This is one of my favorite podcast conversations of all time. When your first psychedelic was given to you by your friend and teacher Richard Alpert (Ram Dass), there is a good chance that you yourself are a legend. And Jim Fadiman is that. One of the true pioneers and revered elders in a field that has been deeply woven with my own life for the past 24 years. Jim Fadiman is a renowned author, educator, and co-founder of the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (which later became Sofia University). We trade stories about our experiences while weaving in discussions about microdosing’s effects on the brain and how to drown out fear with love when navigating challenges. Additionally we touch on the difference in perspective between Ego and Eco (and how much there is to learn from trees), reincarnation, the connection between psychedelic use and kindness, and the importance of focusing on divine play and truly enjoying the game of life.

AUBREY: This was an absolute honor to sit down with one of the OG psychonauts, Dr. Jim Fadiman, who started his study at Harvard, got his doctorate at Stanford, received his first dose of psychedelic medicine from someone named Richard Alpert, who we know as Ram Dass. So, he has been in the field of psychedelic medicine, psychedelic experience, and as a true psychonaut for longer than I've been alive. And so, this podcast allows us to share stories from one generation to another generation, and just the deepest bow to author, doctor, researcher, Dr. Jim Fadiman.

Starts after intro at 2:14
AUBREY: Well, Jim, this is a real honor to be talking to you. You're one of the pioneers in the field that has been so dear to my heart. I don't know how much of my story you know, but when I was 18, I was sent off by my father, with my full, enthusiastic, but also terrified choice to go off on a bit of a vision quest with some of the sitters and facilitators that came through Stan Grof's associated kind of lineage, he was doing breathwork. And then, there was also kind of the underground crew that were, and you probably know them, but--
JIM: I do.
AUBREY:: Out of respect, I'll spare the name of my sitter who is just an absolutely gorgeous and wonderful human being. So, we went off to the mountains, near Santa Fe, and at 18, I had my first psychedelic medicine experience, which was psilocybin and MDMA. I came in rationalist, reductionist, materialist. I actually thought I was going to take down religion because it was all absurd superstition. And then I felt my body disappear. And the only word that I had for what remained was a soul. And I was like, shit, I gotta rethink everything. I stayed up all night by the fire writing. That radically changed my life in that moment. And so, for the last 24 years, I'm 42 now, I've been exploring the sacred medicines, both plant and otherwise. And it's been the biggest boon and the biggest gift to my life, to be able to understand myself and understand the cosmos. Not because of something I read, but to be able to read things and then test them against my own anthro-ontology, what I know in my body to be true from the places that I've gone and what I've experienced. So, I share that with you, just because I know that your story, you're one of the legends and the pioneers who've gone down not exactly the same path, but similar paths, and then shared your wisdom and distilled it and your guidance. So, it's just with absolute honor and reverence that I have this chance to talk to you today.
JIM: Well, we've really had the same path because once you're on this path, what you notice is there isn't any other.
AUBREY:: Right, it's the choiceless choice.
JIM: And what you meet is really nice people. There is research about how much nicer people who've had psychedelics are than people who haven't. Nothing extraordinary, but there is... I think it's something about relaxing that self, when you stop being in your little body box, and get to see that you were a larger being, it's easier to relax around people. It's easier to forgive people, it's easier also just to be compassionate and exciting. And so, your curiosity is, I mean, what I'm saying is, you're like the new normal, okay?
AUBREY:: Yeah, I agree. I agree. Once you've felt it and really tasted it, then nothing else will quite slake the thirst that you'll have for that direct experience. And it's not the only way to get there. I mean, I think that's, as you mentioned, Stan Grof, his holotropic breathwork was a beautiful example. And I always mentioned that. This path isn't for everybody, but some path, whether it's meditation or breathwork or ecstatic dance, or yoga, some path I think is really necessary for us to evolve our consciousness to a level where we can be fully happy and also serve each other.
JIM: The image is that there's an awful lot of ways to get to the top of the mountain, but the view is the same.
AUBREY:: Yeah.
JIM: And you get to meet other travelers who have come other ways, and you share information, and you kind of share water, little candy bars that you stuck in the bottom of your pack. So, here we are, and I'm really just happy that you reached out to me at MAPS to get together. The only problem was I wasn't there. But now we've worked it out, and we're only a few thousand miles of ocean apart.
AUBREY:: Yeah, that's it. There we go. Which in the world we travel is, it's nothing actually. We're not apart at all.
JIM: We've been waiting for Zoom our whole lives.
AUBREY:: Indeed, indeed, astral zoom has been in effect for a while, but technology had to catch up. So when you talk about your bag with the candy bars and the water and your own way up the mountain, what were the first experiences? And, which medicines did you find first? And, how has that evolved over time as you've continued on the path?
JIM: Well, you just kind of trusted your father, and had no idea what you were getting into. I had finished college, and I was living in Paris for a year. My favorite professor who was named Richard Alpert...
AUBREY:: Oh, boy.
JIM: And Richard is on his way to Copenhagen, where he's going to give a presentation with Tim Leary, and Aldous Huxley. And it's like the first big opening of psychedelics to the world psychological community. Now, psychedelics had been explored for a long time. This is like 1961. But they were still seen as something you could use to describe your own craziness, or to learn how crazy people felt. They hadn't really seen them as positive and redeeming and soul opening. So, I'm living in Paris, and I'm pretending I'm cool. And Richard is new to Paris, and he's not pretending he's cool. And, he says to me, "Hey, the greatest thing in the world has happened to me, and I want to share it with you." And I think, "Oh, that's cool. I'm going to now get some great stories from Richard." So, I sit back and say, "That's great." He reaches in his breast pocket of his jacket, and comes out, a little bunch of pills, and I'm thinking, "Oh." Straight, I don't drink coffee. But I think, well, not only he's my friend and he's my favorite professor. But he feels better and healthier and less neurotic than I'd ever remember him. So I figured how bad can it get? So, a little bit of psilocybin later, we're still sitting in the café. And the colors are getting a little brighter, this is in the night.
AUBREY:: Was it a synthetic psilocybin that was in the capsule or was it--
JIM: This was Sandoz material. And the way you got Sandoz material in those days is you wrote them a note and you say, please send some psychedelics to me, I will tell you how I use them. Literally, I think you had to have some credentials, but not much. Literally, the little bit of paper you'd get with your little bunch of, in this case, LSD or psilocybin, had a little note, and I've seen a copy of it, which said basically, here you are, tell us how you're using it. Okay? Because Sandoz--
AUBREY:: Leave your reviews. Leave your reviews in the box.
JIM: Well, literally. Just check at the bottom if you like it, or you'd just like to pass it on. So, what Sandoz was saying is, we know this stuff is incredibly powerful, we just don't have any idea how to capitalize on it, how to make money out of it. We're a drug company. So, anyway, Richard takes out his little bottle. And it's getting brighter. And behind me, I'm hearing, there’s a café in Paris, there's people walking behind you, it's a big street. You're aware of conversations behind you when you're sitting someplace. And then I had this insight, which is, wait a moment, I've been living in France for a year, I've never been able to understand the conversations. I don't speak French. I said to Richard, "This is too much for me." He said, "Well, why don't we go up to your room." And I said, "Great." He says, "It's too much for me, too." I said, "But you didn't take anything." He says, "My first night in Paris." So, we went up to my room and I let go of a lot of things that I thought were necessary. Now, I was still Jim Fadiman. This was not a transcendental experience. The colors were brighter, but the object state, if I looked at a glass, it kind of looked like a glass. It didn't turn into Chartres Cathedral. So, a few years--
AUBREY:: Which is also, just to bracket one second in this conversation. I think a lot of people who are psychedelic naïve assume that it's going to be this like crazy Salvador Dali, where everything melts and bends into something else. I've never even had that. I've done so much medicine. I've never had that experience. I've seen the trees breathe. I've seen a lot of unbelievable magical things and closed eyed visions, open eyed visions. But I've never really seen a reality that, maybe that's because I haven't done enough LSD. But I've never seen reality just bend into this world that I couldn't actually discern. And I think, while that can happen for sure--
JIM: Well, when we get to the end of the story, we'll give you a case in which it happened, okay?
AUBREY:: Great. I love hearing those.
JIM: I'm feeling pretty cheery, and I'm not as attached to whatever I was attached to. And Richard goes off to Copenhagen, and I leave Paris a week later and I go to Copenhagen, I do this again with him. And it's about closeness, it's about human contact, it's about there are no kind of the ‘I thou’, it's the dash between. And then my draft board has sent me a letter that said, "Hey, we have a great idea for you for your next couple of years. It's a southeastern Asian country, and you get to crawl through the mud on your hands and knees carrying an automatic rifle, and you get to kill people." I wrote them back and said, suddenly graduate school looks fantastic. I'd been accepted to Stanford. So I go to Stanford, and a few weeks later, complicated story, but I end up in a research institution in Menlo Park, the International Foundation for Advanced Study, and I'm being offered another pill. I look at these people and I say, "Oh, this has got to be no another bonding experience." And after a while, I don't really want to talk to them. In fact, I don't really want to sit up. I don't want to see anything. So, I get headphones and an eye mask. And, what happens then is the Jim Fadiman-ness stays where it is, but a deeper sense of personal identity emerges and it's simply larger than that. Jim Fadiman is a subset of that. And that archness, not only you let go of self, but you let go of body and you let go of space and time. And it is called a transcendental or a mystical experience. It's found, again, lots of ways to get there, and most religious traditions are based on it. But, I'm a first-year graduate student in psychology, not a very enlightened psychology, at Stanford. And when I come back to being Jim Fadiman somewhat later in the day, it's very puzzling. One of the puzzles is, given what a giant, magnificent, complicated being I am, why am I in this kind of powerless and uninteresting position? And, it took some years to figure that out, and I'm still working on it. But, that transcendent experience which you say you haven't had, is a deeper shift. It's really a shift in which holding on to almost any theory or idea or ideology feels like a shrinkage.
AUBREY:: I want to clarify as well, that it's not that I haven't had complete dissolution, dissolving, experiences. Many, many dissolving experiences. It just hasn't been accompanied with, when the visual field, so, seven grams of mushrooms in the daytime, I dissolved into the sun. I was one with the sun, that was one experience. 5-MeO-DMT, I have been trained in the lineage there to receive, and also serve if the situation is right. That's not my calling, it's not my vocation. But I went through a deep initiatic path there. And of course, there's radical dissolution into the everything of God, God screaming through every one of your cells.
JIM: Oh, yeah.
AUBREY:: One note, one symphony of God. And then I've gone in ayahuasca into the deep, deep void of the nothingness of God, of the zero point of God, where everything is just dissolved into the presence of silence and blackness, which is kind of like the opposite of everything of the divine. So, many, many experiences with that. I haven't just found, and I think it's because I don't have a lot of experience with LSD. I've had lots of huachuma experiences where my heart bursts open, and I become like one heart, one breathing heart with the forest and the mountains, and everything is just the heart field. So, many experiences like that. What I was just saying is, that a lot of times people focus on the visual aspects. And for me, that visual aspect of the world turning Dali and everything getting really confusing, sounds interesting, because I'm very comfortable there. But it also hasn't happened. So if people are expecting who are psychedelic naïve, that that's always going to be the case, that you're going to look at your glass of water, and it's going to become some bent thing going in an infinite spiral, and you don't know it's a glass of water, it's not always how it works.
JIM: No, not at all. Okay, I withdraw any notion that you have not experienced. You've experienced what is the classical peak experience, which is I am the sun, I am the mountain, the heart is all things. The visual actually is a lesser experience. It's a shrinkage. It's already back into identity. I mean, I remember one afternoon, I had some life changing event. And at the end of the afternoon, I was watching the leaves all change. And I thought, "Oh, man, that's all I can handle at this point." I just love that visual little magic. I'm tired, I'm back being me, which is always a little bit of a downer. So, I think it's fair to say you skipped that place on your way up. It's kind of instead taking the local, you took the express.
AUBREY:: Yeah, I would agree. I remember that time on the seven grams of psilocybin. The facilitator, to build resonance with the group that we were in, he had us clacking sticks. We had like those musical wooden sticks, and we were clacking them in rhythm. And I remember we were cracking the sticks, and then the medicine kicks in. And then, I just, I can't clack any sticks anymore, I'm the sun. And I come out of the sun,15, 30 minutes, I don't know, could have been 45. I have no fucking idea. I was the sun. I'm not keeping track of time. And they were still, some of my friends were still clacking sticks. I look at them and I go, "You're still clacking stick." I was just blown away. And then as soon as I said, they're still clacking sticks, they go, "Oh." And everybody stopped clacking sticks. But they were locked into that pattern. And, I was so in admiration, that they were able to continue with their stick clacking in the face of dissolution.
JIM: What's wonderful about this kind of, I mean, I have to let people know, we've never met. But we come out of the same tribe. And we haven't said a word about the kind of medical necessities and a lot of other things that people are talking about. So, we're talking from a different place to start. Now, I don't know where we'll go, but it's nice to notice how easily you and I blended.
AUBREY:: Yeah, for sure.
JIM: I know very little about you, and you know a little bit about me. But, it's kind of like saying, "Oh, you've been to Hawaii? I've been to Hawaii." "You know that part of Hawaii? I know that part of Hawaii." "You know that little bar? Oh yeah." Then you kind of have handled the basics, are we in the same kind of caress? Are we in the same little tight group? And we are, and then we've all taken different insights and gone in different directions.
AUBREY:: Yeah, absolutely. I think with some of the work that you've done on the multiplicity of self is also, kind of, a beautiful exploration of myself. The model that I use is from a mystical Hebrew wisdom teacher, Dr. Gafni. We talk about it as first there's the separate self, which can be called the small self, or the identity structure, or the Aubrey, just in its own separate Aubreyness. And then there's the true self which is the field. It's the unified field, the source point, the oneness, the monad. There's many names for it, the Atman. IT has many names. Atman is Brahman, of course. So, you lose the distinction between the self, the big capital S self, the true self you carry inside and the true self, it's everywhere. So, one of the reasons when you have that experience, you see everybody as another version of you living a different life. And once you have that perspective, there's a kinship and a sense of ohana and sense of family. Like, oh, I see you, you see me. And then all of that, then configures in our model. Configures the separate self, moves with the wisdom of the true self into what Gafni calls the unique self, which is a celebration of your radical uniqueness with the inclusion and transcending of both separate and true self, so that you sing your own sacred name song, but a name song that includes the recognition of the entire field of the true self. And that's kind of the path that I see, that really, deeply resonates with me.
JIM: Well, as I said, a lot of ways up the mountain, okay?
AUBREY:: Yeah, totally.
JIM: What I've found is, when you start to go into any given system, at some point, the system starts to structure itself. And at the moment, the system that I've been using is, as you are at the moment, I can see ocean. And what I know about ocean is there are waves, and each wave is convinced of its intrinsic identity. It has one, it is special, it's like no other wave. And, a part of it knows it's just part of the ocean, and it's going to be the ocean again, and it's going to be a different wave. That is the kind of model that I'm working on these days, is to enjoy my waveness, but not forget that we're only here a short time, and the ocean's here a long time.
AUBREY::Yeah, the ocean is eternal. It's the eternal renewing and revivification of life itself, capital L life. There's a deep peace that comes with that understanding. In the Toltec tradition too, another model, which has different ideas. But in that model, it's actually, they call this state that we're in, Don Miguel Ruiz will say, that death gives way to life, because life is the true eternal unchanging, and life is the force of life itself. And, this is actually in physical form, a particular temporal identity, that ultimately gives way to life. Now, if you take a reincarnation perspective, then the wave has a wave that actually carries, well, maybe not eternally, but at least for a long time, until it goes back entirely into the ocean, dissolves completely. So, the wave actually includes the death of this one identity, and then all the lessons of this identity into the next wave. And, whatever karmic things that need to get worked through, whatever proclivities and aggregations of energy that you've created, then create some energy for the next wave of your next life.
JIM: Well, then I'll see you there.
AUBREY:: No doubt. We might run this back
JIM: One of Ram Dass's last interviews, he's talking about reincarnation, and he finally goes into that little beatific smile and says, "Birth death, birth death, birth death." And then like a week or two later, he's on the death part of the cycle. So, I'm not sure about what comes back. But I'll probably know before you do.
AUBREY:: Yes, yes, that's quite possible. But the mystery always has its plans, but I'm so happy, Jim. My life is, I can't even express to look at the difference. I always had a good life, but I was somewhat tortured in many ways. I felt a lot of anxiousness, and I felt like I was always never doing enough. I didn't really have faith that I would ever really be able to do enough. And it was this constant. I was always worried. I have a mind that, in the stoic sense, is always premeditating different problems and different challenges. And it's useful as a CEO, because you want to look at all the different storms that could be coming, and all the different challenges from social dynamics. But it weighed on me and it was this kind of heaviness that I could burst out of it into exstasis, or into joy and laughter and play. And I love sports for that, because when I was playing sports, then I could release all of this, worry about anything else other than the next dribble of the basketball, or the next stroke or the tennis racket or whatever it might be. But now, it's interesting. Again, two decades, 24 years of work with the medicines, it's, I have this deep sense of peace and joy and happiness that is, it's really, it's unbelievable to just, I just want to share that with anybody listening. The level of contentment that you keep with you, not in the journeys themselves. The journeys are amazing, and I love them and they're incredible, but it's the changing of the baseline. It's a baseline state that can be achieved, where you really, really, really can be happier than you ever thought possible. And there's dangerous, there's risks, there's ways in which when you're playing with the fire of transformation, that you can get burned or lost. And I've seen many examples of that as well.
JIM: Well, the last 10 years or so, I've been dealing with microdosing, where you don't have any of the excitement, and you don't have any of the risk. And it's a different universe. And in terms of contentment, one of the wonderful things is when I talk about microdosing, I'm talking about something that is so safe, that I kind of look for problems so that the people who say, "Well, what are the risks? What are the contraindications?" that I have something to say. But it's a little bit like, what are the risks of Cheerios? Well, you can put it up your nose. I mean, there are ways to hurt yourself with anything, but some things, it's harder to make a serious mistake. It's easily possible to get very little benefit. But that's kind of the risk-reward ratio, and high-dose psychedelics are genuine risk, and amazing payoff. Microdosing is, it is very small risk and small changes, sometimes very large changes, but mostly, oh, my system's working better, tuned up. It's been a real shift for me, because for 40 years, all I cared about was the transcendental, all the things we're talking about. I didn't care about the therapeutic, I wasn't interested in the creative. I wasn't interested in the kind of rave level. I think the universe said, you've been up on that kind of top of the mountain a long time, I've got some work for you in the sub cellar. And I say, "Oh, come on." And then they said, "Trust me, you'll like it." And I do.
AUBREY:: That's awesome. That's awesome. Let's go. I want to continue on the discussion of microdosing, because I'm still in the path where you were, where I didn't have microdosed before, but certainly, my path keeps taking me. Partly for myself, and partly because of all of my experience, the people that I love so much. I'm always taking them to see the great medicine and lineage keepers, and the great experiences and ceremonies. Whether it's Don Howard, or whether Maestro Orlando Chujandama or El Dragon. Whoever it is serving whatever medicine, I'm often taking people there and enjoying those experiences. So, I do have a lot of those kinds of transcendental experiences. And I have explored microdosing and found it valuable. But still, my path is, as it was with you in the younger days. And I want to talk about those days, and then we'll go back to microdosing a little bit. Let's talk about some of the scary and kind of hairy places that you've been. Some of the places where you were, uh-oh, this is a dangerous path. Places where you're on a freeway and the freeway's safe. But if you take an off ramp, that's certainly available and you start to see it or maybe even take it for a little while, and you go, this off ramp leads to something dangerous.
JIM: Top speed, and there was this little sign, and you didn't quite see it. And you think, "What's that sign say? Oh, it's a bridge out. Oh my God, woo!"
AUBREY:: Yeah, those experiences.
JIM: I'll give you just a moment, because it's what comes to mind. I'm on some level of something, and this inner voice says, "You're dying." And I think I know that game. LSD likes to play that game. Because in a sense, it's your ego, saying, "I'm really so important that I'm going to see if I can frighten you into staying inside me." So, it says, you're dying. And I say, "I know that game." And it says, "No, no, this time you're really dying." And I say because I had enough trips, "I know that too." And then it's like, you know that trip, don't you? But this time you're dying. Oh, my. I guess I'm really dying. There's not much I can do about it. And then the game gets you know, so Charlie Brown chicks that football every time. Every time. He says this time, "I'm not going to take it away." And every time she takes it away. So, having come through that one more time, and I realized that dying is two ways of looking at it. One is dying to identity and the other is dying to the great universe, and in the great universe there's no dying. But at that moment, I really thought I was done. I was more sad than terrified because there was nothing I could do. You know, you're in the airplane and they say we're going to crash, there's not a lot you do about it. You just say, okay. I really wanted to go to Coachella, I didn't want to be in a plane that was going to crash. And maybe I shouldn't have taken all that ayahuasca before I got on the plane.
AUBREY:: Yeah.
JIM: So, there are moments in which whatever structure you've made of your life is threatened. It's not a danger for me, but it's certainly a moment when you're up against everything that you've ever done. So, the kind of classic terrors and being in hell and being tortured forever, I haven't had that. So, I don't know that world. What I've learned and what I was trained in after the graduate experience, in the few years that I worked with people in what we would now call, the now well known, understood, therapeutic environment of the two therapists in the nice room, which we developed in Menlo Park, is, almost any negative experience can be turned around with a little guide. And here's one which was tricky. This is a high ranking executive of a major electronics firm. And he's frightened. I'm there and his two therapists are there. He looks up at us, and it's just terror. And we all know to say, it's all right. One of them holds his hand. And for most people, that handles it. His terror only grows. And we say, "Can you say what's going on?" He looks at us, kind of eyes flicking back and forth. Now, what we learn much later, is what he has just realized, as he's on this couch, is that we actually work for a military, an intergalactic military. And there's a war on. The soldiers are kind of robot soldiers, but they need a human, they need a sentient being in the control room. And that we are a recruiting station, and that we take people out of themselves and then we ship them to Alpha Centauri and they go into the soldier. Now he understands that, and then he looks up at us, and we're smiling. And we're saying, it's okay, just relax, just go with it. And he is aware that if he goes with it, he ends up, he next thing he knows he's on Alpha Centauri, getting his military fatigues from the sergeant. It was a very tricky moment, because he had developed a worldview in which everything good about guiding was evil. So, there are problems. There are tricky problems. And I'm thinking of another woman who actually just climaxed, like all day long. She didn't necessarily want to do that, but that's all that she did. Again, there was no intrusion into that, that that guide could do. So, there are real problems, people do get in trouble. There was one person in our, there were many, many people. Hundreds of people we worked with, who afterwards felt that his approaching divinity, as we've been kind of joking about, was that he was very special.
AUBREY:: Yeah, inflation. Lucifer completion.
JIM: Yeah, and there's a term in the Jungian world called, I think the, kind of mana personality. You are genuinely inflamed with religious zeal. You have charisma, and a fatal flaw, you think nobody else is like that.
AUBREY:: Right.
JIM: Now, he ended up giving up his job as an early brilliant computer scientist, and ran to be the governor of Nevada. I don't think he got even his own vote. So, there are difficulties, and it was very hard to work with this because, fortunately, I was kind of the assistant, so I have sorrow, but it was just something that went very wrong. And Ram Dass has a similar story, where early on when he's back from India and he's wearing a brown dress and sandals, he goes to visit his brother who's in an insane asylum. And his brother who is dressed in a kind of ivy league coat and J. Press clothes, is there because one of his delusions is that he's Jesus, which is particularly awkward in an upwardly mobile Jewish family. But in any case, what he's learned in the mental hospital is, don't say that. Or they really treat you badly. But he has not let go of this. And at one point, Ram Dass is talking to him, and he says, in his very warm, friendly way, because he loves his brother. Says, "You still think you're kind of Jesus, don't you?" He says, "Well, no." Ram Dass says, "Am I Jesus?" And the guy says, "No, certainly not." He says, "That's why you're in here."
AUBREY:: Yeah, the differentiation between Jesus and the Christ. Well, we're all the Christ, but there's no other Jesus.
JIM: Not very special.
AUBREY:: Yeah, exactly. Everybody's the same.
JIM: Until you know that everyone is Christ, that everyone is Buddha, you're in a very confused state. And in our culture, some cultures, they make you a teacher. Some cultures, you are the village kind of madman, and people give you donations of food now and then. In others, you're dressed in an Ivy League suit, and you're in a mental hospital in Boston. So, identity is a very delicate part of us that we tend to think is automatic, and you can't let go of it. It's inviolatable, and so forth, but it's not true. And psychedelics are particularly adept at taking you out of your identity, which no matter how wonderful it is, it's still got limitations, and saying, hey, there's more to be seen, there are different ways to appreciate reality, there are other ways to be with people and so forth.
AUBREY:: Yeah, those are all three great examples, and examples that I've either personally experienced, or experienced in my network. I'll go through a couple of them. So, my first ayahuasca experience, I'd had dissolving experiences, but never anything that said I was dead, I was just alive. And then I was alive in another state. I was alive in the fullness of, so, there was never a fear of death. I was just alive in a different state. I again transitioned pretty smoothly there. But ayahuasca then started showing me all of the ways that I was dying. There were bugs crawling into my ears and my eyes, exploding in my brain. And I was like, I understand this game, this is a vision, I'm not worried about it. There's no real bugs, I get it. And then there were eels that were swimming through me through the astral and going into my belly, burrowing in and then eating all my organs and busting out. I was like haha, I'm not going to fall for that trick, ayahuasca. And then I go in, I'm sliding. Next thing, I'm sliding down this tree that has all these spikes on the tree. All of these spikes, these berita, these spikes, and it's just eviscerating me, and I was naked. And so, it's from the genitals first all the way up my whole torso. And I was like, wow, that is horrendous. It's a horrible thing to look at. But I know that that's not real too. And then ayahuasca goes, oh yeah? Well, you got lymphoma, just like your uncle and you're going to die. And you're about to die. And I go, uh-oh. Because I was scared of that. I go, "Uh-oh, no, I don't." And ayahuasca's, "Yes, you do. You're going to die. It's late stage, actually. You're on your end days." I'm like, no, no. So, I'm wrestling with ayahuasca, and I'm feeling go ahead, I'm going, no, no, no, no, no. And ayahuasca is persistent. "You're going to die, you're going to die, you're going to die of cancer." Finally, I go, okay, okay, I'm going to die. That's all right. I'll just love everybody as much as I can before I go, and I'm going to die. And then as soon as I said that, it was like the earth came and wrapped up around me, cradled me, and then the voice of ayahuasca came and said, "No, you're not going to die, sweetheart. You just needed to accept that level of surrender." And I was like, "Oh, my God, what a journey. So, I mean, that's an experience that resonates with the first story you told. And then the second story you told, I remember it most clearly with one of my friends Kyle. And I only mention Kyle, because we've told this story before, but did an extreme psilocybin journey. 30 grams psilocybin journey by himself. And it kind of destabilized a lot of things, and he went into different hell realms. In the hell realms that he was in, then he went and actually did a 5-MeO journey with me which is inadvisable in the vulnerability that he was actually feeling, but I didn't understand it, and I didn't know enough. He's a well experienced psychonaut. And in that, he went into another hell realm where everything was a simulation and nothing was real, and he was stuck in this infinite loop that didn't evolve. And I think, to me, that's one of the aspects of hell is you're stuck in a place that has no evolution. It's just you're stuck in this infinite loop. And I was part of the loop. So everything I would say to him was, of course, you would say that, because the Aubrey knows to say that, because the Aubrey is trying to trick you into thinking that you're going to get out, but you're never going to get out, and it's part of the torture. So everything I said, no matter what it was, was, "Of course, you would say that. Of course, you would say that." And it took him two years, three years really, to actually make it through completely where he was, he'd wake up with nightmares in this hell realm. And so, I've seen that danger as well. And I've seen some of my friends slip into hell, and I've started to develop, and I've been in my own hell, and I started to develop a strategy for how do you get out of hell? It sometimes doesn't work, because somebody may think that you're part of the agent of hell itself. Like you were part of the Alpha Centauri recruitment office. But it's really, it's connecting to love, and also helping people remember who you are. I had a friend who recently found himself in a hell realm. And, I was like, alright, I know how to get out of here. But the first thing I needed to do is let him know that it was me. We're athletes together, we compete on the basketball court, and I'd say, he couldn't recognize me at that point, he was just stuck in this place. I say, "Well, first of all, I want you to remember who I am. I'm the guy that last time we played basketball, I beat your ass. I hit so many three pointers in your face." And I started talking shit to him because that's what we do. We play that game. And when I said that, he just had this little faint smile of, oh, this is Aubrey. And I was like, alright, now you know it's me. Now you just got to anchor to some piece of love, any love that you can find. A love that you have for something or a love that something has for you. And find that one piece of love, and he finds it. I say, what was it? He says, love of the mother. I go, alright, beautiful. And then, alright, we need to find another piece of love, and find it. What is that? "Love for the brother." Okay, great. And then there was another piece, and it was like, the love of the world. Took four jumps of different love. And when he found enough love, then he was able to burst out of hell. And so, that's been my own get-out-of-hell guide that's just anchored to some peace of love.
JIM: No, I was thinking I have a Tibetan Buddhist teacher friend. And she said, we were corresponding about something about the illusion of the self, and stuff like that. And she wrote love is never a delusion. Whoa. When you were talking, I thought, well, if you ever want to stop doing what you're doing, you could do some wonderful coaching.
AUBREY:: Yeah, thank you.
JIM: Because that's a beautiful way of getting someone to shift awareness for that moment. And that moment is, it's like, when you're about to fall off the cliff and you hang on to something and it's a root. That's a good start. Then someone can pick you up. You're not slipping anymore. That was really beautiful. That was just a wonderful way that you discovered that is very universal.
AUBREY:: Yeah, it's been really helpful to know that I have a plan. Both for myself and for any others. I just trust. If you just trust love and find it in any small piece, any small thing. Ram Dass said that, and he actually recorded that at East Forest. You love a cat, you love, it was an East Forest John Hopkins collection. You love your cat, you love anything, and then you expand that love, expand that love, expand that love. And that's the way, how do you open your heart? It's just love something and then love it more, and then love it more, and love it more. There's really deep wisdom in that, that love is part of the field of love, and any anchor point you can get to love is going to open you up to the field. And, the field of love, that's the kingdom, that's the opposite of hell.
JIM: Well, again, a lot of people when they are trying to summarize their positive psychedelic experience, say the universe is, it's just love. In fact, I think Michael Pollan says in one of his books, and he says, I know how trite that sounds. But that's the best I can do. It's trite, because we come to that from so many different places. It's not trite. It's more universal than people admit.
AUBREY:: Yeah, and there are places, I have seen places where I tried that move. And, this is something interesting I also want to get into, which is, if you've had any experience with what feels like the trickster being or the force, like a force that has an intent, like a Grigorik aggregation of energy that of course lives within us, but also is external to us that will try and actually has intent to trick your mind and subvert the truth and create illusion. There was an experience I had recently as well, where someone actually got into this house, where there was this trickster energy, which was kind of dominating her dialogue. And I said, all right, so here's what we got to do. We gotta just anchor the love. What do you love? And it was, cats. She's like, okay, love your cats. And then I was like, alright, well, you just gotta find another piece of love. Which she then, with this energy that was not hers, she looks at me and says, "Love is a trap." And I go, "Uh-oh, my strategy has a problem here." I was like, all right, love is a trap. I gotta use a different tool here. And it was interesting to just evolve with that and have to deal with that kind of trickster energy. But I want to ask you, in your experience, and we were able to succeed, and it took a variety of different shamanic tools to kind of shake the state, almost shake the state loose. Used Agua Florida, and some smoke, and some different, more the magical practices that I've picked up along the way. But ultimately, and that was just improvisation, honestly, because my method, my tried and true method of love was immediately tricked, love is a trap. I was like, "Shit." But anyways, what I really want to ask you about is, about that force. Any experiences you've had with what would be that force of delusion and trickster energy, and if that's showed up in your journeys or anywhere where you've really been able to see it?
JIM: Being a kind of new age optimist, I shy away from thinking that has reality. And, then, what comes into my mind is Alan Watts says, every piece of paper has two sides. I think, oh, Yin Yang, light, okay. So, what comes to then mind was a time when that energy, and I thought, and this is this high transcendental experience where I am being welcomed back into the chorus of angelic beings. And the comment is, "Hey, you woke up again, how great. We missed you." And we go right on, and I know my part. And, the universe is nothing but light. And way, way, way, way, way, way off, there's a little dark spot. And it gets bigger and I turn toward it and I'm aware that it is antithetical to this kind of loving and gentle world that I'm part of. And so, I take responsibility and I go towards the dark spot. I have no body, but I have form, and kind of form. And so, the dark spot is evil, it's dark. It wants to harm. And so, I actually end up kind of wrestling with it. And kind of like a Doctor Strange comic, we're wrestling and going through worlds and so forth, and I'm winning. And then the being looks up at me and says, "You know you lost." And I say, “No, I'm winning," and he says, “hahaha”. And then I realize, I have come from unity into duality. And that was the trick. Once I saw that, suddenly, I was back in the course. And they said, basically, you forgot again.
AUBREY:: What a beautiful story.
JIM: So, it doesn't make darkness. Darkness maybe took on for me negativity, but I don't really know. It simply may have said, you can't live in transcendence. Nobody in transcendence can walk into McDonald's, let alone be willing to eat what they serve. But once you're in duality, then there's a whole other set of issues that you need to deal with. And as a physical living being made of matter, you're in duality. And all the metaphysics you want is not going to take you out of there, except very rarely, with spiritual practices, with psychedelics, with death. Those are all ways in which you transcend duality. But most of the time you don't. And so, in a sense, the lesson I got from that is, don't fight it, blend, do what you can, use all the things you know, and you lose a lot. But in a sense, that's the game you're in. The thing that's wonderful about almost all sports games, is individually, strokes, holes, runs, there's lots of losses. And that winning only happens very briefly at the end. But in between, if you're not enjoying the game, if you're only there to win, one, is nobody wants to really play with you. You are not playing. You are not in a term Leela, Hindu word, divine play. And divine play is what the universe is doing. So, either you want to play with the universe, or you want to kind of sit on the sidelines and pout.
AUBREY:: So well said.
JIM: And pouting, it's never been very appealing to me.
AUBREY:: No, it doesn't sound super productive. Non-super productive. Yeah, reminds me of, I had a really intense battle with this being that was, it showed up as the world crusher. And so, long story. So I won't tell the story. I've told it elsewhere. But this giant being the size of worlds, and it can just take whole worlds like Earth and just crush them and destroy them. It was tormenting me because my father, my father ultimately had a psychotic break that, which is another long story, which I've told. It's not related to plant medicine. He stopped that path for about 10 years, and went into a path of channeling. But he wasn't channeling with any guidelines or precaution. And eventually what he started channeling was a representation of the isolated ego that had all of the inflation like you talked about, where he was the Messiah, and everybody needed to give him fealty, and it was this kind of the voices then took control of who he was, and he isolated himself. He passed recently, and there was a whole shamanic and kind of Hebrew lineage practice to help connect with his spirit. So, the story to me has a happy ending, actually, but in the process of this, this being, this world crusher being was tormenting me, and trying to tell me that if I sacrifice my soul, it would give me my father back. And so, it was playing this bargaining game, and I was like, "I can't do that." It's like, "Don't you love your father? Don't you owe everything to your father? Why wouldn't you..." I was like, I can't. It's like, "You're a coward." So, it's back and forth, and then it's flexing its power and its might. For some reason, I also had guidance. I had also had guidance there with me, like angelic guidance with me. Through that and through maybe my own choice, or maybe just pure guidance, I don't know. Hard to distinguish what's guidance and what's agency, but I just floated up to the top of this being in between his big horns, and his furrow demonic brow. I just kissed him right in the forehead. And I don't know why I did that, but I just did it. And then his eyes turned like the heart emojis, when you're texting and you do the little heart emojis. Eyes turn like heart emojis. And then all of the angelic beings just swept me and they put this breastplate of opal on my chest and my head and I was just flying with the angelic beings. The lesson was, you don't fight the darkness like that. You love it. You don't also listen to it. You don't say, the way that you actually resist is through love, and love creates the transmutation. And then when you get into that state of almost non-resistance, but also applying love as a tool of transformation and transfiguration, then that's really the lesson. That's how things change and heal. And so, I've always carried that with me that the number one strategy when dealing with any darkness is not to fight it, but to find love for it, knowing that that's what it's actually looking for. That's what it's missing. That's the impulse for its dark energy is the absence of love. And so, if you can apply love, then the whole situation can change. Otherwise, you'll just spend all your whole time fighting demons and that's exactly what they want. They want you to fight.
JIM: Exactly, exactly. The opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is fear. That which you fear controls you. Found it very straightforward. So, if you're fearing death, death says, oh, that's terrific, I can control you. If you're afraid of having cancer, right? Ayahuasca says, haha, so you're attached to not dying of cancer? Okay, let's see what that feels like. I mean, if you said, "Well, I'm not going to die," ayahuasca says, "This is really dumb. I don't even want to play."
AUBREY:: Yeah, totally.
JIM: So, we're all educating each other. Ram Dass has this wonderful term, is we're walking each other home. We're all going to go home. You don't need anyone to walk with you, but it sure makes it nicer. And again, that's one of the things that interests me in the psychedelic world, and it may change as things, we get more popular. I've done a lot of consulting, and what you do is consulting now and then is you run groups. You run groups in a company. Usually, when people are mad at each other, they hire you. So they get mad at you, but you're getting paid, and that's a fair deal. And what I've seen is working with groups of psychedelic leaders. Now, these are people all of whom are used to running the show. This happens after several MAPS conferences, when I get this opportunity to run a group of researchers who get to be with each other. What I found, and a lot of things went on, but what I found is they were so much nicer than any group of high functioning, powerful, effective people that I've dealt with in other situations. Because everyone there had an ancestral agenda, which is they wanted it to work for everyone. Secondary agenda is they wanted to get something personal out of it. And that's a great difference in most groups. No one, for instance, said, I have a question, and the purpose of the question was, look how fucking smart I am. None of that. Now, I deal with academics a lot, so you know where I got the example. Because academics are all a little bit concerned that maybe they're not as smart as the other people. And they know how to torture each other with that. But again, people who've had the experience of not being totally caught by their identity, can much more easily support a group intention.
AUBREY:: Yeah, I mean, so much of life is governed by these win-lose metrics of the ego, which knows itself in comparison, rather than this recognition of the field. If you're an academic, then you have a recognition of the field, and anything that advances the field, no matter what place it comes from, is like, wow, incredible. Now let me take that knowledge and let me see if I can advance, move the ball just a few more yards with something that I can add to it, and include to it. We don't see that in a lot of other places. But definitely, I agree with you, in this kind of renaissance that we're experiencing, this ‘we consciousness’, which includes the self but transcends the self to what can we collectively do? And it seems like at this point in our world, we need that more than ever. We need this we consciousness to transcend the polarity that's keeping us at odds with each other, and these win lose metrics and then stepped into a greater, alright, we're all part of Gaia, we're all part of Gaia Sophia, if you want to talk about the astral form of Gaia. But, we're all part of this and we all gotta come together or we're all going to suffer. There is no such thing as an isolated victory in the face of the existential threats that we're facing. It's existential, it's all of us, or none of us. That's also the problem I have with people building all of their bunkers underground and everything. I'm like, that's great, but do you really want to live in a fucking bunker as the world burns? Why don't you take all of that energy that you're spending building the bunker and try to help the world, and stop it from burning? That's to me, where my mind goes. Not saying don't have some fallback plan and maybe there's a temporary situation, you need your bunker. All good. I have a farm, we're growing our own food, and we're drilling a well, and we're doing some things just in case. But it's always in my mind a temporary retreat, and then it's back into the fray. Because I don't want a world where I'm okay, and then people are starving at my gate, and we have automatic weapons pointed at the gate to make sure they don't get in. No, fucking come in, eat our food. We're in this together. Like, fuck.
JIM: You have an opportunity when you're here to enjoy yourself, or enjoy yourself and other people benefit. You also have the opportunity to suffer, but it's amazing how many people have a theory that suffering is a necessity. Now, I know that's very popular. I know all the theories and I probably lectured on it. But also, nobody ever says to me, starving is really good for you. Or breaking your leg is an incredible learning experience. So, we don't take suffering quite as seriously as people who say suffering is good for you really mean. The nice thing is, once you stop, again, once you stop identifying just with yourself, it's obvious that helping other people benefits. At the moment, I'm kind of torn between people and trees, if I had to make a choice of who I want to be with. Because trees are inherently social, they help each other. They also help other species, there's no racism in trees. And I just recently, remembering that one of the things trees do is when an old tree dies, and it's been what we would call a mother tree because other trees are much younger around it, and it comes from the same root source, that stump is nourished by the other trees, often for decades. I mean, it doesn't rot. So, I'm looking at trees and saying, oh, I think there's something that human beings have missed, when we and trees kind of went our own evolutionary ways. And there's a lot to be said for the way nature makes everyone part of the solution. I have a daughter who is an ethno-botanist. And with her guidance, I've been to a rainforest in Costa Rica. First cut, when you're in a rainforest, is it looks like and it is true, that everything is trying to kill everything else and eat it. That's true. But if you go up a level, everything is feeding everything else. Everybody wins when everyone can feed off of everyone else, because everyone is, it's not about an individual life. This butterfly is not saying I want to live as long as I can, and I just don't want to talk to any other butterflies. The butterfly gets I'm part of the system, the flower is part of the system, let's see if we can do something. Because without us, the system doesn't work. It isn't a metaphor. It's looking at the way the system has been developed. Remember, if you have a couple of billion years to tinker, probably you got things that are working. So when you're looking at, remember, we used to save a species, which is very, identity, I, we're going to save the species. We're going to save the owl. Someone says, "What about the owls house?" "Well, it's just a tree. I mean, a bunch of trees..." No, no, no, you don't get it. The owl lives in that tree, and other things happen because the owl and the tree are there, and other things can grow, and so forth and so on. And you end up saying, oh, we have to save a habitat. And, of course, the habitat that we're all now looking at is the world, and we need to get back to saving the habitat if we want to save even the single species. All we want is total selfishness, and it's just us. The only way we do that is it turns out everyone else, the Ark didn't stop after the first two animals got on board.
AUBREY:: Right.
JIM: So, as I say, I'm aware that I'm more and more learning, not from other people as much as I have and certainly I still do, but I'm learning much more by seeing that interrelationship between other things in the organic world. And of course, if I were more profound, I get that the organic world only survives because of the generosity of the inorganic world. And so forth.
AUBREY:: All the minerals. The mineral kingdom.
JIM: Yeah, I was thinking the other day, when the first life was formed on earth, what did it eat? Unfortunately, I don't know enough to answer that question so I can let it hang out there. But all of a sudden, wait a moment, can you just start with one form of life? Or do you have to kind of have a little ark?
AUBREY:: Yeah, of course eating I'm sure the sunlight and the water, and the minerals, and all of the things.
JIM: Something worked.
AUBREY:: Something worked. That force is inexorable, the force of life. Reminds me, and again, I apologize for telling some of my own stories. But this is one of the great joys of talking to someone like yourself is I've had my own experiences that I can share from it. But, remember, I was in the jungle in Peru, and we're doing ayahuasca and huachuma with Don Howard. I really don't like mosquitoes. I get, particularly whatever it is, my Jewish blood or my own, I get big welts. I'm not one of those people that gets bit and then it itches for an hour, and then it goes away. No, no, I got big itchy welts that last days. So, I'm having a little war with the mosquitoes that are there, and I'm covering myself, and natural deterrent, because I don't want D all over seeping into my body when I'm doing the sacred medicines. So, I'm in the medicine journey, and we're in a maloca. So, I'm pretty safe from mosquitoes in there except for an occasional one that sneaks in. In the vision of the ayahuasca, I connect to the mosquitoes. And I see the oversoul of Mosquito, and Mosquito is there, just capital M mosquito. Mosquito is talking to me. I go, "Mosquito, what is the deal, man? What is going on? You're always biting people, you're always sucking their blood." I was projecting that some Mosquito is like a vampire. And the mosquito looks at me and goes, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, we're just nature's taxes, man. You got all this blood. And then we take that blood, and then the bats eat us, and the frogs eat us, and then they get some of that blood, and then they get some of that life. And we're just taxing all of you that have more blood than you need." I was like, well, I guess that makes sense. And I was like, "Well, what about malaria? That's fucked up. Why are you spreading that?" And Mosquito goes, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, malaria is a parasite to us. If you want to talk about malaria, you gotta go talk to malaria." And then I was like, "Go talk to malaria?" And I look at malaria. Malaria is just this chaotic whirlwind of energy. I was like, nope, not going to go talk to malaria. If I had a little more courage, maybe I would have talked to malaria. But I was like, nope, got it, understood, moving on. But it really speaks to what you're saying that everything has its role. And actually, if you can shift your perspective, it's still not that I don't slap a mosquito if it's on my arm. But nonetheless, I have a deeper respect of like, oh, I understand your purpose, I understand that you're part of this sharing process that allows an ecosystem to thrive.
JIM: Yeah, I'm remembering someone early on in psychedelics, when we really didn't know what we were doing. Someone said, I decided that the snails were eating everything up in my garden. But since I've had LSD, I just can't go kill snails. So, I went out there, I told them. I sat there and I said, "Unless you leave, I'm going to kill you." Now, two possible ends to that story.
AUBREY:: Yeah.
JIM: He said, they left.
AUBREY:: Wow.
JIM: Now, that's, of course, that I would like to remember that, but I remember very much accurately, the way he was dealing with the problem. Pretty much what you and mosquito are doing, which is, let's understand each other. Nothing personal against snails. But I also represent the best interests of the other plants in the garden.
AUBREY:: Right, right. Yeah, that holistic view is super important. All right, let's go back to... I want to go back to microdosing, because we placed a footnote and made a promise to our people to go back to it. And so for me, personally, the medicine that I've found the most benefit in microdosing has been iboga. Which doesn't actually get a lot of conversation in the microdosing community. I actually learned about that because Hamilton Morris, he talked to me about that on a podcast. He's like, listen, of the microdoses I've had, iboga is the best. And I'd had big iboga flood doses which are incredibly intense. 24 hour, super intense and difficult experiences. Also blissful in certain places, because your mind can become very clear. But that microdose, in particular, has been something that's been a huge ally for me. But really, the other microdoses, I haven't really been able to engage. So, I'm just curious as what you've found, and I can share a bit more about what iboga does for me, but what you found in your microdosing protocols, and which medicine you think has been the most helpful for you, and what you would kind of advise if someone was interested?

JIM: Yeah, I don't talk too much about my microdosing because I'm not that much interested in me, I already know all that. What I'm interested in is the couple of thousand people over the years who I have talked to. And so, you begin to see patterns. I started microdosing with LSD, because LSD felt to me like, that's where I began, that was where my major breakthrough was. Where I was living in Santa Cruz, it was available. So, microdosing seemed to simply improve my day, improve things, make things work better. So, I asked some other psychonauts who would take anything, would they be willing to try as low a dose as microdosing was? And after a certain amount of ridicule, they said, "Sure." And so, people began to say that LSD was very helpful in these very low doses. And then, psilocybin has pretty much a big overlay of the same effects. It's a dose question. A couple of research papers, who said, the major differences between LSD and psilocybin after testing them on 20 psychological variables, and 20 physiological variables is, psilocybin doesn't last as long. Wow, that was a lot of money wasted. So, psilocybin has become kind of the microdosing choice, because it's easier to obtain, and people grow it. And it's legal in the EU, in a certain way through Holland. So, we have more and more and more cases of people using psilocybin, and people are blending psilocybin. So, those are the two of the reports I get, maybe 95-97% are either LSD, or psilocybin. Now, psilocybin is a lot of different mushrooms. Again, the difference in mushrooms is strength, not quality. Now, we will, I'm sure, get to a place like wine tasting. At one level of wine is wine, but another level, it has all these incredible, subtle differences that you get, have to be trained to notice. But right now, people pretty much get the effect appropriate to the dose. So, those are most of what I get. Now, I'm a little wary of, particularly since I'm more visible than most people in microdosing. I don't particularly spend much time on substances that are endangered or rare. And so I'm very careful. Just as we never recommend peyote anymore to anybody, but we're very comfortable recommending San Pedro, which is the identical mescaline. So, I think iboga has remarkable properties that nothing else has. But for your run of the mill microdosers, who are interested in better grades, or not being depressed, or recovering from chronic pain, it handles it for most of them. Now, enlighten me about the special benefits of iboga so the next person I talked to, I can say, well, I've changed my mind, I now see that I should give iboga more space. And the people who I know who've used iboga, have remarkable results and remarkable stories.
AUBREY:: Yeah, so I mean, I think if you look at what's happening with iboga, it's acting on more receptor sites than most of the other medicines, which is usually the 5-HT2A receptor site that's actually being activated and locked in. Iboga is working on multiple different receptor sites. So in a way, it feels like, instead of just moving one valve up, and actually switching through one place, it actually has multiple controls, almost like you're on one of those audio mixer boards. And if you're mixing up the low end, the high end, the bass, the treble, the mid range, it's kind of pushing all things in this kind of balanced way. And the result for me is that there's this increase of vital life force energy that I feel. And again, you have to be mindful, there's a difference between a micro dose and a small dose. A small dose, you start to have some more interesting effects with iboga. And the way that your mind is operating is, you'll know, you'll be very aware constantly in a small dose that you're on a dose of medicine. But if you're on a micro dose, you'll actually often forget that you've taken a microdose and many times I'll have to remind myself, "Man, I had a great day today," and I'm like, I had the Iboga microdose this morning. But what it'll feel like is a general increase in lifeforce energy, that is kind of universally applied so that I might have more mental energy, more physical energy, more spiritual energy. It's not the stimulant type of energy, although Iboga does have some stimulant qualities. Of course, when you have a large dose, your heart rate increases. So, it does have some stimulant qualities, but that's not necessarily what I noticed in the microdose. But I do notice a kind of sustained energy lift. And also, iboga is very long lasting. So, it's definitely something you want to microdose in the morning, not in the afternoon. In the morning, I have a little salt spoon, which is a very small spoon. They used to use more often before we had salt shakers. It's a very tiny spoon. I'll take a little tiny spoon of what they call the wood, and it's like sawdust, and take a little spoon of the wood, and the salt spoon full of wood is my microdose. And then if I want a small dose, then I'll do two spoons of wood. And if I want to journey, well, I just keep spooning wood till I reach--
JIM: That's enough.
AUBREY:: Yeah. Exactly, exactly. So, yeah, it's been a really great ally for me. And I've been blessed that I've had some brothers who've gone down and spent some time with the Bwiti and been gifted some iboga from their village, to be able to just receive that gift. And it lasts a long time. Because again, the spoons are very small. So, one small jar of iboga has lasted me well over a year now, and I'm not even close to finishing it. And it's not an everyday thing. It's probably usually about once a week with it and a day where it's like, alright, today, I really want to have my full power available, and I'll take that spoon. That's the kind of the best way I can describe. Just like everything is more tuned up. My conversation is a little sharper, my physical energy's a little higher, my spiritual energy and access is a little bit more open. So, I found it to be the most universal in the different microdoses.
JIM: Well, that's not greatly different from what people report with either LSD or psilocybin. And just to protect you from further cog tests, 5-2A isn't true.
AUBREY:: Oh, really?
JIM: Yeah. Oh, well.
AUBREY:: All right, great. It's good to know.
JIM: There was research that came out the week before MAPS, that said 5-2A, this is now just for those of you that don't hang out in 5-2A land, it's a neuron, it's a particular neuron, and it has a little opening at the top. And the notion is that LSD, or psilocybin, or ibogaine goes inside and the neuron closes over. That's why it lasts a long time. And all of the multiple events are due to that. And the same neuron is what SSRIs, or antidepressants, affect. And isn't that remarkable? Now, it turns out that part of the effects, mainly, it looks like the visual effects are as described, but the vast majority of effects and this was another part of the brain that picks up the psychedelic a thousand times more strongly than the 5-2A picks up is responsible for the bulk of the effects. Now, this just came out the week before this massive MAPS conference. And I thought to myself, and this is petty and small, and I like it. I never bought 5-2A, because the notion psychedelics had the same effect, or affected the same neuron as antidepressants just made no sense on the surface. It's kind of like eggs and chocolate, both give you energy, therefore they must be the same substance.
AUBREY:: Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
JIM: So, 5-2A is not dead. But it is no longer absurd. Julie wrote a recent book about oxytocin. Yeah, I have to keep clear that it's not Oxycontin, oxytocin. And she said, psychedelics clearly raise your love energy, your love chemicals. That has nothing to do with 5-2A. So, we've seen all along, it didn't make sense. But what I know about my scientist friends is if they have something they think they can measure, they stop. For instance, the notion is that psychedelics affect the brain, of course. Do they affect the liver? Well, let's say you put it in your mouth, does it go to your liver? Of course, it goes to your liver. Would it affect your liver? Why wouldn't it? How about just those neurons? We'll just talk about the 5-2A neurons. Where are they? Well, it turns out, more of them are in your gut than are in your brain. And when you ask a neuroscientist who's just given you the 5-2A routine, "Well, how does it affect the neurons in the gut?" Now I know that there's no research. But it is a kind of moment that says, I've explored everything in France because I went to Marseille. So what I'm enjoying is that the truisms that we all know, and I said 5-2A more than I wished, is simplistic. It's not a, "Aha!" It prevents you from looking farther.
AUBREY:: And that makes beautiful sense. And, also a lesson to remember where my real knowledge base is, which is not in describing the receptor sites. It's describing the experiential states.
JIM: If we go back and replay the iboga tape from what you just said, it hits on all levels, it goes to all places, it opens up all areas. That doesn't sound like...
AUBREY:: Yeah. Absolutely.
JIM: The nice thing about microdosing is there's a certain group of people, most of whom I like, who think microdosing doesn't exist at all. So, I get the pleasure of kind of seeing what people's assumptions are. And the assumption that microdoses can't exist at all, it's because it's too small a dose. Now, let's go back in history, and there's Albert Hoffman, who's synthesizing LSD 25. He inadvertently, we think, had some in an open cut, whatever. And then the next day, he takes the smallest conceivable amount that somebody who has been doing biochemistry and working with human drug things for like 15 years, what's the smallest conceivable amount he could find? 250 micrograms, okay? Which blows his ass off. Okay, so I'm working with microdosing now, which has remarkable effects at 10 micrograms. And what I usually don't share with people is I have a subgroup of people that I've looked at over the years for whom one microgram is sufficient. When I say sufficient, I mean, for instance, someone who has dropped their migraine headaches, 90%, with one microgram. And people say, well, oh, that's too small. So, I wrote Nick Cozzi, a wonderful professor of pharmacology. And I said, how many molecules are in a microgram? And I thought, 8, 25, 150. 1.54 quadrillion.
AUBREY:: Oh, boy.
JIM: And I thought, Well, okay, that means there's enough molecules for every cell of the body to get several 100 molecules if they'd like. So, the notion that it would be 5-2A just is absurd. Don't do that anymore.
AUBREY:: Yeah, understood and fully received. And also, I want to recognize how that understanding may have also shifted my bias, and perception of why iboga might be the preferred microdose choice, because that was explained to me. And I think it was explained to me. I mean, I'd read it several different places. It was a popular theory, of course. But it was explained to me by Hamilton Morris, in that same podcast with iboga, and he used it to scientifically give credence to the idea that iboga was a better microdose choice. And I was like, oh, yeah, more receptor sites. That must mean it's better. So then I've been parroting this. And of course, I was at the MAPS conference, but I didn't check the talks or the research that actually explained this, but it's one of the problems with this materialist reductionist kind of isolated approach is it can create a bias in your mind that you can be unaware of. I was unaware that and I can see it actually now, and I can see that, that probably biased me. It probably biased me to believe that iboga was better.
JIM: What you and Hamilton both said, it affects more receptor sites. You already knew, you already had correctly identified the normal way human beings would think about something. You take something into your body, it goes into the bloodstream, it has access, it eventually goes to every cell, it can go to every cell of the body. And you look at microdosing with Stamets Stack. Stamets Stack is this Paul Stamets' way of understanding it. The best way to use microdosing is psilocybin, Lion's Mane for cognitive improvement, and niacin. Now, what's the niacin for? The niacin is, what Paul says, it opens up the capillaries so that it can be more easily diffused throughout the body. Guess what? Paul's understanding is that mushrooms actually affect the body. Now, Western science has this thing where different specializations get different organs. I'm a psychologist, so I'm allowed to study everything from there up. And I remember a guy who was repairing some damage I had from a car accident, and I had damaged my knee and damaged my ankle, or my heel. He was wonderful with my heel, and my foot. And at one point, I said, "My knee still hurts." He says, "Does it hurt very much?" I said, "No." He said, "Okay." And I realized he was a specialist, and he was a great specialist in, so took me a long time to get somebody to help me with the rest of it. It's a collegey thing, which is the idea that you're helping the brain, or this eye is kind of, we're going to save the species, but not the habitat.
AUBREY:: Yeah, what comes to mind is we've been in this Cartesian Dualism kind of world, of the split between mind, body, and spirit. These are split and distinct. That's radically collapsed, as we understand the placebo effect and we understand how the mind affects the body, the body affects the mind, how spiritual transcendental experiences can actually create radical health changes. I mean, this is part of the medical side of the psychedelic renaissance that we're in. So, we're understanding that this Cartesian split doesn't really make sense. But then there's a subset of that split, which is the specialization of the body, which is trying to split the body up, from also not only the mind and spirit, but split the body up from itself. There's certain isolated parts. And what we're seeing is a more radically holistic viewpoint come into effect that these medicines are affecting mind, body and spirit, and the entire mind, body and spirit. So, they're affecting the self.
JIM: Well, we really have that model. We just kind of sold out to the pharmaceutical companies, which is, the mode is, if you say, "Well, I'm going to have a really healthy lunch." No one says, "Which organ are you going to be helping?" Because we know that food is for the body. Now, there's specialized foods that have certain, usually, negative effects. We know that too much alcohol affects certain systems more than others, and so forth and so on. But we have again, the radical, holistic medical model is actually the oldest boring, everyone understands it, universal, indigenous health model. Which is, no one says, "Well, I have a kidney problem. All I want from ayahuasca is something that will help my kidney." Now, we know what ayahuasca would say to that. Haha. Let's start with the anacondas eating you, and then we'll discuss your kidney.
AUBREY:: Yeah. And then we'll open your heart and we'll see what happens from there.
JIM: Basically, we made a wrong turn. And you were mentioning with mind, body, and then the scientific world because there was too much information, rewards specialization. And the specialists then guard their specialization, because that's both their living and those are valuable. But we begin to lose track of what we're looking at, which is a much larger hole. And so, one of the things that's happened for human beings is we now talk about the biome. Now I remember back when nobody had one. It got digested, and if it went fine, it went fine. If it didn't go fine, that was too bad. You took Tums. Now, we say inside your gut, are thousands of species of bacteria and viruses working out their destiny with each other. And each of them has a different take on not only food but what it's going to tell other parts of your system to favor it. And science doesn't work, particularly medicine and pharmacology don't work well with complicated things. That's why almost all medications, they say, have to be a single substance. That's why the medical profession or the pharmaceutical profession doesn't like plants. They're complicated. How many alkaloids are there in marijuana? Hint.
AUBREY:: Probably hundreds.
JIM: Close to 400. How many alkaloids are there in peyote? Of which mescaline is one, about 40. And when I was looking up the work on this, and I hope that it's better now, four of the other alkaloids had even been looked at. Now, if you follow the cannabis world, and I'm sure you do, every few months, there's another alkaloid or a variation on alkaloid that's been–
AUBREY:: Delta 8.
JIM: So, we're beginning to unwind cannabis. But again, if you go back to what's good for you, most people say, and it's a lovely term, the entourage effect, which means the way nature who's had a few million years to work on it thought was a good model. For instance, we don't know what's the difference between synthetic psilocybin and natural psilocybin as an entourage, okay? Now, you would think that would be the first thing you'd ask, if you're offered a synthetic meat, an Impossible Burger. One of your first questions is, how does this compare to meat? Now, the Impossible Burger people say it tastes like meat and the meat people say, no, it doesn't. It's not hard research to do. And I'm cooperating with people at UCLA. We are working towards the basic test of how do you test the difference between a synthetic and a natural. It's very hard to do it in human beings. Because every experience has its own differences. So, we're giving it to a particular tiny, little roundworm, called C.elegans. And it happens to be the most studied organism on the planet. Because it had its DNA kind of spelled out, it was the first organism. It's fairly simple. So, there's volumes, there's a whole journal just to, I'm sure it's not called the worm, but it's about studies done on C.elegans. Well, C.elegans has one marvelous trade if you're trying to find out what would be better? Is it has a 30-day lifecycle? So, one of the things we're doing is, we're simply taking these little roundworms, and we're feeding them whatever they eat, purina worm chow. One has Purina worm chow, and the other has Purina worm chow, and natural psilocybin, synthetic psilocybin and nothing. And one of the easy things is, we just check how long they live. And it turns out, once we got into this, the worm people at UCLA who are wonderful, said, “oh, there's all kinds of other things we can study, because we've learned how to study so many things about the worm.” So I can only tell you partially way through the study, worms, this will surprise no one, they were trying to figure out what's the right dose level for a roundworm, okay? You won't find it on Google. So, they had to give different levels. And so, they now have one where they think it's pretty much what a microdose would be. And it turns out that if you have these roundworms with and without just psilocybin, these move more. Now, I don't know what they do. They don't read more, they don't do more social media. But we're trying to get down to some very, very simple science, but it's about the whole thing. Now, if synthetic psilocybin is different than natural entourage, all of the research that's been going on now for about 12-15 years, has to be relooked at.
AUBREY:: Yeah, included and evolved.
JIM: And we don't know which way it'll go. It doesn't matter which way it goes. The chances of them being identical are very small.
AUBREY:: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
JIM: So, while I say nasty things about a lot of science, if you know how to use it, it's a wonderful tool. If you use it to say, well, we measured five CA, we're done. That's not using the tool as well as it can be used.
AUBREY:: Yeah, I don't know, I forget the person who said the quote, when science becomes the answer, instead of the process by which you get to the answer, then you have a problem. And another thing to really drive this home is, if anybody had experience with coca leaf, whether you go to Peru and you're in in Machu Picchu, and they give you that coca leaf tea as soon as you land or if you have mambe which they have in Colombia, which is like matcha powder of the whole coca leaf. It is radically different than cocaine, and cocaine is not a drug that I have any interest in whatsoever. I've experimented with it, and it just does not work with my system. It is not a pleasant experience for me. But mambe or coca tea, I love it. It's fantastic. And it's a radically different experience because cocaine is just one isolated alkaloid within this entire complex, biological, miraculous medicine healing plant.
JIM: Now, see, one of the fun things is LSD is just itself. However, Morning Glory seeds, certain species, have LSA, lysergic acid amide, not diethylamide , which is an active psychedelic. It's 100th as strong as LSD, which still makes it pretty strong. And it exists in certain Morning Glory seeds, which are named, and I don't know, I just wonder why they're named these two species. The popular names are Pearly Gates, and Heavenly Blue. Those two species, and don't rush off to your Burpee Seeds Center, and get any, because on the packet, it still may say, they've put poison on them. Because at some point, during the 60s, when we discovered this, the seed companies got hysterical and poisoned those two.
AUBREY:: Wow.
JIM: Organic seeds if you grow your own flowers. And I once was doing a research project, which was my way of doing research, which is, I wonder what psychedelics I can buy on Amazon. Since psychedelics are Scheduled One. And so one of them, I thought would be, well how about Morning Glory seeds? So, there were two companies that sold Morning Glory seeds, usually by like quarter pound, half pound, a pound, which is hundreds and hundreds of seeds. And so I looked at Amazon, gives you this wonderful thing called the reviews. And so, one set of reviews said, "I planted along the back fence, and it's so beautiful." "I use it between my cornfields, and something else. And it just made it wonderful." "My wife really enjoys these planted by the door." Okay, that's one set of reviews. The other set of reviews said, "Man, this stuff is terrific.” There's a lot of information out there that the scientific community eventually gets around to, because we the citizen scientists do something often enough, so that there's interest. For instance, you're basically very visible. And Hamilton's more visible. And both of you are now saying of the microdosing world, Iboga is superior. Now, in the research world, there's nothing. But your saying it will change the dynamic, and probably someone who is also a psychonaut and postdoc in organic chemistry will say, why don't we do a research study comparing iboga to such and such? And we'll use mice because that won't frighten anybody. And science begins to catch up with what we've experienced. And that's how science is wonderful, because it does clear away a lot of things that are irrelevant.
AUBREY:: Yeah. Beautiful, beautiful. Well, thank you so much for your time here. It's been such an honor, and I just want to close with just any kind of message that you have to offer. Ideally, a message of hope for people who are in a state where they're feeling hopeless, and they're feeling the world's all coming to shit, and in their own life, they're experiencing a lot of challenges. Just perhaps any message of hope that you have to offer.
JIM: Dalai Lama was asked about how does he feels about different religious traditions. And he said, all religious traditions have somewhere within them, the idea that more kindness is beneficial. Now, what we know from the biological world is species that cooperate do a lot better than species that destroy. And so, it's not optimistic or pessimistic because you're going to do something. And making the world a little better place may have no effect at all, except for you and the people that you help. That's probably a good start.
AUBREY:: Amen. Amen.
JIM: Amen.
AUBREY:: Jim, again, thanks so much. This was wonderful, an absolute joy, a real gem. I'm just so grateful that you took the time to have this conversation, and this connection has been established. Any way I can be of service to any of your research and helping spread the word, or helping share anything, just count me in as an ally.
JIM: Well, I should warn you, I am giving up my place of being not identified with any commercial interests, which is, I've just agreed with a wonderful publisher called St. Martin's to do a book. Working title is "What You Need to Know About Microdosing". So I'll get back to you when I'm commercial.
AUBREY:: Amazing. Amazing. That sounds great. And thanks, everybody, for tuning in. So much love, and we'll see you next week.