053. Robert Mitchell

53: Robert Mitchell on Psychedelics, Astrology and Cosmic Consciousness

We are delighted to host Robert Mitchell for episode 53 of the Mangu.tv podcast series. 

Robert is a religious and Jungian scholar, a Western psychedelic lineage holder, an astrologer, a practical mystic, a podcaster, and a writer.  He received an undergraduate degree in Religious Studies from Syracuse University, and a Master in Counseling from The California Institute of Integral Studies. For thirty years, he has worked worldwide to strengthen people’s relationship with the transpersonal intelligence that animates their lives. He uses tools of Western esoterica that include astrology, psychedelics, meditation and dreaming.  His specific interest is working with the unique structure of the consciousness of the individual, while demythologizing the psychedelic experience, removing the need to fetishize it or make it something exotic. His motto is: “People don’t need to use more Paychedelics, they need to be more Psychedelic.”

Robert speaks about his upbringing in Los Angeles, where his parents were part of the bohemian, creative scene, and how the sudden loss of his father, at age 16, impacted him. He talks about his education, with various teachers from Jung to Stan Grof, Agehananda Bharati, Ram Dass and more.

Giancarlo and Robert discuss mystical experiences and the doors one can access with altered states. Robert discusses the overlap in religion and astrology and his work using the intelligence of astrology to understand timings and cosmic consciousness. He shares a few profound case studies and speaks about the occasionally unrecognised value of astrology.

Go to the full transcript here

Full Transcript

Giancarlo: [00:00:00] Hello, hi, welcome to this new episode of the Mango TV podcast. Today I’m very excited to have Robert Mitchell. Robert Mitchell is a religious and Jungian scholar, a Western psychedelic lineage holder, an astrologer, a practical mystic, a podcaster, and a writer. He received an undergrad degree in religious studies from Syracuse University and a master in counseling from the California Institute of Integral Studies.

For 30 years he has worked worldwide To strengthen people’s relationship with the [00:01:00] transpersonal intelligence that animates their lives. He uses tools of western esoterica that includes astrology, psychedelics, meditation, and dreaming. His specific interest is working with the unique structure of the consciousness of the individual, while demythologizing the psychedelic experience, removing the need to fetishize it or make it something exotic.

His motto is, people don’t need to use more paikedelics, they need more psychedelics. So welcome, 

Robert: Robert. Hey, how are you, Giancarlo? It’s so nice to see you today and nice to speak with you. 

Giancarlo: Absolutely. And for people that know Mango TV, they can imagine how much I’m salivating here because you seems to be the ideal candidate that brings together all the Mango TV interests.

Robert: Well, you know, I’m fortunate to be in the position where I got exposed to a lot of wonderful people and wonderful ideas at a young [00:02:00] age and, and I love what you’re doing and I’m really happy to be here with 

Giancarlo: you today. Nice. Nice. So, so for maybe your follower that don’t know very well, Mango TV, you know, despite the fact that we talk about very esoteric thing, we have a little bit of a conservative format.

We try to keep it at least for the first past. Part of the, of the podcast to keep it, you know, biographical. I like the past, present, and future format to keep some order. So why don’t you tell us a little bit, you know, what did you, what did you grow up? What brought you to your you know re religious study?

What, and, and, and how you decide to dedicate your life to helping others. 

Robert: Okay. Well, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s everybody’s story is interesting. And my story is that I grew up in Los Angeles and I grew up around, my mother was an incredibly successful novelist and screenwriter who [00:03:00] wrote bestselling novels in the sixties and seventies.

And she also wrote the first half of Lolita for Stanley Kubrick, who was a friend of hers. And she would, and my father produced television. He produced the Carol Burnett show and the Academy Awards, and they were quite the LA scene stirs. You know, they had big glamorous parties and, and, and glamorous friends.

And it was a very bohemian environment and a lot of creative people, a lot of, Film people and music people. And so I was different from most of my friends because most of my friends who lived in the environment that I did, you know, their parents were just successful. They were lawyers or doctors or, you know industrialists or, but my, my, my mom was a real artist and she was surrounded by artists.

And looking back on my childhood, she was always interested [00:04:00] in consciousness. She had been at Stanford in the creative writing program with Ken Kesey and, and they had sort of been like foils at Stanford and she thought a lot of what he did was nonsense. Like she thought like that whole scene and she was sort of like, she’s in the electric Kool Aid as like the stuffy East coast.

Novelist because she’d grown up in New York City and she was really intellectual. And I always think that, you know, Carl Jung said that nothing affects the fate of a child, like the unlived life of a parent. And so I feel like there were things in play already. That my mom was sort of like stuffy and had kind of turned her back on the acid tests and all that sort of stuff.

And there was just something in me that was a little more tolerant than she was. And I also was aware growing up in this [00:05:00] environment that there were a lot of really successful people and they weren’t very happy. 

Giancarlo: But let me ask you some, let me ask you something about Ken Kesey because the acid test, I can see how people can, you know, raise their eyebrow, but someone’s flew on the cuckoo’s nest.

That was a real good movie. 

Robert: It was a great movie. And you know, when my, when my mom wrote her first novel, she wrote it about all the wife swapping at Stanford, because that’s what Ken Kesey was into. And he got in touch with her publisher after he got a, he got a hand, he got a hold of a copy of it before it got published.

And he said, if you write this as is, I will sue because it’s defamatory. And then when he wrote one floor of the cuckoo’s nest, he put a character in it. My mom’s name was Gwen Davis. He put a character in it named nurse Gwendolyn who followed everybody around and wrote about their pain. And she said, told his, his publisher, if he published that as is there, she was going to sue them for defamation.

So, so, so she was just right in there with [00:06:00] all that. And no, he was a brilliant. Brilliant man, you know, he wrote two great American novels, Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion, which, you know, my mom always said he could have done better, but two great novels is quite an accomplishment. And he spread LSD through America with the acid tests like Johnny Appleseed.

You know, he went all over America and he changed people’s relationships with psychedelics in the bus, on the bus, you know, like he had as much to do with the psychedelic revolution in the sixties as anybody. Yeah. You know, he’s, he’s a big character. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. I mean, I can’t remember where I read. that, you know, he went to Millbrook to visit Timothy Leary, 

Robert: but they didn’t get along.

Yeah. Well, they were probably both super narcissistic.

They probably both wanted to talk about themselves and that’s hard when you’re talking to somebody else, you know, and they probably were both [00:07:00] sort of. wrestling to see who is going to be in charge of LSD culture, you know, and that’s probably part of it. 

Giancarlo: But, but, but do you agree that Timothy Leary, he was also a little bit all over the place, but at least he has got this, you know, rigorous psychological background.

They were trying in Millbrook to keep it a little bit academic, whereas Ken Casey was not even trying. 

Robert: Ken Kesey had no interest in that. He, he, he was interested in creating chaos by, by, by putting LSD into American culture. You know, my feelings about Leary are kind of mixed because he was a charismatic man and he was a learned man and, but he was, he, you know, he got LSD.

Confused with timothy leary. It was 

Giancarlo: trouble. It was trouble. The wife committed suicide. The daughter committed 

Robert: suicide. And he was, he was alcoholic too. So, so for me, lsd just became another alcohol, you know, and, and I, I had the good fortune when I was in [00:08:00] graduate school to be educated by ralph metzner.

Who was with him and Ram Dass at, at, at Harvard. And I think all those original sort of LSD pioneers kind of felt that Leary did a real disservice to, to psychedelics and, and that he was part of the reason that they became criminalized. You know, because he made it about him, you know, and didn’t make it about, about being responsible.

Giancarlo: But so, so when you were 17, and you were exposed to that, what was your reaction? Were you curious? Were 

Robert: you you know, basically more, more than anything, I’d say more than psychedelics. The thing that affected me the most was when I was 16, my father died from lung cancer. And I’d been really close to him, probably closer than I’d ever been to anybody and still kind of feel that way.

And it was kind of faded. And when I was a child, I used to [00:09:00] dream of his death a lot before he, before he was even sick. 

Giancarlo: Like as a nightmare or as a wishful 

Robert: thinking, I know, you know, I told a Jungian analyst that once and maybe he said it was, it was, he said, maybe it was a wish, but, but which is sort of like archetypal and, you know but, but the way I dreamt about it was, it was always sad, you know, and it was the same dream and I spoke to him about it.

I would speak to Matt when I was a small child, five, six, seven, and he would say, it’s just a dream. Don’t worry. And then he died. And I was aware I’d also had a mystical experience about, about his death a couple of years before he died. And it was really, I’d say it was the one pure mystical experience I ever had.

And it was. I was 14 and you remember what it’s like when you’re 14, you’re kind of peeling away from your parents and you want to be with your peers and it’s not cool to be [00:10:00] close to your parents anymore. And I felt like that was very hurtful to him because I was always saying, no, I can’t do this. And no, I can’t do that.

Cause I wanted to be with my friends and I didn’t want to run into my friends when I was with him because they were all together then and he, we chose to go to a place. That I knew he asked me to go someplace where we’d gone during my childhood where I knew we wouldn’t run into My friends and so we went there And so for the whole day I became kind of transpersonally aware that he was going to die soon.

And it was almost like now I’m 55 and it was like, I was, I had 55 year old consciousness. I wasn’t 14 and I just looked at him and smelled him and held his hand, which I didn’t do anymore. And listen to the timber of his voice. Like I had one more day with him. Like he had already died. And that I was being given one more day with him.

And I was in this kind of ecstatic gratitude [00:11:00] for the love that he’d given me. And at the end of the day, it just closed up and I didn’t even think about it. Like I didn’t even think like why that happened or what was that about? Or should I be worried about him dying? And then a couple of years later, when he got diagnosed with lung cancer, when I heard the diagnosis and I heard how, how, how dire it was.

I remembered the day, you know, and it was like a dream. And so it made me aware that there was something going on beyond life and death and beyond my everyday consciousness. And, you know, I think I was inclined towards that. You know, I think I was. Open and my mom once told me this story how when I was three or four that I had a Canadian nanny and she came out of my bedroom and she was white, like she looked really scared.

And my mom said, what’s wrong? And she said, well, I was thinking Robert looks really adorable. And he looked up [00:12:00] at me and he said, what does adorable mean?

So I think that I’ve just always kind of, I was just always a little bit like that, you know, and, and I think making peace with that has been sort of the work of my life and then sharing that with other people in ways that are beneficial to them. 

Giancarlo: But so, so you had like a privileged insight. You were allowed to peek into this cosmic design for a 

Robert: second.

Yeah, yeah, I was. And I also, you know. Carl Jung says that death surrounds life like night surrounds the day. And I think when you’re 16, you know, you’re trying to fit in with your peers. You’re hoping maybe you can have sex with somebody, you know, and that you can become a man and you can drive and you can be an adult and suddenly.

Right when that happened. I Mean, you get your driver’s license in LA in California when you’re 16 and my father [00:13:00] got his diagnosis, like. Two or three weeks after I got my driver’s license, you know, and I did suddenly death was this real reality about life and where it wasn’t for a lot of my friends, you know, for all of my friends and, and I became the kid whose dad died, which I never imagined that that’s who I would be, but it just, it just, it made life this more, it shattered my reality, you know, it shattered my reality about what life was, but what do you 

Giancarlo: think?

Yeah. How, how, why do you think you had this opportunity to, to, to see the, your father’s death two years in advance and how, how do you have a rational way to explain that or is a mystery? 

Robert: You know, there’s a mystery aspect to it. Look, I think the way that consciousness. Functions. The unconscious functions is it’s like a wave, you know, it’s not, it’s not, it’s not causing effect, [00:14:00] you know, and I think you’re unconscious.

I think your ego is in the moment and your ego seeks pleasure and to avoid pain, but that your unconscious and yourself is spread out all across your life. It’s spread out behind you and it’s spread out ahead of you. And I think that the future, yeah. Is as causative in your experience as the past is, and I think I think that I was connected to my future in that moment.

I think that part of my consciousness kind of bled through to the from the future to show me what was happening. And maybe. That gratitude was important. Yes. You know, so that I wouldn’t be bitter when he died, you know, so I would feel how lucky I’d been to have him as my father. And I remember also a few days before he died, he, he, he, he was sort of bitter in his death.

He was very young. He was like 45 and now I’m 55. I realized how young that really was, you know, [00:15:00] and I crawled up on his belly face to face. And I looked him in the face and I said, thank you for everything you gave me. I love, I thank you for all the love. I’ll take it with me the rest of my life and I’ll be okay.

And we wept into each other’s like into each other’s bellies, you know, for, for a long time. And it was so cathartic. And I remember my mom kind of snuck around and afterwards she asked me, she said, how did you know how to do that? Yeah. Yeah. Cause I was, I was a boy. Yeah. And so I think that that experience informed all my experience around his death.

Yeah. 

Giancarlo: It’s interesting when you said like, you know, like some of the future consciousness bled into the present moment. I think you said something like that. Yeah. Because I remember the, I have this image of a Barbara Marx Hubbard had this graphic of, of, of cosmic consciousness as a spiral going upward.

And she said that sometimes there are some doors. [00:16:00] Yeah, that you can access with altered states, with mystical experience, with, with fasting drumming. And, and, and maybe, yeah, it’s, it’s still very mysterious. You know, I had a meeting yesterday with someone who wrote a book called Holo Movement based on David Bohm, Implicit Order.

Yeah. And you know, now there’s so much coming from quantum physics, right? Yeah. The two Swedish Nobel Prize were, was given because of this quantum entanglement, this, this idea that, of non locality. Bernard Castro came out with this metaphysical idealism. So it’s growing now this in, in quantum physics, this, this idea that, you know, this old cosmos is not a mechanical clock, but he’s alive and as an intelligence.

And so when I hear you saying when there is this consciousness bleeding as, as you called it for me, it’s in a way, [00:17:00] exciting, reassuring you know, it, it, I don’t know why I’m, you know, you make me discover that quote from Young’s that says that, you know, when, when you, when you understand that you’re part of something infinite, then you, you know, Pull your shit together.

I mean, he didn’t say that, but he said, 

Robert: you stop, you stop caring about things that don’t really matter. About the trivialities. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. You don’t, you don’t, you don’t concern yourself with things that are of no real importance. Yeah. That’s what he said. And what you’re saying about quantum physics is great.

And you know, what I always tell people when I start working with them, especially with their astrology, because you know, astrology is so misunderstood in the culture. But, you know, when, when they had electron microscopes and they could finally look into an atom, and it was so exciting, they could see all the structure of an atom, they could see the nucleus and they could see electrons.

And, you know, they could see, and they could identify what the atom was by its structure. But nobody was able to say what held the atom together. [00:18:00] There was no way to, to, to quantify that. And ultimately what the quantum physicists came up with was that it’s an intelligent. And so every atom in physical reality is held together by intelligence, and thus, physical reality is constructed by intelligence.

And it’s used with it. And we’re, we’re completely surrounded about by it, by that intelligence, no matter where we are. And we always have been, you were when you were in, you know, a cradle as baby, you are now, you will be, I will be when we’re old men, you know, children are, and, and, but. No one’s thinking like that.

Giancarlo: Yeah. No one’s thinking like that. People still don’t get it. I mean, there is a major change of ontology happening, especially through psychedelic, but you know, people are so concerned and concentrated on the medical application of psychedelic that [00:19:00] they forget that, you know, that’s can be one of the door to this intelligence.

Robert: My friend, James O’Rourke, who’s no longer alive. Yeah. Yeah. Tryptamine Palace. Yeah, James, he was great. And he always said to me, he said, he said, Robert psychedelics are not for sick people. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and, and that’s why he didn’t like calling them medicine. Yeah. You know, he thought that they’re real.

Their real utility was at the upper range. It’s sort of like, you know, it’s sort of like quantum physics, you know, like the, the lower range of quantum physics, the lowest, the lowest fruit on the tree to be picked is sort of like television and the internet, you know, but there’s stuff way, way, way up there where you can probably reverse engineer the environment and physical reality.

Yeah. And you can do that with people too. You can reverse engineer people. You know, because rather [00:20:00] than orient them towards what they’ve been through and who their parents were and, and what their, what their culture is, you can orient them towards the self. You know, which they can encounter in those experiences and it can reorient them towards their origins, you know, and, and we all walk around going, my mom was like this, my dad was like this, he died, whatever I grew up here.

I grew up there. I feel good when people treat me like this. I feel bad when they treat me like that. And it’s just, that’s the low hanging fruit on identity, you know, you know, and, and, and what really heals people. You know, Jung said this. He said people are not healed by insight. People are healed by when their consciousness assumes a higher level and the things that were a problem for their consciousness when it was in a lower state are no longer a problem.

You know that he had this notion called metanoia, which is one of my favorite words. And it’s [00:21:00] when your consciousness is so transformed that it doesn’t even recognize the state of consciousness that preceded it. And that’s what real healing is. 

Giancarlo: But can you, what’s the etymology of Betanoia? 

Robert: I think it’s a, it’s a Greek word and, and it means, it means to be transformed.

They use it a lot in Christianity, but I think they borrowed it. I see, you know, but it is, it is such a profound word and it’s really the thing that heals the 

Giancarlo: most. But so, because this is, we, we, we already went to the, to the to the heart of, of, of, you know, one of my passion, this idea of healing and mental, not just mental healing, but also mental wellness and, and, you know, perennial transformation.

But I don’t want to jump just to stay a little bit on I mean, I need to ask, but so when you and James O’Rourke were discussing psychedelics [00:22:00] are not for sick people, then the question is, who are they for? 

Robert: Everybody? Well, they’re for everybody. Everybody, okay. They’re for everybody who, look, I really think, you know, there’s a lot of stuff.

If people are bipolar, It can activate their, their mania. If people are schizophrenic, it can, it can, it can stimulate their schizophrenia. It’s not for people who don’t have an organized consciousness, you know, like we don’t have an organized baseline consciousness, so it’s not really for everybody. But every, what I always say is in the work I do, you know, I’m so, you don’t need to be, it’s not about shamanism, you know, there’s, there’s so much, there’s so much love for shamanism and for indigenous, indigenous culture, but everybody has a soul and everybody has this place where if they’re in the right situation [00:23:00] and they’re safe and they’re comfortable and they trust the person who they’re with that.

Yeah. The most profound experience can be catalyzed by psychedelics, and it has nothing to do. It doesn’t need to be exotic. You don’t need to be in the Amazon. You know, you don’t need to be. You don’t need to hear foreign languages. You don’t need to hear a car. If you, everybody has this doorway in them that if they’re properly tended to will open.

Yeah, but you need to feel safe. Oh, safety is the most important 

Giancarlo: thing. And for some people, safety comes from tradition. 

Robert: Yeah, you know, there’s going to be some people who are going to feel Look, a lot of the work that I do is really 1950s, 1960s psychedelic therapy. You know, they were doing it in Beverly Hills.

Cary Grant was doing it. He did it a hundred times. And, and I always say my first psychedelic experience was with Cary Grant, because my mom, how old, how old, how old were you? I [00:24:00] was four.

But the story is, it’s a good story. It’s a good story. Is that. So my dad got a call one day and he picked up the phone and he said hello and a voice said is Gwen Davis there and he said yes she is mask is calling and he said the voice said it’s Cary Grant and my dad had a lot of friends who were comedians like the Smothers Brothers.

And he thought it was one of them. And he walked through the house saying, Gwen, Carrie Grant is on the phone. And when she picked up the phone, it was Carrie Grant. And he had read one of her novels and he’d liked it so much that he took her to lunch. He wanted to meet her. He called her publisher and they became fast friends.

Cause he was, you know, people were drawn to my mom because she had an incredible intellect. And that was sort of rare in Los Angeles. And so she became friends with him. And one day when I was about four, he lived near us. She took me to his [00:25:00] house. It was Christmas time and I didn’t know who he was, but I remember when he opened the door, he was incredibly handsome and his hair was white and he was tan, but I’d never seen anybody who’d looked like that.

And he took me inside and he had a magic, he had a magic. So he would have been about 70 at this time. You know, he had been older, Cary Grant post LSD, a hundred LSD sessions. And he, he had a magic set. And he did every trick in the magic set. And then he gave me the magic set for Christmas. And you were, you were four.

I was four or five. And he enjoyed it so much that the next year he did the same thing. And I really think that it was you know, he, he was so affected by his LSD experiences that he just got into this playful, childish place with me and we just played together. You know, and I really feel like that was a bit of a call, but so you didn’t 

Giancarlo: really 

Robert: had lsd.

No, I didn’t [00:26:00] do lsd with him. No, no, of course not 

Giancarlo: But but but you know, but neurological, you know, if if it’s true that we neuro regulate so 

Robert: deeply Yeah, I entrained myself to the space that he and I knew there was something different about him And it may have been his celebrity and it may have been how handsome he was, but you know, he definitely was so impacted by his LSD experiences and, and, you know, he, he wrote an article about it in 1958 in, in life magazine.

And, you know, he was going and doing it in a coat and tie. You know, in like Mad Men era, Los Angeles, you know, so it was so interesting, but he had so many profound experiences with it. And I really feel like that was my first encounter with psychedelics. Yeah. 

Giancarlo: I read somewhere that before doing LSD, he was religiously cutting all this article about him on all the papers and it was, it was keeping like this photo album of his article, really ego driven.

Right. Yeah. And the moment he did LSD, he [00:27:00] said, fuck that. 

Robert: He has the best quote from somebody who did LSD. It’s so funny. So he, he was out at dinner post LSD, you know, after he’d done this work and he was at this restaurant called Chazen’s, which was this famous Beverly Hills restaurant. And somebody came up to him and he, and he said, Mr.

Grant, Every time I see one of your movies, I say to myself, I wish I was Cary Grant and Cary Grant looked at him and he said, you know, I have the same experience.

Giancarlo: But so, but so, but so Robert, tell me about the real first 

Robert: psychedelic experience. Oh, my real first psychedelic experience. So my real first psychedelic experience, I was 18. And I was in college and somebody’s brother had sent a box of mushrooms to the dorm and I’d heard about it, you know, I was pretty, I’d kind of been like this kind of smart jock, the smart athlete up to that point, like I’d been the quarterback on my [00:28:00] football team, American football and played baseball and I was, you know, I wasn’t, I was a little asleep and so, but I was curious, like my intuition said, Oh, I’m curious about this, like really curious.

And so I, I got some from the person whose brother sent them and I took them in this very reverential way. Like I, I was intuitive enough to know it was a serious thing. I didn’t want to do it recreationally. I didn’t want to do it with everybody else who I remember at the time everybody got their mushrooms and then they all sat in the dorm room, television room, watching Miami Vice.

You know, but how, 

Giancarlo: how, how, how did you know about the where did the reverence 

Robert: come from? It was, it was pure intuition. So I went in my room and I took them by myself. And when I sort of became intoxicated, I had this experience where I was like, Oh, so there’s all these parts of [00:29:00] myself that have nothing to do with my parents.

They have nothing to do with my personal history. They have nothing to do with where I grew up and I’d completely forgotten about it right until this moment.

So liberating, right? Yeah. It was so liberating. It was like, Oh, for the past 18 years, I forgot about this, you know, but I remember it now and it’s fantastic, you know, and I didn’t have any fear or any dread. It was like a homecoming. How many grams do you think it was? I think it was probably like two and a half, three grams.

Two and a half, three grams, yeah. You know, maybe less. I’m pretty sensitive. You know, I think I, I, I ate what I ate, whatever they told me to eat, you know, I don’t remember. I’m so precise when I now with it, you know, I’m so, I use such precision when I work with people, but then I think, I don’t know, three or four or five or mushrooms, whatever I, [00:30:00] but it was so, it was probably besides that experience I’d had with my father, which was so ephemeral.

And so like, I didn’t even think about it. Like I thought about it when he was got sick, but I never thought about afterwards. It was so profoundly mystical because I experienced my timeless self that had moved between life and death and lifetime and lifetime. And I knew that Robert was this kind of recent construction and was, this was as valid as, as Robert was.

You know, this experience was as valid and as, and way more profound, beautiful, beautiful. My enthusiasm for it was top level. And of course, the first thing I did was I had friends and I was like, you got to do this too. 

Giancarlo: And so that’s, that’s where you decided to go into religious 

Robert: studies? No, no, no. That’s, that’s a really interesting story is [00:31:00] no, I was, I was in San Diego at that point.

And I, I, I, I, I didn’t like it there and I transferred to Syracuse University and it’s kind of fate. Syracuse has this unbelievable broadcasting program, journalism program. And almost everybody you see on American television, whether it’s sports or the nightly news, they all went to Syracuse. And my plan was to host the NFL pregame show because I love football and I went to one class at this place and it was so boring and they were talking about television like it was curing global warming that I had my forehead down on my on my desk and I couldn’t believe I traveled all the way across country to to study this imbecilic study.

You know, and I thought everybody in it was just like, they were like six to me. Like all they did was talk about TV and I was so depressed. And a friend said, [00:32:00] Robert, you got to come to this class. I think you’ll like it. It’s it’s required. And it was a religious studies class. It was required for the undergraduate for you to graduate.

And I walked in and there was this incredibly handsome, charismatic man talking about the hero with a thousand faces. Joseph, Joseph Campbell. Joseph Campbell. And the itinerary in the class, you read The Golden Ass, you read Elie Wiesel’s Night, you read Margaret Atwood, you read, you read just all these incredible books.

And I, I, I just had this literally an epiphany. And I was like, this is what you go to college to study. You don’t go to college, college to prepare for a job. You want to learn about things that really, really matter. And so I spent a lot of time with that particular professor. And the amazing thing about Syracuse was Syracuse besides Yale has the.

most impressive religious program in North America. [00:33:00] People go off from all come from all over the world to study in the graduate program there. And I was one of four undergraduates who was studying religion there. Cause Syracuse is a pretty conventional school and gets a lot of kids from New York city.

You know, and they had the most amazing professors there to one of whom was this union scholar named David Miller, who, like, had had studied at Zurich and he and he had taught at Pacifica and he was James Hillman’s best friend and he knew more about young and I just haunted his office. Like I spent, no one ever came to his office hours except me.

So I would spend, I would spend hours with him a week, you know, asking questions, talking to him about stuff. He would invite me to things that were for graduate students and I took graduate seminars with him because I burned through the religious studies so quickly, the undergraduate program. And then this [00:34:00] other guy I met who is probably the most formative figure in my life.

And he’s well worth telling you a quick little story about his name was Aga Ananda Bharati and he had been born. His name was Leopold Fisher. He had been born Austrian aristocracy and he from birth was fascinated with Indian culture and he was so fascinated with it that his parents hired him in a Hindi tutor when he was five or six and he became fluent in Hindi.

And then he got drafted into Hitler’s army and they sent him to India because he had language skills. And the moment he got there, he went AWOL and abandoned the army and lived as a Sanyasin monk for 17 years. And he, he walked India barefoot twice. 

Giancarlo: Sanyasi with Osho. 

Robert: Yeah, no, not with Osho, but with a very, very strict order of monk, I see, [00:35:00] and he learned, he could speak 17 continent, subcontinent languages, and he then became a, an academic.

And he was head of the Eastern Studies Department at the University of Washington, and they asked him to leave in the late 1960s because he was giving undergraduate women LSD and teaching them tantric sex. Like Rambas. Yeah. Yeah. Like he was a total character and he was at Syracuse and like when the Dalai Lama came to Syracuse, he asked to meet to eat dinner with Bharati.

The first he introduced himself and Bharti looked at him. He said, you don’t really believe you’re the incarnation of the Budha, do you? ? And he, and the, he said, the Dai Lama shrugged and said, who else? ? And, and so he wrote a lot of books on mysticism. He wrote a book called The Light at the Center. He, he did a lot of LSD with, with, with celebrities and, and academics and intellectuals.

And he [00:36:00] was the most discriminating. kind of religious scholar you could ever imagine and very charismatic, but he’d say things like, okay, if anybody in this class calls the Himalayas, Himalayas, I will fail you. 

Giancarlo: But so tell me, so why were you so passionate about that? You will keep on going to find David Miller.

And, and then, and then, and then second question, what then the new mentor brought that David Miller was, didn’t have? 

Robert: Well, David Miller, he was a Jungian scholar and I was fascinated by Jung. I was fascinated by archetypal, by archetypal psychology. And you know, I think what I, what I sensed was that Jung, You know, Jung was like a closeted mystic, and he also was so interested in Western esotericism.

But why was 

Giancarlo: it, why was it closeted? Because it wasn’t appropriate for a serious academic to be too 

Robert: mystic. Yeah, at the [00:37:00] time, you know, at the time, you know, it’s funny because the Jung and Freud story is so interesting, but, but at the time when, when Freud, Freud was grooming Jung to be the face of psychoanalysis, because at the time all the psychoanalysts in Europe were Jewish.

Yeah. Yeah. And it was known as Jewish psychoanalysis, that’s how psychoanalysis was known, and Jung was 6’4 and you know, he was like blonde, and so he was grooming him to be the face of psychoanalysis. And Jung’s real interests were mystical, but he knew that he knew that if people knew that they would disregard him.

Giancarlo: But why Freud wanted to stop the tradition of psychoanalysts being Jewish? 

Robert: Oh, just because of antisemitism. I see. He thought, he thought that it would limit the scope and the study of psychoanalysis. And so, you know, what basically happened, so Jung was, he’s like a [00:38:00] closeted mystic. He was interested, he was really interested in alchemy and astrology.

Which, which he thought were the, he thought where they were the esoteric religions of antiquity, you know, and. But what happened was his understanding of the psyche was so much larger than Freud’s and their, their, their breakup was really about that, you know, it was really about that he had a larger view of consciousness than Freud did, which was just it and ego and, you know, you know, and 

Giancarlo: And And Just, just, just by graphical material?

Robert: Yeah, just biographical material. And Jung thought that there was a self, you know, he thought that there was Of course. And, and so of course. And so I was fascinated by Jung. I just, I just instinctually, you know, I knew that Campbell, Joseph Campbell was hugely influenced by Jung and that was my first exposure to it.

And you know, young is such a giant Yeah. In Western culture. Yeah. 

Giancarlo: Yeah, it made, it made me think that, I read somewhere that Stan Grof said that [00:39:00] Freud was fishing sitting on the back of a whale. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He was, he was looking for Phish and he was missing the big one because he didn’t look at just personal stuff.

Robert: Yeah. And you know, Stan was one of my professors at CIIS. Yeah. He, he was a big influence. I mean, I always think that like Stan was kind of like the J of psychedelic. Yeah, 

Giancarlo: yeah, yeah, yeah. History will, will eventually recognize that. Yeah. 

Robert: Yeah. And so what I, what my good fortune, my good fortune was that I was around discriminating scholars, you know, who like, they totally believed all this stuff was real, but they also thought like, don’t be a nitwit and fall for every sort of false presentation of it.

And I remember Bharati, Agahananda Bharati, I asked him a question once. About the, the Indians that Carlos Castaneda had written about in, in his books and his head [00:40:00] snapped. And he looked at me and he said, you read that liar Castaneda, don’t you? And I was like, and he was like, I was like yeah. And he’s like, they don’t even have peyote in that culture.

It’s the Weechul, you know, the Weechul have peyote. They’re not within hundreds of miles of where he was. He made up everything. And he had, he had edited a. A book called that anthropologist had written called tracking Castaneda. And it was all about the untruths of his writing and that was fiction. It was good fiction and it was entertaining, but it had no authenticity and Barty was all about authenticity.

He once said to me, he said, you know, the dumbest thing I ever saw. And I said, what? And he said, It was a album in a record store and the title of it was Aloha Amigo.

Giancarlo: I love all these anecdotes, I could hear that forever, but, but, but let’s go a little bit more on the personal. So [00:41:00] where were you with your life purpose at this time? Oh, 

Robert: at that point I was like, this is my calling. You know, I thought it might be academic. You know, I thought I might be an academic, you know, I, I sailed through that religious studies program, I was Theta Chi Beta, which was a national religion honor society and Robert Thurman inducted me into it.

And I thought maybe I’d go to the University of Chicago, which has a great, where, where Mevchia Iliade was and, and, but. What happened was my mom had a family friend, but 

Giancarlo: sorry, Robert, you wanted to be an academic and continue to explore what more consciousness or more indigenous wisdom or more healing. 

Robert: I was interested in, well, all I knew at that point was sort of like the study of religion.

And then what happened was one summer, my mom was really good friends with Jack Kornfield. Who is a great, great Vipassana teacher. And she’d known him, she, he was one of the people [00:42:00] she had gathered in her circle and she had known him since like the early seventies. And he suggested that I go to Esalen for the summer and work at Esalen.

And so I went to Esalen for the summer. I think I was 21. It was my last summer before my last year of college. And Esalen just blew my mind. You know, like just being in Big Sur and learning about the history of Esalen and being involved in workshops there and, and meeting the old timers who’d lived there for many years and being in the tubs and it’s, Esalen is like, it’s like an ecstatic state.

You know, it really, really is. Have you been? Yeah. Yeah. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. And I think it’s different than I’ve been recently. Yeah. It’s different than going when there is Alan Watson, Stan Groff 

Robert: walking around. Yeah. I was there, I was there in the early, early nineties. So it was still a little bit more like it. I was there recently too.

And it was a little bit still like the seventies when I was there sort of, because it was such a [00:43:00] microculture, you know, it was so unaffected by anything else going on around it. And then I was like, Oh, okay, this is what I want to do. You know, there’s all this human, there’s all these ways to transform your consciousness.

And, and then, then I decided to go to the California Institute of Integral Studies. 

Giancarlo: So that’s what I want to do, like being a, being a coach, a transpersonal therapist. 

Robert: I thought I wanted to be a psychologist or a therapist, you know, like I thought that I want, yeah, like I want to be a, I got a master’s degree in psychology.

And I thought that was a way to work with people. But when I did all my internships, I thought that that kind of work was a little slow, you know, and I was continuing to be involved with psychedelics. And one of the great things about where I went to graduate school is Stan Groff was there and Ralph Metzner was there and Michael Harner was there, you know, who wrote the way of the shaman.

And I got to be friendly with these guys and especially Michael Harner. I [00:44:00] Got to find out about shamanism and applied shamanism and I also there were so many therapists in that program who had were psychedelic pioneers and knew that it worked and their, their attitude at that time. This was 30 years ago was they were like Vietnam vets.

They were like, the war is over and we lost. But it works. And there were also in the Bay Area. There were also all these people using MDMA for therapy, and I have the good fortune of doing psilocybin as therapy as a client and also MDMA as a client and seeing what amazing technologies they were for healing.

And as soon as I saw how to do it, I could do it for other people because I had, I had psychological training. And I knew that you didn’t need to be a shaman to heal people. You needed to be empathetic [00:45:00] and that’s really the primary skill for healing people in these States. It’s not that you go into their dream world and rearrange the furniture.

You know, it’s that you’re empathetic to the experience that they’re going through. And that’s all that people require. And if you’ve trained yourself in empathy, you know, I always say to people, people always want to do what I do. And they’re like, well, how do you do it? And I’m like, well, you should probably have a background in caring for people.

You know, you probably should have demonstrated that you really care about the wellbeing of other people before you think like, Oh, I did ayahuasca and I’m a shaman. 

Giancarlo: But so where is that care came from 

Robert: for you? Oh, I know. I, I can tell you exactly where it came from. You know, my mom is a brilliant, was a brilliant person.

I mean, she went to college when she was 14. She could write a novel in a weekend, but she wasn’t a very caring or [00:46:00] empathetic parent. So it 

Giancarlo: came as a, as a, as a, as a, the deficit created the existence. 

Robert: You know, I think, I think as a result of my own suffering, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, like, like, I think I suffered in an emotional.

and profound way from my mother’s pain, you know, and also from the death of my father, you know, that was so devastating that I was able to empathize with the suffering of other people, you know, and I think that that’s a calling, you know, it’s the wounded healer. The wounded healer. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t think that You just come to that, and I don’t think it’s fun coming to it, and I don’t think you’d choose 

Giancarlo: it.

Yeah. It’s, it’s also, it’s also a form of gratitude for transcending your own personal trauma that once you’re on the other side, you feel so, you know, that feeling of liberating, you know, getting free from the trauma that doesn’t control your life anymore. There’s so much gratitude. You just want to give it [00:47:00] back.

Robert: You know, it’s such a, it’s the most wonderful thing that you can give another person besides love. You know, love is a wonderful thing and, but it’s kind of like structured love. You know, I have people in my life that I love and I give that to them freely. And then I have people in my life that I work with.

And in a structure, I’m able to provide that for them to the best of my ability. And then it, the, the, the fruition of that is that they are able to be transformed in this part of themselves in which they’re suffering. Okay, so let me 

Giancarlo: just go back. So you are 21 more or less. You are in San Francisco at the 

Robert: California Institute of 

Giancarlo: Integral Studies.

California Institute of Integral 

Robert: Studies. I’m 22. I’m probably 22 when I get there. Yeah. Yeah. You 

Giancarlo: try, you, you, you receive psilocybin and MDMA for, you know, as a, as a, as a therapy, you understand immediately [00:48:00] the potential about that. You’re studying psychology. And so you’re, so where are you heading now?

What do you 

Robert: want to do? Well, it’s also interesting because at the time, you know, I read a lot about astrology when I was in college and a lot of it’s nonsense. 

Giancarlo: There was there was Tarnas there, 

Robert: right? Yeah, Tarnas was there and he had written The, the, what’s the, the passion of the Western mind. And then he wrote Cosmos and 

Giancarlo: Psyche.

Cosmos and Psyche. That’s a big one. They made a documentary, you 

Robert: know? Yeah. And I sat in a class with him that was him and Stan Groff basically teaching Cosmos and Psyche. And my honest experience was Stan Groff was more interesting sitting there silent. Then Richard Tarnas was talking for an hour. Like he, like he’s, he’s very Aquarian.

He’s very Uranian. He’s very intellectual. And like his class was, was as boring as the [00:49:00] class on sports television. You know, I again had my, I had my forehead down on the, down on the table and my good fortune besides that was at that moment. Astrology programs, Apple had astrology programs, you know, they had a program that if you put in the time, date and place.

that someone was born, it would put out a chart. And up to that point in human history, if you wanted to draw someone’s chart, it took hours of calculations. And I have very, very limited math skills, you know, like I’m just not very good at math. And so if I had had to do that, I would never have done it.

And what I found, somebody gave me an astrology program. And as soon as I could see a chart, I could read them. Like I can talk to somebody now I can talk to somebody about their astrology chart for eight hours if they wanted to. But then I, as soon as I saw somebody’s chart, I could do an hour and a half, two hours on their astrology chart.

And it was so accurate, you know, like, [00:50:00] and what I’ve learned over the years is that the chart doesn’t lie. All you have to do is talk about what’s in there. And so I started doing astrology readings. and making a living at it at a very young age. Like 

Giancarlo: it was like, the clients find valuable. 

Robert: Oh yeah. It was all about, you know, what you, what you see in people’s astrology charts is you see their potential for transformation and, and where you see that is in their conflicts.

Giancarlo: Did you meet, did you meet Jorge Ferrer when you were there? And, you know, he gave me a reading last year, he lives here in Ibiza and but then, you know, you’re all excited when you hear it, but then you leave and you sort of forget about it. 

Robert: Yeah. You have to, you have to, you have to give people what I call Utilizable intelligence, like, yeah, like a handout.

Yeah. Well, you can record it, but I mean, you have to give them things that are going to make point. I always record the recordings I do with people and so that they can listen to them again, because it’s a lot of [00:51:00] information. And it’s a lot of translating information, you know, it’s a lot of translating information that you understand that they don’t and the important thing is to speak about it in the language of the person that you’re talking to, you know, and, and, but what I always say is you need to get people utilizable intelligence.

I think of it in terms of. Like, like working for an intelligence agency, you know, you have to give people information that they can use. Yeah. 

Giancarlo: This is so true. Very well said. But let me ask you this what is, is there any overlapping between religious studies and astrology? 

Robert: Oh yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, a hundred percent.

Because look, you’ll love this because to me, astrology, when, when, when most people talk about astrology, they’re like, it’s like this you know, it’s like your son’s like this. So you’re like this and your Mars is like this. And you’re like, that’s what it really is. It when I see somebody’s astrology chart, it’s like a hologram of their consciousness And [00:52:00] everybody has differently arranged bands of consciousness going through their hologram And you can talk to them about it And it really to me when you’re looking at that you’re looking at somebody’s dharma.

You’re looking at somebody’s karma you know like you’re looking at the momentum they have going into this lifetime of consciousness and how it’s going to propel them through life, how it’s going to create situations for them, how it’s going to create conflicts for them, and how it’s going to present opportunities for growth during this lifetime.

And then there’s a second aspect to it, which is the real tragedy of astrology. Which is at different times in your life, different things are being asked of you, and it’s completely identifiable, and if you know what those things are, you can partner with those energies. You can partner with the intelligence that’s designed your life for certain things to be happening at certain times.

And if you don’t know that that’s happening, then those things [00:53:00] just appear to be happening to you out of nowhere. And so what I always Work with people is to show them what this intelligence has intended for them in this lifetime, but also where they are in the process, you know, and and and what the what’s being asked, and it’s never like this Wednesday or next week.

It’s always the big ones are always yearly two year three year processes. 

Giancarlo: So you would say you would say astrology is the language of cosmic consciousness. 

Robert: Yes, 100%. It is. It’s so funny because it’s so lowly. It’s regard is so low in Western culture because it’s in the back of like fashion magazines and it’s in newspapers, but actual astrology.

It’s like an electron microscope into the structure of the consciousness of the person that you’re working with and nobody’s astrology chart Ever reminds me of anybody else’s they’re all so unique They’re as unique as a thumbprint or dna and I love I [00:54:00] love to work with these really accomplished tech and finance Powerful men who have never given it a thought and the moment It’s revealed to them what it is And they’re usually quite disinterested.

They’re like, you’re going to do this for my CFO and my wife and my kids, because it is such a powerful tool of information of consciousness of the individual. There’s nothing like it. You know, I, I hear all these people who are into all these other things, like. What are people into now? They’re into like life, human design of which astrology is a part of it.

Astrology is so explicit. Like you would never, if you really understood astrology, have to turn to anything else. Because it’s, you know, you, here’s what Jung said about astrology. He said, astrology contains everything that I have found in my psychology. And I am not sure that my psychology has [00:55:00] anything to offer its older sister.

You know, it’s, it’s so profound and it’s so explicit and I’m going to write a book on it because I’d really loved it to be reoriented in the culture. I haven’t had time to do it, but it is the most. incredible tool of insight, but also of transformation. And, and partly when I work with people with, with psychedelics, I can’t believe that people work with people with psychedelics without understanding their astrology.

And when I was at CIIS, Stan Groff said once he understood astrology, he would never work with psychedelics with a person without understanding their astrology first. This, 

Giancarlo: this is fascinating, but before we go into the intersection of psychedelic and astrology, just to finish on the on the religion connection, I never heard any theologian or religious professor talking about charts.

Robert: Do you? Well, here’s the thing. Okay. So. [00:56:00] Astrology in antiquity was so highly, it was so, I’ll tell you why you’ve never heard that. It was so highly regarded. Okay. Originally the three wise men in the Jesus story were astrologers and the church was so threatened by the power of both alchemy and astrology, because here’s the thing.

It was uncontrollable. It’s the thing is they are esoteric tools. And what I always explain to people is exotericism. The exoteric is churches and synagogues and mosques, you know, and temples. And you go there because you stand in front of somebody who has religious authority, who’s an intermediary between you and God.

And basically you go there because if somebody else in your community has traded you a goat for your cow. On the weekend, you want to feel like that was, that was fair, and there’s an intermediary between you and God, and that’s an imam, [00:57:00] or a rabbi, or a priest. But when you get into esotericism, that’s between you and God.

Then it’s a democracy. Then everybody has access. And that is not what, that’s not what religious structures wanted. And my Yeah, yeah. It’s a radical 

Giancarlo: disintermediation. And 

Robert: my study was always never about religions. I mean, I have cursory knowledge of Christianity and Judaism and the Eastern religions and Native, you know Indigenous religions.

I do understand that stuff, but my study was always about how do religions come to be, you know, and whether that’s an Indigenous, Plains, Native American religion in America or Catholicism, they come to be to structure society and esotericism, you know, astrology, alchemy, mysticism, psychedelics, it doesn’t structure society.

That’s why, that’s why Timothy Leary, that’s why Richard Nixon said that [00:58:00] Timothy Leary was the most dangerous man in America. He knew that that psychedelics were fueling the counterculture because young men who had seen themselves as only waiting to grow up and and as cannon fodder in the military were like taking psychedelics and being like, wait a minute, I’m having this whole experience of life that has nothing to do with these.

paternalistic structures and old men telling me what I should do with my life. 

Giancarlo: And, and, and, and competition and materialism. Yeah. 

Robert: And so, so, so once you see through the veil of that and you see how thin culture is and how, how thin. authority is around you, you know, you don’t agree to it. And that’s one of the reasons why astrology, you don’t hear about it in, in, in religious life is because they purposely disempowered it because then, then it’s a democracy and you’re having some kind of relationship between [00:59:00] you and the cosmos.

And the, and there’s this intelligence behind everything that’s invested in you, and you don’t have to ask anybody for permission to be in contact with it. You know, and psychedelics are the same. They’re also a, they democratize, they’re a democratization tool of mysticism. You know, so, and, and, you know, that’s really the age that we’re in, you know, we’ve been in the age of Pisces, our lifetimes are on this cusp, the age of Pisces was, there’s an intermediary between you and these avatars, Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, and you have to ask them permission to understand and Aquarius, which we’re in now is that it’s a democracy, everybody has access, that’s what the Internet’s about, you know, everybody, everybody can have direct access, that’s what psychedelics are about, you know, they’re about There’s no, there’s no intermediary between you and God, between you and your, the eternal state that lies behind everything.

Giancarlo: But so I’m very curious now to understand [01:00:00] how you apply this knowledge you have of psychedelic astrology and religious study to help people to heal. 

Robert: Oh, wonderful. Yeah. Well, okay. So I would also include dreaming in that. Yeah. And meditation because look, dreaming and psychedelics happen in the same part of the brain.

To me, it’s the same mechanism. Like psychedelics are activating your dreaming mind. And so the way I do it is I make, it’s, it’s really interesting. The first thing I do with people is I talk to them about their astrology, which is usually really disorienting because all they give me is their time, date and place of when they were born.

And then I can talk to them very, Intimately about their experience, not so much the events of their life, but the, the experience that underlies these events and they, I want them to. Become aware of the invested intelligence [01:01:00] in them that every single person is an expression of the intelligence that animates everything, physical and nonphysical, and most of it is nonphysical.

You know, the quantum physicists say 96 percent of reality is nonphysical. And so I want people to begin to think about that. About that presence in their lives and notice it daily, not just when they’re on psychedelics, but to look at their dreams and learn the language of their dreams, which is a foreign language, because it’s from a much more primitive part of your brain and to understand that when they’re dreaming some part of themselves.

That is outside of their egoic awareness is trying to communicate with their ego about things. Their ego does not understand and that it needs to understand. That’s what dreaming is. That’s exactly what psychedelics is too. It’s the same [01:02:00] exact thing. And so what I want people to do is I want them to become more permeable to the numinous and also to you.

Embrace Jung’s idea that all psychological problems are at their root religious problems. And so, so that’s how I work with people. I don’t, you know, and you know, Jung, Jung, the root of religare is the root of religion. It’s a Latin word. It means to reconnect. And so when I speak about religion and when, when the word religions use, it’s really about reconnecting with the origins of one’s being.

And where people are not connected with their origins, where they’re temporal, where they’re just connected to their bio bio biography and their history and their culture, they are suffering and where all they can tell is their story about themselves and their narcissistic formation, [01:03:00] they’re going to be in misery.

And so my work with them is to introduce them to the idea that this is a daily occurrence. That that in synchronicity in dreaming and intuition in in in meditation, which is as important as psychedelics and does the exact same thing and you can do it every day that they’re, they’re, they’re disentangling themselves from a net of confusion, you know, and, and they’re, they’re also deconstructing the architecture of a false self and, and that that can be a painful experience, but it’s also liberating and joyful.

Giancarlo: But so, so just to make it a little bit more accessible, can you like give a real example from one of your clients? Maybe you can merge two, three clients. I can 

Robert: tell you a story. But from 

Giancarlo: the beginning, from when the person come [01:04:00] to you. Yeah. 

Robert: Okay. So, so basically the way people come to me, people always ask me, they want to do what I do.

Because they think it’s very interesting. And I’m like, well, they always say, how do you do it? How do I be able to do what you do? And I always say, well, you study for 30 years. You go and study with these psychedelic pioneers who are dead 30 years before, you know, people are actually thinking this is a real thing.

You do, 

Giancarlo: you do, you do LSD with Gary 

Robert: Grant when you’re four. Yeah, right, right, right. You know, I’ve been fortunate to have like faded occurrences, but also, you know, what you have to do, really, if you want to do it for a living is you have to do it for somebody, and they have to think so much of what you did for them that they tell somebody else that they should do it, too.

It’s that simple. So that is how I get all my clients, you know, and a lot of my clients in New York City are very high achievers. Tech CEOs, finance CEOs, lawyers, doctors, they’re, they’re discriminating and they’re demanding. And [01:05:00] so I got this one client who was a tech CEO and had created a couple of tech companies and sold them and had generational wealth and still felt like something was missing.

And he had a similar experience to me where his father had died when he was young and he, he, you know, his father had dropped dead going to work one day when he was young. And, you know, I felt empathy for him because I knew what that was like, even though his was more. acute than mine because my father took a few months to die, but I knew how profound that was.

And he was very curmudgeonly about what I was doing. He didn’t believe in astrology. He didn’t want to write essays. I have people write essays and some people write pages and pages and pages of essays. And he wrote about three or four words. Yes, no, sometimes. You know, [01:06:00] I, yeah, I did once, you know, stuff like that.

And so when we got working, 

Giancarlo: But so, so Robert, sorry to interrupt. What was his symptoms that he wanted to address? 

Robert: I think depression, depression, I think an underlying depression. Couldn’t 

Giancarlo: find motivation to be alive. And no, I 

Robert: just think that there was an underlying NUI. You know, a mallet is that, you know, he’d have caught, he was a very accomplished man, very educated, brilliant, had a wonderful family, you know, a long term marriage, you know, was successful by any means.

And like I had so many stories, something was missing. Yeah. And so, so we worked and you know, he was, he sort of like didn’t have time for the preparation and the preparation is the most important thing, which is the chart, the chart reading. It’s the chart reading, but it’s also me getting to know the person that I’m working with so that I can genuinely have empathy with them, you know?

And, and so I spent hours and hours and hours and hours getting to know people [01:07:00] developing rapport. Yeah. And them knowing me, you know, cause that’s what makes them feel safe and trusting 

Giancarlo: and trusting and develop the 

Robert: trust. Yeah, they have to trust. So anyway, we go to his place and he’s got this beautiful home.

And, and so we’re, we’re, he, he, he ingests what we were using and, you know, psilocybin and, and he sort of looks at me after he takes the capsules and he says well, what if I have a bad trip, you know, which never happens. I don’t believe in that. It’s never happened. People can have hard trips. Which are really difficult, but that’s like digesting a meal you’ve never digested before in your life and it’s been stuck for 20 years, you know, like it can be the best hard trips can be the best 

Giancarlo: trip can be also psycho can be also psychotic breakdown.

Robert: Yeah, that never happens in my work nice because I’m very discriminating about who I work with. And, and that’s never happened and hopefully never will anyway. So once, once [01:08:00] he starts being affected by the psilocybin, he starts moaning and wailing and crying and tearing at his clothes. And I was, I’d never seen somebody do that before.

And it concerned me and he probably went, but. Psilocybin is so non physioreactive, I don’t ever worry about somebody having a physical reaction to it and, and it affecting them. It’s all emotional. You know, they get, their heart can beat faster because they’re having an emotional experience, but it’s very non physioreactive.

Anyway, he wailed and rolled. And cried for hours, hours. We’re talking, 

Giancarlo: we’re talking five, six, seven 

Robert: grams? No, I think it was probably three. Oh, wow. You know, people, people, it’s, it’s, you know, I work with people at higher dosages. It’s more important than milligrams of psilocybin, but it, people can [01:09:00] have huge experiences at moderate dosages.

If it’s part of the preparation, it’s part of, you know, Jung said, God sends you your clients. And, and I feel like by the time they found me, they really need a transformation, you know, whatever mechanism has brought them to me. If they read a newspaper article, as in if a friend’s told them about it, if they’ve just surfed the internet and found me, I feel like it’s a very profound thing that they’ve arrived here.

And so he wails and cries, snot, tears, rolling around. Occasionally he’d look at me and he’d say, is this all right? And I’d put my hand on his shoulder and I’d say, this is great. This is fantastic. And he’d be like, and then he’d keep going. You know, he just wanted to know that it was okay, but I could see that this was something that had been stuck in him for his entire life.

And so at the end of five or six hours, he sits up and he shouts at [01:10:00] me. He says, is there MDMA in this? Cause I feel amazing. And, and I, I said to him, I said, you know, the thing is, no, there’s not, but you know, you’ve just spent the last almost 40 years of your life. with one hand on the cellar door, keeping that from coming out.

And now it’s out. And he was a guy who’d done therapy and he’d, he’d meditated and he’d done yoga. And he was like, that’s what I was trying to do the whole time. Like, like, I can’t believe that that just happened. And he was so grateful. And he was so, it was so cathartic. And I remember he called me the next day and he said, Robert, I want to go back in that room.

I left my glasses in there. And I said, okay. And he goes, but I can’t go back in there because that place is the holiest of holies. And I said, I said, it’s not like that anymore. It’s okay. You can go get your glasses. And that, that particular person has referred so many people to [01:11:00] me, you know, and like all over the world.

But what do you think, 

Giancarlo: what do you think happened on the. 

Robert: Yeah, well, you know, that’s that’s really interesting because, you know, I always feel like there are neurological correlates to what happens in consciousness, but that consciousness is primary. You know, I know Stan Groff always says there’s no proof that consciousness originates in the brain.

Nobody’s ever been able to prove that. And I think, I think the brain, it’s like it’s like a satellite radio. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, like when, when you hear all you need is love on your satellite radio, the Beatles aren’t in there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and, and I feel like we’re like that with our brains, our brains are receivers for physical reality.

So. I think what would happen in, in, in, in someone’s brain is that their default mode network, which is like the highway that they’re usually driving to work on every day that comes down. And that’s so [01:12:00] dominant. It’s such a dominant frequency in their consciousness. That it, it, it screens out everything else.

It’s so loud that you can’t hear or see what’s around it. And when you turn it off by, you know, taking a psychedelic and also putting on eye shades and earphones, that what’s all around it emerges. And oftentimes that’s trauma, you know, or memory or even transcendence or even your transcendent transpersonal origins that emerges probably more often than a cathartic traumatic experience like that one did.

But that, that basically your primary mode, the primary direction, the primary channel in your brain gets shut down and everything around it that, that is waiting to be discovered. rises up into, into awareness. Yeah. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. Yeah. Can I share, can I share a metaphor that really helped [01:13:00] me? You know how I had an accident with my motorbike and I almost tear my Achilles tendon and, and, you know, when, when, when you tear a muscle, there’s the cartilage around it.

Yeah. That immediately gets created to. You know, protect the injured muscle, right? Right. So, so one image that really helped me, which is completely speculative, is that when you have a traumatic event in childhood, it’s like you have a neurological tear of a specific of a specific neurocircuitry. Yeah.

And the cartilage equivalent of the, for the brain is some sort of armor that protect, that protect this circuit and then predispose you to go through life and recreate similar trauma. That’s why people don’t have one abusive relationship, but they have five in a row. 

Robert: Right, right, right. 

Giancarlo: And so what I think is happening with the psychedelic, with all the tryptamines, that they reduce the blood supply in this, the full moon network and they [01:14:00] melt that armor.

Yeah. And, and, and, you know, this image really helped me to to make a sense of why during psychedelic, you feel whole, you feel complete, you feel integrated, you feel aligned, you feel grateful, you feel connected, you feel great. 

Robert: But then it disappears. Yeah. Well, what James always said, what James O’Rourke always said to me, he said like during a psychedelic experience.

And he said this more in relationship to 5 MeO DMT, which is way more powerful than these other than psilocybin and DMT and you know MDMA, which isn’t psychedelic and LSD. But he’d say, you know, what happens is, is that your ego gets completely deconstructed in all these experiences. It happens really fast and really hard with five MEO.

And, but eventually your ego is going to reconstruct, it’s going to come back together. And so hopefully it comes back [01:15:00] together, incorporating the experience it’s had. And I always say to people, it’s like you’re red and these experiences are blue and you would like to come back from them purple. You know, you don’t have to be blue, you don’t have to be totally blue, but you want to, you want to have be shades of purple, you know, you want to incorporate what has happened into your egoic state going forward.

And then I also think that these experiences are so formative, they’re as real as trauma, they’re as real as personal history, you know, they’re as real as anything that’s happened in your life, so they can be transformative. Just as any other experience can be. But so 

Giancarlo: how do you keep the purple? You know, do you, how, I have a few questions.

So, you know, you have your tech CEO, he had a, a more, the formal network armor you know, decomposition or weakening, he [01:16:00] felt great. He may be, might have accessed this trauma coming from. You know, maybe the father dying and, and he never, you know, maybe had the emotional support. But so, so now what are we gonna, how do you help?

How do you help with the therapy? How often do you suggest another session? Oh yeah. What is the integration after a session like 

Robert: that? Well, you know, I, one of the things is, is I write down everything that happens during somebody’s session, everything they say, everything they do. And there’s usually a logos in that there’s a narrative and you have to act like it happened.

You know, I remember I saw this, this psychologist who’d worked with indigenous healers, I think in the Amazon, and they said, you have to live the medicine afterwards. And I hate those words, medicine, you know, like James does, but you have to act afterwards like it happened. You have to behave in [01:17:00] ways that are different.

You have to think differently, you know, you have to, you have to behave as like the information that you received is valid and that you have to plant it in your life digested, integrated, yeah, and you have to behave that way, you know, it’s like you have to interact with people, my thing is, you have to notice, but 

Giancarlo: that’s easier said than done, 

Robert: right?

Yeah, well, my thing is, okay, so you’re gonna everybody who has this experience. Is going to have a certain awareness of an intelligence in the experience and you have to engage that intelligence every day in real time. Afterwards, maybe, maybe 

Giancarlo: some people do. 

Robert: Yeah, I think a lot of people do have to act like, like we have to act.

Like that intelligence is here right now and it’s part of our getting to know each other. 

Giancarlo: Did your clients say [01:18:00] that I felt there is an intelligent bigger, greater, greater than me? Did that? 

Robert: I think everybody, yeah, I think almost all my, I’d say 95 percent of my clients experienced that. Did you 

Giancarlo: prepare them in this way?

Did you tell them that there is? 

Robert: Oh yeah, no, that, that’s my whole premise and working with people, you know, my work with people, it’s like secular religion, you know, like that, that’s, that’s it. I’m like, if you’re not looking at your life as this, Undertaking that has meaning and profundity and like exists on a continuum that, that begins before it and continues on after it.

But it’s here right now too, then that is going to be a lot of your suffering. And I also think that we, you, I, everybody. Is animated by the same intelligence at our core. You know, there’s no difference at the core. There’s differences as you get closer to egoic consciousness. [01:19:00] And I always feel like everybody that I’m working with is me.

You know, it’s some part of me that requires care and attention and healing. And that if I can treat them that way, they will come to understand. A bit of what I understand, but so 

Giancarlo: if a client says, listen, I’ve been recommended by so and so I really want to work with you, but I will, I just wanted to put a heads up that I’m really secular.

I don’t believe in a design. I think everything is random. Would you still take him? 

Robert: Yes, but it’s like what I’d say is I don’t, it doesn’t matter to me what you believe. It’s like, it doesn’t matter to me if you believe, if you believe in gravity or don’t believe in gravity. You’re still affected by it.

And so, so, so I think a lot of people I do work, especially, you know, I, I’m living in New York city and I work with a lot of people who are secular materialists. [01:20:00] And that’s actually the root of their suffering. You know, I work with a lot of finance people who have generational wealth and they’re, they they’ve really achieved and.

They’re suffering. And so people are more open, they’re people are more open than you might imagine, you know, even, even, you know, even if they have these ideas, like, I always think, like, when I see somebody says they’re an atheist, you know, usually to me, that’s somebody who’s depressed. Because they think it’s just me.

That’s how to me, that’s how they’re talking about their, their depression, you know, cause they think it’s just them. It’s like pure narcissism. Like I exist only from my origin to my death and there’s nothing I’m under any influence by except myself. Yeah. Yeah. What that comedian, Ricky, he’s really funny.

He’s that British. Gervais? Yeah, Ricky Gervais. He’s constantly talking about [01:21:00] atheism. Like, he’s an intellectual giant. And I always listen to it. It’s like listening to a child, you know? And, and the despair that, that, that people who think of themselves as atheists. Experience is profound in my experience of working with them, and I don’t need people.

I don’t need people to believe in some divine order for me to work with them, but I know that it’s going to appear anyway. You know, you don’t have this, you don’t have this thing. He had the, he had the stone carving over his door. And, and it said, and it said, and I think it said in Greek, it said called or uncalled.

God is always present. And his other wonderful quote about that is he said, the only place that God doesn’t exist is in the human intellect.

So, so it doesn’t matter to me what people think or think they think, [01:22:00] yeah, you know, they’re in for it. If they’re working with me, they’re in for it. Yeah, that’s why, 

Giancarlo: you know, it’s my, my wife makes fun of me because, you know, she comes, she was a yoga teacher. So she had intuitive, you know, like Eastern philosophy has been recognized a cosmic design forever.

Right. Right. So when she see me obsessing around, you know, this new quantum thesis, the Nobel prize, Bernardo Castro, David Bohm, try to, you know, Western science, putting the base from an understanding of this. of this cosmic intelligence. And she laughs about why do you need confirmation from the Western scientists?

We know that intuitively from the Eastern philosophy, but that’s the answer is for people like, you know, the people you were mentioning, the CEO, the New York finance people, you know, in a way they are, you know, if there is a Western Renaissance of idea of cosmic intelligence, they’re not going to be so You know, like a shame even to open the door, at least, at least going from [01:23:00] agnostic.

Robert: And here’s the other thing, Giancarlo, is, is that if the, if the huge transformations are made in society, you can laugh and you can say this. And I love yoga teachers. I have a lot of friends who are yoga teachers. I’ve had girlfriends who are yoga teachers. I mean, those huge transformations aren’t going to be made by the yoga teacher.

You know, they’re going to be made by the architects of society. Yoga teachers are healers and they’re profound and they’re disseminators of information and they’re, they do amazing things for, for people, but those are not the people. who are, who are moving the resources of society. Yeah. Yeah. It’s 

Giancarlo: funny.

It’s funny because even if this comment is not very politically correct, you’re right. Because now my wife, she then became a meditation teacher and then now she’s a, you know, compassionate inquiry, qualified psychotherapist from Gabor Mate. Right. And, and, and now that, you know, the [01:24:00] quality, and again, that’s not politically correct, but.

You know, now she has, she’s exposed to certain clients that, you know, would be, would pay attention to the quantum physics of the West in, in understanding reality. 

Robert: You know, I a hundred percent agree with her because I think in Hinduism and Vedanta philosophy, like it is all metaphors for quantum physics, you know, and they completely understood that.

And, you know, I think in my psychedelic experiences, I’ve had experiences. That have been identifiable through the structure of quantum physics. You know, and, and, and explainable, but I also think that for a lot of experiences, there are no words, you know, there really are no words. And I always explain that to my clients is like, there are no words for some of these experiences, so you don’t have to have any, [01:25:00] and, but it’s really important that the people who have the levers of power in the world.

That’s the most benefit that psychedelics can do. And if people are really narcissistic, which a lot of very powerful people are, psychedelics will just feed into their narcissism. If they 

Giancarlo: don’t have a base of understanding of, of, of, of the infinite. 

Robert: If they don’t have a humility and they don’t have a base of transformative inquiry.

Yeah. Like if you give a white supremacist. a bunch of psilocybin, they’re just gonna have a white supremacist fantasy psilocybin experience that really affirms, like you always think like, well, what if you gave Trump psychedelics? Well, Trump would just be like, Oh, I am even more than I thought I was. 

Giancarlo: But, so what do you do if you want to, you know, you need to put the hours for the 

Robert: preparation?

Yeah, you need to put the hours of the preparation and then you need to ensure that [01:26:00] afterwards that same sort of humility and that same openness continues on. Yes. You know, like it’s all about, it’s all about not having the primacy of the ego. Run everything. Yes. And having, having the mystery permeate you as often as you can and be informed by it.

Because if you allow it to inform you, it will, you know, you’ve said that if you turn towards the unconscious and this is metaphorical, it turns back towards you at twice the speed. Yes. You know, I can’t tell you how many people I work with. Who I tell him I want them to work with their dreams and they say, I don’t dream, you know, I don’t remember.

And I go, okay, so get yourself a nice book and a nice pen and put it next to your bed in the morning. And then when you wake up, have the first thing you do is write down your dreams and they’ll the next time they’re in touch with them. They’re like, oh, my God, what did you do to me? Yeah. You know, because suddenly they’re having florid dreams.

And if you [01:27:00] turn towards the absolute, it will say, yes, welcome home. Let me give you as much information as you can handle at this moment. Yes. And I think that’s the most important 

Giancarlo: thing. Yes. And also, if I may add, you know, this belief on the absolute or the mystery or. It also helps you improve the quality of your life because you develop trust and you stop judging so harshly what you might perceive as a setback, which maybe you realize that is not, you know what I mean?

Like there is that Chinese proverb, right? About the man who has the horses and, and, and the farmer was the whole three horses and one, one horse run away and the neighbors say, Oh, I’m sorry that you lost one horses. And the Chinese farmer says, maybe. And then the horse came back with three more horses.

And then the neighbor says, Oh, you’re so lucky [01:28:00] that the horse brought back. Yeah. Now you have more horses. And the Chinese says, maybe. And then the son of the farmer break a leg trying to tame one of the newest wild horses and the, and the Chinese and the neighbor says, Oh, I’m so sorry. Your son broke a leg.

And, and the farmer says, maybe. And then the military came and they’re recruiting people for the war. And so the son got not recruited because he was a broker. Right. And, and this is something I’m learning myself. You know, I used to be so attached about certain outcome of certain things, and especially in business.

And, and if you just surrender to the fact that there is a design and that event might come back being more useful than you thought, you 

Robert: can relax, you know, and, and see that like endings are always beginnings, you know, and, and, you know, there’s another great quote. I’m, I’m pointing you in a lot, but he always says that chaos is always the emergence of a new unseen [01:29:00] order.

Mm. And, and to know that. And to know that when you don’t understand what’s going on, even if you don’t like it, something else is emerging that is a more profound formation, a more profound structure than you currently find yourself in and trusting that process. It’s, it’s incredible. You know, it’s, it’s an incredible discipline and, and, you know, there’s this great metaphor, your, your, your wife will love it because it’s, it’s a Hindu story and it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, I say it on one of my podcasts, but it’s, it’s, it’s about fishmongers and it takes place in India and these fishmongers, these fishermen.

They have to travel miles every day into a village to sell their fish. And one day they bring their baskets full of fish and they travel miles and miles and miles into a village. And on the way home, a huge rainstorm happens and they’re just going to get, they’re going to be cold and wet. [01:30:00] And somebody calls to them from their home and says, please come stay here for the night.

And you know, you’ll be dry. I have dry clothes and I have shelter for you and we have food and they go, Oh, okay, thank you very much. But the person that they, the person whose house they go to, it’s, they grow flowers. That’s what they do. They, they, they, they sell their flowers. So they have rows and rows and rows of roses and daffodils and all these beautiful flowers growing.

And the fishmongers can’t fall asleep. Because they’ve never been around roses before and they hate how they smell like keeping them up. They’re so stimulated by them. So what they do is they take their fish baskets and they put them by their heads. So all they smell is old dead fish, and then they fall asleep.

It’s so funny. And we all have, we all have to think about what are our fish baskets? Wow, you know that make us comfortable in the face of, you know, the absolute. [01:31:00] Yes. You know, I love that story and, and you know, we all have to think about the ways that we’re putting our fish baskets next to our heads so we can fall asleep.

Giancarlo: Amazing. Listen, that’s a, that has been very, very, very informative and, and, and, and amusing of course. So how people can find you and do you have time for new 

Robert: clients? Yeah. Yeah. You know, I usually prioritize people by their enthusiasm, you know, like that’s what I use. And I always say to people, another word for.

psychedelics that people use as entheogens. Yeah. And entheogens and enthusiasm have the same Latin root. It’s entheos. It means to be filled with God. Yeah. And so people can find me online on my website at it’s funny. I just changed it yesterday. The psychedelic portal. com. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. We’ll put, we’ll put, we’ll put a link on the show notes.

Yeah. 

Robert: That’s the best way to get in touch with me. I also have a podcast. That’s called the psychedelic [01:32:00] portal that they can find. It’s on Apple and all, all these, all these, all these other platforms. 

Giancarlo: It’s a solo cast to 

Robert: be precise. Oh yeah. I know it’s a solo cast up to this point. It’s mostly me talking. I had this wonderful friend who was she had been a publicist and she was Steve jobs publicist and I was writing essays.

And she was like, nobody reads, you should do podcasts. And she sent me the, she sent me the software for it. So I just changed my essay, but I, you know, it might adapt into doing podcasts, but it’s a solo cast. Yeah. It’s very, 

Giancarlo: I recommend it. It’s very entertaining. I think I listened to four episodes and they were like, you know.

As, as if people have been, if people are still hearing now, they know, they know that 

Robert: your podcast will be entertaining. You know, I want to be a rock, a rock on tour and I want, I want the stuff to be fun and I want it to be interesting and entertaining. Yeah. And a little 

Giancarlo: bit politically 

Robert: incorrect. Yeah.

Yeah. I’m, I’m a little psychedelically politically incorrect, [01:33:00] but 

Giancarlo: so let me ask you, let me ask you a last question because I lived in New York for 25 years and then we 

Robert: left. I’m so sorry that you’ve left. I really am. Richard was telling me about you and I was like, Ooh, I wish he was still here. We’d have so much fun together.

Yeah. We’re gonna, I’m gonna, 

Giancarlo: I’m gonna come back from my son graduation in in May. 

Robert: Oh, I’m looking forward to seeing you. Maybe, 

Giancarlo: maybe, maybe earlier. I’ll definitely reach out. But so how do you feel, you know, you just moved to New York from LA, right? Yeah. And so how, how, how do you, how do you enjoy New York?

What’s the difference with LA? What’s 

Robert: your, what’s your feeling? Yeah, it’s, it’s really interesting. You know, there’s so many, I have so many feelings about that. I feel like I was living in Kansas. And now I’m living in Oz.

What was, what was happening was I was going, I was coming here a lot because my mom had dementia. She was an end stage dementia. Every time I went back to Los Angeles, I felt like I was in this far off Western outpost. Where nothing was really happening. And I [01:34:00] find New York to be so stimulating and exciting and profoundly, there’s a lot of consciousness here.

There’s a lot happening. And I also feel like it’s this wilderness that has a very thin crust of civilization on top of it. And I feel like there is all this kind of opportunity for mystical awareness here and for transformation. And it’s so demanding. And the people are so demanding that I feel like it’s the place where I can make the biggest difference.

Yes. And, and to have a life of consciousness and transformation in New York City is very hard. But I think if you can do it, it can be the most profound. 

Giancarlo: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think, I think people in their 50s are ready to leave New York. Yeah. You know, 50, 60s, but so I’ll send you an invite. [01:35:00] My friend Pinchback is having a show with a comedian.

I’m sure he’s going to be funny and psychedelic. I’ll I’ll send you the invite that I just received it today. Okay. Listen, let’s, let’s leave it a few months so you can have some new stories. 

Robert: Okay. I’ve got so many stories for you, Giancarlo. I just, I just got started. I got, I’ve like thinking, I didn’t tell that one.

I didn’t tell that one. I got lots more. Don’t worry. Okay. We’ll do round two. I couldn’t have enjoyed this more. Thank you so much. It’s such a privilege Giancarlo. I enjoyed speaking to you so much. 

Giancarlo: Thank you. Thank you for doing this with your life. It’s very useful. 

Robert: Oh, well, thank you for doing what you’re doing.

It’s, you’re helping a lot of people as well. I really appreciate. You’re a wonderful man. Thank you. Take care, Robert. 

Giancarlo: All right. Speak to you soon. Bye-Bye. Chat. 

Robert: Chat. Chat. Bye.[01:36:00] 

Coca Zunaray Zunarayenti. Coca Zunaray Zunarayenti.

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