"Could you tell us why psychedelics can be useful?" And here I'll give the caveats that maybe you'll feel obligated to give as well, but this we're talking about use safely and responsibly, age appropriate, context appropriate, ideally with some clinical or other type of guidance, legality issues obeyed, et cetera.

All that stated, psychedelics to me are an experience of altered perception, internal and external perception, altered space-time relationship, somewhat dream-like. I think it was Alan Hobson at Harvard for a long time talked about the relationship between psychedelic-like states and dream-like states because of this distortion of space-time dimensionality. And I haven't experimented with them much.

I've been part of a clinical trial, three doses of MDMA, which certainly altered the quality of my conscious experience in ways that led to a lot of lasting and at least for me valuable learning. So what are your thoughts about psychedelics in terms of how they intersect with the discussion that we've been having and what utility do they play in recognition of the self or in other sorts of brain changes?

Well, so yeah, let's just price in all those caveats that people can anticipate. These drugs are not without their risks. And one problem is that we have this single term drugs or psychedelics, which names many different types of substances, and they're not all the same. So like MDMA is not even technically a psychedelic.

I think it has an immense therapeutic value and it actually was my gateway drug to this whole area of concern. Amphetamine pathogen, right? It's a sort of an amphetamine and a pathogen at the same time. Yeah. I mean, it's often called- M pathogen, excuse me. Not pathogen. Yeah. Not pathogen.

M pathogen. Yeah. An empathogen or an intactogen, it's been called. But it doesn't tend to change perception in the way that classic psychedelics do. And it's also serotonergic, but it has to be in some part differently so than even LSD and psilocybin, which are much more similar and classic psychedelics, both are also serotonergic, but they're not merely so, and they're also different.

And the higher dose you take of these drugs, the more you... At lower doses, everything can kind of seem the same. At higher doses, they begin to diverge. And we can talk about the pharmacology if you wanted to, but I would just say that for many of us, I mean, certainly for me, psychedelics were indispensable in the beginning in proving to me that a first person interrogation of the mind was worth doing, because I was somebody who at age 17 or 18, before I had any real experience with MDMA or LSD or psilocybin, if you had taught me how to meditate at that point, I think I would have just bounced off the whole project.

I think my mind was... I was so cerebral in my engagement with anything. I was so skeptical of any of the religious and spiritual traditions that have given us most of our meditation talk, that I think I just would have... I know many of these people, like I have tried to teach Richard Dawkins to meditate and Daniel Dennett to meditate.

I've ambushed them with meditation and both in a group setting and one-on-one, not Dan, but Richard, I ambushed on my own podcast with a guided meditation. And he just, from his... He closes his eyes, he looks inside and there's nothing of interest to see. He doesn't have the conceptual interest in him that would cause him to persist long enough to find out that there's a there there, right?

Now, this is not a problem with LSD or psilocybin or MDMA. I know that if I gave him a hundred micrograms of LSD or five grams of mushrooms or 25 milligrams of psilocybin, that's probably not the analogous dosage to the five grams of mushrooms. Five grams of mushrooms would be more than that.

I forget what it is of MDMA, maybe 120 milligrams. I think the MAPS dose, which is the one that's under clinical trials, is 125 milligrams with an option of a 75 milligram booster. Funny I would remember that. It's strange, the facts that come to hand. But there's just no possibility that nothing's going to happen right now.

Something with a psychedelic, with MDMA, most people tend to have, certainly under any kind of guidance, tend to have a very positive pro-social experience. But with a psychedelic, you might have a somewhat terrifying experience if you have, we'll quote, a bad trip, and I've certainly had those experiences on LSD and to some degree on psilocybin.

But the prospect that nothing is going to happen is just nearly a million cases out of a million just not in the cards. Just neurophysiologically, something's going to happen with the requisite dose of one of these drugs. And if that thing that happens is psychologically at all normative and pleasant and interesting and valuable, which it is so much of the time, and certainly under the appropriate set and setting and guidance, it can be a lot of the time for virtually everybody.

Again, there are caveats. If you're prone, if you think you have a proclivity for schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, this is almost certainly not for you. And anyone doing the studies at Johns Hopkins for the therapeutic effects of any of these drugs, they're ruling out people with first-degree relatives with any of these clinical conditions.

But so for somebody like me at 18 who didn't know that this was an area of not only interest, but would it be the center of gravity for the rest of his life if only he could pay attention clearly enough to see that it could be, right? I was someone who very likely-- again, I don't have the counterfactual in hand.

I don't know what would have happened if someone had forced me to meditate for an hour at that point. But I know I wasn't interested in it until I took MDMA. I know I wasn't having these kinds of experiences spontaneously that showed me that there was an inner landscape that was worth exploring.

I was a very hard-headed skeptic who was very interested in lots of things, but there was no alternative to me just thinking more about those things, right? I mean, the idea that there's some other way of grasping cognitively at the interesting parts of the world beyond thinking about the world, right, I just-- that just wouldn't have computed for me at all, right?

And if you had-- so I just-- and I literally have-- no one ever gave me a book to read or a-- I don't-- if you-- the noun "meditation" very likely meant absolutely nothing to me before I took my first dose of-- in this case, it was MDMA. So what the drug experience did for me is it just proved-- I mean, so one of the limitations of a drug is that, you know, obviously, no matter how good the experience, the drug wears off and then you're back to, you know, more-- in more or less your usual form.

And now you have a memory of the experience. And it can be a fairly dim memory. I mean, some of these experiences are so discontinuous with normal waking consciousness that it can be like trying to remember a dream, you know, that just disappears-- it degrades, you know, over the course of seconds.

And then it could have been the most intense dream you've ever had. And for whatever reason, you can barely get a purchase on, you know, what it was about. And, you know, there's some psychedelic experiences that are analogous to that. But for most people, most of the time, there's a residue of this experience.

And with something like MDMA, they can be quite vivid, where you recognize, okay, there was a way of being that is quite different than what I'm tending to access by default. And it is different in ways that are just, you know, obviously better and psychologically more healthy. And it's possible to be healthy psychologically in a way that I never imagined, right?

And then when you link it up to the traditional literature around any of this stuff, again, so much of it is shot through with superstition and otherworldliness of religion. And, you know, as you know, and I think your listeners probably know, I've spent a lot of time criticizing all that.

But there is a baby in the bathwater to all of that, right? So, I guess it's not that somebody like Jesus or the Buddha or any of the matriarchs and patriarchs of the world's religions, it's not that they were all conscious frauds or, you know, temporal lobe epileptics, or like there's a pathological lens that you can put on top of all that.

But once you have one of these experiences on psychedelics or on a drug like MDMA, you know that there's a there there. You know that unconditional love is a possibility, right? You know that feeling truly one with nature, right? I mean, just so one with nature that you could spend 10 hours in front of a tree and find that to be the most rewarding experience of your life, right?

That's a possible state of consciousness. Now, it may not be the state of consciousness you want all the time. You know, you don't want to be the crazy guy by the tree, you know, who can't have a conversation about anything else. But once you have one of these experiences, you recognize, okay, there's some reason why I'm not having the beatific vision right now.

And I can't even figure out how to aim my attention so as to have anything like it. And that's a problem, right? Because it's available, right? And it's the best, you know, it is among the best things that has ever happened to me, right? And now I can just only dimly remember what that was like.

So how do I get back there on some level? And so that invites, again, a logic of changes, a logic of seeking changes in the contents of consciousness, which sets someone up for this protracted or seemingly protracted and, you know, fairly frustrating search to, you know, game their nervous system so as to have those kinds of experiences more and more.

And again, it's not that that's in principle fruitless, but it is from the point of view of the kind of the core insight of, you know, the core wisdom of, you know, what I would take from a tradition like Buddhism, which is not, you know, it's not the only tradition that has given voice to this, but I would argue it's given voice to it in the most articulate way.

Again, leaving aside any of the superstition and other worldliness and miracles that, you know, we don't have to talk about at the moment. And you certainly don't need to endorse in order to be interested in this stuff. And so that's the bifurcation between all of the utility of psychedelics and what I'm talking about under the rubric of meditation is at this point of, okay, once you realize there's a there there, what do you do and what's the logic by which you're led to do it?

And I think it's possible if your only framework is the good experiences, the good feels you had on whatever drug it was, and a further discussion of like what that path of changes, you know, can look like, and that can come in a religious context, it can come in just a purely psychedelic context, or, you know, some combination of the two.

I think you can be misled to, you can just be, you can be misled to just seek lots of peak experiences. You're just trying to string together a lot of peak experiences, hoping they're going to change you. Every one of which by definition is going to be impermanent, right?

I mean, it's first it wasn't there, then it's there, and then it's no longer there. And then you've got a memory of it, right? What I think it's, what everyone really wants, whether they know it or not, and they're right to want, is a type of freedom that is compatible with even ordinary states of consciousness, which can ride along with them into extraordinary states of consciousness.

I mean, so what I hadn't done psychedelics for 25 years, because I mean, again, they were super useful for me in the beginning, then I discovered meditation on the basis of those experiences, got really into meditation and realized, okay, this is a much more, this really is, conceptually, this makes much more sense to me.

This is delivering the goods in terms of my experience. There's no need to keep having these, seeking these peak experiences with drugs. But it had been 25 years since I had done that and there was this resurgence in research on psychedelics. And I was being asked about psychedelics and I was talking about their utility for me, but again, these were distant memories.

And so I, and there was also one type of psychedelic experience I was aware that I had never had. I had never done a high dose of mushrooms blindfolded, you know, like every mushroom trip I'd ever had, I'd been out in nature and interacting with, you know, it was just been a very transformed sensory experience of the world and of other people, but I'd never done it alone, blindfolded, just purely, you know, inwardly directed and at a high dosage.

I'd done high doses of LSD, but not mushrooms. So I did that, you know, and it was very useful. And I spoke about it on my podcast and there's actually this, I think if you search Sam Harris mushroom trip on YouTube, you get the 19 minute version of that, my describing that trip.

It was incredibly useful and, but what was doubly useful was my mindfulness training in the context of that explosion of synesthesia. I mean, it was, it was, it was such an overwhelmingly strong experience. And there were so many moments where it could have gone one way or the other based on my sense of just, okay, I'm going to try to resist this.

You know, it was like, it was, it was, it was in truth, irresistible because it was just so much, but there were moments where I was aware of, okay, this is like letting go of self, you know, in this context is, is the thing that is going to, you know, make the difference between heaven and hell here, you know, and because there's, there are experiences that are so extreme that you can't even tell if it's agony or ecstasy.

It's just, it's just, it's everything has turned up to 11, right? And the difference between the two is like, you know, the tipping point is just, it's on, it really is kind of a high wire act in some sense, you know, you could just fall to one side or the other.

And yeah, so what I think people want is they certainly want to be able to extract from the psychedelic experience, wisdom that is applicable to ordinary states of consciousness. It's like, what is the thing you can realize in a moment of having a conversation with your child that isn't distracting you from that relationship?

It's not a memory of when the world dissolved or, you know, when you were indistinguishable from the sky, but it's just a way of, a way of having free attention and unconditional love in this, you know, totally ordinary and potentially chaotic human experience, you know, which can be psychologically fraught and you can meet, you know, iterations of yourself that you don't like, that are, that are not equipping you to be the best possible person in that relationship.

And what we want to do is cut through all of that and actually, you know, be in love with our lives and with the people in our lives more and more of the time. And that's, there's, I'm not saying that's the psych, you know, that repeated psychedelic journeys aren't, can't be integral to that project, but, but you know that it can't, the project can't be being high all the time, right?

So whatever is extractable from that, the, the, the occasional, you know, psychedelic trip has got to be mappable into ordinary waking consciousness. And the point of con, the real point of contact does kind of run through this, you know, what I've been calling the illusion of the self. And again, it is, that part is discoverable without any changes in contents, right?

So you don't have to suddenly feel the energy of your body be rush out and be continuous with the, you know, the ocean of energy that is not your body, right? Like that's an experience that's there to be had, right? I mean, it's, there's no doubt, but this, the truth is, I mean, just looking at this cup is just as formless and as mysterious as that, right?

When it's seen in the right way. And that's, and that's, that's what, you know, meditation encourages, you know, one to recognize.