Video: Psychedelics and Philosophy: Metaphysics and Meaning-Making in Psychedelia

December 14, 2023

As part of the Psychedelics and the Future of Religion series, the Center for the Study of World Religions hosted scholars Drs. Christine Hauskeller and Peter Sjostedt-Hughes. Philosophers Prof. Hauskeller and Dr. Sjöstedt-Hughes present a multi-perspectival hermeneutics of psychedelic-occasioned experiences. They discuss the question: How do we make sense of the myriad of experiences and extraordinary states of being that psychedelics can evoke through lenses ground from the discipline of Philosophy?

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: Psychedelics and philosophy, metaphysics and meaning making in psychedelia. November 6, 2023.

JEFFREY BREAU: Welcome, everyone. My name is Jeffrey Breau. And I'm a graduate student here at Harvard Divinity School, and a researcher with the Center for the Study of World Religions, where along with Paul, I co-convened the psychedelics sacred and subversive reading group.

Last week, our group engaged the work of Professor Hauskeller and Dr. Sjostedt-Hughes. And to say that it sparked lively and excited discussion would be an understatement. We are grateful that they are both joining us here today. And imagine that the conversation will be no less lively.

Today's event is part of the very popular series on Psychedelics and the Future of Religion, which is now in its third year. This series is part of the center's larger ongoing and evolving Initiative called Transcendence and Transformation or T&T for short. If you're interested in T&T, we'll put a link to the T&T page in the chat function.

As always, the best way to stay abreast of what we're doing here at the center, and its programming, is to sign up for the weekly newsletter, which you can do on the center's landing page. After our introductory remarks, Paul and I will both disappear and turn the floor over to Dr. Sjostedt-Hughes, who will present for about 20 minutes.

At which point, I will briefly reappear to introduce Professor Hauskeller before, again, turning over the Zoom to her. Once both speakers have presented, we will all be back on the screen to discuss their works. With that, I will turn it over to Paul to introduce himself and today's panel.

PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: Hello, everyone. Welcome again. I'm Paul Gillis-Smith, grad student at Harvard Divinity School, and researcher here at the Center for the Study of World Religions. It's been an absolute delight working with my comrade Jeffrey here on all things psychedelia at the center and beyond. And our reading group that Jeffrey mentioned is always a highlight of my week.

It's such a gift for our own understanding and edification to have that multidisciplinary and collaborative space to work through these texts, and then be able to engage the authors and editors with all of those conversations front of mind.

Our panelists today are two philosophers, Dr. Christina Hauskeller and Dr. Peter Sjostedt-Hughes. They will present a multiperspectival hermeneutics of psychedelic occasioned experiences, and discuss the question, how do we make sense of the myriad of experiences and extraordinary states of being that psychedelics can evoke through lenses grounded in philosophy?

One might describe their work as a psychedelic humanities. While in conversation with the thoroughgoing scientific and medical discourse that dominates this psychedelic Renaissance, the psychedelic humanities, as I see reflected in Dr. Hauskeller's and Dr. Sjostedt-Hughes's research, is committed to the humanistic study of psychedelics, whether informed by the likes of Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche, the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, or commitment to the decolonial turn.

It is our absolute delight to convene this forum and highlight the work of thought leaders in the psychedelic humanities, specifically at a time when Harvard and the Divinity School, specifically, has committed to the advancement of just such a psychedelic humanities.

So without further ado, it is my honor to introduce Dr. Peter Sjostedt-Hughes. Dr. Sjostedt-Hughes is a philosopher of mind and an unabashed metaphysician, as well as a research fellow and lecturer at Exeter University, and co-organizer of the Philosophy and Psychedelics Exeter Research Group.

Dr. Sjostedt-Hughes is the author of two books on psychedelics and philosophy, Modes of Sentience-- Psychedelics, Metaphysics, Panpsychism, and Noumenautics-- Metaphysics, Meta-Ethics, Psychedelics, as well as the co-editor of Philosophy and Psychedelics-- Frameworks for Exceptional Experience.

His research has primarily concerned the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Benedict Spinoza, and their relevance to the metaphysics and phenomenology of psychedelic experience.

Dr. Sjostedt-Hughes has taught the psychedelics and philosophy course at the University of Exeter alongside Dr. Hauskeller, which is likely the first of its kind. So Peter, the floor is yours.

PETER SJOSTEDT-HUGHES: Well, thank you, Paul. Thank you, Jeffrey, and Charles and Laurie and everyone. It's a real honor to be here. Thanks for the invitation. So I've only got 20 minutes for almost 50 slides, so I'll just get on with it.

So yeah, my talk is called On the need for metaphysics and psychedelic therapy and research. The plan is this. I'm just going to give you the primary point, which I think is quite basic. Then I'm going to try to explain what metaphysics is. I'm going to give you examples of psychedelic metaphysical experiences, and then talk about the application of metaphysics to psychedelic therapy and beyond.

And this talk is based on my paper, On the need for metaphysics in psychedelic therapy and research, which came out a few months ago, which is open access. So you can all download it for free, if you are so inclined.

So what is the primary point here then? The primary point that I'm trying to make is this-- psychedelic-induced metaphysical experiences will be more adequately comprehended and integrated with recourse to metaphysics, almost a tautology, as we say in philosophy, almost.

In my research, I realized that I was not the first person to come up with this idea, this basic idea, really. Albert Hofmann, who synthesized LSD, he wrote in his autobiography from 1979, quote, "A type of 'metamedicine,' 'metapsychology,' is beginning to call upon the metaphysical element of people. Let us make this element a basic healing principle in therapeutic practice."

So yeah, so the paper, generally, is about applying metaphysics to psychedelic therapy, primarily, but it could have social implications as well. But we'll focus on the therapy here. So let's begin with asking the question, what is metaphysics.

Well, the word metaphysics comes from Aristotle's book, the Metaphysics, which literally means after Aristotle's book the Physics. It was named that by a later editor, probably Andronicus of Rhodes. Aristotle used the words "first philosophy," not "metaphysics."

I point this out quite often. And the reason I wrote this paper really is because in our Exeter colloquium on psychedelic research, a lot of scientists and psychologists, psychiatrists were coming in talking about metaphysics/supe rnaturalism/spiritualism. And I thought, listen, in philosophy, metaphysics has quite a particular meaning. And we get that meaning from, initially, Aristotle. Of course, metaphysics doesn't begin with Aristotle. He's talking about metaphysicians of the past, including his teacher, Plato.

But anyway, in the metaphysics you get these kind of questions. So questions of being ontology. So questions of what the world is made of the substance as it were. So the physical, the mental, and so on and so forth.

You get questions about causation, mechanical causation, mental causation, teleology, and so on. Of course, metaphysics has added or the discipline of metaphysics has added to Aristotle's program. But more or less, there's an outline there in the book.

He also talks about form, universal, space time, the eternal qualities, properties, relations, modality, what is possibility, what is actuality, what is necessity, and so on. And he even, interestingly, in the metaphysics, speaks about deity.

So he talks about in book Lambda, the prime mover, the uncaused cause, which Whitehead said was the sort of first and last non-religious God in Western thought. There's more than that that's non-exhaustive. They're all interwoven as well, but you get a basic idea.

Even more basic is this. So I've put this sort of ontology, the substance metaphysics, or the metaphysics of mind into this metaphysics matrix, which is a diagram on my paper. You get five main columns there, physicalism, idealism, dualism, monism, the transcendent, and some rows.

The reason for that very basically is because I think that a lot of people who have not studied philosophy think there are merely two options, physicalism and dualism. But there are many others and many varieties are all interweave.

Even more basic way of presenting this is thus. So let me just quickly go through these positions. So we have the concepts, mind and matter. Now, maybe they're the same thing, but at least we can differentiate them as concepts.

And we ask how they relate. Well, maybe there's some kind of pre-established harmony, as we have with Leibniz with occasionalism, with Malebranche. It's not very popular today. Descartes, in the modern world, introduced this interactionist substance dualism, where mind and matter are both separate substances that interact. Many problems with that.

20th century, we have now eliminativism, so consciousness doesn't really exist at all. It solves a lot of problems. From Aldous Huxley's grandfather, Thomas Huxley, we get epiphenomenalism, which is the view that the brain creates the mind, but the mind has no power to affect the brain and body in return. Again, comes up with a lot of problems.

Probably, the dominant paradigm today is emergentism, at least in the Cognitive Sciences. And that's the view that the brain, or rather the mind, emerges from the brain. And you see the arrow going down, that sort of indicates that there's also this need to believe in mental causation, partly for evolutionary reasons, why did mentality evolve if it has no power, whatsoever. Although that causes many, many problems, such as the exclusion problem.

In the mid 20th century, we had psycho-neural identity theory, which is that the idea that the mind is the brain, not that the mind emerges from the brain, but it actually is the same thing. But there was a big problem with octopuses regarding that that I can't get into anyway, so people moved on.

Doing the rounds in the last-- well, again, returning to do the rounds is panpsychism-- I did my PhD on panpsychism. It's the view that minds exist throughout all of nature, somewhat related to animism.

We have idealism from Berkeley, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, which is the view that the mind, rather than the brain, or matter creating mind, is the other way around. Mind creates matter or projects the world of matter as we see it.

And then there's neutral monism. Bertrand Russell coined that term neutral monism. But what he meant then in the early 20th century is different from what it really means now. We can take Spinoza as an example of a neutral monist. So mind and matter are both expressions of a neutral substance that's neither one or the other. And I'll return to Spinoza in a moment.

On top of that, we have the-- as well as mind and matter, we have theories of the transcendent. And many thinkers such as Whitehead, Santayana, Russell, early Russell, at least, and so on, Godel, Roger Penrose and Karl Popper as well, I should say, believe that you have to have a transcendent element. So a transcendent realm, a sort of platonic realm to explain the relations between mind and matter as well.

Anyway, so there, you just have a general menu of metaphysics of mind, and we don't know all of those options are problematic. And there are many other options as well. Even our definitions of mind and matter are very problematic. But nonetheless, there's no obvious solution. There's no obvious one answer to how mind and matter relate.

Metaphysics is related to mysticism. In metaphysics, we have, then, systematic intellectual metaphysics. So the grand schemes of Leibniz and Spinoza and so on. We have, in universities today, analytic intellectual metaphysics, which is kind of a bitty study of causation or identity or necessity, and things like that, non-systematic.

So we study metaphysics at University and elsewhere. But I think you can also-- I argue that you can also have an experiential metaphysics. In other words, you can experience this in one go. And some of that experiential metaphysics overlaps with classic reports of mysticism.

William James, for example, writes, in 1902, quote, "In the nitrous oxide trance, we have a genuine metaphysical revelation." So it's this overlap that I'm interested in, the overlap between metaphysics and mysticism. Not exactly the same thing, but some of it is.

And then we have a third overlap with psychedelic experience. So I'm not saying at all psychedelic experiences, mystical or metaphysical. There are, sometimes, people take psychedelics to get a different sort of viewpoint of their body or to become better hunters or whatever.

And there's no neutral view, again, with metaphysics. So as Alfred North Whitehead said, "if you don't go into metaphysics, you assume an uncritical metaphysics." I don't think there's a default view. It's part of the ideology, the culture in which you find yourself.

And it's no good, I argue, to say that well, we don't know the relationship between mind and matter yet, but maybe neuroscience will because as Jaegwon Kim, the great philosopher of mind said, quote, "Making a running list of psycho neural correlations does not come anywhere near to gaining an explanatory insight into why there are such correlations."

So in other words, neural correlates of consciousness present rather than resolve the problem. So this is a metaphysical problem. And the mind matter problem keeps the metaphysical options open for interpreting psychedelic experience.

So let's say you have a-- you take the psychedelics and you have some kind of pantheistic experience, where God is nature. You don't know because we don't the solution to the mind-matter problem. We don't know whether that is a delusion or vertical.

Let me give you a few examples of psychedelic metaphysical experiences. Benny Shannon, in his seminal book, The Antipodes of the Mind-- Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience, writes this, quote, "Overall, Ayahuasca induces a comprehensive metaphysical view of things. I would characterize it as an idealistic monism with pantheistic overtones."

Nice cocktail there. "Reality is conceived as constituted by one non-material substance, which is identified as cosmic consciousness." Spinoza would accept them.

Or a classic pantheist insight from Alan Watts. "The individual discovers himself to be one continuous process with God with the universe. To those who have known it, it is as real and overwhelming as falling in love."

This is an interesting one on panpsychism from a book. I don't know if-- not that well known, by Richard Ward, called A Drug-Taker's Notes, from 1957. It's about taking LSD. And interestingly, he wrote this before there was a lot of literature on what to expect when one takes psychedelics.

He wrote this. "I realized, on 100 micrograms of LSD, that the whole universe is made up of things which have their own natures, relationships, significances, and that in some universal scale, each thing has its proper degree of awareness."

Panpsychism, as I mentioned, is related to animism. Our good friend, Dr. Luis Eduardo Luna, for example, writes this. "It's impossible to understand Amerindian animist culture without reference to these psychedelic plants." And that relationship between panpsychism, Western panpsychism, Amerindian animism, and psychedelic experience is something that I would like to explore further.

As well as those systematic theories, you have analytic intellectual metaphysical revelations like about the memory, past. That's a lot of therapies based on bringing back. So making conscious lost memories and working with them again.

Here's an example from Oliver Sacks' book, Hallucinations. This one LSD, I believe. "Then my whole life flashed in my mind from birth to the present with every detail that ever happened, every feeling and thought, visual and emotional was there in an instant."

Interestingly, Thomas de Quincey, in his 1820s book, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, also writes the same thing, that lots of memories from his early childhood came back in exquisite detail.

I think a very interesting philosophical thing with psychedelic experience is what I call novel qualia, qualia being colors, sound, smells, and so on. Jaegwon Kim writes this. "Why are there just these qualia," in normal consciousness, "and not other possible ones? That remains a mystery."

Why do we translate as it were electromagnetism, light into color or airwaves into sound. You get synesthesia with psychedelics, but also, I think, in my own experience, there are qualia, which cannot be categorized in any normal sense like color or sound, something beyond it. And then the question is, well, what was the sort of ontological status of those qualia?

Metaphysical entities feature a lot. It seems universal throughout every country, little people. I won't read that one. That's totally grotesque one from Rick Strassman's study on DMT.

Nature connectedness, again, very common, it seems. Here's an extreme example from Paul Devereux saying he became one with the daffodil and felt a sort of exquisite experience of light falling through his petals, and so on.

And monism, neutral monism. Albert Hofmann, whom I mentioned, he begins the last chapter of his book, LSD-- My Problem Child, with this epigraph from Goethe. Quote, "What more can a person gain in life than that God-nature reveals himself to him?"

Of course, Goethe, there, is referring to, with God-nature, Spinoza, the great thinker, Jewish-Dutch thinker of the 17th century, who was suppressed by his fellow Jews. Excommunicated by his fellow Jews. And his books were banned by the church.

And people, then, did not dare speak about him until the pantheism controversy of the late 1700s, 100 years after his death. If you're interested in that, I've got a book-- not a book, a chapter in our book, a book edited with Christina Hauskeller, Philosophy and Psychedelics, on basically comparing Spinoza's ontology with certain psychedelic, phenomenology, especially 5-MeO-DMT. Phenomenology.

OK. I've got a few minutes left. So let me just quickly talk about how we can apply this in practice. I should also say, just an interesting thing, a lot of people accuse philosophers of living in sort of ivory towers, and not applying to the world. But think with psychedelic research, philosophy can be applied in practical ways.

Anyway, give you an example. So I'm going to talk about psychedelic therapy, and I just quickly say that generally, psychedelic therapy in the clinic, these days, involves three phases-- a preparatory session, where therapists get to their participants, usually a man and a woman. And then there's the drug session itself, where they take whatever, psilocybin, DMT, whatever.

And then there's the integrative phase at the end, where the therapist tries to integrate the experience into the person's life to make it significant to them, to make it therapeutic for them.

But unlike most other forms of therapy, psychedelic therapy often involves metaphysical experience. But psychotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, clinicians, and so on are not trained in metaphysics. It's not in their professional ambit yet. Maybe some are existential psychologists, for example, but generally, they're not.

So here's my conjecture from the paper. Offering a patient an additional and optional discussion of a scheme of metaphysical perspectives, from that matrix, for example. For integration, may extend long term benefits of psychedelic therapy and beyond. Why? Because let's say, there's certain evidence to show that certain experience, metaphysical experiences, are the most therapeutic, usually of a monist variety.

It seems that-- yeah, this has most effects. But when you return to as it were normal life, you might think, after a few weeks, well, God, his nature, that was quite interesting experience, but probably, complete rubbish. It can't be true in any way.

But by telling participants, and giving them a basic overview of pantheism, for example, you might actually get them to reflect upon that experience and not to dismiss it as quickly, thereby, extending long term benefits. That's a conjecture. It can be tested.

And moreover, intellectual metaphysics can help explain experiential metaphysics and mystical experience. So I suppose, at the moment, we're testing a lot of people's psychedelic experiences with the MEQ, the mysticism questionnaires, and so on.

And that's somewhat useful. It's very problematic. But mysticism stays at the level of mystery. Metaphysics goes to the level of explanation, or at least it seeks to explain experiences. Therefore, metaphysics, I argue, can be of use in integrating psychedelic-induced mystical and metaphysical experiences.

This is the primary point, again, psychedelic-induced metaphysical experiences would be more adequately comprehended and integrated with recourse to metaphysics.

If you're interested in more, you can look at these-- take a look at these lovely books. And with that, I will stop and say thank you.

JEFFREY BREAU: Thank you very much Dr. Sjostedt-Hughes. That was a fascinating talk and appreciate you stepping out of the ivory tower and entering the [? dayglo ?] tower to explain all of that to us.

It is now my pleasure to introduce Christina Hauskeller, who will speak for about 20 minutes as well. All right. So by way of introduction, Dr. Christina Hauskeller is a Professor of Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Exeter, where she served as the co-organizer for the Philosophy and Psychedelics Exeter Research Group until 2020.

For decades, Dr. Hauskeller published widely on processes of knowledge production in genetics, genomics, and stem cell research from a feminist ethics perspective. This rich background in the philosophy of science and medicine provided an on ramp into the philosophy of psychedelics, specifically towards an analysis of psychedelics as novel tools of biomedicine.

Dr. Hauskeller co-edited the recent volume Philosophy and Psychedelics, frameworks for exceptional experience with Dr. Sjostedt-Hughes. And she is the primary author of Decolonization is a metaphor towards a different ethic, the case from psychedelic studies.

Dr. Hauskeller is also a co-editor for a forthcoming special issue on psychedelics in the journal, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, which she will tell us more about.

Under Dr. Hauskeller's leadership, the Exeter Research Group has hosted two conferences, and is going into the third year of an interdisciplinary psychedelic studies colloquium, which has featured lectures on ketamine therapy, MDMA therapy, psychedelics and metaphysics, mysticism and ecology, and much more.

And with that Dr. Hauskeller, the floor is yours.

CHRISTINE HAUSKELLER: Is my sound on? Yes. Thank you, Jeffrey. Thank you for this introduction. So I've been working with Peter since 2019 on topics around philosophy and psychedelics. And I come from a slightly different background in tradition, having worked for a long time in philosophy of the new life sciences and in medical ethics.

So I take a much more a sort of ethical point of view now at meaning-making around psychedelic experiences, in particular, looking at problematic ways in which I think current clinical research and the medicalization of psychedelics actually pre-shape such experiences, and offering at least some hints at alternative ways.

Just a second. Yeah. So looking from a critical theory perspective, which I will explain in a minute. And any topic basically means you look at the ways in which there are processes of power that actually shape a space.

And we look at the psychedelic medicalization space, and there is more than one dimension of power. But one clearly-- the one I've looked at in some depth, this clinical trials and standardization, as a necessary method. And this is some of what I'll be saying will build on.

But also the utilization of psychedelic experiences of Indigenous peoples and lands and underground communities, and that medicine, itself, is woven into a complex fabric of dominant institutions, including, not least, the predominant structures of political economy, that define its parameters of action.

So medicine doesn't necessarily always do what might from a medical point of view be best for a patient or a group of patient. There are many other parameters that are being considered. I will bring these aspects in.

But first, this article that Jeffrey just mentioned-- the writing's gone dark there, where it should be red, on decolonization is a metaphor. So this decolonial perspective is really important to my work. And I'll try to develop this. There is a quite heavily cited literature on decolonization.

And one article in that states that one should never ever use decolonization as a metaphor. In our paper, we have argued that quite on the contrary, taking a decolonial perspective that aims to break open the borders between things that are usually fenced off, namely, in the case of coloniality, the settlers and the dispossessed, or people of color and white people, or men and women or culture and nature.

These sort of dualisms of colonial thought, as the philosopher Val Plumwood, for instance, elaborated in the 1990s, are actually part of arguing that decolonization should not be used metaphorically because it supposes there is a literal use.

And if we assume that it's a literal use, then we take a method from the epistemic playbook of colonization and say that there is a particular way of colonization such as the North American form of colonization settler colonialism that actually is the right one for which decolonization should be applied and not for other things.

When we look at the medicalization, and I mean, the ongoing colonial structures within the medicalization of psychedelics, then we see that actually, these processes take on new forms. And we cut off a whole critical perspective if we disallow the use of the word colonization for that.

So if we say there is colonization happening in the psychedelic arena, what does it mean? Well, it's quite conventional in a way. So colonized objects are things such as psychoactive plants, rare animals, Indigenous knowledges, Indigenous rituals and practices, Indigenous peoples and persons, but also human minds and experiences.

This is where the metaphysics is really critical and the main focus of my talk today, and of course, the hopes and needs of people, who might be desperate and of mental distress.

What are the methods of this colonization? Well, the conventional ones-- extraction and appropriation, adaptation, synthetic reproduction, marketization and control of profits. So more on this in a minute.

But when we think about here in this talk, in particular, at internal colonization, what is the discourse here? And I thank very much, Luis Eduardo Luna, for allowing me to use his fantastic images of Pablo Amaringo and his group of painters on some of my slides.

So psychological and internal colonization, what could that mean? It's the question of which kinds of experiences are legitimate. In our Western culture, psychedelic experiences are not legitimate. They are extraordinary.

But on the other hand, we do have therapeutic party and religious uses of such experiences. But in those, they are not a self-expansion through expanded consciousness, but in a particular context within which they aim to serve.

So whilst we say that psychedelics are illegal, I would contest that this is actually the case. I think we have three spaces in which they have been used for decades. And are at least semi legitimized, semi legal, and that is the clinical space, the party use and raves, and the religious uses for psychedelic religions, such as the Center Diamond.

But in each of these spaces, of course, there is a specific already given role for the psychedelic experience. And that is to cure yourself from a mental state of ill health to actually have an extraordinary experience for a fantastic weekend with people, where you're all in unison, and then get back into your normal life afterwards. And the religious use very similar to this but within the context of a whole narrative of religious belief.

So can psychiatry or psychology include the fullness of psychedelic experiences without distorting them? And this is what I've been looking at in these clinical trials. And is it right that we actually restrict access to such experiences?

My background in theory, I will briefly introduce you in just a couple of slides. This will be very rough and ready, but I'll try anyway. So thinking with key concepts from critical theory, as developed in the Frankfurt School, foci of this theory are in terms of epistemology, ontology, and ethics, that on the one hand in epistemology we think in constellations, not in linear causalities.

So this is a critical approach against instrumental reasoning, the use of reason to just serve particular purposes that are material purposes. It is a approach that argues against and tries to present a different ontology that is not reifying, that doesn't turn everything into things goods or exemplars.

And argues against the commodification of everything and what is called also substance fetishism. And in ethics, it is really against alienation, describing the state of alienation contemporary science puts human people in. And that is widely recognized, in psychology, as one of the main causes of mental distress.

So alienation, also through the culture industry and through so many offers we have to actually even in our spare time not find ways to truly being with ourselves. It is a method of critique that aims at criticizing the social order that is focused on possession and control.

And one quote from one of the leading theorists in this. That is Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. They write, in the dialectic of enlightenment, that representation about science, they write this or should have said that.

About science, they write, "Representation gives a way to universal fungibility. An atom is smashed not as a representative, but as a specimen of matter, and the rabid suffering the torment of the laboratory is seen not as a representative but mistakenly as a mere exemplar.

Because in functional science, the scientific object is petrified, whereas the rigid ritual of former times appear supple in its substitution of one thing for another."

Here, they talk about magic. "Magic like science," so magic here is not radically different from science. Science is a different form of magic. "Magic like science is concerned with ends, but it pursues them through mimesis." That means through sort of trying to imitate, "not through an increasing distance from the object. It certainly is not founded on the omnipotence of thought."

So the critique here is that the scientific approach turns things into exemplars. And very much distances itself as something radically different from that which it studies, which in psychedelic clinical practice, I will say and argue here, is a problem.

So in terms of psychedelic knowledges, I have certain thoughts I will defend here that the war against drugs is harmful. And for many psychedelics, unjustifiable. I think that is relatively widely been argued. And that we have these semi-legalized spaces, I said earlier, the clinics, the churches, and the parties.

But science, however, limits and manipulates psychedelic experiences. And I will show this by giving an example from music. And that, generally, psychedelic experiences are, these kinds of experiences are deemed as dangerous in and for maintaining particular power structures within Western civilization.

Then there is a question and I've done a little project with a student last year on connectedness and psychedelic experiences of nature. And the context within which we actually can change the way we relate to the world through psychedelic experiences and what matters, I'll give an example from that, which provides then evidence against alienation, but in a form in which psychedelic experiences are not in that same way instrumentalized and woven into a capitalizing fabric as medicine is prone to make them.

So I'll end with a critique of prepackaged meaning-making in psychedelics. So here's the three spaces. I think I've already explained this. We have the clinic to cure mental illness. That's the purpose, to make people feel or be more normal.

We have the party as an occasional very limited and time-framed experience of self-abandon in which you're not supposed to radically change yourself. You're just going off into that and back out.

And in a church, you have a shared community and rituals and ecstatic transcendence. But as a part of our life, that is left to that, bordered off from the everyday work environment and life environment we are in.

Now, looking at clinical colonization, psychedelics are sort of in between clinical trial practices and these practices of scientific extraction within these frameworks of the medical pharmaceutical industrial complex.

And of course, drug development and business decisions that are shaped by technocratic demands of creating scientific evidence-based to show efficacy and cost effectiveness of these new treatments.

That means that we use methods of diagnosing people, admitting them to a clinical trial, and then they experience the psychedelic trip in a situation such as depicted here. This is from a clinical trial report. I could have chosen many. This is one.

In which it's clearly stated, during the sessions, participants were instructed to lie on a couch in a living room-like environment. And facilitators encouraged participants to focus their attention inward and stay with any experience that arose to enhance inward reflection.

Music was played and participants were instructed to wear eyeshades and headphones. So it's you with your mind. Then example of this way of control that I'm talking about here is the music playlist.

The Johns Hopkins playlist page states, "For the onset, the best music is unfolding and has a dependable structure, so it is a net of reassurance, almost, and of leadership." And let me pronounce this word again, "leadership." So the music is there to guide people through their trip, Bill Richard says.

And in order to keep participants inside the experience, there's music chosen for instance that has little music that has English text. English texts. So interesting. As if not other people would speak other languages and understood other texts, but that aside.

So this playlist is very conservative, classical music mostly. A lot of sort of death music, very sad in some ways, quite a baffling music list that contains none. Let me just remark on this. None of the music from the '60s and '70s that was developed in the context of consuming psychedelic drugs. This is music from a different space.

Kaelen and colleagues have done a study with people coming out of clinical psychedelic trials, and asked them about their music experiences. It's a very small number of people, 19. So this is not a big number study. But it was still interesting to look at what these participants wrote about their music experience.

And that 30% of them said they felt the music was misguiding them, that there was a mismatch between the music and how they were feeling and their experience. And that some of them even said that the music felt intrusive, that they were being unable to positively influence a challenging experience, and giving a sense of being manipulated.

So if this is the case that clinical science actually has a way of structuring the experience. And the metaphysics questionnaires, of course, do that too. Let me mention that Jeff and Paul, together, wrote a really nice article for the special issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews that is coming out this month on critiquing, in detail, these metaphysics and these mystical experiences questionnaires.

So if psychedelic experiences in the clinic is guided, what does this mean? There have been people in the field who have been trying to write something like a manifesto for embracing the weirdness of psychedelics, not putting it in a corset in which we can make sense of it in that way in which science, inevitably, must sort of present itself to count as science proper.

But they want to sort of include what they call the mystical unscientific side of psychedelic experiences. And that is really striking, that the mystical and the unscientific are aligned here.

And they look at the way in which systematic adverse events in clinical trials are not well reported. And all the shortcomings of these clinical trials have. So there is within the clinical community, quite a lot of resistance, or reluctance to actually use the strict protocols of controlled clinical trials for psychedelic, for bringing psychedelics, into the treatment spectrum of psychology.

Yet, it's really difficult to do that. And it's partly because you're trying to really hit something. Yeah, to square a circle. I do think when just try to square a circle with using this in science. But what does this mean for the ethics? And there's an interesting aspect for our topic today, and that is connectedness.

If metaphysical experiences, as Peter said already, or mystical experiences even much more strongly and narrowly, have something to do with not feeling as a singularity, but feeling connected, clearly, there are at least three different ways in which we could look at connectedness. So there is a sort of cosmic or transpersonal connectedness. There is a social or interpersonal connectedness.

And then there is what we call, just for brevity, nature connectedness. And my focus here will now be on nature connectedness, even though for many people, probably the cosmic or transpersonal connectedness experience might be in the foreground. But I think Peter has covered this quite well in his talk.

So I just want to list here, cosmic experiences includes things like oceanic feeling, mystical experiences, feeling one with the cosmos, the 5-MeO-DMT experience. Peter mentioned self-loss or dissociation, which are also clinical terms in psychiatry, indicating that something is really wrong.

Then, there is the second social and interpersonal connectedness, where we could look at things like Indigenous uses of psychedelics that are usually in a group context. The way in which non-official use in either the clinic or on the rave or in the church is actually everyday use with friends or in retreats and that is in groups.

That people are creating communities of mutual care in extraordinary experience situations. And then of course, on this connectedness, one condition for such experiences of connectedness is that you actually have a somewhat intact community. And there is some reporting, increasing reporting, on issues of sexual, gender, racial, and other forms of violence and hostilities that happen in some spaces of groups.

And of course, most likely, but not only, by far not only, in the underground spaces, but also in the official spaces. So where, a certain sociology sociality already needs to be friendly in order for connectedness to be an amplified positive experiences.

So now, finally, to nature-relatedness, nature relatedness, in psychology, is something like a measure for the connection to nature. In philosophy, nature-relatedness is linked often to environmentally and responsible behavior to what some call an ecological identity, which includes the self, humans, non-humans, and entire ecosystems.

Nature, in that sense, in philosophy, also is often seen as something chaotic. Meaning, many different things. There are many different meanings of what people mean when they say nature.

But Castree writes that culturally specific representations about nature "govern our understanding of the natural world and how we behave toward it." "The meaning of 'natural' ranges from untamed wilderness to a single plant in a clinic," a treatment room, where you might undergo a psychedelic experience.

Kettner has been written about, with colleagues, on a project they did "From Egoism to Ecoism-- Psychedelics Increase Nature Relatedness in a State-Mediated and Context-Dependent Manner," where they say, "Our primary hypothesis of increased nature relatedness following a psychedelic experience was confirmed, providing the first empirical evidence for a causative role of psychedelic use in the enhancement of nature relatedness in a large sample of healthy participants.

This represents an important advancement on the correlative association observed between the amount of lifetime psychedelic use and nature relatedness in previous studies."

So what happens in this clinical environment? Can we argue, as I have, that actually, alienation, as being an existential condition of contemporary modern society, It's experienced in clinical psychedelic experiences, where there is, such a thing as manipulation of the self and where the outside world is completely irrelevant, where people lie with headphones and eyeshades and listen to a music list that somebody else has concocted, according to how they think your psychedelic trip should go.

So where this attention is directed only inwards for a clinical pursuit, this might be more effective. But it also means when we think about nature relatedness, that what you actually experience as nature relatedness not an actual nature, but an imagined nature there is no physical or essential encounter with nature, no touching or smelling or seeing things differently like, famously, Huxley did with a rose.

So it's an imaginary connectedness. And I wonder, as an ethicist, what is the ethical importance? When actually, something that is supposed to be a life changing quality of experience is something that just happens with the stuff that's already in your head.

So this question of the experience, the sensual, the touch, is made a point in Herbert Marcus's essay on liberation, where he talks about psychedelics. And he says that our contemporary society needs something like a revolution in perception, which will accompany the material and intellectual reconstruction of society creating a new aesthetic environment. "Awareness of the need for such a revolution in perception for a new sensorium is perhaps the kernel of truth in the psychedelic search."

So what does this mean when actually outside, but not encountering any outside is a nature connectedness you experience based on a playlist? And in a sort of very closed up setting, what is the nature that you encounter there? Do we not need sensory encounters with what is outside, not just what is already somehow inside our minds?

So in this project I did with Cordelia Marcus, she was interviewing a group of students who were using psilocybin and were reporting about-- mushrooms rather, their mushroom consumption and experiences indoors and outdoors. And an interesting finding from this was that it really makes a difference to these very small numbers again. I think it was 14 students.

But there was an agreement that your ethical attitude can be changed through an outdoor experience. So from Cyril, he was lying in a field when insects began to crawl all over him. He contemplated panicking because of his fear of spiders. But then he thought, I'm in their home. I'm lying in their home. It felt like that neural pathway was sort of seared into existence during his trip lying in the green.

So this changed his experience. And it led him to continue to treat bugs with respect not only during his trip, but also since then. And he says, I don't kill insects anymore. Cyril had direct physical encounter with insects during his trip, which he attributes to his changed thinking and behavior.

There is another example I want to give from Luis Eduardo and his text, The Ethnopharmacology of Ayahuasca, where he says that when he did field work-- I just read, for times reason, only the right side of this.

"While doing fieldwork in Santa Rosa de Pirococha, a Shipibo settlement by the Ucayali River, I asked Don Basilio Gordon, a shaman, about the plants he used to heal his patients. He said that it is enough to know the song of the plants to be able to cure."

The plants are needed only if you do not know their song. So there is something about interconnectedness and nature connectedness and the importance that is given to the psychedelic substance in our current approach to them, that is seriously challenged here. Maybe we just forgot the song or we've never learned the song of the plants. But I doubt that sitting in a chair with headphones and eyeshades will actually ever learn a song of any plant.

So alienation, psychedelics, and connectedness, then, play out in such a way that actually what we need is create self-chosen practices other than constructed environments. If we want to have something like self-realization and a different respect for nature and other life, we should aim, therefore, for a decriminalization to enable new ways of connectedness and ethics of care.

Such an ethics of interpersonal care might include within the psychedelic space that we encounter now and within the medicalization, a thinking about the personal space and time people need for interpreting their experience, for making the meaning of what it was that they actually experienced, not sharing it right after, or filling out preset questionnaires, that we might have to give up playlists, eyeshades, and the enforced passivity of the clinical setting in order to enable embodied sensual and active experiences.

Also, this question of engaging with others and how engaging with others, peoples, plants, and animals.

Then there is a question of the colonization of substances and the non-utilization of specific ends, especially the question that I come to this with my last slide. The ethics of psychedelic studies could then include for us, as researchers.

That we need to be considerate of the risks of appropriation, of the appropriation of participants' experiences, not, least, by recording them in big files somewhere for later use and asking them to report, even if it is in the form of questionnaires.

That we need to search consensually for practices that respect contributions to clinical applications from people's knowledge of plants and animals that are not currently given their due recognition for that, establishing methods of fair compensation, establishing methods of sustainable substance production, and providing users with the freedom to find their own paths based on sound knowledge, unadulterated by profit interests.

There might even be the perspective of saying that one refuses to partake in research that is not decolonizing in that sense, that in research, that is colonizing. Thank you.

JEFFREY BREAU: I think just taking a point of moderator privilege to ask a first question of my own. This is a question for both you Peter and Christina, for both speakers. One of the things that I loved about your talks, and the work generally, is the way in which these philosophical ideas are really connected to the practical and the pragmatic.

And I think in both of your talks here today, we saw the way in which religion and the spiritual and the mystical, these ideas, have been absorbed into the clinical use of psychedelics. And what I'm sort of interested in asking you both about is sort of almost the inverse. What can we take from the ideas you shared today into our thinking about religious use?

So perhaps, Peter, for you, what is the benefit of thinking about the metaphysical when folks are using or constructing traditions around psychedelics, spiritually? And for you Dr. Hauskeller, for this ethics of interpersonal care that you were getting to at the end, could you maybe explain even more about how you would see that functioning in religious traditions that are using psychedelics, whether they be Indigenous or new?

PETER SJOSTEDT-HUGHES: I guess, I'll start then. Yeah. Well, I think one thing that maybe puts people off psychedelic experience and research just exploring it generally is associations with any kind of not established religion, but sort of new age religion, spirituality, things like this, or theisms, even, to a certain extent.

And I think what metaphysics offers is kind of like, I don't want to say halfway house because it sounds negative. But some kind of bridge between the secular. And this kind of exceptional experience that is not necessarily off putting to a number of physicalist scientists, for example, in the field, and so on.

But at the same time, of course, from a religious point of view, metaphysics was the handmaiden of theology for centuries, if not millennia, and deeply intertwined. I mentioned Spinoza then again. So his pantheism, of course, can be studied in religion, but it can also be studied in secular philosophy.

In fact, Ernst-- what was it called? Ernst Haeckel, who coined the term "ecology," a great artist, but also the person who brought Darwinism to Germany, he tried to make Spinozism the basis, the metaphysical foundation of science today. He was unsuccessful.

But nonetheless, it's possible, I think. And I think psychedelic experiences, not only can be looked at in that way, but that way, also, can make sense of those experiences, can make sense of them, as can all the other in that menu of mine.

So yeah. So I suppose my ultimate answer is I think that metaphysics offers a kind of neutral perspective on these experiences, which doesn't have to be religious, but doesn't have to be materialistic either.

CHRISTINE HAUSKELLER: I mean, my answer to this question, how could or should or what do I have to say about psychedelics being used in religious spaces, I mean I think there's a lot of defining to do first. First thing is what do you mean with religious when you say traditional or Indigenous? Or I would be reluctant. I would like to keep the word religion for the big religions.

And some of these sort of subgroups that are sort of split, that are sort of splinter groups that are very religious Christian splinter groups, such as the Santo Daime. I mean, they're not new religions. They are Christian religions that use psychedelics.

I mean, I have some reservations not against people having rituals around psychedelics, I think that is very important for most people to have some forms of rituals, and because psychedelics should be taken, if experienced, in groups mostly, that is actually almost inevitable and a very healthy thing to have.

And religions, our big religions, at least, have always used all sorts of substances and techniques to make people feel elevated or part of something very special. Whether that is the incense, whether that is the music and the organ, the space and its hugeness in a cathedral we know. I mean, there's a way in which religions play with emotion to actually make people feel in a certain way.

Psychedelics maybe are just one element of this. And I'm not sure it is helpful to see psychedelic experience as so extraordinary. We can't have psychedelic experiences. Maybe they are on a spectrum from things to dreams to sort of intense art experiences to the ways in which one can have trips of very different intensity, which people, who have experienced quite well seem to know how to manage, how much of what they take for what.

So the extraordinariness-- if you can have psychedelic experiences through breathwork, there is a way in which we might need to give up this radical binary separation between the normal state of mind and the extraordinary psychedelic state of mind. I think that's a fiction. And this is what we can probably learn most easily from Latin American culture, whether that is its literature, or its Indigenous peoples practices and epistemologies.

So in that sense, I think religion uses whatever they want to use. There's nothing new in that. And nothing I would particularly want to problematize. On the other hand, I think we should think about the ways in which we create the extraordinary are so extraordinary.

And whether we shouldn't maybe tone this down a little to actually think more constructively about our being in the world and how we can translate from one state to another. Maybe these boundaries are not helpful.

PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: If I could follow up with a question for both of you as well, do you each of you provide a set of ideal futures for what psychedelic clinical therapy and research might look like? Peter, for the introduction of a metaphysical language and knowledge for clinicians, and Christina, for entirely radical reform of the view of the subject in the research, as well as potentially new settings, sort of a set of critiques and possibilities for the future.

I'm curious, what you see as the potential for any of this actually happening. Have you seen any of this movement in your own life? Have you witnessed a sort of uptake of psychedelic metaphysical integration?

Peter, you mentioned the existential psychotherapy as one sort of mode that has a metaphysical edge to it. Christina, have you seen any of these reforms, some rather radical in relation to how we see a lot of the research being done. What is your view on the future?

CHRISTINE HAUSKELLER: I mean, the anti-psychiatry has tried and I'm on a par with some of this to actually critique very much the way in which we see the problems for somebody being unwell in their state of mind, in their mind, rather than in the world we all have to live with.

And the way in which something I find quite upsetting about some psychedelic therapy now, especially when we talk about the more bigger business developments recently, is the question that there might be so in so many tens of thousands of cases of PTSD in 2050 or 2070, all of which can miraculously be cured with a particular psychedelic treatment.

PTSD is a response. It's post-traumatic stress disorder. So there is first, a trauma, experienced. Why shouldn't we and can't we find a way of preventing the trauma rather than finding ways to cure it?

So I think, however, that psychedelic experiences, also through breathwork, and the wider repertoire that I've tried to hint at with these quotes from Marcus of a wider sensory experience of sensitivity to the world around us, not being so radically individualized would actually be a different way of engaging with the world.

And psychedelic experiences can be part of that. And some clinicians are trying to do that working with groups looking into this nature connectedness thing, even if it's quite sad the way they do it. I think it doesn't work. But there is a start. You can move on from there.

I also think that when my generation, in the first half of the '60s, was very affected by the thalidomide scandal. And so the drug prohibition was so easy, partly because drugs, especially for young people, were sort of completely out on many levels.

So children didn't get drugs. I see my students being diagnosed with all sorts of illnesses and getting all sorts of drugs. We have a much looser use of drugs, that creates massive problems with addiction. But it also enables us to think differently about how we moderate and modulate our way of feeling.

That does not necessarily have to create addiction. Psychedelics don't make addicted. So there is ways in which we could create different ways of engaging in which psychiatry can be part, if it lets go of some of this rigid epistemology and its misunderstanding of evidence that is currently created.

PETER SJOSTEDT-HUGHES: Yeah. Well, I'd say, it's early days, of course, with regard to seeing practical applications here. And there are also different levels of hierarchies of ideals. So ideally, you wouldn't need therapy whatsoever. You'd strike at the root.

But in my case, with metaphysics integration, I mean, at the moment, we are seeing clinical trials. And they are, when you look at the Integrative phase of those, they are quite ambiguous and multi-varied.

And there's sort of-- it seems to me a little bit lost. So I think that on this practical level, ideally, if we are to have therapy, if that does exist psychedelic therapy does exist, I think this can be applied and I'm working on that slowly in the background, creating a metaphysics manual for this, and a few other projects in the pipeline.

Also, René Joseph, at Exeter University, and I, and others, are working on a metaphysics matrix questionnaire that's been factor analyzed in our forthcoming paper there and further work on that. So that will be not a method of integration, but a method of a sort of more comprehensive way of understanding experiences, perhaps.

That's on the practical level. But beyond that, I mean, the way I look at things, and I think this I differ a little bit from Christine here, is that I see this kind of medicalization framework for psychedelics as a passing phase, but one that's necessary.

I don't think Christine sees it as quite as necessary as I do. But I don't think it's the end goal, though. I think beyond that, psychedelics don't have to be for those who are diagnosed as ill. I mean, this is a problematic term, as Christina said.

But beyond that, I see a societal uses for it. So in the sort of tradition of Santo Daime, the native American church, and whatever you could have, some kind of centers, perhaps, which offer this not for curing a disease or condition or whatever, but for the enrichment of life, for the enrichment of society, generally. But like I say, early days. So who knows where we'll go.

JEFFREY BREAU: Yeah. Certainly lots of unknowns. But I think if I'm hearing both of you correctly, there's another sort of through line is by in thinking about the future, having a language, and precision with our language to think about what are those futures, what are our presence and what could our futures be really seems critical.

And it seems like both of your works are touching on that in a really engaged way . To move to a question, sort of building on that from Thomas in the audience, Thomas is wondering really about the credibility of philosophers who have not had themselves a psychedelic experience and without any need to out yourselves.

Maybe more generally, is there a value in having a direct experience with a psychedelic to thinking about these philosophical questions? Or is this something that can be done credibly and effectively without having that personal experience?

PETER SJOSTEDT-HUGHES: Well, I've added myself many years ago. So I've done a lot of these experiences. And I think with certain elements of philosophy like phenomenology, you couldn't possibly do any phenomenology as that experience without having that phenomenology.

So that goes without saying, I know the illegal substances are not the only way of inducing this. I did holotropic breathwork recently, and so on. But I think they're quite different experiences. 5-MeO-DMT was a level beyond that even.

You can't possibly talk about the phenomenology of the experience of that without having done it. It seems to me a requisite. You can talk about other elements so philosophically, the ethics of patenting, cognitive liberty, things like this, of course, without the experience. So it's not-- but if you want to get into the sort of more the mental realms, as it were, I think it is a necessary requisite.

JEFFREY BREAU: Christina, do you have any thoughts on that? Is that something you would agree with?

CHRISTINE HAUSKELLER: That seems quite sound. I mean, it's difficult to do a phenomenology of anything you haven't phenomenologically experienced. On the other hand, I've been working on genomics and stem cells for 20 years. And nobody actually asked me how many gene tests I had run or how many stem cell lines I had created.

Psychedelics is not like that. But on the other hand, it's also not such a disconnected tool because it's about our state of mind. So I did mean this seriously when I said we should maybe not see the psychedelic experience as something so radically different from other ways of experiencing the world because we have so many.

There isn't one other. There isn't the normal state of mind, and then the psychedelic experience. There's so many ways in which our minds work. But I think in principle, Peter is right, that it helps to have at least done a proper session of holotropic breathwork. Would be good. I'd recommend. That it's entirely legal.

PETER SJOSTEDT-HUGHES: One thing that Christina and both always say is yeah, there's a variety of psychedelic experiences. There's not one. There's a dose-dependent, context-dependent, and substance, chemically-dependent, I think. And these are all interesting variables and other variables as well. Probably, we don't even realize.

And as well, what is normal experience is a big problem in the philosophy of mind. And there's no obvious answer to that. So I would say, as a spectrum though, in a variety, s variety, which sometimes, overlap.

PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: If I could bring a question that came from our-- or came out of our reading group, we were talking about the difference between the experience of knowledge. So in the case of your chapter on Spinoza and 5-MeO-DMT, there seems to be a correspondence between what Spinoza lays out as the third kind of knowledge, the intellectual love of God, And the felt experience of 5-MeO-DMT.

But it seems, at least to my reading of Spinoza, that the experience of knowledge, the experience of an intellectual love of God, is not the same thing as true. I cannot think of a better word, true knowledge, true knowledge, true encounter with the intellectual love of God. And. So I'm curious, Peter, if you have any thoughts on how do we parse the difference, specifically, so much of our conversation has sort of centered on experience, psychedelic experience. What is the difference or do you see a difference between the experience of knowledge, your having a feeling this sort of passive encounter with a sort of revelatory state versus a true revelation, a true sort of attainment of knowledge?

Do you see a difference there? Or is this insignificant or not part of how you're putting 5-MeO-DMT and Spinoza together here?

PETER SJOSTEDT-HUGHES: I mean, that's a deep question of epistemology really. So with respect-- and Spinoza's scholarship. I'll just say this that Spinoza has three types of knowledge or cognition. And it's the second kind, which is generally what we would call knowledge scientific, rational knowledge, which uses concepts and inference.

The third kind of-- now the third kind of knowledge for Spinoza is contested. And there's many different interpretations of what it means. But my interpretation, which I think is quite standard from other scholars is that the third kind of knowledge is not a representational of the object.

So we don't represent the object in a certain way. We become the object. And in this case, we become nature. This is ultimate nature connectedness, intellectual love of God, because God is nature.

And this interestingly, I was reading a de Castro on Native American animism, again, the other day. And he argues that there's this exchange of perspectives and true shamanistic, what he calls shamanistic knowledge, which is you truly get to know something by becoming it. You don't represent it. And you don't reduce it to your own conceptual framework, and so on.

So it's very hard to fathom this. But it's somewhat akin to the, I think, the third kind of knowledge in Spinoza, becoming the object. And this is ultimately, I suppose, traceable to the classic kind of mystical notion of becoming the Plutonian view, of becoming one with the object that he speaks about.

So yeah. But the question then is, what's the veridicality of that? You might feel it in the Jamesian noetic sense, but how can you attain any certainty? And then it becomes a question of, well, what is certainty? What gives you certainty? Is it inference? Is it scientific verification? What's that based on in the first place? So yeah. That's not really-- that's just an attempt towards an answer, which would make a book.

PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: And it seems-- I mean, perhaps, this recourse back to a more religious or theological reading of Spinoza, where revelation or a sort of apocalyptic encounter with knowledge sort of fits within what Spinoza is describing here as this realization of a oneness with God or a co-identity of matter and mind, or something along those lines.

PETER SJOSTEDT-HUGHES: Well Spinoza, himself-- sorry.

PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: Go ahead.

PETER SJOSTEDT-HUGHES: Time difference. I was just going to add in quickly. I mean, Spinoza, himself, references the third kind of knowledge and the intellectual level of God as its peak with the word glory in the sort of Old Testament. So there is that link there from Spinoza himself.

Spinoza was always sort of keen to try to make his views harmonious with biblical scholarship really. And of course, he was the first to begin higher criticism before it became a big thing in Germany, 200 years later.

But sorry, I batted into the second part of your question, Paul.

PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: Oh, it was more of a comment than a question. Yeah. I appreciate that response. I am wondering if we could turn to the mystical experience questionnaire, which I think sort of hits on something relevant within both of your work and your presentations here.

It seems to have become the common currency for quantifying the mysticality of psychedelic experiences in the research setting. For Peter, do you see, or for either of you, but do you see a certain metaphysics being imposed in this questionnaire? And more generally, what do you make of the widespread use of the MEQ?

PETER SJOSTEDT-HUGHES: Well, yeah. As you know, the MEQ is very much based on Walter Stace's book, Philosophy and Mysticism, from 1960. And that is, as you are well aware, has its influences from a number of sources. And Walter Stace, himself, was very much a perennialist, as opposed to a contextualist.

So he certainly had his metaphysical views. And the MEQ stems from that. And I think it's been used by many people like Johns Hopkins, by people who share that perennialist metaphysical view.

But also, I mean, I see--if you read that book more fully, he uses-- he talks about pantheism, for example, against Spinoza. But also, he's influenced by Vedantism, and Neoplatonism, and so on. So there's many different strands.

I mean, when he wrote that book, he, in the same year, wrote another book about mysticism. I think it was just reports, wasn't it, of mysticism around the world. And there, you see a common core experience.

So there's that belief that there's a common core experience, which was-- well, "perennialism" was coined by Agostino Steuco in the 16th century, I think, had political reasons behind it. It was taken on by William James Huxley and others like that.

So there is that running through. And that's a kind of Western-- well, I shouldn't say Western even. It has sort of non-western influences, but it has been a metaphysical belief system for a few hundred years. Well, Steuco, himself, says it comes from even further back, the eternal theology. I forgot what he calls it.

But yeah, there's that common core experience belief coming through Stace, and thus, going through the MEQ. And I think it's somewhat limiting. That's why I think metaphysics is more comprehensive. It includes much more, for example, idealism.

It's not part of that. But you're getting, 1799, Humphry Davy, taking 200 pounds of nitrous oxide and expressing an idealist perspective. So I think it's just too limiting really, and perhaps, it belongs to a certain ideology. And thus, is a little bit too restrictive.

PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: Christina, do you have anything to add on the MEQ conundrum here?

CHRISTINE HAUSKELLER: I mean, it's part of exactly this way in which you direct an experience. So if you have a clinical situation, where people get admitted to having a or two doses of psychedelics after a diagnosis being established as being part of the target group, if it is a clinical trial in particular, then being prompted in some ways of what they might expect.

And then afterwards, getting a whole bunch of questionnaires to fill in, that actually give them a language and imagery with which to describe their experience. That is why I said, people may need the space and the time, and maybe a discussion with some of their friends, to find their language.

You can do a lot of work with the prompting and with the interpretation through questionnaires or directly through asking. And actually, so when you ask people, did you encounter? Did you have a transcendent experience? Did you feel one with nature? Did you have ego dissolution?

These are all such-- I mean, sociologically speaking, these are such pre-formatted questions. I mean, you can answer them with yes or no, but they put something in your head and the way in which, obviously, these people who know think how you might want to think about what you have experienced.

And if there's anything true about our culture not having a good language, which is where this whole talk about the ineffable from the experience comes from, if there is something that is radically new to you, experiencing, and then somebody comes and tells you, did it feel good? Did you feel like riding on a horse? Was it feel like underwater or being drunk, or flying in between the stars? Or whatever you throw at somebody. Yeah.

If you are perceived as the expert, and the clinician is the expert, and you come with these leading questions, you give people words and interpretations on how to see and speak about what they have experienced.

And that, I think, is a sort of prompting and control of the process in which you make all these experiences relatively the same because you give them all this kind of language in which you want them to express what they've experienced, so that you can then quantify it.

And this is why I say the exemplar of the study object is a real issue with this, but also the way in which the experience is somewhat distorted and formatted, not through what one oneself experienced, or what maybe talking to your friends, you might make of this in some warbly way, but something that immediately is pressed into the language of a set of questionnaires.

And the mysticism one being a particularly problematic in that background because it has so much Christian substance to it from its whole origins.

PETER SJOSTEDT-HUGHES: Those who say other parts of it are problematic like, for example, like Stephen Katz said in his famous '70s paper on contextualism. Like a word like "ineffable" doesn't really describe an experience. It describes the fact that you can't report an experience. It's not part of the actual content of the experience itself. Or he says another word. "Unity" means something very different in Jewish mysticism, as opposed to Zen Buddhism.

So again, I think, generally, there's this requirement to develop a much more nuanced, subtle taxonomy of these states. If possible, [INAUDIBLE] states, and maybe there aren't even repeatable states, really.

It's very complex thing. And it relates to the fact that these cannot be really empirically verified. These are mental states. And one of the key aspects of the mental and philosophy mind is that it is private, at least partly private.

So I can't see your memories of yesterday, for example, whereas you would have access to them. And in a way, that sort of makes it not unscientific, but beyond the scientific method, ultimately. And so there's a struggle to bring it in to scientific investigation.

I mean, we don't even know. Like I said, with my thing, how my mind and brain-- the concepts of mind and brain relate. There's just not agreement on that, let alone in the other kind of exceptional peak 5-MeO states or whatever.

JEFFREY BREAU: Yeah. And I think that is doing a good job at pointing to the question that Lucas had about how can we even think about these sort of highly speculative concepts in what are they doing when they're applied to psychedelic.

So maybe, actually, instead of focusing what I was going to go next, but maybe I actually want to make sure in the last couple of minutes that we get to Andre's question here in the chat. And one of the things that the MEQ is doing is it's positively balancing people's experience. Mystical experience is a positive experience in the MEQ's conception.

And what Andre's question is about the opposite of this. It's about bad trips, bad mystical experiences. And whether or not we should be, as they say, whether or not we should be inclined to interpret such experiences as metaphysically important in the same ways that we do with positive experiences.

And maybe, Christina, turning to you, first, I'm curious about this idea of the dark and the negative. And maybe, specifically, thinking about it from a non-eurocentric model, are those experiences important? What should we make of those experiences?

CHRISTINE HAUSKELLER: I mean, it wouldn't be surprising, would it, that somebody who is ending up in a clinical space in particular? But I guess, we all have sort of dark paths of things that happen in our life and that are in our minds.

So if you want to frame this in a religious language or Christian language or not. But encounters with the devil happen in life. And that is not the language I'd normally use. But I don't necessarily see or encounters with death. Yeah.

In psychedelics, and there seems there is a way in which people lose anxiety of death in certain uses of psychedelics when they are threatened by death and severe illness in the near future. So there is a whole treatment protocol that [INAUDIBLE] and others are studying psychedelics for.

If the encounter with death is something that we all should face, and philosophers have a great tendency to think, indeed, we should, then I'm not sure what is often seen as a bad experience. I mean, it's trivial. Some people say, yeah, every bad trip, if you think about it long enough, becomes a good trip.

This is not where I would take this. I mean, at least not in this banality. But there is some truth in this, that it's an encounter with a world inside us and outside that isn't all happy and pink and Barbie.

So we know this. This is why we are doing this. So what's so shocking about it? This judgment of bad is something about the emotional response to it and knowing where to put it. And this is where help is needed.

And what I question whether the clinical help that is on offer is maybe the most helpful. There might be other more helpful for making sense, giving time, making sense with experiences that are challenging. And that really throw you off, not just for a day or two, or like coming out of the party environment or something, but maybe for four weeks.

But we shouldn't be too surprised about this because such things happen in our life. Things that throw us off our path for a year happen in life. They are normal. So I'm not sure to which degree we have to think about this. But it means taking psychedelic experiences seriously.

This is an argument for not seeing this as a sort of for our afternoon entertainment because you can't predict the experience. And it might take you somewhere, where you then need to invest time and care to actually work through something.

JEFFREY BREAU: Wonderful. I know we're at time. Peter, I just want to if you have 10, 15 second sort of response here, want to make sure.

PETER SJOSTEDT-HUGHES: OK. I mean, there are many different varieties of so-called bad experiences from anxiety to extreme nihilism, death. I'll just speak about one quickly. I've had a number of very dark experiences. And by which, I mean Gothic dark.

But at the same time, in one way, they're frightening, so they can be defined as bad, but in another sense they're beautifully aesthetic, and really fascinating. So you can value them. Also, just quickly mention, there's this great book called The Falling Sky by David Kopenawa, a Yanomami shaman.

And becoming a shaman is like almost kills you. I mean, it's as dark as it becomes, but that's part of that tradition. So I think we should be careful of not getting too safety conscious and sort of trying to infantilize and pad everything with safety concerns.

But I always say this. This is not for everyone, especially at the higher doses, and so on. But it's very context-dependent. And I can't say enough in these few seconds.

JEFFREY BREAU: Yeah. No, but perfect. I think that's a great way to end. And if there's one thing that philosophy does well, it sort of help tease out what are those contexts and how should we talk about them.

So on behalf of the CSWR, and Paul and myself, we're just so grateful to both of you for this time and for your talks they were, as expected, even more enriching and interesting. And I also want to extend a thanks to all of the audience here for the wonderful questions.

As mentioned, we will pass those on to both of the speakers. And I also want to thank Laurie, and the rest of the staff, and Professor Stang, at the Center for the Study of World Religions, for all of their help in making this possible, and of course, to my colleague and friend, Paul Gillis-Smith, for helping today.

And as a last note, I just want to make everybody aware of our next installment in the Psychedelics and the Future of Religion series, which is titled Mescaline and Psychonauts with Mike Jay. And that, as the title tells, will be a conversation with the author Mike Jay on both his new book, Psychonauts, and his fantastic history of the psychedelic mescaline.

And that talk will be again on Zoom. It will be Monday, November 27, from 10:00 to 11:30 AM Eastern time. And more details will be posted here, and are also available on the Center's website.

So again, just thank you so much to both of our speakers. Thank you, Paul. And thank you to Laurie and everyone else and have a great rest of your week.

SPEAKER 2: Sponsor, Center for the Study of World Religions.