Psychedelics in the 21st Century and How to Use Them

UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript is provided in its raw, unedited form and may contain errors. We have not proofread this transcript, so it may include typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this rough transcript as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session. 

 

Tami Simon:  In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Zach Leary. Zach is a teacher, speaker, writer, and spiritual explorer with one of the most iconic legacies in psychedelic history, being the son of pioneering psychologist and LSD advocate Timothy Leary. Zach is a psychedelic facilitator and guide. He hosts the MAPS podcast. He’s a trained meditation teacher and an IFS coach, and he’s the author of a new book with Sounds True. It’s called Your Extraordinary Mind: Psychedelics in the 21st Century and How to Use Them. Zach, welcome. 

 

Zach Leary: Thanks, Tami. So thrilled to be with you. Thank you for having me. 

 

TS: Now you attempted as a Leary to not be right in the center of the psychedelic movement, yet that’s where you’ve found yourself. How did that happen? 

 

ZL: Yes, I did attempt with all my might and effort to get as far away as it from it as possible. I mean, it happened, you know. When you grow up with somebody with that big of a presence, you know, um, you know, a lot of people of course like to ask, oh, what was it like to grow up with Leary?

And of course there are so many wonderful stories I could share and so many amazing advantages and opportunities and exposures that were just amazing to be around. But it does come with a dark side as well. It really does. I mean, being in the, the, in kind of the underneath the sun that shines that bright, um, it’s very hard to find your own identity.

To find your own voice and to find your own dharma. You know, it’s, um, by default you also always get associated with that. And when he left his body, I really had no idea who I was. You know, I, I was just kind of flailing in the wind and, uh, didn’t know who I was other than I was his son and had no sense of purpose or direction, or I.

Or, uh, you know, really kind of a path that was my own that I felt I could articulate and live up to. So, uh, when I finally did, came time to make a decision, I went somewhere else completely. I worked in digital marketing and advertising for a number of years, and, uh, was somewhat successful at it, you know, at least from an external level and how we measure things in the American Western ethos of what success looks like.

And I did check some of those boxes off. But one day I woke up pretty miserable and felt spiritually empty and bankrupt, and I decided to go visit Ram Dass, who I hadn’t visited. I hadn’t seen him since he moved to Maui, so it’d been almost five years. And I’d spent so much time with him growing up and I just thought something called inside of me said, you know, Zach, go visit RD.

It’s time. And there was something about that visit to RD where my relationship with him changed, uh, his presence and um, role in my life changed. And it was the first time that I viewed him as my teacher and mentor. And there was just something about that visit where everything just shifted. And I woke up one morning in Maui in his house, uh, and I had this vision, um, of me well into my seventies and telling myself, seeing myself, gosh, if you stay on this path that you’re on now, you’re gonna wake up in your seventies miserable, wondering where your life had gone.

So to make a very long story short, that didn’t end up in me just working in psychedelics right away. But that ended up in me taking a different path entirely, and that slowly morphed into welcoming the psychedelic ecosystem back into my life. Um, and yeah, here I’m here I am. So it’s partly thanks to Ram Dass, partly thanks to revisiting psychedelic medicines myself, and partly thanks to having kind of a spiritual crisis that I hope everyone has in one shit form or another, because that kind of sense of suffering really does, uh, wake you up to something new.

 

TS: Well, I think you’re probably right on time that most people are having some kind of spiritual crisis as they’re listening to this. So, now Zach, you say towards the beginning of your new book, Your Extraordinary Mind, that it’s important that we learn from the history of psychedelics and that here we are in this new time. Some people are calling it the psychedelic renaissance or revival, but let’s make sure we bring with us the lessons from history and perhaps no one is better in some ways to share with us the lessons from history. You saw it up close and personal. What are the most important lessons you think we need to have in our awareness? 

 

ZL: I did see it up close and personal and you know, within the last few years I started to notice this trend when I was going to psychedelic conferences and speaking that a lot of younger people who are newer to the psychedelic movement today, they’re kind of not so aware of the first round of icons of the psychedelic movement.

I mean, they know them by name, but they’re not really familiar with their work and their contributions and, and to me that seems startling. You know, I found it very odd that I’d go to a psychedelic conference and nobody really knew about the works of Terrence McKenna or the psychedelic work of Leary and Alpert and, and Humphry Osmond and those guys, and I was, that’s really interesting. So I really kind of took it upon myself to, you know, that’s part of my mission is to keep, is to be a legacy holder in a way, and to keep, um, those teachings and that fervor for, uh, consciousness exploration alive and well. And I think those are really the lessons. I think it’s no small thing to go back and look at some of the work of these early men and women in that movement and to really feel like the fire that was burning inside of them, I mean, being on the edge of consciousness, exploration, spiritual growth, um, kind of a re-expansion and reinvention of psychology, which was what early psychedelic research really was, um, and how radical that was at the time.

You know, we take it for granted today when, look, there are publishing houses like Sounds True, which are filled with all sorts of expansive ideas and concepts and practices and methods and stuff like that. But in the early ’60s, you know, nobody had ever heard of that stuff, you know, at all. It was considered really fringe and radical and for these guys to come along and introduce these medicines, these drugs into their, into their repertoire, really just, you know, blew the culture wide open. So it’s really that, you know, it’s just really kind of giving homage and just being really cognizant of the impact that these men and women had on, um, our, on our culture. 

 

TS: In addition to respect, honoring, homage, what do you think are the key, if you will, so we don’t repeat mistakes that were made—if you think there were mistakes made at that time, like let’s, let’s, let’s learn from history. 

 

ZL: I do think that there were mistakes made at that time.  It would be naive of me to say otherwise. You know, I think there were more successes than there were mistakes. You know, I don’t think, you know, some people in the modern psychedelic renaissance kind of poke the bear in saying, oh, well psychedelics leaked, leaked from the laboratory and went into the mass public.

And that created a lot of unsafe use and reckless use, which ruined legitimate psychedelic research and all these types of things. And that’s fine and I understand that argument. But, you know, I think the success is far away that, but as far as the mistakes go, um, you know, I think a huge part of the problem, Tami, was that I — when Psychedelics did, kind of, the Pandora’s Box opened, um, from 19, say 63 through 69, um, it happened in such a radically fast way. You know, it was so fast that I don’t think our society was prepared for that many people to be turning on in such a large number. There wasn’t much of a guidebook, there was no education, there was no, you know, so it was kind of a crapshoot.

Everybody was just kinda shooting in the dark. So yes, there was a lot of unsafe use and a reckless use, and people didn’t know what it is that they were getting into. So I think that’s number one. Uh, had we had a better blueprint for safe and, uh, wise and compassionate use in 1963 through 69, whatever, I think a lot of the psychedelic problems that we saw in the 60th probably wouldn’t have existed. So that’s probably, that’s what I’d put at the top of the list. 

 

TS: Now, the subtitle, interestingly, of your new book is a response to this gap, if you could say “Psychedelics in the 21st Century and How to Use Them” and, you know, in a, in a way, the book is a beautiful education offering. You’re saying here, we didn’t have a blueprint. We can amass one now. We’ve learned a lot. Let me offer you a blueprint. I think that’s part of what you do with Your Extraordinary Mind, and you do it beautifully. And at the beginning you say we need to get educated about specific compounds. 

 

ZL: Mm-hmm. 

 

TS: We can’t just lump them all together, not knowing what we’re talking about. And I wonder if you’d be willing here at the beginning of our conversation, as part of just the fundamentals of our conversation, there are five compounds plus ketamine that you cover in Your Extraordinary Mind. Would you be willing to introduce them to us like you were introducing us to a friend? A friend?

 

ZL: Absolutely. Uh, it’s a funny way of asking that question. I don’t think I’ve ever been asked it like that, and I do really appreciate it. Um, I wanna preface it by saying there are, um, exponentially more compounds than that. Uh, I just chose to write about those ’cause they are the most popular, they’re the most kind of, uh, accessible in our current kind of landscape.

And they have all kind of been lumped in together under this umbrella of psychedelics. Right? And I think that’s kind of, sort of out of convenience in a way. Um, ’cause an argument could be made that a couple of them aren’t really psychedelic, but they’re kind of in that category, but they’re kind of not. So it is kind of a strange thing. 

So yeah, let’s start with MDMA. I think if I was introducing MDMA as my friend, MDMA is the most loving and compassionate and heart expanding friend that, you know. Um, it is a very embodiment of heart expansion, of self-forgiveness, of discovering the most authentic parts of your heart and soul.

And it really takes you to that place of being able to experience unconditional love. For a limited amount of time. You do have to come down. And what you do with that exposure to unconditional love like that in that way, um, then the rest is up to you. Um, so that’s how I would introduce MDMA, um, extremely, uh, effective for treating trauma, um, and other sort of aches and pains of this thing that we call being alive in the material world and suffering and grief. MDMA is very effective at reconciling a lot of that.

Mushrooms, psilocybin mushrooms, um, perhaps the oldest compound that we know of on planet Earth as far as we know. Humans and even our ancestors, uh, pre-human, pre homo sapien have been using psychedelic mushrooms, uh, since the dawn of time. They are indigenous to literally every single corner of the globe. And, um, and I think because of that, there is an essence to psychedelic mushrooms, to psilocybin mushrooms, that it’s perhaps the wisest friend that you know, it is that person that is truly the wise elder who’s sitting in the corner of the room. If you really want to go and get a, a connection to the wisdom of the ages of the human experience. That’s how I would introduce mushrooms as. 

With the plant medicines, uh, ayahuasca, also as old as mushrooms. Indigenous cultures have been using ayahuasca for a couple thousand years, as we know of probably longer, especially in the Americas, central and South America. Um, ayahuasca is also wise, but it is also, um, can be a little bit perhaps extraterrestrial in the sense that indigenous cultures believe that there are disembodied teachers who live in the Ayahuasca vine and they call it grandmother ia. And, uh, and they believe that there’s an actual teacher who lives in this vine who is there to gift you with ancestral wisdom and to put you to confront you with the joys and terrors of the human experience and perhaps, uh, allowing you to make contact with something else as well. 

Uh, what else? That’s three of those.

LSD. Know the M as well. Yeah, I think LSD if I’m introducing it as a friend, is probably like that friend of yours who you might be jealous of. Because he, she, or they is just so wild and unhinged and free and creative and a mystic and full of talent and can, um, turn on the drop of a dime from being an incredible musician and storyteller to being a shocking and terrifying artist of some kind. So LSD might be your most artistic, but also your most unpredictable friend, uh, that you know of. 

And what else? And, oh, ketamine. I think that’s what we wanted. 

And DMT. OK. DMT, um, DMT is a… it’s also a component of ayahuasca. DMT is the active ingredient in ayahuasca. But when you isolate DMT and just use it on its own, it’s a, the short acting, uh, tryptamine that’s found within ayahuasca, but it’s very short, very powerful. The most powerful, psychedelic known to man, DMT and 5-MeO-DMT. It’s cousin, um, which is extracted from the Sonoran Desert Toad referred to as Bufo. And the most powerful, uh, psychedelic, uh, that 10 to 15 minutes in that space is a complete ego disillusion, will take you to another plane of existence and will have you questioning reality and whatever you think reality is in a split second. So I think that if I’m introducing it as a friend, it’s that friend that you’re really curious about when they come over for dinner, but there’s something completely terrifying about them. Um, so that’s DMT. 

Ketamine. Ketamine’s a weird one because I think by definition ketamine is not a psychedelic; it’s a dissociative anesthetic that used under lower doses elicits psychedelic properties. Dr. John C. Lilly, the great scientist who was a close family friend, uh, discovered the psychedelic properties of, of ketamine in the sixties and seventies. He also invented the flotation tank as well, and he saw that, uh, there is something about that dissociative, psychedelic effect that can be a very profound tool for inner voyaging.

I think if I’m introducing ketamine as a friend, uh, it’s that maybe you might know a therapist in your life who comes over who really might have some keys to a much more clinical and kind of regulated form of self-improvement, who isn’t so, you know, wacky and unhinged and wild-eyed, mystic wonderland kind of guy, but is safe and measured and very effective.

 

TS: Thanks Zach for starting there and I realize for some people who may be like, we know all this, come on, let’s get going. But for other people, I think it’s really important because one of your points at the beginning of Your Extraordinary Mind is, know what you’re getting into.

 

ZL: Yeah. 

 

TS: Educate yourself properly on what these different compounds are and their various effects and dosages, and make sure you know the source of what you’re getting as well. That it’s a pure resource. And I don’t know if you wanna speak to that for a moment here. I’m just trying to lay out the fundamentals of how to use them safely and effectively in the 21st century. 

 

ZL: Yeah. Well, no, I mean that, that was part of it. Um, when you, about the mistakes we made and the first round of things, and that wasn’t just the sixties that extends, in fact, extends all the way today into today, but was really prominent in the eighties and nineties, impure compounds. Um, because of the, the illegality of psychedelics. Um, especially with the synthetics, the demand outweighed the supply. And these aren’t necessarily easy molecules to make, especially with the synthetics like LSD, MDMA, um, you know, and that invited in a lot of bad actors who could sort of make it, but not completely in its full, uh, potency and purity, which introduces, and it’s, that’s the same thinking if you want to talk about the fentanyl crisis in America today, right? With heroin. And we could talk about the dangers of heroin and all that. That’s one thing. But we can all agree that fentanyl laced heroin is exponentially more dangerous. So having impure MDMA, which we refer to as Molly or ecstasy and all these club things, created a wealth of problems, um, around, uh, the misinformation around these compounds.

So when I’m talking about these compounds, I am talking, it’s assumed that we are talking about a hundred percent pure unadulterated versions of these things. And I do provide resources in my book. Um, there are companies out there, one called Dance Safe, that allows you to get a testing kit at home. So in case you do come on, come up to these compounds you can test at home, check its purity and things like that.

So that is one, you know, when in all of this conversation and anytime we kind of veer into these things, you know, the umbrella that we look at it through is harm reduction. Right? It’s, uh, a very safe assumption to say that human beings have been using intoxicants since the dawn of time. And that is not going to change anytime soon.

So I do put psychedelics in a generalized category like that because I think it’s really important that we look at it as a holistic, global issue of humans are going to use mind and wound altering chemicals. So if they are, why not provide them with the safest route to go? 

 

TS: Now right here in establishing the fundamentals, you also add on to the notion of set and setting.

 

ZL: Yes. 

 

TS: This idea of sustainability, because I think a lot of people have heard of set and setting. But I want to hear it from you, Zach, because I learned a lot in the way that you presented it. But then I wanna move into this notion of sustainability and why you think this is so important. Starting, uh, with the notion of set you, you talk a lot about intention and it’s not enough just to say, I’m curious. Like really? Why can’t I just say I am curious? Why do I need to clarify as part of my mind set? As part of the set? This very strong intention. 

 

ZL: Yeah, I mean, look, it is, I, I’m, I think I did perhaps, you know, maybe overemphasize that being merely curious is, is, is a good thing, but it’s a good starting point. But I highly recommend that you dig a level deeper and say, OK, I’m curious, but why am I curious? Like, OK, well, is curiosity enough or is there something that I could perhaps get out of this if I’m going to embark on my curiosity and listen to that curiosity? So the next level of that is intention; is taking that curiosity and turning it into perhaps a blueprint for your own exploration.

And that’s what I mean by that. Um, and uh, setting is the place where you do it, the physical environment, you know, and who you’re surrounded with, where you do it, and the energy in the room and all those kinds of things. And, um, but what you asked about, you know, so. And what I noticed in researching this book, and which also in parallel with the last kind of 10 years of psychedelic, um, expansion that I’ve seen is that, you know, I went back and I revisited a lot of the early works of the psychedelic pioneers and there’s no mention of integration.

It’s almost absent. It’s conspicuously, absent from all the original psychedelic books, there really wasn’t any talk of integration. And integration is OK, you had this experience, so now what? Now what are you gonna do with it? Right. And in today’s psychedelic community, I mean, gosh, there are entire courses on psychedelic integrations and certifications and different methods, and there are psychedelic integration therapists, and it’s this whole specialized cottage industry.

So when I was writing this book, um, I also took a little bit of creative liberty because my dad and Richard Albert—Ram Dass—did come up with a concept of set and setting. And given that I’m his son and Ram Dass was my teacher, I felt if there was anyone who could add to the set and setting paradigm, it was me. I kind of felt like, OK, I think I’m OK with that. It’s a little presumptuous, a little, you know, kind of an arrogant thing to do. But I’m, I made peace with it. And so I was kinda batting the idea around with, um, my partner, uh, my partner Heather was also a psychedelic therapist about this whole thing of integration and adding on to set and setting and, you know, my whole kind of thing.

And being a facilitator, my passion is really extracting every last drop from each and every psychedelic experience and turning it into something meaningful. And we were talking one day and she said, sustainability. That’s it. That’s the third S and I was like, yes, that’s it. So that’s what set and setting and sustainability is.

It’s um, it’s not just a word. It’s also a framework that allows you to take these insights, take these expansions, take these downloads, and turn them into action, turn them into something tangible so the experience can be meaningful, spiritually expansive, and pragmatic. 

 

TS: Let’s talk more about this notion of turning the insights into action. 

 

ZL: Hmm. 

 

TS: Because I think a lot of times when people hear a word like integration— 

 

ZL: Mm-hmm. 

 

TS: They think, oh, I’m gonna kind of weave this new thing in and understand it, but does that mean that I’m going to behave differently, act differently? So how, how do we take the insights and using your word, turn them into behaving, acting, functioning differently? 

 

ZL: Hmm. So there are a lot of ways to go about this. There is no one singular method, um, for integration. It’s really kind of a hodge-podge of different applications and methods ranging from traditional med meditation to breathwork, to Internal Family Systems, to, um, sharing with others to going into integration circles, to journaling, to creating music, to creating art.

It’s a number of things, and really finding a combination of things that works for you best. One thing that we’ve learned, excuse me, through the expand, the myriad of psychedelic research that’s happened in the last 10 years is the five to 10 days after a psychedelic experience is when the neuroplasticity alterations that have are occurring in your brain are the most malleable.

That is when these compounds have opened up your brain to allow for new neuronal networks to form. And new neuronal networks can come in the form of new ways of, of relating to your emotional intelligence, perhaps behaviors that you wanna break, that you’ve been stuck in for a long time, for, um, creative endeavors that you’d like to expand upon to ways of reinterpreting and reprocessing your trauma.

You know, so there’s kind of this window after a psychedelic experience where kind of anything’s possible. I. Right. And by giving people a tool, set, the user, the Voyager, a tool set to take what’s possible and to turn these downloads into action is what they mean. So on a practical sense, that means, you know, working possibly with your guide, your therapist, your facilitator, your shaman in writing down what it is that happened during this journey.

You know, the things that you said, the things that you felt, um. Perhaps it didn’t come in the form of language. Perhaps it came in the form of a somatic alteration. A somatic release. What does that mean? What does that feel? Was it metaphorically relevant to you? And, and really taking the time to process all of these things after the journey and turning them into little kind of like pockets and wells of awareness, you know?

So that’s what I mean. I know that sounds kind of lofty, but when, again, when it goes back to intention, if you go into a psychedelic experience for a very specific reason, you can perhaps come up with a new game plan for treating that intention, for making good on that intention afterwards that you previously might not have considered.

 

TS: Zach, I pulled out this quote from Your Extraordinary Mind as you were describing about this notion of sustainability. I wanna, I wanna read it to you. “It’s my belief that the experience while on psychedelics is not the work in and of itself. It’s the fertilization stage that creates the embryo for the real work that comes after.”

 

ZL: That’s right. Yeah. I mean, look, anyone, anyone can take a bunch of mushrooms and go sit in the desert and have an experience and be like, wow, OK. But that’s not really, you know, that doesn’t require, I mean, sure it requires kind of a certain emotional stability and you know, a strong set, but that doesn’t really require any really effort.

It requires some surrender and things like that. But, um. So that’s what I mean, like the experience in and of itself is just an experience. You know, anyone can do that. But I would say that most psychedelic experiences have something in common in that they are unadulterated, honest. They will show you the inner workings of your human condition and of your incarnation that are just the raw truth. The inescapable truth. And that can be a very difficult thing to take a look at. You know? Um, you know, our wounds, our fears, our insecurities, uh, also what it is that we’re good at. You know, what it is that makes us shine. What, what it is that I know I’m really good at, but I’m afraid to express in the world.

Why do I feel like, uh, I’m so, I default to staying small and things like that. So that’s kind of what I mean by that. These things lay kind of little fertile, little seeds in you that it’s up to you afterwards to water them to help ’em grow. 

 

TS: I thought one of your very concrete practices related to integration that I really liked was to reflect on the voyage you’ve been on, and if there have been, let’s say, three highlights of insights that occurred, then to specifically lay out what you are going to do about it starting now, related to those insights, the actions you’re gonna take, and then start taking them in this formation of new micro habits. I thought that was just really like right on like, let’s turn this into action. Just like that. 

 

ZL: Thank you. Thank you. 

 

TS: I know it’s not that easy to do it and follow through, but at least that lays it out for people, what the work is, what the path is. 

 

ZL: It does, and it’s just a way for us loosely to create a little bit of a working blueprint, blueprint slash relationship with these realizations, you know?

And it’s also worth noting, too, that our bigger psychedelic experiences, maybe the dosage might be slightly larger, they, you might come out of that journey with it being completely ephemeral. You have no words for it, you can’t quite describe it. Um, and that’s OK too. That takes a while to kind of figure out and to put it in its right place as well.

So there’s kind of a balancing act. There’s kind of a cosmic dance between all of it, you know, as, uh, Ram Dass would say, you know, spiritual practice is not about trying to figure it all out. You know, we’re not here to figure it all out. We’re here to open our hearts. 

 

TS: Alright, Zach, let’s talk about bad trips. You say that the causes of bad trips are, the compound wasn’t pure or there was a problem with the set and setting, couldn’t there be other reasons why I will just encounter a really quote, unquote bad, or you could say difficult, or you could say extraordinarily painful trip, even with a pure substance and even with a strong intention in a terrific setting?

 

ZL: Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Um, and I just do wanna state for, for the record, um, it’s just semantics, but we’re kind of changing the language here. We’re calling them challenging experiences now and not bad trips because sometimes even the most challenging experience when, which may be frightening can later turn into an extraordinarily rewarding realization.

 

TS: I’m glad you pointed that out. I think that’s really important. I think that’s really important. So, so the use of that language bad trip would be reserved for what kind of thing? Or would you never use that language? 

 

ZL: I don’t really use that language anymore because… 

 

TS: OK. 

 

ZL: …that kind of creates sort of this corner in the kind of American vernacular of like, oh, if you take these, you’re gonna have a bad trip and it will ruin your life and you’re never gonna come back, or something like that.

So I instead, I use it like, you know, instead it’s, it’s also about being very honest and not sugarcoating it. Even with the best preparation and the best guide and the best shaman in the whole world and the best compounds, you still might have a challenging experience and nobody is immune from that.

That can happen to anyone. Um, it’s not always likely, but it can happen. So it’s more about just being really honest about that and really kind of giving people insight into the reasons why that might happen. Yes, there’s the low hanging fruit impure compound set and setting warrant. In the right place to be doing it anyway, all those kinds of things, right?

But those are all kind of 101 things. But aside from that, um, you know, I think that the majority of challenging experiences come from Voyagers being confronted with an aspect of themselves or their life or their past, or their deepest, most inner workings of what it means to be alive that is really terrifying to take a look at. It’s really, really hard to see that. 

I can speak for myself. I’m a recovering substance abuse user from other. From hard drugs, and I’ve had  psychedelic experiences that put me face to face with the horrifying realities of the things that I did on in my active addiction, you know, and that in my waking state, sure I see them, but I’m not confronted with them in that way.

And the  psychedelic experiences magnifies sometimes a thousand. But the benefits of that is that it really created a lot of distance from it. And thus, you know, giving me the inspiration to not go back to being that person, you know, when you really see it’s, it’s, it’s kind of classic Jungian shadow side stuff, you know?

There’s a lot of benefits. Uh, I mean, Jung wrote whole books on, on the shadow, and when you unearth that shadow, that can lead to the most profound transformation. 

 

TS: OK, Zach, I have to go here. I wanna be delicate, which is, it’s one thing to have challenging experiences where we’re confronting dark material in our shadow that’s really hard for us to work out. Wow. That is a difficult truth. And in Your Extraordinary Mind, you tell some really inspiring stories and I wanna make sure we get to them about transformations that happen in people’s lives that generate tremendous freedom. Freedom from addiction, freedom to face dying in a new kind of way with the type of trust and confidence.

And here’s the part that is hard to talk about, but also we hear, I hear, about some tragedies that have happened that occurred for people psychologically. And I wonder, how do I, what do I do? Do I just say, look, everything in life has a risk and you know it’s, life has risks and these terrific benefits that come, yes, there are the possible risks of that your psyche’s gonna get blown up in some kind of way that you’re not gonna be able to put it together again. Or is that just fear stories? Or, you know, look, you, you host the podcast on MAPS, you’ve been there, you’ve heard it all. You can help us. Your book is about harm reduction. How do you approach it?

 

ZL: Well, yeah, it’s a fair question, Tami, and I certainly, I’m glad that you asked it. Um, I am, and you know, being someone who’s emer, enmeshed in this culture, you know, I am not one to say, oh yeah, these are completely 100% safe and they’re suitable for everyone. Uh, they’re not. Uh, however, I do think that the risks in terms of people being coming through the other end and ending up further destabilized or having their psyches blown completely open and never coming back, that is in the vast minority of experiences.

I mean, the vast minority. Sure it happens. And I could speculate onto why that happens. You know, I think it comes down to psychedelics aren’t right for everybody. Not at least not at any given moment, you know? And people rush into it far too quickly with too big a dosage or maybe are suffering from some other mental health issues or something.

But I do think it is in the vast minority. I would, if we surveyed, you know, a thousand mushroom users, I would think, you know, you know, less than 1% of them would say, gosh, that was, you know, whatever, a hellish thing that I never wanna revisit again, but yes, um, it does, unlike other, I consider psychedelics to be a spiritual practice and/or method in a way.

It’s not the same as like, say, meditation or breathwork, which is something you can do every day, but it is still a method of some kind. And, you know, other methods don’t carry, I mean, what’s the risk of meditating every day? Not much. Right? It’s pretty, pretty safe, you know? Um, so yeah, I mean, it is possible. But again, I think the data speaks for itself in brief. 

 

TS: What’s the right self-assessment to say, you know, this is, it’s not, it’s contraindicated because of where I am right now in my life, or No, you know, come on, go for it. You’re fine. You’re just a little bit afraid. 

 

ZL: I think the right self-assessment is to, and this is one of the beauties of the internet today. Um, you know, there are a lot of dark shadowy corners of the internet today, but one of the beauties of it is there are a tremendous amount of resources out there to help educate you and to create a framework about whether or not you want to go into this. If you feel like you cannot arrive on that place on your own, find the others.

Find a psychedelic-assisted therapist. Find if you, if that’s, or at least a therapist at a psychedelic friendly, and they might not serve you the medicine, but they can coach you. Go to your local psychedelic community meetup. Every major city in America and in the West has a psychedelic society. Go talk to the others who have had these experiences and really, you know, create a human dynamic about ex uh, exploration.

 

TS: “Find the others.” That’s a phrase. That’s a phrase from your father? 

 

ZL: It is, but I use it liberally. 

 

TS: Yeah. It’s a great phrase. Now, you mentioned a little bit about your own history with addiction and how psychedelics were helpful in that regard. I’m curious, what’s your sense of how the psychedelic experience, if it’s turned into something sustainable, how it works? And you could speak from your own life experience such that the root of the addiction is actually getting seen and resolved. How, how do you see that?

 

ZL: Um, well, I think most addiction scholars and anyone ranging from like, say Gabor Maté to, you know, anyone else, any of the great kind of modern addiction scholars of today, as well as people who are in recovery will tell you that their substance abuse use didn’t have so much to do with just loving the drug and you couldn’t stop putting it down. Sure. That played a part of it. Yeah. I like the way heroin and crack made me feel at one point, but that’s not really why I did it. You know? Um, most of us, I mean, there’s certainly that, that gene inside of us. I do definitely, I have a, you know, a dopamine abnormality that, you know, when I use opiates, my body responds to it differently than other people.

That is a core component of it, but the majority of it is that there is an unspoken trauma amount of grief, um, component of my shadow that I am just afraid to get in touch with and to get naked and to dance with it. And instead of getting naked and dancing with it and really confronting it and working it out, I need to numb it out.

And that’s my only… what I feel is my only solution, at least in that moment. And substance abuse is a very effective method for that, unfortunately. Um, it’s very effective at numbing you out of creating emotional neutrality for a really long time. You’re not too happy, you’re not too down. You’re just kind of there and coasting through life and escaping through life.

And, uh, it’s a really sad reality to wake up years into and find out that you’ve been in that. And when you use psychedelics to explore the nature of how that manifests in your life, it’s a radical, radical thing. It’s, uh, radically uncomfortable, um, radically honest, but beautifully in its transformational properties of showing you where it is that you’re stuck. Yeah. 

 

TS: Would you be willing to say more about that from a personal revelatory perspective? 

 

ZL: Sure. Um, so at the end of a relapse, um, I was, you know, well on my path, Tami, you know, here I was done well this time with Ram Dass and Jack Kornfield, all these great luminaries and thought I was just, had all this information and all this wisdom and look at me at my spiritual ego and spiritual materialism is so high and go to India all the time.

And then I ended up relapsing in my drug of choice and, um. And, uh, it was just horrifying, you know, incredibly sad and painful and a blow to the ego ’cause I thought, like I had knowledge and it occurred to me one day that, you know, I think maybe if I revisit the mushroom here, it can show me something.

And I did. Um, and it, the best way I could describe it is that it played two simultaneously projected movies of me, of my life. I had the drug free, addict, free, fully, kind of actualized version of Zach’s self over there. Happy, joyous, and free, not addicted. Living. Living his dharma. And then I had this person over there, you know, who was horribly addicted, doing terrible things to continue to get the drugs and to stay high and kind of showing them simultaneously side by side.

And it clearly showed me which one I wanted to gravitate towards, but it did also show me like the reality of, this woman I was engaged in, the way I was hurting myself, the way that I was hurting others, and really just created this palpable, energetic shift inside of me, of the person that I didn’t wanna become anymore. Really hard to look at, you know, it’s, I just don’t recommend that for everybody at all. Um, it’s definitely not a solution for beginners, but it did give me sort of a cosmic jolt of the reality of my predicament that it’s what I needed to see. 

 

TS: It was so powerful that it led to an integration of that seeing for you?

 

ZL: It did. It did. Yes. It was so powerful that it led to an integration of that and, uh, yeah, and a relationship with, for me, it was kind of like a relationship with, uh, the fragility of sort of the way that I feel that I’m built. I’m not saying I’m terminally unique, but it just, I kind of feel, you know, I’m extremely sensitive. Just certain like parameters of the way that my human vessel was created that are hard to reconcile with incredibly sensitive, um, sort of, it’s a great thing that, uh, one of my favorite 12 step speakers says is addicts are egomaniacs with inferiority complexes. You know, and that speaks true to me. You know, and just little things about how I’m hardwired that coming to terms with that, uh, ended up being a, a wise road. 

 

TS: You know, one of my favorite sections, Zach, of Your Extraordinary Mind is the section on psychedelics and death and dying. And you start that section by pointing out that there are parallels between experiences. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that, the parallels between the dying experience and the psychedelic journey. 

 

ZL: Am I allowed to say a bad word on this show? 

 

TS: Yeah. Oh yeah. 

 

ZL: OK, cool. Well, for anybody who’s uh, an avid, an experienced psychonaut, even themselves or a facilitator, if you’ve been around enough psychedelic use, there’s one thing, a commonality that you see a lot and that is watching someone or yourself, oh shit, I feel like I’m dying. Oh shit, I’m dying. And it’s such a funny little thing that we use those words when the ego starts to dissolve and you start to merge with the one, it feels like a death. And that really continued to gnaw at me over the years and why that is so common. 

And then I sort of paralleled it and was like, oh, wait a second. It’s not that odd at all. One of the first great manuals in psychedelic exploration, The Psychedelic Experience, written by Tim Leary and Richard Albert and Ralph Metzner, is juxtaposed the psychedelic experience juxtaposed against the Tibetan Book of the Dead. And that was written in 1963. And they had enough foresight and wisdom into, into the psychedelic experience even then to be like, oh, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, yeah, that’s the model which, which ego death is, is about you feel like you’re dying. You feel that everything that you know and believe in and everything you are is just turning into cosmic dust and you’re emerging with com pure consciousness, and that feels like a death. And, uh, yeah, it’s really hard to, I mean, we like to be very grandiose and talk about ego death and oh, it’s such a, you know, a noble thing to strive for, but it’s scary as shit to, to go through it.

It’s scary as shit to have everything that makes you, you dissipate and merge into the one, right? That is not an easy thing. It’s not putting on a warm, comfortable pair of slippers, you know, so it feels like death. Um, and it is a death of, of some kinds, for sure. You do come down and you get pieced back together again in a new way.

And so when you take this model of the psychedelic voyage and you apply it to end of life, into transitioning to people who are terminal or right there on the edge. Um, one of the great examples that I write about in my book is Aldous Huxley, who used, uh, LSD, was administered by his wife Laura on the day that he was dying on in November of 1963. Same day Kennedy was assassinated. And a beautiful, beautiful, uh, just kind of, uh, spontaneous utterance of transition that he was experiencing while being on LSD, going in while he was leaving his body. It’s because those two realms are similar in nature. They’re similar in feel, um, and we see that, you know, with, uh, a lot of the great studies that have been done recently on end of life anxiety with cancer patients and at NYU specifically some beautiful, beautiful studies and Hopkins as well, um, how psilocybin is just this very kind of warm hug of, of allowing our egos to get comfortable with that transition because it’s already like that in some ways to begin with. You know?

 

TS: I wanted to hear more about that because one of the things I am, uh, learning more and more, more is that people that I know are reporting to me, people that I know who are in their seventies and eighties and even Sounds True authors are telling me who are in their seventies and eighties, “You know, working with psychedelics to explore what’s potentially going to happen during the dying process has been the number one helpful thing for me to prepare for dying.” And I’m curious what these studies are showing that you mentioned and just to say a little bit more about the anxiety reduction that can come from the dying through psychedelic voyaging experience.

 

ZL: Yeah. Well I think, you know, with, you know, most of us anyway, unless you are extremely spiritually advanced, right? Uh, most of us are afraid to die. I mean, goodness. Even when Ram Dass had his stroke and he was laying there on the ground thinking he was dying, he was terrified. And one of the messages that came to him was, “I have more work to do. I’m supposed to be Ram Dass. Why am I afraid?” You know, that even happened to him. So I mean, that’s kind of a default thing that the human experience has because, you know, we have some ideas about what’s next, but none of us are entirely sure. And it’s a difficult thing to reconcile with. 

So, um, but what’s the nature of that? What’s the commonality in that? And that is attachment, right? I think attachment to the material world, attachment to the ego, um, and if there’s any, one thing that psychedelics do very quickly is they challenge our sense of attachment and they show us, they can give us a little glimpse anyway into being unattached.

And that consciousness and consciousness and it being attached to the body is not necessarily true. That consciousness is not something that is inherent to this human vessel. It is, uh, it is a place, it is a disembodied stream of cosmic happenings that has nothing to do with the material body at all.

And if there’s even just a little assistance that we can get and reminding us that once we drop the body that our consciousness still exists, I think that provides a tremendous amount of, uh, anxiety relief for those who are afraid of that. 

 

TS: In this same section on psychedelics and death and dying, you share a really powerful story about a woman who you worked with. You were the psychedelic facilitator and guide, and she came to you because of extreme grief. She was suffering from the sudden death of her husband of 23 years who died on the tennis court. And she came to you and she wanted to have a strong and intense psychedelic experience. And she did. And I wonder if you can share with us what happened.

 

ZL: Hmm. No, thank you for calling it out specifically. Yeah, she was a really interesting person to work with. ’cause she really had no psychedelic experience at all. She had read Michael Pollan’s book and started diving into some of the more modern research on it, and uh, was very well versed with a lot of Ram Dass’s teachings as well. But she came to me with kind of just this strong realization that she was, her grief was just, you know, inextricably bad and painful, and she could not let go of her grief. Uh, and she kind of came across, crossing psychedelic research and thought she really had nothing to lose, and that’s what she wanted to bring into. This was a way for her, a window into her grief. 

And why is this so hard to let go of? Um, and the grief, the reprocessing of the grief and the attachment to the grief didn’t necessarily come in the form of the grief. It came in the form of the visitation of her, uh, departed husband and I witnessed her having a completely, you know, I had nothing to do with it. I was just bearing witness. And there were no cues given. There were no prompts. And she’s just having a spontaneous conversation with her husband as if you were in the room. Um, her, him telling her that it’s gonna be OK, then I’m fine, perfectly safe, all of these things. And she’s just having this dialogue with him saying that, of course, I miss you. I miss you. I miss you. I love you. Why’d you have to go? And I was just this back and forth dance that went on for a couple of hours and I’m just there witnessing it, not doing anything, you know, lighting incense and sage and just you hoping that this exchange happens. Uh, and then when she came down from the medicine, that exchange did not dissipate. She did not, it did, did not. It was not like a dream. She remembered it verbatim and just thought it was just this incredible gift of a reminder to her that death is another plane of existence. And, uh, thus, I mean, I wouldn’t say it cured her grief or completely reconciled it overnight, but it took her a long way, for sure. Incredibly beautiful to witness one of the most powerful psychedelic experiences I’ve ever witnessed. 

 

TS: In the beginning of our conversation, I asked if you’d introduce these psychedelic substances as if they were friends, and as you did, I imagined them coming to a party at my house and each one and what they looked like and what they were wearing.

 

ZL: I hope I did a good job. 

 

TS: You did a great job. They were all very interesting people at the party, you know, uh, especially liked DMT, that didn’t come for long, but was really, you know, intense and terrifying and gave us, OK. And I wonder if you see these compounds, if you will, as some type of evolutionary partners for humans and if they were our evolutionary partners in some way, what role they’re playing at this point in time with human beings under so much stress and in such a position of are we even going to make it as a species or not over the next several decades? And how you view that? 

 

ZL: Yeah, that’s a good question. It’s a big question. And, um, taking it from a cultural anthropological sort of lens, um, let’s just take the mushroom for instance. The mushroom is woven into human evolution since the dawn of time, right? Um, the Stoned Ape theory even says, which is a Terence McKenna thing, that says our pre homo sapien, uh, Neanderthal ancestors who are hunter gatherers discovered psilocybin and roam roaming the plains, and just through trial and error and through their consumption, that helped their brains grow and for us to evolve.

 

TS: Can I ask a question about that? Is that considered a controversial or accepted theory? 

 

ZL: It’s just considered a theory. Yes. It’s considered a controversial, it’s not… 

 

TS: OK. I was just curious about that.

 

ZL: I mean, Paul Stamets even says it’s a hypothesis because there is no way to prove it. We have no…

 

TS: OK.

 

ZL: …archeological evidence, but we can make some very strong assumptions that our hunter gatherer tribes were roaming the plains and were eating everything in sight to see what was created sustenance and what didn’t. You know? So like you can make a pretty strong assumption that they tried these things and like, oh, OK. And there’s, uh, mushrooms are adaptogenetics, you know, they help our brain get rewired and grow and things like that. So possibly they did play a big role in their growth. But the second row recorded history does start. We do see the, uh, induction of psychedelic, uh, mushrooms in that as well, and cave paintings that are 10,000 years old in, in Algeria.

So we know we’ve been using them for a really, really, really, really long time. And so, and if you kind of, now, if we tangent just a little bit and look at indigenous cultures that use psychedelics, right? Um, what is one thing that they have that the rest of us don’t? They have equanimity with their environment. They live in harmony with nature and with their surroundings and with their families, and with their communities, right? There’s very little friction, very little, you know, violence and, and they live in harmony with everything that is around them, as opposed to the rest of us who, you’re right, are we gonna make it? I don’t know. 

So look, I’m not, you know, a wild-eyed, you know, 1960s radical, who’s like, we need to drop LSD into the water supply to save us all, or anything like that. But I do think that there’s definitely an argument to be made that the wisdom of, especially the plant medicines because they come from Mother Nature. They come from us. They are us. They’re part of our earth. And again, to use the indigenous framework that they are teachers and that we really have nothing to lose by seeking the wisdom of these plants, uh, these psychedelic plants and vegetables to, to show us, uh, what we can do as a society, as, uh, a community to live in harmony and to slowly chip away at the illusion of separation. So from an evolutionary perspective, I think it’d be very wise. 

 

TS: I’ve been speaking with Zach Leary. He’s the author of the new book, Your Extraordinary Mind: Psychedelics in the 21st Century and How to Use Them. He offers a Psychedelic Studies intensive. Tell us a little bit about it, Zach. 

 

ZL: Yeah, thank you for saying that. Next cohort begins in July 2, and for anybody listening, if you use the promo code SOUNDSTRUE, you can receive 10% off, um, tuition fees. Uh, it’s an eight-week course, all live not prerecorded content. Um, meets twice a week for two hours each session. And there are actually one week that has three classes, so there’s 17 classes altogether. Um, we build community and really talk about a little of the pharmacology around psychedelics a lot, the history, safe use, harm reduction. And use a lot of research from the past and present to create a framework if you’re at all curious about becoming a facilitator and perhaps working with others in the medicine space. And I think my course is, uh, I’m pretty proud of it, Tami. I am. This will be cohort number eight, and I think it gives a really strong foundation for those who are interested in working in this field.

 

TS: I have to say, Zach, you have an extraordinary mind and it’s been really fun to talk with you. Thank you so much. 

 

ZL: Thank you so much for having me. 

TS: And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in the aftershow Q&A session with our guests, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community featuring award-winning original shows, live classes, community learning, guided meditations, and more with the leading wisdom teachers of our time. Use promo code PODCAST to get your first month free. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.