- This is "Luminous," a podcast series about psychedelics from "To The Best Of Our Knowledge," I'm Steve Paulson. When you hear testimonials about psychedelic experiences, they're often stories about how they've triggered some sort of personal transformation, but there's a different dynamic when two people do it together, especially when a married couple shares the experience. And that's the story I want to tell today. Marcelo and Kari Gleiser are both highly accomplished in their professions, and they also happen to be friends of mine. He's a physicist at Dartmouth College, and she's a clinical psychologist. I've known Marcelo for years. He's the kind of philosopher-scientist who asks the really big existential questions, which are precisely the kinds of questions that I'm drawn to. And more recently, I've also gotten to know Kari, who uses psychedelics in her own therapeutic practice Over dinner one evening I discovered that Marcelo has his own history with psychedelics, and they told me about one experience they had together that turned out to be a real breakthrough. So I asked if they'd be willing to talk about it on this podcast. I also wanted to know how psychedelics have influenced their thinking about their respective fields. Marcelo, as someone who investigates the nature of reality as a theoretical physicist, and Kari as a psychotherapist who specializes in treating people with trauma. So you might say this is an interview in three parts, and we really do cover the waterfront. Kari and Marcelo recently moved to Tuscany, Italy, where they just started a small think tank called The Island of Knowledge, which brings together scientists, philosophers, and writers. And I'm actually working with them on another podcast series, which is how I ended up sitting in the kitchen of their house near Siena. You'll occasionally hear their dog Felix rustling below us. And you'll also hear the nasty cold I had at the time. We ended up having an amazing and very revealing conversation. I think you'll really enjoy it. I'm willing to bet that each of you came into psychedelics, your interest in psychedelics along different paths, and I wanna get at that. But I also wanna hear from each of you what your initial experiences were with psychedelics, your personal experiences. So, Marcelo, what about you, how did you first discover psychedelics?
- So I grew up in Brazil, in Rio, and there were lots of my friends that were doing psilocybin mushrooms, you know, and LSD as well. And I was the athlete, the nerd physicist guy. Until one day I went to a farm with a bunch of friends and they had LSD tablets, and I was about 21 maybe. And I had never done anything like that. And I took the full dose and it was the most mind-blowing, spectacular experience I could have. I couldn't even have imagined how could that little piece of paper, you know, a tiny little paper put on your tongue and then boom, right? The universe becomes an open book and you have this kind of immersion into nature. And everything that people say, you know, the feeling of oneness, the deep spiritual kind of flights, we're all there and we were a group of friends, we were about maybe 10, and we did all these games. There were so much fun. I have to tell one game just because...
- Sure, yeah.
- ...so what you do is you get all your friends in a circle and you embrace, and you know, I'm talking about the tropics. It was summer, it was a beautiful, clear night. And then you all bend into the ground like this, you know, holding. And then you go, whoa. And then you go up to the sky and literally you take off to the universe, you know, you just go like a rocket ship into the stars. And it was lovely. And so I would say that then I took a lot of that into my own self. And I detached from the group because I felt like I had to explore, you know, to me, being a physics student, I was studying quantum mechanics and relativity. I started to poke myself with the questions of, "Can this actually help me see space-time "or understand quantum entanglement in different ways?"
- Oh, that's so interesting. Because I was wondering if how much you saw the connection between your own experiences and your work as a physicist. I mean, obviously, we're just starting out at this point.
- Yeah, and I have to say, I remember this so clearly, it's crazy. It's like 40 years ago or more, actually. And I remember saying, "So this is what space-time means," meaning the connection of space and time, which is something that is not very intuitive, right? And it made me kind of get an intuitive grasp of what the mathematics was telling me, which I did not see, just by calculating, right?
- In what way the intuitive grasp of mathematics?
- Yes, because I could see mathematics as really describing this subtleness of reality that is not something that you see with your everyday, you know, experience of space and of time, you know? So that was very moving. But then I moved away from that and I went into this feeling of oneness, and it was very deep and very intense. And I remember very clearly it was, you know, it's the tropics, its very humid. There was this tree that was literally dripping with humidity, and I thought the tree was crying. And I went there and I hugged the tree and we're so happy together, hugging each other. And it was this thing that you never do this, right? And I know, when would you cry hugging a tree? And to me, it was the most natural and most wonderful experience I could have. I loved it. It was incredible. It was eight hours of bliss. But I also realized, and I was very scared because mental illness runs in my family, and I was very scared that this could do something bad. You know, a lot of people told me that. And I remember I had a notebook and I said, "This is horrible." But I have to say, I said, "If this is what madness is, "sign me in." Because it was this blissful experience with the totality of being, that's how I felt. That was my first.
- Yeah, I want to pick up where, how you came back to this then, but Kari, let me turn to you. So I know you have come at this whole question of psychedelics in a very different way. I mean, you were a clinical psychologist, so how did you get interested?
- That's right, I had a very different portal into the world, let's say. I was more of a solitary, kind of introverted child. So I didn't have a lot of exposure to the world of psychedelics. I didn't have my kind of rebellious period, I would say, until I was kind of an adult, which is actually a lovely time to kind of be an adolescent. But it really was through a professional setting. And I started having these little kind of glimmers of interest and hearing, you know, I was kind of entering into the zeitgeist of my world of what can psychedelics do in the world of healing and mental health. And then I had an opportunity to try MDMA, and this was about four years ago. And I was lucky enough to do it in a setting with colleagues with deeply trusted, admired, safe people. And it was an incredible different than LSD because MDMA, you know, is not the same kind of class of psychedelics. It's more in a pathogen. And so my experience was of such a profound opening and interconnectivity, and I explain it experientially as almost, I mean, I'm a relational and attachment psychotherapist and experiential psychotherapist. So a lot of my focus in life has been just more and more opening to experience, opening to emotion, opening to relating, and helping other people do this too. But what I didn't realize is that because I think of some attachment trauma in my own life, there was this kind of like kink in my ability to relate that I didn't even know was there until MDMA, like you can have a fold and a hose that's stopping the flow or slowing the flow. And it was almost like it straightened. And all of a sudden I had this amazing flood of connection and emotion. And I remember saying to the people that were sitting with me, "I've been waiting for this feeling. "I've been searching for this feeling all my life, "and here it is." And it was the most amazing experience of interconnectivity and like a feeling of almost unarticulated longing that had been in there that was all of a sudden satiated.
- You said that it was like you had this kink in there and then it got unkinked.
- Yes.
- Can you be more specific about that? I mean, what was the block that then you somehow that this helped you get through?
- You know, this is the mystery of psychedelics, is that sometimes you get a direct rush of experience without content. It wasn't like I was flooded with memories or, you know, all of a sudden knew something. I just really literally felt like there was an energetic scrub brush, going from the top of my head through all of my cells, down to the bottom of my feet. It was really just the direct experiential shift. And it was beautiful.
- You said you did this first experience with MDMA with colleagues.
- Yes.
- So this was, presumably, this was kind of you were thinking, "Can I use this in my therapeutic practice?"
- Absolutely, it was guided by a personal and professional curiosity, and seeking. But I don't really make a barrier between personal and professional.
- But you must distinguish between, I mean, you're working with a client who comes to see you and is looking for help, and then what this is doing for you personally.
- Absolutely, absolutely, and I think whether you're talking about psychedelics or, you know, therapy in normal states of consciousness, we can only lead people down paths that we have walked ourselves. And so healing processes are states of consciousness as therapists, as psychologists, is only as expansive as our own experiences. And I think that's even heightened in the world of psychedelics. I don't think we can be competent, ethical experiential guides.
- If you haven't done it yourself.
- Exactly.
- Yeah, so I want to come back to kind of how you use this in your therapeutic practice, but Marcelo, lemme go back to you. So you had this incredibly powerful experience when you were 21. I'm guessing maybe there were some other experiences when you were younger as well. But then pick up the story later, I mean, you went on, you've had a big career as a physicist, a theoretical physicist, as a cosmologist. I mean, was psychedelics part of your life all the way along, or did you sort of put it aside and only come back to it much later?
- Yeah, so it was really my first one apart from cannabis, you know, but it was really my first one and then maybe happened twice again. And also with psilocybin mushrooms. But in my early 20s and then exactly my career as a physicist took me away from that. And I very much focused on the whole path, right? The professional path. It's hard, it's competitive. You have to shine and publish and get a job as a faculty member and get tenure. So all that happened, and honestly, we met a long time ago, Kari and I, it's been 29 years. And for most of that time, this was not part of the conversation until Kari comes back.
- That's right, it opened a portal for us as a couple as well.
- Big time, yes. And so it really is when she came back with this thing of, "You know, my colleagues, you know, psychedelics "and Michael Poland, and we all have seen all of that." And we said, "Okay, maybe we should do something together." And that's how the second phase, let's put it away of our exploration started.
- So that's really interesting. So then you rediscovered this together really as a couple, I mean, was this like consciously as a couple? Because I mean, this is one of my questions here, which is, if one person sort of dives deep into the psychedelic world and it's transformative in a way, where does that leave the partner? I mean, do you sort of have to come along or do you just because you know, one person is probably gonna be changed by this experience, and then so where does that leave the relationship?
- Yeah, that wasn't really a risk for us. I think it can be for some couples, but I would say, and I'm curious to hear what you think about this, Marcelo, but I think one of the hallmarks of our relationship has really been this mutual joy in exploring limits together, right? Whether it's physical limits because we're both ultra-marathoners and we've both done extreme sports. We've both done spartan racing, obstacle course racing together, you know, and that was kind of jumping into a world where we were testing our physical limitations, and we found a lot of joy in doing that, psychologically, mentally, spiritually. You know, we're always kind of pushing and stretching each other and exploring together. And so this just felt like the next chapter and let's explore some new horizons together. And it was never really a big question or debate. I mean, I think maybe you had a little bit of caution about, "Well, am I gonna really do this at my age "and with my family history?" And there was a tiny bit of caution, but I'll let you speak to how you overcame that.
- Yeah, so it was just a tiny little bit of caution. Just because, you know, we had, I've done it before and I mostly, not always, but I mostly had positive experiences with LSD, you know, a long time ago. We've done cannabis because, you know, United States is okay, it's legal. And so we've done that and we always enjoyed it very much. And it brought the level of proximity to our relationship, which was kind of wonderful as well. My early experience with Kari, was three, four years ago, I don't even remember anymore. It was with MDMA, we did it together with a therapist. So it wasn't just, "Let's go do this." It was very kind of like, not scripted, but prepared with safety.
- Yeah, it was held. The space was very lovingly held.
- And it was just the two of you and the therapist.
- Yes.
- Yeah. It's a funny story. We should tell the story.
- Yeah.
- So we arrived in New York City, we drove down and we arrived, I think at like almost midnight. And we had rented this Airbnb, and let's just say that the pictures of the Airbnb made it look a lot nicer than it actually was. So, I mean, I would describe it as kind of like a dingy, dirty little hovel, maybe like a dorm room almost that you kind of like didn't really wanna touch the floor in the bathroom when you went in. And, you know, I remember thinking like, "Should we find a hotel, this setting, blah, blah." And Marcelo was like, "I think we should find another hotel." And I looked at him and I was like, and he had not done MDMA yet, and I said, "Sweetie, it is not gonna matter. "Tomorrow you're gonna see, it doesn't matter where we are "because we're gonna be journeying inside. "We're gonna be in other dimensions, other realms, "and our immediate surroundings "are not gonna make a bit of difference."
- So by this point, it sounds like you were somewhat experienced with MDMA?
- Yes, this was after I had done my first individual experience. And he trusted me, and sure enough.
- Sure enough, there was no need for any special space because the space is really irrelevant. Where you are, at least for us in that moment, was completely irrelevant. Just held hands and talked, and experienced, and cried, and laughed for a very long time. And we came up with beautiful revelations of our own personal histories together. Because we were like teasing each other, you know, because honestly, in this particular case, and because we've had such a long relationship, it was so easy to build a bridge between our hearts. You know, the things just were, they're just flowing to the point that the person that was accompanying us, she was emotional.
- She was.
- Because she was like, "My God, I've never seen this kind of love "flowing like this." And so it was a very cathartic experience, you know? And in particular, for me, you know, there was a point where I was holding the little boy who was myself on my lap to give that little boy love because, you know, I lost my mother when I was six. And that was a very traumatic experience, was a very powerful and tragic loss. And I never really took care of that little boy, you know? And both of them, Kari and this other person really helped me reattached myself with that little boy. And it was so transformative and honestly very deeply healing, you know, because it's so easy to feel sorry for yourself when bad things happen in your life, right? And it's so much harder to kind of come to terms and embrace the loss as a path to self-knowledge. And I think that's what that experience did to me. And it was very, very powerful and rewarding. And then we had more wonderful things that happened due to this experience.
- Can I just say that it also felt very profound, and beautiful, and kind of sacred. It's almost like these medicines, they afford you a time travel, so that I got to go back and interact with Marcelo's little boy too, right?
- That's right.
- I'm curious about how that worked. So you talked about this, so I mean, during the experience, Marcelo, were you sort of talking about, "Oh, you know, I was holding this little boy "in my lap and then..."
- Well, they suggest that I did.
- Oh, okay.
- You know so the talking, so one of the things that our, how can I... I call this person the enabler, but I don't know if that Sarah, because she was enabling us to kind of opening us up. But I would say that they just coaxed me into doing this, you know? And it was so obviously necessary.
- Because he was talking about this little boy and I can't remember if it was me or her, just basically said, "Let him be here, feel him here. "He's here already," right? And so it becomes a real experience, a real relationship, not a hypothetical, not an abstract. It becomes an occurrence, like a meeting.
- I mean, this is so interesting because I always wonder sort of what happens during the experience itself and how much you sort of wanna articulate it in words, for instance. And in this case, you're doing it together, so you wanna talk about it. And then there's the aftermath of, you know, the integration process once you're sober again, you know, how you incorporate that. And, but this is happening during the experience is what you're talking about.
- Yeah, and it was the experience. This was, and the experience was much more emotional and experiential than verbal. The words were just a little, you know, poking in a certain direction. And when I started to try to rationalize too much, this person would say, "Stop, get out of your head. "Go back to your heart. "Get out of your head. "Go back to your heart." Because that's, you know, scientists and a lot of people are just trained to rationalize, right? It's so much easier. So it's almost protective, right? Your mind protects you from the emotions, they're hidden down there. And they were saying, "Stop that," you know, and "Open up." And it worked. And it was very, very powerful. You know, not completely different from the LSD experience, but in a path to self-knowledge and to understand and to integrate your past. It was a beautiful experience. And then the post-experience was basically just digesting emotionally what had happened, you know, and integrating those feelings in such a way that they were not without confrontation, but with acceptance, you know, and honoring the past.
- Which means what, I mean, how did that change things for you going forward from that?
- I stopped feeling sorry for myself and blaming others for my pain and understanding that, "you know, hey, "this pain is part of who I am, "you know, and I have to embrace it." And also later on with another experience, I start to think of my mother and her pain. And not about my pain, but her pain, which is really what I think had the deepest healing effect for me.
- Can you tell me about that later experience?
- Sure, so there was not MDMA, there was smaller dose of the 5-MeO-DMT. So it's very short, very explosive. And so my mother had depression, so, you know, talking about the 60s, and there was no medication, there was just electric shock therapy, and it was pretty bad. And, you know, you inhale those crystals, right? And so suddenly without me knowing, you know, my two hands on my, how do you say this?
- Temples.
- My temples, like this, you know, like that, like that. And then eventually I figured out that what I was doing is, it was her, it was her electric shock therapy in the head like this. And I was somehow connecting with that pain that she must have felt, horrendous pain that she must have felt through this crazy, well, but some people perhaps sufficient, but not in her case treatment. And so that allowed me to look at the world from her perspective, not from my perspective, you know? Because so easy to victimize herself all the time.
- You've been carrying this with you. I mean, you said she died when you were six?
- Yeah, my whole life.
- Your whole life, wow.
- And I never had this insight, you know, and it wasn't really an insight because insight sounds like a rational thing. It was a complete transference of emotions, right? That kind of like, "Wow, this was horrible for her," you know? And she was the hero, you know? And my pain was not the hero. She was the hero. And so that completely transformed my way of thinking about my past, which is kind of remarkable, right? And that was not even in a therapeutic setting was something else. Yeah, so I would say that that was made me understand a little bit and respect the power of those medicines, you know, as a transformative kind of help to people in pain.
- I would even say that the experience we had together of caring for and tending to and holding your little boy allowed something to heal and settle down. So you weren't stuck in that perspective anymore, right? Because then his consciousness because I really think that these parts of ourselves, these traumatized parts of ourselves, they maintain a life inside. They may be tucked away, and they may be kind of not entirely available to conscious awareness, but they exert an influence. There's this kind of emotional seepage, right into our conscious awareness, even if we don't know the source of it. And so once this little boy was settled down, you were in a much different place. A place that, you know, you could do this perspective taking, you could feel compassion, you could feel empathy for your mother's experience. And, you know, the whole effect was a clearing.
- I am talking with Kari and Marcelo Gleiser. She's a clinical psychologist and he's a theoretical physicist. You're listening to "Luminous," our podcast about the science and philosophy of psychedelics from "To The Best Of Our Knowledge." I'm Steve Paulson. Kari, can you talk a little bit more about how you incorporate psychedelics into your therapeutic practice? I know this is not only what you do. I mean, this is just a piece of it, it's a tool in a way. But what can, working with psychedelics, I don't know if it's MDMA in particular, or you know, what the substances you're using are, but what does that do or what does that enhance that maybe it's hard to get otherwise?
- Yeah, it's an excellent question, and it's a question that I'm passionate about. I am also somewhat frustrated by, because legislation and laws lag behind, I think the passion and the excitement and the possibility, right? So I have been a trauma clinician and worked with really complex trauma and dissociation for about 20 years now. And it's only been the last few years that I've entered this world of the healing potential of psychedelics. And I'm not willing, some people are courageous and plunge in and become underground guides, and I was not willing to take that risk. So in my clinical work, I can only work with legal substances, which in the US are cannabis and ketamine, you can get a prescription for both a medical prescription for cannabis and a medical prescription with ketamine and incorporate them legally into therapies. So even though I'm trained in working with other medicines, I'm poised and ready for when they become legal and excited for when they become legal. So far my clinical scope is only working with cannabis and ketamine.
- Can you, if there's maybe a case history that, can you talk about how this might work with someone who has experienced trauma?
- Absolutely, so in general, what these substances do is they take us off the beaten paths of our mind, right? So what trauma does is part of how the mind and body copes with trauma is by staying on the known pathways. Even if those pathways incorporate some of the limitations, some of the woundedness, a lot of the fear, like the known fear is better than the unknown fear. And our brains get grooved by our lived experience, right? So those grooves, the more we kind of walk those familiar pathways, the deeper they get tread into the brain, and then they get maintained by fear often. So it's hard to leave those beaten paths, even with the help of a therapist kind of saying, "Let's look over here, let's explore over here." You know, I think the relationship, especially with the kind of psychotherapy that I do, which we can talk about a little bit later, because I think it makes a real difference, the model, I think there are some kinds of therapy that are just brilliantly suited to working with psychedelics.
- Well, and I would think that especially when you're dealing with trauma, there's the question of like, during the therapy session, are you asking your clients to relive the trauma, to go back in there and to somehow turn it into something else, is that the practice there?
- So the way that I work is very emergently. I don't ask anyone to do anything, but I trust that what will come up in the system, especially once someone is in an altered state of consciousness, so the medicines help reduce that fear of leaving the common pathways, right? There's like an expanded landscape for us to explore. All of a sudden things open up, things arise from the depths, emotions arise, memories arise, feelings arise. And you don't have to be artificial or say, you know, "We're gonna do this medicine "and then we're gonna go here." It's really a process of trusting that what will arise will arise, and then going there together. And this is where it's important, the kind of therapy that you're doing, because psychedelics they're non-specific experiential amplifier. So kind of, they turn up the volume on all experiences.
- So it could be good, or it could be bad?
- Could be good, could be bad, could be meaningful, could be meaningless, right? Like, you know, if you put someone in an altered state of consciousness next to a speaker, they're just gonna become one with a throbbing music. You know, that's the experience that they're gonna incorporate. And that's why, you know, people doing psychedelics and dance clubs don't necessarily encounter spontaneous healing. So what you do with that enhanced access to experience, is deeply important. And the kind of therapeutic model that I have learned, and teach, and follow, and offer is called AEDP. It's accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy developed by Diana Foșha, who's a clinical psychologist in New York City. And it is an attachment, focused, emotion-focused, and transformational-focused psychotherapy.
- Meaning the person who you are with, I mean, the relationship that you have with that person is all important in this practice.
- It's important and it's transformational.
- Can you give me one example? I mean, I hope you're not violating, you know, patient confidentiality here, but if there's just one, you know, without going into excessive detail, but one story that you could tell.
- And in anticipation of this, I asked a couple of patients that I've worked with, if they'd be willing to allow me to share confidentially without any identifying information. And all of the patients that I asked, their responses were really beautiful. And they said, "I trust you." So the one I wanna talk about is, this was a woman with a really complex trauma history, and in an altered state of consciousness, she had this vision that just occurred to her, right? These occurrences just kind of, they spontaneously arise and you go with what arises. So what arose for her was this reality of this baby whale. She could see the baby whale, she could feel the baby whale, and the baby whale was stuck in a net at the bottom of the ocean. And this baby whale was gonna die. You know, she kind of had this real immersion, she wasn't thinking this, she was living this of diving down, and she couldn't hold her breath long enough, and the baby whale was gonna die, and she was crying, right? And this was like a real fundamental part of her. And I think a lot of psychedelic approaches would trust the inner healer, right? This is a big notion of there's an inner wisdom and an inner healer, and we just have to hold the space. And ADP says something different, says, you know, sometimes people need other people. And some of what went awry in someone's history is exactly that, that they were all alone with something that they couldn't cope with, with something that was overwhelming, and that they couldn't figure out on their own. And so, instead of just waiting it out, I mean, I waited somewhat, right? Because I wanted to see if she had this capacity, and I wanted to also hold with her the despair of the situation. And at a certain point, I just said, "Okay, now I'm there with you. "We're diving down together. "What do we need? "Well, we need clippers. "We need to cut that net, right? "We need to go down there together." And it took a while, but we were able to rescue the baby whale. And this became a central motif in her life that really the baby whale was swimming with her and leading her out of despair, leading her out of depression. And she needed that connection with me, right? It wasn't that I was her rescuer, but I was her companion. I was her partner in this endeavor. And together we rescued this baby whale. And I think that there's a beautiful lesson in that about, it's the opposite of self-sufficiency, right? That we have to be able to do everything on our own.
- So, just to wrap up this particular story that you're telling, did you go back into the source of the trauma itself? I mean, did you talk about that, or was...
- Yes.
- ...the baby whale, the stand-in for dealing with all of this?
- Both, I would say that there was definitely trauma processing, you know, and not just in the sessions and the psychedelic sessions, but in the whole long course of therapy. But this really was the turning point more than any other turning point in our therapy, I would say. Because we had done tons of trauma processing, and yet I think there was this piece that had not been touched, that had not been accessed, that had not been reached. And this is what makes me so excited about psychedelics for people that still stay in some way stuck, right? Despite all of their efforts, and attentions, and commitment to therapy and commitment to transformation, something inside stays inaccessible. Through no fault of their own.
- It's the net.
- It's the net. That's exactly right. And we talk about that now. It was the net. We were able to find the net, feel the net, cut the net out. And now it's a central metaphor in all of our work. We say, "Oh, there's the net again, right? "There's the net." And she's able to evade it and to push it off and to know that it's there. Whereas before she was really, really caught in it. So I think that these psychedelic medicines, they just give that little extra nudge, that little extra push that sometimes people need in their healing processes. And, you know, they're not miracle substances. They don't do it all on their own. They're tools in sometimes a very long, deep fraught challenging process. So I think we have to make sure we also don't get seduced by this idealization of psychedelics are the transformative piece in trauma work, or they're the salvation of humanity to lead everyone into, you know, a more spiritual and connected place. Do I think there's a tremendous potential for all of that? Absolutely, but I don't think it's a given.
- Yeah, an amazing story. I mean, the woman you were talking about. So, Marcelo, I wanna turn to you. So as you said, you went on to, you know, your big career as a physicist, as a cosmologist. I know what, there have been some turns that have taken over the years, and I mean, you have been quite literally investigating the nature of reality. I mean, that's kind of what theoretical physics is about. And I guess the question is whether your psychedelic experiences gave you any new insights into those questions you were investigating as a scientist?
- Right, so that's the million-dollar question in a sense, right? That well, are these substances allowing us to see aspects of reality that we just can't see with sensorial apparatus or with telescopes, and microscopes, and particle accelerators, or is it something else, right? And I thought a lot about this, a little bit thanks to you, because you've been asking me this question for a while. Like, okay, what is going on, right? When you take these things, right? I mean, is it really opening, Aldi Oxley, right? Why does he call it, the doors of perception?
- And he talks about the Mind at Large, I mean, so Aldi Oxley had this theory that the brain in normal everyday life is kind of a filter. It filters out a lot of the stuff that, you know, we might otherwise access and psychedelics open the door.
- So the question then becomes, is it coming from the outside in or from the inside out, right? And at this point, and my thinking has been evolving a along these lines, I would say that this is a false dichotomy in a sense, that since our brain and our embodied experience of the world is all we've got I think those substances, they are experienced amplifiers in a way that you are allowed to perceive things. You're sort of like teasing brain states that you otherwise would not. And to me, as a physicist, that's kind of amazing because one of the most powerful tools in physics is something called perturbation theory. So you have a system could even be the solar system, right? And it's doing its thing, and then you start to poke at it and push it and perturb it. And you wanna know how far does it go until it reaches a different state, right? And it could be a new good state, or it could be a new catastrophic state. But it's a perturbation that is going to lead you away. And the truth of the matter is that those substances are strong perturbations. I mean, you can have this feeling of oneness, for example, with some of them, and it can say, "Yes, this points towards a cosmic mind "or some kind of panpsychism." And basically, it's sort of like you have a little antenna, which is your antenna of being in the world, you know, and this substance make this antenna gigantic, right? So you're like, so this is really the world, not just this little world, but the little antenna, but the bigger antenna. And I think the most important aspect of that, because it's so hard for us to know because it's so subjective. And that's the problem with the scientific narrative, right? I mean, how are you going to describe what you're doing objective ways, when even for yourself, every experience is so different, right? I mean, you can take the same stuff you're going to experience different things, see different things, right? There are some patterns though. So for example, psilocybin, some time ago I did like a pretty substantial amount, you know, five grams. I think that's kind of like the "see god" kind of thing, and...
- The "hero's dose."
- The "hero's dose," is that what...
- Yeah, yeah.
- Okay, so I took the "hero's dose," and to me, why was I doing that? Well, I was doing that because I wanted to see what my mind, body, totality would be like under those new antennas of reality, right? And funnily enough, I had a committee of my ancestors around me in bed, you know, to just stop. We had a great conversation, you know, like many generation of my family. But I also saw these kind of like typical geometric colorful patterns that so many people talk about, right? And the question, because if so many people see these things, is it a trick of the brain? Because you know, our brains are very similar, or is it something that is really out there that you just don't see light that way? We don't know. We don't know what's going on. But perhaps knowing is not the right thing here. You know, perhaps is the experience that is essential, you know, is what the experience makes you feel like, and makes you relate to the world in different ways. And I think to me, that's the most precious aspect of that is not to scientific the heck out of this thing, but actually, "No, let's experience reality in ways "that are beyond a scientific narrative." Because there are ways of deep being in the world, right? And to me, even as a scientist, does this make me understand quantum entanglement better? No, it doesn't really, because quantum entanglement is a subatomic thing. You know, it's not about me being connected to a tree. That's another experience of the human.
- I mean, it's interesting you say that because of course some people do believe, I mean, maybe not traditional, definitely not traditional scientists believe that, "Oh, yeah, quantum entanglement is really sort of "this thing about the experience of consciousness. And this shows that, "you know, there is some sort of cosmic mind, "and we're all connected, and there's this collective unconsciousness." You're not going there.
- I'm not going there. Because in a sense, you don't need this quantum word to explain the experience of connectedness, right? I think that's an unnecessary exaggeration of rhetoric. You know, you just need the experience of connectedness. And I think honestly, science almost is in the way of that. And if you start to rationalize the experience, you know, and say, "Oh, this is to do with quantum entanglement," I think that takes it away from the true value of the experience, which is we are all one with nature. And I think so many of these medicines are trying to tell us that, you know, and we Westerners kind of shut off our minds to this very fundamental truth of who we are. You know, we are one with nature. And I think those things are just a portal to kind of, "Hey, open the door. We are one with nature."
- You're listening to "Luminous" our podcast about psychedelics from "To The Best Of Our Knowledge." I'm Steve Paulson. My guests are Marcelo and Kari Gleiser. And just ahead, why Marcelo calls himself a rational mystic. One thing that, you know, many people talk about, if we're sort of getting into what I would consider the more mystical aspects of psychedelic experiences, people talk about the noetic quality of these experiences, that these are realer than real. I mean, that's what a lot of people talk about. It's sort of like they are tapping into some deeper fundamental nature of reality. Maybe you would call it consciousness than we ordinarily have access to. And I guess the question is, what do we do with that? Is that actually a source of knowledge? I mean, this sort of gets to this question of, you know, is direct experience like this, is that a source of knowledge itself, or is it, you know, I mean, how do we put that up against scientific knowledge that, for instance, you've been studying all these years, you know, with your physics?
- You know, when you're saying source of knowledge, you know the word that came up in my mind was not, it's not about knowledge, it's about wisdom. You know, I think there is a level of understanding our place in the world that gets transcended through these experiences that you become so expensive in your being, right? That your being fills the whole universe. And that is should fill you with wisdom in a sense that, you know, how fundamental it is our connection with things that we don't even think about in our everyday lives. So this is kind of a privilege to have this kind of encounters with the sacred, which is really what these things are doing, right? And so, I don't know, if you ask me in two or three years if I'm still going to think that way, but right now, you know, I am honoring these experiences as something that takes me and Kari, you know, even together to an emotional and spiritual place that we wouldn't go normally. And that's just wonderful. You are basically creating a perturbation that is so powerful that it opens up a different way of being with each other, with the world that is revelatory. You know, it's an ecstatic feeling, and I think that's just fabulous and wonderful. And I don't know if you need to kind of go into quantum physics or create a fundamental consciousness for that. You know, to me, what it does say is that how amazing it is to be human and to have these experiences, you know, of oneness with everything.
- Kari, I wanna get your take on that.
- Yeah, it also makes me wonder why we feel this impulse to explain that, you know, not necessarily to explain it away, but that it feels like snapping back into another state of consciousness that isn't experience, that isn't expanding into the experience of it, and even into the mystery of it.
- Well, I mean, I'll tell you my answer to that. I wanna understand, you know, the nature of reality. I mean, since I can remember, I've always been obsessed with the big existential questions, and it seems like this is one of them. And it does come to this question of, are these psychedelic experiences unearthing some buried corner of my unconscious, or is it connecting to something larger? To me, that seems like a significant question.
- And I try to break down those dualities in my mind because I think that the experience is not something separate from reality, right? Like our experience is reality, and it's part of reality.
- Of course, yes.
- And it's part of this network of reality. And that line is very fuzzy, right? And I think psychedelics plays with that line in really profound ways, but I'm not sure it necessarily gives us enough distance, or I don't know if this is the hard problem of consciousness, right? In a way, you need to be outside of something to look at it, and we're trapped within it. We may have an expanded landscape on psychedelics, so we get to push into and feel things that we don't normally feel, and that those things are deeply transformative, right? They can transform us, they can transform our connections with each other with the world. But I'm not sure so far, and again, let's report back because we wanna continue, one of the things that is on our bucket list is that we wanna do ayahuasca together, but that feels like it needs to be the right environment. It needs to be the right time.
- Well, especially because Marcelo, you're from Brazil, so you know, the land of ayahuasca, so...
- Exactly, I have so many invitations, it's crazy.
- I know, we're trying to listen inside to where is the right moment? Where's the right context? Because that really matters.
- Well, so let me ask this in a more pointed way, and I'm gonna come back to you, Marcelo, and I mean, you've mentioned this experience with psilocybin and, you know, encountering ancestors. And I heard you somewhere else talk about what sounded like a really profound experience. I don't know if it was that, or if it was with LSD, where you really met your ancestors. And I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about that and how you see that experience.
- It was that one.
- It was that one, okay?
- It was psilocybin, like...
- Yeah, so if you're willing, tell me what happened.
- Yeah, so just even before that, just very quickly, I think the difference between the psilocybin and who am I to classify here I am, right? And the LSD experience is that the psilocybin brings in a more personal connection with your past in a sense of this ancestral connections and lineages, you know, and LSD I think blows that all up. And if the ancestors are there, you know, they're dancing with you, or something like this. And in this case was more of a, it was almost like a committee, you know? I mean, I was laying down in bed and looking up at this window that is on our ceiling, and they just surrounded me. And they started to talk to me about my life and what I have done. And they were proud. And at some point, you know, I don't know why I remember this. I said to them, because a lot of the way I frame my life, you know, in the past was like, I wanna honor my mother. You know, the fact that what she missed, well, because she didn't live that long. And at some point in this evening, and you were downstairs, right, Kari?
- Yeah.
- I said to them, you know, I think it's enough. You know, I think I've done enough of this honoring, and I just want to kind of like enjoy this and not have to feel like I have to pay dues, you know, to my past. And that was very liberating. So that was, I think that's the experience you're talking about.
- Right, so the question is, where did those ancestors come from, I mean, why did they appear to you?
- Because they're always here, right? I think they're always present. They just not be visually present as they were in this case. I mean, it was a visual encounter.
- I mean, you have to wonder, was this calling up memories for you, or was it calling up something else?
- Yeah, well, that's the question. I would say that it was more an unexpected projection of what I needed at that moment. You know, it is not planned. It is not scripted. It just happens. And you can push it away or you can embrace it. And I embraced it to see how far this would go and, you know, and if they are around, wonderful. You know, but I only saw them at that very moment. I don't see them at any other moment, right? So the question then again, becomes, are they always there? Is there such a thing or are you just projecting, and honestly, this is where my scientific background comes in. I feel more comfortable with the idea that yes, you are projecting some very inner emotional desire of connectivity with your past, because how else are you gonna do this? And this wonderful medicine allows you to be in touch with all these people that are fundamentally, you only here because of them, and...
- Well, you have called yourself a rational mystic.
- Yes.
- And what you're describing now is the rational piece of this. I mean, there's, I guess you're only willing to go so far in terms of explaining some of what these experiences.
- Yeah, and it's more than that. I just don't have enough empirical evidence either way, you know, and I just have the experience. And so I'd much rather try not to quantify or try to... Because I don't even know how to start quantifying these things, you know? And people say consciousness is essential and it's primal in the universe. I don't know what to say. I'm like, "Okay, "I mean, like mass and electric charge, really? "How does that even work? "You know, I have no idea." And so at this point, I'm much happier. Maybe that Karis influence too. You know, it's like I get out of your head and embrace the experience for now. And if something else comes up one day, fabulous, you know? But for this moment, what's been very healing to me was not the scientific aspect of the experience, but the emotional aspect of the experience.
- So I agree with all that, and I wanna do a thought experiment.
- Okay.
- Would there potentially be, you said like maybe one day if the evidence is there, you know, you'll realign, what could possibly give us the evidence? Like could you in a thought experiment, think of any way to say, "Okay, "of course, all of our ancestors are with us all the time. "They're in there as living presences, and our psyches, "and our hearts and our bodies, right?" Just as there's intergenerational transmission of trauma, I really believe there can be intergenerational transmission of healing. I've also had, you know, communal meetings with ancestors going back generations, right? And so I think that this is the mind manifesting. That's what psychedelics are, a manifestation of the mind that is not disconnected from reality. It is reality. Does physics have any way of, like, when you're in your scientist mind, can you think of, would there be any way to design an experiment to say, "There's something else here right now."
- That's a better question that I would've asked.
- I cannot think of any, it may very well be that this is not the right question to be asking, and I honestly do not know what would be a manifestation of cosmic consciousness, you know, from an experimental perspective that would be quantifiable and meaningful to the scientific community at this point.
- Well, I think it would be somehow you would receive information that you couldn't have just gotten on your own, and you could test that in some way. And maybe multiple people could do that.
- Isn't that what we call insight?
- I'm thinking very specific bits of information that would only be accessible through some sort of collective mind.
- Oh, collective mind.
- Yeah.
- Okay, yeah, because individual minds, you know, people have dreams of...
- Oh, sure, right?
- ...like right? He had the dream of a snake biting his tail, and he came up with the structure of benzene kind of thing, you know, so "Oh, the dream told him the answer, awesome."
- Right, you do wonder where that dream came from?
- Yeah, exactly, so the unconscious is the...
- Collective unconscious.
- Right?
- Yeah.
- Possibly.
- So this is a question kind of for both of you, but particularly for you, Marcelo, I think just doing this interview here, having this conversation, you are to some degree coming out of the closet in terms of your being willing to talk publicly about your psychedelic experiences. And you know, because I've talked to a lot of scientists who've taken psychedelics. It's always a question whether they're willing to talk about it personally or not. And a lot of people don't want to because you know, it raises questions about credibility and all of that. Here you are talking about this. How do you think about that and given where you are in your career and you're extremely established and prominent, and how, yeah, how do you sort out those questions?
- I think, I kind of embodied a little bit the spirit of the natural philosophers of the 17th and 18th century, and even 19th century, Victorians too, that actually did experiments to themselves in order to kind of understand better the nature of reality. And I feel like that's exactly what I'm doing. You know, when I'm taking those substances, which is not very often, by the way, I'm actually trying to understand better how my mind works and how my body works with my mind. And so there is an experimental dimension to this.
- So these are kind of tools just like, you know, the early astronomers needed telescopes to see the cosmos. This is a tool to investigate the mind.
- Yeah, and I mean, just think Isaac Newton believed that the eye had a hole in the middle, you know, which is iris, right? And then he goes and he puts a needle through his eye to show that there is a hole there. So that's experimentation. And many of the others, you know, Robert Boyle and others ingested substances, you know, in order to understand the nature of reality and who they were, and if there are other hidden dimensions. And so I think I feel very much that I'm not the first one doing this, many others do this, but because of the rigor of the academic world, you know, people sort of hide those things. And I don't see why you should hide these things because humanity have been doing these things for thousands of years, right? And we should just honor these traditions and see where they take you.
- Is this though, because you are at a particular point in your career where, you know, you don't need to prove yourself anymore. Would you have been saying this if we had done this interview 10 years ago?
- Yeah, that's a great question. I think that helps a lot, yeah. You know, the fact that I am where I am right now, professionally, I don't have to prove anything to anyone, and I can just be myself and hopefully inspire others to be a little more courageous. You know, that's another way of saying there's nothing to hide here. You know, it's not like you're doing something...
- Except for, you know, I mean, a lot of these experiences, I mean, they're not legal in a lot of places.
- Yeah, but then you go to Oregon, and you go to Vancouver, and they're legal, or Boulder. So it really depends where you are in the world and which shows already, you know, that things are changing, right? And I hope for Karis and her patients and lots of people suffering in the world, then they'll change faster than they are right now.
- Yeah, and Kari, what about you? I mean, do you feel like you have to be cautious about what you say publicly about your experiences or what you do?
- I think my field is a little more forgiving, because we see the transformational potential. I mean, we desperately need for the sake of humanity, for the sake of the sustainability, the preservation of our planet. We need tools that help us reconnect. Can I just say one last thing that we didn't touch on...
- Sure.
- ...that I think is potentially valuable and fascinating to people? The potential that these medicines have for pushing the limits of interconnectivity in couples, you know, because we've been together for almost 30 years now, and I would say that after the last three or four years, we are closer than ever.
- That's true.
- And it's in some ways, I mean, we've been through a lot in the last three years. A lot of transformation, a lot of co-creation. But a lot of it are these shared experiences where we're choosing to alter our states of consciousness, and our brains, and our beings to be in deeper and deeper communion with each other. And I think that there's something really sacred and beautiful about that, that may not have happened between us without these psychedelic medicines.
- Yeah, the hearts beat in synchrony.
- Yeah, yeah.
- And maybe they were, but we're feeling it so powerfully, right? And taking hours and hours just to be with that experience, being able to orchestrate moments where the boundaries come down and the defenses come down, and direct experiences of relationality. I think there's something really precious in that. So I think the time is ripe for us using all the tools at our disposal.
- Thank you, thank you both of you. This has been wonderful. I wanna thank Felix too, your dog who's been sitting very patiently, maybe slightly less patiently now, as you know, anyway.
- If Felix could talk, he would tell you that some of his favorite moments in life have been when we do MDMA together as a couple. And he's actually usually not allowed on our bed. But just to leave everyone with the image of Felix, a very sweet dog, kind of cradled in between both of our arms. And I actually took a selfie of the three of us once, and he looks more high than both of us.
- I'm sure he knows something is going on there.
- Oh my gosh, he totally does, and he's a fan.
- Yeah, yeah, thank you. This has been great.
- Thank you.
- You're welcome. That's Marcelo and Kari Gleiser. Marcelo is a theoretical physicist, and Kari is a clinical psychologist. You'll find more interviews on the science and philosophy of psychedelics on our website at ttbook.org/luminous. And I hope you're subscribing to the podcast feed where you'll meet a lot of amazing people, including Chris Timmerman, a neuroscientist who studies how psychedelics can change fundamental belief systems. Erik Davis talking about the history of LSD and the psychedelic underground. And Spring Washam, who's both a Buddhist teacher and a healer who works with plant medicines. "To The Best Of Our Knowledge," is produced in Madison, Wisconsin. Joe Harkey is our technical director. Sarah Hopeful did the sound design for this episode. And Angelo Bautista is our digital producer. I'm Steve Paulson. Be well, and join us again next time.
