PSYCHEDELICS: A Conversation With Rick Doblin | Dr. K Interviews

it felt like an oasis of sanity in a crazy world and so it's not that unusual that there would be a guidance counselor there that would know about lsd research thanks a lot for coming rick so we're live um just so let me just introduce you again so this is a rick doblin he's the founder and executive director of maps which is the multidisciplinary association for psychedelic studies i know that uh a lot of our community has been very interested in psychedelics recently there's been a lot of uh studies that have come out showing the potential benefits of using psychedelics um as mental health treatments and i know other will kind of get into how it has additional uses um and so i i think a lot of that frankly is due to you rick because maps has been funding studies and you've been a long-term proponent for decades since 1986 is when i started maps but but really since 1972 when i was 18 when i decided to focus on

psychedelics yeah so thank you so much for all of your hard work and dedication because i i do think that psychedelics are going to offer a really wonderful opportunity in psychiatry um just a quick disclaimer that you know psychedelics are currently not really medically approved treatments for anything so um you know we don't really re or i don't recommend that you guys use them we'll talk a little bit more about that um so you know in the studies as i understand them are done in relatively controlled environments with controlled dosing and sort of a certain amount of purity of like what people are using so a lot of times things are contaminated and so you know steer clear of that but rick i i know you may disagree well um i i think our clinical studies are done in a highly controlled environment with pre-screened patients with medical tests to make sure that they're fine to handle the experience and then it's a

two-person therapy team with them for eight hours and there's been preparation and integration so yeah it's a highly controlled environment um but i i do think that um some of the most important experiences i've had um after i was quite familiar with psychedelics was doing them on my own in the woods in nature um some once actually on my own in a flotation tank for 17 hours oh wow with a big dose of lsd so i i do think that it's wise to have somebody that's not under the influence of psychedelics kind of like a designated driver because you can go deeper when you feel really safe and you're not worried about the interaction with the outside world somebody at the door the phone or anything like that um and also i i do think that

there is a lot to be uh gained from other contexts than therapeutic context but but the concern i have there is just that when people take them in more of a what you would say recreational or celebratory context if you're just doing it to have fun one of the big dangers is that when difficult stuff comes up and psychedelics do kind of impact this membrane between the unconscious and the unconscious mind and things that are emotionally charged come to the surface if you're just trying to have fun and something difficult comes up if you try to stuff it down and not focus on it you could end up worse off for months or years later so i think the attitude going into it is very important regardless of whether it's a therapeutic setting or any kind of settings back in the 80s when mdma was first being well it was middle 70s actually that mdma under the code name adam was first being used in therapy settings and then eventually

escaped out of those therapeutic settings and was used uh recreationally under the name ecstasy there was still sasha shulgin who was the chemist that really helped pioneer this whole area and sort of rediscovered mdma he and his wife anne had a several page mimeographed information sheet that they handed out along with the drug and it ended up with remember there is no such thing as a casual experiment experiment you do have to take it seriously even though it may not be in a therapeutic or religious uh spiritual setting it's still you shouldn't underestimate these substances and just don't approach it casually yeah so rick just in that vein i've actually had a lot of people reach out saying that they've had ptsd or anxiety develop after using lsd or other psychedelics what do you think about that um i think that that's um very it's not uncommon i mean again it's when

you take these situa lsd and psilocybin and the classic psychedelics operate by dissolving your sense of self you know which can lead to this sense of deeper unity and connection but it also helps um if people are are not feeling safe in a way it can contribute to people feeling like they're losing their mind or that often we are so identified with our ego with our sense of who we are that the ego dissolution is sometimes confused with physical death that ego death or ego dissolution is often confused with physical death um stan groff who's um sort of the world's leading lsd researcher and therapist um he started doing lsd research in the 50s in the czech republic he's 89 now and we just published his book way of the psychonaut for encyclopedia in her journey so i highly recommend that for people but he told a story about how he watched a bunch of people um

doing lsd before he ever did it himself you know now these are patients and he was the the psychiatrist in this part of his training and he saw how this confusion between ego dissolution and ego death and physical death often manifests um and so when he had his first lsd experience and he started going through that same thing he uh for a temporarily he persuaded himself that somehow or other because he had had a a special illness when he was like six years old that that had altered his body chemistry such that even though he knew that other people when they started feeling that they were dying it was actually not true for him he thought it was really true because he had this illness when he was six and it only took him it took him a while to work through that but this just relates to your question that people can uh when difficult stuff comes up and you try to um push it down or you don't feel safe in

the context to explore it you have now created a situation where these memories that have been unconscious are now sort of halfway conscious halfway not and you can have very difficult experiences in therapeutic settings in the future and also underground settings and i've done this um you know back before mdma was illegal but you know when people have difficult experiences with lsd or psilocybin what you can do is give half a dose of mdma and what that does it's not like a tranquilizer that sort of tries to take you out of it and freezes the conflict in place but what it does is it reduces the fear of whatever it is that you're concerned about the fear of dying the fear of going crazy or traumatic memories that are coming up and then you can process it so that you know that would be the if people go to the emergency rooms or something because they've got a panic attack from lsd the ideal solution and i

know emergency rooms aren't prepared for this at least not yet would be to give a half dose of mdma and then keep them processing it and provide that sort of support interesting so rick you mentioned that you've been doing kind of you've been interested in psychedelics for a long time can you just tell us a little bit about like what your upbringing was like and yeah um yeah i'd be very glad um yeah so it was really um i was born in 1953 and i was born in in chicago um you know i feel like the sort of classic american story in that grandparents on one side great grandparents on the other side were immigrants they came fleeing anti-semitism and violence against jews in russia and poland to the united states and then after a couple generations they were successful um my great grandfather was the classic

rags to riches in the sense that he was actually a rag salesman collected rags and um there was a family story about one time in the winter in chicago he's on his horse collecting rags and there was a little cart behind him and he froze to the saddle and my great-grandmother had come out with hot water and pour it there so that he could unfreeze from the saddle um and eventually build a paper company so i was um and then after in his 60s he sold the paper company my great grandfather moved to palestine and built a house there in 1924 that is now a historical site on rothschild boulevard and it's kind of an iconic image of israel and tel aviv because the house has been preserved but in the backyard is a skyscraper and right across the street is another skyscraper so it's in the middle of this you know very commercial district but it when the house was built just um less

than a hundred years ago it was just sand around it it was yeah um so the the all that is to say is that i've been raised on stories of the holocaust and you know the foundation of the state of israel the sort of the response to the the holocaust and my father was a doctor um so i you know my family was well off and so i just was given i'd say the the gift of security in order to look at more deeper risks what do i mean by that what i mean is that um you know prejudice genocide um you know those those you could you could be financially secure as a lot of people were in germany you know before hitler and then you still end up dying um you know so that the deeper threat is this kind of um problem of the human spirit you could

say humanity as a whole is um a lot of people are um willing to dehumanize others to be racist to um think of us as separate from nature and trash nature so rick this is a deeply interesting and philosophical kind of take i'm kind of curious what was your act like i mean were you thinking this way when you were like 12 i was yeah see my father's hero was saul lewinsky and so saul alinsky wrote the book rules for radicals he's a community organizer in chicago obama studied with saul linsky you know his approaches um so my my family was very um progressive you could say so you grew up in chicago yeah i grew up in chicago i grew up in a place called uh well first off in skokie and sometimes people know of skokie because it's heavily jewish a lot of survivors of the holocaust and at one point in time about i guess

it was even 30 or 40 years ago the american nazis wanted to march through skokie and the american civil liberties union defended them and um as a right of free expression and and they lost a lot of support but i i do think they did the whole the right thing but in any case i grew up surrounded by jewish people i was um six years old and my family tells this story i thought the whole world was jewish because that was the whole world that i knew and my parents when they realized that they said no no no we're like a fraction of one percent of the whole world and i got really scared and i'm like well you know what if they're right you you know christ is the messiah we're going to hell you know and they were just like well just you know we don't know about that but we're a tiny tiny minority and so this idea of um sort of yeah security

um and the concerns of the world that i was really moved in this direction and so when i was um growing up before i became um 12 was the cuban missile crisis and so that was something else that was deeply deeply traumatizing you're a little kid in school you know today sometimes the little kids in school have active shooter drills which is terrifying but this other idea that there could be a nuclear war between the the russia and the united states and we have all these weapons and it could blow up the whole world then you know and then you're saying what how was that traumatizing in what way well you just think of how insane that is you know that um we could be destroying the world you know for these um political conflicts and also that you're told you know duck and cover you know get under your

i'm sorry um you know duck under your desk and then you you might survive you know and then you see all these movies of hiroshima and nagasaki and what's going on there what happened there so it just was terrifying that that this was beyond like um genocide of the concentration camps now this was like we could lose the whole world and that this could be pois i remember reading i love to read you know there was a book i read called on the beach which people probably don't know much about today but it was about um people that were on the beach in australia and this was after a nuclear war and they were waiting for the radioactive fallout to you know come to them in the wind so it was like post-apocalypse you know post-nuclear war waiting for them all to die so it just expanded my sense that psychological factors um the way that we

can dehumanize others the way that we can make other people the enemies the way we lose our sense of common humanity that that that was a real critical problem and and i i recall einstein saying that our technology has exceeded our humanity so rick yeah yeah i'm i'm noticing so sometimes i'll ask you about kind of your experience of growing up and i i for example i asked you know what was traumatizing about that i noticed that a lot of your answers have to do with the world yeah that like you know the world was a scary place that gender that we had exceeded so i i'm i'm kind of curious about you know use your mind seems to have a focus on the outside that you're sort of thinking about these like broad existential or cultural or societal or worldly problems about like the nature of humanity losing our humanity that our humanity has been exceeded by our technology so i'm kind

of so i'm i'm sort of i'm just kind of noticing that we don't seem to be talking about like when i ask you about you you talk about the world ah well my my parents were married for 67 years before my father died um i had a big extended family of grandparents aunts and uncles and cousins so my personal life was really secure and beautiful you know i had loving parents loving grandparents big extended family um i'll share something else about me personally um when i was 12 we moved from chicago from skokie to winnetka which is a little bit further north suburb and my parents had a house that was they they had a house designed by a student of frank lloyd wright's and so i grew up in this incredibly beautiful structure that had an enormous impact on

me personally and how i thought you know frank lloyd wright sort of blends inside and outside the whole idea that the you know the inside flows to the nature outside um it was a chinese pagoda with a big eight foot by eight foot square skylight at the top it was a one-story house but the roof went up 22 feet so i had it wasn't a box i didn't grow up living in a box i grew up with an indoor atrium where we had a tree that was like 15 20 feet high inside the house and i could see from my bed through the skylight uh the moon and the snow and the rain at night and i could see the whole house had stained glass windows uh not saying sliding glass doors i mean sorry it did have some stained glass windows too but it had sliding glass doors uh between as the exterior walls and we had a very private location so you know it just flowed from the inside and out and one of the biggest influences on me as i was growing up was um

you know this house the the other part was that i feel now in retrospect that i had absolutely everything that could be done to give me a sense of self-efficacy you could say that i could impact the world so i was born at the time of america height of american power you know before we got uh into vietnam and stuff um i was uh jewish the chosen people before i realized that everybody's the chosen people um i was white um male i was the first born male child and you know my family was well off so i i had um you know probably every advantage that you could have so i guess when i started talking about the world that's where my um my insecurities were not about my own life but were about what the world could impinge on me in different ways and you know when you're young jewish too you're also taught about uh jewish history

and there's just this uh constant theme of various people trying to scapegoat and kill the jewish people and you know we were jerusalem world is a dangerous place yeah that that was the kind of thing but i had that message from the utmo sense of security in america after world war ii with you know just where we moved in winnetka i i didn't know this at the time but um they weren't um a lot of people were unwilling to sell the jewish people so there was four houses on a cul-de-sac that my parents got together with three of their jewish friends and they had a christian person buy the land and then once the christian person bought the land then they separated out into these four jewish families wow so the only way we got to live in winnetka was to overcome these prejudices against jews interesting so that was a big part of my upbringing um and so i guess the other thing is that i

really got to be very interested in the other you know that and so i studied russian in high school to learn about the russians and because i had my great grandparents came over from russia and my parents were very much open to educating me experiential learning so after my junior year of high school my parents sent me to russia for the summer and to study russian and we went to summer con tashkent there's about 60 other high school students from around america we went to london to paris all over moscow but my parents sent me on a mission as well and they gave me in my luggage they gave me a bunch of prayer books to give to the people at the synagogue because prayer books were forbidden at this time in soviet russia which was you know atheist so as a 16 year old boy my parents are saying here's this political mission i want you to do bring these prayer books

to the guys at the synagogue wow and because i spoke um russia not very well but well enough to get by on this group of 60 people 60 high school students uh me and two other guys were approached by some of uh russian um young people as well but they were like black market people and so this is now 1970 summer of 1970 the psychedelic revolution is happening in america didn't happen in russia so the russians wanted to buy anything that smacked of freedom so button shirts even or um books or albums somebody had uh abbey road and you know they bought the record for like two bucks we sold it for a hundred rubles which was more than a hundred dollars worth now rubles at the time were not worth anything outside of russia so they didn't want anybody to be able to escape with money uh but we made thousands and thousands of rubles by selling

stuff from all of the people in our trip you know their clothes they're this and that and we took our cut of course and so in the end you know i just had a large amount of russian rubles and i went to the synagogue in moscow to um give these prayer books that my parents had sent me to deliver and i said to this guy hey i got all this money for you got these prayer books and the guy said hey we're being watched uh don't give me anything here but i'll meet you at the subway station underground subway at a certain time at a certain station and bring the money in the books then and i was like okay and i just thought okay you know i'm a 16 year old kid if the russians catch me they'll just send me home you know can we just pause for a second rick can you tell me what on earth it's like to be given a covert political vision at the age of 16 like what's going through your head when your parents are like what was your understanding of what you were getting yourself into well my parents were like uh each of us as individuals can make a difference it

was very empowering it was like look we we can't stop the prejudice against the jews we can't overturn everything in russia but you yourself can bring a few prayer books and that is something to do so it connected me with my small life and what an individual can do maybe you can't solve the whole uh problem but but you can make a small contribution so that's what i felt like i i thought this is a really wonderful thing that my parents are thinking that in this small way with a few people now maybe getting a prayer book i can make a difference and i think that was that was the main education that i got from them is that you can't just stand idly by you have to get involved and even if it's you know way bigger than any of us each of us individually can make a bit of a difference wow so yeah i i respected them for it and um and and also they were telling me that um they wanted me to take certain risk

not only that that they didn't want me to find the safe path um that they wanted me to take certain risks so when i was 18 two years later and after i had been in college hold on we got to find out what happened with the did you meet the dude in the underground station i did i did so what happened well you know we made the transfer and i and nobody and he got away safely and i gave him all these rubles and he was super happy and um and i just felt like wow you know my first underground activities was against the russians against the communists in russia um and it kind of prepared me for uh addressing the drug war too which was also similar you know unjust in different ways that means i prepared you for the drug war well you know this was illegal what i was doing in russia and so you know once i started wising up to the fact that the drug war was uh criminalizing tools that could be

used for personal growth for spirituality that um and if i wanted to use them i would become a criminal myself that that was uh how i was prepared you know that that this first sort of law breaking was against the communists and then this law breaking was against repressive drug war interesting okay so you were saying uh 18. yeah so at 18 now i'll also add that as i was growing up my parents um don't drink alcohol they don't they're both dead now but they they didn't smoke cigarettes they they they were very um rational my grandparents my father's parents had a bookstore they were you know poor immigrants had a bookstore they lived above the bookstore that they had only one child but my dad and mother were very um rational and i and i think that part of that was about the fear of what happened in nazi germany that the irrational gets out of control and and we see

echoes of that in the united states right now where rationality and truth you know don't matter and it's to a lot of people so it was just this um they were very rational and so we i didn't have a history i'm the oldest of four kids too so there was no drug use going on in my house really my dad who was a doctor realized also that a lot of what he learned in medical school was no longer true so we had a drawer of drugs medicines at our house and whenever we get sick my dad's attitude was don't take a thing you know you're gonna heal on your own it's going to be a little few difficult days the downside of that is when i say oh i don't want to go to school i feel bad you know he's like no you better go to school so but i just believed the propaganda that i was receiving about psychedelics so even though i knew better in other ways i believed that if you took lsd five or six times

you were certifiably insane okay that was one of the stories that your sanity is a delicate balance and if you take lsd five or six times you've permanently altered that balance you're certifiably insane i believed the idea that you had chromosome damage and that you would have deformed children from psychedelics that was another big thing you know i believe that these drugs were something that caused hallucinations delusions there was nothing valid about them whatsoever and it was in my russian class actually in my senior year when i was 17 that this uh sort of propaganda i started cracking through the propaganda a friend of mine in the russian class gave me a book to read and i just loved it this was a phenomenal book and when i gave it back to my friend he said do you realize that some of this book

was written by the author when he was under the influence of lsd and and i was like that's impossible you know there's nothing good comes from lsd how could you possibly write this great piece of literature it can't be done and and he encouraged me to check into it further which i did and it turned out he was right it was one one flew over the cuckoo's nest by ken keezy and some of it indeed had been written under the influence of lsd so that that sort of made me think here's all this propaganda that i've got it can't can't all be true the other part was that um because i had thought so much about the holocaust about the um you know the human missile crisis and all that now i was being confronted as i was getting closer to 18 about vietnam and i was in one of the last years of the lottery and i was you know we had to face the fact what am i going to do about vietnam and at the time and still if if you want to be what's called a conscientious objector

and you can get a deferment for a conscientious objector you have to be a pacifist you have to be and i was not against all war i think that there are times when it makes sense to defend oneself so i couldn't be a conscientious objector and this was also at the time uh you know martin luther king was assassinated um a little bit before that and there was just so much that was going on about vietnam um when i was actually um 14 i was the precinct captain in my area for eugene mccarthy the peace candidate in 1968 and of course he got hardly any votes and so i wanted to be closer to the action so i actually volunteered for mayor daley who was the mayor of chicago and i was a runner for the delegates inside the convention of 1968 and so i was um

traumatized there at one point where i was downstairs in the sort of um outside of the the where the main convention was taking place and there was a media room and i went in there and there was all these tvs and people were watching tvs and it was tvs of the riots in downtown chicago the police riots against the demonstrators and just this way in which uh the delegates were trying to pretend as if life was normal while there was these massive riots going on outside it just really further radicalized me so i decided to um that what i would do in terms of vietnam is that i would not register for the draft that i would not cooperate with the system at all and that i would drain the system of the most energy um by having them come after me and i would go to jail so i talked this over with my parents and they were fine they just said the problem is that if you do that you're going to be a felon and you're never going to be able

to be a doctor or lawyer or whatever is going to require a license but they were not sympathetic with the war in vietnam and and so i you know what uh martin luther king had said that um he said for those who think a law is unjust and are willing to break the law and suffer the consequences as a way to send a message to everybody else about the unjust nature of the law that they actually have the highest respect for the law so that this kind of civil disobedience it's it's you're you're really trying to make the system of laws better by showing the injustice yeah so i i thought that since i was paying taxes i had a social security number i was in high school you know that i would be caught but as it turned out it was just this amazing loophole that i didn't register for the draft and around 60 000 other people never registered for the draft and nothing happened to us at all enough people were

volunteering for the war that um they had enough recruits and somehow or other from anticipating going to jail to then realizing nothing's going to happen so at a very early stage when i was 18 thinking that i was going to be caught any day but i was in college and i started doing lsd and psilocybin and uh mescaline and i started getting this intimations of um this deeper unity you know beyond ego identification i had a difficult time with my drug trips because i was um insecure and you know not very emotionally adept and so it was very hard to let go it was very i got scared a lot but i felt that this was very important it was also um 1971 1972. so the the backlash against the 60s really took place in 1970 with the

controlled substances act and nixon criminalizing all these drugs saying timothy leary was the most dangerous man in america um and so it was after the backlash that that i started uh doing these psychedelics and i started sensing something which was this why did you start well because of that book because of um one flew over the cuckoo's nest you know i just thought this is brilliant and if if lsd had something to do with this then it's something that i should explore you know that it it's not just a hallucination it's also that i was very interested in psychological factors and this repression how people can be irrational i had i had a great class in high school on young it was um so my senior year of high school i had a jungian psychology class and the only thing we did for the entire semester was read moby dick from a jungian perspective and so again

i started getting more and more interested in psychology and that's around the time i started um looking to psychedelics and it was really a political understanding that inspired me the most that if you can identify as part of everything um you know and that that's your core identity and that your other identities of your race or your gender your nationality or your religion those are secondary built on top of this common humanity which is also linked intimately connected with nature that that's the antidote to genocide or the antidote to this irrational dehumanizing and otherizing others so and when i looked at what happened with the 60s and with all the psychedelics and how that motivated a lot of people to get involved with the anti-war and also with the environmental movement the women's rights movement civil rights movement that it just felt like in a crazy world

where it could we could blow up the whole world with nuclear weapons or there could be another hitler or that their my own country was now doing these things that really seemed um counterproductive and deadly and dangerous and and not helpful um it's it's just felt like here was a ray of hope psychedelics and the psychedelic consciousness can not only do this connection to spirituality but can also be used to help help us with our own individual issues and the fact that they were criminalized and wiped out the research wiped out all over the world and because i at the time i still thought i was going to go to jail any day and i couldn't have a normal career i thought ha it all comes together i can potentially be a psychedelic therapist i could be an underground psychedelic therapist i don't need a license for that and i need psychedelic therapy myself and and i'll just say one other thing

what crystallized it for me was that um i i had a lot of difficult times with my trips um and so i went to the guidance counselor at college what did i mean by difficult yeah yeah um well to give you one of the worst examples um resistance i was scared to so you know psychedelics are moving in you they're opening you up your your logical train of thought is uh inhibited and and you're getting feelings and emotions and different kind of visual images when your eyes are closed sometimes when your eyes are open and the sense of uh being safe enough to surrender control and i didn't feel safe enough to do that so one time when i was um yeah at the time also to put this in context the standard dose of lsd was 250 micrograms which was a major existential dose right now a lot of the lsd tabs blotter tabs are like 60 or 80

micrograms so this is three or four hits at one time and that's was just standard what people took you'd be going through a period of a couple hours where you have a hard time to talk for those people that love music one of my absolute favorite albums was by david crosby came out during the 60s with people from all the other groups from san francisco but the title of the album was if i could only remember my name so it's a classic psychedelic album it's terrific if i could only remember my name by david crosby so that's what some of these experiences were like and so i i felt like i was scared i couldn't let go and i had the image of my brain um heating up like a light bulb you know there's like a current that and if you resist the current you know it lights up and so i felt like my resistance to all this mental energy was such that my brain was actually melting and i

had this uh nasal drip at the time and i started like thinking oh my god that's my brain coming out of my nose wow and i would hear my brain sloshing around and and you know i exaggerated obviously my brain did not melt but that was the feeling of you know one of the worst trips i ever had that i was and then what made it even harder is that it was my fault you know that i was bad that i was resisting that it wasn't from the lsd llc doesn't normally do that it was my own weaknesses that was causing this terrible situation to happen but i felt that i needed to do it i felt like the 60s idealism had crashed and burned that we needed to do this inner work to figure out how do we make a better world and so i i kept doing lsd and the experiences kept being more difficult still with intimations of some beautiful moments and that's where i went to the guidance counselor at college at new college of

in sarasota florida and i said help me with my trip and you know it was a different era then and he took me seriously and he said this is important what you're doing and it's just as important as your classwork uh maybe even more important that you really need to be seeing a you know you're your own instrument you are your own instrument and you need to work on your own clarity as well so that you know we see the world through our own blinders the whole scientific method is about getting past our own biases the beauty of the scientific method is uh methodologies to try to make it so that we can see more closely to what's really there compared to what we want to see so this guidance counselor gave me a book to read and this is what sort of sealed my future rare guidance counselor it was so lucky well beyond lucky um the book was realms of the human unconscious

observations from lsd research by stan groff this was 1972. this is stan's first book it wasn't published till 1975. so the guidance counselor had a manuscript copy directly from stan and reading that book is what put it all together for me and i would still recommend that book realms of the human unconscious to people who are looking to understand more about lsd psychotherapy but what stan was talking about was sort of three basic areas you could say you know your psychodynamics based on stuff that happened when you were alive then this um birth trauma this idea of you know going from this floating in your mother's womb to going through this traumatic situation of birth that that kind of imprints things in in consciousness and then beyond that would be the union era that he spoke about which was sort

of archetype spirituality mysticism things that went beyond our own individual life but sort of about all humans and all that he learned about these realms from lsd and so it had that mystical spiritual thing which i thought was fundamental for political reasons but it also had a scientific overlay because i had already learned to distrust um religious mythologies that you know a lot of them are you know they they make things too concrete they can be beautiful symbolically but when they become concrete then you have to be a little bit more suspicious of them and then particularly when people say this is the only one right way and all that but so this was science looking at um mysticism and spirituality in a way i felt was trustworthy but the ultimate thing was that it was about psychotherapy so it was about a reality check a practical thing

what do all of these mystical what are all of these experiences that you can have what do they actually do to help people enjoy their lives more to have a deeper richer sense of meaning and purpose and that that was something because i think you can get lost in spirituality and lost in mysticism and and where do you bring it back down to earth and to try to practically that's so practically so i thought this was something reliable so i wrote a letter to stan groff now i'm just a confused 18 year old you know doing lsd and stands in his 40s and is you know premier md phd at johns hopkins doing lsd research that was just being shut down and he wrote me back that was the amazing thing and he encouraged me and he said he was doing a workshop that summer out in california with joan halifax who he had just been married to um and he invited me to attend

which i did so i hitchhiked across america in summer of 72 back when people were hitchhiking some people have heard about the rainbow festival which is a big gathering it's kind of a hippie native american gathering and and i saw signs about it the very first one as i was hitchhiking across america and so i ended up going to the first rainbow festival in granby colorado i ended up you know making my way across the country and i took this workshop with stan i did a month-long encounter group in the mountains of california again trying to work on myself as an instrument i heard about primal therapy which was sort of the primal scream about this birth trauma and so i did a three-week primal intensive and in the end of all of it i wasn't where i wanted to be i i wasn't evolved as much as i hoped i still had all sorts of problems um worries concerns and i i

i dropped out of college you know i told my parents that school no longer mattered to me that this inner work mattered and i wanted to study lsd and i wanted to drop out of college and i wanted them to pay for me to study lsd and to give you a sense of how my parents were it took them a while but they eventually decided yes they would help me and my what my dad said was that he thought i was a stubborn guy and that um if he didn't help me i would still try to do that and it would take me a longer amount of time to realize it was a mistake and if he helped me i would realize it was a mistake sooner and he said he had a shred of doubt maybe i needed i knew what i needed to do so he also validated that so my parents were willing to uh help me from age 18 drop out of college and study lsd and so after i did all these things i went home

and lived with uh my siblings who were going to school but i just sat around for a couple months and that's where i realized that i had um underestimated the importance of integration and i think to sort of weave this back to some of your earlier comments about people who said that they had ptsd or depression or so after their lsd or psilocybin experiences that you really need to spend time integrating it that that's the way that you can process these things that it's not just about the experience at all in fact that's a big part of it but it's even more about what you learn from it what you bring back how you integrate it and i had had a delusion that the more drugs you take the faster you take them the more you'll evolve and i just really didn't understand that you could end up digging yourself deeper into all that way you really need to integrate what you've learned and that's what we've you know totally put into practice in terms of our mdma assisted psychotherapy

lots of emphasis on preparation and integration the experiences are embedded in a larger psychedelic uh psychotherapy process most of the sessions without drugs at all so i just really didn't understand that and finally i realized that i was so lost in my head about these spirituality philosophical worldly things that i i felt like i needed to get grounded and so that's where i got back uh i thought i need to build things get in the physical world which which basically led to 10 years for me of building houses building handball courts of just building things to help me integrate my psychedelic experiences and it wasn't till i was 28 that i was able to go back to college as a freshman to formally study to be a psychedelic therapist wow interesting yeah so that's that's very rare you know it's interesting rick because i i think um

in a sense i think our story has i have some interesting parallels with my life to what you describe and i think this is part of the message that i think our community needs to hear so you know i finished college at the age of 23 after failing a bunch of classes and then basically had my parents sort of support me with the goal of becoming a monk um really yeah yeah and and so i was lucky enough because you know i i didn't have to worry about how i was gonna pay for a ticket to and i would you know fly to india and i'd stay at ashrams or monasteries and and study different kinds of meditations and i think a little bit more on the esoteric mystical or spiritual side where i also had experiences that were you know far beyond mindfulness um and then i sort of start i started med school at the age of 27 and then it took me about four years to sort of get into med school and i think a big thing that we hear a lot from from this community

is that like people feel like they're behind you know they're like 23 they're 24 maybe they dropped out of college maybe they you know finished college and weren't able to get a job and and i've been trying to explain to them and i think your story is a wonderful example of of in my mind karma yeah that it's such an interesting confluence of events you know it's like it's so interesting how your your your life what i'm hearing is like a lot of threads that kind of get woven together you went to some you grew up in in outside of chicago went to a school in florida it sounds like yeah right so like like you wind up at a school and you wind up with a guidance counselor i for the life of me cannot imagine a single guidance counselor i have ever met or ever heard of when someone when an 18 year old comes into your office and says hey i'm having like bad trips they send you straight to like

university health services for addictions no one says hey i have a pre-manuscript copy from stan groff who's sort of the eminent researcher on lsd and this is a book that's not going to be published for years take it and read it like the the the statistical unlikeliness of that confluence of events is just such an outlier well i'll say one yes very much so but the college that i chose was an experimental college that had started in the 60s and it had been created by people who really wanted to do an alternative to traditional education interesting and so what they said was that the students curiosity is the most important and therefore nothing should stand in the way of the students curiosity so they designed a school where there was no grades it was all written

evaluations heavy emphasis on independent study with with professors you could create your own classes you get a few of your friends you say we want to study this and you come up with a reading list or so you talk to a professor you can get credit for that you had to do a contract for a semester and you passed or failed the whole semester and you negotiate what's in the contract it can be some classes some independent study some risk everybody had to do a senior thesis as well now the honors college of the state of florida but the other thing that they did not that i did not know when i um applied there um i i just was getting tired of being boxed in the requirements this and that so the freedom to explore my curiosity was really attracted to me to that school um they sent out stuff to people that did well on the national merit scores and um and so i just got something in the mail from i've never heard about that but the the two things that they did not put in the brochure that i didn't notice when i visited the

campus with my father um until i got there was that they had a tradition of all night dance parties with psychedelics until the sun rise the school the building was designed by i am pay the famous architect and it had a courtyard palm court in the middle of the dorms that imp had designed where the classrooms were off that he'd also designed somewhere else and so we would have these uh all night parties with psychedelics um and then in the morning um it would go till sunrise kind of like prefiguring raves and things like that and um but there was also this sense of the individual doing their own psychedelic experiences you know that that was valued so it was both therapeutic spiritual and uh communal recreational celebratory with psychedelics so that was that's how dude yeah well it gets even more so um the swimming pool um it didn't have a lot of facilities it kind of was a a school for the imagination because

john ringling the ringling brothers circus had was wintering in sarasota that was their long their history there and so the john ringling's house which is this massive beautiful big party house now a state of florida museum was um right next to the campus and his brother's house charles ringling's house that was donated to the campus to create the school so we we had this like party theme carnival theme circus theme but also there was a woman who actually had studied with jung marion hopping was her name and she taught jungian psychology and her husband was um quite wealthy and they donated this olympic size swimming pool with a big deck around it big fences all around it and somehow or other it evolved into a nudist colony so i was a super shy guy in high school could barely talk to girls and now here i am at in this nudist colony with with all these

um you know naked men and women and it just felt like the underground energies of sex and drugs were sort of brought to the surface where we could try to deal with them it felt like an oasis of sanity in a crazy world and so it's not that unusual that there would be a guidance counselor there that would know about lsd research what i think is wild is that you describe the nudist colony with all night psychedelic parties as the oasis of sanity in a crazy world yeah well it just felt that way that so much is repressed that and when you repress stuff it comes out warped and distorted and when you bring that to the surface you can work with it you can see it's just um yeah it did feel like this oasis of sanity that that we and the campus police their job was to protect us from the real

from the city police and so just to give you an example again um they had two lists of where people were when when parents would call or people would come and say you know where this uh where's my son or daughter you know what room are they in so they had the list at the police the cop shop we called it they had the list of wherever the rooms were that people were assigned to live in but then they had another list of where people were actually living you know you could move in with your girlfriend or you could do all these different kind of things on campus uh it was just astonishing so it it and and there was this general sense that um you know the young people are leading the revolution we're doing this psychedelic stuff and um you know the older people are you know repressing and so it did feel like an oasis of sanity and and so i just would not be who i am without that particular college experience wow dude that's

that's wild man thank you so much for sharing that yeah now i'd also i got a question for you which is uh how did you decide not to become a monk so you you go to meditate you're doing all these things what made you turn away from from that path i so in a sense i didn't turn away so what i real a couple of things one is i met my wife and fell in love and was conflicted for a while um and and so it's funny because i sort of talk about it like i met her at the end i actually so as soon as i tried to become a monk so when i was 21 years old i went to my teachers after one summer so i had a pretty amazing summer where i i started to practice some pretty intensive meditation and and what i loved about it is that i i had some spiritual experiences and so i was always sort of a curious kid was always a skeptical kid but when you have experiences of you know con connectedness or other i mean it's hard to describe but you start to

experience sensations and experiences that are different from your day-to-day existence so a good example of this is like sometimes i'll ask people where their thoughts are localized in space and i think if you really pay attention you'll learn that your thoughts are localized actually somewhere around the space of your head but we don't think about our thoughts as being around our head until you haven't like something like an out-of-body experience where your existence is outside of your physical being and then once you step outside of your physical being then you realize oh there's actually like a layer on top so i had these kinds of experiences which were really fascinating and i loved them but really a lot of my deciding to become a monk so i went to my teachers and i said hey i want to take my vows and at the age of 21 i want to become a monk and they said we're we're thrilled that you want to do this fantastic go finish your education go get a

doctoral degree and then if you're still interested at the age of 30 we'll take you and and so i think they sort of recognized that i was passionate and that it was sort of a decision that was made from the wrong places and what i realized is that my decision to become a monk was actually out of like ego i'd failed at life i sucked at it i knew i was smart i was the son of two doctors and they had everyone expected so much from me and i expected a lot for myself and so i found myself underperforming compared to people who i was better than and that was really hard for me and so what i realized is that i'm going to devalue everything that i'm bad at and i'm going to become spiritual as opposed to materialistic i'm not going to care about going and becoming a doctor and i'm going to rise above all of that i'm going to be better and all that but really it was like a very deep rooted spiritual ego which i think is

very present like in a lot of spirituality there's so much underground ego look at how spiritual i am and and it's really bizarre and so i realized that i don't need to become a monk that actually ultimately becoming a monk is not about wearing a particular thing or living in a particular place it's all about the quality of your internal experience and that being a monk is about attitude it's about paying attention to what's within whether you're doing external things or not it's completely irrelevant and so you know i i think it was strange for a while because i would do things like sleep on the floor and stuff because i didn't care and then my my wife cares about nice things so she would get nice things and i would learn to appreciate those and also learn that like it doesn't matter whether you sleep in a nice bed or on the floor and like you just like being a monk is entirely internal it's nothing on the outside um and so ultimately that's why i

realized that it was it was kind of false and then i i was in love and i was conflicted and then i realized actually that like that was also a division that i didn't i could i could love her and be with her and that that was part of my karma and i could also continue my internal spiritual journey um which is what i've done so that's kind of how i decided wow now i i have a a monk story i'd like to share it seems very appropriate now so this is uh one of the experiences that where i took mdma by myself camping out in nature um this was now in um um 1985. and i had gotten to know a christian monk brother david steinle ross and i i would encourage people to uh check him out he's he's written one book was called the gratitude is the heart of prayer there's something from brother david steinle ross on youtube i think it's like a three-minute

meditation about gratitude like today it's a beautiful beautiful thing but he was also ecumenical he was very much even though he was roman catholic he was very mystical he wasn't didn't see that in in only those ways and also i i met him in 1982 um when i went to uh when i first went back to college at age 28 but i started my first semester was at esslin institute in big sur with stan groff on a month-long workshop called the mystical quest he was one of the teachers that's where i also learned about mdma later on in 83 and 84 i had given him mdma he expressed an interest in doing mdma in half doses in the monastery as a tool to aid meditation and he found that it was very helpful and when we sued the dea in 84 to try to keep mdma legal as a medicine there started to be some publicity and in the beginning of 85 newsweek did

an article uh the first major media article on mdma and it quoted me but it also quoted brother david and he said that he described his experience doing mdma as a tool for meditation and he said that it produced the same enlightened attitude that uh hmong could spend 30 years trying to meditate to achieve which is an incredible statement the quietness that you can get so i i took mdma one time um shortly after this article came out i was camping out it was just this beautiful spot um right at the beaches uh at the edge of the pacific the mountains came down right behind me um there was some boulders out in the ocean so that um the high tide came around me but i was protected from the high tide there was a freshwater stream right nearby and it was a safe protected spot that i knew really well and so i decided that i would take mdma there and i was not in a relationship at

the time and i was thinking i wonder why would somebody want to be a monk you know what what's the you know and why would somebody want to be celibate and and i also was wondering how do i do what i want to do and not get busted by the dea as well so under the influence of mdma um you know it's not visual like lsd or psilocybin but there was a big tree there and i was sort of projecting images on the tree and the tree was like the dea looking at um and how do i stay safe and and i came up with this strategy basically which has served me well i think which is that the dea is always looking at what's under the rock you know what's hidden but a lot of times you just come straight at them even if you're criticizing them um ironically that can be safe you know you're just coming right at him so then i started thinking about um brother david and why would somebody want to be celebrate and why would somebody want to be a monk and i was thinking about that for a while and then i just felt like the roaring of the ocean the waves of the ocean

the ocean was so enormous and then the the milky way and the sky was just incredible and it just felt like i was perched on the edge of the world which i really was in a sense and i started thinking i might just disappear you know what is keeping me here i mean the the universe is so vast um and and i felt like i was dissolving into the universe and and there was that that beautiful aspect of that but then after a while i realized i'm still here you know what's keeping me here and then i started thinking about gravity that somehow or other i had this image of gravity i as the arms of a lover that that i was cradled in the arms of gravity and that that was keeping me together that's what made things adhere instead of just dissipate into everything and i i felt gravity as

warm as an embrace as an embrace of a lover and i thought aha this is what the monk and celibacy is about that you're supposed to feel that kind of love for the universe if you focus it on a specific person maybe that makes it harder to to transfer it to the that same kind of warmth to the to the universe and so one once i felt i after that experience i never have felt as lonely as i have before because i feel like there's this love woven into the universe but then once i realized that i was cradled in the arms of gravity and that this was kind of what the monastic life was in part about i said great now i don't have to be a monk yeah now i can have a real lover as well as the gravity as a lover now 30 years after that i was at a conference and brother david was one of the speakers and

he was uh sitting next to me at dinner i purposely went to sit next to him at dinner and we kept in touch over the years but i had never spoken to him about this experience and and i said uh brother david i just want to share with you this experience the most mystical experience really of my whole life and you were connected to it and i'm wondering just what you might think about it and so um i told him the story and i told him about um you know cradled in the arms of gravity and he just was silent for a very short time and he said every day i think about gravity every day and he reaffirmed that sense that the gravity and this kind of is a force of love so i i felt that it took 30 years for me to kind of get that affirmation from him that that was the case and and so um i i feel like um that that was one of the pivotal experiences of my life

that on the beach yeah thank you so much for sharing rick this has been amazing i think um i know you have to get going in about 15 minutes so i'm kind of curious i think i've got a couple of questions or directions one is uh well one thing i just want to reinforce this point so the first thing is like for people who feel like they're behind i think rick you're a wonderful example of like you know don't compare yourself to someone else's journey and even this last story that you told is like even you know the the ending to this particular experience happens 30 years later yes exactly you know and and so what i'm what i'm really hearing from you and what i want people to really take away is like what i've experienced in my life which is that you're not living anyone else's life you're living your own so don't judge your life by what other people are doing or things like that because it sounds like you started college at the age of 28 and then built up this organization

where we're now you know i mean maps is really an amazing organization yeah well i i started college at 17 and then dropped out at 18 for 10 years and then went back as a college freshman at age 28. yeah it's crazy um so so i just wanted to kind of wanted to do it any differently i mean it was really the right thing for me and i i think the lesson you're trying to pull out of it is really right yeah is that you're on your own timetable and you don't have to compare with you know what's right for somebody else might not be what's right for you and um you know the the other sort of aspect of this is um and and i'm not quite sure where you were and your wife are with children but um you know my wife and i we've had three children but they've all uh two of them are on their own one of them is still in college um but when you have little kids you end up um you know it just seems like it's going to go on forever looking forward you know it's like it's

never going to change you're always have your kids at home but when they're gone and you look back it's like a heartbeat where did those uh 18 20 years go yeah so what i want to say from that is that to have a 20-year plan or a 30-year plan is not really that long you know before you know it the future will have arrived so also chart your own way don't feel that you're behind others but also you can have a very long-term plan uh and i think a lot of people don't do that and and then you don't plant the seeds that can later blossom all these years later yeah so that's the mistake people make is oh you know i've got to think in more short-term chunks rick you may not understand what i'm about to say but i think it's illustrative so what i'm hearing from you is that you're a late-game carry yeah and and so i don't know exactly how you mean that but the yeah late bloomer is sort of how i see myself yeah yeah right so i i love the way that you

kind of think about it i think the problem is that everyone wants to be like early game focused and they don't recognize that you can sow all these seeds and these you know nudist colony all night parties are soda foundation along with you know an incredible work ethic and parents who sort of acknowledge that you're probably wrong but still held enough faith and enough humility to kind of give you a chance and then also that i i sort of see the forces of karma kind of supporting you it's not quite as active as i'm making it sound but well i would say so i'll just share that i had a dream this is what i think is my karma the dream was many people have seen um 2001 space odyssey the movie by stanley kubrick and near the end of the movie there's the scene where the astronaut is in an all-white room he's on his deathbed this is right before the sort of birth of the star child so in the dream and this is in my middle 20s so this is after i decided to focus my life on psychedelics but um i remember this dream like like it

was just last night um so there's a person on a death bed the room is all white and the the fella tells me a story the story is that he was miraculously safe he almost was killed but he was miraculously saved and he knew he was saved for a purpose but he didn't know what the purpose was and then he says to me let me show you how i almost died and it turned out that the scene now all of a sudden we're out of this all-white room we're at the edge of town it's somewhere russia poland something like that there's thousands of jews that are lined up in front of this big mass grave bunch of germans they machine gun them all they're pushed into this mass grave they throw some dirt over it and this guy is wounded but not killed and then it sort of switched a little bit into like a jesus story where he was buried for three days and then he was resurrected sort of so he sort of climbs his and i'm with him in the dirt underground seeing this whole thing and then he kind of comes to and he claws his way up and um he gets

end up somehow earlier he knew where the up was and he gets onto the uh the dirt out of that and there's nobody there it was at the edge of town he runs into the woods he works with the partisans uh till the end of the war and then then he said that's how i was almost safe so now we're back in the all-white room he's on his deathbed and he said now i know what my purpose was i know why i was saved from that i know what my purpose is and i'm like oh what did you learn he said my purpose is to tell you to study psychedelics and that that's going to be the sense of mystical connection is going to be the antidote to genocide and in my head i'm thinking oh okay i've already decided that this is a heavy thing you're trying to lay on me you know that that you want to pass this thing on so you can die in peace and in my mind i'm saying okay i already did decide that so um i will accept that i said okay you can lay that on me i will do that

and and then he died um and then i walk out of this white room i watched him die i walk out of the right room and all of a sudden i'm in the middle of a forest and then i i i go down there's a little stream and so i'm sitting in front of the stream i dread a lot of hermann hesse and this siddhartha and so i'm like watching the stream go by and and all of a sudden i realized there's a young boy sitting next to me and about 10 years old or so and then i realized i know this boy um i i know his father and his father is a friend of mine and at the time i had a large stash of lsd that i was scared of getting busted so i had asked his father if he would store my lsd stash at his house in his freezer and his father had said yes so once i connected this little boy in the dream to lsd then it all made sense then i woke up so i feel that the karma for me is this all these people that died because they were dehumanized because

people were motivated by fears and anxieties that one of the many strategies that can be helpful for that is this kind of helping people understand how we're all connected and helping people work through their own fears and anxiety so that they're not so easily manipulated by them yeah so uh rick that's a great segue i think to an important question is that we get a lot of people in our community who are wondering okay so they've heard your amazing story right and i think a lot of people um you know feel directionless feel a little bit broken have insecurities and anxieties of their own and want to partake in what you're describing so and i struggle with this too it's interesting i actually have a a patient who has treatment refractory depression who i'm trying to figure out how can i help this person because i do think that it's not like a neurochemical imbalance or something i i really do think that their depression is more spiritual in

nature so what do people do who are interested in this kind of healing because as a medical doctor you know i certainly won't and and really can't recommend it right now um and and so but what do people do like so we do get questions about you know i i want to like figure out what my purpose is i want to feel less insecure i want to heal on a spiritual level what should what should they do well first off you can recommend ketamine to people ketamine isn't a medicine for um refactory depression sometimes it does help people have spiritual experiences i i think the first thing and we sort of talked about this earlier is that what's legal and what's moral are two different things so everybody has to decide for themselves to what extent are you going to respect certain laws and to what extent are you not going to so you know that's for each person to decide for themselves what risks are you willing to take

um one of the incredible things about stan that i think stan groff that was so remarkable is when psychedelics were criminalized a lot of people who had been psycho research said okay it's taken out of our hands let's explore meditation let's explore other things and then some of even like we don't need psychedelics anymore you know there's other ways to get there which is true there are other ways to get there but what stan did was to see that that kind of non-ordinary state of consciousness that was produced by psychedelics was very valuable and he developed an approach called the holotropic breath work which is hyperventilation with support in groups to let these deeper experiences come out so anybody legally anywhere can look for holotropic breathwork practitioners and there's quite a few hundreds that have been trained around the country and around the world even more that practice holotropic breath work or other kinds of therapies so people can go to

i think that there there's um it's a very small place but it's called peyote way church of god and you can go on an individual vision quest with peyote you know they they're part of the native american church they've got a legal context for you know you know it's not that big but they have it set up for people to take and wander off you know in a special place where they're camping you can also look for ayahuasca churches cert in america there's quite a lot of ayahuasca experiences that that the two churches uned vegetable and santo dami are legal but um you know most of the ayahuasca circles are not exactly in those kind of settings but you could try those um but i i also think that there are um a lot that can be done with close friends you know a lot of peer support so because you know at college we have this all night dance parties what maps is doing on the one hand it's mostly uh drug development

mdma assisted psychotherapy for ptsd through the fda but we also have what we call the zendo project which is psychedelic harm reduction for people who have difficult trips that take it outside of medical context how do we help them so we train all sorts of people in this so people could look at the maps.org website and we have training materials about zendo how do you help somebody with difficult trips we also have what's called the treatment manual for our mdma assisted psychotherapy for ptsd so you go to the research menu bar mdma near the bottom of it it's called um treatment manual that explains how our therapeutic approach is done and you can practice it on your own with your friends um sitting for you or or you can sit for your friends i i think that um it's difficult you know to find ways to channel that interest at a time where we still are living under prohibition um you know denver has made

the mushrooms the lowest enforcement priority so now has oakland so as ann arbor there's the oregon psilocybin initiative that's going to be on the ballot so there are more opportunities for people to go to certain areas and have these experience you can go to the netherlands amsterdam for mushroom experiences there are all sorts of people that bring groups there there's going to south america for ayahuasca personally i i prefer things in my own cultural context um but you know some people really like going into these other contexts i think that what you can do is study humanistic and transpersonal uh transpersonal psychology is sort of beyond the person trans it's what we share in common and it does have a lot to do with these kind of spiritual mystical states but it also has a lot to do with you know just regular psychodynamics and what's the root of a lot of the problems and and i think that there are going to be over the next um couple of years we're

hoping now we anticipate that if our research continues to go well sometime in early 2023 we should have mdma assisted psychotherapy approved for ptsd as a prescription drug the people working with psilocybin are are thinking maybe the end of 2023 2024 they'll have psilocybin approved we'll be setting up all these psychedelic clinics and the therapists all want to be cross-trained they don't want to be an mdma therapist or a psilocybin therapist or a ketamine therapist they want to be a therapist that knows all these different modalities that we're really trying to bring in a new field of psychedelic psychotherapy where the psychedelic psychotherapists have the range of psychedelics available to them and they customize the treatments according to the individual i think people who are struggling now um it's difficult one way to look at it is clinicaltrials.gov if you go to clinicaltrials.gov pharmaceutical companies sponsors have

to list their studies there and you can put in drug and condition and you can see what studies are available that you could maybe volunteer for there are even studies some of them that need healthy volunteers where you can volunteer and get psilocybin or mdma you know as part of the control groups or something interesting so i i think there's opportunities for people but but many of them if they are involving psychedelics are going to be against the law and so that's really up to each individual's moral compass you know what what they feel about that um but but also i would say to people um don't give up hope you know that the things are coming around the things are changing and there will be um increasing opportunities and the other big thing i'll say is dreams you know we tend to undervalue dreams are incredible tools freud called them the royal road to the unconscious you know jung did all sorts of stuff about his dreams um you know i just described to you one of the most important dreams in my whole life that that's really influenced me my sense of

karma what i've been passed on through my forebears in a sense so i i think people can spend a lot of time just focus on your dreams and if you don't remember them in the morning just have a dream journal you write that down and um even if you write down i dreamt nothing um you know over time you'll get better and better you'll remember more and that can be a powerful tool for you to work on psychodynamic issues yeah thank you so much for kind of offering that perspective i think um you know just one or two thoughts that i kind of have one is that i think holotropic breath work is pretty interesting i think it has a lot of roots actually in kundalini brown i am yeah yeah and so i actually sort of steer clear of holotropic breath work because i think sometimes it can have i think it needs to be done with the right kind of setting um it can bring stuff to the surface the same way that it's like delicate experiences yep yeah and and so when i was studying kundalini yoga myself i mean it was done

in isolation actually precisely for that reason so like you're done it's done with a guru and like it's very intensive and and what my teachers told me is that it's kind of playing with fire and it can be powerful and transformative and it can also really kind of mess you up if you until you learn how to integrate it i mean the interesting thing is in either case the experience is powerful it's really i really like your emphasis on integration afterward it's it's when you kind of talk it through or work it through with with a guru um that really i think you can really change uh one other thought that that i i kind of just want to share is you know i had some realization i don't know if this is entirely true of psychedelics but i think it's sort of theoretically true that if you think about chemical substances they don't really change our brain really what they do is activate it right so you look at any any compound and and what it serves as an activator like if you think about marijuana they're endogenous cannabinoids they're

endogenous opioids um i don't know necessarily that what they're what we would call endogenous psychedelic compounds but it's been my understanding and what my teachers have told me is that essentially you know if you take if you use something like mdma like this this monk that you mentioned sort of said that 30 years of dedication you can achieve that in one moment with with mdma and i think that that's true i think that the the interesting thing about meditation is that you know you sort of learn how to cultivate a particular branch of spiritual experience and my experience or my understanding has been that in psychedelics you know different compounds will lead to generally speaking different kinds of experiences but when you take a substance you don't really know what you're signing up for um exactly well stan groff has talked about lsd as a non-specific amplifier of the unconscious yeah which means that you don't know what's going to come up and your conscious mind can't predict it you

could even have a list of all the things that you want to deal with during this session and what emerges may be completely different yeah that's interesting yeah so i know you've got to run well i do have a bit more time if so i i think you know another 10 15 minutes uh i mean i i think rick though the richest the best part of this i think has been your stories bro like i think i think hearing your stories has been has been eye-opening man it's such an interesting background and it's so interesting because i you know i had envisioned you as as you know this this phd who had done research and and just to hear a little bit about your life has been amazing um okay well i have two another story i think that yeah maybe so this comes up with maps of strategy so this is where i really um so this is a story of two days one day where i did dmt the next day ketamine and so again back in 1985 so this is you know 35 years ago but but

really maps his strategy evolved from that from in a sense from those experiences and what i mean by our strategy is on the one hand is drug development on the other hand is drug policy reform and trying to work on what's called mass mental health we want to help people that are suffering first that's the doorway into a frightened culture that's been scared about psychedelics that has a lot of misinformation that that is um the opening uh wedge you could say medicalizing but that we all need this kind of mission purpose uh meaning um and healing and growth even if we don't have a clinical diagnosis so masses had this parallel strategy and where that sort of came um from was these two experiences um also took place at esslin and this was with the groups of people that were gathering to try to figure out how to protect the use of mdma

as a therapeutic drug so one day we did dmt this was with terence mckenna ralph metzner a bunch of other people that were very um experienced i had never done dmt and and so the way we did it was there was about eight of us sitting in a room and one person would would smoke the dmt it takes around 10 minutes you just lie back and you have this experience and then you come back and you share a little bit with the other people about what happened so this is the integration part and then you pass the pipe to the next person and then they do it and then each person in sequence will have this um dmt experience and so for me the the dmt which i'd never taken before um it's very powerful now it's the main active ingredient in ayahuasca but when you take it in oral form it comes on slower it lasts longer when you smoke it it's about a 10 minute experience and so the the first thing that i experienced

was just uh you smoke it you sort of fall back i just felt there there's a line there was just like a horizontal line and then there was a vertical line and then it turned red it was a color and then it started assembling in cubes so it became kind of um three-dimensional and and then it rapidly turned into like an m.c escher kind of drawing where the the dimensions didn't quite work and then i was blasted into sort of the universe and all of that is like fraction of a second but you know this was the progression of it and so then i i felt like i was part of creation part of this uh big bang and and and at one point i had this thought which is amazing in a way that you can still be thinking um even though your normal orientation is not there that in the most inner parts of myself um and and you talked about this about where are your thoughts located you know and you're saying it's around here but i thought inside my my head where i i talk to myself

where i think i'm using words and i didn't invent these words you know in the most private part of me it's from millions of people that have developed the english language that have language that all of this might so the part that i think is the most private in a way is not actually the most private it's it's intimately connected with everything that's come before and so i felt like more and more it's just this beautiful thought of this whole long stream of evolution i'm part of everything and and it just just felt great but then i had this thought which you know i've learned not to disregard these thoughts but the thought i had was if you're part of everything and everything's part of you then hitler is part of you too it's not hitler out there i'm all good that bad is out there the the the hitler is part of me too i have to own that and that was just such a shattering thought that um

it just really brought me down and i i felt like there's a logic to it i i can't deny it um this inner hitler and so it just depressed me you could say and and the whole rest of the day you know we went through i told my story we went through the rest of the other people's stories uh but the whole rest of the day i was just really wrestling with this thought that um that there's this touch point where part of me is hitler too that i can't really disown that um it was very kind of a somber day so the the next evening we decided that we would do ketamine and this was intramuscular a hundred milligrams ketamine intramuscular this differently it lasts about an hour so we didn't we all did it more simultaneously we didn't want to you know one person sit there while they would go out for an hour and come back all right so during this experience of ketamine um somehow or other i was

into a different space i was um above and behind hitler as he was giving speech to a a mass rally and i'm thinking okay hitler's part of me i'm potter hitler how do i get inside this part of my head or how do i get inside his head to see about healing this murderous um nature of what he's doing how do i you know do this and and so that got me really scared like i have to psych this guy out i have to figure out what's going on and um and the more that i saw him do these uh speeches this particular speech um and and then i got this sense a whole different sense i'd never thought of about the heil hitler salute the way it was heil hitler and then everybody would do it back to him um and it it felt like this power from the one to the many so that he was doing the salute and then they would all do it back to him

so it's like push out this energy and then they would all give their energy back to him and then he would do it again and then they would do it again and it felt like this vibration that was getting stronger and stronger that was increasing this kind of um connection between um you know him they're all giving his power to him and and i started thinking this is this is terrifying i'm i i and i i felt like i might freak out and i had this image then of bubbles that were like air bubbles that were coming to the surface but these were fear and if these fear bubbles broke the surface then then i would panic and i wouldn't be able to really deal with it and the the one of the good things about ketamine is that it doesn't interfere with your respiration that's why it's such a good anesthetic drug so i had the thought breathe breathe if you just breathe maybe you'll be able to not panic so much so i was able to breathe and i didn't panic and then i got this thought that there is no way to get inside of hitler's head he's

getting so much out of it you know that p the same way for psychedelic therapy is that people have to be willing to face things that they're the ones that are doing the healing they're the ones that are doing the hard work you try to create a safe and supportive setting and you prepare them but in the end the therapist is not the the magician that's making everything happen it's the person healing themselves and they have to be willing and so i realized that he wasn't willing there was no way that i i from the outside you know he ended up committing suicide not having any kind of change even after all of germany was you know destroyed and so many people were died um so i realized though that the long-term strategy has to be all of those people that were giving away their power to hitler they get a lot less out of it so that that's why we need mass mental health

that the strategy for for maps the strategy that i'm trying to put forward is how do we help all these people who are giving away their power to dictators or authoritarians or you know um we see this a lot in america too people that are giving away their rationality and their power we have to it's it's going to be easier to help each one of them work through their traumas and fears so that they don't give away their power so ironically rather than changing one person it's changing 50 million people or more and so that's where maps of strategy has been that the medicalization is a tool for a larger change in consciousness that can only come from embedding this kind of new awareness in millions and billions of people which then need drug policy reform as well as drug development so most of the um non-profit or for-profit psychedelic companies

are about um drug development they're about training other therapists treating people and doing research and so the difference between maps and them is that we are really about mass mental health and going beyond just working with people that have a diagnosis to try to spiritualize humanity as a whole yeah that's that's great you know it's funny so someone a couple months ago mentioned that what we do at healthy gamer is something called aoe healing and aoe means area of effect and so the implication is it's actually i think it aligns perfectly with mass mental health so i mean a big part of our mission and what we do is is exactly what you described it's sort of the idea that you know we think that we can try to understand ourselves better as individuals and the reason that we have these interviews is so that one person can share their experience right and then that your experience goes

out and affects a ton of people and then those people create changes in their life without which i think definitely does feed back to you or at least to me um we had a pretty traumatic uh suicide in our community a couple of months ago and you know i think it was hard on me but i i think it was really interesting to feel everyone's energy and support and and how at the end of the day it's like we're all on the same team and you know we have to support each other and and i'm with you a hundred percent about sort of you know fixing each individual person kind of one at a time but that's how you create a mass you you sort of i mean it's a beautiful way to put it i think it's it aligns perfectly with what we've evolved into because that's what healthy gamer has become it's been become a community of somewhere between 30 and 250 000 people depending on which metric you use

um and you know we really try to support each other and we we try to work on and we work on ourselves together even the way that you kind of described the dmt process like we have a you know a community like our discord server where people come and sort of share their individual take on things um and then we kind of go around and people will share their own take on a particular subject we had like this particular channel that was devoted to ego so people come in and they talk about okay what's my ego telling me to do how do i understand my ego how does my ego interfere with things and one of the things that i love about hearing these communities and in our groups is that it's really hard to see your problems in you because of cognitive bias it's way easier to see your problem in someone else and you can learn so much when somebody else is talking about the same thing that you can that you struggle with and you're like oh wow that's exactly what i do

and it's so much clearer when you're kind of working together with a group of people and when you kind of integrate different people's perspectives you can learn so much more so it's amazing and and i want to say one thing about ego too which is a couple times i've used the word ego death but i've mostly used ego dissolution but um i think ego death gives people the very wrong impression um and so we need our ego we just need our ego to be in the proper place so the metaphor is that um well stan sanderoff has said that the psychedelics are the study of the mind what the microscope is the biology and the telescope is to astronomy and so you know at times the telescope has produced knowledge that was very dangerous and this was for the status quo so this was in the time of copernicus galileo and all and so what we thought at the time or what people thought at the time that the earth was the center of the universe and that everything revolved

around that and as it turned out that's not the case that um we revolve the earth revolves around the sun the sun is just the minor part of this galaxy there's billions of galaxies and i think the same thing is true of the the ego is that we think everything revolves around us but that actually there's the bigger self the bigger world and so we need to put the ego in its place uh but we we need to pay attention to our own ego we are bounded by life and death we are individuals to be egoists to not pay attention to that is also not paying attention to a a key part of reality which is that we are real human beings and we have uh to take care of ourselves and to take care of each other so what stan has also said is that the ego becomes transparent to the transcendent it's like cleaning the window but the window doesn't go away the window protects from various things so i i just think that um you could get very punitive in this idea

that i got to have no ego yeah that's really important that that's where i think you get that spiritual ego that you see a lot in spiritual circles the ego of having no ego look at how egoless i am yeah and and so i i'm with you and i think sort of there there's so much that i could kind of relate to what you said in in sanskrit and sort of yogic traditions um you know and i'll just leave you with two or three like i think the most relevant things the first is that you know the yogis also say ego is a function of mind just like emotions or intellect it's just about who's in is the ego in control of you or are you in control of the ego the second thing that i i kind of it's it's interesting so there's there are four um mahavakyas which are like great phrases and i think these are sort of the essence of what a lot of yogis understood and one of them is aham brahmasmi which means i am the universe and and i think this is very poorly

understood because i think people sort of assume that this is kind of like a yoga calendar sort of concept it's like i am like you know we're all connected like it's not an intellectual or a physical philosophical concept aham brahmasmi is the experience that you are hitler and hitler is you and that that like is is terrifying as that is that essentially there is some kind of underlying unity which carl jung talks about which you know people who have psychedelic experiences talk about and the yogis talk about which is that the self and the other that there is atman which is individual soul and paramatman which is universal and that essentially like there's one ocean and you can pull a drop out and is the drop no longer the ocean is it a separate thing what happens to the drop as it goes back into the ocean you know and and so like a humbra masmi is like the main thing that when i sort of do meditative practices on the hum brahmasmi i think i have experiences somewhat like what you

describe um but it's interesting that there's so much overlap between like eastern mysticism and a lot of what you're describing yeah i i guess i'd like to go back just for a second and then i do have to go um which is to the the the sadness that you said about the person that committed suicide that was part of the community and this isn't just about that person but i think a lot of times what happens is people lose the connection to the whole they feel so isolated and alone that life is unbearable but but they they have somehow lost that touch with the the bigger like uh you know cradled in the arms of gravity or that kind of love that permeates the universe or even being part of something bigger that that that i think that experience can help people um as an antidote to suicide yeah that's been my experience that a lot of people who feel suicidal ultimately what they feel the most profoundly is alone

yes isolated and um it's a it's interesting as a mental health provider to to see what works for suicide and what doesn't and i mean i think that's a conversation maybe for a different day but rick i know you got to get going thank you so much for coming thank you for having me it's been a wonderful discussion yeah thanks a lot i i did not know that you wanted to be a monk yeah and so it's it's interesting um thanks to wise monks and your wife that uh talked you out of it well take care rick and and best of luck with everything and thank you so much for all the work that you're doing and all the wonderful work that maps is doing if people want to participate just learn more maps.org yeah perfect we'll we'll send that out take care bye you