#  Video: Explorations in Interdisciplinary Psychedelic Research: Group One 

 





April 01, 2023

 

 

On April 1, 2023, The Harvard Psychedelics Project at Harvard Divinity School, a student organization, held the "Explorations in Interdisciplinary Psychedelic Research" conference gathering together faculty, researchers, and students from across Harvard University to explore their diverse, interdisciplinary, and promising research on psychedelics. Speakers came from across the University’s Schools, units, and departments, including the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Business School, Harvard College, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, and POPLAR at the Petrie-Flom Center. This third series of talks featured Suzannah Clark, Max Ingersoll, Logan Fahrenkopf, Jeffrey Breau, and Paul Gillis-Smith.



 

**Explorations in Interdisciplinary Psychedelic Research: Group One**

NARRATOR: Harvard Divinity School.

Explorations in Interdisciplinary Psychedelic Research, University Speakers, Group 1, April 1, 2023.

JEFFREY BREAU: Welcome, everyone, on this rainy day to the assembly on Explorations in Interdisciplinary Psychedelic Research, a grassroots conference showcasing the wealth of psychedelic research here at Harvard.

To open the day, I'd like to recognize that Harvard is located on the traditional and ancestral land of the Massachusetts, the original inhabitants of what we now know as Boston and Cambridge. We pay respect to the people of the Massachusetts tribe, past and present, and honor the land itself, which remains sacred to the Massachusetts people.

A recognition of Indigenous people from whom this land was taken is indeed imperative for an event dedicated to psychedelic scholarship. Many of these chemicals now used in research are only known today through acts of cultural theft from the Mazatec, Nahuatl, and many other Central and South American Indigenous peoples, as well as Indigenous and ancient peoples from around the world.

The question of reparation towards these groups is an open one and one that we should hold in our bodies and minds throughout this event and when we return to our research. With that context in mind, I would, again, like to welcome all of you to the Explorations in Interdisciplinary Psychedelic Research.

My name is Jeffrey Breau, I am a graduate student here at Harvard Divinity School. I'm one of the founders of the Harvard Psychedelics Project at HDS and a conference organizer along with my colleague and co-conspirator, Paul Gillis-Smith.

\[APPLAUSE\]

Thank you.

We are excited to have all of you here on this groundbreaking day, a day dedicated to the vast field of psychedelic studies happening now at Harvard, which will feature the work of 17 researchers across the University along with a phenomenal keynote panel on regulation and law which, will feature Glenn Cohen, Mason Marks, Rick Doblin, and Leonard Pickard.

As that panel in particular will highlight, our past is always in conversation with-- our present is always in conversation with the past. And the future of psychedelic research must reckon with both its positive and negative histories as well as the ongoing criminalization of these substances.

It is in that-- it is in that spirit that I like to imagine back 61 years, where on this very campus, in these very halls, a Harvard Divinity PhD student, Walter Pahnke was hard at work on his dissertation and was meeting with his advisors from the Harvard Psilocybin Project to prepare for the Good Friday Experiment, a pivotal moment in psychedelic history that united psychedelics, mysticism, and psychology in ways that continue to shape the psychedelic renaissance.

Could those Harvard researchers have imagined the winding road that psychedelic studies would take to arrive at this present moment? To a present when, as we will see today, psychedelic research stretches across nearly all departments and disciplines at Harvard and is more diverse, more socially conscious, more ethical, and more collaborative than ever before.

Paul and I both came to Harvard with the goal of studying psychedelics, past and present. My personal research interests include psychedelic chaplaincy, the religious antecedents of clinical psychedelic research, and the often maligned, unfairly, in my personal assessment, psychedelic underground.

My forthcoming research project, which is advised by Professor Stang, is an ethnographic study of psychedelics spiritual communities practicing in recreational settings.

Paul will introduce his work in a minute, but it was really our research that sparked the idea for this conference. We both found, time and time again, that our research was inevitably breaking through and breaking down the borders between disciplines and departments.

Just as many psychedelic users report a thinning between self and other with these substances, so too does the study of psychedelics encourage researchers and even the University itself to transcend the rigidly constructed categories of different departments and to become a truly collaborative enterprise in pursuit of real knowledge, wisdom, and truth.

It is with that goal in mind that we organize the conference and structured the day. There is, of course, much more to be done to ensure that psychedelic studies is as just, equitable, diverse, and collaborative as possible. And we hope that today will be one piece of a lifetime of work towards those aims.

Before turning it over to Paul to share the specifics of the day, we must also acknowledge that none of this-- that none of this would be possible and none of us would be here without the support of a veritable village.

There are too many people to thank everyone. But we want to give special mention to Professor Stang, who believed in this event from the start, helped with many a logistical challenge, and provided funding from the Center for the Study of World Religions or CSWR to ensure that today not only happened but that it was free and accessible to as many people as possible.

And with nearly 400 people registered and even more on the live stream, I think that goal was certainly successful. Additionally, Katie Caponera, who is the director of Student Life at HDS, could not have been more helpful, more supportive, and more of a joy to collaborate with.

We truly owe everything good about the day to her tireless support, logistical magic, and her office's co-sponsoring and funding of this event as well. Similarly, all of the staff at the CSWR went out of their ways to put this together, especially Gosia, Hilary, Laurie, and Mariam.

We are also grateful to our volunteers, Adam, Simon, Michael, Sam, and Rebecca, to the AV team, to all of our speakers for their time and wisdom, and finally, to all of you who are here attending, whether in person or on the live stream.

It is all of you who will turn the work of today's conference into a psychedelic movement that embodies the interdisciplinary, intercultural, and interhuman potential of these substances. Thank you all for being here.

\[APPLAUSE\]

With that, I will turn it over to Paul to introduce himself and give a little bit more about the logistics of the day.

PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: Thank you, Jeff. Hello, everybody. Welcome. I'm Paul, Paul Gillis-Smith, a grad student here at Harvard Divinity School. And I currently work at Faulkner Hospital in the Spiritual Care Department, where I'm developing an integration practice for their ketamine infusion program.

My research here at the Div School is broadly on the conversation between medical and religious approaches to psychochemicals from the 1950s to the present.

Many thanks, again, to the Office of Student Life here at the Divinity School, to the Center for the Study of World Religions, to the Divinity School Communications Office, to our facility staff, to our AV staff for making all of this event accessible to those not in person.

Psychedelic research at the University has, up until now, largely been siloed and consisted of interdependent exercises in different departments and researchers. And so our wish is for today to be a starting point for future interdisciplinary encounters, collaboration, and conferences, and even to find potential points of incommensurability.

And of course, this conference is not meant to be comprehensive. There are simply too many ongoing psychedelically-oriented projects to fit into one day of programming. So without further ado, let us get to our first round of presenters.

To kick us off, here we have Dr. Charles Stang, Professor of Early Christian Thought and Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. He hosts a series on psychedelics and the future of religion as part of the CSWR's Transcendence and Transformation Initiative. Please welcome Dr. Stang to the stage.

\[APPLAUSE\]

CHARLES STANG: Good morning, everyone, and welcome. First of all, thank you so much, Jeff and Paul, for organizing this amazing conference. And let me add my voice to the choir in thanking the staff and colleagues here at the Divinity School for all their tireless work in putting this conference together, and especially, the staff at the Center for the Study of World Religions.

So truth be told, I'm a bit surprised to find myself here. If you told me five years ago that I'd be involved in a conference on interdisciplinary psychedelic studies or research, I'd likely have told you that you needed to lower your dose.

\[LAUGHTER\]

I'm a scholar who spends most of his time in antiquity, working on the history of philosophy and religion in the ancient Mediterranean world. And even if I fancied myself a psychonaut of sorts or a sailor on the seas of soul, mine were not journeys occasioned by those substances we're calling psychedelics.

My drug of choice, as it were, is reading ancient esoteric texts in their original languages, which is a mind-altering and tried-and-true method I highly recommend. So what happened? How did I find myself here? Three things happened all about the same time.

First, I became aware, and I confess, rather late, of other research coming out of Johns Hopkins University led by Roland Griffiths, which reported astonishing therapeutic results for treating anxiety, depression, and addiction using psilocybin doses, large enough to induce what they called mystical-type experiences.

As someone who'd spent the last 20 or so years studying the emergence of mysticism in early Christianity and adjacent traditions, my interest was piqued. I thought this was a rare opportunity and one I could not pass up, namely a significant public discourse around science, spirituality, and quote, unquote, mysticism.

Second, my good friend Jeff Kripal from Rice University put me in touch with Brian Muraresku, whose book, The Immortality Key was in page proofs at the time. For those of you who don't know Brian's book, it explores the evidence for psychedelics in the ancient Mediterranean world in the Eleusinian Mysteries and in early Christianity.

His book brought the question of psychedelics right to my doorstep. And if you're interested in my answer to the question, you can watch the interview I did with Brian in February of 2021. Suffice to say that Brian got me much more interested in the question of whether and how psychedelics were used in the ancient world, and that's something I'm still actively exploring.

In the interest of time, though, I'm going to move on to the third thing. Several years ago, I began reading around in the anthropology of Amazonian, works associated with figures such as Eduardo Kohn, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and most recently, Aparecida Vilaca, all of whose work attempts to give voice to the implicit but sophisticated worldview of the Indigenous peoples of Amazonian and of Central and South America, more generally.

Sometimes, this worldview is called perspectivism. But whatever name we call it, I agree with Viveiros de Castro that it constitutes a full blown metaphysics, with very different and challenging assumptions about body, spirit, language, and land. And with it, the conviction that the boundaries between the human, animal, plant, and spirit are very, very porous.

And of course, plant medicines are nearly always part of the practice of this metaphysics, often, but not always, psychedelic plant medicines. The most famous of which, of course, is ayahuasca. And so I found myself reading more and more about these Indigenous traditions, their implicit metaphysics, and their ritual use of ayahuasca, especially among their shamans.

And I began to track the syncretic traditions that emerge from Amazonian, such as the Santo Daime tradition. In fact, just last week, I interviewed Bill Barnard about his new book, Liquid Light, Ayahuasca Spirituality and the Santo Daime Tradition. That video will be made available shortly.

So these were the three developments in my life that led me to interdisciplinary psychedelic research. It was a kind of momentum that was building. And it was all during the early years of my tenure as the director of the Center for the Study of World Religions.

And it led me, eventually, to launch the series that Paul mentioned just now, Psychedelics and the Future of Religion. We did that in 2020. Perhaps some of you have seen the episodes in that series.

The idea behind the series was to explore the intersection of psychedelic research and religion and spirituality and to do so with an open mind and an open heart but also with as much rigor and responsibility as possible.

I confess, I entered the psychedelic space as something of a skeptic. But I think that skepticism has served me rather well. I hope it's not controversial to say that in the contemporary enthusiasm for psychedelics, there's a lot of noise, a lot of froth on this latte.

\[LAUGHTER\]

I've come to believe firmly that there is a signal amidst this noise, that something crucially important is coming to the surface in this cultural moment, occasioned by the psychedelic, quote, unquote, renaissance. I'll come back to that in a moment.

But I do want to say that this is one of the reasons I'm excited to spend the day with my colleagues because I trust that each of you, in your own domains of expertise, also sense that there's a signal amidst the noise, and you're working to isolate and amplify that signal.

I should also say I've been humbled more than once in this effort. And so I'm constantly trying to refine my own sense of what is signal and what is noise. And the students here at Harvard, including Jeff and Paul, and Rachael and Natalia, from whom you'll hear next, have helped me enormously in that refinement.

So back to the series, Psychedelics and the Future of Religion, the three threads I mentioned became well represented in the series, the therapeutics of psychedelics index to mystical experience, the evidence for psychedelics in antiquity and why we should care about that today, and the use of psychedelics or plant medicines among Indigenous traditions, especially in the Americas.

We're moving beyond those themes. At the end of April, we'll be hosting an online panel discussion on the question, are psychedelics theologically significant for Judaism? We're hosting that in collaboration with an organization called Shefa, the Jewish Psychedelic Support group, and the Berkeley Graduate Theological Union Center for Jewish Studies.

And next fall, Jeff and I are putting together a panel on the role of psychedelics in Hindu traditions, hopefully, including Vedanta, Yoga, and Tantra. Another way of actually framing that is might be the relevance of Hindu traditions for the introduction of psychedelics into this country, so both ways.

So I've made it several confessions already, and I need to make one more. Here it is. I'm not exactly interested in psychedelics per se. I said earlier that something crucially important is coming to the surface in this cultural moment occasioned by the psychedelic renaissance.

I think, psychedelics are most interesting and most significant as one among many means and modes of exploring what I will call transcendence and transformation. To put that another way, I'm interested in the transcendence of our normal states of being, perception, consciousness, and embodiment and the way-- and the ways that transcendence affords the transformation of the individual, group, and society.

I'm interested in psychedelics as one among many practices of transcendence and transformation. And I don't believe they're necessarily the golden road but rather one path or rather a set of paths, for psychedelics are hardly a highway but rather a web of paths, each with its own individual qualities and character and paths that may lead to very different destinations.

I prefer to think of psychedelics as one among many ecstatic practices, what in other contexts might be called spiritual exercises, that is practices that usher us outside our accustomed states of being and understanding and invite us into new relationships with ourselves, our fellow human beings, and are more than human or other than human neighbors, including the Earth's plant, fungal, and animal life, but also those elusive entities we call spirits, angels, demons, and gods, visible and invisible, real and imagined, malevolent and benign, practices that allow us to experience differently, the relationship between mind and matter, body and spirit, what is animate and what we allege is inert.

So in no small part inspired by the psychedelic renaissance, the CSWR, last year, as Paul mentioned, launched this Initiative under this very banner, transcendence and transformation.

I want to make clear that I'm interested in and committed to interdisciplinary psychedelic research here at Harvard and beyond. But when it comes to the intersection of that research with spirituality and religion, I feel that the research needs to be put in a larger frame. And that is what I intend transcendence and transformation to be.

As is fitting for the Center for the Study of World Religions, we will study the traditions of transcendence and transformation in those so-called world religions. But we also want to attend, carefully, to those traditions that are excluded by that framework, including Indigenous traditions and those that have been, for better or worse, grouped under such categories as animism, paganism, shamanism, and folk religion. That's only to name a few.

Those of us in the Initiative are committed to the study of these traditions and practices for their own sake but also as a resource for contemporary religion and spirituality. We want to attend to the ways elements of these traditions and practices are continually disassembled and reassembled for contemporary use, what often goes under the name of syncretism, especially by so-called seekers, those who identify as spiritual but not religious.

And we'll explore, sensitively but also sensibly, the thorny history and politics of such borrowing and recombination, what today goes under the label of cultural appropriation.

So to speak, of transcendence in the contemporary academy is frankly, somewhat transgressive. And to understand why, I want to linger for a moment over that Latin preposition, "trans," as in transcendence, transformation, and now, transgression.

Trans means, at its most basic level, across or beyond. And it implies movement from one place to another, from one state to another, across something like a threshold or a line or a boundary, whatever it is that differentiates here from there, this from that, one from another.

Many contemporary thinkers are wary of transcendence because they think it implies a particular kind of movement, namely an escape, an escape from the thorny realities of our here and now, to some fanciful refuge, disembodied, unencumbered by the weight of history and its horrors or its beauties.

They regard the escape as escapist. And they're certainly right that transcendence has been marshaled to justify our flight from our bodies and their demands on us from other people and our responsibilities to them from the Earth and how we have grossly mistreated it.

This is decidedly not what I invoke when I speak of transcendence. I'm committing to the trans in transcendence and transformation, movement across and beyond to explore ourselves and others and to embark on an adventure into this world and into others.

When we worry that transcendence might be an escape from our here and now, I want to ask whether we should be so confident we know our here and now. Perhaps, the first thing to be transcended is that very confidence in hopes that we might discover other ways of being here and now.

Rather than a flight from the body, for example, might transcendence be a flight into the body or at least other modes of embodiment than we are accustomed to perceive.

I'm convinced that we are, individually and collectively, much more than we typically take ourselves to be and that the urgent task is first, a kind of imminent transcendence, an imminent transcendence, crossing the very proximate thresholds of our accustomed states of being, perception, consciousness, and embodiment.

Maybe that will open up onto new horizons of the then and the there. But we're not there yet. Where are we? In any case, let's start here and now, recognizing that both here and now, like us, have always been much more than we've let them be. Thank you so much. I look forward to all the presentations.

\[APPLAUSE\]

PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: There we go. Just want to provide a content warning, not in our next presentation but just a few in advance. We have 1, 2-- in our third presentation so that you may prepare yourself. In Ms. Lerner's talk, she will be addressing sexual and physical violence, child abuse, suicide, genocide, and gaslighting, to make yourself aware of this.

Our next presentation is from Natalia Schwien. Natalia Schwien is an herbalist, sustainability consultant, and a PhD candidate in the study of religion at Harvard University. Her research is primarily around expanded ontologies of personhood, spiritual diction in scientific discourse, conceptions of the more than human and Celtic studies, and posthuman ethics. Please welcome Natalia to the stage.

\[APPLAUSE\]

NATALIA SCHWIEN: Hey, everybody. Thank you so much, Paul and Jeffrey, for having me here today. And thank you so much to the rest of the team who put this conference today together. And to my other panelists, I'm so grateful to hear your insights and to share stories with you. And thank you to all of you who are here today.

As well first, I'm just going to reiterate our land acknowledgment, that we are here in the unceded lands of the Massachusetts people. And when I am home in Vermont, I am on the unceded homelands of the Abenaki or Abenaki people. And I am grateful for the ongoing work that both communities are doing and hope to continue to be engaged and to support those communities.

A little introduction to myself, my last name is actually spelled I-E-N not E-I, though I do love pigs.

\[LAUGHTER\]

So I don't mind the misspelling. So I am a PhD candidate in the Committee for the Study of Religions, formerly an MTS student here at Harvard Divinity School, where I studied the intersection of spiritual practice and ecology.

My research is in expanded ontologies of personhood for the most part, relational cosmologies, as Paul kindly explains. I am also the associate director of the Program for the Evolution of Spirituality here at Harvard Divinity School under Dr. Dan McKanan.

Quick plug that's relevant for this conference, we have a conference for the Program for the Evolution of Spirituality happening on April 27 through 29 on uses and abuses of power and alternative spiritualities, which is deeply relevant to some of the conversations that are going to be had today.

As Paul also said, I'm an herbalist, and I'm a wildlife rescue and rehabilitation apprentice. So much of my work is in deep engagement with nonhumans as persons.

And what does that mean? And also the word "person" is deeply complicated and is really specifically situated in different contexts. And that changes and can even change based off of what someone is-- like how someone is engaging with them in a specific moment as opposed to the next moment.

So I'd first like to pause with the word "psychedelics." So for me, as an herbalist, I use the term "entheogenic" plants rather than the term "psychedelics." This is a blend of two Greek words, meaning "full of god" and "to come into being."

This isn't necessarily the correct or appropriate word for these individual plants in their own individual contexts, which is to say that I use that word, but other people may not. And I think it's really important to note that these are relational experiences.

So my voice is a voice of caution and hope in this space. I have two primary concerns, some of which have been brought up by Professor Stang. And also, I'm deeply grateful for Jeff mentioning and talking about the commitment to supporting Indigenous communities.

The first is the appropriative behavior and the commodification of a variety of Indigenous lifeways that occurs and can occur in this work. And to say that having, in general, land acknowledgment is not enough.

So first, I think when we're working with entheogenic plants, in one way or another, we need to think about the communities who those plants have evolved alongside and who have been the traditional keepers of those plants. And within that, I think, language is really important.

Just to say that the word "use," I think, is a complicated word, to say, I use psychedelics, rather than "I work with or engage with, I partner with, and thinking about, what does it mean to use a being, who has a deep ancestral relationship with communities and ancestral relationship with land?

I also think, as we're thinking about language, thinking about, what names do we use when we engage with these plants? What language is your mode of engagement when you're working with them? And do we, including myself, acknowledge their ancestry in these spaces where we have the joy and the terror of working with them?

The second bit that I am concerned with, often, in this space but have a lot of hope for, is the disassociation of the experience of working with an entheogenic plant from the living Earth and also from engaged practice. So placing these beings as in a category of drug or a category of cure-all is troubling to me.

And I think that there is, when we talk about the hope and the rightful hope we have for how these plants can engage with a variety of mental health and traumatic healing or healing from trauma, but also it's a note that-- I know this term is a controversial term, but there's a lot of bad trips out there.

And what does that mean as spiritual practitioners or spiritual leaders but also leaders in psychology who are working with these plants?

And I know there are people like Chris Bock who are writing and talking about engaging with bad trips as a practice. But I don't know that the average individual who is processing trauma and needs to hold the weight of human trauma on their shoulders. And that's something that I find often isn't discussed in these very rightfully excited conversations.

I also want to think about how these plants, as Charlie said and Rachael will also say, that many of them are very charismatic plants. And are these plants that are yelling at us or are these plants that we're yelling at, who are the plants that aren't yelling, and who are these quiet plants that care for us day to day?

And I find that when you're working with entheogenic plants or interested in working with entheogenic plants or substances, thinking about, well, how do I engage with the red clover that grows in my yard? I mean, there's medicine everywhere in plants and thinking about this more broadly.

We're surrounded by plant medicine, and it's not just those who are entheogenic. I'm sure many of you know this, but medications, like aspirin, are derived, were originally derived from white willow bark. Even Mucinex is derived from guaiacol, which is present in a variety of plants, including tobacco.

Paclitaxel or Taxol comes from Pacific Yew trees. You can see their cousins outside. Go outside and say hi to them during the coffee break.

I think it's really important to think about why are you working with an entheogenic plant? Are you in relationship with other plants? Are we thinking about how these systems are connected and how behavior is connected?

So to put these two thoughts in context, are we uplifting colonization and furthering the projects of distancing mind and matter, culture and nature? As Charlie said, how are we using that term "transcendence" when we're working with mind-altering or numinous engagement?

And so this space, I think, is again, a really beautiful space where religious study scholars can continue to-- and I hope, to continue to do decolonization work. And it is my experience, as a person who studies spiritual language and scientific discourse, that many other departments-- and I think this is one of the exciting things about what Jeff and Paul are doing-- are sometimes woefully behind in decolonization work, especially science.

And there are incredible Indigenous scholars, like Vanessa Watts and Billy-Ray Belcourt, Megan Bang and her colleagues, who are talking about, what is the Indigenous voice in science, is science ready for Indigenous voices, and what are different approaches that we can take?

And there's also scientists, like our very own Christine Elizabeth Webb, Becca Franks, Barbara Smuts, Monica Gagliano, who I'm sure many of you have read about, who are talking about this as relational frameworks, rethinking how we engage with science.

And so in this space, where religion and science are coming together, thinking about, what are lessons that we're learning currently in religious studies around decolonization that can be applied or engaged with in the sciences and in that research?

So finally, just to say that, personally, it's about method and messaging around psychedelic culture for me and engagement. And my hope is that as we continue this conversation, as research is continued, that the work of interspecies relationships are centered and that we hear some of the plants who maybe aren't yelling as loud. So thank you very much.

\[APPLAUSE\]

PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: Next up, we have Rachael Petersen, who is a writer, facilitator, and Master of Divinity student at Harvard Divinity School, where she co-leads the Plant Consciousness Reading group.

Previous to HDS, she led a decade-long career in environmental policy, serving as senior advisor to the National Geographic Society and founding deputy director of the Global Forest Watch. Please welcome Rachael to the stage.

\[APPLAUSE\]

RACHAEL PETERSEN: Hi, everyone. Good morning. First of all, echoing thanks to Paul and Jeff for organizing this incredible conference, and to Charlie for his unwavering support for this area of research.

Today, I want to draw on my own research and experience to briefly speak to three areas, perhaps three signals in the noise, where I believe that the study and practice of religion can vivify our understanding of psychedelics. And psychedelics can also vivify the study and practice of religion.

But I fear we are far from this potential. The humanities often find ourselves in the unenviable position of defending our relevance in the face of pressing societal changes, like awkward kids begging for an invitation to the only party in town.

This predicament may be as attributable to the cultural zeitgeist as it is to the current state of the humanities, but that is perhaps a discussion for a different conference. In light of this, the privileging of neuroscience, psychology, and chemistry over, say, religious studies, within the mainstream psychedelic conversation, comes as no surprise.

Insofar as psychedelics are said to be mind manifesting, the dominant reductionist culture tells us that the mind is simply a product of what the brain does and thus, can be explained by the sloshing of juices between our ears. And insofar as psychedelics are said to be entheogenic or god revealing, gods have long been drained of their revelatory prophetic fury.

They are hollow signs without signifiers, ghosts, and the machine, regarded by many as archetypes at best, not glimpses of the ultimate with which we must reckon, not as real presences that descend, surround, ascend, emerge, and can place, sometimes, inconvenient demands on our hearts and our minds.

And yet, the notable absence of religious scholarship feels suspect in the light of well-touted research findings, which Charlie mentioned, that psychedelics can reliably and dose dependently occasion experiences that many but not all people consistently rate as the most spiritually significant of their whole lives.

To say nothing of the fact, as Natalia and Jeff and others have pointed out, plants and fungi have played a central role in Indigenous and folk ritual practice today and throughout the world.

So what does it mean? That these nonordinary experiences that have formed part of the world's religion for millennia could, in the future, form part of our medical paradigm. One might ask, do we really just need new ways of administering drugs to minds, or do we also need new ways of ministering to souls?

Today, as I speak to these three areas, I will frame each of them with a true story. She hoped for healing, the young anxious woman, a charismatic evangelical Christian, attending her first psychedelic retreat in Europe.

In keeping with what is considered best practice, her guides reminded her that all is welcome, that no matter what she encountered on her journey, she could invite it for tea and ask it what it wanted from her and what it had to teach her.

The woman was frightened then when she encountered demons. She cried out in distress, and her guides calmly reminded her that all is welcome. She was confused, disoriented, tormented, perhaps. I don't know.

But what I do know is that in a staff debrief afterwards, the guides recounted the incident to a staff chaplain who, horrified, explain that to charismatic Christian's evil is very real, very present, and best cleansed, purged, or exorcized. In short, an evangelical Christian would never invite a demon to tea.

So the first and most vital area and perhaps, the simplest area of work is a deepening of the care and the sophistication around which we treat religious and spiritual issues that may arise in psychedelic research and practice. Researchers and guides need to consider, with more care, the metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical frames of those they study and treat in order to provide more culturally appropriate treatments.

And of course, those studying and practicing religion must also better familiarize themselves with the sometimes lost, repressed, forgotten wisdom within their tradition about how to navigate transcendence and transformation.

So one of the projects that I've been involved with here at the Divinity School and also in my capacity working with the RiverStyx Foundation, which funds psychedelic research, is advocating for the greater involvement of spiritual caregivers and chaplains in psychedelic training, research, and practice.

Professional chaplaincy is concerned with how to appropriately create spaces for meaning making and otherwise, secular venues. Chaplains are trained to be reflexive, attending to other spiritual needs in an appropriate idiom without imposing their own beliefs, which is particularly important given how psychedelics make people very impressionable.

I, frankly, am deeply ambivalent about-- well, increasingly ambivalent about the medicalization of psychedelics. And in this context, I don't view chaplains as a silver bullet by any means, but I do view them as an important form of spiritual harm reduction if we are truly going to move these into medical treatments.

The second story, a young woman enrolled in a clinical research trial to study the use of psilocybin to treat major depression. During her first high-dose psilocybin experience, the woman, a Vonnegut-styled atheist-humanist underwent what she would later reluctantly come to characterize as a conversion experience.

Though she had entered the study asking, will this work? She left asking, what is real? And one week later, during her second psilocybin treatment, she had what William James termed, a reverse religious experience.

After her first initiation into the ultimate, she suddenly felt the bottomless terror of being ripped from it, an experience that left her with acute chest pain, nonstop panic, and months of severe insomnia. And the very quality that had made her first experience so profound, its felt sense of authority made the second so indelibly harrowing. That woman, as many of you know, was me.

So the second area I have called for greater research into, as Natalia also named, is this area of so-called bad trips or challenging experiences. And I wrote about this in a long-form article in the winter edition of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, if you want to read more about what I say there.

But in short, I argue that the effort to medicalize psychedelics is focused on a narrow set of positive experiences but that if we are to have a full account of what psychedelics are, how they are, and most vexingly, why they are, we are as beholden to the harrowing as the heavenly to abject terror to unbearable bliss, and that the therapeutic instrumentalization of transcendence actually is actively ignoring volumes of wisdom from religious traditions that warn about the dangers of cultivating transcendent and nonordinary experiences.

I talk about many of these in this piece. But you can examine folks like the 13th century French speaking mystic, Marguerite Porete, who believed that only sad souls could become into union with god, but doing so would completely annihilate them, or early Chan Buddhist texts, which warn about the dangers of intensive meditation practices, or in the Hekhalot literature in Judaism, the tale that four rabbis go to meet god, one drops dead, one goes crazy, one becomes a heretic, and only one returns with his faith affirmed.

So I argue that important wisdom is lost when technologies of transcendence are stripped from their religious and cultural contexts and presented as simple psychological treatments. So firstly, I think, and many people are starting to work on, fortunately, we need a more sophisticated and honest phenomenological analysis of what can go wrong in these experiences.

But more fundamentally, we need to break out of this framing of right and wrong. We need to ask more interesting questions of so-called bad trips, like how do these experiences shift your notion of the potentiality of your own mind? What do you know now that you didn't know before? And how do you know that you know? These are the questions, I think, bad trips tend to answer, and we, as scholars of religion, must ask.

A final short story. They sat in a circle talking about talking to plants that talked back. I was a girl always chatting with lilacs, a woman said. A man shared how a bristlecone pine once warned him, don't grow too quickly, and that the secret to being beautiful is always to be just a little crooked.

These are conversations we have in the margins of your wonderful plant consciousness reading group here at Harvard Divinity School, which I have the great joy of facilitating alongside Natalia. But we do much more than share our personal stories talking to plants. We explore the latest cutting-edge science, along with philosophical reflections into how plants and fungi communicate, learn, signal, cooperate, and can be said to think.

It seems that one of the potentialities of psychedelics or plant medicines is that they can awaken people to the aliveness, sentience agency of the more-than-human world. A Johns Hopkins study last year affirmed that after psychedelics, many people increasingly attribute consciousness to things like trees, plants, fungi, and even rocks.

But there I go again, appealing to Western science to authorize knowledge that has been safeguarded by Indigenous and folk traditions throughout the world.

So in our group, we are looking at some of these Indigenous and folk traditions alongside science to ask questions like, what is mind, where did this extend and how, what is matter, and what does it mean to call it inanimate or animate, where do mind and matter meet, and what can plants and fungi teach us about what it means to really be human?

As has already been emphasized by speakers here today, psychedelic experiences, I believe, are not the best or even the only way to explore these questions. Plant medicines are, as Natalia mentioned, simply the plants that are screaming at us. I see them as dramatic invitations to cultivate more subtle, sustainable ways of relating to plants.

So in closing, I'd like to warn us against what the Columbia psychologist and neuroscientist Carl Hart has called psychedelic exceptionalism. To the extent that psychedelics represent sacred plants or are sacred plants, they are plants, plants among many. To the extent that they are aids to explore the far reaches of mind, they are tools among tools.

To the extent that they are spiritual experiences, they are experiences among many. The extent to which these things may be exceptional is a matter of degree, I believe, and not kind. They are entry points into questions, but they are never end points themselves.

This, I think, is what the study and practice of religion has to teach us. Thank you.

\[APPLAUSE\]

PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: All right. Next up here-- it feels so fast paced, and I'm sorry. I wish there were another way. We need like six days next time. Next, we have Andrea Lerner. Andrea would like-- let's see, just kidding.

Andrea Lerner is a multilingual activist, artist, educator, who has specialized in trauma and equity-focused community engagement, body-based psychoeducation, arts, and conflict resolution for over 15 years.

During her own trauma-healing journey from homelessness to Harvard, she trained with teachers and shamans in expressive and ritual arts, somatics, and psychedelics around the world from Peru to Palestine. Please welcome Andrea to the stage.

\[APPLAUSE\]

ANDREA LERNER: Hello, everyone. I'm Andrea Lerner I'm here from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. And this work, as you might imagine, is extremely personal for me. I'm alive, in part, because of psychedelics and also all the people who've been safeguarding and holding psychedelics for decades and sometimes, many generations.

Growing up, I was constantly told by my family, schools, policemen, psychiatrists, mental health professionals that my voice, my body, and my needs didn't matter. And so this is especially powerful and healing for me to be able to be on this platform at Harvard University with you all and be heard. So thank you so much for being part of my own story of healing and redemption.

So I want to mention a few things that, I think, might be a bit more unique to the field of human development and education as it relates to psychedelics. And when I say psychedelics, I'm also referring to entheogens and all kinds of medicines that are having their own consciousness as well.

And I think that psychedelics can be used really to establish new relationships to ourselves, to our bodies, to our ancestries, to the Earth itself, and to what it means to be alive in this great adventure we're all on.

I also think that they can help us establish new systems of governance, economy, education, medicine, and even uses of technology, all of which, we desperately need in the current throes of the issues we're facing with climate, with economic collapse, and so many other things.

Along these lines, I think, psychedelics are phenomenal to be able to help us hold space for much darker, more complex issues, like atrocities in human history, such as genocide and slavery, upon which, this country was built. And so I think they can really help us make really substantial transformation and even be part of truth and reconciliation and reparations for Indigenous and African-American communities.

And along those lines, trauma is actually an innate part of the human experience. In the most ideal life we all live, we'll still experience trauma. And psychedelics can be a really powerful way to help us recover and establish new meaning and new ideas in relationship to these traumas.

So let's hold some more space. This presentation is obviously a bit heavy, but it's also hopeful. \[CHUCKLES\] So as I mentioned, I am also a survivor of chronic PTSD. And I actually grew up in all of the best that New York City had to offer, in terms of clinical, mental health treatment, and also in San Francisco.

And I was one of the 40% to 60% of PTSD survivors who did not recover with traditional cognitive-based psychotherapy and in fact, was deeply retraumatized again and again and again. And I think, part of this is because there's a major gap in both treatment and even research of post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as, even now, in psychedelic research.

There's much less research on women and female survivors of sexualized violence, which is a huge epidemic worldwide, and also on non-- let's say non-Western, nonpatriarchal practices. So we'll get to those later. And of course, there's a huge gap in terms of treatment and research with BIPOC communities, low income, and other communities who are marginalized.

So coming from the human development and education field, I want to offer two tenants that are often too lost in the West but that this work really necessitates. And that's embodiment and relationship. And also, in my last mushroom ceremony two weeks ago, the mushrooms were very clear that I had to focus in this talk on embodiment and relationship, and I listened to my teachers. \[CHUCKLES\]

So I believe that psychedelics with embodied and relational methods will lead to more empowering, effective, and lasting trauma treatment. And for an example, these are just some of my many teachers. You'll notice that most are women of color, are artists, are activists, and basically, community workers. Not a single person here is a clinician, and yet most of them are working for decades with largely female and queer communities recovering from trauma. And some of them are even survivors, which, for me, as a survivor, was incredible and a part of modeling my healing.

So I want to present my theory of change I designed, as a distillation, based on what helped me heal and what I saw help heal others with PTSD. I designed an integrative psilocybin PTSD treatment program. The core activities are somatic, which means body-centered, trauma education, narrative reframing coaching-- essentially, instead of, necessarily, psychotherapy, it's coaching using transforming the narrative from victimhood to create new meaning to something else entirely that's less pathologizing and more asset-based-- and also the ritualized use of psilocybin or magical mushrooms.

So I believe that this will lead to the outcomes of increased and embodied safety and connection, increased self-efficacy and empowerment on behalf of the survivors, and lessened PTSD symptoms. And of course, the greater impacts of this is a lesson dependence on the for-profit medical and pharmaceutical systems, increased legality access and safety of PTSD treatment-- because I believe that this sort of program could be legalized or put forth through the compassionate care-- and also the increased treatment of underserved populations, which I think is a major urgent matter of equity.

So the core, again-- embodied and relational. So the body is the source where trauma happens. And it's also the source where trauma can be healed. We need to recenter the body as a source of healing and wisdom and also enable us to acquire new tools to both be inside psychedelic experience and also integrate from them. So when we give psychosomatic or body-based education, we're allowing people to take back control of their bodies, of their lives, of their behaviors, and have new techniques for self-regulation and coregulation which are imperative to healing, and also make them more active participants instead of passive participants who are given something with the guide or teacher or clinician who's more knowledgeable or more wise than them.

So this is really important. And this might be the more unusual aspect of what I'm here to say, is that we also need to use touch. We need to use safe, healing, consensual, embodied touch that comes from real love, real compassion, and real presence. Because this is kind of hitting the core of the neglect and violence to the body that usually initiated the trauma, especially for survivors of physical or sexual violence, sometimes even emotional neglect.

So that, for myself, has been extremely powerful, as someone who grew up being abused, to have also healers, teachers, literally cry with me in deep, deep empathy and presence for my own pain. It rehumanized me. It told me I wasn't crazy. And it made me finally deeply feel seen in a very different way than a more distant clinician. And also to really be held-- to be held and cradled, physically, as a grown woman, by another grown woman, like the mother I never had, it reprogrammed my most basic reptilian brain, my most basic nervous system, all the way to my psyche and how I saw thought of myself and saw myself as not alone in the world anymore.

And along these lines, we're really both rebuilding community and cultures of care in an individual way, but also a communal way. And so, for instance, I've done this work-- and I've actually helped this work as well-- both individually and in groups. And they're both extremely effective. And we're really reweaving the fabric of humanity through this kind of work.

And I want to mention a few next steps that I believe could be used with psychedelics, first in the name of the relational work that we're all rebuilding relationships of more authenticity and care and responsibility. I want to use this opportunity to connect and collaborate with my colleagues, here and beyond, to recognize, research, legalize, and fund somatic or body-centered trauma education and integrative psychedelic practices to bring them into the clinical and medical scientific spaces and also to especially platform them as they are with the practitioners, largely Indigenous women, queer people of color, holding these traditions around the world for tens, hundreds, if not thousands of years.

Obviously, we need to create a more equitable, inclusive, integrative health system for all. And I definitely hope-- and maybe some of you share this vision-- to build an interdisciplinary center for psychedelics and human development and more at Harvard. And I want to end with this beautiful quote by a man and a teacher who once walked in these walls, Ram Dass. "We're all just walking each other home." Thank you for being part of my story.

\[APPLAUSE\]

PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: OK. Next up, we have Emma Beck. Emma is a second-year MBA at Harvard Business School and the founder of Papaya Therapeutics, a digital therapeutics company building companion products for ketamine and psychedelic medicines. Please welcome Emma to the stage.

\[APPLAUSE\]

EMMA BECK: All right. Thank you so much, everyone. And I just want to say this will be-- I'm coming from the Business School, so this will be a slight tone shift-- before we jump in. So just brace yourselves and also forgive me. But really honored to be here and excited to share some of the work that I've been doing.

So the business of psychedelics-- amazing. I still very clearly remember the first article that I read on the clinical application of psychedelics. It was actually this article. It was published in The New York Times, April 2012. The article highlighted research using psilocybin on patients with treatment-resistant depression that resulted from a terminal illness diagnosis. The patients were basically cured, total and lasting remission of their depression symptoms, which is kind of unheard of.

Why were more people not talking about this? Why isn't something that's not more widely available? These are questions that piqued a curiosity in me that has lasted over a decade.

Since then, the headlines have evolved fairly dramatically. We're seeing billions of dollars being poured into drug development. States are legalizing psychedelics. And in fact, we'll likely see some new drugs come onto the market in the next year or two.

That being said, there is justifiable concerns. People are worried that the business world is going to corrupt psychedelics. It's my hope to share my perspective on some of the ways the business community is thoughtfully approaching both the challenges and opportunities in the psychedelics space.

To do that, I'm going to split the world into two camps, so the legalization and the medicalization. And I'm going to just dramatic pause for some water.

And what I hope you'll take away is that successful companies that are operating in both of these realms will really be focusing on two things-- promoting access and affordability of psychedelics. So we think about legalization as pursuing the legal pathways for general access to psychedelics. And medicalization will be the clinical application of psychedelics. So in the legal realm, people are obviously very excited about Oregon and Colorado, the states that have recently legalized psychedelic use, and are pointing to those states as examples for how general use of psychedelics will evolve.

There are still a decent amount of logistical hurdles that need to overcome for these programs to be successful, namely investments in infrastructure across the supply chain-- so production and distribution capabilities, licensing and credentialing of facilities and treatment centers. And there's a ways to go.

And needless to say, when the topic of legalization comes up, many people like to point to cannabis as the shining example that psychedelics will follow, though I'd argue that that's not entirely true for a couple of reasons. Namely, the states where psychedelics have been legalized have put fairly strict guidelines around how these drugs will be administered or available-- so in a treatment facility with the supervision of a guide, unlike the dispensary model, at-home use that we see with cannabis.

Similarly, on the matter of cost, it's estimated that these therapies are going to cost anywhere from $1,000 to $3,000, which makes them fairly cost prohibitive for many individuals. It's these challenges in the legal space that many folks in the medical realm cite for justification of their efforts.

Yes. So in the medicalization route, what we're seeing is tons of money being poured into drug development. And as we saw, biotech stocks were hit pretty hard last year. And psychedelic pharmaceuticals were no exception. Many firms are actually running out of money, and will likely see consolidation in the coming months.

In terms of access, there are many clinics popping up in anticipation of providing these psychedelic medicines, but they're having a difficult time getting to positive unit economics. These therapies are expensive for clinics to deliver because they require clinical supervision over what's a multi-hour-long experience. Affordability for patients is also a huge concern. These therapies are estimated to cost anywhere from $20,000 to $30,000 a session. And it's unclear how insurance companies are thinking about reimbursing for these services.

And while these therapies will not require the same regular administration that you see with typical antidepressants, in the US, people change plans so frequently insurance companies aren't incentivized to cover these large costs even if they result in massive savings to the system-wide.

So while there are plenty of challenges, I will say there's also a tremendous amount of opportunity for businesses to be successful in this space and do so thoughtfully. In this new legal psychedelics paradigm, what we're seeing is that the story of successful businesses will really be one of public and private partnership.

So the companies that are creating access-- so producers, distributors, delivery pathways-- will need to work in lockstep with government regulators to ensure that we minimize any risk of adverse events occurring. In terms of the affordability, yes, these are still expensive therapies, though the hope is that once the supply chain reaches a sufficient scale, that these treatment facilities will be able to reduce their operating costs and pass that on to patients.

I will be the first to say that affordability and pharma are not typically words that you hear associated with one another. But there are some companies doing work to address that. For example, there are some companies developing psychedelic compounds that actually have the hallucinogenic properties removed. And while there are many cases where the hallucinogenic properties drive the therapeutic benefits of the drugs, there is research that shows that the neuroplasticity induced by these compounds alone can be beneficial.

So why is that significant? From a business perspective, that means that the barriers to entry can be significantly reduced for people who would otherwise benefit from these therapies but are frankly just horrified of the notion of hallucinating. This is also important for our providers, as it likely reduces the clinician time-intensive nature of delivering these therapies, making them more affordable for patients and more sustainable for clinics to deliver.

Clinics that are going to be successful in this space are really going to be the ones driving towards value-oriented, outcomes-based care at scale. We've seen this be successful in the primary care settings with Oak Street Health, outpatient infusion centers like DaVita, and I expect the same to be the case with psychedelics. Providers who are currently administering ketamine and other alternative therapies are looking for digital tools to help them realize that goal, lower costs, and drive towards insurance reimbursement. This is the part of the value chain that I'm particularly invested in, and is where I'm building a business.

Let me just show you quickly. Papaya-- which got a little altered here, but that's fine-- is a digital therapeutics platform of companion products for ketamine and psychedelic therapies. On our platform, providers and patients will work on tracking their sessions, doing integration work, and measuring clinical outcomes. Embedded within the platform will be digital therapeutic modules, which are essentially FDA-regulated apps that enhance the efficacy of these therapies. Research shows that engaging with these types of exercises following a ketamine infusion meaningfully increases the durability of the antidepressant effects of ketamine, meaning less frequent treatments for patients, making them more affordable, and freeing up clinical space for clinicians to provide care to new, more profitable patients. OK, shameless plug over.

So we have come a very far way in the last 11 years since I first read that article. And I certainly couldn't stand here and tell you that I know what the future headlines of the business of psychedelics will look like. But I do know two things-- that the successful companies driving towards these headlines will be the ones driving towards access and affordability, and that while I've framed much of this discussion through the lens of legal versus medical, that it won't look entirely like this. It will look like this. It will take the collective effort of all of the viewpoints represented in the room today to really build successful businesses and really reap the benefits of this enduring therapies.

I'm honored to be a part of building this. And I'd be remiss not to mention that all of this is thanks to the hard work of people who have done this before us, the research advocates, people like my mom, who has benefited from this as well and have made me really appreciate how important this work is. Thank you so much.

\[APPLAUSE\]

PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: Thanks so much, Emma. Next up, we have Ned? Edward? Ned.

NED HALL: \[INAUDIBLE\]

PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: OK. Professor Ned Hall, who joined Harvard's philosophy department in 2005 after teaching at MIT for 11 years. He works on a range of topics in metaphysics and epistemology that overlap with the philosophy of science-- for example, how best to understand such key concepts as law of nature, causality, and confirmation. Please welcome Professor Hall to the stage.

\[APPLAUSE\]

NED HALL: Got to set a timer. Sorry, Paul. You're now behind schedule. But I'll try and bring us back.

So I'm a philosopher. I have to pause and say it always feels strange to say that because I kind of think we all are. Just some of us are more obsessive about it. But in my world, one thing we love to do, we academic philosophers, is to draw distinctions. And the thing I want to do today is to draw a distinction that I hope will be useful between two different orientations one could take towards inquiry into psychedelics.

One orientation is going to strike you as unexceptional. The other orientation, judging from the room, I guess, is going to strike roughly half of you as exactly the right orientation to take. And the other half is bonkers. But I think it'll be good to get the orientations out there as clearly as possible, partly in an effort to sort help bridge disciplinary divides that need to be bridged if the kind of inquiry that we want to do cross-disciplinarily is going to work.

OK, so the first orientation that I have in mind, the one that's unexceptional, is one that treats the human subject and the experiences they have while on psychedelics as the object of study. That's the object of study. What's happening to the person? What kinds of experiences are they having? This is the orientation that asks questions like, how does set and setting influence the kind of response one has? How does cultural background influence the kind of response one has? What are the range of different responses one might have? What are their long-term effects on the psychological state of the individual?

And I think there's nothing like-- that research obviously should proceed and is great. And what I'm going to contrast it with is not something that's in conflict with it, but it's an alternative sort of approach towards inquiry that, in a way, is much more ambitious. And some of you, again, might think, yes, that's exactly how ambitious we should be. And others might think it's bonkers.

But on the second orientation, the human subject and their responses to psychedelics are viewed as potential sources of information, and potential sources of information not just about the internal state of the subject themselves, but about the reality we collectively inhabit. And that needs some unpacking and it needs some motivation.

So let me start with what, for me, is the primary motivation, where I think this should be taken seriously. And here I'm going to quote, from Michael Pollan's book How to Change Your Mind, something that I think is sort of helpful. In describing a 2006 study of psychedelics and their effects on patients, he writes "the study demonstrated that a high dose of psilocybin could be used to safely and reliably 'occasion' a mystical experience." It's interesting that he puts occasion in scare quotes. You can see kind of hesitance there.

"Can safely and reliably 'occasion' a mystical experience, typically described as the dissolution of one's ego followed by a sense of merging with nature or the universe. This might not come as news to people who take psychedelic drugs or to the researchers who first studied them back in the 1950s and 1960s, but it wasn't at all obvious to modern science or to me in 2006 when the paper was published. What was most remarkable about the results reported in the article is that participants ranked their psilocybin experience as one of the most meaningful in their lives, comparable to the birth of a first child or death of a parent. 2/3 of the participants rated the session among the top five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives. 1/3 ranked it the most significant such experience in their lives."

And in further descriptions of the book, he makes it clear that, for the subjects, there was something veridical about the experience. It wasn't just that it was intense. No. I guess I've been really drunk before. That was intense. But it wasn't-- there was no sense in which I felt like I was discovering something.

And that's the piece about these experiences that I think is so fascinating, that there's a sense that one is encountering something that is independent of oneself in undergoing the experiences.

And so if you're new to this space, and someone-- like suppose I'm new the space, and Charles comes along and says, Ned, I finally did it. I took mushrooms. I decided to expand my sort of research focus. And I felt like I was having an encounter with the divine.

And I can imagine having a couple reactions, each, in its own way, kind of dismissive. The first one would be like, how lovely. Here's a cup of soothing tea. There's that kind of dismissive reaction.

And then there's the kind of reaction that's dismissive of the orientation. I'm trying to bring into focus the clinician's reaction, like, subject reports encounter with the divine.

But there's another kind of reaction-- and it's the one I'm trying to encourage-- which is provoked by genuine curiosity, by the thought, well, Charles just reported-- and in follow-up conversations, made it clear-- that there was something very, very real about this, as real as the kind of experience you have when you open your eyes and see people and take yourself not to be in the Matrix.

And maybe I should take that seriously. Taking it seriously doesn't mean being utterly credulous or thinking that he's got infallible first-person authority over the nature and content and sort of revelatory qualities of that experience. But it does mean being open to the possibility that this experience genuinely was responsive to something independent of himself.

And just to expand on this a little bit, I found it helpful in thinking about what strikes me so unique about psychedelic experiences. Like the reason why we're having a conference about psychedelics and not about drunkenness or about the experience of being stoned-- which can also be intense-- there's a distinction in the philosophical work on perception-- or unconsciousness, really-- that's helpful here between conscious experiences that are and conscious experiences that aren't directed at something outside of oneself.

And to get a little bit more precise about that, we're all familiar with experiences that have a very distinctive phenomenology but where the experience in no sense presents itself as disclosing something about an aspect of reality that exists independently of us. So for example, if I'm feeling grumpy because I have a committee meeting I have to go to, in some sense, there's a cause of the feeling, this bad mood I'm in. But the bad mood is just sitting there as a bad mood. I know, in some sense, what it's about. But the bad mood is not purporting to present reality to me in a sort of a way. Or if I'm had a couple of glasses of wine, I'm feeling warm and fuzzy, the warm and fuzzy feeling is not presenting any aspect of reality to me as being in a certain way.

Whereas many of our conscious experiences do have this disclosive quality, to borrow a helpful term Charles gave me before we started. They have the quality of presenting themselves as disclosing or revealing something about some aspect of reality that exists independently of me. Vision is an obvious example.

Again, when you look out, it's not that our vision is infallible. But our experience of opening our eyes and looking out over a room like this is an experience of some aspect of the world being a certain way that is that way quite independent of the fact that we're experiencing it or the fact that we exist.

And so we could say that conscious experiences that have that second quality, we could say, just to have a label for it, that they have a kind of prima facie objectivity to them. Again, it doesn't mean they're accurate. You can have a visual experience and be hallucinating. But one way to see what this term does mean is that these are the sorts of experiences for which the question, "is it merely a hallucination?" is apt. So that's a kind of diagnostic for the kind of experience I'm talking about.

Again, if I'm feeling grumpy because of the committee meeting, it would be weird for you to say, Ned, that grumpy feeling you're feeling right now, that feeling, that's a hallucination. Or if I'm feeling kind of warm and fuzzy after a couple of glasses of wine, again, it would be weird to say, that warm and fuzzy feeling, that's a hallucination.

But notice that when we talk about psychedelic experiences in someone reporting an encounter with the divine, say, or an encounter in a bad case, like an encounter with demons, the question, of course, is apt. And that's enough to show the kind of surprising character of this kind of drug-induced experiences as opposed to what happens if you get stoned or drunk or other things that I remember from my reckless undergraduate days that did not have this kind of disclosive experience.

So the thesis I want to advance is that at least some psychedelic experiences have this prima facie objectivity. And more, what they present themselves as being about is something novel and laden with meaning and value and purpose. That's also important. Again, we wouldn't be having this conference if the distinctive psychological effect of psychedelics is that they sharpened your vision, say, so you could see a greater distance. That would be cool. That'd be worth studying. But it wouldn't get people to get up and come here early in the morning or just sort of worry, late at night, my God, what does this show about the nature of reality?

What seems to be disclosed to us is something having to do with meaning/value/purpose. No. These are my fumbling attempts to label the thing that people report themselves encountering here. And that seems to me to be highly significant.

So the core idea behind the second orientation is that this aspect of psychedelic experiences should not be dismissed as mere hallucination. Maybe it is, but it shouldn't be dismissed as such.

Why not dismiss it as such? Well, I kind of want to shift the burden of proof on that in a couple of ways. One is to just point out that seems sort of arrogant given the subject's own very strongly felt sense that these experiences have something veridical to them. And the other is, where does the dismissal come from anyways?

So Michael Pollan confesses, in the book, he says-- to something that he's quite willing to question, he says, "my default perspective is that of the philosophical materialist who believes that matter is the fundamental substance of the world and the physical laws that obey should be able to explain everything that happens." And then he acknowledges that his own experiences with psychedelics and his research into this subject has made him soften that stance.

But I think it's worth questioning where a commitment to scientific materialism comes from anyways. Like if someone wants to trot it out, fine. I'm tempted to say, can you point me to the articles in Science and Nature or other prestigious journals that experimentally establish scientific materialism?

And certainly, within the philosophical world, there's a long, long tradition of trying to understand what kinds of claims about reality are claims that have to do with meaning and purpose and value. And the option that these are ultimately merely claims about projections that we foist out onto the world, that's a live option, but it's not the only option. And it seems to me that research into psychedelics is a novel way of inviting us to consider alternatives. Thanks.

\[APPLAUSE\]

PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: This has really put the kibosh on the next conference I wanted to plan, on being stoned and drunk.

\[LAUGHTER\]

So I'll wait on that one. For our last speaker in this morning block-- which, congratulations to all of you for getting up on a Saturday morning at 10:00 or something on April Fools-- like, this could all been a trick, but it wasn't.

Our last-- where was I? Yes, Justin. Justin Williams is a PhD student in the lab of Charles Davis in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, or OEB. And he's researching the ethnobotany and evolutionary genomics of-- \[EXHALES SHARPLY\] here we go-- Banisteriopsis caapi.

This research aims to unravel the geographic and temporal origins, elucidate the domestication history, and inform sustainable cultivation of this sacred plant. Please welcome Justin to the stage.

\[APPLAUSE\]

JUSTIN WILLIAMS: Good morning.

AUDIENCE: \[INAUDIBLE\]

Oh, wow. You guys are listening.

\[LAUGHTER\]

In many ways, the field of psychedelic studies started right here at Harvard, first with William James in the late 1800s, and then with Richard Evans Schultes, the father of ethnobotany, who spent a dozen years uninterrupted conducting fieldwork in the Northwest Amazon.

In 1969, Dr. Schultes wrote, "one of the weirdest of the hallucinogens is the drink of the Western Amazon known as ayahuasca, caapi, or yajé. Notwithstanding its extraordinarily bizarre effects, the narcotic preparation was hidden from European eyes until just over a century ago."

What is ayahuasca? How long have humans used the plant? And perhaps the greatest mystery of all, where does ayahuasca originate? These are outstanding questions, not just for ayahuasca, but for most psychedelic plants. Meanwhile, many plants that lack the psychedelic stigma have already had these questions elucidated.

Let me tell you about one of these. Amongst incredible biodiversity found in tropical Western Africa grows an extraordinary and magical plant. For centuries, if not millennia, Indigenous peoples have cultivated this plant for its miraculous phytochemistry that temporarily alters sensory perception. However, this mind-bending plant is hardly considered a psychedelic. Or is it? I'll let you be the judge.

Dubbed the miracle berry and the appropriately named bioactive compound miraculin, it is when these tiny fruits of a shrub in the sapote family are combined with acidic foods like lemon or lime that the miraculin binds to protein receptors on the tongue, transforming the perception of sour to sweet. Not sweet itself, the fruit transforms perceived sour to sweet-- truly miraculous.

For too long, the word psychedelic has left a sour taste in the mouths of many Westerners, especially bureaucrats and academics. And this stigma has left these plants marginalized, pushed to the fringes of society and science, despite ubiquitous centricity in prehistoric cultures. Today, I hope to leave you with a sense of appreciation that evolutionary biology, the tool of modern ethnobotany, can be the miracle berry that will transform the perception of sour-tasting psychedelics into sweetness, and in doing so, remove taboo, increase appreciation for shamanic traditions, and redefine humanity's relationships with these sacred plants.

So what is evolutionary biology? And how do we in the lab of Charles Davis and myself as an ethnobotanist use it? We can think of evolutionary biology as a form of storytelling across deep and shallow time scales, from millions of years to just a few days, depending on the organism.

Today, this is done by analyzing DNA statistically using supercomputers to infer family trees or genealogies, allowing us to answer questions of how and why in nature. Why does ayahuasca produce harmala alkaloids? And how have the associated genes evolved through time and space? This is the genetic revolution now in its third generation.

Catalyzing this revolution was Kary Mullis, a 1993 Nobel Prize winner, inventor of one of the most important advances in molecular biology over the last century-- polymerase chain reaction. Mullis said, "what if I had never taken LSD? What I have invented PCR? I don't know. I doubt it. I seriously doubt it."

Understanding of the planet's biodiversity and history of nature on Earth is being rewritten through the genetic revolution. DNA sequencing has illuminated thousands of previously unknown cryptic species, or those only identifiable through their DNA. When applied to psychedelics and especially in combination with phytochemistry, surely we will discover psychedelic diversity otherwise unknown, what we might call cryptic psychedelics. The species of ayahuasca are incredibly cryptic. Ayahuasca, or yajé, can refer to a plant and also a drink, the hallucinogenic decoction from the Amazon routinely employed during shamanic ceremonies to perform what might be called miracles.

Over 100 admixture plants have been documented in ayahuasca brews. And while Banisteriopsis caapi is the canonical species, known itself as ayahuasca or yajé, nearly a dozen other species are used as substitutes or analogs. That is to say, there are many ayahuascas, plural. And then, within just a single of these ayahuascas, there may be dozens of different cultivars or varieties, like different types of apples-- Gala, Macintosh, Pink Lady. And like the different flavor and colors of apples, the different ayahuascas have different flavors and make you see different colors.

Harnessing evolutionary biology, we can resolve the difference between cultivated varieties versus different species. And more, we can connect the genotypic variation to phytochemical patterns and trace the history of this through time and space to understand ecological context that preceded human interaction with these plants as well as measure the human impact on the plant itself.

Once again, what is ayahuasca? So to quote Dr. Schultes once more, "without doubt, the spectacular advances in psychedelic studies have only been made possible through interdisciplinary studies. And it is from the integration of data gleaned from seemingly unrelated fields of investigation. And even though that only an interdisciplinary consideration can adequately cope with such a fast-moving field, the starting point must be the identification of the plants involved and their associated traditional use."

This Schultes quote from 1969 aged quite well. "For if we do not understand the species, how can we possibly make other informed investigations? By taking an evolutionary approach, we gain an appreciation of the true extent to which psychedelics in nature exist, what these species really are, and how they have evolved through time and space."

One of the most exciting applications of evolutionary biology are investigations into plants domesticated by humans. That is, cultivated plants or garden plants. For a human fingerprint is visible in the domesticated plant genomes, or human artificial selection abruptly alters the genetics of these plants, leaving a signature in the genomes.

So to what extent is ayahuasca domesticated? Just like any other food crop. When did this start happening? Where? How many times? In this way, not only can these studies inform us about the plants themselves but also inform the historic relationship between humans and plant hallucinogens.

And there's practical knowledge that can be gained as well. Not only can genetics of sacred plants help establish intellectual property rights and protect Indigenous traditional knowledge, but these evolutionary family trees can identify the wild relatives of ayahuasca, and combined with the robust understanding of the genetic diversity, can inform sustainable cultivation as well as breeding efforts for pest or disease resistance and to increase yield just like any other crop.

We live in an extraordinary epoch of human history, a tipping point socially with the psychedelic renaissance and scientifically with the genetic revolution. It is the synergy of these two transformative movements that promises to illuminate age-old mysteries about sacred plants.

Dr. Stanislav Grof famously said "psychedelics can do for the mind with the microscope can do for biology and the telescope for astronomy." I hope to have convinced you that evolutionary biology can be both the microscope and the telescope for psychedelics. That is, just as psychedelics, according to Michael Pollan, "leave users like they have been let in on a deep secret of the universe," similarly, evolutionary biology allows humans to penetrate the depths of the unknown, and as such, can also reveal deep secrets of the universe, illuminating some of the greatest mysteries of psychedelic plants. Thank you very much.

\[APPLAUSE\]

PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: How about one more round of thank yous to our speakers in this block. So one of the things that we built in a lot of time for was Q&A. How many did we have? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. We have five. Let's see if we can squeeze one more chair up here. And if I could invite all of our speakers back to the stage. And then we are going to run around with a microphone, as is the custom, and have some Q&A time.

AUDIENCE: What an exciting group of ideas and speakers. My name is Ryan \[? Henner. ?\] And I have the privilege of working clinically with ketamine, and anticipate continuing to work with these kinds of substances.

And my question is, psychedelics are being brought into Western consciousness primarily through this medical model. And many of you have identified potential problems with that. And yet here we are. So what would you recommend to the clinicians of the world right now, working with these medicines, and incorporating your ideas into the conversation and practice?

ANDREA LERNER: So as my presentation platformed, I believe there's already a lot of therapeutic uses that have been happening for decades, if not hundreds of years. So I think it's time, it's a matter of decolonization, it's a matter of equity and inclusion, to really look at what's already happening.

And to incorporate different methods, I highlighted embodiment and relationship, also ritual art, music. There's so many different methods which actually are being looked at by some clinical and research practitioners. Unfortunately, I've heard countless stories and I've read-- and maybe you have as well-- of a lot of actual appropriation, of a lot of researchers and companies going to longtime practitioners who are operating illegally, or at least underground in some respect, and then they learn the traditions and the methods of set and setting, and literally try to patent them or steal them in some other way. Like I know there's a lot of that happening.

So again, it's a matter of a very deep internal look at what we're doing, and why, and how, and who's being left out of the conversation, and how do we change this. And this is, again, a deep collective healing in many respects and in many other disciplines.

JEFFREY BREAU: That was an open question to anybody. So I don't know if anybody else wants to address that. Or we can go to the next question.

RACHAEL PETERSEN: Sure. I can address it quickly. I can't promise that anything I say will be cost effective, which always seems to be the problem in this conversation.

Yeah, so as I mentioned, we already have something called the field of professional chaplaincy. And again, I don't think it's a silver bullet, but there are things like spiritual assessments that are done for patients coming in to understand, for example, as a patient coming in to ketamine, does this patient view it, as Ned framed, as, like, it's going to make me hallucinate, but it'll help my depression. So then you know how to hold that experience, versus someone who comes in, and may be open to the idea that what they're experiencing is reality, and how do they work with that, and how do they hold that, so working with frameworks and practices that can integrate that experience.

One thing we didn't touch on also is the fact that these have always been deeply communal practices, as I think you're alluding to, and discernment about what to do with what is disclosed to you. In religious traditions, this has always been done in groups. So how can we make take this out of the individualistic frame that medicine is putting it in, as well, I think, is a really important question?

JEFFREY BREAU: I'm going to come over here.

AUDIENCE: Thank you so much. This is just so rich. And I'm getting a lot out of it, not the least of which I think is the question that's right in front of my mind is about-- and I'm not quite sure how to ask this, so I'm just going to ask it humbly-- what are your thoughts or ideas and beliefs around using these sorts of plants as a way to transform communities as it relates to class difference, religious insecurity, justice work?

And so I'm asking from the space of, either anecdotally, what you've seen, or academically, is there a way for us to use these plans to bring people together from a heart space to really create connection? And I guess I'm asking in a vulnerable sense because it feels a bit unethical to even understand how to ask that question. Any thoughts?

ANDREA LERNER: So I've learned with psychedelics and teachers who are holding psychedelics throughout the world-- again, from Peru to Palestine. It's quite literal. And I've actually lived a lot in the Middle East, where there's a lot of psychedelics being worked with between Palestinians and Israelis, for instance. And again, what I mentioned, I've been in many circles with women and genderqueer people. And again, that's really in response to the violences of the patriarchy.

So I would say there's already, in practice, so many deep, longstanding traditions of responding to these issues and violences of systems of oppression already in place. And I think, also, again, platforming communities and practitioners that are usually marginalized or being left out of the conversation is also a matter of justice and healing, for those communities, but really for all of humanity. Because all of these issues of violence really affect us all.

JEFFREY BREAU: All right. I'll go to the next question. I think you had your hand up.

NATALIA SCHWIEN: I'll add, really quickly, to that, just slightly. And I think this is probably on many of our minds, is just questions of commodification in those spaces. We heard Ned and also Paul talk about drunkenness and being stoned. Alcohol and hemp, or marijuana, are ritual substances as well that have a religious history.

And I think the question for me is, again, who's benefiting, I suppose. They are communal substances. They're communal beings. And so how, if the purpose is to make money from them-- I don't know. Yeah, I guess the question is around commodification in group spaces.

NED HALL: Can I just add one thing? I think--

\[LAUGHTER\]

Thanks. I guess one question your question prompted in me is, is there room for exploring interpersonal therapeutic benefits of psychedelics? So one fact of life that is depressing to all of us is the extent to which disagreement between people in our polity is becoming sort of more vicious. It's becoming more and more common to view someone with whom you disagree about something you care about as someone who must, because they disagree with you, be either stupid or evil or deranged. And that's pretty toxic.

And one interesting question, just from my own experiences and experiences of people I know, with psychedelics, is whether there's a capacity there to sort of tap into your ability to empathize with other people.

And so this, again, would be sort of trying to get us out of an overly medicalized model. Like, oh, you have a problem? Let me give you some psilocybin, and then your problem will go away. And more seeing these as tools that can facilitate certain kinds of understanding between people. That seems promising to me.

JEFFREY BREAU: All right. Question here.

AUDIENCE: Hi. My name is \[? Reya. ?\] I'm a sophomore at the college. Very excited to be here.

My question is mostly towards Mr. Williams and Hall, but if anybody has ideas. I hadn't thought at all about the genomic profile of the plants and how humans can kind of interfere with that. And so I was wondering if an increased human fingerprint could manipulate a plant such that it's less organic. And if we're thinking about increasing accessibility and broadening usage of plants, are there certain ethical considerations that we ought to think about if we're changing the inherent properties of the plant.

JUSTIN WILLIAMS: Thank you for the question. It's really great and well worded. In terms of the organic properties and the human fingerprint, humans, for thousands of years, have interacted with plants, and taken plants out of the wild, and grown them in a cultivated setting in gardens and farm plots. This is different from genetic modification that's done modernly that literally engineers the genome for a particular purpose.

And so more or less every crop out there that can be certified organic has what I described as this human fingerprint that's represented in either a decrease or increase in genetic diversity depending on the plant's life history traits. So as far as humans affecting the ability for plants to be cultivated organically, I think that every plant that's cultivated has this human fingerprint. And all of those can be cultivated organically. So it doesn't, in my opinion, seem to affect the organic quality.

In terms of the ethics, which I believe is the second part of the question, this is quite thorny. So I think that, done properly, and in collaboration with Indigenous colleagues in a way that values their perspective, uplifts their voice, and encourages initiatives that are longstanding within their community-- as opposed to projecting the initiatives of Western science-- is one approach, and understanding how they view genetic diversity and what their desires are for their traditional and Indigenous knowledge, as opposed to maybe what we may, may think the desire should be.

And so really, in my opinion, it starts simply by listening and observing and going in with an open mind and open heart, as opposed to trying to project our Western scientific views. Anyone else wants to add?

NED HALL: Sure. You know, Paul's definitely got more expertise. I would just say my own concern in this area is much less with Western science-- which I kind of like, to be honest-- but more with capitalism and thoughts like even the engineering of drugs to achieve some preset purpose without first understanding what kinds of purposes are worth pursuing in our interaction and work with these drugs.

I'd like to see people in this space go slow and not try to just be in it to make money. But that may be absurdly pollyannaish on my part.

\[LAUGHTER\]

JEFFREY BREAU: All right. I saw there was a question here.

AUDIENCE: Good morning. Thank you all very much. Extremely informative.

So I come at this-- my name is George-- I come from the other side of the river, BU, but following much of what you guys have done already. And I come at this from a ecotourism background, 11 years in the cannabis industry, and now business school, looking to find psychedelic treatments for veterans and sexual violence victims.

But my question, which hopefully the whole panel can dig into, these are extremely powerful medicines. Whether it's Cosmic Serpent, which showed, 10 or 15 years ago, there probably is positive genetic changes from using these plants; whether it's herbalism and talking to plants, and recent research showing that plants are actually talking to us; whether it's violence and trauma and holding a space with religion; and perhaps, also, the business side, since these are so powerful, how do we avoid not just commoditization, but actually, how do we get true research on the plants?

There are people here from the Center of Neuroscience. And unfortunately, what's not published is that they're using single-molecule synthetics supplied by Compass. We saw, at the MGH conference in the fall, that the double-blind model doesn't really work. And so having left cannabis because of its capitalization and moving towards single molecule and getting rid of highs, how can we make sure that, as this industry moves forward, it really does not only heal people but also heal people in all the-- for instance, your last speech, all the different flavors of healing that can come? And wonderful to hear each of your perspectives if possible.

NED HALL: I was hoping to avoid that. I have no idea how--

\[LAUGHTER\]

Good start. I have no idea how to avoid this trend in industry because I have no idea how to do anything in industry. So I'm a terrible person to answer that question.

I just want to say-- and I may reveal my ignorance here. I guess I already have-- just to say that I think-- Andrea has mentioned something I just want to reiterate, which is I'm worried about the obsolescence or disappearance of, I guess, what we're calling the underground, and just getting pushed to the margins. There's a generational aspect there, although I know there are more and more people kind of stepping into that space, maybe out of frustration with regulation and medicalization and legalization efforts.

And I just want to celebrate that. I think that's a great thing. And I think it goes hand in hand with also protecting Indigenous traditions use. So I know maybe it sounds cliched, but I suppose my answer to your question is I don't know whether or how industry is going to write itself. I'm curious in the things that are outside of the industry. Sorry.

EMMA BECK: No, that's fine.

\[LAUGHTER\]

NED HALL: You're doing great.

EMMA BECK: So the extent to which I can speak to industry, which I will say is not very much, but I think the perspective that I come at it with-- and I'm very grateful to be sharing this perspective on the stage with all of these people-- is that I think about it, yes, people are trying to make money and are making money off of it, no question. That being said, the way that I think about it is more so, how do we help the most people? And I don't necessarily think that there is one sort of pure, "without fail or fault" way to do that.

And I believe that there's always going to be perverse incentives. There's always going to be that, sort of universally. And I really believe that the companies that are doing it in a way that puts patients first truly are going to be the ones that drive the largest impact.

And I think there's no-- I have a hard time thinking that-- take VA, for example. There's research in San Diego that two clinicians are doing using MDMA on vets doing couples therapy research. And their relationship has fundamentally broken down because of their trauma. And giving them access to that, to me, is incredible. And to say, no, you can't because we don't quite the universe of ways this could go wrong-- which is true with a lot of innovations in medicine-- that is challenging for me.

So what I think is the most important is having a set of just understanding that is open, considering all of the perspectives here of the ways that it can go wrong, not just the clinical ways. And thinking about who are the right people to administer these therapies. Are they psychiatrists? Maybe not. Are they social workers maybe? Are they chaplains. Maybe. But sort of broadening our understanding and asking those questions of how can we help the most people as safely as possible, that is how I think industry will be the most successful. And the ones that aren't doing that, it will be very obvious very quickly.

JEFFREY BREAU: All right. We'll take a final question back here. Oh, unless-- yeah, please, Justin.

JUSTIN WILLIAMS: I'll just add, one thing about, I guess, the commodification of some of these products. I think that, really, we should be asking, in the case of traditional knowledge, what the Indigenous peoples would like to be done with these products, if they really are OK with the commodification, which certainly isn't happening right now.

So in the case of ayahuasca, there's nearly 500 patents, the majority of which have been written in the last just handful of years by biotech companies really salivating at the opportunity to make a quick buck off of knowledge that really is not their own. So this is very much 21st century bioprospecting.

I think, furthermore, we should recognize that a lot of the questions that we're trying to ask, myself included, are questions that have long been answered and already figured out by Indigenous peoples who are using these plants and medicines. And so really placing them in the center of the conversation is going to be one way to overcome some of these barriers.

And then, finally, in terms of the single-molecule approach and single-compound approach, in the early 1900s, in ayahuasca research, there was strong efforts to isolate individual molecules or compounds-- the harmine, harmaline, or tetrahydro-harmine, and mostly in effort to find a cure for Parkinson's. However, the majority of these studies were unsuccessful. It's really due to this reductionist quality of the Western scientific milieu by isolating a single compound. These plants are extraordinarily complex. So yes, these are the three canonical harmala alkaloids, but there's nearly 10 other alkaloids that almost don't receive any attention by chemical researchers.

And that's just in banisteriopsis caapi, and not in the DMT-containing plants that also have other alkaloids beyond just DMT. And how these other alkaloids and these other compounds are interacting with each other really remains to be understood. And so I'm not sure that isolating a single molecule is necessarily going to have the same effect as drinking a decoction itself.

JEFFREY BREAU: All right. Final question here.

AUDIENCE: Yeah. I appreciate all of your perspectives and the opportunity to ask a super-quick question. I'm a lawyer who is an interdisciplinary scholar focusing on religion and drugs. And so I think a lot about the legal side of this. But I'm curious, do you envision bringing back-- we've heard about medicalization legalization, we've heard about chaplaincy. But what about religious use of psychedelics in religious context in terms of research here at Harvard Div? Or could we see, in a decade, a class here at Harvard Div where students get to have hands-on experience or integrate that into practice? Just wondering if that's part of this future of psychedelic religion vision that you're so wonderfully discussing here.

RACHAEL PETERSEN: Sure. Well, there's a couple of different ways to get at this. And actually, I'm curious-- I feel like Jeff could speak to this in his research in underground religious use and spiritual and recreational use.

But I do want to name something that came to mind that I didn't name. I'm a co-author on a paper that will be published-- fingers crossed-- in a few months that's sort of a clinical refresh of the Good Friday experiment. So we have a 25 clergy of differing faiths who were administered high-dose psilocybin at Johns Hopkins and NYU. And we're doing a qualitative analysis of their appraisal of those experiences, how it affected their ministry and the extent to which they view them, potentially-- or not-- as valuable tools in the spiritual cultivation. So I think, again, to the extent that peer-reviewed research is helpful, and kind of shifting discourse around that, I would just say, keep your eyes open for that study because I think it will be really important.

And increasingly, we are seeing more and more groups moving towards legal arguments for religious use. I think that is both a good and a bad thing. I mean, I think, like everything else, as you were saying, there are trade-offs. I've already seen several groups claiming to be Jewish or Christian and use psychedelics ritually that are actually being quite predatory and using religion as a mask for what is otherwise not a religious community.

So as all other things in this space, there will be trade-offs. But I do think it's an area of growth that we have to examine both in formal ministerial spaces and in more underground community churches.

NED HALL: Yeah, I could speak to that. \[INAUDIBLE\]. So I've been on the faculty here for 15 years. And I can't imagine this conference happening 5 years ago, never mind 15. And that's obviously wrapped up in the psychedelic, quote unquote, "renaissance." And I think we all, in this room, probably have a good dose of ambivalence about that category.

In any case, we've tried to make deliberate steps in the university to make psychedelic research licit, rigorous, responsible. That's not the champion. I actually think, in some ways, that's because universities are square environments. And so we have to square the circle.

But it's important that universities do something. And so we're trying to do it in the way that universities can, recognizing full well that there's a lot of really important work that is never going to happen within the walls of a university.

So I'll just speak for the efforts here at the Divinity School. No, I don't think, on the horizon, there's going to be a practicum in which students are-- we currently don't have a practicum where people get high or get drunk. And I'm not trying to equate those things, but that hasn't happened. And I don't think it needs to happen.

I think what needs to happen is a recognition that this is not some stigmatized subject, that it's serious, and that in this case, here, that it's woven into the history of religion. And not just religion, but it's woven into the history of religion. And so it's actually responsible. We're being responsible by taking this seriously.

And I'm proud of the modest efforts that we've been able to achieve in the last five years. And I want to just credit Jeff and Paul, because I think this is-- there going to be many crowns along the way of this work, but this is a watershed moment. And it owes a lot to them to-- I mean, to have this number of people from around the University accept an invitation to come to the Divinity School is remarkable. For those of you who don't the Divinity School-- ha ha-- we're at the margins of this University in more ways than one.

So welcome. I'm so glad you're here. And kudos to Jeff and Paul for getting you guys to come out here to the absolute periphery.

\[LAUGHTER\]

You're welcome.

\[APPLAUSE\]

PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: Thank you all so much for coming to our first block here.

SPEAKER 1: Sponsors-- the Harvard Psychedelics Project at HDS, the Center for the Study of World Religions at HDS, and Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: Copyright 2023, President and Fellows of Harvard College.



 

 

 



 

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