Because for most of human history, psychedelic brews were taken in temples, around fires, and at holy sites with songs and prayers and intention, where the sacred was just assumed. Today, we measure doses and outcomes and what this is doing to the brain, but we rarely pause to ask what inner world people are stepping into, or what language we even need to make sense of it. And here's author Brian Muraresku again.

• 36:09Speaker 04

  The fact that within medical settings, this can happen in more controlled environments, I think is a great step forward. But I don't think our allopathic medical model in the West is necessarily the best to handle. An experience that seems very existential, very ontological, raises questions that most physicians, or psychiatrists, or even psychologists are not trained to answer.

• 36:31Ky Dickens?

  What I take from Brian's wisdom and everything we've heard here is that the data shows that psychedelics can make a profound difference in people's lives when they're guided responsibly. And a growing number of doctors and researchers believe that we should decriminalize these medicines due to their profound promise for the mental health crisis. But at the same time, we need to be ready to address the other side of the coin. Because we cannot use a purely medical framework to guide people through experiences that are not purely medical. They are intrinsically metaphysical. And as a culture, we've lost the language, the tools, the rituals, and even the humility that once helped humans navigate these realms.

• 37:06Speaker 04

  The word psychedelic means that which manifests the soul. And when I read ancient authors, when I study ancient mythology, their world is suffused with the paranormal. Their world is suffused with the universe of gods and goddesses with whom they daily interact, or spirits, or muses that communicate with them on a daily basis. And our materialistic world in the wake of the scientific revolution, just over the past few hundred years, is very, very different from the worldview of the ancients. If you look across history, and I'm talking about tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, the traditions that I was uncovering were all related to death, this notion of communing with the ancestors. And you can go back many thousands of years to...

• 37:50Speaker 04

  A Neolithic site like Obekli Tepe, where they seem to have uncovered ambiguous evidence for the ritual consumption of something like a cultic beer, going back many, many millennia, for the purpose of ecstatic communion with these same ancestors. And at that site that I mentioned in Spain, it was often interpreted as a place where the living commune with the dead. And so, as you look across the ancient classical world, as you look into traditional societies, this notion of using psychedelics either for divination or prophecy, right? So stepping out of time and space or communing with ancestors seems to be like a recurrent theme that pops up again and again.

• 38:27Ky Dickens?

  Here's Ben Kelmendy again.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  Right now, integrating psychedelics into healthcare is like trying to introduce a three-dimensional being into the flat land. The existing systems really don't have the dimensions to comprehend what's happening. We're not just adding a new treatment. We're asking a system built on symptom suppression to accommodate transformation, transcendence, if you will. So it's an architectural issue rather than a procedural. And I see that we're moving towards a model that integrates biological, psychological, social, and spiritual dimensions of health.

• 39:05Ky Dickens?

  There are so many threads to this psychedelic conversation. These experiences can be profoundly healing. But beyond the medicinal uses, I really want you to feel this deeper truth, that the history of being human has always been braided with these plants and substances. For thousands of years, they were a doorway, teacher, bridge. And somewhere along the way, we shamed and criminalized the very tools that once connected us to universal consciousness. We buried the bridge. And so psychedelics aren't some modern new thing. We are just slowly remembering what our ancestors always knew, connection to the other side, to knowledge, to the sacred, present and woven throughout this world. And we actually have the tools to access them. Here's Brian Muraresku again.

• 39:45Speaker 04

  The notion is that, well, maybe humans have been doing this forever. And that this notion of seeking the divine in nature, like through naturally occurring plants and compounds, was a tradition that we may have even inherited from species that precede our own. There are abundant examples of animals who seek out altered states of consciousness in the natural world. Baboons craving tobacco, or bees snacking on rhododendrons, goats foraging for coffee cherries. Like, there's no shortage of examples in the animal kingdom in that quest to alter consciousness. And so, we're really just following in their footsteps. We may not have invented any of these rituals.

• 40:25Ky Dickens?

  The telepathy tapes is about shifting paradigms, about realizing the world you woke up in was shaped long before you took your first breath. And when it comes to psychedelics, we were born into a paradigm that tried to bury anything that felt too mysterious, or too powerful, or too ungovernable. And that erasure goes back far. It traces all the way back to the moment the Roman Empire began outlawing the ethiogenic rites that connected humans to the divine for millennia. And these traditions were already fragile, passed orally, protected by secrecy, and once they were targeted, they had almost no chance of surviving.

• 40:55Speaker 04

  Why is the Temple of Eleusis destroyed? It's a reason why a lot of pagan sites are destroyed. After the Roman Empire becomes Christianized, right? This illegal cult becomes the official religion of Rome. And as a result, you know, by the end of the 4th century, the pagan shrines and temples, and their libraries too, come under suspicion.

• 41:16Ky Dickens?

  While these ancient psychedelic traditions in the West were shattered, erased by empire and secrecy and fear, they didn't vanish everywhere. Across the world, in indigenous communities, these practices were carried forward with courage and precision. And it's not that they weren't touched or went unchallenged, but they were protected, held in ceremony, and passed on, generation after generation. And while colonization and war and progress swept across continents, these traditions endured because people risked everything to keep them alive. And when we look at those surviving lineages today, shamans of the Amazon, and the curanderas of Mexico, and the ayahuascaeros and peyoteros and plant teachers across the globe, we're not looking at something exotic or other. We're looking at a mirror, a glimpse of what the Western world might have looked like

• 41:58Ky Dickens?

  if our own bridges to the sacred hadn't been burned, or buried, or outlawed. If anything at all, these traditions show us that psychedelic practices were never fringe. They were never reckless. It was medicine, ritual, community. It was a way of knowing the world. And knowing ourselves.

• 42:12Speaker 04

  I sometimes say that these secrets died under the weight of their own secrecy. And I think that's something to take very seriously. Some of these potions, some of these formula, some of the ancient pharmacology itself. If that was all kept secret, I mean, the odds are, if it's not being written down, it'll get lost to time. And there is concerted effort to make them disappear and to exclude women from positions of power and authority.

• 42:36Ky Dickens?

  Throughout much of the Western world, it was usually women who prepared these wines and herbs and potions that made these psychedelic rituals possible.

• 42:44Speaker 04

  The brewers of the magical beer, for example, ancient Sumeria in Egypt, that was women. And as you go forward in time, women are also mixing these sacred wines. We have any number of artifacts that specifically show women literally throwing herbs into the different krater and mixing bowls. This holy wine shows up in the literature, too.

• 43:05Ky Dickens?

  If any part of the old Western psychedelic tradition survived, any scrap of the plant knowledge, the formulas, the rituals, it was almost certainly carried forward by women.

• 43:14Speaker 04

  Women are often excluded from the continuation of some of these traditions to the point where they go underground. Maybe some of these female healers become the folk healers or the witches or the wise women of the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The witch, if anything, is known for prowess over the natural world, right? She has the ability to harm or to heal. She is the expert of the pharmacopeia.

• 43:39Ky Dickens?

  For generations, we've held this image of a woman bent over a cauldron. And it's felt like nothing more than superstition or a fairy tale meant to frighten children. But when you look at the historical record, you start to realize that maybe those stories were a distorted echo of something real. Women were the keepers of sacred wines and herbal brews for thousands of years. So if even one recipe survived the Roman crackdown, it would make sense for it to resurface centuries later, carried forward by the women who refused to let that knowledge die.

• 44:07Speaker 04

  In the Vatican Archives, I targeted one specific file from the late 16th century, 1590, that talked about this witch named Lucrezia. And it's all recorded in this archaic Italian. But what I found in there, through the help of an Italian scholar, was mention of a special wine that Lucrezia herself had been concocting, mixed with various herbs. And it even talked about a magical ointment that she concocted out of lizards. And I remember seeing that on the page from 1590 and just thinking straight back 1500 years to the same kinds of things that had been physically discovered outside Pompeii. Witchy wine of henbane and black nightshade and opium and cannabis mixed with lizards.

• 44:49Ky Dickens?

  If a lizard-infused potion is found in ancient Pompeii and described again in a witch trial 1500 years later, it's hard not to wonder, did that knowledge really disappear? Or was someone keeping it alive underground for generations?

• 45:02Speaker 04

  And so, something about knowledge of the pharmacopeia and these magical wines and this forbidden, heretical knowledge survived. It seems to have really survived into the record to the point where, you know, church inquisitors are writing about this during the trials and prosecutions of these medieval witches.

• 45:21Ky Dickens?

  And that is the devastating irony. It was those women that were trying to preserve those doorways to the divine that were once later persecuted the most. Through the Inquisition and the witch trials, the last custodians of Western and theogenic knowledge were silenced. And when they were gone, so much of the West's spiritual technology vanished with them. But here's the good news. The impulse behind those ancient traditions, the desire to heal, to shift consciousness, to work with forces bigger than ourselves. Those impulses did not die. You can outlaw the rituals and burn the libraries and bury the practitioners, but you just can't extinguish the human instinct to reach beyond the material world. And while the West lost much of its plant wisdom, these medicines are still alive and intact in lineages around the world. And even when these plant-based rites

• 46:05Ky Dickens?

  were pushed into the shadows in the West, the deeper insights behind them, the knowing that the metaphysical world is real, present, and trying to work with us, lived on in many other traditions, and not just through psychedelics, but through practices that work with the body and the field around it. Which brings our journey to its next chapter, energy healing. Across cultures and continents, people believe the body was animated by subtle life force that could be balanced, directed, or strengthened. There have been different names for it in different languages, but the same idea stretches back millennia, that we can heal one another by harnessing an invisible force that seems to know exactly what to do. We started season two in the heavens, exploring consciousness far beyond us, and we've slowly been working our way back toward the powers that live within our

• 46:50Ky Dickens?

  own flesh, maybe even inside each and every one of our cells. So next week, we ask if consciousness can heal itself. Join me for a two-part journey into energy healing, a world where people describe heat moving through their bodies, pain dissolving in minutes, and recoveries that defy explanation. A world where the unseen becomes undeniable, and where emerging science may finally offer evidence of the metaphysical.

• 47:14Ky Dickens?

  This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended to substitute the advice of a physician, professional coach, therapist, or other qualified professional. Psychedelics carry risks and are illegal in many places. Consult with your physician or other qualified medical professional regarding the use of psychedelics, and any use should only be conducted in a safe and legal way. To dive in deeper, subscribe to our Backstage Pass by visiting our website. With it, you'll unlock access to bonus content like telepathy tests, Ask Me Anything interviews with myself and guests. You'll be able to enjoy the podcast ad-free, connect with other members on our Telepathy Tribe Discord, and hear and see exclusive content from the Telepathy Tapes Vault. Visit our website at thetelepathytapes.com for more info on how to subscribe to our Backstage Pass. It takes a village to make this podcast, and I want to thank our producers, Jesse

• 47:57Ky Dickens?

  Steed, Jill Pachaznik, and Catherine Ellis. Original music is by Rachel Cantu. Mix, mastering, and additional music is by Michael Urbino. Our associate producer is Selena Kennedy. Original artwork is by Ben Kandour Design. And I'm Kai Dickens, your executive producer, writer, and host.