In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast, host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) has a conversation with neuroscientist and author James Cooke.
James shares his journey from a profound spiritual awakening as a teenager to studying neuroscience and exploring psychedelics as tools for consciousness and healing.
We touch upon topics such as:
00:17 – James’ spiritual awakening and scientific path
01:45 – How psychedelics sparked emotional healing and trauma work
03:40 – The unique perspective of a neuroscientist on Ayahuasca and DMT
05:46 – Entity encounters and their possible scientific explanations
11:58 – Sam’s experiment idea: enhanced reality and psychedelics
19:26 – Where thoughts originate: brain, consciousness, or antenna?
26:49 – How science and spirituality intersect
30:26 – James’ personal emotional healing with psychedelics
37:12 – Neuroplasticity and the long-term transformative effects of psychedelics
40:12 – Meditation vs psychedelics: mechanisms and outcomes
If you would like to attend one of our Ayahuasca retreats, go to http://www.lawayra.com.
Find more about James Cooke and his book The Dawn of Mind at http://www.jamescooke.info
Transcript
Sam Believ (00:02)
James, welcome to the show.
James (00:04)
Yeah, thank you for having me. It’s good to be here.
Sam Believ (00:07)
James, ⁓ tell me a little bit about yourself and what brought you to work with psychedelics.
James (00:17)
Yeah, so I am a neuroscientist, but I got interested in neuroscience because of a profound spiritual experience I had as a teenager, kind of spontaneous, what people typically call like an awakening. And yeah, it was a kind of dropping fully into the present moment and discovering what it is to exist without being identified with thoughts and the kind of profound wellbeing that’s associated with that. And so that led me
James (00:47)
being fascinated with his consciousness experience. ⁓ but my background leading up to that had been that I was raised Catholic and I really didn’t like the dogmatism of the kind of superstition and that kind of stuff. So it, pushed me in a kind of scientifically oriented direction. And the thing about the awakening was it felt like awakening to reality. didn’t feel like awakening to something supernatural. It felt like I’d been living with a kind of in this thought identified state that we all live in, ⁓ until we engage this terrain. And I,
James (01:15)
I’d been living through kind of interpretations, delusions of like how the world is. And then I’d woken up to kind of how it actually is. So that’s what led me to wanting to articulate this stuff from a scientific perspective to be like, this isn’t, this is very much real. These experiences. And so then I went to study neuroscience. And on the journey, I got interested in psychedelics because of people doing research on mystical experiences induced by things like psilocybin.
James (01:45)
And I found my own experience like that to be really transformative. And I wanted to be able to, I was excited by the possibility that other people could experience this, this too, this kind of shift in perspective to one instead of feeling separate and like you’re alienated in a universe that’s much bigger than you, instead of feeling that you are a manifestation of the unfolding of existence. And so I decided to try a high dose of psilocybin for myself to see if it was the same terrain, experientially.
James (02:14)
⁓ and I found it was very similar and, and kind of confirmed that, but then that experimentation unlocked basically the awakening I’d had was very much in consciousness and to do with identity and in the mind, that unlocked basically emotional stuff that I hadn’t been doing trauma healing work. I hadn’t been doing any of that stuff. ⁓ and I didn’t know it was there as all very repressed and the psychedelics really opened that up, which led me eventually to Ayahuasca and does a lot of beautiful healing work done there. So it took.
Sam Believ (02:41)
So, thank you.
James (02:43)
what was initially a kind of intellectual exploration into very much became very personal for me and very transformative. So I had like a five year period of doing psychedelics quite intensively, therapeutically, once I discovered that there was this healing to be done. And at the end of that phase, the things all kind of came together. And then I wrote this book about science and spirituality and consciousness. And so yeah, that’s what brings me to sitting here in front of you today.
Sam Believ (03:12)
Thank you for sharing. It’s interesting that you kind of described that you came to it from scientific point of view and the research and then it resulted in more of an emotional exploration. It’s interesting we tell people when they come to the retreat that ayahuasca will give you what you need, but it will rarely give you what you want. So ⁓ talk to us a little bit about your ayahuasca experiences. ⁓ You know, it’s common for me to hear.
James (03:32)
Great.
Sam Believ (03:40)
Many people describe their experiences that’s day to day, but not every day you hear ⁓ a neuroscientist talk about it. I’m sure your perspective is somewhat different because you deal with the brain matters.
James (03:56)
Yeah, I wasca and DMT more broadly is the thing that has humbled me intellectually more than anything else in the world, basically. ⁓ before I wasca and also just vaporized DMT, I, ⁓ I felt I was interested in things like psilocybin induced mystical experiences, LSD, like these substances.
James (04:21)
seem to fit nicely with our neuroscientific stories. You know, we have this this paradigm now of understanding the brain as a prediction machine that where you can understand the self as a kind of something that’s like simulated in consciousness. And this, this whole paradigm fits nicely with the idea that you should be able to dissolve the self and have experiences of ego dissolution and unity with existence. That’s what the train I was interested in, felt very comfortable with extremely confident explaining how these
James (04:50)
science and spirituality matches up in a way that where you don’t have to diminish either one just because you can explain it what’s going on the brain doesn’t make that unity any less real. are truly part of the unfolding universe. It’s not like a delusion or something. ⁓ and so when I, with the kind of, with our Oscar and DMT, the, ⁓ the phenomenology, the experience of it, the, the entity encounters, the kind of the really out there stuff was, I was not expecting the experience of kind of hyper reality of feeling like
James (05:18)
you’re remembering this is true reality or that kind of stuff. ⁓ I was not really expecting, ⁓ and before someone does this, it’s very easy just to be like, well, why would, know, obviously you’ve taken a drug, your brain’s doing this stuff. Why would you take it seriously? And then you have to experience yourself and then you’re like, okay. That’s why people take it seriously. Cause it doesn’t, it doesn’t, there’s a lot about it that doesn’t lend itself to a simple reductive explanation of like, it’s just your brain making noise or whatever.
James (05:46)
as you might expect, it’s just distortions and things. So from that place of humility, still, you know, given my training and my background and my biases, I still am interested in the project of explaining how, how this stuff might be explainable without invoking unseen hidden supernatural elements. You know, I still am very much interested in perhaps there’s like explanations about how the brain might be in some kind of
James (06:14)
it’s like an archetypal dream state, know, where like you’re dramatizing stuff that has truth value that feels very real and significant. So those kinds of explanations is where my bias lies. But yeah, I have a lot of respect for Indigenous worldviews and for other interpretations. So yeah, I guess there’s a lot to say about it. think the, in my own experience, you know, I went on and I’ve been on one ayahuasca retreat, multiple ceremonies, and had a lot of different experiences from
James (06:44)
emotional catharsis, healing trauma stuff, through to very trippy DMT world, kind of alien landscapes, and through to kind of feeling like entities were performing soul surgery on me. And I’d say that yeah, those were the main
Sam Believ (06:52)
Yeah.
Sam Believ (06:57)
This is so unbelievable.
James (07:05)
main experiences and initially, I guess before this stuff like
James (07:13)
figured there may have been a kind of a neurotic anxiety to need to explain our way. And now I’m a lot more comfortable with the mystery. I’m a lot more comfortable being awed by the experiences. And whereas I think that was a sense of what people call ontological shock, where you have this sense of like, wait, what is this? I didn’t know this was on the menu for existence to experience this kind of stuff. So yeah, there’s a lot of different avenues we could go into there.
Sam Believ (07:39)
Well, ⁓ as a scientist and with your depth of understanding, what do you think about entities? What are they in your opinion?
James (07:49)
Yeah, yeah, it’s a great place to go with it. I again, the humility thing is, I may end up just being like, I don’t know, ⁓ really, but I will give some some speculations.
James (08:02)
My experience of this was very much of extremely convincing, as convincing as talking to you now, if not actually more convincing, it felt more real, the whole environment as in felt more real and familiar and a sense of obviousness of recognizing, like waking up from the matrix or something like if you’d chosen to go in and then kind of be like, ⁓ of course this is what’s really happening. so from that subjective experiential side, really, it doesn’t feel like you’re going to explain it away.
James (08:31)
just talking about the brain, but that is why I now go on to try to speculate about because I do think it is possible. It is plausible to me that this stuff could be generated by the brain. But when I say that again, it doesn’t mean it’s reductive in that it’s always just kind of mean this experience. I far more think about it as like profound states as a set of like archetypes that we have to reckon with. If we want to be whole, you know, to really engage with deep aspects of what we are. So
James (09:01)
So when I think about entities, I do think like there’s a story you could tell about the fact that the way we think about consciousness scientifically is the contents of consciousness is as a kind of controlled hallucination that right now this experience, the world isn’t actually, you’re not just seeing a world directly as it is. This is actually a kind of something you’re dreaming up in every moment. And, it’s being controlled in the sense that the information coming in through your senses is stabilizing it. And so you see this with things like
James (09:30)
There was that dress that went viral years ago, that some people saw it as white and gold and some people saw it as blue and black. And in that moment, people suddenly realized that we’re not actually in contact with objective reality. We were in contact with our experience with reality and we have, we each carry around these different experiences of the world. so in light of that, and then think about when you dream at night, you can conjure up these whole worlds of interacting with people. ⁓ and given that we’re social primates, it makes sense that
James (10:00)
deep part of our programming is interacting with other entities, detecting, you know, like right now it’s palpable with the sense that certain pixels on the screen are you an agent that I should be interacting with and other things are tabs that aren’t agents, aren’t entities that should be interacting with. So when you start to think about it that way, it starts to become plausible that you could activate very deep parts of our programming that would then dramatize in like this kind of dreamlike way. It’s very convincing entity encounters in the same way that
James (10:29)
entity encounter between you and I right now is actually playing out in my consciousness from my side and your consciousness on your side. So we know we can do this as organisms. So that is my bias is to say, how far can we take this kind of story without needing to genuinely autonomously existing entities and things like that, which is how it feels in the experience. Yeah. So that’s the Avenue I go down. And there’s been some research.
James (10:56)
a colleague at, ⁓ have my Chris Timman at Imperial College London, who has done some studies where he found that, ⁓ theta oscillations, which is a certain rate of brain waves that occurs during sleep that peaks during, ⁓ the DMT experience. And so he was making the case that this kind of dreams story, the idea that the brain is in some dream state, a waking dream that that fits with the effects of DMT on the brain. So yeah, that’s my,
James (11:26)
my current hypothesis.
Sam Believ (11:30)
Maybe you can talk to some of your colleagues that do research on brain and psychedelics. have a really great idea for a study, which is also somewhat simple. ⁓ On Ayahuasca, I have experienced ⁓ visions that are not with your eyes ⁓ closed, but with your eyes open, but not ⁓ separate. So basically it’s like a reality that is being enhanced. So you see like energy flows and stuff like that.
Sam Believ (11:58)
⁓ The experiment would be done ⁓ such so you have ⁓ you give people psychedelics I think could be done with mushrooms or maybe a waska that puts them in that state that allows them to ⁓ see enhanced reality ⁓ and you could use VR. ⁓ You could then put them on VR goggles on them and if the reality in VR is still enhanced, it means that it’s just a general concept.
Sam Believ (12:27)
⁓ But if you only see energy flows ⁓ in reality in nature, that means that you actually see energy. So as opposed to hallucinating, you then see something that you normally don’t see and then psychedelics serve as ⁓ a telescope for being able to see stars. What do you think about that? ⁓
James (12:36)
Right.
James (12:43)
Right, right.
James (12:48)
Yeah, Right. it’s like, yeah, it’s an interesting idea to be like in one situation, you’re genuinely looking out of the world and in another situation, you’re not. And so if there’s something that’s present in the world you’re detecting, you should be able to see it in the, yeah, it’s an interesting paradigm. Cause I, and I think, yeah, people report stuff like kind of group experiences on ayahuasca and kind of telepathy and things like that anecdotally. I have no real familiarity with the kind of,
James (13:18)
My interest in spirituality stuff is very much of the kind of, guess, like, sides of things like Buddhism that are understood scientifically rather than kind of parapsychology and things. But I think there’s definitely like a hostility to this kind of stuff in the scientific mainstream that is not, you know, it would be better to have this stuff just be studied in a way where there’s not this big cultural divide. So, yeah, I would welcome studies like that just to test it one way or the other, because people seem to, it’s, what we can say is this stuff is definitely a profound, like,
James (13:47)
these kinds of weird experiences are definitely a part of the human psyche and to not study them, even if you end up concluding whatever you end up concluding, actually, either way we want to know to pretend, I mean, I guess we live in a culture that doesn’t really value human experience very much. So I guess it’s part of that whole thing of just like, psychedelics, consciousness, we’ll push that over to the side and focus on like the hard material world, economics and physics and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, I’d like to see a world where we study through paradigms such as that, the
James (14:17)
richness of human experience more.
Sam Believ (14:20)
Understand what you mean. I came to ayahuasca myself very much so from the point of view of, you know, it’s going to do something to my brain and make me less depressed. It was all scientifically proven. I’m not a scientist, but I’m an engineer and I come from a very non-religious background. So that’s how I view the world. But now after running an ayahuasca retreat for three years, I’ve been a witness to many of events that cannot be explained. ⁓
James (14:33)
Great.
Sam Believ (14:48)
I can at least tell you that. And now I believe that there’s an invisible connection between people, whether you call it telepathy or something else, but like a son has an experience and the father knows what experience son had or there is a connection. It’s almost like, so that that kind of is no longer a doubt. cannot prove it, but I can assure you that it’s a reality and the connection is stronger between ⁓
Sam Believ (15:18)
family members, for example, that it is between everyone. And I’ve obviously seen, had psychedelic experience where you can see that everything is connected, which is hard to understand when you’re not in that state. But ⁓ obviously scientifically, would say it would probably be ⁓ frowned upon. But what do you think about that personally?
James (15:37)
I mean, the thing you just described is anecdotally like a very robust thing people report in terms of family members connections of insignificant moments. You know, people close to me have described that. And in the past, they would have just dismissed it as and you can you know, it’s important to be aware that when you’re dealing with like, anecdotes and stuff like that can be a selection effect where like, you know,
James (16:01)
the people who tell you their stories, thousands of people don’t have those experiences. And so there can be these kinds of things that lead to an impression that there’s something there when actually truly is coincidence. And, but at the same time, I, and I, but I think I used to reject those based on, again, I mentioned before, kind of, before we do healing work, they can just be this basic existential anxiety. That’s kind of, especially if you’re someone who’s scientifically oriented, just to kind of, you’re emotionally motivated to explain these things away and be like, I don’t want them to be true. Cause it feels weird to me. I want to fit in with the mainstream.
James (16:32)
So now I don’t have that anxiety anymore. And so I’m little more open to it, but I would basically, I mean, that is why I love science because it’s like when it’s done right, it’s about getting yourself out of the way, getting what you want to be true out of the way and just being like, we’re just going to set it up and try and test it and give it a fair shot. And the interconnections you mentioned is like,
James (16:56)
It is, it’s an illusion to think that we’ve truly got all of reality pinned down and that we know exactly what’s going on. And it doesn’t seem impossible to me that a hundred years from now, we could have a deeper understanding of physics where it’s like, actually there is some, there’s some way in which the parts of reality resonate with each other that, that allows something like that. I used to think that, that, that doesn’t fit with our current stories of physics. So it’s not true. Whereas now I’m like, our stories are provisional. They’re going to change. Who knows? I’m fundamentally open basically.
Sam Believ (17:26)
Yeah, it’s like if you can, if I’m talking to you right now through wifi, I believe I’m using Starlink right now. So it’s like how, why isn’t it possible there is some other kind of ⁓ wave that we haven’t detected yet that maybe is on some kind of different spectrum? Yeah, there’s still lots, lots we don’t understand, but this is, ⁓ this specific story I can give you is a person have not spoken to his father for five years.
James (17:35)
me too.
Sam Believ (17:55)
⁓ There’s been a deep trauma between them ⁓ He had an ayahuasca experience all about that specifically about his father and the next morning his father called me and said he has a feeling that they have to speak and They haven’t spoken for five years. So coincidence possibly ⁓ or like a lady having a very deep experience and then ⁓ her entire like maternal family line calling her and like
Sam Believ (18:21)
what’s going on, I’ve been feeling this stuff because something has been removed from the entire generation. ⁓ those are not, they’re not that common, but still it’s enough to be like, what the hell is going on? mean, you can, of course you can make it up, but when it’s like firsthand, then it’s, then it gets harder to, to reject. So hopefully science will catch up with that.
James (18:26)
Yeah.
James (18:41)
Yeah.
James (18:44)
That’s the kind of thing I was talking about when I said it’s definitely a thing people experience. so no matter what’s going on, it’s part of human experience and it’s there to be understood. we should be doing that instead of, because the bias at the moment is just to preemptively write it off as impossible because of some artificial confidence that we’ve got everything figured out. So yeah, having that attitude of humility and openness, think is why is it corrective to that.
Sam Believ (19:09)
So James, you wrote a book, Dawn of Mind and How Matter Became Conscious. ⁓ As somebody who, for those who watching the video, you have a brain on the shelf on your background, so you must know a lot. ⁓ Where do thoughts originate? What do say?
James (19:26)
Hopefully one in my head too. I said, hopefully one in my head too. He said, I a brain on the shelf. Sarah spoke over your question. it where do thoughts originate? Is that the question?
Sam Believ (19:31)
Hopefully I can see it, but I can assume there is one. ⁓
Sam Believ (19:39)
Yeah, where do thoughts come from? know, like, ⁓ do they come from brain as brain, brain just an antenna? What is your opinion?
James (19:46)
Yeah, so I guess the subtitle for people who are more into the metaphysical side of things and tuned into that, the subtitle may be slightly misleading when I say how matter became conscious in the life because while I do think it makes sense to talk about the physical, I’m not, you could say like, I don’t believe that there is a solid substance called matter that is like a
James (20:07)
think reality is like a process like, so there’s, this gets into, yeah, more kind of spiritual conception of reality that is very philosophically and scientifically grounded. So there’s part of the synthesis of science and spirituality. So I think experience itself like consciousness. The point that kind of the picture they lay out in the book is to say that when you see reality as a process that’s not made of solid substance, I don’t think it’s made of mind, but I think it’s made of
James (20:36)
Yeah, it’s like a flowing river of interdependence of like, yeah, relational. So the whole isn’t connected with itself, but it’s fundamentally empty of substance. so reality, the way that it relates to itself is what we call matter, that kind of web of relations that physicists study. And I think consciousness is a kind of relationality between organism and environment. So we’re conscious because we’re like this.
James (21:05)
moment to moment with this evolutionary process that’s discovering how to be in the world that we’re fundamentally connecting to the rest of existence to discover, you know, basically like how to be self organized. And I go into the science of this and like self organization and stuff like that in the book. But so the key takeaway is that it’s actually not the brain or the nervous system that brought consciousness into existence. It’s life, it’s being an embodied living thing. And so any living thing will will feel will have experiences, even
Sam Believ (21:14)
Thank you.
James (21:31)
single celled organisms, even plants. and there’s, you know, whole paradigms now of like plant intelligence research and stuff like that, suggesting they have some mental functions. So it’s very much fits with kind of animist views of, ⁓ yeah, indigenous views of experience being widespread. I point very firmly in my book to the fact that we are fully part of nature. The rest of the living world is truly our kin, like our relatives. They’re not, we’re not separate. We’re not superior. We may be able to control them technologically, but we’re not better or like.
Sam Believ (21:57)
Thank you.
James (22:02)
And that’s that sense of separation, that misperception is at the root of ecological breakdown and climate crisis and goes all the way back to colonization and, along with that suppression of psychedelics, which tap you into this, this kind of more holistic vision of the world, beyond separation. so I think that’s where experiences, that’s where experience or consciousness comes into the story. And, and it’s very much like because we’re
Sam Believ (22:27)
Thank you.
James (22:29)
because of the interconnections of existence and because we are fully part of it, it’s not that we are these little alienated separate organisms that have experiences. It’s rather that the universe kind of wakes up through us, that it’s not a coincidence that you’re having the conscious, even though consciousness is this kind of vast, very grounded thing. It’s, it’s not a coincidence that it’s appearing in this way that’s connected with this body at this time. You’re not having the experience of being the sun or being an atom or being a river.
James (22:58)
I think it’s, it’s very much to do with being a living thing, but it’s like, we’re like the eyes with which the universe sees, you know, opens its eyes through us and takes in itself. ⁓ so, so that that’s experience. then thoughts is something more complicated because it’s like, thoughts you get, it’s like the brain. I mentioned before this idea we have now of the brain is a prediction machine where it’s constantly predicting and simulating what’s going on in the world to help it survive. ⁓ and when you do that, you.
James (23:27)
it’s like hierarchical, so it gets more and more abstract. So at the lowest level, it’s like, okay, I’m seeing blue of the sky, and then I’m seeing, I’m seeing like blue, blue, blue, white, white, white, pixels of colors. And then at a higher level, it’s like, okay, well, that’s a, that’s a shape, and that’s a shape, and then a higher level, it’s like, well, that’s a cloud, that’s a, that’s the sky, and then a higher level is the whole scene. And this is kind of how AI systems work now, based on this, this kind of extraction of more and more abstract features, which was inspired by the brain.
James (23:56)
So in that view, yeah, and the self is the highest abstraction of all of it. You know, the idea of who you take yourself to be. Yeah, it’s this kind of fantasy of some invention, some highly abstracted thing. So when you’re dealing with thoughts, you’re dealing with these very abstracted perceptions of reality that are useful to allow us to navigate, but they’re fundamentally distorting in the…
James (24:25)
You know, a simple example is like, you, if you’re a gardener and you see a plant in your garden that you don’t want to be there, that we would call a weed, you might get angry and you might figure, there’s a weed in my garden. That’s annoying. And you objectively perceive that to objectively be a weed. But then someone might say to you, say you’ve got a neighbor from a different country and they say, actually, that’s a really prized plant in our country. We really like it. We don’t consider it a weed at all.
James (24:47)
In that moment, can realize, yeah, weeds, plants are not objectively weeds. The concept of a weed is a thought I’m having an idea I’m having an interpretation that I’m bringing to bear of how I relate to that plant. But to be a weed means I don’t want it in my garden. It doesn’t mean objectively as a weed for the humans died. It wouldn’t be a weed. ⁓ it would just be a plant. ⁓ or it wouldn’t even be a plant. Like everything is, is this is kind of points to reality itself is beyond our ideas of it beyond our concepts. It transcends. Yeah. Ideas and the concepts and thoughts.
James (25:17)
So, so that’s the kind of, that’s where thoughts emerge. think, I think, I don’t think worms are thinking. I think there, there may be some level of interpretation, but I think it’s basic, quite simple things, pleasure, that kind of stuff. But then when you get complex brains like ours, that’s when you can leverage these abstractions and language really sends into overdrive and that we can have these symbols of like, ⁓ yeah, that we can use as, a kind of structure to structure our language, to structure our thoughts.
James (25:48)
⁓ but it’s, but that’s really where we get into all the trouble of suffering. Cause we start to, that’s what delusion creeps in. And we start to distort how we see the world, ⁓ in an emotionally motivated way. And it takes us away from that wholeness, that connectedness, that simplicity of, of being in flow with existence and into this analysis mode where it’s, you feel genuinely separate and other things are separate and that you’ve somehow got to navigate through this, this world that you’re separate from.
Sam Believ (26:18)
A lot of it is above my pay grade, very complex ⁓ analysis, but ⁓ it feels like when you go deep in scientific approach and you’re trying to analyze the reality or consciousness, there seems to start to become this interlap between what we know as science and what we know as spirituality. where can science and spirituality be compatible?
James (26:49)
Yeah, so for me, the this issue of concepts and mistaking them for reality, like in the weed example is
James (27:00)
So when you understand that reality is beyond our concepts of it, and you get really clear about what’s the map and what’s the territory, you know, the territory of existence is this, like whatever’s here right now, that’s beyond words. And then the words, the thoughts, the concepts, they all overlay it. But we don’t typically see it that way. As I was pointing to, we mistake our concepts for reality. We think the weed is genuinely a weed. We think, you know, I’m genuinely James who lives in my head somewhere and looks out from behind my eyes. Yeah, we get into confusion there.
James (27:30)
And so in terms of how they fit together, they fit together in quite a simple way. that spirituality for me is about connecting with what’s real with like what’s here beyond words now, what’s ineffable and, and yeah, so real that it can’t be encapsulated by our thoughts about it in the same way you can’t pour the ocean into a thimble. It’s just not going to happen. Thoughts can be, can encompass reality. ⁓ so that’s how they fundamentally fit together, but then on a more
James (27:58)
detailed level, then you get into how neuroscience, you know, they should fit together. If we’re studying the same reality through internal methods and external methods, it makes sense they would fit together. And so when you have experiences of ego dissolution and then neuroscientists, especially with psychedelic research can look at the brain and say, well, actually with the abstractions I mentioned before that it does make sense that what is the self? It’s a, it’s a, an idea. It’s a thought basically it’s a
James (28:28)
there isn’t actually a thing that exists, they inhabits the body that is the self. isn’t, yeah, an agent that owns the body. There is just this organism, which itself is a process that’s fundamentally part of reality. So even the body isn’t truly separate. But we don’t typically feel like we are the body. We feel like we kind of own it. You know, there are studies where if they hold an object close to your head versus your foot, people typically say it’s closer to them when it’s
James (28:55)
close to the head. And if you wouldn’t, if you thought you were the body, you would say it’s equally close in both, both cases. ⁓ so this seems to be a robust phenomenon that we, yeah, we feel like we are the self. ⁓ and then ego dissolution gives us a really good linchpin point to say subjectively through spiritual experience and objectively through the study of what we are as organisms, how they fit together. And I said before, how I don’t think they diminish each other. I don’t think understanding, because I guess it’s like,
James (29:23)
scientific understanding isn’t explaining away the spiritual experience, because that’s what’s most real. What it’s explaining is delusion. How is it that the brain and the organism gets itself into this confused state where it thinks it is a separate self? Like that’s the thing that is explaining, in my opinion. And so the spiritual experience is self-validating. It’s a state of just that which cannot be doubted if you’re connecting with a non-conceptual ground of reality.
James (29:48)
And then the thing you have to explain is the delusion, the usual state we live in and walk around in. Where we do think we’re a self that lives in a world with separate objects and that we’re not part of this unit of expressiveness of being.
Sam Believ (30:05)
Thank you for that explanation. you mentioned that when it came to psychedelics first for the ⁓ more of a learning, you encountered some emotional stuff coming up. ⁓ if you can share what was it and how, was it, were you able to resolve it? Were psychedelics helpful for you in that process?
James (30:26)
Yeah. Yeah. So the, ⁓ I’ll give broad strokes out of interest of, ⁓ the people involved, but it was pretty standard, ⁓ emotional challenges from childhood stuff of, you know, ⁓ and there was, yeah, kind of a reckoning with, I guess there was a sense of, if I guess the whole thing felt like a maturation process, a process of,
James (30:52)
becoming an adult, of feeling like there were these wounded childhood parts that hadn’t been integrated, and that I needed to meet them and fully accept them and witness them and bring them into my system as a whole, instead of leaving them disconnected. And so by facing memories that set up those those traumas of the yeah, let those parts feeling that way, there was a sense of increasing wholeness and this the experience itself was very much a kind of
James (31:23)
Yeah, going through memories and imagining confronting people who, who’d wronged me in a way where I felt empowered and imagined a positive, you know, had a vision of a positive resolution where I asserted myself and stood up for myself even. Which is when you’re like two and this stuff is playing out, it’s, it’s, you can’t assert yourself at that age. So imagining yourself as an adult defending your younger self, that was a big part of it. Actually. Yeah. That was a key vision was imagining young me as like a two year old adults.
James (31:52)
behaving self optimally and then me stepping in as an adult, I’m kind of standing off myself. That was very powerful. ⁓ there was also the purgative side of it, the kind of vomiting, which I found that coupled with the emotional repression was of a, a, a discomfort with that opening to just letting my body do what it wanted to do. It felt like, again, James was the, the ego in the head somewhere that was using thought to repress and control the body. And instead of allowing the body to just
James (32:21)
be this instinctive animal that wanted to vomit. There was this going into the head of just kind of like, you know, I’m only five minutes into the ceremony. If I vomit now, maybe they won’t have, you know, the dose won’t have kicked in. like, so all this analysis that’s fundamentally about repression, disconnection from emotion. I think that’s what’s really powerful with Ayahuasca as well. The, I think disgust and vomiting is such a primal, I think actually even our most primal sense of self is really based around that.
James (32:49)
maintaining our boundary of like, if I’ve ingested something that’s not me, that’s bad for me, I need to get it out of me. Like a single celled organism needs to get stuff in and out of its membrane. Like I think that’s maybe the most primal layer of our sense of self. And so it really allowed me to go into that terrain of the most kind of deep emotional repressiveness and to feel into that threshold between what is it to feel like an abstracted.
James (33:15)
identity who represses emotion versus to feel like an animal that’s allowed to be itself and to express itself. so yeah, there’s a lot of emotional catharsis, ⁓ with that stuff. And I think it is pretty standard. mean, you’re the one who you’ve seen a lot of this stuff more than me, but it felt very, like, yeah, acquire standard healings, like a, a wasp experience. And then the group shares as well as part of as well, which was also very healing to just be witnessed in describing this stuff to other people.
James (33:43)
I had a really nice group I was with. Yeah.
Sam Believ (33:50)
So what do you think is the potential for psychedelics? Can they be not good in the society or what do you think?
James (34:02)
Yeah, so I think, I think they should absolutely be part of mainstream society in terms of saying society would embrace them is my still my my thinking. And I think the evangelism people can have with psychedelics, where there’s excitement that this is the answer. I understand why that’s the case, because, you know, I think I described before how we we kind of perceive ourselves to be separate from the rest of universe, and humans make this mistaken perception.
James (34:31)
least in the modern world that we’re separate from nature, we’re superior to it. Interhuman violence happens when we are the people and we don’t see them as like ourselves. So separation, perceived separation, where actually there isn’t separation, the reality as whole. That is the engine of discord, suffering, yeah, in the whole world. But it’s this fractal picture where it’s from this individual all the way up to society and our connection with nature. I think separation is the issue. so coming into connection,
James (34:59)
wholeness, the wholeness that’s already here in the present moment, just mindfully orienting again and again to that wholeness is the solution. And psychedelics can really do that in a way that if your brain and your body is locked up through trauma, you know, in my case, I can’t know if it’s true that I needed it, but it really helped to have these tools. felt like I needed it basically, I needed to soften up my brain to really let myself access these traumas.
James (35:25)
And so, and when I say soften up my brain, I’m talking there about the plasticity and stuff that can make it sound like they have a damaging effect on the brain, which is not what I’m saying. so yeah, I think that’s, there’s absolutely reason to have excitement in that, in thinking that way. But then, you know, the sixties happened and that’s, really had this effect of going from the individual to the social, but it was, it was boxed back in afterwards and
James (35:54)
I can feel the boxing in happening already with this kind of psychedelic renaissance in scientific research, I can feel it being channeled into the least revolutionary versions of what it could become in terms of changing society and the world for the better. And so I think given that fractal structure, without people being kind of socially engaged and really kind of quite radical in how they’re thinking about the context in which we’re using these substances, I think they won’t be
James (36:23)
that transformative. And also when you’re, when you’re not taking that wide view, that’s also where it’s difficult to, we don’t have the networks of care that we’re supposed to have as social primates. We’re supposed to have like living, totally new communities with lots of room for care and breathing room. And without that, that can lead to kind of neurotic, egoic struggling and difficulty in surrendering because you don’t have the right level of care. So then you can get abusive practitioners and you can get
James (36:52)
just stuff spiraling out of, know, in ways that we don’t want. So I have that, I still have that sympathy for it, but it’s not a slam dunk. Like it’s not like psychedelics alone are gonna heal the world because it’s a, there are other facets that need to be, need to be factored in.
Sam Believ (37:12)
So you mentioned neuroplasticity, which is one of the ways they explain how the healing and change happens in your brain through psychedelics. But you you drink ayahuasca six hours after it’s out of your system. How come we have changes ⁓ that, ⁓ for some people, persist for entire life? So what’s the neuroscientific perspective on that?
James (37:39)
Yeah, so I mean, the when these things enter the system, they interact with receptors on neurons, particular parts of the brain and very specific pathways. And when they induce plasticity, the even though this the substance can can leave the system, things have been set in motion. So and then when there’s plasticity, there’s there’s room for that, that new trajectory to to
James (38:09)
take shape over a long period of time. So there’s more thinking about this stuff in terms of complex systems, dynamical systems, systems that thinking of the brain and the body as these systems that evolve over time. Robin Harris, who’s a kind of leading figure in this stuff, he takes a lot of this kind of perspective. And in that perspective, you’re not thinking of the brain as this static object that, okay, now it’s not a drug, now it’s not a drug. It’s that it’s evolving, developing, constantly changing.
James (38:39)
Pleasicity is always happening as well throughout our entire lifetime. Like right now, our neurons are kind of wriggling and writhing as they’re reconnecting every moment. And that happens our whole lifetime. So it’s kind of like, it sets you on a new trajectory. hits the course you’re currently on. It can send you on a new course. And if that course is one that is self-reinforcing, then it could just keep going and you could just have a transformative path for the rest of your life. There’s also, you know, it’s not as simple as the
James (39:09)
connect to a receptor and then they affect the neuron and that’s it. There can be intracellular signaling cascades and there’s a whole, even individual cells, as these vast universes of complexity that we do not fully understand by any means. So there’s a lot of questions to look at there, but it’s, yeah, it’s a…
James (39:29)
The taking of, mean, people, you know, we’ll often talk about how the integration is as important as the experience itself. I think that’s true that the psychedelic itself is a moment of perturbing the system, but then the evolution of the system over time is really, it’s really the important thing.
Sam Believ (39:47)
Thank you for that explanation. ⁓
Sam Believ (39:52)
You know, we can get to the altered states through psychedelics, but also some people are able to get there naturally through meditation. What is the similarities and differences between those states? ⁓ And ⁓ what is the mechanism in which that people who are meditating can get to the same ⁓ states?
James (40:12)
Yeah, so the I was gonna my first thing was to point out how the, you the obvious thing is that psychedelics can induce these fireworks perceptually that aren’t as common with meditation, but then they do happen. And actually myself, I was on a 10 day meditation retreat once and about day nine, I started having insane DMT like experiences whenever I close my eyes, it was like my body dissolved was exploding, there’s colors everywhere. It was really intense. I was very surprised.
James (40:41)
at that time, I think at that point, as you hadn’t tried DMT, it was only after the fact that it seemed similar. And so, I mean, if you take something like you give a solution in both cases, you can, so you go back to this hierarchy of abstractions in the brain, and people may have heard of the default mode network, which is kind of sits at the top of this hierarchy, which is kind of the puppeteer that connects our kind of memories and our orienting in the present moment and towards thought and to kind of thinking through
James (41:11)
past and future and who I am like all that stuff is it kind of sits at the top of the hierarchy and psychedelics, the receptors that psychedelics act on are very densely expressed in those brain areas. So they, they, they perturb the activity there. They soften and, and, ⁓ lead to you holding on less tightly to your, your interpretations, you know, so you take someone who’s very depressed and the main way people think about psychedelics now is, is in terms of
James (41:38)
the state before psychedelics as being one, if you’re suffering with some mental health issue, like depression, I mean, there’s obviously a lot of different issues, but it can be a state of rigidity where you’re set in some, some ruts where like, just have your, your habitual patterns, ways of being that aren’t serving you, but you’re, you’re just stuck in them. And then psychedelics basically allow you a lot more flexibility to check in and be like, well, actually is this serving me? Is this true? So someone who, ⁓
James (42:05)
found a useful coping mechanism to be pessimistic and to be self-critical and to not have aspirations because they learned that whenever they had aspirations, they felt they failed or say, for example, they had traumatic experiences that led them to internalize this sense that they’re not someone who succeeds. If you’re repeating that story to yourself decade after decade, despite the fact that maybe by that point, you are actually a very competent person who could achieve things, but you’re still repeating this story because it feels safe, even though it feels unpleasant and you’re in pain.
James (42:35)
and your wellbeing’s not great. The system wants to keep you surviving. It’s mainly interested in like, if you’re still getting food and you’re not dying, then we’ll keep with this story because it’s good enough for survival rather than flourishing. So then when you have the psychedelic, you have the opportunity where maybe that thought arises of like, ⁓ I shouldn’t go for that job because I’m not, I won’t get it. And then that moment, just the system isn’t as, you don’t go so rapidly from thought to like, yes, that’s true.
James (43:05)
Instead, there’s a lot more flexibility to be like, well, is it true? Like, actually, maybe let’s question that. Let’s think of that. actually, there’s these memories that are associated. It kind of expands the whole thing, allows you to investigate the connections. And then to maybe, well, actually, last week, I did something that I succeeded in. I can update this belief I have about myself. So in that way, psychedelics can really…
James (43:26)
allow you to go in and reprogram the highest levels of this hierarchy. And then with meditation, you’re doing a similar thing where it just so happens that you can use the circuitry of the brain itself. You can use attention to modify the same brain circuits. And so the trajectory will be different. You probably wouldn’t have those same, you know, experiences that unfold over the course of minutes they do in psychedelics, but you can suppress activity in the default mode network. And so if you take a high enough dose of a psychedelic, you could
James (43:56)
not only start to have a flexible sense of self, could absolutely dissolve your sense of
Sam Believ (44:27)
Yeah, definitely. There is many ways to get to that mountain. take a, you can hike and you can take a bike or ⁓ I was, cause a helicopter takes you straight to the top, but then you can kind of, you’re going to go back again. So it’s a temporary thing as opposed to maybe other slower methods. ⁓ James, thank you so much for sharing and teaching us about those concepts. I think it was really.
Sam Believ (44:55)
educational. So where can people find more about you and more about your work and maybe where can they buy your book?
Sam Believ (45:54)
Cool, James. So thank you guys for listening and check out James’ stuff. He obviously knows a lot about the topic. James, it was pleasure to talking to you. And guys, I will see you in the next episode.