In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) has a conversation with Alexander Beiner. Alexander is an author, cultural commentator, co-founder of Rebel Wisdom, Executive Director of Breaking Convention, and author of The Bigger Picture. His work explores psychedelics, sensemaking, culture, and how transformative experiences and cognitive science can help us navigate the social and political challenges of the modern world.

We touch upon topics of

00:00–02:42 Alexander’s early psychedelic experiences, Psychonautica, and the online psychonaut forums before the current renaissance

02:42–07:10 The current psychedelic renaissance vs the previous one, psychedelic capitalism, and the risk of psychedelics being captured by late-stage capitalism

07:10–12:07 Can psychedelics still transform society if they go mainstream? The “psychedelic Walmart” question and the importance of containers

12:07–17:20 The argument from The Bigger Picture: psychedelics teach us a way of being, not just new ideas

17:20–19:23 Pain, truth, and the transformative power of going directly into what hurts

19:23–23:02 Culture as “people like us do things like this” and why changing systems is harder than changing individuals

23:02–24:17 Why society feels sick, and whether psychedelics can help us change fast enough

24:17–28:04 AI, abundance, Star Trek, space exploration, and why exploration may be humanity’s next frontier

28:04–33:45 The Imperial College DMT study, intravenous DMT, hyperspace, entity encounters, and the sense of entering a real ecosystem

33:45–36:17 Are DMT entities “real”? Consciousness, idealism, and synchronicities

36:17–39:26 Synchronicity, writing, manifestation, and how inner state affects what shows up in life

39:26–42:45 Responsibility, control, grief, and balancing personal agency with surrender to larger systems

42:45–46:07 Consciousness, truth, and how psychedelics shift Alexander’s worldview

46:07–49:32 Healing vs purpose, what we are healing for, and how to avoid spiritual bypassing

49:32–50:26 Where to find Alexander, his book, and his current work through Kainos

If you would like to attend one of our Ayahuasca retreats go to http://www.lawayra.com

Find more about Alexander Beiner through his book The Bigger Picture, his platform Kainos on Substack, and on Instagram under Alexander Beiner.

Transcript

Psychedelics vs Capitalism: Can Ayahuasca Really Change Society?

 

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Alexander Beiner: One of the things that psychedelics teach is that if you go into pain and really own it and be with it, it will transform and you will move through. If you avoid pain, you will be stuck. If we don’t wanna spiritually bypass, go into the pain and the embarrassment and the feeling small and the things that the spiritual bypassing is designed to get you, trying to get you away from.

Some entities don’t give a shit that I’m here. Some of them are really interested in me. Some of them I can’t trust, some of them I can trust. It’s like being in a jungle, right? If you’re stuck, just look for truth with a capital T. What is true, and our deepest truth is what is real for me in this moment.

To make something digestible to the existing system, you have to take the magic out of it, and you have to take the challenge out of it and the darkness out of it. The biggest hope we have with psychedelics is that they teach us how to be human beings rather than teach us what to think or what to do.

Psychedelics can be captured by our existing system, which you could call late stage capitalism. It’s a system and a worldview that sees quantity as more important than quality. We could live on heaven on Earth. We could do everything totally differently if we were different.

Sam Believ: You’re listening to ayahuasca podcast.com.

Hi, guys, and welcome to Ayahuasca Podcast. As always, with you, the host, Sam Beliaf. Today I’m having a conversation with Alexander Beiner. Alexander is an author, cultural commentator, and a leading voice in the psychedelic renaissance. He’s the author of “The Bigger Picture,” a co-founder of the influential media platform Rebel Wisdom, and an executive director of Breaking Convention.

His work focuses on cultural sense-making, exploring how transformative experiences and cognitive science can help us navigate the complex social and political challenges of the modern world. This episode is sponsored by LaWayra Ayahuasca Retreat. At LaWayra, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity.

LaWayra, connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you. Alex, welcome to the show.

Alexander Beiner: Thank you, Sam. Yeah, good to be here.

Sam Believ: Alex let’s start with your story. How did you get into this line of work?

Alexander Beiner: Yeah. I I think like a lot of people, I got into it really from having a very transformative psychedelic experience.

Actually, I would say my, my first experience, yeah, it was certainly transformative, but it really felt like a kind of this kind of connection and homecoming and a feeling of “Oh, wow, this is very familiar and very new at the same time.” I think there’s something really amazing about psychedelic experiences that they can feel like I’ve been here before somehow, but also this is totally alien and new and amazing.

So I had an experience, and then I became… It was actually a, a friend of mine this is in about 2007.

No, ear- earlier, so like 2006 maybe. Friend of mine who went by the handle Max Freakout, and he had a podcast, a early psychedelic podcast called Psychonautica, and this was actually like pre-social media. It’s right when Facebook began, right? So we were all on a forum, a internet forum called The Grow Report, and we used to just talk about psychedelics and philosophy.

This was also like actually pre really the psychedelic renaissance, which you could say started with Rick Strassman’s DMT book and DMT research and then really ramped up with a, a Johns Hopkins study in 2006. And so I was very influenced by that whole experience. I started my own podcast about visionary art.

And then, it was in this whole online community, where we never saw each other’s faces, and it was just words on a screen, but this real connection. And, yeah, I’m to this day still friends with some of those people. That was kinda my way in, was really through the almost like the thinking around it as well as the deep experiences that I had.

Sam Believ: So then you started very early, like pre-current renaissance. That’s very cool. And I’ve been on a couple forums myself back in the day. I think forums is, that’s what internet allowed us to do, just find very niche, nerdy topics and people, they get together and they go deep.

It’s lovely. So-

Alexander Beiner: Yeah …

Sam Believ: you mentioned the current psychedelic renaissance that started with Rick Strassman and then that study on the psy- mystical experience and the- … psilocybin mushrooms, and now it’s kind of full force again. Obviously it’s not the first renaissance. There was one with Tim Leary.

What do you think about how this renaissance is going, comparing it to the previous ones?

Alexander Beiner: Yeah. It’s a good question. I go in waves, honestly. Like right now I’m in kind of a down space in some ways, and the reason is because I’ve, not just me, but others as well have been making the argument that psychedelics can be captured by our existing system, which you could call late stage capitalism.

You could, you could… There’s many different ways we could frame it, but let’s say a system where the only thing that really matters is progress, growth, and creating value, right? The things that are measurable are more real than things that are experienced. So it’s a system and a worldview that sees quantity as more important than quality.

So like quality is your experience right now of listening to this, your experience of being alive. I would argue that’s the only thing you can say is real, and that’s when we take a psychedelic, we often really deeply connect to that experience in new ways, but our system doesn’t value that as much as it values what can be measured.

I, I did a documentary last year called Leviathan, where I really explored how this shows up in the modern world and in, in our systems and what we can do about it. But in- 2020 when a lot of investments started coming into the psychedelic world, I did a series of films about psychedelic capitalism, and there were a bunch of us who were really concerned about this, many of us.

And, one shout-out is to a short story that was published called “We Will Call It Pala.” Did you ever come across that? Did you see that? Really amazing kind of short story, but with beautiful kind of animation. And this is about… It was about 2020, maybe 2019, 2020, and it was a a, a kind of story of a young woman who has a deep psychedelic experience, then she gets into, pharma and medicine, and she’s like, “I wanna create a psychedelic retreat center.”

She creates the retreat center in some city in America, and then she gets investment. And then slowly what happens is that because of the forces of the market, she realizes “Oh, actually the retreat center over there is doing two days of integration instead of three, three weeks like I’m doing,” and then her investors are like, “Why don’t you do two days? You could do it online. You could do it with an AI tool. Why you have to have people? It’s so expensive.” So slowly everything gets chipped away and commoditized until eventually the dream is dead. And so i- it’s a lovely story really well done, and I think it really encapsulates how I’ve felt about the, the combination of capitalism and psychedelics.

And so it’s also complex ’cause psychedelics are trick- tricksters, and mysterious, and transformative, and deep teachers, and so they’re very powerful too. So it’s not black and white in my mind. And but I think we’re at a strange place right now where psychedelics have gone mainstream to some degree.

I wouldn’t say they’re like super mainstream. To those of us who are in the world, it feels like that, but I think when you talk to most people on the street about psychedelics, they’ve maybe heard about a study or they’ve seen something on TV, depending where you are, but it’s not that mainstream.

But it’s mainstream enough that you have Bryan Johnson is, like this longevity guy doing, live streaming his five gram mushroom trip. And, I have, the, the problem is to make something digestible to the existing system, you have to take the magic out of it, and you have to take the challenge out of it, and the darkness out of it.

And that’s for me, the big problem.

Sam Believ: Yeah. It’s it’s very interesting because, so I have one investor at my retreat who owns 10% of the business and, but he’s a friend of mine. He’s a silent investor. But I’ve had money offered to me prior and I have declined several times because I felt maybe there was not good synergy, so to speak.

But it’s like- … we do live in a capitalistic world, and like you do need to charge prices and pay the workers. And it does fro- from a retreat owner p- point of view, it is that very difficult balance where making money and business is this kinda like inherently a little bit greedy and oh, I need to like…

And a little manipulative state of mind. Like there’s almost- Yeah … there are other ways to do business consciously and you try your best, but still there’s like bargaining for prices and things like that. It’s just it’s an inevitability as opposed to the spiritual thing which happens to the medicine itself.

And i- in, in a way, as a, as the owner, I am the one that takes that painful part of managing the money so that the shaman can be like completely just clear. Like he just gets his money and he doesn’t need to worry about it, so kinda keeping it clean. But regarding like capitalism, obviously it’s not a perfect system, but it’s the only system that work.

And what I’m thinking is sometimes I’m in a ceremony and I’m… Obviously, I’ve been to this Ayahuasca world for years now, and I’ve had hundreds of ceremonies and like I do the podcast about, and I feel like I understand it pretty well, right? And then sometimes Ayahuasca’s like you think you understand me?”

“Do you really think and it just like kinda humbles me. So what I think is obviously it depends on what kind of psychedelic, but I think- I think you talk about as a Trojan horse, but maybe you talk about it from a different point of view. But if even through the capitalistic system, let’s say there’s like a Walmart of psychedelics and people just come and they get their experience, and let’s say it’s not optimal, don’t you think that eventually still somehow the psychedelics will prevail and they will seep through and convert people the way in the, into the positive till we reach that critical mass and maybe we can like build a new system, which like I have no idea how to look how it’s even gonna look like?

So yeah, it’s a pretty vague concept, but talk to

Alexander Beiner: me about that. No, it’s a really good question. I don’t know is the short answer. Like I, I have gone back and forth around that question many times in the last whatever, 20 odd years I’ve been in the field or more. And on the one hand there is something…

Okay, so there’s a, there’s like a spectrum we could talk about, right? So on the one hand you have the idea that psychedelics are totally like a blank slate, and that it’s really about set setting and dose completely, right? And then it’s like you could use psychedelics for warfare, you could use psychedelics for, maximizing your business.

You could use psychedelics for deep spiritual inquiry and deep, connection. Or on the other side of the spectrum, the psychedelics have a message that is specific. Ayahuasca in particular, in my experience, and psilocybin do, in, in a lot of ways. They have a spirit, they have a wisdom, they have a a way of teaching.

I think both are true at the same time. And when I was writing my book, “The Bigger Picture,” I asked, I think I interviewed, I dunno how many people I interviewed. Probably 30 people in the field. And then including just informal conversations and I asked every single one of them, “Where do you think the spectrum is?

Is it totally the psychedelics are influenced by what’s going on around or do they have some kind of internal message that they’re directing?” And everyone had a different answer, like every single person. There was no consistency. So I think it’s really one of the deep mysteries about psychedelics.

Now, I lean more towards, okay, let’s take your example of like a psychedelic Walmart, right? I lean more towards the idea that- experiences, the experience people might have in the Walmart can be very transformative and real. And in the moment, the medicine might tell them something that could really shift the system, right?

What it, the problem is what happens afterwards when they come out and they’re trying to interpret their experience. And imagine if it was a Walmart situation, the Walmart would be like, “Hey. Oh, really? Okay, the medicine told you need to give everything away for free? We think you should do another journey because we’re gonna make money for that, and we think you should maybe get a different message.”

It’s so that’s where the, there’s a conflict of interest that happens perhaps not in the experience, although that is also a thing. But in the container around it. That’s what I’m… For me, the psychedelic Trojan horse is that container, right?

Sam Believ: Yeah, obviously we all come into this world of psychedelics, and after having this blissful experience, we like think like it’s gonna change the world and it’s all only bright.

And then you start meeting shamans that are not good people, and you start thinking like how can it be that, they’re drinking the medicine, but they’re like, they don’t get it. And or people that even use it for dark things, right? So it is very, it is not as simple as, as it seems, but Yeah, I’m an optimism– I’m an optimist.

For some reason, even after having some experiences with things like that, I still see so much positive and I still see the potential of psychedelics to break the mold and then allow people to heal and grow. And if something can save our society, it would be psychedelics. Yeah. I believe you think similarly.

I say like you tell me the problem in the society, so not just like personally, but on the societal level, and I appreciate that you talk about that. But I like to say, “You tell me the problem in the society and I’ll tell you how to fix it with ayahuasca” . So- Yeah. Yeah … so tell us about that and maybe about your book obviously, ’cause that’s kinda what you talk about- if I’m correct.

Alexander Beiner: Yeah. Firstly, just to say yeah, I am also, I have hope, I would say. And and I also have a very deep respect and awe of psychedelics. And I had a, a mushroom experience what, four or five days ago, which was, the first in maybe six months, but really profound in a period where I’ve gone through a lot of grief, and it really has just been transformative.

And every time that happens, after however many ceremonies and journeys, I’m like, “Oh my God, thank you so much. This is incredible.” There’s nothing that does that. Nothing. I’m a breathwork facilitator as well, and breathwork is very powerful, but they’re different practices, breathwork has its own magic, too. But so just to say that first, but So the argument I make in the book about, to take your phrase like, show me a social problem, see how ayahuasca can fix it, I think yeah, for me, there’s a yes and with that, because there’s a few things.

So the argu- one of the main arguments I make in the bigger picture is that the way that psychedelics really transform us, or one way that I think is the most potent, isn’t just the insights. We feel– we focus a lot on the insights that we get, right? And the new perspective, which is important, but I think more important is that they teach us a way of being, and for example, one of the things that psychedelics teach is that if you go into pain and really own it and be with it, it will transform and you will move through. If you avoid pain, you will be stuck, right? That… And if… What… there’s a great there’s a researcher called Max Wolf who has this speculative paper about like a cognitive behavioral approach to psychedelics, who I think is really interesting.

And he says that, it might be that in day-to-day life, our psychological wiring is that we can avoid pain- And it’s just about less painful to avoid it than to look at it, ’cause we can distract ourselves, we can watch Netflix, we can drink, we can get into relationship. Whatever it is, right?

When you take a psychedelic, that flips upside down, and it becomes more painful to avoid something than to accept it. And for me, that is the main way that I have been taught with psychedelics. And for me, that, for example, in day-to-day life. I’m not saying I do this perfectly, by the way. I avoid a lot still.

But there are times where I go, “You know what? I’m avoiding this thing, and I know from the medicine journeys I’ve had that if I really just have some courage and look at it, and look at it maybe it’s embarrassing or difficult or I don’t wanna accept it because I have to do something about it.

Whatever it is, do it, because that is what I’ve been taught.” Now notice that’s different. That’s a way of approaching a thing rather than some idea about a thing. And so my argument is that the, the biggest hope we have with psychedelics is that they teach us how to be human beings rather than teach us what to think or what to do.

And so that, for me, is beautiful ’cause that’s freedom too, and so there’s a lot of cognitive science behind that, that like what you do even, for example the way that you– The way… There’s a researcher called Barbara Tversky, and she argues that the way we talk about ideas is using the same cognitive processes as the way we move through physical space, right?

So when I say, “Oh, this is a bit complicated, I need to take a step back.” Now you get a little hint, and it’s like, okay, actually my experience of hold on, too much, is physical, right? It’s the same thing. And so when you do a practice like tango dancing or walking across hot coals or having a deep psychedelic journey, you’re learning new ways of thinking as well, through the experience.

So that’s– And so I talk a lot about that and why that’s important in the book.

Sam Believ: Yeah. Yeah, it’s interesting. You mentioned pain, and I’m only now getting to a realization, like last few months I’ve been going through a really difficult personal experience myself. And what I realized that combining a lot of pain together with psychedelics, where you just sit through it and just get pushed like face in, there’s a lot of growth.

It’s like growth on steroids.

Alexander Beiner: Yeah.

Sam Believ: And yeah, it’s definitely part of it. But another part I think with Ayahuasca specifically I’m a big fan of mushrooms as well. But with Ayahuasca specifically, it’s Like I’ve felt this, And coming from an engineer, right? So I used to be an engineer, I used to be zero spiritual, but through psychedelics I discovered that feeling of God within.

And this just completely changes everything outside me, and then also this understanding of self-love. And I’m just thinking if we were to, let… It doesn’t matter which model or capitalism or some new system, but if somehow the psychedelics would truly be popularized, and let’s say tonight 99% of the world’s population would have a psychedelic ceremonial experience in a group, more traditional container, what would the world look like tomorrow?

Like I, I can’t seem to imagine that it would not become m- much better. Just seeing ’cause we have groups. We have three, four groups a month, and the comparison, the way they come and the way they leave, like everyone just becomes so much better. So it’s that optimistic sort of maybe a little childish dream of what’s the percentage of the people we need to give this experience to that it starts to actually transform the world?

I don’t know if you have any metrics around this.

Alexander Beiner: Yeah. I don’t have metrics. I’m always a bit skeptical when people have metrics for that because I s- I’m very interested in how systems work, and I think what’s often forgotten in that is that there’s you and me as individuals, and there’s you and me in a group, and then there’s you and me in a group as part of the many systems we’re part of.

The environment, social system, economic system. So let’s take your metaphor. Let’s imagine… I think in your metaphor, if everyone did a very well-held psychedelic ceremony at the level that they were able to experience, probably the world would change overnight because everyone would come out of that and go, “Okay, we’re going to create together systems that are different.”

Now, that requires everyone doing it to some degree. I don’t think everyone needs to do it, because I think at the same time there is a way in which… Okay, so- What I think needs to happen is culture needs to change, right? The good thing about that is that culture changes really quickly. There’s a, a, a writer called Seth Godin, and he has a definition of culture which I heard maybe a year ago, and it’s still– all year, I’ve– all through 2025, I tried to find a problem with this definition, hitting it from different angles, and I can’t find a problem with it.

And his is a seven-word definition of culture, which is, “People like us do things like this.” People like us do things like this. That’s true of a country, it’s true of a, a family, it’s true of a, a group of friends even. And so if you break that apart, people like us, that’s like the, the, the values, the state of being, the identity, all of these things, that can really change with psychedelics.

The tricky thing is the next stage of what do we do, and so you need the culture. You need a mix of people. You need engineers, you need, people who do, who create art. And I think that’s the thing that I’m most excited about, is that we– psychedelics open a, a doorway into hey, we could do th- things completely differently.

That’s always for me been the thing. I took them the first time, had my first mushroom experience, and I was like, “We could live on heaven on Earth. We could do everything totally differently if we were different.” So I still believe that, for sure. The tricky thing is that the systems we’re in perpetuate themselves.

So when you try and dismantle, say, capitalism, you try and dismantle– even a, think about a family system. The family’s always– let’s say there’s a family that never talk about stuff that’s really serious, if you go into that system, say one person has an ayahuasca journey in that family, and they come back, and they’re like, “Guys, I wanna start talking about stuff.”

Because they’re right. It’s gonna be more healthy. It’s gonna be better for everyone. They are going to have a very hard time because the system does not want that change. Now, they might have the courage and energy and sophistication to figure out how to elicit that change. But if you go, you– maybe people have had this experience.

You have a big experience, and you come back and you’re telling everyone about it, and they’re like, “Ugh, it’s too much.” Because the system ne- there, there’s some clever way, I think, and this is what I think about all the time, like how do we be really smart about the changes, and so that’s– I don’t have an answer to that, but I’m continuously experimenting with that.

That’s my, it’s like my kind of life mission. I’m like, what are the ways that we can change, like people like us, and then doing things like this?

Sam Believ: That’s the thing, right? The, this let’s take family system as an example. If they all had a psychedelic experience, then boom, the system can change very quickly.

But then you can’t really force people to do it. So that’s… I kinda understand now why they wanted to add LSD to the water supply, right? ‘Cause it- … that, that would make it fast. Yeah. I definitely don’t have the answer, but it’s a nice topic to think of because our- the society’s definitely very sick and, And there, I can’t seem, I can’t seem to think of other ways to make the change quick enough in a way so we don’t destroy ourselves.

Alexander Beiner: Yeah. W- well, one way is radically changing the systems. We’re probably not gonna do that unless we have to, though. So then you get people who are, like, accelerationists, for example, who were like… A… For example, they say “Okay, if AI is gonna radically tr- completely upend all of the system we’re in, let’s make that happen as fast as possible.”

There’s a logic to that. I think there’s also problems with that. So yeah, this is the biggest question there i- these are the biggest questions that no one has the answer to right now.

Sam Believ: What do you think about AI? Let’s say AI goes into a positive direction, and instead of Terminator movie kind of- scenario, we have all of the physical, boring, repetitive work has been taken care of. AI, there’s unlimited abundance. Everyone has enough to eat, clothing. And w- I was thinking about it, the people will have nothing else to do. So of course, art and writing books and stuff like that, that’s great.

But I think the, the spiritual exploration is the last frontier, and that’s why maybe then everyone just can just come and just drink a lot of Ayahuasca and just get en- enlightened. What do you think about that?

Alexander Beiner: Yeah, it’s interesting. I think what resonates with me around that is the idea of exploration.

What do you do when… look at “Star Trek,” right? What do you do when everything’s sorted? You can synthesize food out of nowhere. We’ve got world peace. You explore. You go to the edge. We always wanna go to what’s unknown, right? So once, once we hopefully figure out how to live together and how to create fairness at a decent level, and love then it’s immediately as a human being, it’s curiosity.

So yeah, psychedelic exploration, but also building spaceships, for me, that’s one of the really sad things about the 20th century, is that we had this moment where it’s like, “Yeah, we’re gonna go, like we go to the Moon. We’re maybe gonna go to Mars.” And because of our own political and social bullshit, we didn’t do that really.

We’ve been to the Moon a bunch of times. Mars will… we… That should be for me, I read a lot of science fiction as well but I’m like, “That should be…” That’s the most exciting because we don’t know. Or if, or, under deep under the ocean or deep into consciousness. Yeah, so I agree with that.

Exploration is the next stage.

Sam Believ: Yeah. This episode is sponsored by LaWayra Ayahuasca Retreat. Most of LaWayra if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while. Some of you might have already been to LaWayra before. For those who don’t know us yet, we started LaWayra four years ago. At LaWayra, we combine authenticity, accessibility, and affordability.

LaWayra is currently highest-rated ayahuasca retreat in South America with more than 700 five-star reviews and an average rating of five stars. If you come to LaWayra, you’ll experience powerful, authentic ceremonies led by our indigenous shaman, Fernando, in a very beautiful venue just one hour south of Medellín, Colombia.

We’re surrounded by nature and have comforts like hot water, Wi-Fi. At LaWayra, our team has guided more than 2,500 people through this life-changing transformation of ayahuasca experience. At the same time, we keep it very affordable. So whether you’re coming for healing, clarity, or a deeper connection to yourself, LaWayra is the best choice.

If it is your first time drinking ayahuasca, you will love our three and a half hour preparation course and integration support. All of that is included in price as well as pickup from Medellín, accommodation, and ayahuasca. Visit lawyra.com to book your retreat or learn more. LaWayra, connect, heal, grow.

L-A-W-A-Y-R-A.com. I when I grew up, I got obsessed with reading adventure books, specifically like there’s a ship, and they go, and there’s an inhabited island, and they need to recreate the civilization. That, that kind of feeling, or like finding a new continent and stuff like that. And I re- and in one year, I read the entire supply that the library had of those books.

I was addicted.

Alexander Beiner: Where did you grow up, Sam? Where was that?

Sam Believ: I grew up in Latvia.

Alexander Beiner: Oh, cool. Okay.

Sam Believ: Yeah. And in front of my bed, I had a world map of the world, and then one day… so I finished all the adventure books, and I was like, “I need more of this. Give me more of this feeling.” And so she gave me…

the li- librarian gave me a book about space, like kinda kids science fiction, and I read a few of them, and then I kinda lost interest. I think the language was too complex or something. But I remember like looking at the map and understanding that everything has been discovered, like there’s nothing left to discover, and then the, the last frontier is space, same as you’re saying, so that’s kinda was I was thinking.

And I’m… i’m… I worked on ships, right? I was a marine mechanical engineer, so even in my profession, I ended up kinda like exploring in a way. And then when I found ayahuasca, I was like, “Yes,” like I just realized there’s this unlimited exploration that is… You can access worlds that are more complex than this reality altogether.

And then, Not just spiritually meaning oh, let’s find God or gods or whatever, but also I do believe also you can encounter entities or alien minds and stuff like that. And you were a part of this DMT study in Imperial College, And that’s kinda using psychedelics To, okay, let’s explore this DMT realm.

Not… Because obviously we largely focus on psychedelics for healing, personal or societal. What about that exploration? What, what have you guys found?

Alexander Beiner: Yeah. I was lucky to be one of nine participants in the dose finding section of that trial. So they needed experienced psychonauts to figure out the right dose and delivery method for intravenous DMT.

So we were injected for 30 minutes, and the experience lasted about around 40 minutes. ‘Cause obviously, like when they stop injecting, you’ve got the DMT still in your system, and it was very profound. And the biggest lesson I had is I went into it with this duality in my head of, inner growth work, which I’ve done a lot of, and I’ve trained as a counselor and I do a lot of group processes, with and without psychedelics and a lot of therapy.

And I was like, I said to the study cor- people running the study, I said “Hey, look I’m doing this ’cause I want to go into hyperspace. I want to explore. I’m not really interested in doing more like, my childhood and everything.” And so the first dosing is all about my childhood and I was like, oh my God.

But it was also transcendent and hyperspace and entity c- encounters and really exploring totally new territory. And the final dosing actually was very much… The first… The thing is, when it’s injected, I’m guessing a, a lot of people listening will have experienced Ayahuasca. It’s not s- Ayahuasca you could say chemically is extended state DMT to a degree.

However, you also have the teaching and presence of the vine, which is, it’s, which I’ve sat with just the vine before. And I have some sense, it’s very mysterious, but I think they act in synergy. But I would say the teacher was in the DMT in this experience for me. I really had a similar teaching.

It was just cleaner and more ev- all the, also, even the visuals were very crisp and very precise, but it’s immediate, right? So when you smoke DMT, you’re lying on a hospital bed in a hospital, and you have in one arm a cannula, so in your veins, and that’s called the DMT pump.

In the other arm, they’re taking blood every, I think it was every two minutes to then compare. And so the worst part was waiting for the injection, ’cause they didn’t tell us when, ’cause they didn’t wanna mess up the data, that if we knew it was… I figured out what time it was by the fifth dosing, so I knew.

This is actually a little bit easier for me. But then it immedi- you feel this kind of cold sensation in your arm, and then immediately it’s like you vaporized as much DMT as is possible to vaporize. And so from zero to completely in the experience. So if you imagine going from how you are sitting right now to the deepest Ayahuasca journey you’ve ever had within two seconds.

So that was, I did a lot of training to prepare for that shift, and also really inspired by Terence McKenna, ’cause he said that, he would go into DMT space and entities would say, “Don’t give way to amazement,” right? So just don’t be disoriented so much that you can’t pay attention. And that’s what I really trained.

But, the first minute or two for all of us, because we have the data now, like our heart rates like doubled and we all, it’s just it is just so intense. It’s just a state change. But then after about a, I don’t know what it was like, let’s say in 90 seconds, it, the heart rate dipped down.

And my experience of that was that I entered the space and then I was just present, and sometimes I actually shouted like, “Hello? Like anyone here?” I always was in this like waiting room area, which is very common in DMT, like just a void. And then I was like, really in adventure mode, really, because I was like, “Okay, I’ve got 40 minutes.

There’s so much I want to explore. I don’t wanna stay in this space the whole time.” Sometimes I had to stay in that space to go through some personal baggage, and then I would transition. And what I really learned, or at least my experience of it, was that there is no separation between going into these other dimensions and who you are.

Like they’re related to each other as well, right? And so you, wherever you go, you, there you are, right? So you’re bringing your baggage with you. Actually the, the teaching presence, as I call it, like the DMT, the spirit, whatever you wanna call it, said to me like, “Hey, you have too much baggage right now.

You have to pack your bags before you go into the trip.” So that’s the, what we’re doing now, whether you like it or not. And then below, by the fifth dosing it was like, “Okay, your bags are packed.” And then that was, I write about it in the book at the end, like that was a really the one of the deepest experiences I’ve ever had, and really an experience of exploring the nature of the many different realms we go into.

And the biggest thing in that was that I had so many different types of entity encounter in a space of 10 minutes, that I suddenly was like, “I think this is an ecosystem, and there’s different ecological niches in the ecosystem.” And then it– I got this message of “Yeah, that’s it. That’s, that…

And you’re a part of it as a human being. You’re also part of that.” And then I was like, “Oh, shit, that’s so interesting,” because some entities don’t give a shit that I’m here. Some of them are really interested in me. Some of them I can’t trust, some of them I can trust. It’s like being in a jungle, right?

And the other message I got, or the sense I had, is that with this technology, I was, like, parachuting randomly into a part of the jungle, and I’m sure people with more shamanic training, there’s a bit of intention setting to where you’re gonna go, right? And if you have a cosmology that helps you do that, great.

But I was in a hospital, and it was almost like gung ho “Let’s fucking– let’s see what happens.” It was incredible, though. It was really incredible. Yeah I think it’s a, an amazing technology, and it was also very healing for me.

Sam Believ: So basically, if I understand correctly, you think that those, those entities they’re outside of you and they exist in another dimension, and there’s this ecosystem of them, and we’re part of them because we can also access those states.

And do, Does that, is that correct?

Alexander Beiner: Yeah. It’s really, it’s complicated, right? I think that our model of reality can’t really give us a good answer to that question because in the same way that we know that physically everything is interconnected, so you and I, on some level, are of the same substance, right?

Similarly there, where I think the entities are simultaneously part of us and archetypal and really rooted in our own perception, and exist independently of us. But I actually think that about consciousness in general. I think that about all things. So it doesn’t necessarily contradict my view of reality, which obviously the, all my experiences have, made me rethink many times, but the weirdest experiences I had on that trial, which I didn’t write about in the book, were synchronicity experiences between the dosings, which were so intense and so inexplicable and so specific that, and verifiable, that I was like, “This is way more confronting to my model of how reality works,” than anything I experienced in the experience.

And actually speaking to Bernardo Kastrup was helpful. Do you know Bernardo Kastrup’s work? Have you come across him? He’s a really impressive dude. He’s, I think he has two PhDs, one in computer science and one in philosophy, and he is a philosophical idealist, so his position is that everything is consciousness.

We’re all within one single mind, effectively. And he was really helpful when I asked him about this. I was like, “How can synchronicity be?” He was like it doesn’t make sense if you think everything is linear, and then something happens that’s super interconnected in an impossible way.

But if you see it as everything is interconnected already, then when something hyper interconnected happens, it fits in that model. And most of the time things just seem linear because you’re not seeing the big picture,” right? Or you’re not tuned in. But I think DMT, in my experience, does something on whatever level that opens us up to synchronicity in a really profound way.

I don’t know if you’ve had those experiences, after lots of ceremonies, for example.

Sam Believ: My life since my first Ayahuasca experience is one big synchronicity. Even the retreat that I run started itself, and I, it’s a, it’s an entire episode in itself. Like- synchronicities, like seeing stuff and then having it happen and needing something and then universe delivering.

It’s at the bizarre level. As I like to describe people… Pe- when people ask me “How did ayahuasca change your life?” I like to say that I was going in this direction and it just changed my direction by one degree, and then, and I ended up in a totally different place.

But specifically in me, it changed something where I just started to believe in my ability to manifest things, and, like-

…

Sam Believ: Manifestation, I guess- is part of it. I don’t know, I don’t know if you ever think about it, but-

…

Sam Believ: Creating, you create something in your mind and you put it out there, and you kinda hold that thought, and eventually things just fall in place.

I don’t know if you if you’ve learned anything about that.

Alexander Beiner: No, but yeah, definitely. And, I think it’s fascinating. I think there’s a lot of truth to it. And, what I’ve noticed as a writer is that the more thought and emotion I put into writing, the more synchronicities happen that are similar to what I wrote, which is really…

And especially fiction. But also there’s an, it sounds like you had, a difficult recent time. I did as well. Last year was very difficult on a personal level, and there was a time where I couldn’t really write properly. And that’s pretty much what I do. I have a Substack, is my main, output and I constantly writing about culture and and being embedded in the world.

And I just was Going through such a difficult time, I just could- I just wanted to retreat from the world, and then I also was just finding it difficult to write. And what I noticed, my first piece I wrote this year, a few days ago after my mushroom trip, the whole energy of it was different and the response was different.

The pieces I was writing when I wasn’t feeling right, I was manifesting something different. And it’s so interesting because, my skill level, and this would be true for anyone who has a skill, I’m still in a, a professional writer, right? And someone who is like a sports person, if they’re having a bad day, the, a basketball player or a football player who is having a bad day in football is still 10,000 times better than I am at those sports, right?

And yet they could be losing matches because something’s off inside them, right? And so there’s something really interesting about just the energy you’re bringing to it, and it changes everything. Even think, I have a mentor who always says that, And maybe this is an interesting thing for you to hear since we’ve both got similar experiences of, wanting f- retreats to fill up.

He said that if a retreat isn’t filling up, start talking about it a lot with each other. Start just planning, talking, being creative around it, and then suddenly, interestingly, you start getting ticket signups, and I’ve noticed that it’s weird, if you bring it, the right energy to it, that can really start to happen.

You start bringing it into the world and speaking it into the world.

Sam Believ: Yeah. This, this mindset is bo- both empowering and also terrifying because all of a sudden everything that happens around you is your responsibility. And it’s good because you can do something about it. But at the same time, sometimes you’re like I’m not really directly connected to- US invading Venezuela and Venezuela being close to Colombia, I’m also…

I’m not really responsible for Americans not knowing enough of geography to think that it puts them in danger by traveling to Colombia. Yeah. But at the same time, I also understand that there is this deeper spiritual context like it’s when your energies are in the right place, things just fall in your lap so much easier,

Alexander Beiner: yeah.

Sam Believ: I would say- Yeah, I’m still trying to understand that, and I’ve felt it in ceremony, and I’m constantly trying to raise my vibration, so to speak to have good things come to me. But it’s yeah it’s challenging. Even just to ki- it’s kinda like almost assuming godlike position in your own life.

It’s like I’m the boss. I’m the one responsible. I can fix it. It came to me in a ceremony a couple times where I’m in the ceremony and I go super deep and it starts to become dark And then I’m regressing to my childhood self, and I’m this poor, sad lonely, abandoned child, and I feel cold, and I’m like, “Oh my God, who’s gonna come and save me?”

And then there’s this realization, I can save myself, and I start tapping on myself and chanting, and I’m raising my own vibration, and then I have this blissful experience with so much learnings. Just like how can you do it day to day in the real life? Just remind yourself.

Alexander Beiner: Yeah. No, I think it’s a huge topic, and it’s one I’ve…

I explore all the time in myself. I, my take on it is that the problem with the law of attraction came when it became associated with a particular type of consumerist individualism, where it’s like you can, just you, who’s not connected to anything else, can manifest. But the reality, my perspective, is that as human beings, we are individual, but we are simultaneously part of a deeper systems.

Many deeper systems that run through us, that we’re part of. And so to use your Venezuela example, it’s like you don’t control that. And I o- I sometimes imagine imagine there’s eight billion light bulbs on the planet. Now, some of those light bulbs individually shine brighter than others at different times.

But imagine there’s 300 million light bulbs shining a particular color, and you as one or even 1,000 or 10,000 light bulbs are trying to shine a different color. They’re gonna outshine you because you’re part of a bigger thing. And so I think there’s a humility that also comes with it where… And this is something, this is like catharsis, where you can’t always save yourself.

Sometimes you need to ask for help. Sometimes you need the divine intervention. And it’s, I think both are true at the same time, in my experience. I think grief and loss really brings it up, where you’re like, you’re not in control. Sometimes you’re really in control. Sometimes you’re really not in control.

And w- I think we have to be able to hold both of those things at the same time.

Sam Believ: Yeah. There’s still lots to learn and I think that I myself am going through this. So our motto of my retreat, it’s called LaWayra, is connect, heal, grow. It’s like you connect first to God, universe, medicine, yourself, and then you heal, and then you grow.

And I’m kinda now, I would like to believe in between the healing and growing, that transition where it’s less about myself and more about both helping others and also, like, exploring deeper spiritual levels. Because last few months, I’ve been drinking medicine for five years regularly, and last few months it’s been The, even the connection with the medicine is deeper, and so much stuff is coming up, and larger synchronicities in life as well with information coming.

Even this conversation. The, the right conversations are coming at the right time. Yeah it’s just exciting. It’s exciting to see what, what comes up. And as you say, cosmovision or worldview, continuously refining that worldview. K- going from abandoning the previous one to understanding the, the new one.

And I’m building that worldview, bits and pieces from all the conversations that I have, including this one. So yeah. I don’t know if you wanna talk about that, your own worldview and how it changed and especially what was the biggest, influence, Yeah … in that change?

Alexander Beiner: God, I think in, for me, a big thing has been really around the role of consciousness. I think theoretically, I’ve always been more like panpsychist, so seeing consciousness and matter as the same process, right? Consciousness is everywhere and a fundamental part of the universe. But I think my psychedelic experiences they make that a lived experience rather than just an intellectual exercise.

So that’s one big one. And then I think probably- I, and this is maybe also due to this, the work I’ve done outside of psychedelics, but something about my experiences has really led me to an orientation to truth being the most fundamental thing that there is. And I remember having a mushroom experience in a very difficult time in my mid-20s, and I was all in a loop, tangled, and there’s the, the mushroom was just like, “Hey, if you’re stuck, just look for truth,” with a capital T. What is true– And our deepest truth is what is real for me in this moment. Not what do I think I should feel, not, how should I behave for other people, but what is actually true. And I’ve– every time, what I find is if I go into that place, then I grow and transform, and I I have a relief, and so I think human… carl Jung talked about this a lot as well as human beings we are deceiving ourselves all the time. And my experiences on psychedelics are the moments where I’m not deceiving myself. And I think the thing I’m most grateful for is where I can take that insight or way of being and bring it into my life, my work.

And then the other thing I think is important, you spoke to it a bit, is like once we– like we can spend all our lives healing. There’s always something we can find to heal from, right? It’s a kind of like recursive loop, right? But I think what’s important is once we feel healed enough, what are we healing for, right?

This is why I have a problem with the wellbeing framework, like with just the word wellbeing. What are we being well for? We need a, an objective that is gonna make the world better than we found it in some way, and I think that’s a really important thing, so that’s always a tricky thing, too, because we often approach these experiences through healing, and like you, I’ve seen the most incredibly beautiful healings that I would never wish someone didn’t have, I think that’s really important. And then what I’ve also noticed is that, when people have done enough ceremonies, they’ve done enough inner work, then they have a yearning to “Where do I apply this? How do I bring my gifts into the world?” And that’s something I’m really interested in, how do we actually make that bridge between going to retreat or, even going to some kind of one-on-one therapy, whatever, to actually doing something in the world that shifts it.

That for me is like a big question right now.

Sam Believ: Yeah. I guess it’s the topic of integration or on the opposite side, spiritual bypassing. I know you talk about that as well. So how does one avoi-avoid the bypassing?

Alexander Beiner: I would say by going into pain. The actual book, “Spiritual Bypassing” by, I think it’s Robert Masters, he…

The, the point he makes in it is spiritual bypassing, and maybe all bypassing and avoidance psychologically, is to escape from pain. So sim- similar to what I said before, if we don’t wanna spiritually bypass, go into the pain, and the embarrassment, and the feeling small, and the things that the spiritual bypassing is designed to get you, trying to get you away from.

Spiritual ego, grandiosity, thinking that the entire world is a conspiracy out to prevent, light coming out. Like, all of these things, in my view, while there might be elements of truth to them, are ways of avoiding different types of pain. Pain of being insignificant, pain of being alone, pain of mortality, all of these different things.

So I think when we go into the pain, then we get away from the bypassing, ’cause we’re doing the opposite of bypassing. We’re going in, right? And the other thing with it is that you need a community around you of reflection. You need friends and people in a… Or people in a, spiritual community or some kind of community that can go…

spiritual communities can be tricky and s- you know, and so can friend groups, because sometimes people don’t say the thing that you should say, you need the right kinds of relationships where someone can go, “Hey, man, you’re being an asshole,” or, “Hey, th- this is… You’re going way too far with this idea, you need to chill.

Here’s another perspective I wanna share with you.” Still up to the, it’s up to us to really listen to those messages. But I like this rule of if you hear it three times from the outside world, then start thinking maybe it’s might not be still, but if you hear it five times, or six times, or seven times, the same reflection from different places, which maybe we get in relationship or we get wherever it is, then it’s probably you, and then that’s something we can work on, so I think there’s ways to, there’s ways to do it, for sure.

Sam Believ: Yeah. There’s lots of work to do and yeah, thank you for this conversation. I know you have to run soon, so let’s wrap it up. I think it was very interesting. So tell the listeners where they can find more about you, your book, and yeah.

Alexander Beiner: Yeah. Thank you for having me on.

Yeah I enjoyed it. So my book is called The Bigger Picture: How Psychedelics Can Help Us Make Sense of the World, and you can find that on, yeah most bookshops. It’s on Amazon and Audible as well. And then most of my work at the moment is through my platform, Kainos where I make films. Did a documentary last year, and I regularly put out articles.

So that’s on Substack, K-A-I-N-O-S, or alexander_beiner on Instagram. You’ll find a lot of the stuff I put out there as well.

Sam Believ: Thank you. Guys, you’ve been listening to Ayahuasca Podcast. As always, we’re your hosts, Sam Beliv, 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 wherever it is you’re listening.

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LaWayra, connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you