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hey Leo here for actualised org and in this episode I'm gonna be talking about correcting the stigma around psychedelics [Music] you this is gonna be a in-depth multi-part series aimed at addressing the issue of this stigma that surrounds the field of psychedelics and to educate people about this field and it's really quite a remarkable and amazing field that we've only just begun to explore in this episode I'm not gonna focus on talking about my own trip reports I've talked about that in the past and I will in the future but not here and I'm not gonna talk about how to trip or the proper protocol for which psychedelics to do or all the mystical experiences that psychedelics can can lead towards that's not what we're interested in here I just want to lay the foundation for this field because it's an interesting field and most people don't realize that it's a field and there's this huge gaping hole in our education system which teaches nothing at all about this field it doesn't teach about the historical context it doesn't teach about the Anthropology it doesn't teach about the botany of it it doesn't teach about the chemistry of it isn't teach about the psychology the psychiatry the clinical and medical studies and a lot of new science that's being done this is a really cutting-edge field that a lot of people I think underestimate and the reason that is is because our culture has this giant stigma around psychedelics as soon as you bring up the word people immediately associate it with drugs and then they dismiss you or they demonize you or they think you've gone on the deep end or they think you're a hippie or any one of these kind of stereotypes and this is really unwarranted and I want to show you that this is the case now maybe I'm preaching to the choir some of you already are on board with me with psychedelics but really I was quite surprised when I started to release my psychedelic videos about a year or so ago I got a pretty big backlash from my followers and people would leave me comments and they still leave me comments to this day about my stance on psychedelics and really what happened with me is that I started experimenting with them I really wasn't into drugs at all I wasn't into psychedelics at all it was just something that I stumbled upon in my research because the thing that I'm interested in is personal development and reality and so I'm always researching new stuff and my stance on psychedelics before I tried them was basically one of the common masses because you know what I was raised in the same education system and by the same culture that many people who denounced psychedelics have been raised in and our education system is really hell-bent on keeping kids away from drugs and this was programmed into my mind from a very early age as it probably was for you if you grew up in the United States or I'm not sure how it is in other countries but I'm sure that there are similar types of programs and drugs on war that goes on here in the US which also happen in Europe and in Asia or wherever else around the world in westernized first world countries that are rather modern but as we shall see throughout this series is that actually almost all of the negativity around psychedelics comes from just downright ignorant on the people even the people who are teaching this stuff in school they just don't know the fact is these people who are anti psychedelics they haven't actually drunk done them they haven't actually tried them and they are so hell-bent on their beliefs about psychedelics without having any direct experience of it that then that list leads to all sorts of absurdities and where we're at now in our culture is that the education system and what it teaches about psychedelics is anti-scientific it's anti medical it's anti psychological it's anti historical and really it's anti human as you will see and we're gonna build the case for that this episode is gonna be filled with a lot of evidence and facts what I want to do here with a series just to present a lot of just basic facts because there's this whole like I said right and so people don't know the facts by not knowing the fact by not having the historical context by not seeing how psychedelics fit in with everything else that we do in culture and also by not knowing the latest clinical and psychological studies that have been done just in the last 10 years this is all cutting-edge stuff this is gonna completely change your mind and it's gonna dispel this stigma because the reality is is that not only are psychedelics not bad as they are stigmatized to be but they are actually a hundred and eighty degrees opposite they're not just neutral they're amazing and they are very important for the development of the human race and maybe perhaps for the survival of the human race but that's difficult to appreciate before you really hear this case that I'm gonna lay out for you and then you actually go and try them for yourself the reality is is that in our society in the West we have flagrant propaganda coming from the government and from the business sector and from the from education and from our culture and even from our religions from judeo-christian religions that are that are very conservative and Orthodox against psychedelics and they are filled this propaganda is filled with lies and with dogma and it's based on zero direct experience so we're gonna address all that here but really I shouldn't have been that surprised that there was a backlash because you know what um until I tried the psychedelics I wasn't convinced myself I was sort of closed-minded to it but the thing that saved me from committing a great epistemic blunder here is that I actually listen to my own advice about epistemology and I keep my mind open and I listen to feedback and I listen to comments and I investigate and I explore and I question my own deepest held convictions and beliefs and I know that just because I have an opinion about something doesn't mean squat until I actually go and try it out for myself and that's what I do with psychedelics and then that's what that's what changed my mind so see was wrong and I will continue to be wrong in the future and there's other stuff I've been wrong about in the past the key is not to be perfect all the time with your knowledge you're never gonna be perfect don't even try to be perfect with your pursuit of truth the key is to have the right guiding principles so that you don't get stuck in your ignorance don't double down on your ignorance that's the key mistake that people make and that's the reason that I talk so much about epistemology I talk about paradigms paradigm locks default positions true versus false skepticism belief systems and and all this sort of stuff and the reason we do a lot of that here is because that's necessary to open your mind to break out of a lot of this kind of cultural conditioning that we're fed not just about psychedelics but about all sorts of stuff and that's necessary for you to really become highly conscious in this world it's not gonna happen otherwise what I want to do here is I want to start off the discussion by quoting from Terence Mckenna again I already quoted him at the beginning here but he was a pioneer in this field an early pioneer and he was remarkable in his ability to articulate very elegantly and very concisely the core issues surrounding psychedelics he was a psycho not himself and also a brilliant writer so here's what he says about psychedelics quote psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third-story window psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally lay down models of behavior and information processing they open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong and he also says quote part of what psychedelics do is they D condition you from cultural values this is what makes it such a hot political potato a political hot potato since all culture is a kind of con game the most dangerous candy you can hand out is one which causes people to start questioning the rules of the game and quote that's Terence Mckenna this in a nutshell is the reason that this stigma exists and this is something we're gonna explore later on in this series in the second or third episode I'm not sure how many episodes we're gonna need here because I need to protect a lot of factual information to you but we're gonna get into the the really the guts of why society likes to demonize psychedelics so much it's not an accident and Terence Mckenna tells us here why this is so what we're gonna cover in this series here's a brief outline for you we're gonna give you a lot of historical context about how psychedelics were used throughout the last 10,000 years in human civilization and that they played a much bigger role than is generally acknowledged we're gonna talk about the medical benefits and some of the amazing clinical studies and research that has been done and how psychedelics can help with all sorts of issues from depression to anxiety to end-of-life and PTSD and so forth we're going to talk about common misconceptions and myths about psychedelics and we're gonna dispel those we're gonna talk about why psychedelics are demonized what's really behind that and we're gonna we're gonna talk about the double standard that exists between other substances that are legalized in society like Alcohol Tobacco opioids and bad food and then we're gonna compare the risks of all of these with psychedelics so that we can put them into proper context and see whether making them illegal is really justified as the government likes to proclaim so that's our outline now let's begin with understanding and important catch-22 about psychedelics this is something that a lot of people who are just getting introduced to psychedelics we're hearing about them for the first time don't fully appreciate this catch-22 so here's what this is this is the sort of circular logic which prevents people from opening their minds to psychedelics and this catch-22 goes as follows I come to you and I say hey psychedelics can transform your life they really can they could be some of the greatest experiences ever and then you say no leo psychedelics are dangerous they will damage my brain they will give me hallucinations they are just for recreation they will lead me down the road to using hard drugs and this whole this whole thing is just a delusion but where is that notion coming from if you think about it that notion is coming from your schooling your education and from culture at large where did you pick up that idea it wasn't from direct experience with psychedelics it was from culture so you're depending and trusting on culture to be correct now what I'm telling you here is that culture is incorrect and in fact you'll be shocked at how incorrect culture is but the catch-22 is that you have to try psychedelics to discover this and of course when I tell you Kay go try it what do you say you tell me no Leo I'm not gonna try because it's gonna it's gonna damage me but the only reason you believe it damages you is because you're believing your culture you see so you're locked into this loop of circular logic and the only way to break out is well there's two ways one in the most direct method is to actually go try psychedelic for yourself and do a scientific experiment and see you can easily prove me wrong if I happen to be wrong by trying to psychedelic in' and maybe maybe it'll justify all your opinions about it or maybe the reverse will happen what will happen is the reverse if you give psychedelics a good go see one of the problems people do is that they say oh well Leo I have tried psychedelics when I was back in high school you know me and my buddies we went to a rave and we got drunk and wasted and had some mushrooms and I tried a little bit of that and it was it was bad I had hallucinations and a bad trip and so now I have direct experience and I know that they're bad no see that wasn't a proper evaluation of psychedelics you did them when you were a kid in a party setting with alcohol with a bunch of other nonsense you didn't even know what you were taking what the dosage was you were not prepared you were not sure and so you experience something that you can barely even remember all you can remember is that it left a bad taste in your mouth that's not the right way if you do them responsibly using the right protocol at the right dose in the right setting with an open mind and having the right context for what you're experiencing that means doing some research reading some books listening to me talk about non-duality and spiritual learning about these things have that background foundation in place then you will see that what I'm saying is very much true and one of the most incredible epiphanies you will have about psychedelics is that they will shatter your faith in culture and in society which is precisely why they're so dangerous and why culture and society doesn't like them yes you can have amazing non-dual experiences you can have experiences of God you can have experiences of various deities and and you can experience oneness in connection with the world you can also self reflect in a very deep way and you can do real growth accomplish real personal development by getting to the bottom of your addictions your neuroses your bad behaviors your anxieties and and your hangups and your limiting beliefs they can help you with all that sort of stuff you can heal yourself both physically and psychologically with psychedelics but and all those will be huge revelations but perhaps not as much as the revelation that everything that culture has told you about psychedelics is a hundred and eighty degrees wrong it's the exact opposite it's almost as though the devil got ahold of this field of psychedelics and turned it inside out to serve his purpose of maintaining the status quo hmm might that just be an accident or might there be something a little more deeper to that if you wash my Devil episode then maybe you'll know that's the catch-22 so you have to be very careful here not to reason in a circle but to really be honest with yourself very objective and to say okay this guy's telling me that there's information that I don't know about their studies I don't know about and that society has lied to me about this stuff and to be honest I don't have a direct experience of what he's talking about so I have to keep an open mind he might be wrong but maybe he's right see and maybe he's not just right and that's just okay fine he's right but it's like he's right and this information could transform my entire life forever you see that's why this topic is so important is precisely because of the potential that this topic has for transforming you and everyone around you in all of society and this is something that we need more than ever now in the 21st century so the substance is just to be very clear and specific that we're gonna be talking about here and calling psychedelics are gonna be things like DMT v Mao DMT LSD mescaline psilocybin or magic mushrooms iboga salvia divinorum MDMA or otherwise known as ecstasy these are all in this category I'm not really gonna be talking about pot or weed or marijuana you could call it a psychedelic or you could not I mean edibles like edible pot is actually quite hallucinogenic but generally smoking pot is not it's not done it's not nearly as powerful as a true psychedelic and it is really in a sort of separate category but what we need to do is we need to make a very clear distinction between all these substance that I just talked about and heroin cocaine crack and meth quaaludes and any other kind of weird hard drugs that exist out there these here are recreational drugs and they need to be very clearly distinguished from psychedelics and see one of the first mistakes or actually maybe it's not a mistake that our culture has made is lumping all of these together into one category in our education system we try to treat all this stuff as just drugs and not just in our education system but even legally the the DEA the US federal government classifies DMT and LSD and psilocybin as schedule 1 substances the exact same category as heroin cocaine and crack believe it or not meth actually meth from what I can recall if my memory serves me correct meth is actually scheduled to so the federal government says that DMT and LSD and psilocybin is worse than meth which if you have any experience with this field just goes to show you how ridiculous that is there's a lot of ridiculous things in the DEA guidelines but we'll talk more about that later but anyways see our education system and I can understand where it's coming from it has lumped all these things together because our education system it's number one priority is what it's not the spiritual evolution of mankind or of our kids it's not higher consciousness consciousness is not even taught in school you can go to school for 12 years you will not hear the word consciousness let alone all the stuff that goes into it all the subtleties of it nor will you hear the word personal development our school system has loved all this together because our school systems number one priority is just to give kids the basics they need to have a job and to not be homeless and to have a little bit of education and to not get sidetracked and to not become heroin junkies and that's good nothing wrong with that of course we don't want kids becoming heroin junkies and so of course we tend to lean towards the side or air in the car in the side of caution and we shouldn't say well just keep kids away from drugs entirely we don't want to split hairs too much about this stuff but see damage is done there because in this sort of sloppy black-and-white way of thinking we really fail to see a big difference between these kind of substances and why they're used and how they're used and what their potential is see heroin doesn't have the potential to enlighten you heroin doesn't have the potential to make you a more self-aware human being whereas DMT and LSD do and heroin is extremely addictive whereas LSD and DMT are not addictive at all and that's something we'll cover more as well so we need to make this very clear distinction here otherwise this whole field gets muddied up and any time people talk about psychedelics those who are not in the know just hear it as drugs it's like olio you're talking about drugs you're just doing drugs you're just justifying your use of drugs actually I'm very anti-drugs not only am i anti heroin and cocaine and and meth and all this sort of stuff but I'm even anti alcohol and anti smoking and tobacco and anti prescription drugs and I'm anti eating sugar and drinking soda and caffeine I don't even I don't even consume caffeine I mean I do a little green tea so that technically has caffeine in it but I don't I don't like guzzle down coffee or any of this kind of stuff right so I actually carry my dislike for drugs over into a lot of other fields to me there's no distinction really between drugs and for example television or reading tabloid magazines or getting addicted to pornography are getting addicted to the Internet or getting addicted to greasy food to me all this stuff is just addiction and then there's different degrees of it and psychedelics are really a whole nother ballgame now let's start by talking about the very deep historical context here to put all this into perspective to see the big picture once you got to understand here and this is again something that's not taught in school at all is that you can find psychedelic plants by the dozens and hundreds on every single continent in the world every single culture from the beginning of prehistory we have evidence that they have partaken of psychedelics and this is what I want to show you a lot of evidence for it's really quite mind-blowing when you start to study this stuff because none of this stuff is talked about anywhere you don't see this on the evening news this isn't talked about in magazines mostly this isn't talked about by your family by your co-workers it's not taught in school so where else would you get this information other than that if you were interested in you actually went and did this open-minded research see what you got to understand is that human beings for about ten thousand years have been living in cities and building civilizations but before that we were hunter-gatherers and as hunter-gatherers we relied on our environment to live this was a matter of survival this was a matter of natural selection evolution this was serious stuff these days we live in our comfortable cities and we're very disconnected from nature we're disconnected from the stars we don't even see them in our cities were disconnected from the earth were disconnected from building shelters from hunting animals from gathering berries and mushrooms and and identifying plants when you take this into account you realize that actually herbalism was one of the earliest sciences that man developed before there ever was a notion of science herbalism is the science of distinguishing making fine distinctions between all sorts of different kinds of plants and the environment that you're living in because we lived in forests and we lived in savannas and grasslands and we lived in jungles so no matter where we lived or even in the deserts there were critical plants to our survival there and these early herbalist soar medicine men they would go out there and they would have to test through trial and error and at great peril and danger and risk all these plants personally by taste testing them testing them on their people and seeing all the survival benefits that could be gleaned from herbalism so they had to go out there and they had to learn which berries we could eat which mushrooms are edible which ones will kill you which which vines we can cut open and get water from which leaves we can rub on our wounds to cure an infection or which flowers we could brew to make a tea to help with an upset stomach or to cure the plague or to help with pregnancy AC or to stop bleeding so these were very serious matters and if you take a look at modern surviving native tribes hunter-gatherer like tribes which live in Africa which live in Aboriginal Australia which live in the Amazonian rainforest basically all over the world in Indonesia these types of tribes exist you can see that these people are very very reliant on herbs and plant life also animal life of course to their knowledge of it and they're very fine distinctions of it in order to survive which is the exact opposite of us today in modern cultures and as modern cultures we like to think that oh well we're the sophisticated ones they're just like savages primitives living in the forest running around naked with a loincloth or even less but the more you start to study these savages and these primitives you realize that actually they have a lot of wisdom and intelligence and there are also very spiritual people and also you start to study them and you see all these guys don't have things like depression or anxiety I see they don't have suicide they don't have heart heart disease epidemics they don't have ADHD problems with their kids you see so you start to see that and say hey maybe they are the intelligent ones and were the backwards ones maybe we have it 180 degrees in the opposite direction maybe the devil is playing a trick on us mmm that's an interesting possibility and it just makes perfectly logical sense that 10,000 years ago even a hundred thousand years ago our ancestors would be experimenting with every possible plant that was in their environment and we even see primitive very primitive notions of herbalism at work in our cats and dogs if you have a cat or a dog who is sick you can see them go I had a cat once and she would go and she was sick she would actually nibble on some grass some blades of grass that grew outside and that would help her to to purge and to get any bad food out of her system see that was a very primitive form of herbalism but of course us humans we took it to the next level because we're much more resourceful than that so let me show you some of the evidence for this and it's really quite remarkable I'm gonna be flashing a lot of images here for you as I'm speaking these will be images of various cave art and Egyptian hieroglyphics and all sorts of interesting examples that we see um from history so first what I have for you is I have one of the earliest known clear depictions of psychedelic use in primitive cultures this is from a cave in Alma in modern-day Algeria this cave is called the Cecilia's year cave and they're in that cave there's this picture of what looks like a bee shaman I call him a bichon because he looks like he's wearing a sort of a bee mask in this striped suit and this shaman is holding mushrooms in his hands and has mushrooms growing all around his body very very clear what you see here you're gonna see two images you're gonna see one image of the original cave painting which is a bit worn out it's kind of hard to make sense of it and then you're gonna see a much clearer and sharper pencil sketch of the original cave painting guess how old this is this cave painting has been dated to be 9,000 or 6,000 BC so there's a there's a big gap there because the radiocarbon dating is is not perfect but it's 9,000 to 6,000 BC plus ad 2,000 years of AD to that which means that this is an 11 to 8 thousand year old cave painting and already we have this very clear use of psychedelic mushrooms we also have examples of psychedelic use within ancient Egypt and you better believe that ancient Egypt was not just your ordinary civilization they weren't just like us they weren't just concerned about Commerce and living ordinary lives they were a very spiritual culture very clearly and they invested a lot of their resources towards spirituality and that was not just primitive beliefs that was something deeper when you started to study ancient Egypt it's really quite amazing what you start to find there and especially if you've done some psychedelics and you can connect some of these dots so what you'll see here I'll show you a picture of this ancient Egyptian what's called the Tree of Life they call this the Tree of Life this was a spiritual symbol for them this was very important in their culture and what this tree of life was was the occasional Attica I also want to show you a picture here of the actual acacia plant it's a tree or like a giant shrub this bush and what's special about acacia is that it contains high concentrations of DMT and minut concentrations of five Meo DMT now this acacia bush is quite prevalent all around the world it's found in South America it's found in Europe it's found in the Middle East it's found in Africa I believes and there's a lot of varieties of this acacia mimosa trees acacia are these are all in the same category and all of them contain various degrees of DMT now is it an accident that the Egyptians revered the acacia tree out of all the trees you know why didn't they reveal that Revere the palm tree why was an appalling tree the tree of life but rather the acacia bush after all there's not much special about the acacia tree it doesn't look very special it looks like a bush if you wanted to revere a magnificent tree you could find better trees you could find oak trees palm trees and all sorts of stuff like that which is much more grand to look at but perhaps not as psychedelic so what we are theorizing here and we don't know this for sure but there's a pretty good chance that the Egyptians tested out this acacia in all its various forms eating it grinding it turning it into powders turning it into concoctions brewing it steeping it fermenting it and smoking it and all the other things combining it with all sorts of other stuff just to see what kind of properties it has and there's a good chance they stumble upon its DMT effects we're not sure exactly how but that's a little speculative but since they worship this tree it's not that far out of the realm of speculation especially when you take into account the other things that I will cite to you here in a little bit other examples of the acacia that's been used in other cultures so it's not just limited to Egypt but while we're on the topic of Egypt let me mention the Blue Lotus here are some pictures of the Blue Lotus and I want to show you the actual picture of the Lotus as it exists in the in the lily fields in the water but also how the Egyptians depicted it because the Egyptians also revered the Blue Lotus you can see it in a lot of their temple paintings and in their hieroglyphic I guess you'd call them reliefs where they they show this this blue lotus being picked and being used and being revered and the Blue Lotus while it's not a very powerful psychedelic you're not gonna trip balls on it but it does put you into a sort of dreamy like trance state it does warp your consciousness a little bit and it actually has strong afro diac qualities and they would use it for their Egyptian orgies and we actually have a picture here of a classic Egyptian orgy and you can see the blue lotus flower above the head of the woman who is having sex with the man every depiction of the woman has a little blue lotus flower over her head which I've pointed out with red arrows so that's very interesting also interestingly the the classic the classic poems of the Iliad and the Odyssey if you remember the Odyssey if you read that in high school or something then you remember towards the end of the Odyssey Odysseus and his men they land on the island of the Lotus Eaters and the Lotus Eaters basically are people who get stuck on that island and they eat these lotuses on the island these these lotuses just sediment is this this delightful trance and they never want to leave the island again they get entranced for life and they get enslaved by this Lotus well that pretty well describes what the Blue Lotus is like although it's a exaggeration of it and we know that ancient Greece and Rome were very very strongly influenced by the prior civilization of Egypt so it makes perfect sense that Homer would have adopted that tale from maybe stories that he heard about how the Egyptians used the Blue Lotus and of course the Egyptians probably used it for sex and for for festivals and for parties and for banquets and for all sorts of fun stuff not necessarily in spiritual uses but maybe also in spiritual uses too probably a combination actually because in these primitive cultures that were these sharp distinctions between recreation and festivals and spirituality all this stuff was holistically combined together in a seamless way also we have the story of Moses from the Old Testament and of course you know the classic story of Moses where he sees the burning bush and the burning bush is God speaking to Moses giving him signs which leads him to go on and to lead his people and to found Israel and to to really advance Judaism well what happened there what is the burning bush the burning bush in the Old Testament is none other than the acacia tree that's what it was supposed to be so wasn't an accident that did Moses just was he just walking along the long side of the road and just happened to bump into a burning bush maybe or maybe what happened was that these ancient peoples knew about acacia knew about the DMT and the spiritual effects and that they actually had rituals for burning this bush for smoking it for inhaling the fumes maybe for mixing it into concoction with other stuff and that's where this idea of the burning bush came from on the other side of the globe we have Chile and Argentina where they have found archaeological evidence of snuffing pipes for snorting yopo yobbo seeds yopo seeds come from a tree which is actually similar looking to acacia they have these paws these long pods in these pods or seeds you can break them out they're very flat looking you can see a picture of it here and these yopo seeds can be ground into a fine powder mixed with snail shells and soda in order to give it the right consistency and texture and then it can be snorted very powerfully snorted up your nose and the these natives they still do it to this day this is a classic ritual that they have these yopo seeds they contain DMT five mio DMT and bufotenin in various percentages and we have evidence of these snuffing pipes with trace amounts of this yopo which go back to 2130 BC and you can see you can find videos and images of these natives which still have these practices to this day they take these long pipes fill them full of a lot of yobbo and then they just one native will blast it you have to actually like a blow dart blast it into the nose of the other native and powerful shock that just blows up your nose because you need a lot of this yopo in order to get the full effects because it's not very pure the concentration not very high so they need to like stuff a gram of that stuff up your nose which is not easy to do we also have evidence from that part of the world from Peru for example of very early use of the San Pedro cactus which contains mescaline and we have evidence of this dating back to 8,000 600 BC through to 5,600 BC so in that range is the earliest use of peyote there that's been found I mean not peyote but San Pedro peyote is the next one I want to tell you about that's also a cactus that's found in the Americas especially in the Mexico region and in the southwestern US region and the earliest peyote use that has been found is in chula cave on the Rio Grande River in Texas and this has been carbon dated to three thousand seven hundred eighty BC to 3000 660 BC and these peyote buttons were so well preserved that scientists were actually able to take them and to do an alkaloid extraction and they were surprised that they were able to get almost as much of the active ingredient from peyote the mescaline as they were from modern-day peyote buttons and these were five thousand-year-old peyote buttons and they were still psychoactive after 5,000 years that's quite remarkable and of course peyote ceremonies are a classic ritual that is done by Native American tribes throughout the US and they are still done to this day and the monnet t'v tribes in the u.s. actually have a legal right to do that because they're they have sort of different laws that govern them than American citizens another interesting example that I found is from Scotland there's a there's an ancient archaeological site they're called skara brae which is being excavated and their what they found evidence of is not psychedelics so much as they found this hallucinogenic alcohol they actually found an alcohol that was brewed out of wheat but it wasn't ordinary alcohol it also contained very powerful and downright deadly psychoactive plants like henbane hemlock and belladonna and this these plants can kill you but they're also there they're not so much a psychedelic as they are like delirious but those were infused into this alcohol and evidence of this alcohol this psychedelic alcohol dates back to 3000 180 BC to 2500 BC and you can see a picture here of the excavation of skara brae so the Scot lenders knew how to really party and how to get drunk with the right kind of alcohol not the the weak piddly stuff that we serve today speaking of which we also have very compelling evidence from Greeks and Romans that their alcohol was also this kind of hallucinogenic alcohol they talk about wine a lot in Greek and Roman stories and tales and we know that they drank a lot of wine but what's also very interesting about that wine is that we tend to assume that it was just like regular wine just grape juice right well not quite so fast because the Greeks and Romans right about tales where men would go drunk and blind and mad even could kill themselves by drinking too much wine and you would think well how could they get so drunk just from regular wine especially since the Greeks and Romans did not drink pure concentrated wine they always water their wine down significantly fifty or eighty percent of their wine was diluted with water so how could you get mad drunk or even kill yourself on that kinda looted wine well maybe it wasn't ordinary wine and we know this because wine can only have up to 15% alcohol content in fact it's impossible to produce a hard spirit like vodka or Everclear or rum or gin or any of these very high proof kind of alcohols it's impossible to produce them without the process of distillation through fermentation you can only get it up to about 15% and after that it Peaks so you need to invent distillation when was distillation invented it was invented in the late Middle Ages in the early Renaissance era in southern Italy in Europe so we know for a fact that the Greeks and Romans did not have distillation so what that leads us to believe and there's other evidence for this is that they infused their alcohol just like the Scot lenders did thousands of years before them with perhaps mushrooms henbane hemlock and who knows what other kind of herbs existed there are so many psychoactive herbs in the world it's mind-blowing in fact what I want to do I brought my book the encyclopedia of psychoactive plants now to really appreciate this you gotta feel how heavy this book is this thing is a true encyclopedia it probably weighs around 5 pounds you could kill someone with this book and it's just got pages and pages of pages of every single plant that has any kind of psychoactive properties whatsoever on the planet that we know of and that's only out that we know of there's a lot that we don't know of yet so just goes to show you how much stuff that could have possibly had been infusing into this alcoholic beverage also speaking of the Greeks and Romans we have the illusion mysteries I've spoken about this in the past this is a really remarkable thing the illusion mysteries was a religious cult or sect that existed which was very very popular in ancient Roman Greece and it lasted all the way to the demise of the Roman Empire in 580 but it lasted for 2,000 years before that so this goes back to 1500 BC and the losing mysteries was this religious right this temple in aloose where all the Greeks and Romans would gather they would go there and they would drink this substance called the kikiyaon this substance was made out of fermented wheat but of course not just wheat it also had some kind of psychedelic effect and the some researchers have done a lot of research on this trying to figure out you know what could have been the active ingredient in this cake he on because the Greeks and Romans who took this drink talked about having ecstatic visions of spirits and deities and all sorts of religious experiences so it was clearly a very powerful drink not just fermented wheat there was something more to it a secret ingredient what was that secret ingredient well it's thought to be forgot urgh ah is a fungus a deadly fungus that grows on wheat you'll see a picture here of what ergative wheat looks like usually when you have or got on wheat it can be deadly so it's very important that if you're growing a lot of wheat which of course the Greeks and Romans did and the Egyptians did is you have to be careful with not consuming this organized wheat with this fungus on it because if you do it could actually kill you there's examples of where people got killed by it or they actually go insane or crazy it's a very toxic fungus but what is hypothesized by researchers is that the Greeks and Romans could have learned a method for how to distill the alkaloids from this forgot substance because our God is actually how LSD is made out of so modern LSD is synthesized from her God but modern LSD requires very complicated lab equipment to create you can't just do it in your home and the Greeks and Romans probably didn't have that technology but they could have found some kind of primitive way to extract the good stuff and then basically put it into their fermented wheat drink their cake Eon and then basically what they had is liquid LSD drink and if you've tried LSD you know how power that can be even in very tiny doses so it seems like the Greeks and Romans caught on to that pretty early and they were using this drink this cakey on in the illusion mysteries for two thousand years and this was one of the most important rituals that all the big-name Greeks and Romans partook in emperors drank this drink at these rituals important philosophers like Plato and Aristotle participated in this other writers like umm Cicero and maybe Plutarch so there's there's examples of these these people participating in these illuzzi and mysteries so this was quite popular with the aristocrats in Greece and Rome this wasn't just something that was like a little little-known cult this was a big thing it was a cult but it was a big cult innit lasted for a very long time of course in the Indian subcontinent we have evidence for a lot of different psychedelic use as well and one of the oldest texts that we have surviving in human history is the Vedas the Hindu Vedas and there in particular they have the Rig Veda which praises this psychedelic substance or drink this concoction called soma what exactly soma is we don't know it's speculated that it could have been the Amanita muscaria mushroom or psychedelic magic mushrooms or maybe a combination of various kinds of herbs and psychoactive plants that we don't know that it's been lost to history but this soma is mentioned as a sacred and revered drink and the Vedas especially the Rig Veda all of this there's a rich tradition there of spirituality and mysticism which is directly related to that and this goes back to 1500 to 1200 BC very old also we have Freemasonry Freemasonry is a lot misunderstood in popular culture today but it traces its roots back all the way to ancient Egypt and one of the symbols Freemasonry has a lot of symbolic language that they that they use one of the symbols they use frequently is the acacia branch you'll see a picture of it here and of course you're familiar with the acacia so why did the Freemasons Revere and symbolize the acacia branch so much well it stands for liberation and for freedom and for spirituality and for truth in certain cultures it's called the tree of truth or the vine of truth that will be ayahuasca is the vine of truth they call out until then if we go to South America again into Mexico we have the Aztecs and we have the Mayans and there we have evidence from the conquistadors when the Spanish invaders came to conquer the Aztecs and the Mayans they ran across teonanácatl which literally translates in the Aztec language as the god mushroom and the Spanish conquistadors they discovered these aspects participating in these mushroom rituals and also the Mayans participated in mushroom rituals and here I'll show you some pictures of the Mayan mushroom stones which are these sacred carvings which clearly depict mushrooms and also with the Mayans very interestingly is that they did mushroom enemas and you can see that I'll show you a couple of pictures here of Mayan reliefs and carvings with mushroom enemas is depicted so you can see these guys were not shy about their their botany they would stick these plants in every orifice that they could just to see what kind of effects they could have quite amazing of course if we go further down in South America we see the Amazon region has a rich tradition of psychedelic use including ayahuasca ayahuasca is the vine of the gods the vine of truth it's this fine which is cut and then mixed with mimosa leaves and bark and all this is put into a students all brewed together and then this drink this nasty drink comes out of it that you drink and then this sends you wants a very very deep psychedelic trips and that of course is very popularly still done today it's done there by the natives and actually there's a whole tourism industry of Americans and Westerners going to Peru and instead Brazil and the Amazon and doing this ayahuasca also doing that yopo that I told you about but that's not all we also have psychedelic lichens in Iceland for example I recently learned about a psychedelic lichen these lichens they grow on the shores of Iceland on the rocks there and certain lichens if you pick them and then you you actually can boil these stones with the lichen on top of the drink that stone juice that will make you very very stoned and some of the trip reports from the ISA Icelandic lichens say that it's one of the most powerful trips you could have more powerful than LSD and DMT and some other stuff and this is one that isn't very well known and requires a lot more research we also have witchcraft of course witchcraft is much misunderstood these days but the witches really were women who were interested in astral projection and channeling and having spiritual visions and out-of-body experiences and one of the ways in which they facilitated this is with flying ointments and what is flying ointment a flying ointment is fat which has animal fat which has been reduced down and mixed and spiced with various psychedelic and poisonous deliriant plants like henbane Mandrake datura belladonna and possibly others maybe psychedelic mushrooms all that stuff is mixed into this into this cream this joint Minh tanned this cream is rubbed on your temples it's rubbed into your armpits can be rubbed into your vaginal area and then this actually gets soaked in absorbed through your skin and then this will give you a hallucinations and visions and various spiritual experiences it's helpful for channeling is helpful for lucid dreaming it's helpful for out-of-body experiences that sort of stuff of course in ancient India we have also evidence of the use of datura the datura plant which is used in witchcraft as flying ointments was also used by ancient monks and Yogi's in India and actually there's sometimes depictions of Shiva which is the main God of Hinduism who represents nothingness absolute nothingness or ultimate enlightenment Shiva's sacred plant is called the datura and the tour datura is a very interesting deliriant it's actually quite dangerous it's potentially lethal you definitely don't want to experiment with it at home and it's not just gonna give you hallucinations this thing will make you flat-out insane mad like stark raving mad for weeks this stuff is really really powerful so you don't to screw around with it it's also poisonous you have to prepare in a special way so you don't kill yourself but there's evidence of this being used in ancient India sometimes you see depictions of Shiva with a with a datura flower in his crown and the datura flowers the sort of white trumpet like looking flower of course in Siberia we have the original shaman the word shaman comes from the Siberian shaman who were the Siberian medicine man their word shaman is the local were there for a medicine man and the Siberian shaman are notorious for preferring to work with Amanita muscaria mushrooms these are also poisonous mushrooms with the red caps and the white polka dots which everyone has seen but you probably haven't eaten or even known that you could have eaten them but in that region of the world these mushrooms can be eaten and they have psychoactive properties they also have deliriant qualities to them they're also poisonous if you don't eat them properly and so what the siberian shaman would do is that he would actually eat the mushrooms himself then he would urinate out into a cup or a dish and then he would serve his urine to all his followers all his initiates and they would drink his urine why is that because his body would process all the toxic deliriant stuff from the Amanita muscaria and then he would pee out the the more pure psychedelic chemical substances it doesn't actually deteriorate through your digestive system he would pee it out and then his followers could drink that urine with the more pure Amanita muscaria compounds in it without the toxins he would be like the filter for the toxins he would take one for the team quite literally and then they would drink it and then they would have their trippy experiences of course we shouldn't forget Africa in West Central Africa to this day exists the booty native tribe and these booty rely on a very very powerful psychoactive called iboga it's actually a a root bark that they gather from this tree small tree like a bush and then you can you can grind up this root bark and then you can ingest it and i boga is a potentially lethal psychedelic but it's also very very powerful it'll knock you off your feet you won't be able to walk for days it lasts for like 42 hours or even more and it gives you very very powerful spiritual visions and this is part of the bootys spiritual tradition to this day they do these ceremonies not only do they do these ceremonies this is their rite of passage for young men they give it to the young men that gives them a lot of this I boga so much that it almost kills them and they go into this deep trance they go through this whole ordeal they come out of this experience completely changed and then then from that on from that point on they're considered adults and part of the adults in that tribe so they give this to their teenagers very interesting of course we also have evidence of hashish use hashish is like the flowers of the marijuana plant which can be very potent and we have evidence of that being used in ancient India we have of it being used in in the Middle Ages in the Arab countries in fact we have the assassins if you don't know where that word assassins comes from it actually comes from the arab assassins who would drink various kinds of powerful alcoholic beverages and would smoke hashish and then they would they would use that to go out there into a into a fury and kill and murder people that's where we get an assassins for them also we have this plant called syrian rule which is prevalent in the Middle East and Syrian room has very mild psychoactive properties by itself but it turns out to be one of the most powerful potentiate errs of other psychedelics so for example if you take mushrooms two grams of mushrooms and you combine it with a gram of Syrian rule the Syrian rule will transform your 2 grams of mushrooms into a 20 gram dose 10 to 20 times as powerful just by sprinkling some Syrian ruin there it's actually quite dangerous to do you don't want to screw around with Syria in ruin other psychedelics just because it can potentiate them so much so you want to be very careful but actually there are these combinations that you can make with syrian ruined mushrooms and other stuff which which can take your trips to a whole new level and the the ancient tribes and peoples who live there knew about Syria and Russia Andrew also has the property of this deep red color they would use Syrian route to also dye their carpets and their rugs this bright deep red we also have the plant salvia divinorum which is native to the Mexico region and the Mexicans have been have been using it and smoking it for spiritual purposes probably for a while we don't know for how long also Morning Glory seeds are also found in that same exact area and they all have also been used by by natives of that region for foreign tripping and a very interesting plant that I think has a lot of potential is phalaris grass phalaris grass is this grass that you see here on the screen I'm gonna show you a picture of it it's a very ordinary looking type of grass but what's so special about it is it has very high concentrations of five amiyo DMT and also some amount of regular DMT as well this phalaris grass grows in Europe Asia North Africa and America he's found homeless on every continent it's hard for me to imagine that native cultures to these areas who were growing up around this grass never fully appreciated its its psychoactive properties I would bet that they found ways to smoke it to grind it to extract it to do whatever with it to to get high although we don't have any you know direct evidence from the archaeological record that I can show you on that so that's the historical context hopefully you can start to see that psychedelics have been central to spirituality to religion and to civilization and to human culture for the last like literally fifty thousand years we have cave paintings that go back fifty thousand years ago and there's speculation that these cave paintings might have actually been painted by people on psychedelics because there's a lot of trippy stuff depicted on these cave paintings so this could have been the origins of civilization that could have been the origin of human art it almost certainly was the seeds or the catalyst for human spirituality and mysticism and that ultimately led to religion of course I'm not saying that's like a telex were the only cause I'm not saying that spirituality can only be done through psychedelics that's not true at all I do not believe in terence mckenna's stoned ape theory he had this theory that oh well basically humans became conscious and fully human because of their use of psychedelics I don't know if I buy that completely but I do think that psychedelics played a key role in catalyzing spirituality and mainstream religion because the reason I don't believe in the stoned ape theory is because you don't need psychedelics to have a very deep spiritual experience if you just sit down and practice certain breathing techniques certain relaxation techniques certain focusing and visualization techniques with your mind like it's done in yoga and many other mystical traditions you can have all these experiences you can channel you can go out-of-body you can do astral projection all this sorts of interesting stuff without an ounce of psychedelics but I think the psychedelics make it a lot quicker a lot more effective and a lot easier to distribute through a culture it's a lot easier to just give someone some mushroom and then have them experience exactly what you're talking about rather than having to invent a language and to work through trying to explain something that's really not explainable in words so I think that that's really where they played the crucial part of course we also need to talk about the medical benefits of psychedelics which are a key puzzle piece in correcting this stigma the first thing you need to know about the medical aspects of psychedelics is that they have very very low toxicity levels and are generally very safe they are not addictive and in fact they are anti addictive which means that they cure addictions which means that they are self-correcting and that if you get if you do too many psychedelics basically they themselves will tell you to stop to do psychedelics so the lethal potential of psychedelics many of them like LSD mushrooms and so on is so low that you couldn't even possibly consume a lethal dose almost impossible you need to eat over a hundred pounds of mushrooms to kill yourself you would need to eat over a thousand tabs or doses of LSD to kill yourself whereas if you take a look at apps aspirin or caffeine or even water you can kill yourself with just drinking too much water if you drink a couple of gallons of water straight down you can kill yourself people have died from that if you consume too many aspirins a couple of bottles too much you'll kill yourself that's not the case with most psychedelics now does this mean that psychedelics are perfectly safe and that dosage is already relevant no not at all you can certainly freak yourself out on psychedelics they can certainly destabilize you mentally and psychologically if you take a too much of a dose that you're not prepared to handle and that can be a pretty traumatic experience so dosages are still important there's still potential for abuse with psychedelics I'm not saying there's not but you have to take into account that there's potential for abuse with almost everything you can abuse a car you can have use a gun you can abuse potato chips you can abuse ice cream you can kill yourself with food so yes realistically there's a risk with everything what we need to do is we need to find a balance and what I'm saying is that our culture is totally out of whack we have swung our pendulum so much to one direction that we have disconnected ourselves from our own origins from nature from herbalism and from spirituality and instead what we do is we come up with all these antidepressants and ritalin for our kids because they're stuck on ADHD mode all the time and they're you know they're running around frantically they can't focus and as it turns out these antidepressants and this Ritalin and stuff this is more addictive than psychedelics and it's actually proven to have less effect than psychedelics so let's now talk about the medically proven met amazing results the psychedelics have been shown to have perhaps the most amazing evidence we have coming in is when it comes to addiction it has been clinically they've demonstrated now in numerous studies and in numerous clinical practices that I boga mushrooms LSD DMT ayahuasca that these have powerful anti addictive properties and that these actually are the most effective tool for curing people of heroin addiction cocaine addiction smoking addiction and alcohol addiction did you know that the founder of AAA broke his addiction to alcohol not through the 12 steps primarily but through LSD he did it because he took LSD and actually LSD was one of the key ingredients in his 12-step program but of course the government outlawed LSD and so he had to remove it from his program and some now eh-eh-eh has been defamed the most important element of eaa the LSD has been removed and that is truly the most important element because LSD and DMT and and mushrooms these have been shown to work exceptionally well for people who have alcohol addiction more effective than almost anything else in particular ibogaine is the most promising case here it's a very very powerful psychedelic and it has very special properties that are very helpful with addiction and it's particularly effective for heroin addicts as also is five Meo DMT because it's also very very powerful now why do psychedelics have this anti addictive properties is it just because you take a magic pill and some chemical mumbo-jumbo happens in your body and then all of a sudden you're free not quite i boga has a little bit of that going on but there's an even important element the most important element of the psychedelic is that it raises your consciousness it makes you more aware it gives you the ability to self reflect in an unbiased way about your own life and to see where you're [ __ ] up and what your neuroses are and sure enough people who are addicted to crack and heroin and meth and all this kind of stuff and alcohol the reason they're addicted is not just because they're addicted they're addicted because they have [ __ ] up lives they were abused they were neglected they bullied in school they were molested you know they faced all violence gangs all this kind of stuff which then made them so psychologically neurotic and screwed up that they needed some crutch and they found their crutch to be heroin or some other kind of drug but then of course that doesn't solve the problem that just makes the problem worse so what the ibogaine or the five mio DMT can do is it can get you to to look back at your life with consciousness and then to work through that stuff in a very well effortless way you could say in one sense it's effortless another says it's not effortless is you can reflect on that stuff and then you can gain sort of conscious traction over it to the point where you can just let it go and there has been an amazing success rate with ibogaine and with five Emil DMT for curing heroin addicts these are hardcore addicts who've been living on the streets for 10 to 20 years and they've tried all sorts of cures that have not worked for them but when they try I BOGO or five Meo they have a 50% success rate of quitting and never coming back to heroin which is amazing if you know anything about this field so for addictions these substances are amazing and the reason they're amazing is because they raise your consciousness and as I've talked about in my addiction episodes and I've talked about elsewhere you know what is human growth what is personal development what is it all about it's about becoming more conscious the more conscious you become the less neurotic you are unless you overthink and this helps with addictions this helps with depression with anxiety with PTSD with autism with with relationship problems with anger problems with all of this and right now we have study after study coming out which is showing exactly this we have clinical evidence that's showing that psychedelics are very effective against depression more so than anti-depression medication and they are not as unhealthy as antidepressant medication I need to press has all sorts of side effects it's also very addictive you can't just stop it you have to gradually wean yourself off otherwise you have suicide risks all this kind of nasty stuff you don't have any of that with psychedelics and they're more effective against depression why is that because it raises your consciousness opens your perspective gets you unstuck from your shadow and from your ego it's also proven to be effective with social anxiety it's proven to be very effective against PTSD when other treatments don't work right now mushrooms and MDMA and LSD are being tested on guys from coming back from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who have PTSD and it's proving very effective for them they're to the point where we're looking at having actually a legalization of these substances for curing specifically PTSD in clinical settings these substances are proven to work to help with autism with end-of-life for example cancer patients who are going through terrible chemotherapy and pain and fear about the prospect of dying and then the mushrooms or the LSD or the MDMA can help with that MDMA is very effective for solving marriage problems and relationship counseling that would otherwise end in divorce helpful against anger problems and basically any neurosis you can imagine again why is that because we're raising consciousness when you raise consciousness all that [ __ ] gets autocorrected that's how it works there are a lot of amazing researchers today working in this field these are serious these aren't just hippies and New Agers these are serious academics serious scientists serious phd's one example that I'll give you is Rick Doblin who runs the Maps program it's a nonprofit organization which has been running for over 20 years that works closely with the US government to get approval from the FDA for clinical treatments legal clinical treatments using LSD MDMA mushrooms and ibogaine for clinical cases of Russian anxiety addiction PTSD and so on and right now they are in the process of doing trials proving to the FDA that these techniques work scientifically with double-blind controlled studies repeating them very carefully and it looks like in the next 10 to 20 years we're gonna have a lot of breakthroughs and some of these clinical techniques will be approved and legalized in the US but of course there are other countries besides the US for example ibogaine clinics are proving very successful in Canada Mexico and Costa Rica where they are legal in the US I began as a Schedule one substance I believe so it's not legal here there are no clinics here but these clinics in Canada and Mexico and Costa Rica are having amazing results with hardcore addicts and in fact if you have a friend who is a hardcore addict or even just addicted to alcohol and you see that he is killing himself slowly with his smoking or his alcohol tell him about ibogaine clinics tell him that it's worth his time pay a couple thousand dollars fly to Canada fly to Mexico fly to Costa Rica do a week-long retreat there with this ibogaine it will change your life forever and you'll kick these addictions in a way that you never imagined possible that's real you can do that right now you can research that online and find these clinics I'll also mention dr. yo dr. Octavio Rettig r ett IG who is a world-famous medicine man and shaman from Mexico and Mexico actually five mio DMT is legal for clinical use and so what he is pioneered is he is pioneered the gathering of toad venom from the bufo alvarius toad which contains five Meo DMT and bufotenin in its in its glands and in the venom that it has and they extract it and then you can smoke it and you can have very powerful trips with five mio DMT and bufotenin in there and this guy himself Octavio Rettig he used to be a heroin addict for many years and the only thing that worked for him is smoking this toad venom so he smoked this totem he turned his life around he became a real doctor he has an MD and now he is an ambassador for the UN and he has traveled to over 90 countries around the world providing this treatment of the toad venom he collects it and then he helps people to smoke it in a sort of ritual setting one-on-one sessions in small group sessions and he's had amazing success literally provided it to thousands of addict hardcore addicts and treated them in Mexico and everywhere around the world I've actually had a guy on my forum who heard me talking about Octavia Rettig and then he actually bumped into him in Europe and drove down there did the experience said it was amazing and so that's that's that's one example that I have I'm sure others have done it but that's the one that I've gotten kind of a testimonial back from pretty cool so he's getting amazing results with with his work there's also the work of stanislav grof who was a pioneer with LSD research he was an MD and a psychiatrist and a psychologist who worked in the in the 50s and 60s and he's still alive today and he's done a lot of work showing just how effective LSD and these kind of psychedelics can be for psychotherapeutic purposes and also another guy along that line is a Ralph Metzner who is a Harvard PhD and psychologist and a psychiatrist and he has also worked and on a clinical practice where he provided five in the O DMT and and LSD and other substances and did it in a psycho therapeutic context and has gotten amazing results there and this is just the tip of the iceberg I could stand here and talk for hours and hours about all these amazing guys doing amazing research both clinically and scientifically right now you gotta understand this is a totally cutting edge field this field has only existed for about 60 to 70 years since the 1950s and psychedelics have been outlawed for research purposes in the u.s. for most of that time since the late 60s and early 70s so if the research was not being blocked the last 40 years we would have a lot more research but nevertheless there are still courageous and intrepid pioneer researchers out there doing this research both in the US and in their countries and so stuff is changing and we're discovering more and more and more about the amazing powerful effects of these of these substances and I'm sure that over the next 10 to 20 years you're gonna see a lot more research coming out that's gonna just add on top of this pile of everything that I'm saying here so that's the medical piece of the puzzle pretty freakin big pretty important think about all the people we have addicted to opioids right now we're talking about the IP opioid epidemic in the u.s. well a lot of that could be alleviated if we had a proper system of distribution of psychedelics and a proper context and culture about how to use them and that's not to mention all the other addictions that we don't even call addictions in our society people are addicted to porn people are addicted to Internet to their cell phones to sex to all this sort of stuff and these psychedelics will help with all of that not just with heroin addiction think about how much of a boost in consciousness a substance like iboga or five Meo would have to give a person to get them to quit heroin like that cold turkey that's [ __ ] amazing that's a testament to how big of a shift in consciousness you can have so if it can do that for a heroin addict imagine what it could do for you as a not heroin addict cuz you're still struggling with all the same basic life problems of a heroin addict I mean for heroin addict his problems are just a little bit worse but you still have the same problems you don't like how you look you have social anxiety you're too introverted you have OC OCD you have ADHD you have various fears and quirks and all this sort of stuff and you procrastinate it to all of it and you don't know how to fix yourself that's what personal development is here for but then again you do this personal development and it's so tough and it's a grind and it's difficult and you don't really know how to have an Enlightenment experience you keep trying you keep trying but you're not having one well that's the perfect place where a a substance like thymio or mushrooms can come in and just give you a little nudge in the right direction they are a catalyst it's important to understand that I'm not saying they're a replacement for spiritual practices they're not a replacement for personal development they're not a replacement for reading and listening to audiobooks and for eating healthy and all that kind of stuff they are catalysts they are one tool in your toolbox so of course I talked about the ancient uses of psychedelics but you should realize that we have all these modern uses of psychedelics in Peru and in Brazil today you can do ayahuasca and yopo and people are doing it both natives and Westerners and they're having amazing results and you know they're not becoming criminals their mind is not going insane these substances are not you know destroying families there we have various churches actually in the u.s. we have the Santo dime a church and the UDV Church which are the only two churches that I'm aware of which have a legal right to provide DMT in the form of ayahuasca to their followers because they actually had big court cases the UDV Church case went all the way up to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court ruled that they are allowed to consume ayahuasca but only them and Santo diamond in certain states so you can actually join these churches and drink ayahuasca and they do that legally and they're having success with that and they actually give it to their kids to drink give it to their teenagers to drink not just adults of course Native Americans to this day are doing peyote ceremonies and they involve their teenagers in that in Mexico natives do mushroom ceremonies today in Mexico Octavio Rettig is doing these five amiyo ceremonies today legally and it's working great in mexico canada costa rica we have these ibogaine ibogaine clinics and they're working great and they are legal there in africa the beauty tribe uses i boga to this day and it works great for them in nepal to this day they use datura various Yogi's and saints they have a secret cult therefore using tuturro in india also they use hashish and marijuana in various ways as well the Yogi's do not just guys who are hippies these are serious hardcore mystics and they are they are transforming themselves and transforming the lives of everybody around them by increasing their consciousness through these substances which is not to say they don't abuse them I'm sure some of them abused them as well you can read the works of Carlos Castaneda which talks about modern-day uses of of these psychedelics so it's just not true that these substances are not possible to use responsibly they're being used responsibly all over the world with great success with enormous success but most people just don't know about it and this is stuff you don't hear about in mainstream culture so this concludes episode part 1 we're gonna have a part two and maybe even a part three because there's so much information here and even this episode turned out to be very long but this sort of like an information dump I'm dumping all this stuff on you so you can kind of just jump into the deep end and just start to see like oh my god there's so much stuff that I wasn't taught all this factual information you can go and follow up and I encourage you to go follow up on this read the books get an encyclopedia start reading this stuff there's so much information there browse around online and start to notice how this stigma that you have that around psychedelics just starts to dissolve in in light of all the hard scientific evidence and all the other anthropological evidence that we have and all the psychological evidence and then of course to really sense the deal you gotta go try it yourself and then you will prove to yourself beyond a shadow doubt that this stigma is completely ass-backwards alright that's it for this one please remember to click that like button go check out actualized org check out my blog check out the forum check out the life purpose course check out the book list I have books there about psychedelics and I'll be adding more in the future and just stick around for the next episode so that we can conclude this entire train of thought there's still a lot of stuff very juicy stuff that I want to say on this topic but that will be coming next week you