Psychedelic Confessions Daniel Pinchbeck Scaled 1

14: Psychedelic Confessions: Daniel Pinchbeck

Daniel Pinchbeck first started writing Breaking Open The Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism in 1998, now nearly 25 years later, psychedelics are everywhere; from Wall Street to healing, and social circles. Psychedelics are now being recognized in mainstream media and society for wellness and improving life. 

Here Giancarlo and Daniel continue our Psychedelic Confessions series, discussing Daniel’s Personal experiences of the below compounds:

Mushrooms
Ayahuasca
N, N-DMT
5-MeO-DMT
Ketamine
LSD
Peyote
San Pedro
Mescaline
MDMA
2C-B
Iboga

Listen to the full episode to learn about Daniel’s out-of-body experiences so beyond language, yoga for the psyche, the new age religion of the self, and his fears of the corporatization of psychedelics.

Look out for more in this special series coming very soon.

Go to the full transcript here

Full Transcript

Giancarlo: Hello, hi, welcome to the third episode of The Psychedelic Confessions. Today, we have Daniel Pinchbeck, who’s not only an expert and psychonaut, but an intellectual, who contributed, I think, to the revolution and the renaissance of this compound. From the glory of the 60s, he started writing this book, Breaking Open The Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism in ’98. And now, 24 years later, psychedelics are everywhere. They’re in Wall Street, whether it’s a billion-dollar company, for medical purposes. They are in social circles for healing. And they are into mainstream media and society for just wellness and improving your life. We want to use the format of the psychedelic confession, which we use with Ethan Nadelmann, Alejandro Lozano. So, we’re going to go one by one and we’re going to ask Daniel, his personal experience. 

As I usually say, these are very complicated substances and can be misused. There can be very adverse side effects if you don’t do it properly with the right setup with the right guide. This is not an encouragement to use this compound. It is just an educational tool to hear from people that have been experimenting with the substance for many years in a mindful and intelligent way to learn from them. Okay, welcome, Daniel.

Daniel: Hey, Giancarlo, how’s it going?

Giancarlo: Okay, so, we’re going to jump straight in. I have 12 substances here and we’re going to go one by one. We’re going to take maybe five minutes each and then let’s see what comes to mind for you. What do you think about the compound, what’s your relationship with this medicine, did it help you in some way in your life? Okay, first one, mushroom. 

Daniel: Yeah, mushrooms, I guess, were the first psychedelic that I took back in college. And already, that was very amazing. As I wrote about in Breaking Open The Head, it was deconditioning, seeing the world from a totally different perspective, and becoming super aware of nature, and being aware that the reality that humans had created was artificial, and that we’d built all these structures, and our thinking, and our architecture, that we’re actually not very alive, and actually suppressed people’s vitality and lifeforce. 

Then, I really didn’t take psychedelics for years. After college, when I was working in magazines in my late 20s, I was in a spiritual crisis. The culture I was in was very materialistic and nihilistic, and then mushrooms were once again the first thing that took. I’d only taken mushrooms and LSD. And yeah, once again, that was an incredible experience. I loved how you would remember everything so clearly from the experiences and how lucid it was and how archetypal everything became. Every encounter became archetypal spectacle or something from– Then obviously, there’s also the closed eye aspects of the geometries, where there were sometimes even figures or entities. I guess, yeah, the geometry aspect of it, like the mandala aspect, was also very surprising to me. It actually led me in my– When I started re-exploring, I got very interested in Tibetan Buddhism, which had a similar visual iconography that actually ultimately led me to go to Nepal and try to visit some of the Tibetan Buddhist centers and Dharamsala, because it seemed there was some intrinsic relationship. It didn’t feel like your brain would naturally just create those patterns at that level of visual organization, felt they were almost like an imprint coming from another realm or something like that.

Giancarlo: Interesting. Do you think that was a low medium or high dose, you think?

Daniel: Medium, I don’t know if I’ve ever done a massive heroic dose with mushrooms.

Giancarlo: I see. Okay, great. What about ayahuasca?

Daniel: Ayahuasca, I had a very long relationship with. I’d taken a break over the last few years from psychedelics. Actually, I haven’t even really been thinking about those experiences so much, but I ayahuasca, when I got back into exploring psychedelics in my late 20s with friends, it was not really known in the late 90s. A friend told me about ayahuasca. I did a ceremony in a downtown apartment with some shamans in California. Obviously, the taste was very strange. You are warned that you might vomit or they had us wear diapers in case we shat our pants or whatever. But there wasn’t very much that time just a few short visions, but even that was enough. You’d have a sense of being very interesting. 

Yeah, it’s hard for me to get– because there was a 20-year investigation, where I went to Ecuador with the Secoya. I made ayahuasca with my friends, different analogues in my own apartment. I worked with the Santo Daime. Worked with a number of other types of shamans like Peruvian and Colombian. So, it’s really a long relationship. But for me, ayahuasca, I guess, in a way introduced me to the world of the spiritual, or the occult, or the supernatural. It revealed that there are other realities behind this one or within this one. Whole worlds, but it got to be– I think Ayahuasca, most of all inspired me to get interested in Rudolf Steiner’s ideas and experiences would not just be in the ceremonies, will also carry over into one’s life.

 

I don’t know about the healing aspects. I know that’s been very much like the focus of the contemporary psychedelic movement. When I was starting it, there wasn’t such a big thing around the therapeutic aspect. I never really have approached them so therapeutically. In fact, one reason I think I backed away from them is, I discovered that maybe in some ways, they weren’t actually doing great things for me on a psychological level. Maybe it was just the way that I was taking them or where I was in my own development. I’m giving myself self a couple of years to clear out before seeing to see what’s up again. But ayahuasca, it’s so many things. Unlike other substances, which have like a reliable, like, “This is what you’re going to get,” it’s a huge variety. You could have incredibly terrifying experiences. I remember once comforting you in a ceremony in Costa Rica, where you were like, “These devils, these demons.” They had told you just to try to listen to your own breathing and breathe through it.

Giancarlo: Yeah. You told me disidentify from it. 

Daniel: Disidentify. Yeah. Maybe that’s a key thing. We realized that we have an emotional body and it’s even connected to our breathing. Our heartbeat, if we could actually just calm down our nervous system that often the horrible images or feelings can turn into beautiful ones. Yeah, it’s been a while. With ayahuasca, often, you have a feeling like you’re dying in the beginning or entering into the — And then, this beautiful period, where you feel magnificent and everything is so attuned. Your senses are so attuned, every noise has this incredible significance, every sound, the music of the shamans or the tones that they say. Then, you see all these visions and they can be– 

Sometimes, if I was reading about string theory, I would bring that into the ceremony and then I would have visions of molecules and subquantum particles or ideas from philosophy or whatever. And then sometimes, you would have a sense of heaviness. As it went on, maybe you feel more going towards the bad, your negative emotions or how terrible everything is, how everything’s decaying. Then, that’s connected to physical nausea. Then, you have a purge, where in the releasing, you feel you’re releasing not just physical toxins, but also psychological toxins or things that are cleaned. The last time I really did it seriously was with a very controversial shaman in Peru, Guillermo. I think we did six ceremonies in nine days or something. So, it was very intense, which is the way they like to do it, in the Shipibo tradition. And that really did feel like a lot of healing, and he told me he was pulling stuff off of me and so on. The second to last ceremony, I had this whole experience of dancing with the ayahuasca being as a woman, who was laughing, but also told me that we are done with our work for the time being. That was the second last ceremony. That morning when we were done, Guillermo turned to me and said, “Yeah, we finished our work last night.” It was amazing, because that’s what I’ve been told in the journey. That even though there was one more ceremony, nothing really happened in that ceremony. 

There were some really difficult times. There was at least one ceremony where I felt my psyche was being torn to shreds. There were hooks in my consciousness that were pulling in all directions and it felt like– And apparently, the shaman and his assistant were also having the same experience. We were just holding on for dear life and that was one of the more intense negative experiences. But even that one, afterwards, it almost felt like yoga for the psyche. I felt my brain had been stretched or my consciousness had been stretched in ways that were interesting or even positive.

Giancarlo: Amazing, amazing. You use the word ‘archetypal’ for mushroom and for ayahuasca, you more used the term ‘otherworldly’ or ‘interdimensional being’.

Daniel: There is a sense that– Terence McKenna said that where indigenous cultures found ayahuasca, they stopped using the mushrooms. There’s this sense that somehow ayahuasca is like a truer relationship…

Giancarlo: In the Amazon? 

Daniel: Yeah. It’s somehow a deeper connection to something more profound. I do feel that, yeah, mushrooms are a little bit lighter in a way. Ayahuasca, maybe it’s a deeper connection to the cosmic source or something.

Giancarlo: Amazing. Now, we’re going to some specific, N, N-DMT. This is the compound found in, one of the compounds found in the ayahuasca, the shakuna ….

Daniel: No. It’s not in the shakuna, it’s in the psychotria viridis. 

Giancarlo: Awesome.

Daniel: Ayahuasca is generally two plants put together. One of them is ayahuasca vine that doesn’t contain DMT. It contains MAO inhibitors, harmala and so on. Then the other plant, psychotria viridis contains a mixture of N,N-DMT and 5-MeO-DMT. Other plants also contain those types of DMT. Like phalaris grass, it’s just 5-MeO-DMT. The DMT is also found, on other types of DMT. 5-MeO-DMT is found in the toad secretion of the Bufo toad. But the 5-MeO and N,N-DMT are very distinct.

Giancarlo: Yeah. Let’s talk about the N,N-DMT first. 

Daniel: Yeah, it’s fun to contrast them. N,N-DMT is very much like if you smoke it, there’s a threshold where you have to push through to break through and then you can have a complete out-of-body experience, where basically you smoke and maybe you feel you’re rushing through a tunnel that’s covered in symbols, or geometries, or something. There’s a little disjunctive break, where you almost forget that you exist or who you are. And then, you find yourself in another reality. Many, many people have tried to describe this other reality, but it’s extremely difficult to bring it back into language. It’s foolish to try. It’s like, I would say, hyperdimensional or hyperreal, but it feels a more advanced state of being in consciousness. Far more advanced that maybe isn’t substantive and physical in the same way– Substantive but not physical the same way. 

I got very interested in the string theory idea of multiple dimensions, but these other dimensions that “higher dimensions” are actually microscopic. They’re subquantum dimensions that are twisted within the quantum realm. I feel maybe with N,N-DMT, you’re spiraling into one of these subquantum dimensions. There feels like there are beings there or sentience, or consciousness dispersed and separate among different beings and there’s actually somehow only one being of which you are part of in some way. You often have this feeling of being part of this council chamber or being taken in front of this panel of judges or something. That’s even just stupid language. I don’t know. But it’s so beyond. Yeah, even trying to talk about it, I’m aware that it’s so beyond language that it’s pointless.

Giancarlo: Machine elves.

Daniel: I really don’t like that. You have to be really careful, because what we’ve learned with psychedelics, one of my big problems with the contemporary psychedelic movement and its direction is that language is an extremely powerful tool that even shapes the experiences people will have retroactively, because they’ll form it into a category of language that’s been preset for them. That’s why I’m actually suspicious of a lot of the healing thing around psychedelics. Because that’s a new category that a modern therapeutic culture is creating for psychedelics to try to domesticate them or fit them into our prevailing paradigms of mental health and so on. It’s not really clear that that’s what it was about for indigenous cultures. If we really were to get into it, ayahuasca or DMT was also something that could heal, but it was also power, or vision, or knowledge. It wasn’t just about getting healthier psychologically. 

The machine elves, yes, I’ve had elf experiences, but I think that language has become too much of its own cliche or stereotype but I don’t really think that that’s the most from– It’s also hard to say, because what I feel with DMT is that, it’s almost like people have different levels that they go to maybe according to their karma, or their soul group, or something. I can feel when people go to the same situation that I entered into by their reaction of awe, terror, curiosity, fear, and so on. But yeah, it feels like other people go to different levels in the extradimensional realms or something like that.

Giancarlo: Yeah, that’s very interesting. Now, if I may, I’m passionate about psychedelic psychotherapy. I think people forget that it’s not the psychedelics. It’s the psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, it’s like a tool. It is like giving a surgeon a new type of. It’s not the medicine, it’s how the therapies– then we’ll use this more available subconscious material, because the

Daniel: My problem, we have this new age religion of the self. Indigenous cultures, when they used psychedelics or visionary plants in initiatory practices, the point was partially to strengthen the collective and to place the adolescent or the initiatory candidate into the tribal structure and mythology and so on. Because we’re living in this secular post-religious therapy context, with psychedelics, it always seems to just come back to the self. Healing the self. My concern with the corporatization of psychedelics is that that’s just going to become more and more prevalent, like the more one-dimensional perspective on it.

Giancarlo: Yeah. But I told the New Age was not the culture of the self. That was the neoliberal capitalism. The New Age was the culture of the we.

Daniel: No, I totally disagree with you. 

Giancarlo: [laughs] 

Daniel: Temporary New Age spiritual culture is the exact corollary of the neoliberal capitalist system.

Giancarlo: I understand. But let’s not generalize, because there are deep pockets of consciousness of– okay, let’s call it, Post Age then.

[laughter] 

Daniel: I like to call it.

Giancarlo: To differentiate. There are more and more therapists and evolutionary coaching, integrating psychedelic in the practice on a group level understanding that– Even Gabor Maté is now doing his compassion inquiry on a group level. I mean, the power…

Daniel: By its nature, it’s very elitist. One reason I haven’t explored it is because I can’t afford it. It’s 5,000 bucks or 3,000 bucks. It’s enlightenment if you can afford it. 

Giancarlo: What’s this process?

Daniel: Probably, Gabor Maté. If you want to go to the Amazon, all these people or whatever, it’s become very elitist. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. But that’s why–

Daniel: Its not filtering down into the ghettos of Detroit or even the ghettos of New York.

Giancarlo: Anyway, I think this is the Psychedelic Confessions. We’re going to stay on the compounds, but I want to talk more about that next time. You were saying that N,N-DMT is interesting to contrast with the 5-MeO-DMT. So, why don’t you do that?

Daniel: Yeah., 5-MeO-DMT, my sense is that, phenomenologically, it’s the direct experience of what Buddhism, Vedanta talks about as nirvana or the void. 

Giancarlo: Nirvana.

Daniel: It’s dissolution of ego identity into this ultimate state of bliss. The best visual representation is a crystalline mandala like white light going off in all directions forever, which intriguingly sometimes, looks a little bit like Islamic patterning. I think they were beaming into something of the sublime or consciousness. In fact, there’s even the possibility that the origin of Islam, there was some direct experience of a compound with 5-MeO like acacia or something. Yeah, there’s that dissolution. While you’re in the heart of the experience, there’s no you and yet, there is no experience– or yet there’s experience, and there’s the experiences of this never-ending bliss. But then when you come back re-coagulate as yourself, it can be quite jarring and terrifying for some people. There’s a split between men and women that women maybe because they’re surrendering, or love, or something comes more naturally to them. 

Giancarlo: Blessed in their mind. 

Daniel: Yeah, exactly. They tend to have a very positive relation to it. Men sometimes really struggle with it, because everything that you’re invested in as your ego, or your accomplishments, or whatever are just annihilated. Yeah, the last time I took that was maybe five years ago, I did it once a little bit after that but partly because that experience was– One of the issues with psychedelics, I find if you take them seriously is that, after you have a profound experience, you have to use a lot of your psychic processing power almost on a daily basis to try to be like, “Okay, what did that mean? How do I integrate that into my ongoing experience of being a self and this culture or whatever?” Ultimately, what helped me with 5-MeO-DMT was this YouTube video, The 10 Dimensions of Space Time Explained, and they talked about this being the fourth dimension, the fifth, sixth, seventh dimension. Other dimensions, we move through space and time. We move through time as we move through space, then an ultimate dimension, which is the super strings that are vibrating like a loom that are creating all the other dimensions are built on the subquantum layer of super strings that are just vibrating in these patterns. 

I think that when you take the 5-MeO-DMT, you’re brought back to that subquantum layer of these flimmering super strings that everything else got built on top of that. I don’t know if somehow that understanding of it was easier for me to assimilate than the Buddhist understanding, because yeah, maybe we always have– in terms of our karmic evolutionary trajectory, I tend to believe in reincarnation and all that stuff, there’s always the possibility to dissolve back into the nirvana or the void, which is what Buddhism promotes like you want to be a non-returner or whatever. But you don’t necessarily have to do that and maybe there’s other karmic destiny of being a builder on all these dimensional levels or something like that.

Giancarlo: Wow, fascinating. But so, who was talking about the 10-dimensional? Matias? 

Daniel: It’s a little video on YouTube called The 10 Dimensions of Space Time Explained. 

Giancarlo: Is Matias De Stefano? No.

Daniel: No, I don’t think so. It might be. I’m not sure.

Giancarlo: Anyway, I think is Matias De Stefano and he has a nice interesting conversation with Aubrey Marcus about how we are in the third dimension, but some people already are in the fourth dimension, and what you’ve been calling for many years. These are the tipping point in consciousness, this possibility of mass awakening. It’s explained through the prism of the different dimension. I think it’s quite interesting. I didn’t want to share too much on mushrooms and ayahuasca, because I’ve done on the other podcast. I don’t want to repeat myself.

Daniel: Yeah.

Giancarlo: But I want to say for the 5-MeO, it took for me away the fear of death completely. For me, it was the closest thing to the angelic experience. It was heaven. It was unbounded love, unbounded compassion. I couldn’t speak for several hours after that. It was really profound.

Daniel: Yeah. It’s an incredible medicine.

Giancarlo: Incredible medicine. Okay, so, now, next on our list is ketamine.

Daniel: Yeah, ketamine is probably the pys of the only one that I’m still doing a bit right now with my girlfriend. We enjoy it for our just intimate reality. I haven’t done a massive dose. I have an injection like once or whatever, but I feel a little bit ketamine lightweight, because I ran into a friend this weekend, who’s been doing ketamine therapy with intravenous, and she was saying that when you do it that way, you completely lose any sense of your body that actually you’ll feel at first, you died. You even forget who you are.

Giancarlo: This is the legal protocol?

Daniel: Yeah, intravenous.

Giancarlo: Intravenous. Yeah. But it’s not the legal dose that you go…

Daniel: Yeah. It’s much more. I didn’t realize it was– I’ve been in K-holes.

Giancarlo: Do you remember, you had a in my house?

Daniel: Yeah. That was a disaster. I was on alcohol too. But that was a disaster.

Giancarlo: Yeah, that’s important to realize that you can’t touch alcohol with it.

Daniel: Well, you can, but it’s just a mess.

Giancarlo: Okay. For our listeners, most of the people will know that, but again, there is different application of this compound. Just to simplify, there is the mystical aspect, where you really want to transcend, and it’s a mystical experience and you want to touch different dimensions or heaven. There is a more therapeutic either healing or improving your creativity. But then, there is another application, which the word ‘recreational’ sounds, for Puritan America, it sounds very bad, but we call it maybe celebratory. A celebratory approach, which can be enhancing intimacy, enhancing music, enhancing food. So, that also is welcome. Because you were saying you used this compound maybe to connect a little bit deeper with your girlfriend or in a different way. So, that also is allowed. That’s what I want to do–

Daniel: Yeah. In my reality, that’s totally allowed. I don’t…

Giancarlo: It should be encouraged.

Daniel: What’s that?  

Giancarlo: It should be encouraged. 

Daniel: Well, it’s just an individual choice. Yeah. We have a strangely puritanical perspective. I remember Terence McKenna, again, everyone used to be annoyed– All the Buddhists, who meditated for years were annoyed with psychedelics. They’re like, “Oh, that’s just a shortcut.” Terence McKenna was like, “Yeah, shortcuts are great. If you’re trying to get to a place and there’s a really long way around, you take a shortcut, you’re going to take the shortcut.” Yeah, life is short, it can be gone at any moment. I think we have a complete right. Legit as long as you are not harming anybody to have celebratory or hedonic experiences of pleasure and communion. 

I think sometimes that the distinction that’s made between the hedonic and the ceremonial or therapeutic, it can be a little bit heavy-handed. But I’ve had experiences, where I’ve done compounds with friends that are completely recreational or hedonic way. And yet, it becomes extremely profound. Friends start talking about their mother’s death and what it was like to be at her bedside, stuff they would never normally talk about but the compound allows them to. That’s just welcome. Yeah, ketamine has different effects at different dosages. 

One thing that’s interesting is. you definitely feel almost like a mind meld with somebody. You take it with one person, almost feel you’re inside the other person’s mind, like finish their thoughts or finish their sentences, finish their puns. There’s really an alien feeling to it, and you feel the geometry is suddenly shifted both of space and time. It feels at higher doses, I remember that you feel your whole body is this giant amoeba spaceship that you’re operating from a great distance from this tiny little place. You’re a little person holding the levers in this tiny little place inside of your head somewhere.

Giancarlo: So, interesting. Yeah, for me, I never really make friend with a compound. I feel that the going up is pleasant, but then the coming down is too disorienting for me for some reason. But apparently, it’s legal in a clinical setting. You can go downtown New York and Wall Street as a center, and they give you, I don’t know, I think three or five injections, and it’s very effective for depression. Supposedly from the data we have, it helps with depression for three, five years and then you have to do it again. With mushroom, you have the more permanent healing from depressive state, especially from prescription-resistant depression. But yeah, that’s very interesting.

The next one is LSD. That’s a big one.

Daniel: That’s a big one. I’ve had some of my most incredible experiences in LSD, but also some of my most terrible experiences, and I really had to curtail LSD, because I feel that that was having the worst effect on my psychology.

Giancarlo: I just realized we had so many experiences of psychedelics together.

Daniel: Yeah. I love like– When I flashed back on a memory, I had an older friend, Alan Badina. We were at Burning Man together, and we took LSD, and it was his first time, actually. We both were having the sense of wonderment, childlike enthusiasm, waving these flags around the desert and stuff like that. Yeah, LSD may be more than any of the other substances is completely a psychic amplifier. It’s amoral in a way. It can really take you in any direction. That’s why it’s really dangerous, I think. Because if you’ve got shadows, it’ll amplify those shadows. I don’t know. Yeah, so many incredible experiences. 

There’s the incredible thinking potential with LSD, like the concepts that arise and how you see your life. There is a healing I mentioned that can be part of that. There’s playfulness, the incredibly weird internal visuals that could go on for hours and hours. We can see wallpapers of perfectly rendered black cats, or alien orgies, or who knows what. Illustrations, but fully rendered. You can even at higher doses, see them out in the external world. And then there’s also patterns, like you’re seeing faces, seeing things in clouds. Apparently, somebody was saying that there’s a neocortical layer that has a relationship to face recognition and that LSD particularly somehow amplifies that layer of neural activity or something. So, that’s why you see faces and every pattern feels just anthropomorphized. There’s everything feels very anthropomorphized. What else? It’s been a while.

Giancarlo: How do you explain that this lack of morality compared to an ayahuasca, where you feel the loving God Mother?

Daniel: Well, ayahuasca, as I said, it was used for sorcery. The shamans in the Amazon would use it to kill people on the astral plane. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. So, it’s just a cultural context.

Daniel: Well, I feel that if LSD is connected to– It feels like ayahuasca, there’s some type of energy or entity, some kind of being. People often talk about it like a feminine being. Just as with peyote, there’s a sense of a moral structure that’s somehow connected to peyote. I would say that one is even much more moral in a way than ayahuasca. Iboga also has that sense of like there’s a moral structure that’s almost like some sentience or being that’s underlying it. I don’t think LSD has that. It may because it’s a modern creation, was just discovered in the 1940s. Obviously, its discovery was super intriguing. Albert Hofmann was a chemist in Basel, Switzerland, which was the medieval center for alchemy. He’d been synthesizing– what was it? It was a– shit, I used to know this, compound that– Oh, ergot, right, ergot fungus that midwives had been using for many centuries to induce muscle contraction in pregnancy, but also ergot would sometimes infect the bread of a town and everybody in the town would go crazy for a few days. 

Sandoz was trying to figure out if there were other types of relationships with that molecule that would have an effect just on muscle tissue they can use for many medical purposes. He did a whole series, LSD-25 was the 25th of a series of syntheses and it didn’t have any effect on muscle tissues. So, they shelved it. And then five years later, in the middle of Nazi-Europe, which was the only neutral place in Europe, he began to have apparently dreams of this LSD-25 compound and had never remade a compound that wasn’t effective, but felt compelled to remake this compound, and then somehow accidentally got it on his skin and had the first LSD trip. So, it’s a very magical story that’s very hard to understand in terms of a purely rational, materialistic worldview. It feels like a vision from the higher realms or something. 

There’s interesting relationship between ergot and the kabbalah, apparently. Jewish mysticism, that being the final solution, the Holocaust. It feels there was a whole archetypal trauma underlying. I guess, now, we’re beginning to feel we’re in the next stage of that. We’re having this Second World War reverberation right now with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the same Holocaust tactics being used today. Like mobile crematoriums, they may have used to annihilate the civilian population who were killed. This is unbelievable that we’re reliving this historical trauma again.

Anyway, so, LSD is extremely complex. Obviously very important in terms of the effect that it had on the counterculture of the 60s, and I would say, it was probably, of all the compounds, it feels very much embedded in the DNA of Burning Man as a temporary autonomous zone or liberated potentiality for the future and so on. But it also, as I said, has this amorality and has to be treated very delicately.

Giancarlo: Yeah. You read that book, Christopher Bache, this professor of theology that for, I don’t know, how many years, for 10, 15 years taking big those 500 mg every three times a year or something. He ended up on some alternate dimension, where the humans have transformed into some superhuman that basically allow peace on this planet.

Daniel: No, I never read the whole book. That’s where he ends up?

Giancarlo: That’s what he was saying at the Tyringham Conference. 

Daniel: Okay.

Giancarlo: Remember, he was crying, he was optimistic about the fate of humanity. 

Daniel: I know that he also had visions of the near future that there was going to be a breakdown, like civilization breaking apart and then reforming like a mycelial network again. But yeah, that’s all very fascinating to me.

Giancarlo: Incredible. That’s particularly tricky because there is no cultural container for LSD. It’s very rare that people will offer you ayahuasca without a proper ceremony, but it’s very common. People take LSD in the wrong places in concert and so, I would recommend to treat that as the one of the sacred plants and do it with a structure, with a guide with someone experienced, etc. San Pedro.

Daniel: San Pedro is a cactus that contains mescaline. That also comes from Peru, but it grows really well and fast in a lot of regions, which is great.

Giancarlo: Including cities like in Los Angeles.

Daniel: Yeah. So, peyote, apparently, it’s in danger of being over-harvested. It takes three years for a peyote button to grow to maturity or maybe it’s more than that. But anyway, San Pedro was a great alternative for mescaline. And San Pedro, yeah, very profound. It can be used recreationally, hedonistic hypnotically on a lower dose. It gives you a lot of energy, it’s empathic like MDMA, heart opening. Then at higher doses, it has more of the mescaline-like visionary qualities with patterning or sense of connection to other sources or whatever. But it has a very benevolent, very positive affect to it, generally. Have you heard of anything bad happening on San Pedro? 

Giancarlo: Yeah. Again, that’s another compound I don’t know very well. I’ve tried for the first time with a great teacher, in Ibiza. It was liquid. We had to drink a lot, more than a liter. And then, it was really disorienting for me. I couldn’t really figure it out. I felt a mixture of an LSD bad trip a little bit, some sort of grotesque, or metallic, difficult to explain, but everybody tells me that it takes some time to make friends with San Pedro. 

Daniel: Interesting. Yeah, generally, I’ve only had really great experiences with it. 

Giancarlo: Yeah, they have.  

Daniel: Yeah, peyote does. It is similar from San Pedro. It’s also mescaline containing cactus. I’ve sat in several kinds of ceremonies, Native American church sermons with a teepee. I never was really able to eat enough for the peyote to go super far. Sometimes, they also have peyote tea. I did it also in Tulum with a Huichol shaman outside all night. That was very nice. But yeah, the ceremonial aspects of fire, the precision of the ceremonies around it is very beautiful. It’s very much prayer-oriented and it’s really about– Oh, peyote is very much about the will. If ayahuasca is about the spirit or more etheric, peyote is really about strengthening the will, and facing the fire, sitting up straight for the whole night, not collapsing when you want to collapse or whatever. 

Giancarlo: More mescaline? 

Daniel: More mescaline. Yeah, and it also has a very strong, as I said, moral, benevolent feeling to it generally.

Giancarlo: Mm-hmm. Interesting. Yeah, also my personal experience with peyote has been not very good actually. I’m just realizing that I have some more to do. It brings you the nausea of the ayahuasca, but without being able to get well. For me, it has always been not very lightning. Pure mescaline.

Daniel: Pure mescaline is one of the most incredible psychedelics. It’s unfortunate that it’s not more widely available. It’s just in some ways similar to LSD, it lasts a little bit less long. Maybe five, six hours. But it’s just very deep, visionary experience. Colors are incredibly deep. I don’t know. LSD is very light and shimmery in a way, and very mental. Mescaline is more embodied, more lush. I don’t know. It’s just a very beautiful and profound psychedelic.

Giancarlo: That was what started Sasha Shulgin in his research. 

Daniel: Oh, that was. That’s also what Aldous Huxley wrote about the doors of perception.

Giancarlo: Yeah.

Daniel: Not LSD.

Giancarlo: But so, pure mescaline, something that you extract from one of these plants or is synthetized artificial in the lab?

Daniel: I think you can do either one, but I’m not a chemist. So, it’s not my area of expertise. But yeah, I’m sure you can synthesize it from precursor chemicals, or you can extract it from San Pedro.

Giancarlo: Okay. We have three more to go. 2C-B, that’s an interesting one.

Daniel: 2C-B is one of the compounds invented by Sasha Shulgin, you just mentioned. Shulgin, if people don’t know, he is this incredible psychedelic chemist. I wrote about him, interviewed him several times. Shouldn’t we post that interview with him that we did for him in 2012? That didn’t make it into

Giancarlo: I think he’s in the extra on the 2012 Time for Change

Daniel: I’ll check it out.

Giancarlo: Yeah. On the mangu.tv website, there is the full pack, it’s called special package or something and there is

Daniel: Yeah, I really loved him when I met him. No, I met him earlier. No, I interviewed him for Breaking Open the Head back in like 2000 or something. He is very much like a wizard with his white beard. Yeah, he just had a psychedelic experience in the early 60s, and he decided that he would explore the whole realm, and he ended up creating whole new sets of compounds, like the 2C family, 2C-I, 2C-T-7, 2C-B, 5-MeO-DPT, hundreds of compounds. 

What was really cool about Shulgin is he would do research with all his friends, they would take the compounds every week, they would slowly increase the dosage that he wrote books, where he took all the formula, how to make the compounds, all the experiences that all of his friends had with them, and publish them in the public domain. That meant that none of those could ever be patented or controlled. In fact, I was reading with one of the big psychedelic companies. The CEO was angry at Shulgin, because Shulgin made it impossible for them to patent any of these hundreds of compounds. In fact, I think this company was using AI to map out all of the remaining psychedelic compounds. 

Giancarlo: Wow.

Daniel: They could find something they could patent that they have copyright over. But one of his most successful discoveries was 2C-B. Generally, synthetic psychedelics are much more dose sensitive than the natural ones. 2C-B definitely has different effects at different dosages. But in general, for me, it has a sense of super clarity, laser-like clarity. Like light becomes very crystalline, ideas become very crystalline. I’ve heard that it may not be good to do too much of it. Apparently, the bromine in the 2C-B it is a very active molecule and it might interfere with your neurons or something like that. But to do it a few times, it’s very interesting. It’s also very interesting mix with MDMA. So, then you get the empathic heart opening of the MDMA, but you get the precision of the 2C-B.

Giancarlo: Yeah. I haven’t done it in a long time, but I feel that’s a great combination of MDMA and LSD feeling.

Daniel: Yeah. 

Giancarlo: Okay. The last two compounds to discuss with Daniel, DPT.

Daniel: Dipropyltryptamine, I wrote about it. You don’t remember. Breaking Open the Head, I also wrote about in 2012. I had a very occult experience where– basically, it’s a synthetic compound. Dimethyltryptamine is DMT and the methyl is– Propyl is very similar to methyl, I don’t know if they are analogs of carbon or something. Anyway, so, it’s a slightly different molecule, but it has very different effects. There was actually a religion in this neighborhood in the 60s, maybe the 70s. 

Giancarlo: There in the east village

Daniel: Called the Temple of the True Inner Light. 

Giancarlo: Oh, well.

Daniel: It was all based around DPT. Yeah, it’s super visionary, but it seems to have more of a tendency towards dark experiences. I did it with a friend and we had a feeling of opening the gates to this occult’s other reality, very like Aleister Crowley, Victoria. It felt we’d entered this-

Giancarlo: Well.

Daniel: Luciferic Victorian mansion where there were all these crazy spirits that were very haughty and were laughing at us. One of them even told them her name. We both had the same experience that they were just suddenly totally– As I wrote about it in Breaking Open the Head, it felt as if one of these beings, then stayed with me for the next few months, and I began to have all these crazy dreams about it, and there’s a sense of going through an initiatory process around integrating this other consciousness that I learned in reading more about the occults that there was this whole idea of not the demon, but the daemon. The Greeks, they understood there were beings that were spirits of genius or inspiration like the word ‘genius’ comes from– Then I felt that maybe DPT had introduced me to one of these daemons or haughty Luciferic spirits of inspiration or something.

And there were even psychophysical effects associated with things falling off the walls and strange stuff like that. This is where I got extremely interested in and have always now been saying that this psychic phenomena paranormality, the supernatural are totally real, because I had so many direct experiences of them when I was writing my books. It’s also been difficult for me career wise, because our culture still doesn’t really allow– in general the mainstream media shuns the discussion of paranormal, or psychic experiences or reality for various interesting reasons that are complicated to unpack. But for me, DPT opened like a whole realm of the supernatural or the occult.

Giancarlo: Wow, so interesting. I’m going to go back to your book and check the chapter on…

Daniel: Yeah. Sure. It’s in both books. 

Giancarlo: Okay. And now, to conclude, we’re going to discuss iboga.

Daniel: Yeah, iboga is a little boring for me to discuss because it was the first thing I wrote about, I’ve had to talk about it over and over again. But it’s a West African psychedelic. It’s the longest lasting. It lasts 20, 25 hours. I did it twice, I did it in Gabon through a traditional initiation ritual. And years later, I did it in Rosarito Beach in Mexico in an addiction clinic. Iboga is being used as a treatment for addiction, particularly heroin addiction.

Giancarlo: Opiate.

Daniel: What’s that? 

Giancarlo: Opiate. 

Daniel: Yeah. When the second time I did it, actually, I had a direct conversation with iboga, which was like, I would ask questions and this loud voice would shout the answers in my head. At one point, I asked like, “What is iboga?” The answer was, “Primordial wisdom teacher of humanity.” I found that very interesting after the fact, because Gabon is on the African equator. That’s actually where humanity comes from. It could be the traditional Garden of Eden. So, it could be that iboga is actually the tree of knowledge, of good and evil in the Garden of Eden. That was what was implied to me. It makes sense. It’s funny, because a lot of people have suggested maybe the mushroom or some other plant was, but my bet would be that the biblical discussion of the tree, of the knowledge of good and evil is actually a historical memory of the iboga. 

Giancarlo: Fascinating.  

Daniel: Yeah. Because it has a very moral aspect to it, it’s very much– The first time I did it, it has a different– The shaman, Nganga as they’re called in Gabon, they know the different phases of it. There’s a phase where they have you sit in front of a mirror with your eyes open, and you see different scenes. You see your home, you see your face changing, going through different incarnations or whatever.

Giancarlo: Yes.

Daniel: I saw a being, like a spirit being walking across the room sitting next to the shaman. And then, they have you lie down during this long period when they’re playing music. I went through a lot of my early childhood and saw how my subjectivity and psychology had been constructed through all these different childhood experiences, which had formed my identity and my– Some of them were sad. I had a lot of sad childhood experiences. My parents fighting, and getting infection of my spine, and being in the hospital for eight months, and stuff like that. But the ultimate effect of going through this past journey was a sense of liberation and the sense that even though we’re constructed by these things that happened in our past, we actually have will to overcome them, or to learn from them, and transform ourselves. Yeah, it felt like a very strong and positive message.

Then for many years after the iboga spirit would, sometimes, visit me in dreams in different forms. Sometimes, it’s like an African woman running a restaurant, or an African man, or whatever. Yeah, that’s the other– There’s so many fascinating things that aren’t being discussed in the contemporary psychedelic movement, but one is the sense of lineage. If you happen to have these experiences in a traditional context, you could have the sense that you have a long-term connection to a lineage the same way Tibetan Buddhism or something talks about.

Giancarlo: Oh, yeah. It’s fascinating. I agree that I think among all these medicines is the one that allow you the most access to biographical information of your childhood, it’s fascinating. I don’t know why they are not trying to integrate that into psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.

Daniel: Well, iboga has a big issue of availability. Apparently, that plant is also really threatened with extinction. I know that Dennis McKenna was working on a biotech project to try to stimulate rapid growth of it. I think also, that’s one that isn’t really very synthesizable, because it’s an extremely complex molecule.

Giancarlo: Ah, I didn’t know. 

Daniel: It’s like, we’re stuck at the moment until somebody– I had friends who are trying to grow it. It really only grows in Equatorial Africa in this small region. I knew some people who were trying to grow it in Costa Rica at a retreat center, but I don’t know how far they got with it. So, that’s a problem at the moment.

Giancarlo: Yeah. I have a friend who had a long-term addiction, cocaine, and actually, three weeks ago, had one of his first psychedelic experiences, it was iboga experience. He’s been sober since then. It’s not very much, but he had a clear insight of– He found the strength to stop the addiction. It’s– 

Daniel: Yeah. My friend was working on a film about– With heroin, it’s really fascinating, because you obviously have to stop doing heroin a couple of days before the ceremony or it’s dangerous. But when you finish the ceremony, you have no withdrawal symptoms, no cravings of any kind for heroin. It’s like a reset, neurological reset. But if you don’t change your life conditions or if you still have your dealer’s number by your phone, you’re likely to fall back into your old pattern quickly. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. 

Daniel: But it does give some people an opportunity to break those patterns, however. 

Giancarlo: Yeah, you have to change your environment. Daniel: Yeah. 

Giancarlo: Daniel, thank you very much. Just to conclude, people are listening to us, and they are fascinated by the world that this compound can access. Someone was telling me recently that the psychedelics, they allow you doors into the cycle of operating intelligence of the universe. So, it seems fascinating to me. 

Daniel: Yeah.

Giancarlo: Any advice you might have for people that are naive with this compound? If they have to look for underground ceremony, what would you advise to start with?

Daniel: Well, they could read my nice books, Breaking Open the Head and When Plants Dream, which was a book I wrote about ayahuasca itself. Yeah, there’s a lot of ceremonies happening now.

Giancarlo: Ask friends, ask the community. 

Daniel: Yeah. Use discernment. It’s like journalistic investigation because a lot of people– I was just in Tulum for a year. There a lot of corny shamans doing it that I wouldn’t want to work with or whatever. I think you really have to …

Giancarlo: Look for good recommendations. 

Daniel: Yeah, exactly. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. 

Daniel: Yeah. 

Giancarlo: Very good. Thank you so much. We’d love to have you again to talk more about the Post Age versus the New Age Movement. 

Daniel: [laughs] 

Giancarlo: Thank you, Daniel.Daniel: Ciao-ciao.