In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast, host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) has a conversation with Bill Richards.
Bill Richards, PhD, is a pioneering clinical psychologist and researcher in the field of psychedelic-assisted therapy. Known for his work with psilocybin and LSD since the 1960s, he contributed to groundbreaking studies at Johns Hopkins University and authored the influential book Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences.
We touch upon topics of:
- How Bill began psychedelic research in Germany in the 1960s (01:18–03:39)
- The psychedelic research scene in the U.S. from the 60s to 70s and its shutdown (04:31–07:52)
- The revival of psychedelic research at Johns Hopkins (08:13–08:32)
- The potential of psychedelics to evolve human consciousness (09:30–11:25)
- The role of mystical experiences in healing and behavioral change (13:02–16:43)
- Spiritual language and intuitive knowledge (17:37–20:56)
- Psychedelics and reducing fear of death (22:26–27:18)
- Personal beliefs on life after death and consciousness (27:54–30:56)
- Future of psychedelics in medicine, religion, and education (34:31–36:28)
- Educational value of mystical experiences (39:42–44:41)
- Psychedelics as catalysts and keys, not the source of the experience (46:21–48:36)
- Best non-psychedelic practices for accessing transcendence (50:21–54:44)
If you would like to attend one of our Ayahuasca retreats go to http://www.lawayra.com
Find more about Bill Richards by reading his book Sacred Knowledge, available in 10 languages including Conocimiento Sagrado in Spanish.
Transcript
Sam Believ: You’re listening to ayahuasca podcast.com.
Bill Richards: Psychedelics have been around for at least 9,000 years, and right now they’re emerging in our western world, both North and South America and Europe. I think we know from our own experiences and our research results. That if these substance are used wisely and competently, they have incredible benefit to give mankind, if you will.
You could see it as an evolution of human consciousness, a waking up spiritually and a new attunement to what unites us as a as humanity. The values of love and truth and wisdom that we encounter in many of the alternative states of consciousness.
Sam Believ: Hi guys, and welcome to Ayahuasca podcast. As always, we do the whole stand, believe. Today I’m having a conversation with Bill Richards. Bill Richards PhD is a clinical psychologist and researcher known for his pioneering work in psychedelic assisted therapy. He has been a key figure in studying the therapeutic potential of substances like psilocybin and LSD for treating conditions such as depression, anxiety, and end of life distress.
He played a crucial role in psilocybin research at John Hopkins University. He contributed to the studies on the effects of psychedelics of terminally ill un terminally ill patients. He’s the author of Sacred Knowledge, psychedelics and Religious Experiences, and he’s one of the original people. So he started doing his psychedelic research in sixties, so it’s truly one of the pioneers.
In this episode, we talk about the famous mystical experiences through psychedelics, study co-authored by Bill. Psychedelic research in sixties and seventies. Psychedelics were terminally ill. Role of psychedelics in education. What happens after death, how psychedelics can change the world. First psychedelic renaissance versus the second one and so much more.
Enjoy this episode. This episode is sponsored by Laira Ayahuasca Retreat. At Laira, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity. Ra, connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you. Bill, pleasure to have you on the show. Oh,
Bill Richards: thanks Sam. It’s an honor to be here. I admire all that you’ve been doing.
Sam Believ: Thank you, bill. It’s been a long time ago. I can imagine. Sixties, it was long before I was even born. So tell us, back then, when you were still young, what brought you to work with psychedelics?
Bill Richards: I’ll try to give you the condensed version. Let’s see. I was once 23 years old and I was studying at the Yale Divinity School at that time.
And I went to the University of Geren in Germany. For the second of the three years of the program. And though I went there officially to study theology, I discovered the use of psychedelics in the school of medicine and bumped into it quite innocently and accidentally really. They were studying some new drug in the.
Clinic around the corner from my dormitory, and I was supposed to evoke memories from early childhood. And two of my new friends had participated in that research one regressed to early childhood and experienced himself in his father’s lap. And his father had been killed in World War ii.
That was incredibly me for him, meaningful for him. And the other head reported seeing what he called hallucinations of s stel, a men marching in the streets and so on. And I thought, gee, I’ve never seen a real hallucination. That sounds interesting. But at that time I hadn’t even heard the word psychedelic.
I had no idea what psilocybin might be. And I volunteered they led me to a little basement room gave me an injection of what I later learned was psilocybin, a short acting form, CZ 74 it was called. And, in some sense, my life has never been the same. I, this very profound transcendental form of awareness opened up and I have been in awe and been integrating it ever since.
And now it’s about 60 years since then. Yeah.
Sam Believ: That’s a great story. So it sounds like with many psychedelics found you and yanked you out of whatever lifestyle you’re going to have and put you on this path. Similar happened to me and many of our guests you’re different from most of my guests because.
For you. It’s not the first psychedelic renaissance. You lived the original one in the sixties. Could you tell us about, how was it back then and versus how it is now? Yeah, regarding the reemergence of the research and the interests.
Bill Richards: Gladly from 19 67 to 1977.
I pursued psychedelic research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, spring Grove Hospital here in Baltimore. Working with L-S-D-D-P-T, a little bit of psilocybin MDA different substances. With cancer patients confronting their deaths with treatment of addictions, with alcoholism, especially in narcotic addiction with just people inpatient struggling with severe depression and personality disorders, and with the training of healthy, normal people both in religion and in.
Psychotherapy and it was an exciting frontier. It still is, of course, but there was the feeling back then that we were out in the crest of a new wave of transforming mental health care. And it was so promising that the state of Maryland built this beautiful four story research center, with biochemical labs and animal research and psychedelic treatment suites and sensory isolation chambers auditorium, library, everything you could wish for.
That was in 1999. And in in 2000, our president of the United States allegedly said that Timothy Leary was the most dangerous man in America. And there was an editorial in the local newspaper asking why we were giving, using state payers taxpayers money to give people LSD. And there were these soap operas.
Oh, my child took LSD. You’ll never be the same. His chromosomes must be damaged and so on. Just very irrational. Crazy. Unscientific attitudes. But they were enough to essentially stop the research. And our research was the last place in the United States where psychedelics were still being studied.
So I have this dubious distinction of being the last to leave the sinking ship in 1977. Footnote here. And my 3-year-old son helped me empty out my office, who is now a very competent leading psychedelic researcher 50 years old now. I don’t know how that ever happened.
Sam Believ: That’s really exciting.
So you’re a lineage of psychedelic researchers. There’s a lineage of shamans and you have a lineage of psychedelic researchers.
Bill Richards: There is. In 1999, it came alive again at Johns Hopkins with, when Roland Griffiths and I were able to collaborate, and it’s thriving there. Right now, there’s a staff of over 80 people.
Sam Believ: This is very exciting. And as I was telling you before we started recording that the work we do now, for example, with retreats and is only possible because it was popularized in its, second, or let’s say some people say third wave of psychedelic renaissance. So I appreciate the work you did and the sacrifice, and I’m sorry that, they took away, 40 to 50 productive years of your research for no reason.
I think it’s I think it’s a crime against humanity this whole, prohibition thing. Obviously you’re as excited about psychedelics as I am, probably much more. And I think you believe that it has this potential to, to change the world, and change the humanity. So what have you found through your long life and the research to make you believe that?
Bill Richards: In a footnote here, that. Psychedelics have been around for at least 9,000 years and they’ve emerged and been repressed over and over in different societies. And right now they’re emerging in our western world, both north and South America and Europe, I think and Australia certainly.
And Canada. It’s a very hopeful time, and we know from our own experiences and our research results that if these substance are used wisely and competently they have incredible benefit to give. Mankind, if you will, without being grandiose here. You could see it as an evolution of human consciousness, a waking up spiritually and a new attunement to what unites us as a as humanity.
The values of. Love and truth and wisdom that we encounter in many of the alternative states of consciousness facilitated with psychedelics are there are more than just great surges of wonderful emotion. There is really intuitive knowledge to be found there that can be beneficial for mankind as a whole.
So my hope is we can stay grounded. We can talk languages that don’t frighten those who are wary of it, who don’t understand why we think it’s so important. I always like to stress that the psychedelics. As I see them are incredibly valuable tools in discovering other dimensions of human consciousness.
They’re not the only ones. Those states of consciousness open up and meditative to techniques and natural childbirth and sensory isolation and overflow overload, et cetera, et cetera. But the psychedelics. Provide a potency, a validity, a reliability a and I would say a safety when they’re used intelligently for most people.
And, let’s learn to use them wisely. And I admire what you are doing in Columbia in responsibly structured retreats for people who want to legally explore their own minds. Why not?
Sam Believ: Thank you for that. Thank you for. For your compliments, they mean a lot. One of the things that, that you talk about is not just psychedelics for healing potential, but also you conducted a study about mystical experience.
It’s a very famous study. You hear it quoted a lot in different podcasts in different places. One of the sort of reemerging ones were basically, it’s all, you can almost say this current psychedelic renaissance almost started from that study about mystical experiences. So can you tell us about that study and what you found?
And just for people that don’t know, which I think are very few.
Bill Richards: Yeah. There have been several studies AD Hopkins. Back in the days of Spring Grove and all kinds of different sites, really California and New York and Australia now, and Canada. But all these studies indicate that the wise use of psychedelics certainly give us access to different strata of experiencing.
Mild sensory changes getting into psychodynamic issues of traumas in childhood symbolic, archetypal, visionary realms, and then the unit of mystical state. It’s very hard to put into language ’cause in a sense you weren’t even there anymore, and yet you discover the memory of it in your mind. And one thing we’ve observed and we’ve documented with psychological instruments is that when the transcendental, the deep mystical experiences occur in the lives of people, there are often dramatically positive behavior changes. Lessening of depression and anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms and the like.
So the mystical experience, which I’d be happy to outline, I think, the ma basic characteristics of it. But when that state of consciousness happens. It provides what William James in his varieties of religious experience called fruits for the fruits for life. Okay. It’s more than just a feeling great, it’s really entails new knowledge, not only about yourself, but about the nature of other people and of the universe.
You become a more centered. Mature, perhaps compassionate human being. And those insights, as I know you, stress, do have to be integrated and applied, which is a task of spiritual and psychological development for a lifetime perhaps. But it certainly gives many people a major awakening and forward thrust in development?
Yeah.
Sam Believ: Yeah. It’s it’s hard to underestimate the importance of mystical experiences. I personally came to work with Ayahuasca myself which is my psychedelic of choice based on the location through looking to heal my depression. And later on I. I inevitably was interested in the more mystical side of things and a more spiritual aspect of it.
And obviously now I consider myself a spiritual person. Like what are your thoughts on spiritual side of healing with psychedelics and sort should we go towards it or, should, what? What?
Bill Richards: I think it’s a la it’s a matter of language often. Some people are spooked by the word spiritual, and they’d rather use other languages.
And that’s okay. If you don’t like the word God, you can use the ground of being or. The purpose of properties of protoplasm, whatever you like. But there is something that people discover in these alternative states that’s very. And it happens in good ag, atheist and agnostics. Sometimes I think more easily than in people with very detailed orthodox and religious heritages.
But it’s there. And it makes sense of te deShar who says, come on, wake up folks. We really are spiritual beings having physical or human experiences right now. This isn’t just a matter of adherence to a creed of some kind. It’s an awakening. To the nature, the essence of really being a human being and these spiritual states, or whatever you wanna call them, are simply part of the way we discover ourselves in the world.
To use Martin Heider’s language, we. Whether we like it or not, we do have spiritual roots, spiritual access. And what does that mean? It means access to intuitive knowledge to an energy that we call love to awareness of our interconnectedness with one another within discreet unity.
What the Hindus called the bele net of Indra. And with the psychedelics, these things change from this interesting ideas to experienced realities that you participate in, and that’s experiential learning and it’s incredibly convincing and incredibly powerful and, when the rational mind wakes up and reflects on it and tries to figure out what to do with that knowledge it can go through a lot of different ideas and processes, but it’s not ultimately a rational choice.
I don’t think it’s an intuitive choice to trust those insights. It’s very much like, how do I know that I love my wife or my kids? How do I know that I wanna fight for more justice in the world? It there’s something that’s intuitive there as well as rational in an intellectual framework.
Sam Believ: Yeah, that’s a beautiful way to explain it. I can’t help but notice that, based on my calculation, you said you were 23 and then 60 years of fast. So you should be around 83, 84. Now I’m about to turn 85. 85 exactly when, but I, when is your birthday? That’s not slowing me down. Yeah but obviously 85 is quite.
Quite a big number and but you sound very eloquent, more than many young people that I’ve met, and so I’m amazed by that. Do you contribute any of any of your mental abilities in such a late age to work with psychedelics? Do you believe in their potential to.
Help with neurodegenerative diseases, for example,
Bill Richards: who know, I never applied that to myself. I have colleagues who are giving psychedelics to older adults, seeing if it can stimulate the growth of new neurons or activate neurons that have been dormant or who knows how we understand that.
But for help. To help people avoid ality and live more fully not only more quantity of life, but more quality of life. That’s a frontier of science and I I wish it well. I’ve done a lot of work with cancer patients. Beginning way back in 1967 and being with people who are in close proximity of death, I’ve discovered that when they have these mystical types of experience, or even when they do significant psychodynamic work they live more fully.
And those who have mystical experiences or since the ego can’t have a mystical experience sometimes I think we should say when you’re had by a mystical experience, if comes to you. There word, theological word is grace, but you, when it happens and you discover it’s in your memory. People often claim loss of a fear of death, which is pretty incredible ’cause we have a very death fearing culture. In our, in the United States, we often put corpses in expensive walnut. Caskets and shine red lights on their faces to make them look lifelike. We we’re coming to terms with sex better than we used to, but we’re still pretty phobic about death.
And so when people claim to have lost a fear of death we listen. And what’s so interesting to me in the. So hundreds of terminally ill people. Not to mention, those of us who aren’t terminally ill, who might well be mortal too they don’t get suicidal. They’ve lost their fear of death. But what happens, what we observe is that the present moment opens up and they live more fully.
Here and now. And I just was with a group yesterday a follow-up group of cancer patients from the Aqua Cancer Center in Rockville, where we give psilocybin to terminally ill people and. They’re engaged in life. They’re supporting one another. They’re off or returning from international travel.
They’re not lying in their beds with the drapes closed, feeling sorry for themselves, waiting for the next dose of pain medication, and, sometimes I wonder if besides increased quality of life, they’re really having increased quantity of life. That’s a research question that we can explore in time.
But it makes sense that when people are engaged in life and have meaningful interpersonal relationships, that their immune systems would work more effectively. And they they’re curious about death. Like it’ll be an interesting experience when I get there, but they’re not afraid of it, and in a sense they’re modeling for their families and friends how to live fully in the face of approaching death. That’s relevant of course, to every human being, not just to cancer patients.
Sam Believ: Yeah. It’s that’s one thing that
Bill Richards: like it or not,
Sam Believ: yeah. It’s one thing we can’t avoid and there’s a lot of sort of conversation about that.
Maybe if we were not under constant threat of de mice, maybe we would, not enjoy life that much. What about yourself? What is your personal level of fear when it comes to dying? And then what do you think happens after we die?
Bill Richards: I’m a strong believer in letting everyone put their own words on that.
There are many different belief systems about what. Life after death may be like if there indeed is such a thing. And I don’t think there’s any reason that there has to be a one size fits all. Maybe there are many different varieties of mental conscious awareness after death.
About one of the core insights in mystical states is this convincing, intuitive insight, really, that makes people claim that consciousness is indestructible, that this is an state of consciousness outside of time and space and substance. And it could be one big delusion, but it’s mighty convincing when you experience it because it feels more real, more fundamental than the state of consciousness we’re in right now.
Okay. And I think trying to understand this. We have to look to quantum physics. Maybe they’re on the threshold of dealing with how matter can work independent of time and space, and the final substrates of the natures of energy. We just. We’re terribly ignorant about how to talk about the essence of human consciousness.
There’s a conference coming up in Barcelona where all these physicists are all getting together and brainstorming and trying to find words, but it’s, it’s a real frontier personally. Not to avoid your question I certainly I don’t think I have any fear of death. I want to live as long as I can.
I like it here. This lifetime is fascinating and I’ve got lots of people I care about and I appreciate. Music and nature and friendships and but I don’t live with a dread of deaths. And for those of you whom listening, who may have read my book sacred Knowledge or Colonel Sto, my, I went through the death of my first wife who died of cancer at age 50, and she had a very good death premature though it was our sons were 11 and 13 at the time. It was not an easy experience, but we did it together in a very meaningful way. And we dove through the grief work. You still have to do grief work no matter how spiritual your outlook on the world may be.
But I’ve been with many terminally ill people and that can be a very meaningful stage of life really. ’cause you really, focus on what matters and what doesn’t matter. Yeah.
Sam Believ: It’s it’s good to hear from you and and the sort of consciousness conversation is fascinating as well because the deeper science goes, the more it starts to look like spirituality, right? It’s,
Bill Richards: these transcendental experiences, especially the unit of consciousness often are preceded by what we call ego death.
The death of the everyday personality and followed by the rebirth of. Personality, death and Rebirth. Tibetan Book of the Dead, whatever. All the mystical strains and all the world religions have words to point to this transcendental state of awareness beyond what is often experienced is death.
You could call it melting or trench. Dissolving into transcendence or awakening. But that death is a good word. Yeah. Because you’re letting go of the ordinary, everyday self the Bill Richards, if you will, or the Sam and awakening to something that feels more fundamental. That always has been and always will be in religious language.
We call it eternity in mathematical language. We call it infinity, but it doesn’t look like it’s going away.
Sam Believ: Let’s talk about future a little bit. What do you think based on your knowledge and your observations what do you think is the. Future of psychedelic therapy and just psychedelics in, in, in the Western society.
Bill Richards: In my book I talk about implications for medicine, for education, and for religion.
And they’re all important and they’re all unfolding in developing in different ways in different countries. The wise use of psychedelics appears to be incredibly effective in the psychotherapeutic world of treating depression and addictions and so on. But it’s much more than a new medication.
It’s also an awakening, in terms of the knowledge of who we are, what we are, what we’re capable of, and it has profound implications for religion of all the great faiths of the world. And that awareness is just starting to wake up. It’s been, the psychedelic research has been the focus in medicine.
But not so much in religion until just recently. And there are if there are religious professionals interested, there are websites like Liga, L-I-G-A-R e.org or for people of Jewish Heritage Chef of flow.org and so on, where, more and more religious scholars are now looking at the psychedelic frontier and the implications for what in religion is called revelation.
So it’s keep tuned.
Sam Believ: Speaking about religion and revelation, can you maybe recall? A and a psychedelic experience, something that, you know what is your favorite psychedelic story to tell from your own experiences?
Bill Richards: The favorite stories as I think, Sam can’t be put into words.
Okay. That’s the
Sam Believ: difficulty of having a podcast about it, but we’re trying our best.
Bill Richards: That’s right. We’re trying to put stuff into words here, but one mark of mystical consciousness is, its ineffability. And also the paradoxicality, when you try to put it into words, when you try to express it in words, it feels like you’re contradicting yourself.
I died, but I’ve never been so alive. It was one, but it contained everything that was, it was the void that contains all reality. It was personal, but it was non-personal and so on. It sounds like you’re just contradicting yourself, but that’s the limits of our conceptual abilities.
That’s the limits of human language right now, and. I often feel that the essence of the psychedelic frontier can often be perhaps expressed best in music and in art, and poetry and dance as opposed to scholarly articles in the Journal of Psychopharmacology. Okay. We push language in the rational mind as far as we can, and there’s frontiers.
We’re creating new words and new concepts. I studied with a psychologist, Abraham Maslow. Who never took psychedelics, but he had spontaneous transcendental experiences that he labeled peak, PEAK experiences and wrote about the further reaches of human na nature, the farther reaches of human nature and so on.
Self-actualization. Maslow wrote a book, the Psychology of Science in 1966 where he structured the spiritual as the frontiers of science. It’s not anti-scientific, but it’s. It’s what we’re bumping into in discovering these transcendental states of awareness within us. Okay.
Sam Believ: Thank you. What is so you also mentioned the effect of psychedelics on medical field, on religion, but you also mentioned education. What do you think is gonna happen in, in that.
Bill Richards: Rome. Yeah I’m a strong believer in experiential learning. It’s not just intellectual, rational, cognitive thought.
That’s great as far as it goes, but some things we learn. By experience and intuition. And I think intuition is more than just a woman’s hunch. It’s also a real way of discovering knowledge and it merits more respect than we tend to give it when radically different people report the same intuitive knowledge.
There’s a reliability there, and I think we have every reason to respect it and take it seriously. For example when I studied philosophy, I was taught that Paul Tillek, the Protestant theologian. Was influenced by his doctoral research in shelling a German philosopher, and that shelling was influenced by Flo.
And Plato. Okay. As if the red, those philosophical treatises in libraries and thought, yeah, I like that idea. Never did someone suggest that plots, shelling and perhaps pulic in the depth of their own human consciousness, also encountered the same transcendental realm realms that they’re really writing out of their own personal experience.
Not from thoughts they had while reading treatises in libraries. Okay. When I came back from Germany, I went to the head of psychology of religion at Yale and shared a description of one of the most profound psychedelic experiences I had. The response of that profession was to give me an article full of statistics to critique to prove I could still think rationally and I passed that test but he was threatened, he wasn’t interested in religious experience.
Okay. I then took that same description to my professor of Hinduism. Novin Hein, who just died a few years ago at 103, a wonderful Indian man and Novin read the same description and he paused me, looked me in the eye, and he said, bill, now you know.
No. Scholars of the Divine comedy could experience what Dante experienced. Would that be worth it if scholars of Platonism in philosophy could experience what Plato experienced? Would that be valid learning? Okay. That’s what I mean by educational learning experience. And why shouldn’t the universities, why shouldn’t theological schools, for example, have weekend seminars with credit for young theologians who would like to experience visionary and mystical states of awareness?
To understand where the religious beliefs come from, to know what Isaiah might have experienced in the temple. Why not
Sam Believ: for me personally, that makes all the sense in the world that. I mostly talk about ayahuasca, not psychedelics in general, but I am, I’m a big fan of psychedelics as well, most of them.
And I like to say, you give me a problem and I can tell you how to fix it with Ayahuasca. And education is one of them. I definitely personally have noticed that sometimes I, there’s a problem and I need to look for a solution. And for some reason I have. Spontaneously the best a answer possible immediately.
And it’s, it seems like the work with psychedelics for me made me more educated or at least more curious about stuff. So I definitely believe in in, in getting smarter through psychedelics and that, that’s probably the ultimate realm of education is, whatever, people that create computers that we use now to talk on the opposite side of the globe.
They were using psychedelics to get the ideas to how to fix mathematical problems. And I think if we use psychedelics for healing, for spirituality, and also for learning our society would be saner. Happier and so smarter.
Bill Richards: Yes, and it’s not just psychedelics, it’s knowledge of these transcendental states.
Like Abraham Maslow in his studies of self actualizing people interviewed people like Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt, who allegedly had spontaneous, mystical experiences, that were very. Meaningful and valuable, informative for them. In this I view psychedelics. I have great respect for ayahuasca.
It’s a, definitely a sacred drew, no question about it. But it’s essentially di dimethyl tryptamine and. In my experience with LSD and DPT and psilocybin and so on, I’ve come to view these different molecules, if you will, as different skeleton keys or universal keys that give access to these alternative states.
I think the experiences are. Beth understood is not being in the molecule of the drug, but it’s in the human mind. And I think if you took a sample of 20 people who had received different doses of LSD and DPT and DMT and. Psilocybin and perhaps mescal. I think you would find the same strata of experiencing the same varieties of intrapsychic phenomena being discovered in reported, and it’s, those worlds are incredibly vast and diverse and wonderful.
For some people quite terrifying. But, and incredibly beautiful at times. But I don’t think the experiences are in the drug, if you will, but they’re in us.
Sam Believ: Yeah, I agree with that. I definitely agree that psychedelics are catalysts or keys as you say, or sometimes I like to say they’re like an antenna that helps you.
Put your signal out better and receive better as well. So both receiver and and repeater, whatever types of antenna. But I think I think where psychedelics come useful is the fact that for those spontaneous mystical experiences like experience by Ma Maslow or Einstein, I think the person needs to be very sensitive and very like.
Connected to themselves in order to even feel that. And then the way state, the state in which we are now as a society, we’re probably the most disconnected from those natural states as ever before. So I think what psychedelics can do is be this catalyst and this very strong sort of starter to start that.
Motor going for them, for people to pursue other modalities. And that brings me to my next question to you. What are the best nons psychedelic practices that you have found and experienced and observed to take people to those states and realizations?
Bill Richards: Whatever works for you there.
There’s a plethora of meditation techniques, but basically being centered being open observing your mind for many people being immersed in nature. Is an incredibly powerful trigger of these states sensing the life around you. The beauty of the mystery, of the structure of the flower or the mountain.
David Steinle Ross, the Jesuit theologian, who’s still alive with us in his late nineties talks about just feeling gratitude. He says, gratitude is the essence of the spiritual life. And boy, if you can tune into that you’re close to what really matters, and I also want to acknowledge the value of psychedelics in stimulating, awakening, creativity, people like Steve Jobs and leaders in genetics.
Francis Crick and so on have attributed their creative brilliance really to their psychedelic use. And why should our societies be phobic of them? Like we need to learn to use them wisely and responsibly. Anyone who just throws the drug in their mouth to see what will happen, I think is stupid.
My, my metaphor for that is jumping on a pair of skis and heading downhill without any instruction of how to steer or how to balance, just silly. It’s a waste of good ayahuasca. Okay? But if you have some preparation, you’re in a grounded relationship where you can choose to trust or to entrust yourself to your own consciousness.
Whether what emerges is pleasant or unpleasant, you know it’s gonna be a. Mother Ayahuasca has a lesson for you. It might be a painful lesson, but it’s a good lesson. Trust it, receive it, participate in and turn off the rational mind while the experience is happening. Don’t say, stop the world. I have to figure out what’s going on here, collect experiences, and then put words on them at the end of the day.
If there’s something frightening, go straight towards it as fast as you can. If there’s a boogieman, a monster, a dragon, a scary serpent, it’s hello, what are you? What are you doing in my mind? What can I learn from you? You go towards it. You don’t run away from it unless you want a seminar in panic and paranoia.
That’s silly. It’s your own mind trying to teach you something. No. If it’s scary, you go towards it as fast as you can and you learn from it and you tumble through it. Maybe it’s unresolved grief or guilt, there’s nothing to the insight that people say after deep experiences is. Repetitively, there is nothing to fear, and that makes true inner peace possible.
Sam Believ: Thank you, bill. Those are great recommendations. You mentioned that, gratitude being one of those tools for transcendental experiences and just let’s say enlightenment. So I wanna end this episode. On the note of gratitude. So once again, thank you for the work you’ve done, the studies of the people you helped, the books you’ve written, and I appreciate your generation and the sacrifice you had to endure and lack of appreciation for your work for long time.
So thank you so much and thank you for coming on.
Bill Richards: Thank you for what you’re doing, Sam, and clearly if you’re. Anywhere near where I am contact me and we’ll meet in person. Actually I’m speaking in Latvia coming up. I know you’re not there anymore.
Sam Believ: That’s too bad. I haven’t been there in more than six years, but yeah.
Say say hi to everyone. Say that there are a lot of events also doing doing psychedelic work.
Bill Richards: Yep. Okay. All good wishes to you and to the those who listen to this podcast.
Sam Believ: Thank you. Bill. Where’s the best place for people to find you? A website or maybe a book you wanna recommend or,
Bill Richards: yeah.
I would recommend my own book sacred Knowledge. It’s out there in 10 translations right now in Spanish. It’s, here it is. People are welcome to email me, but I my email box does get overflow and I can’t guarantee to respond to all of them but it’s an incredible frontier that we’re on together here.
Sam Believ: It says that yeah, I don’t think you have a website, but people can read your book. That’s that’s a good start.
So check out Bill’s book, guys. And thank you for listening once again with you, your host, and believe, and I will see you in the next episode. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you’d like to support us and psychedelic Renaissance at large. Please follow us and leave us a like wherever it is you’re listening.
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Laira connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you.