Psychedelics and Consciousness — Psychedelica

[MUSIC PLAYING] >> The mind, it's our link to consciousness, our thoughts, and as a byproduct, the expression of our soul-- that free and unfettered aspect of being human that no one else has jurisdiction over. But as easily as the mind expresses the depths within, it remains easily lured into a false reality where thoughts become the object of attention, and the source becomes forgotten. It is here where some scientists and philosophers believe we have lost the true reality and, in turn, become products of our environment and culture. And it wasn't until scientific study partnered with ancient rituals that they discovered that there might be a way to reconnect the soul and the mind more quickly and intimately. But are these just escapist tools? Or could they actually be a cure for the common human issue on this planet-- the sleeping mind? >> I don't know which half is trying to get into the other half. But somehow or other, I seem to be going like that. >> Certainly you notice that there aren't these separations, that we are not on a separate island shouting across to somebody else and trying to hear what they're saying and misunderstanding them. Well, I mean that there are the colors and the beauties-- the designs, the beautiful way things appear. [STATIC] >> When it comes to drugs, please-- for yourselves, for your families, for your future and your country-- just say no. [APPLAUSE] >> But what are these substances that have such a negative social view, and how did they come into the limelight? One specific drug that captured the hearts and minds of scientists and young adults started a particular investigation of the inner workings of the mind. As World War II was ending, Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman was investigating a migraine medicine and pulled an old vial off his shelf of LSD 25. His accidental dosage opened his eyes to a new experience that he wanted to share with the world, as he believed that this substance elicited a form of psychic loosening or opening. Czech psychiatrist Stanislav Grof believed that the psychic opening allowed experiences to resurface that go all the way back to birth and even pre-birth trauma. So he was willingly among the first to experiment with LSD to investigate what it does to the mind. >> Then I met Robert Hoffman quite a few times. He loved nature. He was taking small dosages of LSD in his garden until his death. And he said, I see the hand of God there. And if anybody thinks that the atoms can do it all by themselves, they just don't know what they are talking about. I was trained in Czechoslovakia when we had a Marxist regime. So I got the purest mentalistic doctrine you can imagine. And it was clear for me during graduation that, you know, the consciousness is the product of the neurophysiological processes in the brain. And when the body goes, the brain goes, and there goes the consciousness. And it was as simple as that. Now, I see it very differently. I realize we have absolutely no proof that consciousness is generated in the brain. Very few people realize this, including scientists. So those are tremendous contributions that psychedelics can bring. >> But the psychedelic experience wasn't something new when LSD hit the scene. Since the late 1800s, experiments were already being conducted on the psychedelic plants containing mescaline and psilocybin. Mescaline comes from the peyote and Wachuma cactus and is used in many Native American rituals. The Huichol mothers of Jalisco, Mexico would introduce peyote through breast milk and by chewing off bits and feeding them to their children. Even the Spanish chronicler Fray Bernardino de Sahagun reports that among the Chichimeca and Toltec peyote was being used at least 2,000 years before the European explorers arrived. Archaeological artifacts were found in a cave near the lower Pecos River region in Texas dating back to 3700 BC. In South America, in prehistory, the Chavin were using the Wachuma cactus in their own religious ceremonies. Wachuma has many different psychoactive compounds than peyote. So the experience is said to be slightly different. But the sacramental use of each were both used to connect with the Divine. These cacti species are native to the Americas. Psilocybin is from a class of mushrooms and used by indigenous from nearly every continent. In Central and North America, we see mushroom imagery in many indigenous artifacts, such as the mushroom stones found in Highland Guatemala, which were used to grind mushrooms before their use. Some images refer to the Amanita muscaria mushroom, which isn't a classical psychedelic-- as it works on different neurotransmitter pathways-- but still is a psychoactive. The Olmec, Toltec, and Aztec imagery shows that the Americas once had a rich history of mushroom appreciation before the European settlers and missionaries resisted their use. Imagery in Siberia among the Chukotka appears in rock carvings. In Hindu imagery-- such as Lakshmi holding what appears to be mushrooms-- some have debated these images as misidentified everyday objects. But believers of the deep psychedelic and shamanic roots of almost every ancient culture and religion say that you'll even find references in the Bible. The King James Version of Exodus 16:14 gives a description of manna that seems very similar to mushrooms in shape and location and even the time of day that they appear. Even a modern look at the witch hunts and trials shows a deep appreciation for psychedelic and psychoactive plants that account for their tales of flying on broomsticks and shapeshifting into animals. There are too many to deny that psychedelic mushroom and cactus use were integral to many cultures worldwide. Whatever the conquistadors of the New World were so afraid of seems to still be present as we fast forward to the end of the 1960s. The revival of psychedelic appreciation among young adults began affecting the national narrative, and anti-drug propaganda was beginning to lose its effectiveness. How would the world deal with this new problem-- people attempting to dissolve the reality constructs of culture? What would this mean for the rest of society? >> Psychedelics are the antidote to propaganda in some ways. They help you develop a mindset that sees through all that. That's the real reason they're considered dangerous, you know. As Terence said, psychedelics make you have funny ideas. But funny ideas are dangerous ideas, you know. So that's the reason psychedelics are prohibited, because they encourage you to think for yourself. >> You know, so the nation states act as though it's kind of normal to have wars. You know, go drop bombs on people, send in the troops-- it's kind of a normal thing to do. It's not a normal thing to do at all. It's a completely abnormal, aberrant, psychopathic thing to do. We shouldn't be going out there and killing other people for some sort of weird national goal. It's a terrible, terrible mistake that we're making. And now, the toys of war have become so big and so huge that they actually pose a threat to the whole future of-- to the whole future of humanity. >> The power of psychedelic plants for perceiving higher patterns and seeing through rhetoric led to a desperate reaction by superpowers, shutting down the collective memory of traditional indigenous practices and cutting off the public from legal use. Quickly, independent chemists were making slightly altered compounds which were technically not illegal. To combat this backdoor approach, the Analogue Act was passed, and the DEA was granted emergency scheduling power in which they could declare any substance illegal and may take up to a year to decide what schedule to class it as. Psychedelic plants and synthesized versions were put into Schedule I. This category proclaims the substance is highly addictive and has no medicinal value. Was there any evidence for this claim, or was it a fear move? >> The classic psychedelics have been used for millennia really, if you think of mushrooms and peyote-- no evidence of toxicity. If you took heroic doses, I suppose you'd see increased blood pressure. But in the normal doses in the studies, you really don't see that happening. >> There is no craving to take them. As a matter of fact, they're anti-addictive, you know, in the sense that you often have to kind of screw your courage up to take them. >> The addictive qualities of psychedelics are non-existent. In fact, many of the psychedelic plants are used to quit highly addictive drugs like opiates. Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill Wilson reportedly used LSD to quit drinking in the 1950s at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Los Angeles. >> Classic psychedelics-- like psilocybin, LSD, mescaline-- they're not addictive. Because they don't activate-- actually, the reward pathways in the brain involve dopamine. >> Psychedelic plants mimic the neurotransmitter serotonin, and tolerance builds quickly at these receptor sites. Even those plants that don't build tolerance still eliminate themselves quickly and leave behind virtually no toxicity. They're also being shown to treat addiction rather than add to them. There are so many benefits coming to light from these substances that groups such as MAPS, Heffter, Beckley, and many others are organizing a science-based campaign to reverse the prohibition. Because the evidence is clear-- they are not addictive, and they have remarkable medicinal and therapeutic value. So the question remains-- why are highly addictive and toxic substances in Schedule II with widespread medicinal use, while these age-old plants-- with a safe and ceremonial history going back many thousands of years and no evidence to prove physiological harm-- are in Schedule I lockdown? Is it a war on drugs or a war on the mind? Why haven't the institutions that make these suggestions turned back to the original use of psychedelics, a return to Mother Earth for answers? >> The position that modern societies have taken on psychedelics-- we've demonized these substances. We've made them illegal. We've subjected people to harsh prison sentences if they are found and in possession of psychedelics. This is a terrible error that is being made in modern Western society. We are losing contact with our fundamental roots by doing that. >> Indigenous people have been their stewards. They've preserved the plants. They've preserved the practices in a certain way. But now all of a sudden psychedelics are going global, you know. And you get a phenomenon where ayahuasca is like taking over the world, you know. And a few years ago, mushrooms did something very similar. >> With all psychedelic plants, the traditional shamanic use of them nearly always includes a community and ritual setting. [SINGING] >> Shamanism is essentially a living tradition of alchemy that is not seeking the stone but has found the stone. >> A ritual simply means an arrangement of the certain setting for certain intentions. This would also be true, for example, of a Native American church peyote ceremony. They have the same kind of thing. It's a group of people. They know each other. Some of them are friends. Some of them are neighbors. Some of them may be invited. And they share the intentions. And then they have the traditional songs and invocations. They invoke the spirits. And that's completely different than the scientific study. There's no psychological discussion. It's not a modern Western system. >> The shamanic cultures were very clear about this. They viewed the psychedelics as instruments that opened up the brain-- the mind-- to telepathy, to clairvoyance, to precognition, pre-sentience. And that ultimately it may be necessary to view the perceptions that occur under psychedelics as our brain basically tuning into a different channel and receiving information that we really don't know how to define at this point. >> For roughly 20 years, across the world the prohibition held firm-- no public use, no medicinal use, not even research to back up the claims that placed these plants in the strictest category. The sleeping mind of the people seemingly fell deeper into consensus trance. It was as if the innate pattern recognition and problem-solving faculties of human consciousness were missing a critical ally, one that had been with us since the dawn of modern intelligence. It seemed that the propaganda campaign had worked. Then in 1990, Rick Strassmann a medical researcher specialized in psychiatry, applied for a federal grant to give dimethyltryptamine to volunteers to simply see what the effects might be. >> Well, so there was a group in Germany-- which got started around the same time or sooner than I did-- studying mescaline. But my DMT study was the first in the US and the first that used, you know, DMT in quite a while. It was pretty frustrating. I never really expected to succeed. And you know, I don't think many people did. >> Public opinion of any mind-altering substance tends to evoke the belief that the experience is simply what happens when the brain fails to function properly, as if the default state most of us spend time in is the proper state to operate from. However, even if this were true, when someone's brain becomes dysfunctional and then hours later returns to normal, how would that individual explain the experience? >> Well, I think the most striking part of the research-- and what I really wasn't expecting-- was the sense of reality that people returned with. They felt the experiences were more real than real. The importance of the feeling of more real than real is we make our decisions based on what we believe is real. You know, the outside world we're assuming is real. Our inner world is real. And we make decisions based on reality-- inner and outer. So if there's a state that feels more real than real, then do we make decisions based on the information there? >> What really is the bedrock of reality? Is the consensus world we typically operate from the more real one? Is this where we'll find the universal truths we seek to make life decisions from? Is it the psychedelic realm that some believe is more real than real? Perhaps it's neither, and they're both merely reference points, implying and pointing to the underlying universal truths, encouraging us to engage with our own truth-seeking impulse, our innate memory, and inner sense of our integral place within the fabric of reality, that we are all aspects of a singular phenomenon appearing as independent things. Even Taoists and Buddhists believe that the outer visible manifestations of life are the illusion of temporary garments cloaking universal and unchanging principles that inform, instruct, guide, and breathe life into all that we experience around us. So why do we experience the illusion at all? What mechanisms cause us to collectively share such a misleading perception of life and living? Perhaps we should take a deeper look at the physiological effects of the chemical compounds in these plants that the government feared so much. >> Classical psychedelics activate a type of brain serotonin receptor called the 5-HT2A receptor. And what that means in real terms is the cells become more sensitive. So what you're doing is really sort of ramping up the ability of these cortical cells to process information quickly and more effectively. There is an area in the brain stem called the locus coeruleus, the LC. It sends projections up to the cortex that release norepinephrine. And the locus coeruleus has been referred to as a novelty detector. So normally if you look at firing in the locus coeruleus, it fires in bursts. So it won't do anything, and then you'll see-- dzzz, dzzz-- bursts of firing. So what happens is psychedelics increase those bursts. So we can imagine if those bursts correspond to the locus coeruleus detecting some novelty, then maybe it looks more novelty. And I've used the analogy when people take a psychedelic and they look at, say, a flower it's as if they're seeing it for the first time. So it increases the sense of novelty. >> What would be the biological purpose of these plants causing humans to see the world as if it's new again? It is a well-known phenomena to be looking for something like your keys while they're in your hand or right in front of you, but you don't see them. Your eyes have even spotted them, but you don't acknowledge that you've seen them yet. Our perception works in pattern recognition, and this allows the world to become predictable so we can find a rhythm to operate within. These plants and their effect on the detection of new information from old patterns may be the direct cause of neurogenesis and neuroplasticity. It has been shown that these serotonergic plants initiate the growth of new brain cells, as well as new neural connections and patterns to emerge. Let's think of this less as a causation and more of a correlation. Neurogenesis and neuroplasticity could be occurring when authentic childlike learning is happening. The neural growth seems to happen most in the hippocampus, which regulates emotions and is involved in memory. A Psymposia.com article says new studies are showing that neurogenesis and the hippocampus activated by psychedelics might be a part of the acquisition of new behaviors and new pattern recognition. With proper set, setting, and skill these changes in the brain may likely be why psychedelics have been so effective in treating post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and depression where other treatments have failed. Imagine for a moment that you were just born again or that all your memory has been put on hold, and you're seeing the world free and clear of cultural conditioning. Imagine all the explanations for what this world is and why it is the way it appears have been erased. Imagine you take a look at the people in your neighborhood, the animals in homes and in nature, the health of the oceans, forests, and communities. What questions would you begin formulating? And what role do you play in all of this? These are the questions one starts asking when introduced to the world of psychedelica. The mind begins asking broader, deeper, and more timeless questions. And perhaps this is what makes them so difficult to properly name. They allow new patterns to be recognized and new behaviors to be adopted, where most of what the Western world calls medicine tends to disengage or mask the symptoms while leaving the root cause untouched. >> And we even have another term, which is entheogens, for usually for the weaker, the amphetamine-related and so on, or something that awakens the God within. I myself prefer to call them like sacred psychedelics or sacred medicines. Because that's what they are. That's how the native cultures saw them, and I think it's accurate. >> It seems that these ancestral tribes understood the many healing qualities of these plants. The most profound effects seem to be the self-reflection people go through under their influence, the ability for these plants to confront you with your regrets and worries. Psychedelics help deconstruct old behavior patterns and build newer and healthier ones as seen from the creation of new neural pathways and the birth of new nerve cells, a quality long thought to be impossible shortly after childbirth. >> Very, very often, what the psychedelic experience will show you is the mistakes and errors that you've made in your life, where you have chosen the dark side rather than the side of light. Where you have chosen evil-- it may be very small, may be very large-- where you have chosen evil rather than good. >> Psychedelics can give you insights into how to be a better person. It won't make you a better person. And if you're a bad person, you may still be a bad person. >> Some of the most skeptical and evidence-dependent researchers speak very lucidly about a very tangible spectrum of benefits they have personally experienced from using these substances responsibly. >> One of the fundamental effects of psychedelics is to integrate material that is normally not accessible to consciousness. And the fundamental way in which psychedelics make this information available is by a destabilizing of what's called the default-mode network-- this part of the brain that integrates our sense of self, our autobiographical memories, and our reflection upon our lives. So basically, what's happening under psychedelics is a liberation of the parts of the brain-- that 80% or 90% of the brain that they say we don't use. I mean, we use it, but we're just not able to access it. Psychedelics give us access to that unconscious. >> The language facility in the brain is destabilized as well. So the combination of our self-identity and our language being put off-balance by simply ingesting a plant gives rise to the ineffability of the experience. Just as we see with any mystical or spiritual experience, words are not enough to communicate the magnitude of the experience. >> But the possibility has to be considered that what the psychedelics are doing is retuning the receiver wavelike of the brain and actually allowing us to gain access to the radical alternative realities-- parallel dimensions. >> We have the same situation in the television. We would laugh if somebody would study that set and go down to molecular level of the transistors and the wires and would believe that this gives you an explanation why you get a Mickey Mouse cartoon, you know, at 7 o'clock in the evening. >> If Stan and many researchers are correct in positing that consciousness is not generated by the brain but tuned into, what then are these psychedelic plants trying to show us? >> Across the range of the psychedelics, you can definitely say that there is a broad range of imagery that is common. Not everybody will have all those images all the time. Not everybody will agree on every single aspect of it. But it starts off with what I refer to as entoptic phenomena-- because they're considered as originating in the ocular system-- where you start seeing zigzag lines, and cross hatches, and geometrical patterns. Sometimes fantastically complex and elaborated mandalas appear in the geometry. Then there tends to be the sense of passing through a vortex of some kind into a seamlessly convincing parallel universe. >> Is this the same phenomena that humans have been experiencing since the time our ancestors were painting their visions in caves some 40,000 years ago? Were those entoptic images engrams and portals depicting a dimension that we are still tapping into today? What is this vision, and could it be some kind of collective consciousness of the human soul experience? >> It's important to keep in mind-- I'm not saying that this is the perception of alien transdimensional thing. It might just be a psychological construct. It might be the result of brain activity in certain areas in relationship to each other. In which case, they would still be as interesting as if they were anything else. >> If five or six artists, you know, were to walk around-- I don't know, New York or Boulder, Colorado-- and make some paintings, you could clearly see that the paintings-- each of the paintings might be slightly different. But you could see that they were of the same place. >> The botanist, author, and psychedelic psychonaut Terence McKenna relates the plant intelligence to that of Mother Earth. The ancient Greeks called it Gaia. >> The whole thing is an enzyme-driven process. We are like an organ of Gaia. We are the organ which binds and releases energy. I mean, a liver cell doesn't need to understand why it binds and releases enzymes of the liver. We bind and release energy for reasons perhaps never to be clear to us, but which place us firmly within the context of the Gaian mind. Suddenly, we come with an epigenetic capability. We write books, tell stories, dance, sing, carve, paint. These are not genetic processes. These are epigenetic processes. And they bind information and express the Gaian mind. >> The Gaian mind-- to many this idea doesn't fit within the context we've been given by Western culture. How could the rocks be considered alive? How could the bones in our body be considered the same? What does alive really mean? >> The Gaian mind is a real mind. Its messages are real messages. And our task-- through discipline, psychedelics, attention to detail, whatever we have going-- is to try and extract this message and eliminate ourselves from the message so that we then can see the face of the other. >> The other in this case would be the identity of that which is sending the message. Because we scarcely understand who and what we are, why we're even alive, and what we're meant to do with our time here, asking what the Gaian mind truly is might be premature. Could it be possible-- just like a human organism-- that plants communicate not only among themselves and to humans, but among all other species? Is this the collective consciousness of the planet? And is it possible the war on the mind is not limited to human minds but to the mind of the entire planet-- the plants, animals, humans, and more? >> Their message, or their interaction with us, might be very different than their interaction with a fungus or a bacterium. But they are in conversations with those things as well, you know. So the message varies. In other words, these are multi-- sort of multi-purpose molecules. >> Terence and Dennis McKenna are possibly the most notable pair of scientists and theorists on why these plants are here and what their greater purpose might be. Both have firm beliefs backed by a lifetime of investigation that these plants are here to serve the planet by those willing to listen to their place in it. >> I like to call them ambassadors from Gaia. You know, they happen to make these messenger molecules that are useful for communicating with the complex brains of these problematic apes that evolution has spawned. That would be us, you know? And we're the most dangerous thing to show up on the planet in-- who knows, depends on when you want to start counting-- but at least the last 100 million years. You know, because we have the potential to completely upset the apple cart by the technologies that we can manipulate. >> I mean, when you look what we have done to the Pacific Ocean, you know, what we are doing to the atmosphere, what we have done to water-- you know, things like the Mexican Gulf or the reactor, you know, from Chernobyl to the Japanese one-- we cannot do this for a very long time. We might not make it as a species. >> One of the other things we know about the world today is that we are living in the midst of a major ecological crisis. Some people talk about the fifth major extinction here on the planet being promoted by human activity. We don't have a compassionate relationship with our environment as a global society. >> If the ecological threat that we face is truly upon us, could the psychedelic plants be intervening on behalf of Gaia? >> So the Earth, I think, senses that we're-- it's in danger and is trying to get a message to us that we have to wake up. >> Are psychedelic plants here to introduce us to ourselves, to the shadow of our psyche and the ills that come from the sleeping mind? What if the greatest threat we face is not out there in the world of symptoms, but in here-- in the dark corners of individual psychology and its rippling effect into the masses? Since the dawn of time, psychedelic plants have been there. They've seen the horrors of the past and have always produced the medicine most needed by these dangerous minds, a class of compounds that-- when all is said and done-- offer us an honest look at ourselves. And from this new perspective, humility, compassion, and community bonding naturally emerge. Perhaps they confront us and give us the only medicine that may help us out of these dark times-- love. And how far back can we trace the human psychedelic relationship? >> There is really an enormous wealth of evidence to suggest-- I would go beyond saying to suggest-- to prove that our ancestors, deep into prehistory, were using the kind of substances that we call psychedelics today. And these would be the natural psychedelics that are available from plants. These plants have played a fundamental role in the human story. >> But how have these plants shaped our human story? What evidence can be found that suggests at one time psychedelics were an accepted practice on the understanding of the universe? Mysteriously, in 1976, a Soviet archaeologist uncovered a 4,000-year-old temple complex in present day Turkmenistan. This complex has many rooms with stone vats coated with residue of cannabis, as well as poppy used to make opium, and ephedra used to make amphetamines. This must mean it was a facility to mass produce a hallucinogenic cocktail. Historians have suggested that this region was home to goat farmers that comingled with a nomadic horseback tribe and for the most part stayed quiet of conflict. Could this discovery hold the key to the ancient mystery of the fabled beverage of the gods? Has the evidence and long-lost ingredients of what the oldest Indian text, the Rigveda, called soma and the Persians called haoma finally come to light? Is this evidence of an ancient psychedelic society? And if so, where did they disappear to? Why has memory of this culture been erased? And could this be an ancient representation of humans going beyond the veil to see the collective consciousness? Up next, we will explore the shamanic route of humankind's relationship with psychedelic plants and altered states of consciousness.