On Weighing Sacrifices Based on the Individual—What’s Easy for You Isn’t What’s Easy for Someone Else
GABBY: “For a man to say, ‘I’m going to really try to be with one woman,’ they’re giving you . . . most of what they’ve got. They’re giving you like 80%. For a woman, maybe she’s giving you 35% [to be monogamous]. . . . Or let’s say I was very shy and I came out and was having a very nice conversation with you. Maybe I’m giving you 200% because of my nature. So I think it’s also starting to understand who they are, that they’re giving how they can give, and receiving it that way. . . .”
On Fixing Physical Weaknesses
LAIRD: “All you flexible people should go bang some iron, and all you big weight lifters should go do some yoga. . . . We always gravitate toward our strengths because we want to be in our glory.”
Advice to Beat-Up Former Athletes?
BRIAN: “More humility. That’s why I thought it was so important that you come up here. It wasn’t, ‘Oh, I need to dose Tim with humility.’ No, it was, ‘Hey, come see what it’s like to apply something that you can do for the rest of your life.’”
TF: By “more humility,” I took Brian to mean considering scary options with an open beginner’s mind. I’m so thrilled I took the risk of embarrassment to train with Laird and the gang. First, it showed me an intense but sustainable method of training, which includes ingredients I often neglect (social cohesion, training outdoors, etc.). Second, it made me believe I am capable of much more than I thought.
Advice for Your 30-Year-Old Self?
GABBY: “Not to take anything personally, but also don’t hold yourself back. I think this is a trait of a female more than of a male. We have a tendency sometimes to sit on our talents and potential because we don’t want to offend anyone or be singled out. . . . I heard a great story. I had a coach once, who was an assistant coach to the men’s USA volleyball team. One game [they needed one point], and the coach looked straight at Karch Kiraly and said, ‘I need you to put this ball away and for you to win this game,’ and it was like, boom—‘Okay.’ And then Karch did it.
“[Then the same coach] was coaching women at a very high level, and he did the same thing to the athlete who was ‘the one.’ It didn’t work because . . . [it’s] a singling-out that we [women] have a hard time with, instead of understanding that you can be singled out . . . for the greater good.”
LAIRD: “Stop drinking now. Stop drinking right now and patent all your ideas . . . and exercise compassion every day.”
* * *
James Fadiman
James Fadiman, PhD ([email protected], jamesfadiman.com), has been involved with psychedelic research since the 1960s. He did his undergraduate work at Harvard and his graduate work at Stanford, where he collaborated with the Harvard Group, the West Coast Research Group in Menlo Park, and Ken Kesey. He is the author of The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide and is often referred to as America’s wisest and most respected authority on psychedelics and their use.
Preface
Some of my loved ones would insist that the most important work I’ve done in the last 4 years has involved studying and judiciously using psychedelics. As just one example, ~90% of the latent anger and resentment I’d had for more than 25 years was eradicated after 48 hours of “medicine work” 2 years ago, for reasons still not entirely clear, and my hair-trigger habits of decades have not returned.
NOTE: I do think the pharmacological risks of these compounds are exaggerated, but their legal side effects are not. In the U.S., most classic psychedelics (LSD, psilocybin in “magic mushrooms,” peyote, etc.) are in the same legal class as heroin (Schedule I) and carry similar penalties. And although the LD50—lethal dose for 50% of the population, a common measure of toxicity—is unbelievably high or practically non-existent for most psychedelics, things can go horribly wrong in uncontrolled environments (e.g., walking in front of oncoming traffic), and they can greatly exacerbate pre-existing mental health conditions. I watched one family friend go from “normal” to schizophrenic (his family had a history of it) after frequent LSD use. Of course, I wouldn’t want you to go to jail or hurt yourself, so only use psychedelics in legal contexts with professional medical supervision. For a legal alternative, see Dan Engle’s discussion of flotation tanks on page 110.
What Are Psychedelics?
The word psychedelic (Greek for “mind-revealing”) is generally used to refer to compounds that can reliably separate you from your ego and occasion mystical or transcendental experiences. The best formal definition of “psychedelics” I’ve found is that of N. Crowley in The British Journal of Psychiatry (“A role for psychedelics in psychiatry?”):
The difference between psychedelics (entheogens) and other psychotropic drugs is that entheogens work as “non-specific amplifiers of the psyche,” inducing an altered or non-ordinary state of consciousness (Grof, 2000). The content and nature of the experiences are not thought to be artificial products of their pharmacological interaction with the brain (“toxic psychoses”) but authentic expressions of the psyche revealing its functioning on levels not ordinarily available for observation and study.
Many psychedelics (psilocybin, mescaline, etc.) have been used ceremonially for hundreds or thousands of years by indigenous cultures. More recently, universities around the world have begun testing these molecules for addressing treatment-resistant depression, removing end-of-life anxiety in terminal cancer patients, ending nicotine addiction, and more. Roland Griffiths, PhD, a professor at Johns Hopkins medical school, shares a typical upshot from one early study: “Most of the [36] volunteers looked back on their experience up to 14 months later and rated it as the most, or one of the five most, personally meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives.” For volunteers with children, the experience was often put above, or on par with, the birth of their first child.
From a psychopharmacological perspective, many psychedelics resemble a naturally occurring molecule called DMT and act as 5-HT2A (serotonin) or NDMA receptor agonists, but there are exceptions, and the mechanisms of action remain poorly understood. This is part of the reason that I’m helping fund scientific studies at places like Johns Hopkins and UCSF.
Although marijuana, ketamine, and MDMA have compelling medical applications, I don’t consider them psychedelics. Jim explains our shared distinction, using MDMA as an example: “It’s not exactly a psychedelic because you don’t leave your identity behind, but it is the single best way to overcome intractable post-traumatic stress disorder.”
The noun “entheogen,” meaning “generating the divine within,” has become a popular alternative to the term “psychedelic.”
My Good Friend
I have a good friend, let’s call him Slim Berriss, who’s devised a schedule for himself that combines practical microdosing and pre-planned 1- to 2-day treks into deeper territory. For him, this blend provides a structured approach for increasing everyday well-being, developing empathy, and intensively exploring the “other.” Here is what it looks like:
Microdosing of ibogaine hydrochloride twice weekly, on Mondays and Fridays. The dosage is 4 mg, or roughly 1/200 or less of the full ceremonial dosage at Slim’s bodyweight of 80 kg. He dislikes LSD and finds psilocybin in mushrooms hard to dose accurately. Woe unto he who “microdoses” and gets hit like a freight train while checking in luggage at an airport (poor Slim). The encapsulated ibogaine was gifted to him to solve this problem.
Moderate dosing of psilocybin (2.2 to 3.5 g), as ground mushrooms in chocolate, once every 6 to 8 weeks. His highly individual experience falls somewhere in the 150 to 200 mcg description of LSD by Jim later in this piece. Slim is supervised by an experienced sitter.
Higher-dose ayahuasca once every 3 to 6 months for 2 consecutive nights. The effects could be compared (though very different experiences) to 500+ mcg of LSD. Slim is supervised by 1 to 2 experienced sitters in a close-knit group
of 4 to 6 people maximum. NOTE: In the 4 weeks prior to these sessions, he does not consume any ibogaine or psilocybin.
Note that not all psychedelics are for all people. Jim, for instance, doesn’t use ayahuasca. On our walk in a canyon in San Francisco, he said to me, “I feel like the plant [aya] has its own agenda.” I’d have to agree with him, but that could fill an entirely separate book. Be sure to read Dan Engle and Martin Polanco’s profiles on page 109, which explore ayahuasca and ibogaine, specifically.
Origins and Dangerous Books
“There are two great beings who invented psychedelics: God and Sasha Shulgin. I think Sasha may have invented more, but there are literally hundreds that he played with and looked at.” Sasha wrote two books about his creations and experiments:
Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story (Pihkal = Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved)
Tihkal: The Continuation (Tihkal = Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved)
The two volumes are filled with instructions for how to synthesize these various molecules. He said he put these books out so that the government couldn’t stop people from experimenting. Personally, I prefer the whole-plant sources that have been used for millennia.
What Does It Feel Like?
“If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.”
—Lao Tzu
Most of us have had the experience of sitting at a computer with 20 open tabs. How did this happen? Didn’t I just clean this up last week? Then you get a warning of “Startup disk almost full.” So you delete a few videos as damage control, but . . . why is everything still running so damned slowly? Oh, Dropbox is syncing. Slack has 17 new notifications. Microsoft needs another “critical” update? There are 20 applications running on top of 20 windows, fracturing your ability to focus. 60 minutes later, you’ve done a lot of stuff, tapped the keyboard a lot, and burned a ton of energy, but you couldn’t say what you’ve achieved. Feeling rushed and frustrated, overwhelm begins to set in. Time to go get another coffee . . .
Life can feel this way. Finances, taxes, relationships, wedding invitations, car check-ups, Facebook, groceries . . . “Startup disk almost full.”
For me, moderate to high dose of psilocybin with supervision serves as a hard reboot. It closes all the windows, “force quits” all the applications, flushes the cache, installs upgrades, and—when I’m back to “normal”—restores my 30,000-foot view. It removes the noise, giving me a crystal clear view of the most critical priorities and decisions. The first time I used psilocybin at sufficiently high doses, the anxiolytic—anxiety decreasing—effect lasted 3 to 6 months. This catalyzes not only insight but action.
Sounds great, right? It can be, but that result is far from guaranteed. Psychedelics usually give you what you need, not what you want. To get to pleasure, you often need to claw through pain first.
Doses and Effects—From Niagara Falls to a Casual Stroll
NOTE: The below dosages are specified by Jim. They are listed from high to low and are specific to LSD, but the effects correlate to many psychedelics. Here’s framing context from Jim: “These substances, unlike almost every other kind of medication, have very different effects at different dose levels. It is almost as if they were different substances.”
Heroic dose: Ethnobotanist Terence McKenna coined the term “heroic dose,” which is often equated to 5 or more grams of mushrooms or more than 400 mcg of LSD. James doesn’t recommend this brute-force dosing, which McKenna described as “sufficient to flatten the most resistant ego.” Jim feels that you don’t remember anything, nor do you bring anything back, at this dose. “It’s kind of like: You want to go swimming? How about going over Niagara Falls?”
400 mcg is where you have a transcendental or mystical experience. At this dose or higher, it is critical to have qualified supervision in the form of a guide. “Transcendental” here roughly means “the feeling or the awareness that you are connected not only to other people but to other things and to living systems.” More on this later.
200 mcg can be used for psychotherapy, self-exploration, deep inner work, and healing.
100 mcg is useful for creative problem solving with non-personal matters (e.g., physics, biomechanics, or architecture). A number of Nobel Prize laureates in chemistry, biology, and elsewhere attribute breakthroughs to LSD.
Jim once worked on a study involving large companies and research institutes trying to solve incredibly difficult problems like new circuit board designs. Volunteers were given psychedelics, and 44 out of the 48 problems were “solved,” meaning resulted in a patent, product, or publication. Jim attributes this to enhanced focus and pattern recognition. Low enough doses (i.e., 100 mcg of LSD or 200 mg of mescaline) can immensely increase the capacity to solve problems.
“We said, ‘You may come to this study, and we’ll give you the most creative day of your life. But you have to have a problem which obsesses you that you have been working on for a couple of months and that you’ve failed [to solve].’ . . . We wanted them to have . . . an emotional ‘money in the game.’ [We gave] them psychedelics and [had them] relax with music and eye shades for a couple of hours. And then, right at the peak, we bring them out and say, ‘You may work on your problem’ . . . what was wonderful is nobody did any personal therapeutic work because that’s not what they came for. And out of the 48 problems that people came in with, 44 had solutions.”
50 mcg is considered a “concert dose” or “museum dose.” Self-explanatory.
10 to 15 mcg is a “microdose.” Described by Jim: “Everything is just a little better. You know at the end of a day when you say, ‘Wow, that was a really good day’? That’s what most people report on microdosing. They’re a little bit nicer.”
He elaborates: “What I’m finding is that microdoses of LSD or mushrooms may be very helpful for depression because they make you feel better enough that you do something about what’s wrong with your life. We’ve made [depression] an illness. It may be the body’s way of saying, ‘You better deal with something, because it’s making you really sad.’
“[A microdose of psychedelics is] actually a low enough dose that it could be called ‘sub-perceptual,’ which means you don’t necessarily see any differences in the outside world. As one person said to me, ‘The rocks don’t glitter even a little, and the flowers don’t turn and watch you.’”
Albert Hofmann, the inventor of LSD, considered microdosing the most neglected area of research. Hofmann microdosed LSD often for the last few decades of his life. He remained sharp until he died at 101. He would take it when he was walking among trees. In Jim’s opinion, microdosing psychedelics does a far better job than a whole class of drugs we now call “cognitive enhancers,” most of which are simply derivatives of speed.
Oddly, there are consistent reports of microdosing having a lag effect. I’ve experienced this myself, and it’s the reason for Slim Berriss’s Monday/Friday spacing of ibogaine. Many microdosers, including one executive who runs a large corporation with manufacturing in five countries, have said, “The second day is better.”
Which Users Have the Most Durable Positive Effects?
In short, it’s those who experience a “transcendental experience.” Remember that squirrelly term?
Jim describes this as “the feeling or the awareness that you are connected not only to other people, but to other things and living systems and to the air you breathe. We tend to think we’re kind of encapsulated. . . . Obviously, the air I am breathing comes from all over the world, and some of it’s a billion years old. Every 8 years, I get almost all new cells from something. Everything I eat is connected to me. Everyone I meet is connected to me. Right now you and I are sitting outside, and our feet our touching the ground. We’re connected to the ground. Now, that’s all easy to say intellectually and even poetically. But when you actuall
y experience that you’re part of this larger system, one of the things that you become aware of is that your ego—your personal identity—is not that big a part of you.
“What I learned was—and this is from my own personal experience in 1961—‘Jim Fadiman’ is a subset of me, and the me is very, very large and a lot smarter and knows a lot more than ‘Jim Fadiman.’”
He saw a similar shift in subjects during his dissertation research, and they very often laughed during these realizations:
“In a very deep way, and it isn’t the giggles of marijuana. It’s the laughter of ‘how could I have forgotten who I really am?’ And then, much later in the day, when they’re reintegrating and finding that they are surprisingly still in the same body they came in with . . . one person said very beautifully, ‘I was back in the prison of all of the things that hold me back, but I could see that the door was locked from the inside.’”
Don’t Rush the Experience, Don’t Cheapen the Experience
“There’s something called Salvia [divinorum], and the wonderful thing about salvia is it has nothing to do chemically with anything else I’ve just talked about. . . . It’s been used in Mexico historically for who knows how many thousands of years for divination, for finding out things. And, again, we seem to be able as Americans to take almost anything that is indigenous and screw it up in some way. So people smoke salvia and have a short, intense, sometimes meaningful experience. That isn’t how it’s [traditionally] used. It’s chewed, which means it takes about an hour, and it comes on slowly. It’s a totally different experience.”
TF: Please note that Salvia divinorum is illegal in either case. The point is that mode of administration matters.
Tools of Titans Page 12