[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.