The Challenges of Facilitation

Welcome to episode two hundred of Future Fossils! On this episode, I'm joined by Ehren Cruz (LinkedIn, Instagram, Website) and Daphne Krantz (LinkedIn, Instagram, Website) to discuss transcendence, trauma, and transformation. We talk about the festival world, our individual journeys, the rise of psychedelics in therapeutic applications, the potential of these substances, and their cultural roots. We also discuss addiction, trauma, and the consequences of collective consciousness, freedom, and how to provide access to these therapies in a way that respects Indigenous knowledge.

✨ Chapters:

(0:00:01) - Exploring Transcendence, Trauma, and Transformation

(0:08:27) - Psychedelic Use With Intention

(0:17:11) - Psychedelics and Substance Abuse

(0:26:13) - Exploring Relationships to Psychoactive Substances

(0:41:59) - Embodiment in Psychedelic Therapy

(0:54:30) - Addiction, Trauma, and The Transhuman Conditions

(1:03:20) - Healing Through Connection and Community

(1:09:04) - The Freedom of Exploration

(1:12:15) - Authentic Expression & Vulnerability

(1:15:26) - Psychedelics for Exploration

(1:27:55) - The Consequences of Collective Consciousness Freedom

(1:43:02) - Supporting Independent Work

✨ Support Future Fossils:

Subscribe anywhere you go for podcastsSubscribe to the podcast PLUS essays, music, and news on Substack or Patreon.Buy my original paintings or commission new work.Buy my music on Bandcamp! (This episode features “Ephemeropolis” from the EP of the same name & “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP.)Or if you’re into lo-fi audio, follow me and my listening recommendations on Spotify.This conversation continues with lively and respectful interaction every single day in the members-only Future Fossils Facebook Group and Discord server. Join us!

✨ Tip Jars:

@futurefossils on Venmo$manfredmacx on CashAppmichaelgarfield on PayPal

✨ Affiliate Links:

• These show notes were supplemented with Podium.Page, a very cool new AI service I’m happy to endorse. Sign up at https://hello.podium.page/?via=michael and get three free hours and 50% off your first month.

• I transcribe this show with help from Podscribe.ai — which I highly recommend to other podcasters. (If you’d like to help edit transcripts for the Future Fossils book project, please email or DM me: Email | Twitter | Instagram)

• BioTech Life Sciences makes anti-aging and performance enhancement formulas that work directly at the level of cellular nutrition, both for ingestion and direct topical application. I’m a firm believer in keeping NAD+ levels up and their skin solution helped me erase a year of pandemic burnout from my face.

• Help regulate stress, get better sleep, recover from exercise, and/or stay alert and focused without stimulants, with the Apollo Neuro wearable. I have one and while I don’t wear it all the time, when I do it’s sober healthy drugs.

• Musicians: let me recommend you get yourself a Jamstik Studio, the coolest MIDI guitar I’ve ever played. I LOVE mine. You can hear it playing all the synths on my song about Jurassic Park.

✨ Mentioned & Related Episodes:

7 - Shane Mauss (Psychedelic Comedy)10 - Anthony Thogmartin & David Krantz (Future Music)27 - Rak Razam & Niles Heckman (5-MeO DMT & Consciousness)58 - Shane Mauss (Psychonautic Adventures at the Edge of Genius & Madness)59 - Charles Shaw (Trauma, Addiction, and Healing)62 - David Krantz (Cannabis Nutrigenomics)68 - Charles Shaw (Soul in the Heart of Darkness)96 - Malena Grosz on Community-Led Party Culture vs. Corporate "Nightlife"100 - The Teafaerie on DMT, Transhumanism, and What To Do with All of God's Attention103 - Tricia Eastman on Facilitating Psychedelic Journeys to Recover from An Age of Epidemic Trauma112 - Mitsuaki Chi on Serving the Mushroom117 - Eric Wargo on Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious131 - Jessica Nielson & Link Swanson on Psychedelic Science & Too Much Novelty136 - Alyssa Gursky on Psychedelic Art Therapy & The Future of Communication156 - Stuart Davis on Zen, Aliens, and Psychedelics168 - Mikey Lion & Malena Grosz on Festival Time, Life-Changing Trips, and Community in COVID171 - Eric Wargo on Precognitive Dreamwork and The Philosophy of Time Travel172 - Tyson Yunkaporta on Indigenous Systems Thinking, Fractal Governance, Ontopunk, and Queering W.E.I.R.D. Modernity176 - Exploring Ecodelia with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy at the Psilocybin Summit

✨ Keywords:

Transcendence, Trauma, Transformation, Festival World, Psychedelics, Therapeutic Applications, Cultural Roots, Addiction, Collective Consciousness, Freedom, Access, Indigenous Knowledge, Intentionality, Context, Consumer Culture, Spiritual Ego, Health Coaching, Mental Health Counseling, Gender Identity, Substance Abuse, Private Practice, Ancient Cultural Roots, Modern Therapeutic Applications, Transformational Festival Culture, Memory, Embodiment, Rat Park Experiment, Brain Inference, Harlan Ellison, Opioid Crisis, Connection, Community, Oppression, Systems of Power, Self-Harm, Interconnectedness, Consumerism, Mindset, Serotonin, Oxytocin, Courageous Expression, Authentic Self, Right Wing Psychedelia, Commodification, Marginalized Groups, Nurturing Attachment, Reality, Independent Work, Apple Podcasts, Patreon

✨ UNEDITED machine-generated transcript:

Michael (1s):

Greetings, future fossils. This is Michael Garfield welcoming you to episode 200 of the podcast that explores our place in time. My God, we made it here. What a view from this summit. It's incredible. And for this episode, I have two very special guests, two very old friends. I mean they're, they're not very old, they're just friends I've had for a very long time. Aaron Cruz and Daphne Krantz. Aaron is a psychedelic experience facilitator. Daphne is an addiction counselor, but I met them both in the festival world when Aaron and I were working on the Visionary Art Web Magazine Sole Purpose back in like a decade ago.

Michael (55s):

And Daphne was producing electronic music under the Alias FU Texture. Dabney was a self-identified man at the time. David Krantz appeared on the show, episode 63 talking about cannabis and Nutrigenomics. So I mean, all of us have been through just extraordinary transformations. Aaron Cruz was the guy whose ceremonially blessed my Google Glass before I performed with it in a world first self streaming performance Gratify Festival in 2013.

Michael (1m 35s):

So yeah, there's a lot of archival material to unpack here, but we don't spend a lot of time ruminating on history. Instead, we discuss the present moment of the landscape of our society and people's trauma and drive for transcendence and the way that this collides with consumer culture and transformational festival scene where we all met one another. And it's an extraordinary episode and I know a lot of people out there are having a really hard time right now.

Michael (2m 23s):

And I am with you. I have huge news to share soon. I want you to know that you are not alone in your efforts to work things out. And if you need support, there is support for you. I really hope that you get something out of this conversation. I myself found just simply re-listening to the recording to be truly healing. And I'm really grateful that I get to share it with you. But before I do that, I want to pay tribute to everyone who is supporting this show on Patreon and on CK everyone who is subscribing to my music on Band camp, the latest Patreon supporters include Darius Strel and Samantha Lotz.

Michael (3m 17s):

Thank you both so much. Thank you also to the, the hundreds of other people who are helping me pay my mortgage and feed my kids with this subscription service one form or another. I have plenty of awesome new things for you, including speaking of psychedelics, a live taping of the two sets I just played opening for comedian Shane Moss here in Santa Fe. John Cocteau Cinema sold out shows. Excellent evening. I just posted the little teaser clip of the song Transparent, which was the song from that 2013 Google Blast performance.

Michael (4m 2s):

Actually that was, its its inaugural debut and I've refined it over the last decade and I submitted it to NPRs Tiny Desk concert. And you can find that up on my YouTube. If you want to taste of the electro-acoustic inventions that I will be treating subscribers to here in short order patreon.com/michael garfield, michael garfield.ck.com, which is where this podcast is currently hosted RSS feed. And thanks to everybody who's been reading and reviewing the show on Apple Podcast and Spotify and wherever you're wonderful, you've got this, whatever you're going through, you can do it.

Michael (4m 46s):

I believe in you and do not hesitate to reach out to me or to my fabulous guests or to other members of our community if you need the support. Thank you. Enjoy this episode. Be well and much more coming soon. I have two extraordinary conversations in the Can one with Kevin wo, my dear friend here in Santa Fe and Kmo, the notorious, legendary confederate podcaster who just published a trial log, the first part of the trial log between the three of us on his own show.

Michael (5m 27s):

Highly recommend you go check that out. And then also an episode with Caveat Magister, the resident philosopher of Burning Man who published an extraordinary book last year, turned your Life into Art, which resulted in a very long, vulnerable, profound and hilarious conversation between the two of us about our own adventures and misadventures and the relationship between Psycho Magic and Burning Man and Meow Wolf and Disney and Jurassic Park. Oh, and speaking of which, another piece of bait to throw on the hook for you subscribers.

Michael (6m 12s):

I am about to start a Jurassic Park book club this spring. I will be leading the group in the Discord server and in the Facebook group and on live calls chapter by chapter through the book that changed the world. I've an intense and intimate relationship with this book. I was there at the world premier in 1993. I grew up doing Dinosaur Diggs with the book's Primary Paleontological consultant, Robert Bocker. I have a dress for tattoo, et cetera. I've sold the painting to Ian, not to Ian Malcolm, the Jeff Goldblum, but I did name my son after that mathematician.

Michael (6m 59s):

Anyway, yes, much, much, much to discuss, especially because you know, one of the craziest things about this year is that the proverbial velociraptors have escaped the island, you know, and open ai. What, what's in a name? You know, everything is just transforming so fast now. And so I am the dispossessed Cassandra that will lead you through some kibbitz in Doug rush cuffs language. Please join us, everybody subscribing Tock or anybody on Patreon at five bucks or more will be privy to those live calls and I really hope to see you in there.

Michael (7m 47s):

And with all of that shilling behind me now, please give it up for the marvelous Aaron Cruz and Daphne Krantz. Two people with whom I can confidently entrust your minds. Enjoy. Okay, let's just dive in. Sure. Aaron Daphne. Hi, future fossils. You're here.

Michael (8m 26s):

Awesome. This took us like what, nine months to schedule this.

Daphne (8m 30s):

A slow burn, but we, here we go. It's great to hear me here,

Ehren (8m 33s):

Brother. It is, yeah. And once again, anything that gets rescheduled always ends up turning out better. Like I, I was just thinking, I'm really glad we actually didn't do this interview nine months ago, just in terms of life experience between now and then. I don't know what that's gonna translate to in a conversation, but personally I feel a lot more prepared to talk to you right

Daphne (8m 51s):

Now. A hundred percent agree.

Michael (8m 53s):

Cool. Okay, so let's just dive in then. Both of you are doing really interesting work in the explosive emerging sector of, in one way or another, dealing with people's trauma, dealing with people's various like life crisis issues. And having met both of you through the festival world, which was a scene of pretty rampant abuse and escapism. And I met you both as what my friend in town here, Mitch Minno would call like psychedelic conservatives, where I felt like there were a bunch of like elder millennials who were kind of trying to help that had been in the scene for a little long and they were really working to steer people into a more grounded and integrated approach to extasis in the festival world.

Michael (9m 52s):

And all of us have seen our fair share of, and perhaps also lived through our fair share of right and wrong relationship to the tools and technologies of transcendence. So that's kinda where I wanna take this. And I think maybe the way to start is just by having both of you introduce yourselves and talk a little bit about your path and the various roles that you've kept over the years in this, in adjacent spheres and what led you into the work that you're doing now. And then, yeah, from there we can take it wherever the conversation chooses to lead us. Daphne, we've had you on the show before, so why don't we have Aaron go first? Let's do that.

Michael (10m 32s):

Okay,

Daphne (10m 32s):

Awesome. Thank you Mike. Yo, we appreciate you're really eloquent way of creating an environment to kind of settle into here. So Aaron Cruz, I've been really deeply immersed in psychedelics for 15 years. My first foray into the world, or in curiosity, was actually going to school in Ohio State University for fellowship in anthropology. And coming it from the perspective of looking at 16th, 15th century around the time of the, the conquest in indigenous cultures utilizing plant medicine ceremony ritual as a community harmonizer agent, as a tool for collective wisdom, also for ceremonial divine communion, but very much from an ivory tower perspective.

Daphne (11m 15s):

I was not very much engaged with psychedelics at that particular lens outside of a foray into a couple of opportunities at all. Good music festival or different things like that. But I beg the question about is using these plant medicines with intentionality, will it create a more symbiotic way of life? A way of understanding the interdependence between the natural landscape, humanity, culture, community building and personal evolution. So it wasn't until major psychedelic experience in 2008 where I had probably inadvisable amount of L s D in the middle of a, an event and went into a full system to dissolve to the, the good degree. I actually didn't even know my name for several hours, but, but what I did feel that came to recognize was just this deep sense of connection to the soul of, of others.

Daphne (12m 4s):

A sense that e, each one of us sped our best efforts with cultural conditioning, social conditioning, how we're races, peers, we had a desire to appreciated, embraced. There's this deep sense of tribal kinship that I think I felt from everybody wanted to explore whether they were wearing a grateful dead shirt, a ballerina tutu or flat cap or whatever it was. And we wear these different types of masks of her own safety and security and and sense of self. But beneath that facade, I just felt this deep, rich desire to be a sense of belonging and connection and desire to be a p a child of the universe for lack of a better term. So that kind of really set me off from that tone as you shared, is that this rapidly accelerated from place of recreation to a deep of place of deep spiritual potency.

Daphne (12m 46s):

And, and from that place on the alchemical frontier, as I call that kind of festival type of realm where many, whether they're using compounds for escapism or they're trying to embody or embrace a particular lifestyle that they can then translate and seed into their own default realities or wherever that is almost train Jedi training grounds or whatever you could consider that to be. However, your orientation around it, that is, I just felt a deep devotion to trying to support those particular realms. First through workshop ceremony and cultivation of experiences that had some integrity and bones to using these things mindfully, actually to producing events. I was producing a co-producing original back in the day where I believe I met you, Mike, with root wire with the popio about 2010 through 2013 or nine through 12, maybe one of those epox learned a lot.

Daphne (13m 35s):

It was a lot of bootstrapping and blood, sweat and everything else trying to get the, those events going and, but they're really creating these containers for radical creativity and self-expression and where music and visionary arts could be upheld in a new model of, of honoring them and mutual out something that never took, took root as much as I would love it to. And then kind of translated into producing Lee Festival out here in Asheville, North Carolina for six years. And the ethos behind that was trying to create a dynamic cultural atmosphere, 10 to 15 different nations, people of all walks of life and traditions expressing their music arts culture ceremony and using that as a catalyst to kind of break down isms to reveal that the true depth and value that the rich, creative and cultural expression has beyond politic, beyond social conditioning.

Daphne (14m 21s):

It's a, you hear one thing about Iranians on on tv, but if you see them doing their Sufi circle dance and chanting and when they're cooking their food at the end of the day, it just really, it's amazing how humanity and expression in those places would really quickly help people bypass certain prejudices without saying a word. We're often dialogue, even intentional and conscious dialogue tend to fail. The expression goes beyond that. So, and of course there is still a rich culture of psychedelics and but these places are, it's kind of underground. It's not necessarily, there's no curated container specifically to facilitate initiation of rights of passage. It's a little bit more rogue, rogue experiencing.

Daphne (15m 2s):

So after that kind of materialized up to Covid where I was really actually even at that point seeking an exit strategy from that realm, the intensity of producing events is extremely vigorous. I remember in 2019 I had 7,800 emails and countless calls just coordinating three festivals and I'd have children, my three girls just hanging on every limb. And that one more call, one more, one more thing. So it was becoming quite burned out and Covid kind of did me at the time. I didn't think so a bit of a favor and giving me, kind of forcing me into an exit strategy to re-identify myself, not as just a producer and an event organizer, but someone that is deeply passionate about initiatory culture. My catalyst was festivals for initiation or creative initiation.

Daphne (15m 43s):

And then I went back to where it all began, really sat with the medicine once again, brought myself back into sacramental ceremony. And then I started really gazing at the broad sweeping frontier, the vanguard of the psychedelic emergence now, and saying, this may be a time I could be transparent and real and open about my deep care and use of these plants and medicines for almost 15 years. And so I went ahead and I got a professional coaching certification from I C F, I got a third wave psychedelic certification. It was the first a psychedelic coaching program in the nation back in 2020, in six months of learning the panoramic of psychedelics, preparation, integration, the neuroplasticity, the ethics considerations, dosaging compound understanding.

Daphne (16m 24s):

So getting that whole holistic review and then the cultivating a practice, a facilitation coaching practice based upon using that psychedelic as a catalyst but in a continuum of deeply intentional self-work and self-care and, and moving into that space with an openness to receive insights. But then really about embodiment. What do you do after you have those lightning bolts of revelation and how do you make that have an impact in your life? So that's been my last few years is serving as a, a ceremonial facilitator and coach in at the psychedelic realm and also a harm reductionist. People are looking for a high integrity experience but have a compound, don't really know how to go about it in a way that's intentional and safe. Really kind of stepping into that space and holding that container for them and being an ally.

Ehren (17m 6s):

Awesome. Daphne. Hi. Lovely to be back here with you Michael. So I'll start from the beginning and kind of give my whole story inspired by Aaron and the way he just articulated that trajectory. And I started out like we met each other. I think we might have met each other also at Root Wire back in that era. And I found myself in this world as a music producer. I was really heavily investing time and energy into building a music career, DJing, producing under the name few Texture for a long time, starting in around 2009. And that was my main gig for about six years and had some early psychedelic experiences when I was pretty young.

Ehren (17m 52s):

14, 15, 16 kind of set me off on a path to where I really had a strong inclination that there was something there and was always very interested in them and came into the festival world, into the music world with a very idealistic lens of what these substances could do for us individually as humanity and had my ideal ideals broken completely in a lot of ways. And what I experienced personally through relationships with collaborators, through my own inability to show up in the way that I wanted to in terms of my own ideals, thinking that because I took psychedelics, I was gonna somehow magically be this person who could live up to these ideals of relational integrity and honesty and like really being a beacon of what I perceived as like light, right?

Ehren (18m 50s):

And really had some issues with spiritual ego when I was younger and kind of had the sense of I've seen these other realms, I, I know more than other people, I'm special. I had all that story and really ended up harming me and other people around me. And it took some pretty significant relational abuse actually that I was experiencing and participating in through a creative relationship to kind of break me outta that illusion, right? That because I am creating interesting forward thinking music with a psychedelic bent in this kind of wild and free community festival community, that somehow I was immune from all of the shadow that exists in our culture in the psyche, in all of these places that I was just very blind to.

Ehren (19m 44s):

And I think it's a pretty normal developmental thing in your early twenties, and I mean at any age ongoing of course to be, to have places that are less conscious and those are blind spots, right? And so I really was forced through my musical career, through my participation in psychedelic culture to either have the choice to look at those blind spots or continue to ignore them. And I'd look back and I'm really grateful that I, I really did at a certain point be like, damn, I need to go to therapy. You can't do this on my own. I'm really hurting. And in about 2015 I kind of stepped away from music pretty hardcore and really shifted my focus because I was in too much pain.

Ehren (20m 28s):

I had experienced a lot of relational trauma around that time and started to just do other things peripherally related to music. I worked for MOG for a little bit building synthesizers and found myself doing a lot of personal healing work, kind of getting really real about my own inability to show up as what at the time I was perceiving as like a good person. In retrospect there it was so much more complex than that. And over time, being able to drop the layers of shame and the layers of self-judgment around a lot of those relational patterns I was living out that of course are familial and cultural and all these other things. But I ended up starting doing health coaching work around that time.

Ehren (21m 11s):

And Michael, that's something that we've connected on on the past episodes around some of the epigenetic coaching work. I do a lot of genetic testing, I do a lot of personalized nutrition, peak performance type work and was doing that pretty steadily from about 2015 to 2019 and I'm still doing it, but over the last three and a half years or so, went and got a master's in mental health counseling, started to really find that a lot of the people I was working with and drawing from my own experiences in therapy and healing, I was like, okay, nutrition and all of these physiological things are very important.

Ehren (21m 53s):

And what I'm seeing is most of these people need emotional healing. Most of these people need more psycho emotional awareness and healing from trauma and relational patterns. And I just felt really unprepared to do that work as a coach at the time. And also had just tremendous openings into understanding myself better into being able to, yeah, be with discomfort and be with pain in a way that when I was younger was totally off the table. It was like I'm just gonna distract myself fully from all of that through, through jugs, through sensory experiences through the festival world.

Ehren (22m 37s):

And that's where I got drawn and no regret, like I love that it was what shaped me and I still engage in all of that just with this slightly different way of being with it, not as an escape, but as a way of celebration in contrast with really being able to also be with the more difficult, darker shadow aspects of life and seeing that as a pathway to wholeness rather than avoiding those things. And so that's the work I'm doing now as a therapist, as someone who does psychedelic integration work. I've also done publications on psychedelics.

Ehren (23m 18s):

I have an article that was in the Journal of Mental Health Counseling a couple years ago. I have another one that's pending right now on psilocybin assisted group therapy that I hope gets through in the international journal group psychotherapy right now. And I'm planning some research also on gender and psychedelics in terms of the way psychedelic experiences impact gender nonconforming and gender expansive people's perception of gender. And I know for me that was one of the early indications that I was transgender was a mushroom experience when I was in my early twenties when I was like, wait, I think I'm a lesbian, I have no idea what this means. And I had no idea how to process it.

Ehren (23m 58s):

And I kind of stuffed it back down for years and two years until it was just too obvious. But I have, yeah, that's in the works working on IRB approval for that this year. So yeah, kind of have a research bent, do general therapy work with people, do psychedelic assisted work, also still do genetic testing, epigenetic coaching, working on more of the physiological side with people and coming from a holistic health perspective. But yeah, just also to add the other piece in here, I did my internship and worked for a little over a year substance abuse rehab as well, doing therapy there. And so as someone who's been a long time proponent of psychedelics and the potential healing capacity of them, still fully believe that despite my own, and I've had many important experiences to counter what I was saying earlier around them also creating sometimes an idealized version of self without doing the work to get there.

Ehren (24m 57s):

I worked in a rehab working with people who've had maladaptive relationships with substances and it was a very important counter to my own, again, idealized image and idealized perception of the human relationship with substances. And so I, coming out of that, I actually left in December starting in opening up my private practice with I think a much more balanced understanding of all the different ways humans can be in relationship to substances from full on avoidance to transcendence and self-awareness. And I really love to be able to hold both of those perspectives and work with people on all sides of that spectrum because there's not just necessarily a clean one thing one way or the other for people.

Ehren (25m 45s):

I find myself and Michael, you and I have talked about this weaving in and out of those relationships of where we end up relating to different substances in good or more harmful ways. And I think there's an importance to be able to be honest with ourselves and with people that we're working with around, yeah, what is this really? What is this really doing for me? And what am I getting out of this? And sometimes it's okay to lean on a substance for pain relief or for disassociation intentionally, right? But like at a certain point, like how do we learn how to take what, and I think this is true regardless of how we're using any substance, how do we learn from it and take what this substance is helping us with and kind of learn how to do it on our own in certain ways.

Ehren (26m 36s):

And so that's, I think maybe where this roundabout description of my life right now is leading to is that point of I'm very interested in regardless of the substance, regardless of what it is, whether it's heroin, whether you're using heroin to avoid painful emotion, how do you learn how to be without yourself, without the substance, right? Or whether you're using ayahuasca or L s D to access the transcendent and become more aware of the deep capacity for inner love and compassion that's already inside of you. Like how do you learn how to do that in a stable, grounded way on your own right? And I, I think there's a, a parallel, right that I think is lost in the discourse about drugs in general that I'd love to bring in.

Michael (27m 22s):

So that's actually right where I want to be for this cuz I think should not come as a surprise to anyone that there is this rather obvious isomorphism, I guess in people's relationship to ecstatic events generally to the festival as some, as a phenomenon that has its origins in the acknowledgement and re you know, the recognition and enactment of a relationship to sort of vertical access or a horizontal, like a transcendent experience of time rather than just a one damn thing after another duration Kronos clock time that there's, it's an observance of a kind of a holy dimension to our lives.

Michael (28m 17s):

And at one point these were all woven together much more intimately than they are today in our lives. The, the holiday has become something that is, and the festivals generally have become something that is more about a pressure valve or kind of escape from the oppression of our lives rather than something that's woven into the fabric of, or our everyday expect the observances of sacred hours in a monastic sense. And so likewise, I think if you were to believe the anthropological take on substance use, the various substances were held more like, more formally, like I think that all of us have participated in a number of discussions, are well aware of ayahuasca in particular being something that is still very much implicated within this fabric of specific cultural utility under understand and practice.

Michael (29m 24s):

But a lot of these things exist. For instance, ketamine is something that is either in, it's used as a medical anesthetic primarily until just a few years ago, or it's used as a club drug. And so there's a, it doesn't have that same sort of unity of purpose and the same clarity as far as the way that it's being applied and it lacks a, a lineage or a continuity where it's not like John Lilly had a, a tribe of people that he coached on how to do this. He was like people experimenting on their own. And I mean the same goes also for other, more, more recently discovered synthetic substances like L S D and also for substances that had a more focused and time-honored indigenous tradition around them like psilocybin, but either through just the proliferation of GarageBand type experimentation taking over as the primary cultural mode or whatever like we have.

Michael (30m 30s):

So there's this whole spectrum of the ways that different substances either have managed to maintain or never or have gotten away from, or never actually even had a system of protocols within which their use could be more or less responsibly engaged. And of course, I'm not saying that there's a ton of examples in which ayahuasca is not even within, even within settings that claim to be responsible. And anyway, this is just a nimbus of considerations around the question, which is where is the line between escapism healthier approaches or like sometimes escapism, like you just said, Daphne is actually healthy if it's encountered in a way or if we people are en engaging this in a way that is not just con ongoing peak ex seeking of peak experiences.

Michael (31m 28s):

I mean, I think one more thing I'll say to this is that I've seen people, and it should, I'm sure anyone listening to this has also seen people who engage traditions that are about in more, you might think like endogenous substances like running or meditation that have strong cultural containers, but there are always leaks in these containers or these containers themselves are not typically are, are not healthy. Like I've seen ayahuasca ceremonies that were the, the, that particular community depended on the patronage in order to do its work of people who had managed to kind of trick themselves into thinking that they were doing important spiritual work, but were just kind of had become gluttons or for punishment or like masochists that were just in there to purge, heal DNA traumas or whatever for their retroactive lineal healing week after week after week.

Michael (32m 31s):

And nothing was actually changing. They had gotten themselves into a loop. And so I'm, yeah, I'm curious how does one ever, how does one actually even begin to recognize when something has crossed over from healthy into unhealthy? Like what is, where is the line? It seems rather contextual and I mean there were, it's funny because, I mean just to bring it back to festivals and then I'll stop, it wasn't ever really clear to me. I mean, it was clear when lip service was being paid to transformation and that was a load of shit because I think that was used as a lure by and still is by event organizers and promoters to bait people into buying a ticket but wasn't really held in the right way in those events.

Michael (33m 19s):

And then there are times when every effort is made to do this stuff sincerely, but is not really handled in a way that makes it success, you know. And the same can be said for anything, I mean for like educational television is an example of something that people have been fighting over for almost a century. Whether the medium, whether the format of this makes these tools effective, potentially effective, problematic in their actual implementation, et cetera. So this is a much bigger conversation than a conversation about drugs really. It's a conversation about how mu how far we can engage in a particular type of relation to a, a practice of self transformation or transcendence or illumination or education or whatever before it becomes more trouble than it's worth or before.

Michael (34m 11s):

We need to call in some sort of balancing factor. And I'm curious to hear your thoughts at length and I'd love to hear you kind of back and forth about this.

Daphne (34m 19s):

Yeah, there's so much there man. That is a panoramic for sure. One of the things to kind of look at here is that the idea of the recreational use of, of a psychoactive or a psychedelic compound is 50, 60 years old. The lineage of using Sacramento entheogenic compounds is at least 40,000 years old for the time of megalithic cave paintings, size of football fields made with depth pigmentation that is with techniques that have somehow have the endurance to be still on those walls this year later is with sac ceremonial initiations and MAs and sabertooth and many mushrooms along the bottom.

Daphne (34m 59s):

So perhaps even people have said such as stems and McKenna, the origin of cultural or creativity of artistic creativity might have been spawned or germinated through the use of psychedelic compounds, the self-awareness and the potential for di interdimensional realization. But you look at Theon that was used with eloc mysteries, the type of reverence people have taken for one time in their entire life to, to walk to the Elian temple from Athens, the distance of a marathon fasting, moving into that experience with great care, great reverence, having an initiation with an ergo wine, a compound that's now been synthesizing the LSDs in 47. But originally was the, the rye, the barley grain, the ergot there infused into a beverage and seeing the immortality of the soul dramatized in front of you by our initiatory rights of passage theater in Egypt.

Daphne (35m 50s):

And you know, the temples of Ocirus, which had little mandrakes wrapped around its feet, or isis, which had little mushrooms at the feed. And those particular lineages of priesthoods and priestesses would utilize compounds to commune and learn the subtle language of that particular medicine in collaboration with ritual and practice to help to uphold virtues of different aspects of the civilization. And you go all around from the flesh of the god's, Aztec, MasTec, olmec, TOK cultures, ayahuasca, there's probably 10 different brews in that region, thousands of years old Abor, pati bush, west Africa, psilocybins everywhere, Druids Nordic culture.

Daphne (36m 31s):

I mean, but you look at the way upon which peyote cactus, you used it in a way that was like, here is an ally, here is a teacher, here is a compatriot a an essence of something that I work in cohesion with in order for me to learn how to navigate my own life evolutionary process in greater symbiotic relationship with the world around me, how I commune with the divine and with more, I guess visceral potency to allow that philosophical faith that aspiring Christians across the world hold this philosophical arm length faith that when things go sour where send in love and light when things are fine, I forget I'm even affiliated or associated with any kind of denomination.

Daphne (37m 15s):

And it's really an interesting thing when you have a different mindset of we are in a continuum of connectivity to an interdimensional web of life and that there's an interdependence between us and these different realms of being to try to embody and embrace a life that is a virtue or an integrity or create community based around these deeper ethics and values that are being kind of almost divinely inspired. And now you're coming into a timer where that has been systematically eradicated beyond all else, whether it's the early Catholic church with the Council of naia, that plant medicine, the original Nixon move was in 3 89 ad pretty much when plant medicine was absolutely persecuted feminine that he, the hosts or the feminine energy that often was the catalyst of working together in communion with the plants and offering it the original catacombs, the nasta catacombs where they find ergot wines and such that probably the original Eucharist was a psychedelic medicine.

Daphne (38m 13s):

All of that was completely ousted and nothing has been persecuted harder than plant medicine. And so then coming into contemporary society, the reintroduction, whether was through the scientific land, rogue experimentation, GaN coming up with massive amounts of compounds, Albert Hoffman. But when it started to infuse into academia, it again started moving people into this awareness that is, this compound is not just therapeutic, it is creating something within it that is inspiring Nas, a deeper wisdom, a deeper sense of internal communion with life force that is beyond something that can be charted on a bar graph or triangulated with an abacus.

Daphne (38m 56s):

And so that, and then they, the considerations of set and setting and if you're gonna host an experiment, how do you, how do you hold a psychedelic space without being on a psychedelic? And there is a lot of challenges there because it just, it is a type of experience that almost necessitates an A, a visceral embodied awareness to even understand how to support in any kind of way because of the potency and the gravity and the expansion of what that is is something you can't read on chapter seven and have a good grasp on how to facilitate or how to curate. But that whole experience, what it ended up happening is that the disruptive nature of people thinking, perceiving, expanding in a way that is unformed or nonconform to the status quos growing industrial complex and commercial material culture created a real schism reality.

Daphne (39m 47s):

And so people that felt like they wanted to embrace and imbibe had to flee, had to go to the woods and had to lock themselves. And Stella Stellar or like Chris Beige who just came out with L S D in the mining universe of absolutely prolific book for 20 years, had to hide his L S D ceremonial work and testing and deep psychospiritual results until he was 10 years past 10 retired to, to finally come out with the fruits of his labor. It just created his isolatory world and framework. And so now we're saying, escapees, please come back. Like you all had to run away to do your compound and try to find yourself and your consciousness, but you, we want you back in community and the old deadheads and those that are kind of in that lineage is like, it's just not safe over there.

Daphne (40m 30s):

We're gonna keep it in the parks, we're gonna keep it in the fields and if we come back over there, we're gonna be always outcasted as the hippies that are just avantgarde and fringe. And so it's a real interesting dynamic in culture where we want to infuse the intelligence and the beauty of the transformation that these things can uphold. But then we don't actually have a paradigm that allows people to be expansive and allows people to be avantgarde and ecstatic in these different things without feeling that they're actually a real challenge to our core sets of cultural beliefs. So part of this kind of third wave that we're seeing right now is the reintroduction of that outcasted, psychedelic culture.

Daphne (41m 10s):

And it's now in a, into a space of deeper therapeutic respect where they're seeing through the results of John Hopkins in Imperial College of London and all these other studies that the power in P T S D complex, P T S D and a addiction and trauma for, with intentionality with a progressive path that includes a holistic wellbeing, body, mind, spirit care, deep intentionality, using it as a catalyst, catalyst and integration process that this can be something that can allow somebody to at least get a sense where is that inner compass, where is that inner sense of who I am? And it's an immersive culture, so you kind of drip dry, you dunk 'em in that space, they get, oh, that's what home is. I, okay, I remember, oh wait, it's going away from me.

Daphne (41m 51s):

It's go, I'm starting to forget. And that's where devotional practice and self-care and all those things are the real way to really supporting and sustaining that. But I think where psychedelics help is it imprints or imbues a remembrance of where that space is and to your port Michael, like once you get that deep message, then it's time to do the work. What decisions in my life, what relationships, habits, patterns, distractions, what is in my life that is taking me away from that center, make those earnest actions, make those earnest choices, and then have a sense of where that foundation is. Then if you name for growing, maybe you do revisit with the medicine in an alliance in a way that is understanding that it isn't, it's an aid, it's not a, it's not a panacea, it's never meant to be, but it helps you at times to say, okay, here's a reminder, here's your truth, here's where you can be if you let go of the drama, the guilt, shame and baggage and, but really you still got a lot of work to do on those faces before you can say that you're, we're all we're a whole.

Daphne (42m 48s):

So there's a nice, there's a nice kind of panoramic or a dance going on here with this third waves trying to rebrace indigenous culture and the long lineage of ceremony, trying to respect the research, trying to bring people back from the fridge of alchemy and then trying to bring about awareness to those that have been tabooed for 50 years in the Nixon war. That there's actually some vitality and merit to re reengaging with this consciousness expansion. Beautiful.

Ehren (43m 12s):

I wanna pick up on a couple pieces there, Erin, especially around the embodiment piece and where I see that as being a really critical component of the way that psychedelics are being reintroduced into the therapeutic community, into the way we're looking at this. And I kind of want to frame it in the context of the way Western psychotherapy has developed over the last 100 years because Michael, as you brought up, we don't have a lineage necessarily that we're drawing from. As these things are starting to become back, back into research, back into culture. John Lilly didn't have a tribe to draw from, right? He didn't. He was out there outlaw on his own doing it.

Ehren (43m 55s):

And in so many ways, what we're seeing right now is the people that have been experimenting, coming back together, having the capacity to get federal grant fund private funding and having these inroads into saying, all right, now that we've had these experiences, how do we codify them and provi present them in a way that's palatable to the skeptics, to the people that have assumed that this is just for hippies and people that you know off their rocker, right? And what I wanna look at is like the sense of when psychedelics were being explored in the fifties and sixties, the dominant modalities and theories that were being used therapeutically were still very Freudian and psychodynamic, psychoanalytic really meaning that predominantly they were mental, there was not necessarily the component of the body being brought in gestalt therapy, definitely the early kind of version of a lot of somatic therapies that are more popular now.

Ehren (44m 57s):

But that wasn't popular therapy at that time. It was being developed in the fifties and sixties, but it didn't make its way into a larger mainstream understanding of the importance of an embodied relationship to the mind and to the emotions until much later on, and especially in the nineties, early two thousands and up to now, there's been a pretty strong somatic revolution in psychotherapy saying, we need to incorporate the body, we need to incorporate the way that most people have heard at this point, the idea that trauma is stored in the body, in the nervous system. And there's absolutely a truth to that and it's kind of an oversimplification of it, but it's true that order to access the, the way we can reprocess memories, the way we can re-pattern our nervous systems, like we do have to include the body for the most part.

Ehren (45m 49s):

Sometimes inside is enough, but rarely, right? And so that's the trap that psychotherapy and talk therapy found itself in for a long time was not including that. And so that was also the frame that psychedelic work was being looked at when it was being researched in the fifties when it was being explored also through the kind of the outliers as well. I don't think there was as much of a com a understanding of that embodied nature of the experience as we're talking about now. And when you look at some of the models that are being put forth, I'm specifically thinking of Rosalyn Watts at Imperial College in London has this really beautiful model called the ACE model or accept connect and body model that they're using in psilocybin research that really includes the body, right?

Ehren (46m 40s):

Includes the what is happening in your body in this moment as you're experiencing this, and is it possible to move towards this and treat whatever is happening, whether it's painful, disturbing, difficult to be with compassion and with acceptance. And that parallels most, if not all of the current understandings of some of the best ways to do therapy with people looking at things like internal family systems or EMDR or many of the therapeutic modalities that essentially ask people to revisit traumatic memories or traumatic experiences, traumatic emotions with a deeper sense of love and compassion.

Ehren (47m 20s):

And when you look at the core of a lot of what the psychedelic research is showing, I think around why these things work for trauma healing, why these, these things work for PTs D, why these things work for longstanding depression or addiction, it's because they do give people access, like you said, Aaron, to that remembrance, right? To that remembrance of I'm more than this limited ego self that experiences pain and suffering. I actually have access, I can remember this access to some source of love that I feel in my body, I feel in my heart. And I can use that as a way to soften and be with the parts of me that I generally don't want to be with.

Ehren (48m 2s):

Like it opens up that capacity to do that. And it's the same thing that I do with clients through internal family systems and other ways of psychotherapy. It just magnifies that capacity for people to find that within themselves really fast and really quickly. You know what I mean? If you've ever done M D M A, like you just wanna love everyone, you feel it. It's an embodied experience, right? And so the levels of that which people can access that in those states gives people this greater capacity than like you said, to almost bookmark that or have a way of coming back to it, remembering ongoing.

Ehren (48m 43s):

And so that's the integration work. And I wanna bring this back, Michael, also to what you were saying about the institutions of festival culture, taking these experiences and marketing them as transformational and actually somehow pulling that label away from that embodied experience of what it's like to have that remembrance that into the right conditions and circumstances creates the conditions for internal transformation through that remembering, right? Like that's the individual experience that sometimes happens in a place where you have autonomy to do whatever drugs you want and beyond whatever wavelength you want to get on with a bunch of people who are also doing the same thing, right?

Ehren (49m 32s):

That approximates in some ways what we're seeing in the therapeutic research, just not in a contained setting, right? And then seeing festival culture kind of take that and label the festival as that rather than the experience that some people have as that. And I think that it brings up this larger conversation right now around the psychedelic industry and what we can learn maybe from the failures of transformational festival culture and the successes when we're talking about how psychedelics might be marketed to people as a therapeutic tool. Because I see the exact same pitfalls, I see the exact same appeal to any company that wants to present the psychedelic experience as inherently healing no matter what.

Ehren (50m 22s):

In the same way that a transformational festival wants to present the idea that coming to this festival is gonna gonna create transformation for you no matter what, and leaves out all of the specific conditions and containers and importance of all the pieces that come together to create the safety, create the container, create the, the ripening of that internal remembering and what do you do with it, right? What do you actually do with it? What, how are you being prompted to know what to do with it? And I too, Michael, remember the notion of the transformational festival and going, what does this actually mean?

Ehren (51m 2s):

What are we trying to transform into? What is this? What is this thing? What is this buzzword? And it's funny because the most of the transformation I, I've experienced in my own life has come from outside of that. And then those experiences now actually are like these celebratory experiences that I'm not running away from at the time they were more these escapist type things. And again, I'm gonna steer it back to that question of like, where's that line? Because I, I think it's in context with all this, all the things I was, I've just mentioned around, it's so contextual, it's so individual around where that line is for people. It's so individual where that line is between going and wanting to have an experience versus actually having it.

Ehren (51m 50s):

And there's no way for me or you or Erin to be an arbiter of that for someone it has someone deciding, but doing it in an honest way, right? Of like, how much am I actually moving towards parts of myself that I haven't been able to be with or haven't been able to understand or haven't been able to find love and compassion for or treat in a way that's more humane or more in relationship to a higher set of ideals or perhaps a more maybe something like an indigenously informed I set of ideals around interconnectedness and how much am I continuing to engage with substances as a way to trick myself into thinking that I might be doing that or that just I'm straight up just having a great time so I don't have to deal with that shit.

Ehren (52m 45s):

And I think that there's the potential for either of that in the festival world, in the commercialized, institutionalized medicalized model, in the coaching model in any of these places. And I think I'm gonna just speak from my own experience as a therapist, like working in a rehab, right? Like I've seen people, you know, substances aside come in and pretend like they're doing the work and just totally diluting themselves and, and we see what that looks like. But sometimes it's easier for people just to kind of pretend like they're going through the steps and the motions and that's what people are ready for and that's okay too. That has to be part of, of the process.

Ehren (53m 26s):

I've experienced that. I've experienced that self illusion of thinking I'm going somewhere when I'm really just treading water. And there's that, I think it's an important and a natural step actually in any part, right? It's kind of the pre-contemplation part in the stages of change where you have to want to change before you want to change before you change. And I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing that the idea of transformation might be prompted by something like a transformational festival or by the idea of doing therapy or by the idea of whatever modality you're seeking to change with. But yeah, I just get the sense that there's no clear answer to that question around where that line is it's individual and that I'm curious to explore more around like how we've experienced that festival realm and how that might translates into the work we're doing now and what we're seeing in the larger context of, of kind of the rollout of a more mainstream version of psychedelics.

Michael (54m 24s):

Can I focus this a little bit before I bounce it back to you, Aaron? Because I think, and thank you both for that. One of the, the things that strikes me about all of this is that I think about that classic rat park experiment that, you know, where it showed that laboratory rats don't just by default prefer the cocaine button over food, that there are these un unhealthy addictive patterns are actually, and I talked about this, another expert in unhealthy addictive patterns. Charles Shaw, right? Old friend and complicated figure.

Ehren (55m 4s):

I love that episode by the way, way back.

Michael (55m 6s):

She's not way back. Charles is somebody who has been a real pain in the ass to a lot of people over the years, but I think really walks this line now and his, he's, he's gonna mature as a wounded healer into the role of addiction counselor and helping people through these same kind of trials that he himself has been through in his life. And Charles made the point in that I think it was episode 58 or thereabouts, that the addiction is actually the brain doing what it should be doing. Now it's, and I'll be talking about this with some neuroscientists at some point this year also, that the brain, if you think about it as like an uncertainty reduction or free energy minimization, these terms that are floating around now, that the brain is a tool for inference.

Michael (55m 50s):

And so it likes to be able to make parsimonious predictions about its own future states and about the future of its environment. And in a weird way, addiction facilitates in that. Like when I had Eric Wargo on the show, he was talking about how many people he thinks are precognitive individuals like Harlan Ellison famous science fiction writer who wrote a lot of time travel fiction and has a, you know, that a lot of these people have problems with alcoholism or, or drug use. Philip Kate, Dick, there's a way in which I'm drunk today and I'm gonna be drunk tomorrow, is actually doing, is the brain doing what it's been tasked to do? So there's that on one piece. And then the other piece is that the rat park thing, when at that experiment, when you put rats together with one another in an environment that allows a much more so like a greater surface area for social encounters and more exercise and so on, that they actually prefer the company of other rats and quote unquote healthy behaviors over these repetitive self stimulating addictive behaviors.

Michael (56m 57s):

And I look at the last few years and how covid in particular seems it the lockdowns people getting stuck in their home for months at a time, the uncertainty of a, a really turbulent environment, the specter of these an ever tightening cinch or vice of government interventions or just the fear of people being as hats and not doing socially responsible behaviors as a res, as a reaction to this crisis. I mean there's just like all of these ways that that mental health has come to the foreground through all of us going through this collective trauma together.

Michael (57m 42s):

And like we were, Aaron and I were talking about before the call started, the living in Santa Fe in New Mexico, in a place that is so much of its character is about it being a concentration of indigenous people living on reservation, trying to make their way in, in community with wave after wave of European colonists that matters of we're like this relationship between oppression, trauma, substance abuse, or addictive behavior. It's all really interesting. And like the last piece I'll stack on this is when I had Tyson Yoko on the show and Tyson talked about how that this kind of pattern is not unique to peoples that have a very centuries long history of abuse and oppression.

Michael (58m 31s):

There is, you see opioid crisis coming up very prominently in Pennsylvania, coal mining communities whose way of life has been disrupted by changes in the energy sector by, by massive motions in the world market. And so suddenly you have lots of alcoholism and Oxycontin and fentanyl abuse and so on in, in these places as well. I mean, I guess Daphne especially curious in your sense, you know, in, in this relationship with you're thinking on transgender matters issues, this thing about this relationship between, like you said earlier about getting yourself out of the cage of a particular maladaptive model of self and the way that's related to getting oneself out of the cage of one's condition, like the actual material conditions of one's life.

Michael (59m 25s):

Because again, just a last callback to another episode, it, the episode I had with Chris Ryan who his book Civilized to Death, he talks about how far we've gone in the modern era from kind of environment that is actually good for the human body and the human mind and how, you know, the covid being a kind of apotheosis of that, of everyone living almost entirely in, in these digital spaces or being forced through economic concerns to work in very dangerous environments without adequate protection. So I mean, I just, yeah, a yarn ball of stuff, but really curious about this, and I feel like you've both addressed some of this already, but just to refocus on this particular corner of it, the way that, you know, addictive behaviors and abusive patterns seem to be the result of structural issues and that the self is also something that emerges out of a dynamic and relational set of feedbacks with that environment.

Michael (1h 0m 43s):

And so who you are is a kind of reflection of or ever-evolving trace fossil of the world in which you find yourself. And so like when people talk about getting over trauma, like one of the, one of the big, the three main things that people talk about are again and again and all of them find some sort of foothold in or expression in various psychedelic practices. But one is service, one is creative work writing or inquiry, right? Autobiographical writing especially. And then one is travel or pilgrimage and there's a way in which the psychedelic ceremonial container can facilitate anyone or all three of those.

Michael (1h 1m 27s):

But yeah, I mean it just strikes me that like more, as more and more people come out as neurodivergent or come out as trans in some way or another, or are trying to maintain their sanity in a set of socioeconomic circumstances over which they have no control, that there's something that comes into light here about the way that we're no long like in a, I don't know, I put it like self-discovery of our parents' generation of the second wave of psychedelics in the west was in its own way more about breaking free of the strictures of squared dom, but had an emphasis on much like it was part and parcel with this other thing that was going on, which was this proliferation of lifestyle consumerism.

Michael (1h 2m 20s):

And Charles Shaw and I talked about that too, about the way that these drives for transcendence were co-opted by finding yourself, meaning settling into kind of understanding rather than a phase change into a more plural or multidimensional or metamorphic understanding of the self. And especially in a regime of extremely granular and pervasive and pernicious behavioral engineering empowered by digital surveillance technologies. It strikes me that there's something that Richard Doyle has talked about this, that like psychedelics are kind of a training wheels for the Transhuman condition and for what it means to live in a network society where you may not actually want to settle on an identity at all.

Michael (1h 3m 9s):

You know that the identity itself is the trap. So I don't know, I don't know. I thought I was focusing things, but I just blew it up into, anyway, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that particular matter.

Ehren (1h 3m 20s):

I'll speak briefly to just that notion around connection and social in the Rat Park piece. I mean there's a reason why any type of addiction therapy is like the gold standard is group therapy and why AA groups and all these things, despite their problems still are so popular is because getting connected with community and people that actually understand you is probably the most healing thing out of anything more mu, I mean, working through trauma is important, but having a network of people that you can call and be in relationship to is what I've seen to be the most healing thing for people. And it actually brings up this revision of what I was saying before in a way around the transformational festivals where in retrospect, the most transformational thing for me about those spaces I was inhabiting for so long are these sustained continued connections that we have now with each other, right?

Ehren (1h 4m 15s):

And like that's where the real magic was actually gaining these deeper relationships with people who understand us. And I think when we look at oppression and look at the systems that prevent people from feeling like it's okay to be who they are, or that there's an inherent shame in the case of trans people or inherent fear of being seen or in the case of economic disparity that like you are stuck in this place and you're going to be stripped and taken advantage of and there's no way out, right? It's a very disconnecting, isolating thing. And even though there can be these pockets of connection between people that are continuously stuck in poverty or contin, continuously stuck in a sense of, as a trans person, I'm constantly being repressed and targeted and there is community in that very often the most healing thing that's needed is to actually integrate back into culture and to change the systems that are creating that disconnection and oppression in the first place, right?

Ehren (1h 5m 26s):

And it's this open question right now for me in terms of when we're talking about substance abuse, like those communities are breeding grounds for it because that's the way people deal. That's they're, they work, right? Substances work. That's why people use them. And I always look at it like there's nothing wrong with you for going with a strategy that works, but when it comes to psychedelics, what you're saying I think is really important around how do we actually integrate this into an understanding of how we are interconnected with other people and that our own personal work needs to include a justice component or a component of social change or influencing other people's healing to other people's place in the world.

Ehren (1h 6m 11s):

And like I say this right now out loud and I go, wow, I could do a lot better with that, right? Like it's this constant assessment not to also shame myself and say, well, I'm not doing enough and so I need to exist in this kinda hyper VC liberal version of self chastity, but how do I like have this balanced approach of like my own internal work and that place of being able to find love for myself after existing in a culture that has essentially for a very long time given me no access to a way of finding compassion and love for the gender nonconforming parts of myself that I thought were not okay to ever tell anyone about or express or be honest with myself about.

Ehren (1h 7m 2s):

Like how do I take that and then translate that into something else that quote unquote changes the world. Not in this like idealistic conceptual sense, but in the actual embodied way of making small incremental changes for other people. And that's an open question. I don't have an answer for it, but I think that's the inquiry into what the healing potential of psychedelics could represent if cre if prompted and if put into a container that asks those questions of people in parallel with the individual healing experience they might provide.

Daphne (1h 7m 41s):

Yeah, that's really awesomely said. I'll come right off of that Daphne, because the fact of the matter is that we live in an idealized society that has been orchestrated or curated around these myths that being strong, stoic, suppressing emotion, being focused on isolatedly, getting mine, achieving wealth, material resource, having a competitive edge, showing bravado, being in a position of power, authority and agency comes from the gravity of personal attainment, prestige, status, claim. All these things are, they're all these incredibly daunting prerequisites to self-actualization or perceived self-actualization where people are always feeling a sense of dramatic lack and disempowerment.

Daphne (1h 8m 30s):

And then when you look at wanting to try to shift this dystopian of view of the everyone who needs to be a their own king or queen and their own fdo of of success is that then come to a place of how can I have agency? I don't have privilege or power or resource or people telling me that I'm fantastic because of my look and my vibe or these different elements. So then the inversion is I'm going to isolate. I'm going to find safety and survival. I'm gonna be small and quiet, I'm going to economize people that are able to do that. Yet in the mindset of that can never be me. And then also that's compounded by this proudest and worth ethic thing that I have to grind to deserve or earn anything.

Daphne (1h 9m 14s):

I can't just be worthy of healing and worthy of buoyancy and joy and wellbeing unless I punish myself for 60 hours a week to earn a vacation and give everybody everything I have and then drink the dregs of my own. And these things have just entrenched, this mindset is deeply isolating and this indigenous, the wet Togo disease of consumerism and you end up in a position where you just have entire aspects of society that are feeling so ill because they deep down they want to be connected, they wanna have impact, they want to uplift and have influence, but they're so repressed by the expectations of culture that they just sit back in resistance and they might try to formulate ideas of how to do something because of that mindset, again, they get stuck in the analysis paralysis, I have to be perfect.

Daphne (1h 10m 3s):

I have to, I can't come out with paintbrushes, I have to come out with a fully honed plan. And again, that just disempowers and creates this lack of movement and ingenuity. And that's where I often feel the psychedelics invert, that sense of I'm already enough. And that's from the neurochemistry, adding some serotonin for a sense of contentment, buoyancy and joy and the oxytocin for that compassion or empathy awareness and some plasticity to be able to perceive that same way of trick or reactive thinking that you have is just one way. There's actually other ways to, to orient and giving you that spaciousness to feel a sense of that you can change and transform. But the biggest thing that I've noticed is a wonderful homological scaffolding study in 2014 where they show those little circles and on one of them is the default mode network.

Daphne (1h 10m 50s):

It's like how your brain works normally. It's very clean lines, very precise things, what is efficient, what's effective, what's my story? And then you adds sideman. It's this incredible myriad web is what the hell everything's possible. You know, I could change the story right now. I could do things something right now. And even though if it's temporary, just the shattering, just the shaking of the snow globe of palm would say just kind of shock paddles the soul in a way. It's wait, whoa, I was in this crazy ass spiral. I'm just gonna go that way. I'm just gonna extract, I'm gonna just choose something different and see where that goes and not have this sense of I require a structure plan or anything to get moving. It helps to bring about that intuitive compass on again is that just feels right.

Daphne (1h 11m 34s):

That just aligns. That just resonates. And I'm gonna flow with that. And if I take a chance and hey, it's not gonna be perfect. You know what? I'll course correct. I'll add a new BR stroke there, I'll learn, I'll grow, I'll just be, and they compared that one that that patterned web on that one thing. And they did a tested and looked at the brain of a five-year-old. And that's what the brain of a five-year-old does when my daughter, a daughter Alan comes down in the morning, she's not, I'm not good enough to make a change today. You know what? I think my friends are gonna judge me for my shoes. All of that is so far away. It's just, you know what a child of the universe, I'm coming out here, I'm excited by what's possible. Your way's different, but it's not better. Less than my way. Let's learn. Let's grow, let's explore, let's expand What's poss that whole energy, I think out of anything a psychedelic, a capacity to reorient people to that kind of more primordial, primal origin space of just openness, of just getting out of the square or cube that the society and structure and these systems say that this is the, this is how you live, this is how you be.

Daphne (1h 12m 35s):

And I, I'll I just take that one further too. When you know as you're saying, Daphne, one of the most powerful things you do with authentic expression once you start breaking that paradigm for the self is you start recognizing how all these decorum you go into 'em. And we only talk when we raise our thumbs and when we go like this, and you're supposed to be in a particular type of business casual with one button open was is a little, you start, you come as you and you come exactly who you are. And every, all of a sudden in a couple minutes everyone's like, oh god, finally someone has invited genuineness. I ha I could actually take this mask off. I could actually have a real dialogue. And it in actually invites vulnerability. And that element, that component is what often shakes things up and allows people to be more, more open, is that if you are courageous enough to embody your own sense of who you are expressively and show up at the board meeting with your cuff on and what, and have a divergent view and just say that's part of your experience and growth.

Daphne (1h 13m 31s):

And then by the end of the meeting what lightens are loosening up, hair is shuffling out and people are like, wow, I'm so grateful. And the under text of of being, having the permission to not conform. So I think one, the part that I'm feeling in this, whether it's addictive behavior, everything is people are utilizing these compounds are utilizing these different things to escape from the oppression of an unfathomably unrealistic ideal. That this archetype of perfection that is so oppressive that no one embodies, that no one actually knows what it even looks like when it's actually actualized. And then they're like, I can't do that, but I wanna make a change and the change is burning bright in my heart, but I don't have the agency to do it, so, so I'm just gonna quiet myself down.

Daphne (1h 14m 13s):

I'm gonna null myself. I'm gonna take some SSRIs, I'm gonna smooth the edges over, I'm gonna live in the middle stream and I'm gonna, I'm going to be a good whatever. And and the psychedelics often are like, and, and those other embodied therapies are like, you know what, just be and express and share and trust that will, you'll find McKen, you'll find the things. It goes beyond the strategy and into a space of contemporary vigilance where you're learning on the fly and on the FL is where we do our best work. None of us had any preconditions to these questions. We share from streams of what we truly feel. And often that's the most honest and powerful thing we can do is just being who we are in the moment and being courageous enough to do, oh,

Michael (1h 14m 50s):

Hold on Dave, you're muted. Oh, go ahead.

Ehren (1h 14m 53s):

Thank you. So I wanna respond to that and push back just a little bit if that's okay. Yes. To all of that. And you mentioned the idea that psilocybin another psychedelics disrupt the default mode network in a way that makes people's brains act look somewhat like a five-year-olds and makes people open to change and suggestibility and a sense of anything is possible. And I wanna bring in Brian Pace's work on right wing psychedelia and I don't know if you've read this article Yeah. De this is an exploration of how psychedelics have also been used throughout history and in modern times to funnel people into the pretty significantly harmful ideologies and to use transcendent experiences actually to reinforce ideologies of division and hate and better than, right there being a sense of divine, divine ordinance to my superiority to other people, right?

Ehren (1h 15m 55s):

And psychedelics themselves, they use this wonderful phrase in that paper that kind of taking off the idea of them being a nonspecific amplifier in general, that they're cultural and political nonspecific amplifiers too. Whatever is being presented, they have the capacity to further emphasize. And I think Erin, you're what you're saying I am hoping is generally true, that the way that people are perceiving themselves becomes more opening, more questioning of social conventions and norms that are limiting or not really serving the expression of self.

Ehren (1h 16m 35s):

And it's also very clear that under the right conditions, psychedelics can equally be used to reinforce ideologies of hate and division and things that we, I think all can agree and this conversation don't wanna seek proliferate, but there's not necessarily a moral compass always to psychedelic use that's inherent to itself. It can be maneuvered in many ways. And I think that we need to have this happening in the conversation around how are these experiences framed, right? Who is guiding them? Who is right? Like actually, you know, we talk about this a lot in the therapy world around really noticing our bias as therapists and it being a constant monitoring of am I honoring client's autonomy or am I inserting my own sense of morals or my own sense of politics or cultural?

Ehren (1h 17m 32s):

It's like I can be sitting in front of someone who's transphobic and is holding these very posing views to what I believe myself. And it may not serve the client therapeutically for me to actually try and challenge that necessarily. Like sometimes I have to bracket my own sense of what is right or wrong in order to provide good therapy for someone. Right? And yeah, and it's the same, I think the same thing comes in psychedelic work that I don't know how much is being addressed, right? And how do we, there's no easy answer to this, but I just want to push back against that idea that in psychedelics inherently are going to push people into this more, I would say altruistic mindset.

Ehren (1h 18m 13s):

It's yes, that's a possibility. And also based on what we see in the world, like it can also reinforce highly egoic, narcissistic sense of I'm better then. And I would say that I would guess all of us in our own ways have probably experienced that through transcended states coming back and going, holy shit, I just saw something that no one else has seen and that means that I'm special and I have access to this knowledge or this place that that can be a pretty potent way to create hierarchy or create distance, yeah. Between people or groups.

Ehren (1h 18m 53s):

And I want to bring that in just as a counterpoint to the idealism of psychedelics themselves, right? Because if we're talking about psychedelics being this potential antidote or opening into understanding the ways that our projections are actually falling short of reality, I think we need to also question our projections and idealization of psychedelics themselves in order to have a more grounded, accurate assessment of both the benefits and the pitfalls in all these ways. Absolutely.

Daphne (1h 19m 31s):

Yeah. And I think that's a wonderful cause, you know, the psychedelic narcissism, messianic complexes, a lot of those things are actually quite prevalent in in the psychedelic experience. And so when you are in that plastic state, when you are in that kind of dissolved invertive space where you are now open and suggestible to neuro orientation of how you navigate your life, that's where there's always that threat of who's hosting that container, what environment, what set setting context are you immersed in that then influences that very vulnerable, very malleable state of being to inform what that next embodied action or the aspect of your forward progress looks like.

Daphne (1h 20m 13s):

And that's one of the real challenges of this particular renaissance is that because of the oppression of facilitation for so long, they're not being lineages of in initiated, oh oh, how deeply compassionate and caring and skilled models of imbuing people with skillsets and also keeping them close in a mentorship relationship over long periods of time to ensure that deep ethics and virtues in those aspects become the core fabric of someone's facilitated service work. Those things just have not been present or prevalent in our particular society. You know, they've been in some indigenous spaces and that's where you get your ayahuasquero that went down three times and comes back and thinks that he's some Emmy God prophet that is here now to imbue the western culture with the wisdoms of the indigenous truth.

Daphne (1h 21m 3s):

Like you have those elements. And so as we're gingerly walking into this and foraying into this mo Daphne, you are in a realm where you have your HIPAA laws and you have your ethical guidelines with psychotherapy. The ethics of ceremonial facilitation is wild west. And so we are in many ways having to revisit and evaluate what is it within ourselves, issues of transference, issues of our own personal biases, issues of our own particular desired outcome. For some facilitators come in with their own checklist of success for someone's journey. Like those things are very real. And I think we're gonna have to go through a very real sincere consecration period of distilling down right practice of feeling out how to host those containers in a way that is extremely responsible to those very subtly vulnerable states.

Daphne (1h 21m 54s):

Now a lot of people that move into those types of narcissistic spaces are people that are more self also, or I can't say a lot of 'em or most, but self-medicating or utilizing them in these open spaces. They're having these revelations, they're having these insights, they're thinking that they're divinely touched, they're coming back in without the framework of prep, integration, embodiment, awareness of some of those elements. And then they're having the course correct over time. I had this wonderful conversation, Rebecca Hayden, who does Ayahuasca Speaks podcast recently. And the fact is that most narcissists where that come through spiritual narcissism, they do have a deep desire to be of service. There is, I think an initial earnest intention there where it's like, I wanna make a change. I see that the issues of the pain of our culture and and the dystopia of our community and I wanna come back and I wanna spread the good news to all my friends and let them know now let's ease the way and I'll share with them these insights the as best as I can, the evangelize that whole experience.

Daphne (1h 22m 48s):

But a part of the message that's optimist is that we all have the capacity, we all have the ability to heal and through actually through our actions and emanations, we have way more influence than our directives and our prerogatives that we share upon others and our prescriptions for how to reach transcendence. So there's a real big question here, and I think when it comes down to psychedelics too, there's a, there's the indigenous would say as well, that's the kind of the difference between the entheogen and the kind of synthesized psychedelic is that there's this idea and insight in working with psilocybin for a while of there being a diva or a spirit or an intelligence or a presence in the plant that often helps us if we're willing and open to receive, get a deeper sense of how do we live in community tasks with the, with people around us.

Daphne (1h 23m 35s):

How can we be a little bit more humble about that approach where, you know, some synthetics they say just kind of avoided the spirit of that type of intelligent helps us as in terms of guardianship, kind of keep us on the path. Just to kind of wrap up on that thought here, I think when we're moving into a culture that's blossoming and blooming with psychedelics, that's why the paramount message I feel is important. This is not a panacea, this isn't something that you take in as a cure all. This isn't something that's your Insta wisdom and you've reached level seven of the enlightened nick totem and now you could come out and be this, this prophet. This is a tool, it is a catalyst. It is a resource. And as much as it's important when I talk about the cycle experience to the people I facilitate and practice with, I say we're starting looking at the arc of a rainbow preparation going into this with health and body and mind, being clear of what your community support system looks like.

Daphne (1h 24m 27s):

Being clear of your environment, being clear of your accountability to others around you. That's 40% of the leg psychedelic experience. 20%, that's the rainbow. That cusp survived the clouds. You get that panoramic 360 view, you get that 30,000 foot, you get to see how your lineage has informed you to now and where your resources and your, where you can be and dynamic creativity and ingenuity and, and what can happen moving forward. But then that's just an awesome ass lucid dream if you don't follow that other 40% of the leg of how do I make sure that I am, I'm attuning to what's important in my life. I'm making decisions, choice based decisions to actively release things that no longer serve me.

Daphne (1h 25m 9s):

Invite things in that really help to create us and support holistic wellbeing and really staying focused and diligent, more vigilant than ever on how I can be more mindful of what I have agency for and what I'm responsible for. All those things, because people think that they have arrived, they're at base camp every single time. This is a continuum, this is a world of process. So that's really important. I really appreciate you bringing that up cuz this isn't the answer. Everybody does psychedelics. There'd probably be a hot mess there. You know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of things that have to come in on the front end and the back end to make sure that that ground's in a safe way.

Michael (1h 25m 42s):

So that's the, that brings us to the last question I have for the two of you, which is that there is a sense in which Zigman Baumann who wrote Liquid Modernity talks about the modern world having a kind of a conflicted nature. That modernity is on the one hand about control, on the other hand it is, is about liberation and like self transformation and either of those drives as manifested through the use of technology to achieve greater agency over the world. And on the other hand, the use of technology to open what Stewart Kaufman calls the adjacent possible to open up the panorama of what could be, they're inherently at odds with each other.

Michael (1h 26m 32s):

And to the extent that we regard psychedelics through the frame of technology we bring to it all of these kind of challenging and ultimately I think irresolvable conflicts into this stuff. And as both of you have just outlined, there's a sense in which the use of psychedelics, the use of meditation, if it's not held within a certain kind of context, can just as biotechnology or anything else can result in these sort of nightmarish scenarios. Just cuz I'm a little sick in the head, I'm curious to know what the two of you see as the likely greatest perils moving forward into the next few decades.

Michael (1h 27m 17s):

Where, what are the bumps in the road here, or what are the ways in which the, you know, taking our foot off the brakes of the regulation of these tools or in reregulating them in ways that enable access, but also perhaps put the, the control and determination of the future of these tools or, you know, if you wanna even talk about it, just as put access to the, the kinship and learning from the, the beings that people experience them as. That this is, to me, everything just kind of boils down, comes back to Jurassic Park like five movies later, God knows how many video games and so on.

Michael (1h 28m 7s):

Everyone knows that this is a doomed project and yet no one can stop it. And that was the lesson of the first thing, right, which was that you shouldn't do this. And yet you go on Twitter and you see people being like, I would still pay for, I would, I would still go in on Jurassic Park, like, why isn't this happening? Why? And it's just hilarious. And I see something very much like that with, I mean that's what, that's a core theme of this show is like everybody wants like super intelligent computers to automate the things we don't like to do, but then you run into all of these, we can't think our way out of the knock on effects, the horrible, unintended consequences of this stuff.

Michael (1h 28m 47s):

Yeah, no. Just to double down on my psychedelic conservativism, I would love to know from you both what you see as either avoidable or unavoidable. What do you see as the greatest, the greatest issues confronting us as the dinosaurs escape the park? And I mean, a lot of these have been talked to death. I mean, there's one of them is obviously that, that this stuff gets, rather, there's a big argument between decriminalization and regulation, right? Where organizations like Compass Pathways are trying to patent shit like the use of sofas in psychedelic therapy, or they're trying to find some way to, to patent a specific vehicle for or formulation of psilocybin.

Michael (1h 29m 31s):

And these, this gets tied up and stuff with IP law and the enclosure of the commons and people's access to nat to nature itself. And like at what point have we have we kind of allowed these large institutional actors to shut off our own, to pay gate or to determine the course of, but even in situations of decriminalization, shout out to Colorado for just decriminalizing so many of these substances. But you end up in this age old argument between the, the benefits of regulation and deregulation. So I don't know what your thoughts are on all of that. And of course, as you both have mentioned, there are also, there are plenty of psychic casualties that come as a byproduct of making mental health technologies available to more people.

Michael (1h 30m 22s):

There doesn't seem to be a way, this is a like theological thing, right? There doesn't seem to be a way to give people more agency in their lives without allowing them to make, without affording them to make really bad self-destructive decisions. Yeah. I'd love to let you both wrap this on where you see the greatest pitfalls ahead of us and if there is anything that we can do to avoid them or if these are just going to be the new focal areas for a concerted collective effort to continue to try to adapt to the crises created by innovation,

Daphne (1h 30m 57s):

I can attempt to foray into this one. Yeah, it's a significant question. I mean, you look at contemporary challenges without even opening the floodgates because of the general renaissance of interest in psychedelics, the indigenous plight of the pe ot cactus and how people are just driving out to Mexico and Arizona and plucking these plants up and bringing them back home and thinking that they're gonna pop off in some kind of illuminated experiences while they've been, there's only a certain region that grows them. It's been ceremonially used as a sacrament for hundreds and thousands of years and, and it's part of a lineage of initiation and healing that's used in a very particular way by groups of people that have deep reverence.

Daphne (1h 31m 37s):

And the privileged, the hardest thing of this all is the privileged, kind of entitled mindset that is just so proliferated in our culture that we have just the right to any, to do anything we want. Like freedom means do anything you want. There's not a sense of real consideration for the collective wellbeing. Sabina offers the magic mushroom mushroom and thousands of people show up at her town demanding service and ceremony. And you go down to, into the, in Peru right now in Cusco, and every corner has a shaman that's offering an ayahuasca journey and everybody's a facilitator and people are getting entrenched in all types of horrific circumstances because of this desire to have an experience.

Daphne (1h 32m 20s):

And, and it's just disrupting the capacity of people to genuinely hold and facilitate the space, the actual production of the material. So when you open up the true flood gates and all this, I anticipate that we may go through some form of a collective purge of sorts where we all, numerous people, various walks of life will have their first encounter in various levels of integrity of container or non-con container and have to move through some form of a personalized initiation of what that actually results on in their life and and anticipate some of it's not gonna be pretty. And because of, you know, there's gonna be some interesting boundary regulatory settings as to how do we offer these compounds in a way that can somewhat ensure that there's the priority of safety is like at the heartbeat of the psychological safety of, of the people that are actually ingesting.

Daphne (1h 33m 18s):

So it's a complex one. At one point I'm like, yeah, I would love to see acceleration of decrem and legalization and these things to take form. And then the other side, there's not nearly enough people that understand actually facilitate with these things. Yet now if you open the floodgates, you feel that genuinely have an embodied sense of the gravity and the power intensity of these work and can actually sit in a container. I mean, I feel like I'm a doula sometimes more than a facilitator in how powerful that those experiences can genuinely be and how sensitive they genuinely own organ too. They're looking at legalizing framework and what do we do in spiritual settings? What do we do in one-on-ones? What makes a group able to do this? What criteria allows somebody to be ready? So I think we're gonna have some real growing pains, but what I feel at the result of the shakeup at the end of the day is consciousness freedom is going to be a pretty awesome thing to perceive.

Daphne (1h 34m 9s):

And see, I just really look at how, sometimes I see the entrenchment of certain people that come into an experience and they're very isolated, withdrawn, and constricted, and then all of a sudden they come out and they have this different sense of possibility on a very sense that could go in a lot of directions. But when you start to come into this deeper sense of, as a human being, I'm a dynamic creator that's only checked and bound by my perception of limitation and my sense of what my own capacity it is based upon my cultural conditioning. Like when that gets broken, interesting things happen. I'm for one to see the fireworks of that being broken for major swaths of people. Because I think in some ways there will be disruption, there will be purging, there will be some mess absolutely clean up on aisle four, five and six and after five or 10, 10 years of re kind of nor like reacclimating to what that actually means.

Daphne (1h 35m 2s):

I anticipate some dynamic discovery. I, I anticipate some deep realization on more collective scales, and hopefully I anticipate some real forward movement on the ability to move away from the material industrialized complex to more of a hybrid symbiotic lifestyle that just takes into account a lot more factors for what makes success or wellbeing or, or overall a sense of community co interdependence that might cross pollinate from just having those blinders and those really powerful parameters that are placed upon so long just popped off. So I might have a little bit of, I think more of the idealistic view that I think we could pull through this for the better by just freeing consciousness.

Daphne (1h 35m 46s):

But I'm not, I'm not verse to say that there's gonna be a learning curve for everybody involved here, and we're gonna have to really start to ha, take a hard look at some of the things that are gonna be falling out and some of the things that are gonna be, we're gonna have to work through when you just take the lid, the genie off the bottle over something that powerful, that strong. And I'm just hoping as well as I added here as well, that we have a lot of respect for the indigenous peoples, for the peoples that have held this in sacred importance for a long period of time. And not just say, Hey, we got this, we're more advanced. We no actually we're babies in that world compared to lineages that have held it sacred and safe for long periods of time. So there's gonna be some, hopefully some real inversion there and who we look to for guidance, not just all white coats, and not to say the whole clinical bases off base, but many psychotherapists that are getting this work have never experienced it many people.

Daphne (1h 36m 36s):

So there's gonna have to be a growing edge on all sides to really understand how to work with this as a collective in a way that allows it to be supportive and not just massively disruptive for the time ahead.

Ehren (1h 36m 48s):

Davene, you wanna close this out? Let's do it. So I'll start by framing this and saying, I'm an Enneagram type seven, so I'm gonna lean on the side of optimism in general. Let's just how I tend to view things. And also I do see probably the biggest pitfall, the continued gonna be the continued exclusion of marginalized groups in this type of work in therapy. And you see it in the research that's coming out, getting 90% of study participants in the maths trials are white. There's almost no gender expansive people in those trials because of my personal interests. That's where I'm focused in terms of getting some more research done. So when people inherently have some gender realization experiences in psychedelic therapy, cisgendered therapists might have some basis to know what to do or that this is a possibility, right?

Ehren (1h 37m 37s):

So I think there's a lot of good work being done, or at least people trying to start this work to expand the capacity for black indigenous people of color, gender nonconforming people, other indigenous and marginalized groups to have access to these things in an equal way who experience rates of trauma and oppression at higher rates and arguably could benefit from psychedelic assisted therapies or ceremonial work in ways that, you know, and I don't wanna put anyone, everyone, it's like everyone can benefit. And also there are certain conditions culturally that have led to higher rates of say, suicide, substance abuse, things that are real crises for certain groups that could really benefit from the potential accelerated healing benefits of psychedelics.

Ehren (1h 38m 29s):

So I see that the stove piping and gatekeeping, and who's gonna just pay the most money for this as one of the major pitfalls that groups like Compass and other things like that are, I mean, maybe having some lip service about, but when you, again, Michael, you brought the patenting and the ip, it's like, what's the real endgame? It's profit, it's the continued rollout of the hyper capitalist corporate model, right? And so I see that also, and I know you said this has been talked to death, but there's a reason for that. It's probably because it's the most glaring, obvious potential pitfall of this is that psychedelics just become another form of nature commodified.

Ehren (1h 39m 12s):

And I don't think we can afford that at this point if we want to course correct as a species. And also I tend to hold the view that, you know, and this is my escapist meta view coming out, that at the end of the day, nature's gonna course correct itself with or without humans. But I hope we can be a part of it. And I do see that there's this need to recreate these systems of incentivization and financial, you know, the, the stranglehold that the financial systems that we've built have on our culture and on groups. And Michael, oh hi, bringing in beautiful child.

Ehren (1h 39m 53s):

Hello. Yeah, I mean, that's it. It's right. What do we want to actually build the world as for the future? I, I think that if we're looking at everyone as a whole, when I look at this type of work, it's like how do we actually give access to people that historically have been denied access to cutting edge treatments and equal and supportive ways of resources. And yeah, I just see that as the biggest piece. And I want to close here just with one other piece that feels relevant and it got sparked before and I kind of flagged it. But one of the things that I have found so interesting pertinent is when you look at lifetime psychedelic use, there's this beautiful scale called the Nature Relatedness Scale.

Ehren (1h 40m 38s):

That's a validated psychological measure that basically looks at how people feel connected to nature. Do they feel like they're a part of it or do they feel like they're separate from it? And lifetime psychedelic use is correlated pretty strongly with feeling as though we are a part of nature and that we're actually part of an interconnected system. And despite all my misgivings and all of my skepticism that I brought up with right wing psychedelia work and every little counterpoint I've added, I do have this optimism that's generated from this in seemingly inherent capacity for people to feel more interconnected at some level with the world we live in, breaking down this nature non nature divide in a way that I think is an inherent fallacy of the English language and modern civilization that indigenous cultures really did not have language for, right?

Ehren (1h 41m 34s):

It was, there was always this embeddedness and psychedelics seemed to bring that forth in people. And furthermore, when we're talking about healing and connection, the attachment relationship that people can have with nature itself, with the world, with reality, with that sense of interconnectedness is such a profoundly healing thing that I feel is broken in modern culture that's broken by the colonization of an industrialization of indigenous interconnected culture. And so like I have, again, I'm gonna bring my type seven optimism into this, is that's where it comes from, is this sort of reestablishment of a nurturing attachment re relationship with our embeddedness in reality itself.

Ehren (1h 42m 24s):

And if we're able to cultivate that, I think there's some hope. And if we continue to just milk the profit out of every little last drop and continue the path we're on, I don't know, I see that as the both the hope, right? And the pitfall is like that embeddedness in the world that psychedelics bring up and the inherent background network of love or compassion that's accessible through that, and also limiting access to that to the highest bidder as the pitfall.

Michael (1h 43m 2s):

Awesome. You both are beautiful. Thank you so much for being on the show. I will link to your respective websites in the show notes. Obviously folks, if you one more information, you can contact them directly, support this podcast on CK or Patreon, which, and my daughter wants you to see this little electric fish that she gave me for Christmas. All right, much love to you both. Thanks so much for taking the time.

Ehren (1h 43m 30s):

Thank You, Michael. Been an honor and pleasure. Thank you, Daphne. Love reflections. Thank you guys.

Michael (1h 43m 35s):

Thanks again for listening. Future Fossils is an independent, ad-free, entirely listener supported program. If you believe in the work that I'm doing and you wanna help see it thrive into the unimaginable future, then you can avail yourself of all of the backstage goodies, patreon.com/michael Garfield. Or you can just leave a review at Apple Podcasts that's more helpful than, you know, reach out to me personally at Michael Garfield on Twitter or Instagram and have a wonderful eon.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe