#2002 - Amanda Feilding
2023-06-27 02:35:46
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
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Thank you very much for doing this, I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
It's lovely to meet you, and I really, really appreciate your life's work. I mean, I think what you've done has been really remarkable, particularly because of the time period in which you embarked in it. I mean, you sort of got involved in psychedelics and psychedelic research at the very beginning of it and when it was extremely controversial and very difficult to do research.
Well, I actually got involved in it when it was incredible fun, and I was incredibly lucky with my timing, I think, because I was very attracted to the other side, if you like, the mystical. Because I lived in this very, very isolated spot, and I had nothing much to do, but kind of mooch around in a beautiful place, have mystical experiences, dream of the future.
Is that your phone? Yes. There we go. When did you first get involved, or even interested, in what you would call mystical experiences? I'll let you turn it on.
Ah, sorry, sorry, sorry.
No worries, no worries.
I don't know how to turn these things off.
Do you want me to turn it on mute for you? Yes, please. Okay.
These wacky kids today and their devices.
Ah, yes, I'm sorry about that. No worries.
No worries at all. So, how old were you when you first got interested?
Very young, I should say.
I grew up in this very isolated place.
I was very, very close to my father, who came back from the war, a diabetic, and he was a very eccentric person. And so, from three, I was his carer.
Three years old?
Yeah. Which was a lovely role. I mean, I was his little pet dog. I went everywhere with him. I adored him and he adored me.
And he was a very out of the... He wasn't in normal society at all.
How so?
He just wasn't. He was eccentric and charming.
Did his own thing. Artist.
A farmer, but not really a farmer. He couldn't bear really farming. Yeah, anyway.
And I suppose, spiritually, I had three. My mother was a Catholic, so I grew up a Catholic. And then he was whatever, agnostic, atheist, nothing. Except a thinker. And then his best friend, who was his kind of...
He picked up as... The person who did all his work when he was at university, called Bertie,
became a Buddhist monk, a rather famous Buddhist monk. So he was a big influence in the absence, because he was my godfather. And so I had these three influences.
And so I kind of dreamt of doing magic, mystical things in the world. And had mystical experiences, as lots of children do.
And so then I... I'm sorry, I can't quite think how to condense it. But anyway, I grew up in an unusual setting.
And with a passion for altered states, mystics. I started studying them when I was probably about 10.. Really? Yeah. And it became rather a passion.
And the place we lived, it got three moats. And it was very overgrown. And in between the moats, there was a mound, a very beautiful mound, where I had a kind of pet god who lived in the mound.
Called Zio. And my mission was making this god figure laugh. So that was the aim of the game.
So, when you say you studied the mystical states at 10, how? so? How were you doing that?
Well, when I started reading, I started reading about it. But I don't know what I meant by that. But when I went to church, Catholic church with my mother, there was incense and all that sort of thing. And I had kind of mystical experiences with Jesus. I was very close to Jesus in those days.
And then,
whatever. But it was a kind of rather wild, quite a dangerous upbringing.
We had to do the farming. It was a mixture between rather kind of beautiful setting, but quite a mixture with peasant life, of looking after the animals and farm animals. Pigs, cows, all of that sort of thing.
And then, at one point, I decided I wanted to leave home. I went to a boarding school. It was a terrible mistake.
And a convent. And actually, when I was 16, I won the sounds prize. I was quite clever, but I hated it. It lived outside the boundaries of the school all the time.
And then I wanted books on Buddhism for my prize. And the nuns said, no, no, we can't give you books on Buddhism. And so I said, all right, I'll leave. Thanks very much. And educate myself, which is what I did.
And I left school at 16..
Really? And it was because they wouldn't allow you to study Buddhism.
Yeah. That's what I chose to study. And they wouldn't, so I said, thanks.
In the original days of the church, the incense that they would walk down the aisle with, that was cannabis.
That was beautiful. I mean, the one thing I loved about that convent, in the chapel, they had even song. And this Italian nun, with the voice of an angel. Really with incense. Took one into a mystical space.
Yeah.
And that was very special. That was the high point of it.
They used to use cannabis. And then the host, what did the host used to be?
The host, I mean, obviously, originally it was a psychedelic.
Yes. Do we know what psychedelic?
I think different places had different ones. But kind of based on mushroom or ergot or those sort of things. But I'm rather keen on making sacred hosts.
I recently was involved in that. Anyway, that's a different story.
But I would love to hear that story. You make sacred hosts?
No, I don't, but I'm going to.
You're going to?
I'm going to. I once. actually, the story was very much a shock.
Probably a Catholic conference. Once I was in Paris and we were walking by Notre Dame on a Sunday.
And really high. And went into the church. And lovely Eucharist. I hadn't heard all those wonderful songs. I love those Latin, 16th century, 15th century chanting.
And so I experienced having the host again. And it was so delicious. Spiritually, it was wonderful. And so I can absolutely see, originally, the host was a psychedelic experience. And with that music and the incense, it's a beautiful spiritual experience.
Yeah. I'm sure that was probably the root of a lot of those religious ceremonies.
I think so.
Have you read John Marco Allegro's book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross?
No, I haven't. No. Is that a good one?
It's an amazing book. John Marco Allegro was an...
Oh, yes, I remember his name. I don't think I've ever read him.
He was an ordained minister who was a religious scholar and an expert on language. And he was one of the deciphers of the Dead Sea Scrolls. So he worked with that for 14 years. They deciphered the Dead Sea Scrolls. And then he wrote The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, which was his interpretation of what the Dead Sea Scrolls was really all about.
And he believed that the origins of Christianity were in the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms and fertility rituals.
Yes. No, I absolutely agree. I'm sure psychedelics were at the root of all of those spiritual practices and part of them.
Most likely. So when you were first experiencing these things, what year are we talking about, when you first got excited about these things?
Let me just think, when was it? Well, I first smelt cannabis when I was 16.. And, funnily enough, the first time I smelt it,
Ray Charles was playing. And I felt this is paradise.
And I bet millions of people had Ray Charles on their first sounding of cannabis.
It's amazing what it does to music.
Yeah. Yeah. So I was 16, which was, I was born in 43.. So I know that was.
Anyway, that's when I started smoking cannabis. And it was, I was at Oxford at that point with a very interesting group of, they were older than the other students because they'd been in Korea. So they were much better educated and they were smokers. And introduced me to a lot of wonderful books, like Against Nature and Lo Trumo, and, well, rather wonderful material. And it was a very creative period.
And at that point, as I'd left school by then, I had somehow got the world's leading expert, like, what was the American one? Anyway, on comparative religions and mysticism, someone called Professor Zayner, who was at all cells in Oxford and wrote a book called Mysticism of the Sacred and Profane. And he became my tutor. So I went and saw him twice a week, which was a very kind of awkward meeting.
Because I was very shy, and he was very shy, and it was in all cells. And we both sat there cuddling the cats kind of thing. And then, finally, I decided the best way forward was to bring my very, very handsome cousin, who was a student at Oxford because he was gay. And that kind of warmed. Loosened everybody up.
And then it became very friendly and fun. But anyway, he'd written this book, which I actually didn't agree with, which was saying psychedelics, mysticism of the sacred and profane. And he was a Catholic compadre, actually. And he thought that he'd had one experience with mescaline, I think it was, and not liked it. And thought that they were a very different bracket to the experience you get through, an endogenous, mystical experience.
Interesting. Which I don't actually think is necessary. I think they're the same experience, but obviously with different qualities.
I've heard you say that you believe that what psychedelics do is make the mind more fertile for these experiences. Is that a good way to...
Yes. That's exactly what I think. I think you're at that level where the ego's control has dissolved to some degree. And so it's like fertile ground. And so if you've, whatever, if you're ready for a mystical experience, you're more likely to have it in that experience, in that state of mind.
So the mind is actually restricting us in many ways, through the ego, from having these experiences.
Yes. I think so.
And what psychedelics do is release those boundaries.
Yes. I think that, due to the evolution of man, and the Homo sapiens, and the ape taking the upright position, this is a theory I was introduced to in 1966..
And actually I think a lot of the details are probably wrong, but in concept I think it's true, which is the ape standing upright.
One thing people haven't taken into account is obviously there are hundreds of acids that are standing upright, free. your hands, you run faster, you see further, all of that. But in the upright position, gravity is against the blood in the brain. It's in the brain. There are two fluid volumes, blood and cerebral spinal fluid, which is water, basically, which is made in the brain itself.
So it has, kind of, squatters rights in the brain.
So when you're in the upright position, gravity is pulling the blood down. So I think, probably with the upright position, we lost a small proportion of our blood supply. I mean, some animals, if you tie them up, right, a dog, if it's tied up so it can't get down, it will start howling and go mad, because it hasn't got the valves to keep the blood up. And we've obviously got a certain amount, but maybe we lost some blood at that upright position. And as a compensation for that loss, I think we developed an internal mechanism more than any other animal has done it, which is to direct the blood where it most needs to go.
Obviously, all animals do that. They have the power to send the blood where it's most important, to survival or whatever. And I think that through the use of the conditioned sound, the word, we learned to control that process more than any other animal. And over the millennia, we kind of built up our power to do that. So I think that's the secret of why humans, which is a talking ape, got control of the whole game, because of our creation of language, which enabled us to do these incredible things we do.
But it also has a disadvantage.
that our basic state is slightly low in blood, in the dominant organ. So we have to keep this mechanism of tight control where the blood is distributed. And that has evolved with the ego, which is essential. I mean, we wouldn't survive without the ego to kind of direct the blood where it's most needed.
People who lose their ego. And in the 60s, when people took large doses of LSD, as it was then, every day, sometimes they lost their ego. They flipped out. And there was one occasion of someone we knew who was in Ibiza, and he'd flipped out, and he put the key in the lock to open the door. Someone would say goodnight to him.
He put the key in the lock and left him. And then in the morning, he was still there with the key in the door. Because the head hadn't told him, turn the key to open the door.
Wow.
We need the words to keep us under control.
Yeah.
The words have made us what we are, this incredible animal who can have a nuclear war, if we want, or know all the atoms in the body, all those brilliant things we do, which is amazing. But we're also, obviously, a very deeply faulted animal at some point.
We're, you know, neurotic, psychotic, psychotic, you know, all of those things, because of this shortage of blood, and then dependent on the meaning of the word. So if we have a terrible conditioning, which a lot of people do,
the separation from reality is, in a sense, in the meaning of the word.
So the danger of our society now, in a sense, is we're getting further and further away from nature,
in a sense. And that, in a way, is why psychedelics can be a very useful medicine, because they increase the connectivity with the senses, with the internal bodily senses, and also the outside perceptual senses.
So I actually think that.
we're entering a kind of new possible age – and that's why, for fun, I call it the psychedelic age – because, for the first time, we've got, or are getting, the knowledge by which we can actually understand the brain better, and understand how we can alter the volume of blood in the brain, which is giving the brain energy. The whole thing is about energy. The more energy we have, the more parts of the brain can function simultaneously.
And that, obviously,
can be very creative, stimulating,
empathic, by just having more of the brain functioning.
And so I think that the knowledge of psychedelics – and when I say psychedelics, I don't actually mean necessarily psychedelics, because, as we all know, one can get these experiences endogenously, through exercise or...
Holotropic breathing.
Holotropic breathing, exactly. Or breathing exercises. I mean, all the spiritual training, all knew that that's. what they were doing in the spiritual disciplines, is teaching people how to control.
their internal ego, and also their sense of consciousness. And I think at the center of the spiritual experience is the getting higher and loosening the grip of the ego, so you're more in touch with nature.
Do you think that, in the absence of these psychedelic experiences, one of the problems with words is that we develop narratives, and then we use our ego to reinforce these narratives, and we sort of deny objective reality?
Yes. I think more and more, the word can become the reality. I mean, in the creation of words, which we all have, and have to have, and are thankful to have, but nevertheless, it does create.
a slightly different world. It's rather like the shadows on Plato's wall. One gets one's internal edition of the world, rather than the real experience of the world. And so, I think it's good to be in contact with nature, and I think it's a dangerous path that we're taking now, where it becomes more and more, life is the screen.
But still, that's where we're going, and it has great advantages as well as dangers.
But I do think that the knowledge of getting high has always been central to the human evolution, and at the earliest demonstrations of what we've got, of the earliest demonstrations of human culture, say, the caves in Chauvet. Do you know them? I think they've never been bettered. I mean, that artwork, the brushstrokes of those animals, they're alive, you can see the movement. No one ever did it better.
And it's like 30-something thousand years old?
Exactly, it's 35, 40, something around there. So, I can tell, because I have some respect for an artist, I know those strokes.
Let's see, pull up some of those images, Jamie, because some of those images are amazing stuff.
They're just incredible, the movement of the animals, the feeling.
Yeah, they did create a feeling of movement, like the animals were running.
Yeah, and the lines. I mean, anyone who paints... I mean, Picasso, I think, said, without them, he would have never done what he did. I can't remember quite, but modern art isn't better, it gets as good, but not really.
It's crazy, because they're depicting rhinos, too.
Yeah.
Just really wild. There was rhinos in France.
Yeah, beautiful ones with horses and buffaloes. Yeah.
And that's in the bowels of the earth they do it. So, it was obviously very spiritual, because why go into the bowels of the earth if it's just a kind of magical, spiritual experience they're having? And so, I think, without doubt,
they were high. How they got there, was it through singing, drumming, or singing, or was it through taking compounds? Funny enough, I've recently been introduced, met a charming man who's an archaeologist in charge of Chauvet, and I said, I'd love to be able to analyse and see if we can find out if there's any remnants of some psychiatric substance. And he said, I was very welcome to go there. So, I'm very excited about the possibility.
Are you aware of Brian Murrow Rescue's work?
Yes, I know. I knew him years ago.
Really? But I never took it up.
Maybe it would help you better if this was on the top of your head.
How do you do that?
Like that? There you go. Thank you. Yeah, his work with determining that, in Eleusis, that they were using ergot and some other psychedelics.
I know the book. I know him. The Immortality Key.
Carl Rook wrote the original book. Do you know that one? The Road to Eleusis?
Yeah, I've heard of it.
It's a very good book, with Albert Hoffman and the banker. What was his name?
So, they know that those people, at least back then, the Eleusinian Mysteries, that they were using psychedelics.
And it's obvious from art. What I think is that one can sense that civilization was,
had at its source the use of altered states of consciousness. I see them, as, you know, civilization, rather like a cutting of a tree. You see the rings. Some years are drought and others are sun and rain. And they are wide and flourishing.
In culture, that Eleusis and that Chauvet, I mean, they must have been high to produce that incredible art. And the same at Eleusis and all of that Greek. I mean, it's never taught at schools and things. Both my sons did, classics at Oxford. None of them, it was never mentioned at Eleusis.
Do you know what I mean?
It's amazing. There at the center.
of the experience of death and rebirth.
Well, Harvard's opened up a field of study about this.
Yeah, which is quite interesting. I knew a student 20 years ago who wanted to do his PhD in Eleusis. And Harvard told him if you do that, you won't get it.
Yeah, that was a giant problem after 1970, correct? Like after the sweeping psychedelic back, where they made everything schedule one, psilocybin, mescaline, everything. And when they did that, not only did they ruin the possibility of having those experiences for so many people, because it was forbidden, because it was very dangerous, you could get arrested, but also it stopped all the research.
Yes, absolutely. It was 50, 60, 70 lost years, which is a criminal thing actually. And the untold suffering of the millions of people who went to prison,
and had their lives ruined by a record for maybe being caught for a joint three times or whatever. I mean, it's horrific.
what happened. Well, there's people in jail right now for that in this country, which is insane.
It's insane. And I mean, I started fighting that back when I started the Beckley Foundation. I saw that in order to do research, one had to change the drug policies. And the two went hand in hand, because doing the research would help change the drug policies. And in order to do the research, you had to change the policies.
I mean, it was a bit of a catch-22, because until you've done the research, you can't do it, if you see what I mean, because they make it so difficult to do.
I think what MAPS has done, which is genius, is their work with MDMA and soldiers, soldiers having PTSD. Because when you think of soldiers and you think of people in the military, you generally think of people who are right-wing, who have more authoritarian leanings, but yet these are the people that would be aided the most by these psychedelics, particularly coming back from war. Absolutely. So. because of that, I believe they've opened up a door to an understanding.
I think it's very, very important. And that's why in the 70s, because I was involved in it in the 60s mainly, when my passion to change the world started, when I first really knew the value of psychedelics, which was probably in 65 onwards. And as the door of repression came down, one could see it's a kind of disaster for humanity. But I thought the only way to overcome it is by using the language of the establishment to prove that these compounds can actually heal humanity, not be damaging for humanity as they were advertised as, but actually there are a route to healing and better happiness, more fulfilled life. And so I thought that's why I started doing the science to try to, with the language of the modern world, which is science, to demonstrate how valuable these compounds are.
And I think our first, that's why I set up the Beckley Imperial Study, and the first study we did was using psilocybin. And then we saw that I wanted to do LSD, but we couldn't do LSD. in those days. It had to be psilocybin, unless no one knows what psilocybin is, how it's spelled, what it means, it's not so taboo. So we got permission.
And I wanted to do brain imaging to look into a hypothesis that what they do is increase the volume of blood in the brain capillaries. And hopefully with MRI one would see that. But anyway, what we did see in the first study we did with psilocybin was a decrease of blood in the default mode network, which is the modern expression of the ego, but part of the ego. And that was very interesting because the default mode network, i.e. the ego, is hyperactive, underlying psychological.
conditions like depression or anxiety or addiction, or all of those things, have a hyperactive ego saying, I need a drink, I'm so depressed. And we saw that psilocybin lowers the blood supply to that part of the brain. And so then actually, we got a government grant to help us do the next phase of the study. So I think it's very important.
showing how, because, as we all know, we're in an epidemic of mental illness, now, getting ever more. And rather surprisingly, and in a way rather ironically, science, which has been so determined to prove that the spiritual is an old man in the sky sitting just total rubbish, which it finally has done, now, at the very centre of the new healing, i.e. psychedelic assisted therapy, is the mystical experience. And what we showed is the people who underwent what's kind of categorised as a mystical experience, i.e. a loosening of the ego, a feeling of unity,
those are the ones who have the best outcomes of overcoming their depression. So it's a rather beautiful little.
ironical twist that now, suddenly, the psychedelics are at the centre of this new approach to healing. And I think the healing of psychedelics goes much, much farther than what we've touched on so far, which is
the psychologically based conditions. I think it can be very, very useful in different doses, because what is so wonderful about psychedelics is they have totally different effects in the different doses.
And at the mini, micro dose,
I'm beginning to have evidence, and I'm just starting a study, which shows amazing potential results of micro dose for Alzheimer's.
Really?
Yeah. Interesting.
Amazing. Remarkable. Really? Yeah.
I was watching a video yesterday on cannabis and Parkinson's. It was incredible. Yeah. There was a gentleman who had horrible loss of control of his body and the shaking, and they gave him cannabis oil and he put it under his tongue and a few minutes later he's lying back on the couch and then he holds his hands out and his hands are dead straight. I'm like, this is extraordinary.
Extraordinary.
And my partner before, who is the father of my children, he got Parkinson's. So I was very well and very fond of him.
Mild Parkinson's, but still it was Parkinson's. And so I'd heard how, and I studied it, how micro dosing ibogaine is very good for.
minimizing. So I'm wanting to do, I'm setting up a research into that.
Interesting.
You know, I think, and I think also...
Yeah, this is the gentleman right here. This is exactly the video that I saw. So this guy has terrible loss of control of his body. He can barely hold the cannabis oil in his mouth.
Ah, poor man. Yeah.
I mean, he's struggling so bad. but now why? It says 1.37 p.m. This is when he takes it. And then, you see, just a few minutes later they show him lie back.
And this is at... Go ahead, Jamie. That's 1.41..
Look at this.
I mean, not even 10 minutes.
That is magic.
And look at this. And he's, he's fine. He sits up and he's, he's just blown away by it. He's like, it's so quickly. And look at his hands.
Incredible.
No, that is wonderful.
I have a friend who has a child that has a pretty severe autism. Ah. And when he gives the kid cannabis, when he gives him edible cannabis, it just stops it. Yes. It just stops it.
The kid can... Absolutely.
Make eye contact, communicate.
Absolutely. Well, I could show you, the trouble is, I can show you privately, but not, the person involved doesn't want it to go out,
of a wonderful old lady of 97 who had Alzheimer's for seven years or something. But she was very bright. She was a pirate and a padre and whatever, and was looked after by her son. And then he went away for a week and someone else came and looked after him. And when he came back, she was in a kind of.
acute vegetative apathy where she didn't recognize him. Hmm. Just staring into space. And they discussed it before and she'd said, she knew he sometimes took psychedelic, and so he gave her a microdose of LSD. And an hour later, I thought, well, she's a little sparkling old lady, Wow.
with her full contact with him, saying, I feel so wonderful, let's read some poetry now. Wow. You know, just like that man.
Yeah.
And then he contacted me and said, what should he do? So I said, well, first thing would be to get a doctor to help you manage it and then continue with the lower doses. gets that effect, which was 10 micro, which is 10 millionth of a gram. I mean, such a small dose, you would hardly think it could have an effect. And that does something which I'm doing research on now.
I think it's to do with the connectivity between the different brain centers, which I think it sparks. And it brought her back. And her children said it was just remarkable.
It's incredible.
You know, and I've noticed the same things. I'm very, I'm in the middle of getting going on an autism study because I think, certainly with level one, the lower degrees of autism,
microdosing LSD can be enormously beneficial. And I've got a friend who's had experience of that.
and wrote a very good book about it, actually called Autism and LSD.
And so now I'm designing a study and getting his advice on the autism level of things. And I think that, what I think is, what I'm fascinated in, and this is where I got this interest right back in 1966, are what are the mechanisms?
underlying that makes LSD and associated compounds have the effect it has. And obviously then there was no brain imaging. It was very difficult to see inside the brain. One could only theorize about it, make hypotheses. And so this Dutch scientist, who I had a long relationship with, had this hypothesis that it constricts, it's a vasoconstrictor, constricting the veins.
so blood comes into the capillaries, can't get out. The capillaries blow up and squeeze out the cerebral spinal fluid and then slowly, over the years, as gravity.
pulls the blood down again.
And you go back to normal. But during that period of more blood in the brain, you have more energy. Now I'm looking into how does it make more energy, apart from providing more glucose and oxygen. And I've got a very, very interesting something which is coming up, which I'll tell you on my next talk about.
Okay.
But I'm very excited because I think people, anyone you talk to, would say that the psychedelics, or indeed cannabis, they all work on the same direction. Cannabis and the psychedelics have the same underlying mechanisms but at different levels of, I think, constriction. The psychedelics are much stronger because you obviously get much higher. You can on the psychedelic, but they're going in the same direction. And that's what the endogenously, a lot of the, I'd love to know more about that, and I will, if I've got time, to do that, study into the underlying, you know,
serotonin, dopamine, all the different enzymes, hormones in the body which can do these things endogenously. I mean we know the saints got top high St. Teresa, her description of her orgasm with God is just like a description of a psychedelic trip, couldn't you say? So it's the same experience, but either got endogenously or through other ways.
I think one thing that's very interesting about cannabis too, is the difference between eating it and when your body's producing 11-hydroxymetabolite from the eating of it. It can produce a very powerful psychedelic experience. And my experiences with it, where it's been very profound, are with the sensory deprivation tank. Yes. I have a sensory deprivation tank and I do it with edible marijuana.
Right. And it's incredible. Right. And I think there's some, I've got a friend who grows marijuana and I think, I'm very interested in the, he always wants me to work with one of the breeds he breeds because it is like a psychedelic. And I thought I'd call it the, if I do it, the Beckley Brain Boost, because it brings back his memory.
And it brings back, I think they're very, I mean we're only beginning to scrape the top of the knowledge of how these compounds work and how we can use them for humanity.
Well, it's just very unfortunate that research was stopped for so long.
Yes.
And we're very fortunate that there's people like yourself and MAPS and some of the other groups that have continued research and really pushed for the legalization of this.
Yes. And I think now we've got a tipping point where I think we've got enough good research which really shows without doubt that we can get better results with using psychedelics to help and cannabis than we can get without it. And therefore it's really criminal not to throw money at this research so we can get it out to the people quicker. Yes. Because access is what we need for all those people who have got terrible things they're suffering from.
which could be helped.
And I mean I do as much research as I can, but I'm a tiny organization, four or five people and tiny amounts of money we've got. And to get a study going takes a year of paperwork, getting permissions, getting the compounds, which I'm at the moment doing because I'm wanting to re-civilize LSD, because I think LSD is actually the purest.
and cleanest of the compounds and in many ways the best. Not against. I think psilocybin and other ones are wonderful and they all have their different characteristics which are incredibly valuable. but it's a complete madness that the one which is really in a way the purest is kind of opening up a magnification of what we are with very little external coloring. I think LSD is.
And as it is, completely non-toxic, you can give it to people forever. you know it's not toxic. they aren't building up toxicity.
A lot of people are micro-dosing it now it's a very, very common thing. micro-dosing of LSD and what they're reporting is an alleviation of anxiety, a heightened state of wellness and of awareness and of being in the moment. clarity just from a micro-dose.
I mean we actually did the first scientific research on the micro-dose. I was collaborating with Maastricht in Holland and we did it on 5, 10, 20. I think it was doses and I mean it was amazing the results. it increases mood, it increases neuroplasticity, it increases neurogenesis, it increases anti-inflammatory, it increases tolerance to pain.
vigilance. you know all of these very valuable qualities in a micro-dose and we could be using that with all sorts of indications which need actually more energy to kind of overcome certain deficits.
and also to therapy applications, because you do it and you're essentially completely sober in the sense of you can communicate, you see things clearly, everything is fine, but you have achieved a very elevated state.
absolutely, but you say everyone can do it. it's only those very few who know how. I come across innumerable people. I know someone who you know, who has terrible migraine.
and he had a micro-dose of OCD and it cured it and he has terrible problems in getting it and it's not easy to get.
no.
so do you see what I mean? yes, and a lot of people don't want to have to go onto the dark web, but I have no idea how you do the dark web. do you know what I mean?
and what you're opening yourself up to when you get on the dark web.
exactly and you don't know what the product is. I mean what I've said about the. I mean I spent ten boring years talking at the UN and places not totally, but I went there trying to say we should have a drug policy which is based on science, on harm reduction, on human rights you know and cost effectiveness I mean you know and not one which is exact reverse.
right. well, that's sort of the problem is cost. the real problem is there's a vested financial interest in keeping these things illegal. yeah, because there's a lot of psychological medications that people are taking, psychiatric medications that people are taking that they really don't need.
yeah, and it keeps companies and also prisons were the second biggest industry. yeah, because it's free labor and a lot of funding coming in.
it's very twisted. it's awful. that aspect of it is terrifying.
it is terrifying, and I mean I've been at it. I wrote a report on the whatever you call them the United Nations Convention on Drugs, which is obviously created by America, but 190 countries follow it. actually, funny enough, America's the one which is breaking it but doesn't allow other countries to break it. but not one word has been changed in the last 20 years.
which is crazy.
which is crazy.
especially when considering what we know now. yeah, exactly about the benefits of it. yeah, were you friends with Terence McKenna? did you know him?
I knew him. yes, yes, yes,
what did you think of his stoned ape theory?
what was that?
the stoned ape theory is the theory that ancient hominids, when the rainforest receded into grasslands, they started experimenting with different food sources. one of the things they started doing was tipping over cow patties to find grubs and beetles, and on those cow patties psilocybin mushrooms would grow, and that they started eating those and that it increased visual acuity, it increased their arousal states and that they also think glossolalia. and so many different the formation of language, so many things came about from that.
yes, I mean I wouldn't put it exactly the way he put it, but I would say that we know animals. we know that reindeer eat mushrooms.
yes,
and as mushrooms, exactly as they're toxic. the king reindeer drinks the pee of the drug which has gone through like the big boss of the village, would get all the lower members of the village to take the psilocybin first or whatever, and then drink the urine of cleaned out.
yeah,
got the clean version. well, the reindeer also does that, and so animals have taken it, and I think I think that psychedelics were an integral part of homo sapiens evolution. if you see what I mean, I don't think it's the only feature at all, but I think it's one of the major. you know, the development, maybe, of the mirror neuron was very important in one or two other things, but I think that's a major lift. I think at the center of human culture is the experience of altered states of consciousness.
he attributed it to the increase in brain size. he believed that, you know, because of the neurogenesis properties, also of psilocybin, he thinks that it may have contributed to the doubling of the human brain size over a period of two million years.
I mean I definitely think all of those things are showing. I don't I mean he was a poet. he wasn't. he wasn't a scientist, necessarily poetically. so I mean he talked a lot of rubbish.
I know that because I went to a lot of conferences with him and I.
I knew it. what did you think was rubbish?
well, I can't remember, but exaggerated things.
the time zero
whatever.
yeah, time wave zero
yeah, but at the same time he's a very good poet and he had a lot of very.
you know, deep thinking.
well, he was very compelling.
yeah, absolutely, and that's wonderful.
yeah, and he got a lot of people to be interested in psychedelics because he was so interesting to hear.
and a very good presentation.
yeah, an unusual voice too.
yes, wonderful Irish. yes, yes, yes, very good, yeah, very good, yeah. but yeah, I think these compounds are integral to where homo sapiens has got to, and I think the disaster is that we started repressing it. I mean obviously, even at the time of Jesus, it was kept secret.
yeah,
he was always kept secret. even at Eleusis, which went on for 2000 years, they kept it secret. probably that's why Socrates had to commit suicide, because he had it with his boyfriend at the dinner parties. do you know? it was only to be used sacredly for the ceremonies?
yes,
which I actually think.
I mean so I think that's an incredibly important part of it, the ceremony, but I think also as an elixir when we get knowledgeable about how to use these compounds. they're just amazing health, mental health elixirs, and I think I mean I'm obviously, as I get older, very, very interested in how one can hopefully.
delay the, and it's all based on blood. you know, as we get older, the blood supply gets worse to the brain. so how does one keep the supply of energy as topped up, basically in the most beneficial way for the animal? yeah, and I think funny enough.
the cerebral circulation is out of fashion, because we discovered about the cerebral circulation whenever we did 100-200 years ago. it's considered old fashioned, so modern science really isn't interested in the blood. actually, you know, everyone knows, blood goes up, blood comes down, but there's very little interest in it. I mean I worked with one of the leading Russian scientists who was on their space program and was the leading world expert on cerebral circulation involving cerebral spinal fluid and the relationship between cerebral spinal fluid and blood, and we worked together for about 6 years and then he died in Covid at 80, something which was a tragedy actually, because he also was very interested in the kind of related thing of the possible increased impulsation brought about by trepanation, which is a very ancient practice which maybe brings the level of cerebral circulation back to childhood level, which is higher than the adult level.
we should explain trepanation to people, because trepanation is a very ancient practice of drilling holes in one's head, and you decided to do. you were in your twenties when you did this?
yes,
and what influenced you to do that? what was the motivation?
well, it was the theory of it which induced me to do it and in a way I prefer not talking too much about it, not because I'm not in favor of researching it, but because I haven't done the research. so I can't say look, this has been proven by science which until then people didn't believe psychedelics worked. they would say that's placebo fantasy only when you show in science. but anyway, the hypothesis is that when we are born, as we all know, there's the fontanelle, which are holes which close soon and you can see the pulsation in the fontanelle hole of the baby you can see, and then the holes close, but the sutras, the bones, are quite flexible. so there's still the full pulsation.
the full systolic pulsation is happening then as you grow and the bones grow together slowly. slowly some of the pulsation is suppressed because it hasn't got the room to explode. so the hypothesis of trepanation, which has been done now the earliest skull found, is funny enough. the archaeologists at Chauvet told me near Chauvet they found a trepan skull of 25,000 years old and you can see if the person lived after the trepanation. the bone grows, yes, and softens.
so that's kind of I think I haven't been studying it for the last 20 years because I've been onto psychedelics too much, but I.
longed.
with.
religion, mysticism.
very often the skulls, which are trepanned, have a special burial. they are buried in a pot or with silk around them, either priest caste or royal caste or some thing. but they are very present in every culture which is interested not very present, but present and the biggest.
mass of trepanned skulls. funnily enough, I think it's on the German-Dutch border. I don't know why, but from what.
time period?
pre-history. I'm afraid my memory is back and I haven't been studying it lately, but the thing is, wherever you look, there's I mean the third eye, the thing in your picture the third.
eye.
I was told by a thing is a visualization of the third eye and one of the high.
whatever.
I can't quite think of the word. the high aims of Buddhism spiritually is by meditation opening your hole in the skull, and that's in beautiful old Tibetan art showing.
energy coming in and out of the hole in the head. so it's always been the priest. why I think the priest caste was associated with it? because I think that on the whole it was the priest. caste took the compounds to get high, whatever they were mushrooms or argot and the danger of getting high.
when you come down you have a bad time, maybe flip out. and I think it was probably observed that the people with a fractured skull or a wound, or whatever it was a hole in the head actually slightly kind of rose to the top in the village in the thing. they became the doctors or the shamans or.
it seems to have an advantage because, like in Mexico, skulls, everyone grows up with skulls. you know they have.
these
day of the dead skulls. they're not real.
no, right, well, I've seen. I mean because I was interested in, I've seen quite a lot of skulls. in fact I've even got one which is, I think it's, I can't quite remember, 400, 700 BC, an Irish chieftain. it's meant to be, and it's got actually six holes. and why anyone wants to do six holes, I have no idea.
but I.
think. I personally think that the change it happens with one hole. all you need is for the membrane to be able to expand on the heartbeat. and I think what the restoration at the point of trepanation is allowing, that expansion on the heartbeat to the full expansion of the systolic pressure which the child has. until it starts to close over kind of 13 onwards, the child comes down.
21 was average. the skull closes and that's often when the mental problems start after 21 psychosis, all of those things.
you're just at a slightly lower level in terms of energy for the brain and what I want to do. it's very easy research to do trepanation, because people are doing it in hospitals every day by the thousand brain operation. first you have to trepan the skull, so it's happening all the time, so we could very easily. actually, I work with some very top level scientists in Mexico and I want to get that study going again and particularly doing it for headaches, migraine, because it used to historically in my father's encyclopedia, which is whatever.
1912. I can't remember when it was something like that. it said trepanation, blah blah, been done throughout history and it is still currently being done, with apparent success, for the treatment of mental conditions, migraine and da, da. so until in the first world war they did the first lobotomy and that stopped trepanation as just an old wives tale. so in a sense they threw out the baby with the bath water, and I think that there is something.
it's quite easy to do, so I'm.
trying to find the possibilities and I really want to do this research.
with trepanation. funnily enough, years ago I was at burning man and I had a campaign. what was it? parlor parlor was an old friend of mine and he got a lot of rather important people to sign up that they wanted to be trepaned, and we were going to do you know, getting people trepaned in a research program, but it never happened. but what I want to say is that, for instance, Jamie, my husband, got trepaned, and how long.
ago did he do?
that looking for someone in Egypt and found a wonderful surgeon there who did it, who was very interested in the kind of mathematics of pyramids and things, and he had terrible headaches all his life. he lost a day or two a week on headaches after trepanation. he doesn't have headaches.
wow.
and I think it just gives back to the body and the brain that extra pulsation, which means I mean you have it from all that exercise. you do so constantly. you're getting that extra blood to the brain through your exercise. but for those of us who don't do all that exercise, it's good to have alternative ways of keeping the blood going.
that's got to be a big factor in the runner's high.
yeah,
because in runner's high they achieve these states of elevated consciousness, they're running.
yeah, I met one. I'm sure you've met plenty, but who runs? I think he said 140 or some enormous number, 100 miles or something. and he said at a certain point he had a breakthrough where he got into a kind of real altered state of consciousness. and I'm sure one day we can do all these things endogenously.
yeah,
I mean obviously that's what meditation is doing. it's training you to do your own way of getting high and monks and people. they productively spend 30 years of their life doing it, and I think that's wonderful. but for those of us who would like a quicker technique,
I think.
there's nothing wrong than learning to use a non-toxic substance.
sure.
to help us get up there.
yeah,
and so I think funny enough, I think the new. how I look on it, it's all about feeding the brain with enough energy, mitochondria working away to produce that mental cell energy so that we can keep our function close to the optimal. that's what we want, or anyway, not allowing it to drop too low, right, and that's what I think is the purpose, in a way, not the only purpose at all. I actually think psychedelics have value in a lot of different, non-specific areas. one is self-realization, experience, beauty, love of beauty, love of sound, love of people, love.
I think.
it increases compassion and empathy and nature, love and all of those rather good human qualities.
so I think it has the sensible use of the psychedelics, and by that I also mean cannabis. I mean the consciousness altering techniques.
and I think those people who do it purely by meditation are to be very much admired, because it's wonderful not to need an outside thing just to be able to do it within your own self, like a hot bath and a freezing bath or any of those techniques obviously change your level of consciousness by bodily reactions, but also, I think, the use of the psychoactive compounds. we can, you know, tune it, so it's a very, very.
carefully regulated. I mean self-regulated operation.
you can dial it in.
yeah, you can, you can control it, and I feel very grateful for many things in my childhood, but one of them was that I was my father's companion and he was a diabetic and he was an artist. so he didn't like his sugar level going high, because then you lose your sight and he's terrible going blind. so he always kept his sugar level low. so every day he was getting short of carbohydrates, falling in a ditch. if he was driving a car, he drove over the centre of roundabouts.
he did all sorts of funny things when he was short of carbohydrates and my job was putting the sugar in his mouth. so I got a very good relationship of knowledge of how the glucose level.
controls your level of concentration if you like, and how important it is. so when Bart, this Dutch scientist, told me his hypothesis of the psychedelics increasing the volume of blood in the brain capillaries and particularly if you're doing a cognitively demanding activity, you use a lot of glucose and the sugar level falls. therefore, you need to keep the sugar level normal by increasing the intake, and actually, all those years before it was legal, we lived on LSD. when I say live, I meant on big doses every day.
we really lived and I psychoanalyzed myself on myself. I was doctor and patient and I read the whole whatever Freud, Reich.
did you make notes? did you take a journal during that time?
not a journal, but I did diagrams of. you know, yeah, and I watched myself. I overcame, for instance. I was very tall as a child and I rather hated being taller than everyone else, so at about 13 I started smoking.
cigarettes behind the bushes. so I was pretty addicted. by the time I met Bart when I was 22 or 23, I can't remember I was pretty addicted and he said what a horrible habit it is was mine smoking. so then I said well, I'll give up, and so I took a trip of LSD with the intention I'll stop, it's a horrible habit, just give it up. and I never smoked another cigarette.
and so.
do you remember when you did that, when you took the LSD with the intention of giving up cigarettes? do you remember what happened to you? do you remember?
yeah, I do. I remember smoking a cigarette during the trip and thinking yuck, it was disgusting. I remember when I was a child. young child smoking made one feel a bit sick. one had to repress the feeling of sickness and then I realized gosh, it makes me feel sick.
yeah,
the smell is horrible.
it's making you sick, yeah.
so I gave up and 40 years later, whenever, when I was talking to Roland Giffith funny enough I had I think it was 10,000 dollars to do a research program. so I went to Roland. Roland at that time said I got this. he said what would you like to do? what would you suggest?
so I said well, what about overcoming nicotine addiction? I did that with LSD, we could do it with psilocybin, try, and that was the basis of the study which is, I mean I remember the first lot was 80% success rate. yeah, 80% success rate, I don't know what it is, but it's an extraordinarily successful because actually nicotine is more difficult to give up than heroin, because you're always repeating it.
so I experimented in those years, when we were living on LSD. we worked. that was our passion. we were studying the human brain and the self. and the t-shirt I've got for you is the motto know thyself.
and that was what one was doing trying to understand how we work better at that level and how we can enhance our working and.
I just think.
there's a lot more to be learned about how we can if we concentrate more on giving the brain the energy it needs to function optimally. how can we help that happen? obviously, exercise is one.
I've always slightly avoided the exercise.
being.
lazy.
but I have to say, you know, there are alternatives which can be used to the health of the person, and I think it's a tragedy.
that one can't talk about things more openly.
yes,
it's not easier to carry out research, because I know, having done it for now over 20 years, or 50 years trying to do research into psychedelics, how difficult it is, I mean, in order for me to do it, I realised I had to stop being Amanda Fielding. no letters after my name, no money. so who am I? and become a foundation. funny enough, it was a very clever conceptual artwork, because in England it's very kind of liberal England you pay whatever it is and you become a foundation thousand pounds, I think, or something.
suddenly you're a foundation, you don't have to have any money, you're just a foundation. registered in Scotland, registered, and then I got the the top scientists in the world, ten fifteen of them, including Albert Hofmann, but the more important ones were the established ones like.
I always forget his name. he was wonderful, Colin Blakemore, who was a kind of top neuroscientist in the world at that point, and he very much backed what we were going to start a centre at Oxford study, but that was going to cost four million and we couldn't get it and various other high level scientists. so I had a very impressive advisory board and so then I gave seminars series of seminars at the House of Lords, where I had presidents and blah, blah, blah, all the head of NIDA, head of the Russian people, and asked themselves if they could come. so 70 invited people came to discuss global drug policy. that made quite a difference.
that went on for 10 years or something, and then I went to the whatever.
national. I would call it.
anyway, I advised certain governments and things on drug policy. the United Nations went there regularly trying to change things so through.
this foundation.
yeah,
if you don't mind, when you had your own personal experience with trepanation, what was that like? what did it do for you?
yeah, it was sorry. can I jump on to that? sure, I remember. I mean no one wants to drill a hole in their head on Saturday or Sunday afternoon. I can tell you it is not something.
I'm a very cautious person and so I I had a deep interest in it, because I had a very deep understanding of the hypothesis of blood supply and I was interested in researching it.
and then um um.
my partner Joey Mellon. um, at that time he was very keen on trepanning himself, and he was second son, so he was a bit more casual cavalier about it than I was and so had quite a few mishots before.
he finally got through and um, funny enough, then I did notice a difference. and the difference is very subtle. you really have to know a person to notice it. but how I'd express it is it slightly lowers the neurotic characteristics. if you see what I mean they become, I mean they don't eliminate them in any way, but it lowers it.
and so, having seen the difference because Bart was trepanned before I knew him, so I never experienced a change. but when I saw the change in Joe I thought, well, it does make a difference. so I had thought I'd find a doctor. so I'd spent four years looking for a doctor to prepare me. um, and I had people who said they would, and then they said, oh, I've got a hole in his head, he would have given up one or.
you know. oh, it could be bad for my career and Harley Street if it came out or if you died, or you know whatever, and so it didn't happen. so then I thought well, I'm a sculptor, I'll sculpt my own skulls and see what happens. so I really studied it, because I'm a very, very cautious person and in London, strangely, the shop was called Down Brothers. so off Harley Street has all the instrumentation for trepanation.
very old shop actually, and charming staff there who'd show me in detail how you trepan, because I went in as an interested observer and so I learned how to do it very cautiously. there are three layers of bone and etc. etc. I learned how to do it. so I felt competent to do it and that took quite a long time deciding I was competent and confident I could.
do it. so I decided to make a film of it because I thought that would kind of separate me from the unpleasant of doing such a silly thing. and so I made. and funny enough, my great aunt just died and gave me 70 pounds and I bought a lovely little movie super 8 camera and set it up, and I had my beloved birdie always with me. so he was an observer of this thing and there was all sorts of stories which I won't waste the time.
but it was amazing because we were asked to a party by rather kind of guardian journalists, so top journalists in England, for the Saturday night. I had been planning on doing it on the Sunday, but I moved it forward, so I thought it would be good publicity for the movement if I.
moved it forward and then there was electricity strike in England. so if I hadn't moved it forward, the electricity would have been cut, which was just a kind of good little trick, beating fate to do it. so anyway, I did it very, very carefully with a hand trapan in the mirror. perfect little operation.
was it a drill?
electric drill, but I used a ball with a flat bottom so it couldn't damage the membrane, because obviously what one's frightened of is damaging the membrane surrounding the brain. I mean I don't want to go into detail with it at all, but all I can say I did it. I knew the second I was through because the second you're through there's no resistance and it had a flat bottom so it couldn't. I mean it's not something one wants to do at all, but it's kind of like people go skiing, people go horse riding. just the same danger.
you know, it's a danger. possibly infection is the only danger, and I always say no one should do it themselves. it's a foolish thing to do. but then, when I'd finished, I bandaged up.
we went out and had steak for dinner to replace the lost blood and then went to this party.
and the photograph, which I don't know if you know this birdie on my shoulder was the evening that came out of the super eight movie. so
I've seen the images.
yeah,
but I haven't seen. apparently you never released the video.
I never released it and the person who made the film actually, as always, conned one. so I'd forbidden to let the images out on public thing because I didn't want, I didn't want anyone doing it, and funny enough.
why did you not want anyone doing it?
because I don't think self-promotion is a good idea, but you did it, yeah, but I'm me.
you know, I took trouble not to and funny enough, then when I did an artwork in New York about it at PS1, because at that period I was trying to educate the world through art.
and I had this exhibition at PS1 of the slides enormous, great. it was like an Egyptian tomb. lovely, enormous room they gave me and.
apparently people were queuing up, including people like Warhol, and Bernardo Bertolucci couldn't get in blah blah. it was a kind of quite a hot movie at that point and people fainted. it said in the papers it was like ripe plum falling to the ground. but then 60 Minutes did a film of it, of me, and wanted to film me back at Bentley with Birdie, who was my pigeon, who was never in a cage, always free. and so they flew me home on Concord because I was pregnant with my oldest son, Rocky.
and to film me with Birdie and Birdie was very strong sense of justice and I'd broken the code of love by going away. so if I went away he punished me until the punishment had been done. so when they flew me back from Concord he wouldn't come down from the housetop anyway. they made this film. he was very pleased, very nice director, and then it was, as always when one did something which was well done, it was.
not allowed to go out because the lawyers said there would be epidemic people.
and the internal conversation of basically the ego calm down now. of course one cannot explain all of those things could happen anyway, just from relaxation of having finished it, blah, blah, blah. so what difference does it make? I would say it makes a slight difference. it's slightly like the energy.
I mean I watch children. children have that extra energy. you know they do those leaps and dances and play around and that energy.
adults don't. energy is the more difficult thing, and when I became 21 I'd had one of my trips to Egypt, where I lived very wild, and I thought I got bilharzia, which is the worm you get and drains your energy, and I went. when I got I was 21 I got myself tested thinking I'd caught it, but I hadn't. then I realized that that was adulthood. it's a slightly lower level and very often that's when people have their first schizophrenic experience or some mental thing.
after that it's a down, it's a slight down, there's a slight.
exuberance, and that's what I noticed after, but the difference is so slight I couldn't swear on it at all.
how long did the difference last?
well, you don't. you only notice the difference, you don't notice the change. do you see what I mean? yes, so now I can't say have I got any advantages? my hole closed?
is it open? I can't say.
have you ever got looked at to see if it's closed?
no, I tried to actually, and it was very difficult to do. I'd like to do that.
it's a very small.
hole, but it's all about the expression of the heartbeat and it takes half an hour. if, if it was shown to increase cranial compliance which is what I worked on with this professor, who was a leading professor in those things he thought yes, it increases cranial compliance and that's just a slightly healthier state to be in. so it takes half an hour to do it. in hospitals, the surgeon doesn't have to do it, it's a nothing operation.
so if that can slightly raise the level of energy going to the brain for the rest of the life it's a valuable tool.
but do you think that these people that have multiple holes in their head is there like a point of diminishing returns?
I should think they had big rain or some terrible thing which went on and tried to. I think something like that.
because I don't see the logic that says you only need one to get the expansion back. but that's why I actually don't talk about it now, because it sounds so crazy.
it's not good optics until you got it proven, which I actually seriously want to do, because what I do is research people with headaches.
because that's one of the things that all cultures who did it, one of the things they did it for, was headaches and insanity. in the old days they said it's letting devils out and the other indication is letting light in, because often people in the mythical tradition were trepanned, so I.
actually, before I hit the bucket, I would really like to have done that research, because maybe no one else will be motivated to do it.
right. has anyone been motivated to do self-trepanation that you're friends with or that you're?
yeah, I know quite a lot, not a lot, a few, I mean. and then they started saying oh would I? I certainly wouldn't trepan anyone, I wouldn't dream of it. do you know what I mean? see, that's why I found a very good surgeon, brain surgeon team in Mexico who did it.
he did it for certain people, but and people wrote back saying it had altered their life. you know, I think.
if I was asked do I think it has effect or not? I would say I wouldn't be humiliated if it didn't, but I think it does. that's my opinion. for instance, it changed my dream pattern after I'd done it. I used to have very anxious dreams, which very often were about birdie my beloved birdie getting killed somewhere after the trepanation.
I didn't have those anxious dreams, so that's something which I couldn't control anyway. I think it makes a difference, so I'm in favor, but we need to do the research.
yeah, it's a fascinating subject. it's just fascinating that it's existed for so long.
yes, and very much associated with religious practice, basically whatever you know, very often, funnily enough in Mongolia, some trepan skulls and nearby is a very beautiful. this is very early, I forget BC 700, maybe a little beautiful basket with cannabis, rather high THC cannabis in it. I mean I think they go together. the trepanation, you know, like in Mexico, there were lots of trepanations and they went with.
spiritual practices.
it's very fascinating to me that from the moment human beings have discovered altered states of consciousness, whenever that was, that it's always been a part of this desire to sort of escape the confines of modern consciousness or of natural consciousness.
yeah, it's to kind of slightly.
expand slightly.
get back the childhood.
yeah, joy, wonder,
yeah, joy wonder. I do think it's that, and I think it's still that, and I think that's a very healthy urge. yes, and I think, therefore, we should. I really seriously think we should do research on trepanation, which I can very easily do. it just needs ethical approval.
that's the problem.
do you think that it's warranted? do you think that the use of psychedelics and psychedelic therapy can replace that? that it's not necessary.
no, I don't think it replaces it. I think they're as we were in ancient times. they're complementary. they're both moving in the same direction of trying to increase the energy supply to the brain.
yeah,
basically, and I think that's very key for our future survival, because at the moment I think we're at a very
critical time because our artificial intelligence is getting greater than our own. yeah, etcetera, etcetera. there's all sorts of forces which, which kind of, build the danger up.
yeah,
so we need internal growth to balance that technological growth.
yeah, it's. it's such a strange contradiction that today, in a day where that growth is so necessary, these substances are so demonized. yes,
it's a tragedy and I really think it's a time, and America is a force which forced it upon us for all the wrong reasons, and we all know it and America knows it.
yeah, it was during the civil rights movement they were. they were trying to arrest the black panthers and the civil rights activists and all the anti-war activists, and that was one of the ways they could do it.
yeah, and it's the way to enter any country you want to, like Afghanistan or Latin America, or any country you couldn't go and raid and spray and kill and capture. you know it was wonderful, the CIA loved it and you know, and so it was.
which is so ironic considering that they did so many LSD experiments, yeah.
and then threw the people who were troublesome out of the window and said they wanted to fly. you know that was such a typical. I mean it's a tragedy. the history of altered states, I mean, like the what you call the midwives, used psychedelics to help stop bleeding. they realized the vasoconstrictive property of these compounds, so they were used in childbirth and the midwives were very often the people who were burnt.
for witchery. and the ironic thing is, when the witches were burnt, then the villagers got a plague. they called it the witches curse of St Vitus's dance, where you shake and then you finally die. and that's ergot poisoning, because the witches went out with their hats at the full moon and the hats would show the glow of the ergot from the light of the moon on the ergot.
how did the hats do?
that? they hid them. that's where the hat story came, because they collect the ergot by night, because it's phosphorescent.
from the.
moon and then the burning of the witches, which was part of the inquisition, basically.
then they had these awful plagues of St Vitus's dance, which was called the curse of the poor old witch who had been using their medication to help childbirth.
so it's quite ironic how the authorities translate it wrongly. I mean basically it was because the witch wasn't gathering the ergot off the wheat, so the villagers were eating the poison and therefore getting sick from the bread.
yeah, that was to me. one of the most fascinating things about the Salem witch trials is that they found out that there was a late frost and when they examined whatever crops they could find back then, they did find ergot in them, and they think that that was partially responsible for that whole hysteria.
yeah,
and it was very much intermingled with the Protestants and the inquisition between the religions, and the whole thing came at the same time.
yeah,
so there's been a kind of tragedy. I mean the point is those in power actually don't want other people taking these compounds, like the Americans didn't want their soldiers taking acid, because it made the soldiers say gosh, actually, I prefer to be in the park with my girlfriend than in some bloody wood far away getting shot. you know, it's pretty common sense.
yeah, they didn't want common sense.
yeah,
so it's a tragedy of the human fate. I mean the tragedy of humanity. us is that we've developed this compensatory mechanism which has made us the genius that we are and we can do all these brilliant things we do, but it also has made us this psychotic animal which is capable of great self harm, and somehow we need to balance it.
yeah,
and that's why I rather like the phrase the.
psychedelic age, in the sense I don't mean everyone taking psychedelics and having a party. I mean learning the art of how do you control your level of consciousness and then how do you control that level so you can keep your concentration. I don't go in and put Leary, you know, turn on and drop out. I say turn on and drop in.
you know.
do be creative.
yeah, that was the problem with Leary that his philosophy and what he was espousing to people was. people felt like it was dangerous to civilization, that people were going to ruin their lives, they were going to drop out and they were going to become part of these hippie communes and.
yes, it was all bad publicity badly played.
yeah, and in those early years, in the whatever mid 60s, when I started taking psychedelic seriously, we took it for working. I mean the Stones would be playing half a mile away from our flat where I lived in London. we didn't bother to go to them because we were having such fun doing our work studying the brain on acid. do you know who gave my bother that thing?
yeah,
so I think that you and some other people know how incredibly inspiring for work the use of psychedelics can be. you can see things you never saw before, because suddenly having more of the brain simultaneously active, as our images showed, the two you can see. this is the ordinary brain. this is the brain on psychedelics. I've got those beautiful things came from our study, the circus.
do you know the other ones? I've got a picture of it in my bag. you can see the difference in the brain.
and that can be used for whatever you're doing, for whatever creative, thoughtful process. you've suddenly got all that extra brain power to dedicate towards what you feel passionate about.
it's a superpower for stand-up comedy, for stand-up comedy. so many of my comedian friends use it to write.
yes, absolutely, and I have an intimate relationship with Jamaica and the deep divers. there's someone on the beach who said the one who wins that prize is his best friend and she can stay down there much longer than the best friend can because he smokes very heavily before he can breathe for a much longer period, you know. so I think, whatever you do, you can. you've got more passion, more energy. so that's the adult.
brain there on the left.
on the left
what are these lines representing?
it's connectivity between different centers in the brain. so this is when you're on a psychedelic, it doesn't matter if it's psilocybin or LSD. when you're on, you've suddenly got this much more intimate connection between the different parts of the brain, and so I think it needs training to learn to.
control that increased. it's like riding an incredibly powerful horse you have to learn how you control it. the brain is the same thing. if you just go and take that, you can have a wonderful experience, looking at the stars or having a love affair or listening to music. all of those things can be wonderful.
but if you want to use it for cognitive discipline, which actually uses a lot of glucose because it's very late in development, so it's not part of the autonomic nervous system. it's a part of the cognitive nervous system which burns glucose to get the energy to concentrate, and so that's the importance of taking the vitamin C and keeping the sugar level normal.
Can I ask you a question about that? What about ketones? What about the like? I know many people. they get on a ketogenic diet and their brain produces ketones and they feel like intellectually, that's a superior fuel.
I think probably it is a very good fuel. yeah, I think there's a lot more. we'll constantly be learning about how you can energize the brain in better, healthier ways, but I think a secret, a basic secret which I felt feel I was given the keto in 1966, when I learned about how one can increase the blood supply to the brain and therefore give it all that extra energy to do have all the brain functioning. and then it's a whole new art. how do you use that?
productively. but I mean that's like being a magician. brilliant magicians aren't? they have to practice, so it's a skill. I always say to take psychedelics you have to be much more disciplined than not to take them.
it's much easier not to take them in a sense.
I agree with that. I think people have a misconception about what you're doing when you're taking psychedelics or when you're taking including cannabis, because I think the common misconception is that you are avoiding reality and that you are somehow giving yourself a crutch. I don't think it's that at all, and I think that with discipline, the use of psychedelics, with discipline, it allows you to experience these states and get something from them and pull something from them and apply it to normal consciousness.
I totally agree. it gives you an extra power, like riding a more powerful horse. you've got in your brain power. there's more there, and so I mean I find, if I'm in a really beautiful place, if I'm in Egypt or all those wonderful places with incredible beauty, it's almost an assault to the place not to be at your optimum.
I say that all the time. I say that because when I go to art galleries, I never go to an art gallery sober.
no, I quite agree.
I always get high.
no point.
I also feel that I mean people don't like this, but I'm going to say it anyway I like to be high around my children, because when I'm around my children, I'm fascinated by them, and things that maybe would be frustrating, perhaps if I was sober instead, are charming, and I find them interesting and I'm fascinated by their mindset and talking to them.
and you have much more in common with them.
because you're.
on the same wavelength, so you stay.
in contact.
with them. I adored having my children and they were the greatest pleasure, and I remember being at one of those conferences in Palenque, or something psychedelic conference, and I think it was Terence McKenna's wife actually was giving a lecture or giving a talk very nicely, and how, when she was pregnant, she gave up everything and I couldn't. I hate public speaking. I remember putting up my finger because I wanted to say well, actually, when I was pregnant I didn't, because I actually think it's good for my health. I've taken enough of it that I really think it's actually.
good, it's not like alcohol or cigarettes. no, and my.
children. I'm proud of my children and you know they are children of parents who understood the benefits of altered states of consciousness, yeah.
I've had those conversations with my children, my youngest.
who are.
13 and 15, and they're at that age where you know. children want to experiment with alcohol, they want to experiment with drugs, and I have conversations with them about ones that you should avoid and the dangers of things that may be contaminated with fentanyl and that these organic compounds, as long as you know the source that you're getting them from, whether they're psilocybin or particular marijuana, they're not what everybody is telling you they are.
and that's what's criminal. and I do think criminal about the government, because all the governments, the knowledge is out there these are non-toxic, the ones which are non-toxic and, like in England, people on the mass can only buy. the illegal market in cannabis is taken over by certain breeders who breed only rubbish stuff. an insensible person would never dream of smoking very high THC cannabis, which is shit, and it's not good for young people to smoke that. and it's the authorities which are forcing the young people into that if they choose to smoke.
and I did a paper for I designed for the government, saying that if they as I hope they do regulate cannabis, they should make very low tax for THC CBD balance and, as it gets more and more strong, tax it more, because that will incline people to stop smoking this extremely high THC.
I mean.
not for grown ups who know how to handle it.
but I.
think it can be dangerous.
I believe so too, and I think there's also some.
LSD is a wonderful creation because it's non-toxic. it's so controllable. you know if the governments were doing what a government should do, which is basically looking after their citizens like a good mother or father, looks after their children and therefore teaching them what they need to know, like our children.
I'm never frightened my children might become addicted because they know they're from an earlier stage. they know.
don't.
don't you know, silly?
right, and also they benefit from you discussing, like your addiction to cigarettes and how you got over it, yeah.
and they saw how, when one did when it was legal you see compounds one was productive with it and it increased one's passion. I mean I'm a workaholic, so
as am I yeah, and I'm a user, yeah, so
it makes one want to achieve the work one can.
do yes, yes, I'm fascinated with American automobile design. I'm a, I collect old cars.
yeah,
and there's a time period between 1965 and 1970 where there's some of the most amazing cars.
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