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On a bright May morning in 1953, the British psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond prepared a strange concoction in the kitchen of a Hollywood home. The drink was for Aldous Huxley, the prophetic novelist behind 1932's Brave New World.
Explores how psychedelics reveal brain processes constructing reality, based on neuroscience and historical insights.
Key Takeaways
- Psychedelics do not distort reality but reveal the brain's construction of it.
- The brain functions as a predictive organ maintaining homeostasis and minimizing surprise.
- The free energy principle provides a unifying theory for understanding brain function and psychedelics.
- Cultural and historical contexts shape the use and understanding of psychedelics.
- Meditation can help sustain the self-transcendent states induced by psychedelics.
Summary
- Aldous Huxley's 1953 mescaline experience inspired his theory that the brain acts as a reducing valve limiting perception.
- Huxley predicted psychedelics could lead to a cultural religious revolution by enabling everyday mysticism.
- Despite this, society today resembles Huxley's dystopia more than his utopian vision.
- New research, including Karl Friston's free energy principle, explains how living systems maintain order against entropy.
- The brain's primary role is homeostasis—maintaining internal stability through predictive models.
- The free energy principle mathematically describes how organisms minimize surprise to survive.
- Psychedelics affect the brain by altering these predictive processes, revealing how reality is constructed.
- The video explores traditional consciousness-altering techniques and their relation to psychedelics.
- It discusses the 1960s psychedelic rediscovery and its political and cultural implications.
- Meditation is presented as a way to integrate psychedelic insights into everyday life and death.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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A couple months earlier, Huxley had read about the research trials Osmond was conducting with a naturally occurring hallucinogen called mescaline, and the drug piqued his curiosity. Huxley was interested in testing a theory he'd been developing that the human brain was a
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kind of reducing valve protecting us from a more expansive experience that he called mind at large. He wrote a letter to Osmond who was more than happy to let him be a guinea pig. So it came to pass
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that Aldous Huxley swallowed 4/10 of a gram of mescaline and sat down to wait for the results. For an hour or so nothing much happened, just dancing lights and geometric patterns. Huxley was starting to get impatient, but then all at once he was gripped by a
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fiery panic. The scaffolding of ordinary perception began to dismantle and he suddenly felt that this was all going too far. When he later described what seized him in that moment, Huxley turned to religious language.
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The fear, he wrote, is due to the incompatibility between man's egoism and the divine purity, between man's self-aggravated separateness and the infinity of God.
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For a few agonizing minutes, he teetered on the brink of madness, between the heaven of presence and the hell of distraction.
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But the last traces of ego finally released. And as he walked outside into the garden, he saw what Adam had seen on the morning of creation. The miracle moment by moment of naked existence.
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For the rest of the afternoon, Huxley was absorbed in a mystic vision. Time vanished into a perpetual present.
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Flowers pulsed with undecipherable mystery. And all throughout, he kept repeating, "This is how one ought to see." Eventually, the trip wore off and Huxley returned to what he called that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as being in one's right
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mind. But the trip made an indelible impression and Huxley would spend the rest of his life trying to make sense of its implications.
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When he documented his experience in 1954's The Doors of Perception, Huxley concluded that the urge to transcend self-consciousness was a principal appetite of the soul. He came to believe that the widespread availability of this experience through psychedelics would
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lead to a religious revolution in the culture. This is the pharmacological revolution which has taken place that we have now powerful mind-changing drugs which physiologically speaking are almost costless.
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On the eve of the 1960s, he made a prophecy that psychedelics would transform religion from an activity mainly concerned with symbols into an everyday mysticism underlying ordinary life.
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Seventy years later, that outbreak of everyday mysticism still eludes us. And in many ways, the world more closely resembles Huxley's Brave New World than any utopia.
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But thanks to groundbreaking new research, we're finally beginning to understand what he experienced that day and what a true culture of self-transcendence might mean.
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This film will attempt to explain that research and what it implies for the history and future of psychedelics.
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We'll begin the journey by describing a cutting-edge theory that's revolutionizing our understanding of the brain.
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We'll go on to explore how that theory sheds light on the problems of the ego and how traditional cultures alleviated those problems through various techniques of altering consciousness.
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Next, we'll explain the attempt to recapture those methods with the rediscovery of psychedelics in the 1960s and see what neuroscience can tell us about the politics of the psychedelic experience.
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Finally, we'll discuss the recent rebirth of psychedelic research and see how meditation can help us carry the freedom of the psychedelic experience into ordinary life and death.
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Huxley's book drew its title from a line by the poet William Blake that if the doors of perception were cleansed, then everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. And throughout his account, he returns to the experience of a finite
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mind threatening to dissolve in the face of infinity. To understand how psychedelics have this dramatic effect on our sense of self and world, we have to go back to the beginning. To understand how selves and their worlds come into being. Our story
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begins not with a creator god or a paradisal garden, but with entropy, chaos, the fact that things fall apart.
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The concept of entropy comes out of physics and it measures how much disorder or unpredictability there is in a system. One way of describing it is that entropy measures how improbable it is that a molecule can be found in a
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particular region. The entropy of an ice cube, for example, is low because the molecules are tightly packed. The entropy of a liquid is higher and the entropy of a gas higher still because the molecules are more and more randomly
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dispersed. The greater the entropy, the more unpredictable the system. According to the second law of thermodynamics, entropy in a closed system always increases over time. Indeed, it's why the arrow of time only flows in one direction. It's why ash doesn't become
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wood, eggs don't unscramble, and a drop of ink placed in water tends to disperse. If, however, I placed a drop of ink in some water and then to your amazement you saw it gather itself up then relaxed a bit and gather itself up
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again like it was breathing, as if time was reversed. You would say there's something very peculiar about that drop of ink. It's almost as if it was living.
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This is Karl Friston, the most cited neuroscientist in the world and the most notoriously difficult to understand.
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Friston's work sheds light on the mystery of how living systems self-organize and avert the second law, how order emerges from chaos. His claim to fame is something called the free energy principle, a general mathematical rule that all living systems from cells to
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societies have to obey. This rule is what holds us together in the face of the infinite and it provides the key to understanding how psychedelics work in the brain.
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If you think about the first duty of a brain, why do we have brains? Why does any organism have a brain? It's not to write poetry or to do neuroscience. It's to keep the body alive. For a system to
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be alive, it first has to be a thing. For there to be some kind of boundary between that system and its environment.
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What distinguishes living systems is that they actively work to maintain this boundary over time. They harvest energy and information from their environments in order to resist dissipation by the second law and keep the entropy of their internal states to a minimum. In
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biological terms, this is known as homeostasis. Think about it like a collection of internal thermostats that measure and adjust the various dials of bodily regulation. If you want to maintain the physiology of the body within certain states that are compatible with survival
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like our heart rate can't go too far up, it can't go too far down. It has to vary within limits. Our blood pressure the same. A good way to do that is to have a kind of predictive model of the body
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from the inside. Just like a thermostat, homeostasis works by having a preferred state, then measuring deviations from that state and acting to return to the preferred range. One of the key insights behind the free energy principle is that
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you can think of these preferences as expectations because they represent evolution's best guesses about what it takes to survive within a niche. In this sense, you might say that a fish has gills because it expects to find itself
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in water. Thinking about it this way allowed Friston to write down a simple equation that describes the imperative driving all living systems. It turns out that there's a very general way to think about systems that do this, especially
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in biology, which is that they minimize surprise and not
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mathematical information theory sense is unexpected data. Remember that entropy indexes the unpredictability of a system. More specifically, the more entropy there is in a system, the greater the potential for surprise in each measurement of that system, the greater the possible gap
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between expectation and reality. The free energy principle says that if organisms sample their internal and external states and work to minimize how surprising those samples are, then over time they'll minimize entropy and continue to inhabit their expected states. The way humans implement this
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principle is called active inference because surprise can be minimized in two ways. either by changing one's expectations to make them better fit the world or by changing the world to make it better fit one's expectations.
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This is a way of sort of inaugurating a self-fulfilling expectation of continuing to stay alive.
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The brain's primary job, whether in action or perception, is managing entropy. And this allows us to see the deep roots of Huxley's reducing valve theory. If we didn't dramatically filter the reality we perceive, we'd quite literally fall apart.
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It's a trade-off. Adapt too little to the environment and you can't anticipate it well enough to survive. Adapt too much and there's no longer a boundary between you and the world.
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All living systems are engaged in this delicate balance between separation and connection, between hanging together and falling apart, between order and chaos.
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The world of experience as it presents itself to us is literally and not metaphorically complex beyond our capacity to understand. And that means that people deal in a real sense on an ongoing basis with the infinite. And I
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believe that that fact is the reason why religious experience is essentially endemic to mankind. It's a human universal. And it's not because people believe. It's because human existence as such consists of a confrontation between the finite and the infinite. And
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religious systems merely take that into account. So we've started to learn something about the basic existential situation that Huxley's trip brought him in touch with. But you still might be wondering what all this biology has to do with the
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psychedelic experience. Well, the themes of order, chaos, and the balance between them will take us much further than you might imagine.
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It turns out that the free energy principle lines up with one of our deepest theories about how the brain generates conscious experience and how psychedelics can transform it.
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Our perception of the world seems so natural, we just take it for granted. You wake up in the morning, you open your eyes, and a world just appears. For most of us, most of the time, perception feels passive, as though the world
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simply flowed into our minds through the windows of our eyes. Based on this intuition, we might assume that the brain works something like this. A sensory stimulus arrives, travels up through a few layers of processing, and gets spit out at the end as the world we
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perceive. But there are problems with this view. For one thing, the data we get from our senses are far too sparse to account for the vivid world we experience. For another, we're subject to all sorts of strange illusions,
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suggesting that our minds play a much more active role in perception. What color do you see?
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This is very obviously white and gold. I don't get the golden white. I don't get the blue and black. When you can't believe your eyes, what can you believe?
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brain. Brain motivated by examples like this, neuroscientists have long thought about perception as a kind of inference, a statistical best guess based on the data we perceive. Starting with this idea that the brain is locked inside this bony vault of the skull, trying to
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figure out what's out there in the world. Really, what it's trying to do is infer the most likely cause of these sensory signals given what they are and given its prior expectations or beliefs about what's going on. This is a classic
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expression of what in mathematics is called basian inference. The mathematically optimal way to do this kind of inference comes from the Reverend Thomas Bae, a 16th century statistician and philosopher. Bae discovered a simple formula to describe how to update our beliefs or priors
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based on new evidence. The idea of BA's theorem is it's a way of taking what you know now and updating it to what you should believe next given some new data.
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Neuroscientists have developed this into something called the basian brain hypothesis. The idea that the brain uses something like BA's theorem to update its beliefs based on sensory evidence.
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There's just one problem. Calculating BA's theorem exactly would require us to consider every possible cause of every sensation. We'd be paralyzed by even the smallest update. Here again, we encounter the limits of our finitude.
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The fact of our affinity is again no academic issue. It's it's central to the nature of our being and we're forced to deal with it on an ongoing basis.
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To solve this problem, evolution devised an ingenious workaround that allows us to approximate basian inference in a much more efficient way. Here's how it works. Instead of starting with the data of our senses and building to a guess
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about what's out there in the world, we actually start with a prediction of what's out there and a model of what we would perceive if that prediction were correct.
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So that's called the generative model. It's a kind of a simulation of what I would be seeing if it were in fact my best guess.
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These are called top- down predictions because they come from the inside out rather than the outside in.
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We don't passively perceive our worlds. We actively generate them at each level of the perceptual hierarchy. We compare these top down predictions with the sensory data coming from the bottom up.
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Then the discrepancy or error signal is used to update subsequent predictions. After the first layer, only the error signal gets passed up the chain, allowing the brain to save precious energetic resources. The fundamental idea is that you can approximate basian
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inference by the brain continually generating predictions about the causes of the information that it gets and then using sensory data to update these predictions. The sensory data here is treated as a prediction error. It's the difference between what the brain
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expects and what it gets. This theory is called predictive processing and it's gaining increasing currency in neuroscience.
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But the strange implication of this view is that the ordinary world we perceive is far closer to a psychedelic experience than we tend to imagine.
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What I am perceiving is in fact my internal simulation, my internal model, but constrained so that it is as close as possible to the few bits of sensory data that I actually get. The term I like to use for this is
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that perception is a kind of controlled hallucination. If this picture of minimizing the gap between expectation and reality sounds familiar, it's because it is. The math behind predictive processing turns out to be exactly the same as the free
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energy principle, indicating a deep continuity between life and mind. Just as the integrity of our bodies depends on minimizing surprise through homeostasis, the integrity of our minds depends on minimizing prediction error.
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Consciousness like life inhabits a middle ground between order and chaos. This is exactly the thesis behind a seminal paper by Robin Khard Harris, a leading figure in the field of psychedelic neuroscience. Inspired by the free energy principle, Karheart
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Harris argues that different states of consciousness can be placed on a spectrum based on the richness or entropy of spontaneous brain signals.
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And then the entropic brain hypothesis says that that richness will couple to it will be correlated with the richness of content of conscious experience.
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Another inspiration for the paper was the psychedelic experience and in particular the idea that psychedelics might loosen the reducing valve associated with ordinary waking consciousness. Carheart Harris and his colleagues predicted that the vastness and intensity of a psychedelic trip
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would correlate with the entropy of the brain state. Both the content of conscious experience will become richer, more dynamic and bigger, more capacious, more stuff. And the activity, the spontaneous brain activity will move in a way that's related to that. So it will
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go up, the entropy will go up. And this is exactly what they found across a wide variety of psychedelics.
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It's possible to place other states on the spectrum as well. Deep sleep and seditive drugs actually represent an excess of top- down order. And just as with life, move too far in either direction and consciousness disappears.
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In the middle of the spectrum is something known as the critical point at which the system is optimally poised between order and chaos. And it's here, as the system teeters on the brink of dissolution, that entirely new levels of
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complexity begin to emerge. Criticality refers to certain properties that you'll see in certain complex systems when they inhabit what we call a critical point or critical zone.
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Criticality isn't unique to brains. You see it throughout the natural world during phase transitions. Think of a sand pile in the midst of an avalanche or water as it transitions from liquid to gas. In these moments, systems balance the dynamism of a chaotic system
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with the robustness of an orderly one. And this allows them to be maximally sensitive to perturbations while remaining stable overall. To see what this might mean in the brain, imagine a few different ways you might react to a
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piece of music. In the first, you hear a note and it falls flat. No memories, no emotions. This is what might happen if the neural signal fizzled out prematurely before it could spread to other areas of the brain.
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Now imagine that you hear the note and are immediately hurled into an ecstatic vision culminating with an epileptic seizure. This is what would happen if the signal propagated chaotically with each brain area wired up to every other.
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Finally, imagine that you hear the note and it triggers a memory from childhood, filling you with longing and nostalgia.
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Soon, a creative impulse strikes and you rush to compose a melody of your own.
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This is what might happen with the optimal wiring of a brain operating at criticality. As one scientist put it, near the critical point, information flows easily, computations are most fil, and the brain is exquisitly sensitive to inputs. Around the critical point, there
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is a narrow passage that opens to an expanse of complexity and emergence that is wider than the sky and deeper than the sea. The secret to such efficient information processing is what's called scale-free or fractal organization. This means that the same structure of a
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single hub node connected to multiple disperate nodes repeats itself at multiple hierarchical scales. Like a simple algorithm that applies here at this really bitty scale and jump up uh order of magnitude and it's the same rule and jump up an order of
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magnitude. You could see the same pattern cuz it's the same rule. Near the top of the hierarchy are regions like the default mode network which encode deep prior like the ego or sense of self.
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Scale-free organization allows such regions to integrate information from across the brain, keeping the ego flexible and adaptive long term. As we'll see a bit later, visiting critical states may be necessary for healthy hierarchy more generally in the brain
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and beyond. But it turns out that the ordinary waking consciousness of modern humans is slightly subcritical, slightly biased toward excessive order. And to understand why we have to see how the modern ego first evolved.
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In addition to the free energy principle, Carard Harris also draws on older less fashionable ideas to explain the psychedelic experience. In particular, the depth psychology of Sigman Freud. At the turn of the 20th century, Freud was attempting to explain
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the peculiar neurosis that afflicted modern people. In 1929's civilization and its discontents, he argued that the modern ego was increasingly struggling to reconcile the instinctive impulses of the id with the pressures of societal expectation represented by the superego.
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The greater the mismatch between cultural values and natural impulses, the more the individual was forced to repress into the unconscious.
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In the dreams and psychotic visions of his patients, Freud believed he was seeing the manifestations of the repressed unconscious. And he noticed a parallel between these states and the thinking of children and archaic humans.
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He came to believe that ego consciousness must have been a secondary process that developed a top a more fundamental mode of being that he called the primary process. Carard Harris believes he was on to something. primary consciousness in Freudian meta-sychology
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was the quality of consciousness of like protottypical humans and that's a fascinating thought like at what point in our evolution did we inflect into ego consciousness it's not a gradual continuous thing it seems but a very rapid thing that happened
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Harris believes that the ego has its origins in the expansion of the neoortex that came with human evolution This change brought with it a massive increase in entropy. That is in the repertoire of possible states the brain could inhabit.
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The fantastical imaginative cognition we see in children and early humans represents our earliest attempt to make use of this new brain power. The basic idea would be that the brain and in in the case of human beings a strange
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brain, an inflated brain is modeling an inflated amount of the world. But more possibility also meant more risk of detachment from reality. So at some point in our history, ego consciousness developed to constrain this newfound entropy to bring our
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inflated capacities under control. Many people have have speculated that it was something about controlling our food sources through agriculture, the so-called, you know, agricultural revolution. And so that's interesting to think on an anthropological level that it was control that changed us in that
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direction. And then you know what a crazy controlling species we we've become. Despite the increased power it gave us, ego consciousness was a mixed blessing.
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It brought with it the knowledge of mortality, the shame of social judgment, and the burden of planning for the future. In Huxley's language, it's the source of the self- aggravated separateness that alienates us from the experience of the divine.
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The story of Adam and Eve, as far as I can tell, is the story of the coming of self-consciousness to mankind. And there's a real cost to that. I mean, part of the cost is separation from the pure and unadulterated flow of animal
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life. And I believe that people suffer from that absence of flow continually. While we don't know for certain when this fall into ego consciousness occurred, Carard Harris believes that its consequences can be seen in the functions of the default mode network.
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This network has been correlated with rumination, mind wandering, and the maintenance of the narrative self.
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Importantly, activity in the DMN also dramatically decreases on psychedelics. In the throws of the psychedelic experience, as the ego dissolves and reconstitutes itself, one can relive the anguish of its initial development. And there's no doubt that many religious
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ideas in some way relate to this domain of experience. For instance, one could say that to recoil from the beatotific vision is to be cast into hell.
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Alternately, one could say that one gets forced out of the Garden of Eden and then one is left wandering this desiccated world of egoity filled with fear and craving and confusion.
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But it turns out that the human brain comes equipped with a system for dealing with the pathologies of the ego, a kind of psychological escape hatch that allows us to return to the earlier, more flexible mode of consciousness. And it's
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exactly this system on which the classic psychedelics operate. So we know that psychedelics hijack uh a certain neurom modulatory system in the brain, the serotonin system. And there's a particular aspect of the serotonin system that does have high expression in
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what I'd call recent or new brain. So this is brain that is disproportionately expanded in our species.
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Drugs like LSD, psilocybin, measculine, and DMT all work on something called the 5HT2A receptor system, a network of receptors in the brain that interact with the neurotransmitter serotonin.
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This system is especially prevalent in the neoortex, the very region that ego consciousness developed to constrain.
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It usually comes online under conditions of prolonged stress or deprivation. Think of a hunter who hasn't eaten in days or an office worker on the verge of a nervous breakdown. And its purpose is to bring about dramatic transformation
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in the moments when we most need it. Adversity, maybe even lifethreatening adversity can turn on, if you want, um, adaptability or plasticity, the ability to change. And that makes logical sense.
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If one's life is in danger, then you might say something has to give. Activating this system can induce what Carheart Harris calls pivotal mental states, periods of radical plasticity in which our most fundamental assumptions are up for grabs. In the best case,
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these states can lead to spiritual epiphies. In the worst, they spiral into psychosis. But throughout our history, humans have learned to harness these states to bring about transformation.
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voluntarily before disaster strikes. Fasting, extreme temperatures, and of course, psychedelics have all been leveraged in a wide array of cultures for profound healing and transformation.
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Even the ancient Greeks, famous for their skepticism and rationality, understood the importance of these kinds of states. A famous example is the so-called mysteries of elusis, a long-standing fertility ritual at the heart of Greek culture.
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The specifics of the ritual were kept secret on pain of death. But we know that it reenacted the myth of the abduction of Pphanie, daughter of Demiter, goddess of agriculture by Hades, king of the underworld.
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And according to Brian Murescu, author of the immortality key, the drink at the center of the mysteries may have contained Urgot, a psychedelic fungus similar to LSD.
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For the Greeks, using urgot infected grain in their sacrament may have symbolized the harmony of the wild and the cultivated, of nature and culture, chaos and order.
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After drinking the potion, initiates would be led through a right with three phases, retracing Deer's journey to the underworld to retrieve her daughter.
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The descent, which began as the ego dissolving effects of the wine, kicked in. the search which culminated in a confrontation with the goddess and the revelation of divine secrets and the ascent symbolizing the reunion of deer with Pphanie and the return of a
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bountiful spring. The function of the ritual according to one scholar was to confer immortality upon the initiates and to elevate man from the human sphere to the divine by undergoing a psychic death and rebirth. The initiates at Elusus not
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only brought themselves back into harmony with the cycles of nature, but freed themselves to lead happier, more carefree lives.
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But after a thousand years, the mysteries were eventually threatened by the rise of the Christianized Roman Empire. There were different attempts to wipe it off the map. And in 364, uh the emperor Valentinian, he essentially outlaws all nocturnal celebrations
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because these things are always at night. In a lastditch attempt to save the mysteries, a Roman prefect attempted to warn the emperor about the cost of losing this sacred experience. And this guy Praictatus is recorded as saying, "Valentinian, please don't shut this
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down. I'm an initiate. I've been to Elusus. I've I've drunk the potion. I've seen the goddess. Please do not eliminate this." Elus is the one thing that holds the entire human race together. He said he said if you get rid
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of elusis life for us will become a biotos which in Greek means unlivable. It wasn't just about Greek existence. It was about human existence. There was something happening at Elusus with that potion with this beatotific vision that literally held civilization together
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like glue for the ancient Greeks and democracy, the arts, the sciences, everything else was an offshoot of that experience. Elusus was the foundation.
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But ban them they did and western religion and culture would develop with a stable separate ego very much intact.
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Mainstream Christianity would maintain a sharp division between creator and creation. Enlightenment rationalism would prop up a cartisian distinction between subject and object.
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Science and technological modernity were in many ways a triumph of the rational ego. But these same forces would eventually bring us to the brink of destruction.
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By the time Freud was writing in the early 20th century, you might say something had to give. And as if on Q, psychedelics returned to the scene.
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On April 19th, 1943, a decade before Huxley's fateful measculine trip, a Swiss chemist named Albert Hoffman became the first person to trip on LSD.
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Hoffman had actually synthesized the compound 5 years earlier while researching Urgot for Sando's laboratories, but he'd shelve the drug after failing to find anything of interest. It was only what he'd later describe as a peculiar presentiment that induced him to give LSD25 another try.
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He decided to ingest what he thought was a conservative dose of 250 micrograms. And as the drug worked its way into his system, he set off on a bike ride home.
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What happened next will by now be familiar, though it certainly wasn't to Hoffman. The world around him grew menacing. time was distorted and he feared that he might go insane.
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But the terror eventually gave way to gratitude and satisfaction which persisted into the following day.
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After Hoffman persuaded his incredulous colleagues about his experience, the first wave of psychedelic research soon began.
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Among the earliest investigators was Humphrey Osmond, who began studying the effects of LSD and measculine in the early 1950s. Osman would even tripit a British MP on the BBC in 1955.
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I'm feeling perfectly fit at the moment and the same as I ever am and I'll take the drug now.
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Though the footage was eventually deemed too controversial to air and it was Osmond in a 1956 letter to Huxley who first coined the term psychedelic.
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Meanwhile, others were investigating outside the laboratory. In 1955, an ethnomiccologist named R. Gordon Wassan traveled to Mexico to study the religious use of the psychoactive salosi mushroom. There he became the first westerner to participate in a mazitec mushroom ritual with the shaman Maria
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Sabina. The trip was documented in a life magazine photo essay, the popularity of which sent a swarm of seekers to South America in search of the psychedelic experience. One of those seekers was a Harvard psychologist named Timothy Liry, who first tried the
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mushroom on a trip to Quavaka in 1960. I learned more about my brain and its possibilities and I learned more about psychology in the 5 hours after taking these mushrooms than I had in the preceding 15 years of studying doing
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research in psychology. When he returned to Harvard, he initiated a research program known as the Harvard psilocybin project along with a colleague named Richard Alpert.
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The group conducted a number of pioneering studies, but soon came under scrutiny for their unorthodox methods, including giving psychedelics to undergraduates. Alpert and Liry were both fired in 1963, but by that point, psychedelics were already taking root as a cultural
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phenomenon. For the budding counterculture, psychedelics appeared to remedy all of the afflictions of the post-war American mind. Where the dominant culture offered conformity alienation and disenchantment, psychedelics shattered conventions, melted boundaries, and provided a shortcut to spiritual experience. In short, they offered an
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escape from the perennial burden of an overbearing ego. The explosion of psychedelics also coincided with an influx of Eastern religious ideas into the West. unsettling more than 1500 years of Christian hegemony. Many look to Eastern claims about the elucoriness
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of the self in order to explain and integrate their psychedelic experiences. This experience could have happened to you that you no longer feel yourself and what you are experiencing to be separated. The Beatles even briefly renounced psychedelics to travel to
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India and study transcendental meditation. Richard Alpert changed his name to Rahm Das and became a disciple of the guru named Kuroli Baba.
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But Liry stayed in America and took a different approach. For him, the implications of the psychedelic experience were not just spiritual but political. And he came to believe that the social order itself was an obstacle to spiritual experience. The only
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solution was turn on, tune in, and drop out. Don't politic. Don't vote. These are old men's games. Impotent and scenile old men that want to put you onto their old chess games of war and power. Drop out.
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Get back in tune with God's harmony. Surround yourself with beauty and sacred objects. You can't get caught in the conforming wrote lockstep which we call American society.
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Liry was embraced by the counterculture and became increasingly threatening and hostile to the establishment. He even joked that LSD might stand for let the state dissolve.
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From the point of view of contemporary neuroscience, Liri's quip was actually more apt than it might initially seem.
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If you think of the functional organization of the brain as a kind of internal government, then the effect of psychedelics could be compared to a kind of anarchy, collapsing hierarchies and liberating repressed information.
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Robin Carheart Harris explores this analogy explicitly in a paper titled Reebus and the anarctic brain.
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The so-called reebus model which is relaxed beliefs under psychedelics. The paper focuses on something called precision waiting a parameter in the predictive processing model that determines which signals get more priority in the meeting of top down and bottom up information. You can think of
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it like certainty or confidence. The more confidence you have in a prior, the more resistant it is to updating.
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Conversely, the more confidence you have in sensory information, the more power it has to update highle prior. The idea with reebus is that under psychedelics, the precision waiting of our internal models, these two things in a handshake, models assumptions beliefs hypotheses
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versus data, the precision of the models will dial down. According to the reebus theory, psychedelics work by relaxing the precision or confidence in highle prior beliefs. This liberates bottom-up information flow, allowing us to perceive the world and our own minds
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more freshly. We can go around the world without our usual preconceptions. For example, if we're a depressed person, one of our top level prior might be, I'm a useless person and everything always goes wrong. And when that prior
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is quietened under psychedelics, you might go around and see, wow, the world is a kind of a pretty amazing place.
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The reebus model helps explain why psychedelics are so susceptible to set and setting. Where are you?
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Oh, stop that, man. The less confidence we have in our priors, the more vulnerable we are to influence.
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But it also helps explain the apparent politics of the psychedelic experience. Remember that operating near criticality allows the brain to develop scale-free hierarchies which balance sensitivity and robustness.
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Politically, you could think of the ego in such a brain as a wise old king who upholds order while remaining responsive to various constituencies.
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Over time, as the precision of internal models grows, this king can become a tyrant, more concerned with the maintenance of his own rule than with the health of the kingdom.
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Psychedelics are like the proverbial flood, dethroning the king, flattening the hierarchy, and washing away the old order. That's why the paper's called Reebus and the anarctic brain.
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Of course, mind and culture reflect each other. Cultures too have priors. An overly rigid culture will create repression in the individual psyche.
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It therefore shouldn't be surprising that internal anarchy spills over into society. We're not going to hurt anyone. We just want a march around that building.
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The problem with the psychedelics is that they dissolve cultural programming and hence inherently have a political charge about them. A psychedelic drug is a perturbation of the mind and the perturbed mind is a mind in the act of rediscovering the
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nature that lies outside of culture. So this tension between cultural values and what we might call for want of a better word reality creates a tension between institutions and the users of these substances.
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By 1969, roughly 2 million Americans had taken LSD. And this culture-wide cleansing of the doors of perception undoubtedly promoted both social and spiritual transformation.
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But as the decade wore on, the frantic pursuit of ego dissolution began to reveal its downsides.
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Ego consciousness may limit, but it also protects. It's another kind of reducing valve. And plunging into chaos only helps if one then reemerges, hopefully in an improved condition.
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It didn't help matters that by the early 1960s, the West hadn't had a mainstream psychedelic tradition for more than 1500 years.
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and attempts to import ideas from the east were fraught with misinterpretations. Timothy Liry's the psychedelic experience, for example, reimagined the Tibetan book of the dead as a manual for tripping. But many read these Buddhist teachings on freedom from the ego as a
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call to destroy it. See, I I got the wrong I got a message on that used to destroy your ego and I did. You know, I I was reading that stupid book of liies and all that [ __ ] You know, we're going
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through all the a whole game that everybody went through and I destroyed myself in it.
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Carelessly bypassing defenses, whether societal or psychological, is bound to lead to a backlash. And indeed, by the mid 1960s, the US government had soured on psychedelic research. In May of 1966, Senate hearings were held on the so-called LSD
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problem, where Liry and other proponents attempted to stem the tide. use of psychedelic drugs such as marijuana, masculine LSD is out of control in the United States today. Now, I am not alarmed by this situation per se. There are many sources of energy in
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the United States today which are out of control. Research has already verified the appearance of religious or transcendental, if we wish to use that word, or serious blissful experience through psychedelics. and government officials would be wise to take this
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factor into account and to treat LSD use with proper humanity and respect. But it was too late. By October of that year, the FDA had ordered a stop to most of the psychedelic research in the country. And in 1968, LSD was banned
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nationwide. With the rise of the war on drugs in the 1970s, psychedelics became a scapegoat for the increasing disorder of the culture. And for nearly four decades, most psychedelic research was driven underground or out of existence.
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But then in 2006, the year of Albert Hoffman's 100th birthday, the tide started to turn.
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So for the next few minutes, I'm going to tell you a little bit about why I'm uh so excited about some research that we've been doing on psilocybin and the experimental mystical experience.
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It began with a landmark paper from a psychopharmarmacologist named Roland Griffiths. Griffiths and his colleagues found that a single dose of psilocybin could produce some of the most meaningful experiences of people's lives.
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The study says at two months, the volunteers rated the experience as having spiritual significance and sustained positive changes in behavior.
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Griffiths developed an interest in psychedelic research through his own profound experiences in meditation, but his eminent sobriety and impeccable credentials helped to restore the field's scientific legitimacy. And since that initial study, psychedelic research has experienced a dramatic rebirth.
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Some psychiatrists and researchers are giving psychedelic drugs a second look. The medical world is taking note of this. This drug going back to ancient times may help treat the mental diseases of our times.
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One of the most surprising findings of this new wave of psychedelic research is that unlike most psychiatric medications, psychedelics appear to be effective across a wide variety of mental illnesses. Depression, anxiety, addiction, and OCD have all shown susceptibility to psychedelic treatment.
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One way of understanding this is through the entropic brain hypothesis. Many different mental illnesses can be thought of as ailments of excessive order. Instead of adversity loosening our beliefs, it leads us to cling to them defensively.
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Stuff happens and we're hurt by it. We're injured and we're suffering, but we can find a place. We can do something that steadies us.
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In recent work, Robin Carheart Harris has expanded on this idea, proposing a construct called canalization as a general factor of psychopathology.
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The idea is that the brain can be modeled as a kind of landscape and learning as the tracing of grooves within that landscape. The steepness and depth of the grooves corresponds to precision waiting, the confidence we have in particular strategies or
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beliefs. Over time, as we repeat these patterns, the grooves become deeper and easier for the brain to repeat. But trauma can also cause these grooves to deepen defensively, making them difficult and frightening to escape even after they've outlived their utility. In
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psychopathology, you know, that could take many forms. It could be falling into a depression, a kind of hibernation from the scary, uncertain world. an eating disorder. We're starting to control our caloric intake cuz at least we can control something.
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The effect of psychedelics has been compared to a fresh snowfall, flattening the landscape and allowing new pathways to be laid down.
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Understanding psychopathology in this way has also started to shed light on the positive end of the spectrum. In a paper titled, "The predictive dynamics of happiness and well-being," philosopher Mark Miller argues that the goodness or badness of our emotions
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depends on the rate at which we're reducing prediction errors. Paradoxically, happiness isn't about driving error to zero, but about confronting the unknown voluntarily and finding new errors to predict away.
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Pathology is about installing suboptimal beliefs that somehow get insulated because of these nasty feedback cycles.
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And so what's going to be central to our long-term well-being are all those skills and abilities and ways that we have of locating those sub-optimal belief packets and then challenging them in ways that they start updating again that they that they become updatable
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rather than um embedding themselves and becoming stickier. Uh we want to find ways of making them more fluid.
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In the paper, Miller describes this as a willingness to remain near the edge of criticality between order and disorder, between what is wellknown and reliable and the unknown and potentially more optimal.
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In other words, a willingness to continually die and be reborn in ways both large and small. That's the meta story, right? Order, chaos, order. But it's partial order, chaos reconstituted and revivified order. What's the ultimate in order? Doing this
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willingness to do that. That's the ultimate order. It's to let these things go as they need to go. That's a sacrifice. And to allow this continual process of transformation to occur.
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Continually riding the edge of criticality is easier said than done, especially if one is identified with the ego that might need to be sacrificed.
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There's definitely a motif of sacrifice here and dismemberment. It's like you are the lucky human sacrifice.
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And there definitely is a fear of death or madness to overcome here because resistance is just feudal and very painful.
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And yet, if the mysteries of Elus are any guide, there's a deeper possibility. one that provides consolation even in dying when entropy inevitably overwhelms us.
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If the ancients were known for anything, it was running to death. In fact, dying before dying, which is the immortality key, by the way, it's not psychedelics.
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But when I when I refer to this key, I'm referring to this notion that's preserved in Greek. Anthanis, if you die before you die, you won't die when you die. For some reason, the ancients prized that experience.
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At the center of Roland Griffith's research is the so-called mystical experience as measured by something called the mystical experience questionnaire. So, the core feature of these experiences is this sense of unity, an interconnectedness of all people, all things, the sense that all
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is one. Sometimes it's pure consciousness. And this is accompanied by a sense of sacredness or reverence, a humility before the majesty of something thought to be sacred.
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Other features include the transcendence of time and space. The past and the present collapse into the present moment. Space becomes endlessly vast.
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Deeply felt positive mood. sometimes described as heartopening or universal love joy peace tranquility and the so-called noetic quality that the experience is more real, more true than everyday waking consciousness.
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In the terms we've been using so far, the remarkable thing about the mystical experience is that it appears to transcend the oscillations of chaos and order.
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Seeming opposites are reconciled in this state. One doesn't just get reborn in a more hospitable condition. One discovers a dimension of awareness that from its own perspective is eternal.
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If we stop conceiving of God as something exterior to us, but that the mystery of being itself is the mystery of your being and the mystery of my being, the way to identify with the divine is to peel back these layers and
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attempt to discover pure awareness. In a 2016 psilocybin study on patients with a life-threatening cancer diagnosis, those who scored highest on the mystical experience questionnaire showed the most significant reductions in their fear of death.
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Griffiths himself would eventually test this finding in the course of his own life. 10 months ago, I went in for a routine screening colonoscopy, believing myself to be very healthy, awakening from anesthesia with the news that I likely had a stage 4 cancer diagnosis.
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Now, ironically, the first psilocybin therapeutic study we conducted was treatment of depression and anxiety in patients who had a life-threatening cancer diagnosis.
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And I often wondered how I would deal with a similar situation. Well, well, now I know.
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After his diagnosis, Griffiths turned his attention more fully to the spiritual questions that first drew him into psychedelic research. It has everything to do with this line of research that I started after meditation and then through psychedelics and that
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is to really understand these core awakening uh experiences. In a way, his vision was the same one that inspired Huxley, the possibility of an everyday mysticism compatible with ordinary life.
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The problem is that as we learned in the 1960s, freedom can't just be a matter of sustaining a psychedelic state. And as seekers like Ram Das discovered, psychedelics alone may not be enough.
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Question is, can drugs be used as a vehicle to enlightenment? I don't think there is much doubt about it that at least psychedelic chemicals, not all drugs, but psychedelic chemicals have a capacity to cut through places where you are attached and clinging to
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set them aside and show you a possibility. The problem is that they don't allow you to become the possibility. They only show you the possibility and then after a few hours you lose the view of the possibility and you have it only as a
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memory. Psychedelic experiences can provide a genuine taste of the freedom beyond the confines of the ego.
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But that freedom is by its very nature fleeting because it relies on dramatic changes to the contents of experience.
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When the trip ends, the ego reasserts itself, however improved it may seem to be.
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The major eastern idea is what is generally known as reincarnation, of going through life after life after life in an endless series.
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A process that is represented in this Japanese print of the wheel of life. The point that has to be remembered is that you can never stop anywhere.
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You may ascend to heaven but what goes up must eventually come down. You may descend to hell but what goes down must eventually come up. And so one goes on and on moving through these various worlds until in Buddhist ideas you
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become sufficiently awakened to become a Buddha. one who is released from the wheel. The way out of this cycle has been understood for millennia, not through science but through introspection.
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And it begins by asking what remains when the self we thought we were dissolves.
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One can ask the question who or what is having this experience? Who or what is having this experience?
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And if one does that instead of finding a usual conventional self we can open up to the empty nature of awareness itself.
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Awareness forms the ground of every experience both ordinary and psychedelic. And it turns out that awareness even an ordinary experience is already free of the boundaries we'd otherwise seek to escape. As you extricate yourself from these attachments, it's as if you are going into the space
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or the ground that lies behind the figures which are thoughts. The thoughts being the definition of who I am and how the universe is ego structure models.
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You see models as merely models and you start to rest in your awareness that lies behind the models. In that awareness, that spaciousness around the forms is the equinimity.
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The intrinsic freedom of awareness is obscured by our habit of ceaseless identification with thought.
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And it's this habit that the practice of meditation can help one to break. By learning to recognize thoughts as mere appearances in consciousness, we can unravel the dream of a separate and isolated self. You have become experience. You have become you've
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transcended dualism, the separation between subject and object. The key insight is that we don't need to identify with thoughts or emotion as they arise, but instead we can turn with great interest to investigate the present moment and we can cultivate
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gratitude for the astonishing mystery in which we find ourselves. Neither meditation nor psychedelics is a substitute for scientific inquiry, but both can help reveal in a visceral way what science increasingly suggests.
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The fact that the selves and worlds of our experience are controlled hallucinations and can therefore be perceived in a radically different way. When we become aware of the fact that we are constructing our experience, then the relationship with all the phenomena can start to
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change. The less we conflate our constructions of reality with reality itself, the more willing we are to let go of them and the easier it is to see through those constructions to the freedom that lies behind them. In meditation, you can have
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a no- self experience and you can actually walk around in a no-fel experience and it can be a rather ordinary experience, ordinary consciousness. No fireworks, no distortions or or anything like that.
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Meditation can allow one to access the freedom of the mystical experience in the very midst of ordinary awareness.
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Indeed, the mystical experience is this ordinary awareness. Our job is to wake up to this fact.
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So, where did I find myself after the diagnosis? Well, today I am more awake, alive, and grateful than I've ever been before in my entire life.
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My invitation to each of you here in this community and elsewhere is for you to join me in this celebration.
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Join me. Let's join together in this celebration to stay awake to this sense of profound and precious interconnectedness.
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Preciousness. The interconnectedness. We're all in this together. We are all in this together. We really are.
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The sense that there's something benevolent, meaningful, and purposeful about it. It feels to be so completely true, completely and authoritatively true. It's simply astonishingly beautiful. So, join me. Thank you.
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Oh, hallelujah. N hey, Yeah, la.
Topics:psychedelicsAldous Huxleymescalinefree energy principleKarl Fristonbrainconsciousnesshomeostasisneuroscienceself-transcendence
