Interview with Neal Goldsmith, PhD

A conversation with Neal Goldsmith, PhD, author of Psychedelic Healing, who has spent decades convening and curating experts in psychedelic research and therapy (including Ethan Nadelman, James Fadiman, Rick Doblin, Dennis McKenna, Roland Griffiths, Jeremy Narby, and Sasha Shulgin) through his long-running role as speaker curator for the Horizons conference. Topics include:

• Reclaiming the word “religion” from its bureaucratic, organizational baggage
• The core-shell theory of personality and how psychedelics illuminate the essence beneath it
• Comparing Internal Family Systems to Assagioli’s psychosynthesis
• Why Goldsmith prefers solitary, internally-directed psychedelic use over group ceremony (Santo Daime, Ayahuasca, Vipassana)
• Unblending as a skill, and whether it can be measured by capacity to stay grounded under increasing psychedelic challenge
• Psychedelic integration and the “dune grass” analogy for making insights stick

Transcript

Joshua: All right. Well, I’m here with Neal Goldsmith, PhD, and he wrote this beautiful book some years ago. The title is Psychedelic Healing. He has actually met personally so many people that I’ve only read about in the psychedelic space, including Ethan Nadelman, James Fadiman, Rick Doblin, Dennis McKenna, Roland Griffiths, Jeremy Narby, like all these people.

Neal: Don’t forget Sasha Shulgin.

Joshua: So yeah, people who have since passed away. So it’s really my honor to meet Neal, and I’m so delighted that he was willing to look at my book, and I am really curious to hear about what his impressions were.

Neal: Great, thanks Joshua. I just should explain how I knew all those people. Throughout my career I’ve always been drawn to the idea of convening groups of experts. I think I saw a TV show on PBS decades ago called Meeting of Minds, where they bring together actors: one is Einstein, one is Da Vinci, and one is somebody else, and they’re in the room doing a panel discussion. So in my academic career on research utilization, my job really was to bring together experts in that field and present to the management. Then when I went to corporate, I was at American Express and AT&T, focusing on artificial intelligence research utilization within the corporate sense, and again I brought in people who were making small AI projects and leaders in the academic world to talk to the board of directors. That was sort of my job to do.

When I got into it, after I left corporate, about 40, 45, I became enamored with psychedelics as a tool for psychotherapy and personal development. And because of this background of bringing people together and research utilization policy, it was a natural fit for the psychedelics realm, so I continued my career basically on innovation and change, but now in the psychedelics realm, and again I brought people together. I spoke at a conference called Horizons in their first year, and I loved it. The idea was to bring in academics to give the general public state-of-the-art research in psychedelics therapy and whatnot, but in a non-academic way. So I spoke, and then I said to the organizer, “This is great, I want to help you, I’m going to join your team.” He said, “Great.” So I then became the speaker MC and the speaker curator. I had already been contacting people because I was curious and not afraid to reach out, so I already had a network, and then for the next 10 years I was curating the speakers, and that’s how I got to know all those people.

I encourage your listeners to reach out to experts, because sometimes we’re intimidated, thinking “oh, they don’t have time for me,” but the truth is, except for the very, very most famous experts, experts aren’t inundated and would love to speak to curious, intelligent folks. So anyway, that’s just a digression about how I got to meet those people.

In your book, you cover psychedelics nicely, but it’s only one of many techniques or approaches, which I really liked about your book. It’s very holistic.

Joshua: I love that you selected that word. So many people look at all the areas I touch in my book somewhat narrowly and don’t see the connections between them.

Neal: In fact, the connections are more important than the differences, because ultimately it’s all part of one big web, one big weave. We separate things out, like the physiological versus the intellectual versus the spiritual, so we can study them almost in isolation. But don’t forget you’ve done that as an artificial zoom-in on one aspect, and real understanding comes from making sure that aspect remains integrated into the whole, because that thing is going to affect the thing you’re studying. So you can zoom in if you need to, but remembering is hard because zooming in is so effective. You can build amazing, powerful drugs, or electricity, or right angles. There’s lots of analytical things that are so powerful and helpful that it’s easy to say, “Forget about the big holistic thing, I want to go where the power is.” Anyway, you didn’t do that. You kept your eye on the holistic, the integral, and integral is a good word, because it’s integrated but also transcended.

I like that a lot about your book. It was also structurally interesting. I don’t want to get into a piece-by-piece analysis, but visually there’s all sorts of little drawings and writings, and conceptually it was that way as well. It was choppy in a very good sense. Mosaic was the word I was looking for. So that stands out immediately, especially the integral approach to the different realms you discuss. I thought it kept it real, kept it accurate, because life is made that way, of multiple…

Joshua: Anything particular stand out to you, or did you have questions about any sections?

Neal: Well, I have lots of questions actually. As I read your book, before I read it, when I just read the title, and the first word in the title is “religion,” I immediately became negative on it.

Joshua: I get it.

Neal: I don’t mean that as a criticism, I love the book, but I’m not a religious person. In fact, I’m against religion, and the reason is, except for one aspect: if you look at the history of religion, you find there’s usually a leader, an originator, who has some kind of epiphany or insight that most people don’t have. Not that he or she is magical, but it’s a moment that pops into this person who’s well prepared, and then they see things in a bigger way. So they share that with everybody around them, who doesn’t have that exact experience. This becomes somebody you idolize, and very quickly, because of how people are, they develop organizations and policies, and it becomes a group phenomenon with shunning, rewards, and teachers. That’s not at all what the epiphany experience of Jesus, or whomever, or Abraham, was. So I’m against religion because I feel it ruins the spiritual essence or insight that created it in the first place. There’s lots of power games and ego, so I’m vehemently against religion. That was my initial approach when I first started reading the book.

But as I read further, I realized you and I are in sort of violent agreement. Your use of the word “religion,” I realized, was because you like everything except the bureaucratic, systematization part. Putting that aside, then what do you have? You have a group of people who are like-minded, inquiring, loving, generous, kind, that sort of thing. That part of religion is the only part I like anyway. So as it turned out, I think we were very much in agreement. But I almost wish you could have picked a different word. Though the fact that the reader has to figure that out makes a very strong point, which I think is worth making.

Joshua: My publicist also felt like the word “religion” is a hard thing to pitch, and she probably would have preferred a different title too. But I think we have to salvage that word, reclaim it.

Neal: I agree. Especially if we can get down to, think about religion as it started, maybe 10,000 years ago. What was it? It wasn’t like the Vatican, it wasn’t an organized, global-type religion at all. It was tribal, based not just on the number of people being small, but on the fact that it’s organic. It’s one whole thing, the community. It’s not just a connection of 70 people, it’s something more, something knit genetically and culturally and in every other way. So when they practiced their religion back then, it wasn’t what it is now: bureaucratic and organized, almost like a factory that produces some product. But they didn’t have that back then. It was more homegrown, earth-based, literally having plants in the environment, embedded in a holistic way in ecology. So that’s a very different kind of religion.

Joshua: And probably like singing around the campfire kind of.

Neal: And with visionary plants. Absolutely. Loosen your perspective, because it’s so important to be able to do stuff good, like sharpen a knife, for example, so you can survive. It’s very adaptive. But the ceremonial use of the visionary plants brings us back down to the essence or the foundation of all that articulation. And that’s really important to remember, because that’s the holistic framework within which we all exist.

Joshua: Where do we go from here?

Neal: So another thing that was interesting to me about the book was your use of Internal Family Systems. I’m not a practitioner, although I’m pretty familiar with it from a couple of colleagues who are practitioners. Before this call, last night, I looked, because every time I hear about it, I think about psychosynthesis, Roberto Assagioli.

Assagioli was a Freud disciple, and he created psychosynthesis to synthesize the analytical and the Eastern religious philosophical into one framework, and it’s kind of similar to IFS. Briefly, the sense is that you have this core self, maybe with a capital S, and then you have these subpersonalities, and you can flip back and forth across them all day long. Maybe if I’m driving my car with my mother in the passenger seat, I’m the beautiful son, but let’s say somebody cuts me off and I get angry, and then all of a sudden I’m in the angry, retribution personality. Then I go back to mom, then over to organizing, and you don’t notice the switching. They’re clusters of personality traits, and the therapy of psychosynthesis is to realize this is not the real you, the essence of you, and that these are real. They don’t go away, they’re not illusory, but they’re subsidiary to this. So you stop residing in the individual subpersonalities and reidentify with the core.

So there’s a lot of similarities. When I looked it up last night, it said Assagioli and psychosynthesis predates IFS by a few decades, and one source mentioned it wasn’t based on, but related to, and that they were aware of psychosynthesis as they created IFS, but IFS is much more therapeutic-oriented, and psychosynthesis is much more philosophical framework-oriented. So those are the things really: the IFS and the religious question, the format was so wonderful.

I’m just going through the different aspects, like the idea of getting rid of belief, Buddhism. Buddhists don’t have a dogma or doctrine, well, I shouldn’t say that, Buddhism is a big thing and there’s lots of different ways to do it, but in essence it’s empirical. You don’t have to join, you don’t have to believe, just meditate and see what happens, and if it works, great, you agree with the philosophy, and if it doesn’t work, you go your way. So getting rid of the belief part reminded me of Buddhism and its approach to membership, in a sense, based on results of empirical investigation of what meditation does for the potential of a seeker.

Joshua: Yeah, that’s a good example. Buddhism is one of the, I don’t know if it’s the most, process-based religions. It’s up there, it’s one of the ones that really emphasizes process over beliefs.

Neal: Absolutely. Yes. But even Buddhism, which I think is the best religious philosophy there is, it gets bogged down in bureaucracy just like any other human endeavor if you don’t pay attention. Look at the Potala, that wonderful tall building in Tibet, home of Tibetan Buddhism. There’s thousands of young boys from around Tibet who come to Lhasa and live in the Potala and get trained to be monks, because there’s not much other kind of work to be done there, you can’t do much farming.

So they go there, and there’s teachers, and it’s the seat of the religion and also the seat of the government. It’s many stories, like 12 stories, remarkably big for that part of the world. I always think of the levels as reflective of intellectual stratification of ideas, articulation, categorization, naming things. I’m a big zero-or-one guy. Once you get to two, three, four, five, my mind glazes over, there’s so much detail. Somebody said you could spend several lifetimes cataloging the lint under the big toe of Kali or Maya. Maya is the world of illusion.

Most of those religious philosophers, Jesus and whomever else, started out with this contrast between the affairs of humans and the spiritual foundation of things, and paying attention to the foundation. They basically all say.

Joshua: Yeah

Neal: Because this stuff, the frontal lobes, kind of distract us from the foundation stuff, because it’s adaptive to be able to manipulate the environment. So you get distracted from the essence part.

Joshua: What’s different about my book, that hasn’t really been written about before, or what new ideas did you find that you hadn’t heard about?

Neal: No, I think all the ideas are out there in a way. This is not a criticism, because the great part of your book is that you pulled together these different approaches into a whole cloth that was quite effective. Like a patchwork quilt, it really comes together very beautifully as a whole. You bring together IFS and Buddhism and psychedelics. You didn’t invent those fields, but you brought them together in a unique and helpful way, which I think is the strength of the book.

Joshua: What about the Varela-Schwartz model?

Neal: Remind me of that.

Joshua: It’s a way of organizing waking experience. If we want to talk about exploring consciousness, we need some way to organize it, and that’s a way of doing that. It’s organized along first, second, and third person perspective, looking inside or outside. Looking outside, it kind of matches the pronouns of grammar. Looking inside, I think the analogy is that first person is self, second person is when you’d be blended with a part, and third person is being with a part but in an unblended way.

Neal: The reason I don’t remember it that way is because when I get to theories that name things and chunk things and categorize things, I don’t really focus into it, because there’s so many different ways to slice a pie. You can slice it into six slices, eight slices, a thousand slices. So parsing the world is useful, but there’s so many theories out there where somebody lays out a categorization scheme that maps to reality pretty well and might be helpful, but there’s so many of them, and they’re all a little different. The good ones point in the same direction, but even those chop it up a little differently, and that’s fine. So when people say, “I don’t know what approach I should take,” I say, as long as it’s venerable, been around a while, proven its success, and you found a good, sincere teacher, and you are sincere in your effort, then it doesn’t matter what school of thought or technique.

I’m generalizing, of course, and there’s lots of exceptions, but if you think of reality like a plasma, contained with magnetic fields, and if you’re here looking at it, you’re a poet and you describe it, and if you’re here, you’re a physicist, and if you’re here, you’re a religious person, but it’s all the same thing. So it doesn’t matter if you want to be a physicist or a poet, you can still get to the essence of reality. If you align with that, if you focus on that, you’re going to be a happier, healthier person. So I’m not really too big on theories, except my own theory, distinguishing between the details of the mind and the environment and essence, the core-shell theory.

The core-shell theory is where you’re born uninfluenced by psychology or your parents, and we’re all born more or less perfect in our own individual difference ways, but in essence we’re perfect, because, like a seed, there are individual differences between the seeds you plant, but they all have the same program to unfold. That’s your essence, your soul, if you will, with a small s, because I’m not religious. So that begins to emerge, but your parents, who have their own articulated personalities and neuroses, come along and say, “No, no, this is okay, but this one you can’t do anymore,” and so the baby has to create some sort of personality scaffolding that fits the template of the parents, and it’s not the essence, it’s a little different. So what do you do? You go up here, to the shell, the interface between the outside world and the inside world, and this is the ego, because the ego actually does all the work and articulation. And since it’s powerful, the soul, which has now been dismissed by powerful parents, you disidentify with that and identify instead with the powerful ego, and that becomes your sense of self and identity.

So hopefully, as you get older and leave the family and start therapy or psychedelics or whatever, you can come to see that this isn’t really you after all, and you disidentify with the ego and reidentify with your core, your essence. So that’s the core-shell theory of personality development.

Joshua: And how do you see psychedelics helping with that process?

Neal: Well, first of all, the phenomenology, the experience of taking psychedelics, is so powerful, it can be scary, distracting, confusing, overwhelming. There’s all those things that aren’t helpful for what I’m about to say, which is what do they do. Because before you can do that, you get involved with all this incredible power and weirdness and distraction and visuals. But if you’re in an environment like a tribal setting, or someplace where they really get it, or you have good guidance from strong, mature people, over time you come to relax in the face of all this excitement and get down to what’s going on deep. Then what they do is primarily illuminate. It’s like the miner’s helmet with the light on the forehead, wherever you look, it’s illuminated. But you don’t want to get too enamored with the light, with the electricity, with the bulb, you want to focus on what it’s illuminating. People who study psychedelics can get distracted again by the details, by the articulation, by studying the one isolated area. But that’s not what psychedelics do, they illuminate essence.

If you think about the core-shell theory, this is the essence, but you’re up here. So you take a psychedelic and all of a sudden you say, “Look at all this stuff.” You see this glowing, throbbing, illuminated orb at the base of you, at the bottom of you, and you know that’s me, that’s the person I was born as, that’s the real me. So you can begin to disidentify with the ego and the neurotic personality scaffolding you’ve created to deal with parental disapproval, and get back down to the essence of who you really are.

That’s for looking internally. Looking externally, people frequently talk about being in nature and seeing the beauty of the universe, looking at a mountain range, because it’s the same thing: the deepest part of you, unencumbered by the structures of modernity, is true, and so is a map, also true, in the same way. I don’t want to say “see God,” because I’m an atheist, but the way psychedelics people talk about seeing God, you can do that by looking inside, and you can see it by looking outside into nature. You don’t want to be downtown Manhattan with cars and smoke, because that’s all man-made. You want to get to essence, but you can see the beauty in that too, seeing that it’s man-made as well, all the cars and traffic, it’s just harder to notice it as that.

Joshua: So it sounds like your idea of how to use psychedelics is very aligned with self-concept differentiation, that section in the book. That’s what I’m talking about, kind of releasing your identification with all these parts of your personality that are temporary or incidental–

Neal: functional, of course, not essential. But if you can keep that articulated, analytical view toward things and simultaneously be grounded, I think of, and it’s kind of trite to say it, but I think a bit of Einstein, who was so mature in his philosophy and yet very mathematical and theoretical and analytical, seems to have kept the grounding part as well, the connections.

Joshua: So moving to the next section, the idea of using different substances for triangulation, did that resonate for you?

Neal: Well, yes, but it’s funny, again, the psychedelics are illuminants, because I often see young people in particular very interested in becoming psychonauts and cataloging different experiences from different types of psychedelics. And while there are differences, it’s true, I’m talking about the classic, classical psychedelics, the tryptamines, LSD, ayahuasca, DMT, things like that. Peyote is similar, very similar in effect, but it’s not the same class of chemicals, mushrooms is over here as well. So the classic psychedelics, there’s differences between DMT and LSD and psilocybin, specific differences, and you can emphasize the different things, some might be deeper, some might be more universal, but they all, as a class of drugs, share the same characteristic of illumination, of intuitiveness, of attention.

When I see people trying to make a big issue about how this one helps this and this one helps that, I say, well, yes, but I’m more interested in, it’s sort of like meditation in a way, psychedelics for me. Meditation is a bad word, I’m not really fond of it as a technique, but the idea of focusing inside, focusing on your breath, silencing your mind, is wonderful. So psychedelics cut through the static or the details of life and get you down to the essence. So differentiating parts of your personality and using different drugs for different purposes is useful, but the hard part is to keep in touch with this while you’re doing it, because people get enamored with the power of articulation.

Joshua: I was asking about triangulation, and you seemed to imply I was suggesting there are differences between the classical psychedelics. Really what I had in mind is looking for very different experiences, like comparing a serotonin psychedelic to cannabis to meditation.

Neal: I’m sorry, I misinterpreted, please continue.

Joshua: Having a variety of ways of entering altered states as a way of creating this controlled chaos that allows you to release your identifications, that’s kind of where I was thinking of using it.

Neal: Yes, of course, especially if you’re working with a teacher, someone who knows which approach you need right now, which is most blocked, or has the most potential for helping you. But personally I find psychedelics to be the most effective of them all, in a way.

Joshua: You mean the serotonin 2A receptor ones?

Neal: Yeah, for the most part, as compared to cannabis or meditation. I would include in the psychedelics realm things like mescaline or even MDMA in its own way. Those are psychedelic-like, and they’re illuminating. As far as cannabis is concerned, I always thought of cannabis as a mild psychedelic, which it kind of is in many ways, but it’s not a serotonin drug, which I only learned recently, and I’ve been smoking for so many years. Same thing with ketamine, it also has psychedelic aspects that are very interesting and useful, but again, it’s not a serotonin psychedelic. So there’s lots of ways to have altered states of consciousness: drumming, dancing, mortification of the flesh, sensory deprivation, and interestingly also sensory overload. Tom Roberts, who has this multi-state theory of personality and psychedelics, talks about that as well.

Joshua: So you’re agreeing that a variety of ways of altering your consciousness could help you gain more perspective, and I also wanted to agree that the serotonin psychedelics have something special about them. How did you find chapter 7, on the Santo Daime?

Neal: I know people in Santo Daime and the UDV, Mundeal, and I have a lot of respect for that. I was many times in a tribal setting up north. I love the icaros, even though it’s syncretic, both philosophically and linguistically, and that’s not me, I’m not from south of the border, so to speak. So eventually I stopped doing the Santo Daime and the UDV, which, as your listeners probably know, are legal religions of ayahuasca from South America, and they have some legal protection up here as well, the UDV has won some court cases too. I’m not against it at all. I love the various ways psychedelics, since they’re so central to my thinking and what’s good for personal development, we need to reintroduce visionary plants and psychedelic medicine in a modern context, but based on what was done tribally. So I’m a big fan of that. Approaches like the UDV and the Santo Daime are fine, and if they help reintroduce psychedelics into society, then that’s wonderful.

But I’ll give you an anecdote. I was in an ayahuasca ceremony upstate New York, they had a shaman brought in from the Amazon, from Peru. We all took it, and he was a wonderful man, all three hours with a rattle, it’s hypnotizing, beautiful, the language of the icaros. But my focus, as we’ve discussed, is core, going down to my essence. So in this ceremony, when I take psychedelics on my own, I take them alone, I go into bed, I cover up, I close my eyes, I go inside, Vipassana style. So I was doing that at this ceremony, going deep, deep down, dealing with mommy or something, and all of a sudden I noticed, right near me, I opened my eyes, and there was the shaman standing right in front of me doing the rattle, because he didn’t want me to drill down, he wanted me to stay up and be part of the room, which for me was one level higher than I really wanted to be. So after a while I stopped doing my icaros.

I’m, for better or worse, a Northerner, a product of modernity, from America, and I don’t want to emulate different traditions too much. I want to learn from them, but recreate the power, the beauty, the insight, the benefit of those tribal efforts into a more modern context. That’s why I’ve been up with psychotherapy and psychedelic therapy. I’m not myself a psychedelic therapist, although I’ve done it occasionally, but that’s not my job. But the way we’re reintroducing psychedelics into medical practice, and eventually I’m looking forward to divinity students being trained with psychedelic substances. That’s the approach, rather than just adopting whole-hog approaches from south of the border.

Joshua: It sounds like the part of the psychedelic experience you appreciate is that it enables you to feel closer to your core self.

Neal: Yes, although I’d state it a little differently, because the way you state it is still dualistic. It becomes, you just see it, realize it, become it, emanate it.

Joshua: I could try to phrase it in a less dualistic way: to settle into the awareness of your own being. How about that?

Neal: Sure.

Joshua: But did you follow my psychological analysis of what happens in the Santo Daime, that in those ceremonies, that isn’t the goal, that you’re using psychedelics but not as a way of settling into your core self and experiencing that.

Neal: Tell me more, I want to understand exactly what you’re asking.

Joshua: So what was your understanding of firmness in the Santo Daime?

Neal: Firmness meaning like will, or essence, do you mean?

Joshua: Well, just to refresh, the beginning of chapter 7 starts with the idea that can we find a practice where we can have our feet in, kind of straddling two different altered states. One altered state is settling into the ground of being, feeling one’s core self. And then the other thing we’re trying to straddle is the community connection, feeling the camaraderie of other people, because sometimes the feeling of just being yourself is like you’re alone, and it can feel a little lonely.

Neal: That’s an interesting question, because the way I described it, and metaphorized it visually, is the core-shell, and it’s very dualistic, really, and stratified, in a way. As I’m listening to your question, I’m thinking, well, if you’re really in touch with your essence, or with nature, whichever approach you choose, or through drumming or whatever, if you get in touch with that multi-state, that altered state, it’s an altered state, meaning the fact that it’s altered so you can notice it. That’s why sensory overload and sensory deprivation both work, because you’re just not in the normal, day-to-day, mindless routine.

Joshua: So maybe I could explain a bit more about firmeza. That’s kind of the aspiration, to be able to straddle those two directions, to be in the community and also in solitude, experiencing your own being. The way that’s done in the Santo Daime is that the ayahuasca, or Daime, helps you feel your core self, but then what participants are asked to do is put all their attention into tracking what’s going on with the group. You’re fully involved in trying to keep track of where you are in the lyrics, keeping the rhythm, and if it’s dancing, then you’re moving in a very specific way. How does that land for you?

Neal: Well, as I thought about your question, I realized that if you’re truly in touch with your essence, it’s not just about being down here and ignoring all of this stuff. It’s multi-dimensional, it’s all of it. So if you’re down here, you’re also, I think, successfully in touch with the group.

Joshua: It’s both duality and non-duality at the same time. Is that what you mean?

Neal: Yeah, they call it non-duality, because they don’t want to talk about the difference between duality and unitary approach. So there’s a duality between duality and unity. It gives me a headache. But on the other hand, this organization part, the structure, and, as I recall, they separate male and female, and there’s structured dancing, to me, I’m not a big fan of that, to be quite honest, because there’s so much beauty in that religion, I’m not trying to trash it in any way, but those specific things, the dancing, the separation, I think it’s unnatural in a way.

Joshua: It feels too organized?

Neal: And also it’s one man’s or one group’s opinion. You go 50 miles down in the Amazon, you find them organizing it a little differently and having wonderful results anyway. I’m not big on doctrinaire things where there’s an organization that has some process you have to surrender to. Maybe that’s my egotistical, modern approach to resisting surrender. I don’t mean to trash that. It could very well be that maybe I should learn to surrender to that, harmonize or heal my Western approach to things. I don’t know. We all learn through our whole lifetimes. My patients used to say, “Oh geez, I’m 45 years old, how come I haven’t figured this all out yet?” I said, dude, on your deathbed you’re still going to be working on stuff. It’s the unfolding process.

Joshua: But did you make the connection between this practice of firmness and the capacity for unblending, the psychological idea of unblending.

Neal: Tell me more.

Joshua: Do you know what I mean by unblending? Should I define it, or–

Neal: Define it for me, please.

Joshua: Suppose I have a part of myself that is terrified of public speaking. If I blended with this part, it would be controlling my behavior, maybe I’d freeze up, or say things that were limiting or distracting. But if I can stay unblended from this part, I still feel its fear, I’m still aware of it, but I have more choices, it wouldn’t necessarily be controlling my behavior, I would be more self-led in my behavior.

Neal: Who is the ‘my’ in “my behavior”? When you unblend from that fear, you’re retaining your identity, disidentifying with the fear and identifying with maybe a deeper, wholer part of you. What is it unblending to, is what I’m asking. I have my own sense of that, but to me the more operative part is, unblending, yes, but to what?

Joshua: To the mystery, right? Who knows?

Neal: It’s terrible mystery!

Joshua: If you just keep unblending parts of yourself and keep looking for the deeper and deeper core, what do you find?

Neal: The only question there is what you find is the question of why is there something rather than nothing.

Joshua: Yeah, okay, that’s a good one, that’s the question.

Neal: I don’t mean to be too bold, but if you take scientific inquiry all the way down to subatomic particles, you get to that question. And if you take religion and spirituality all the way down to essence, why is that at all? So, why is there something rather than nothing? To me that’s an unanswerable question, either by science or religion. The Hindus have a term for it, suchness. If you will, suchness. I like that term.

Joshua: I think we’re aligned on the idea that suchness is under there, but understanding or studying that is very valuable, and I would counter that what’s equally valuable is the practice of unblending, the practice of peeling back those layers, that’s the key practice, going from blended to unblended. How does that land for you?

Neal: These are just words and terms, but, like I said earlier, you want to be down there, but also in touch with the details, you just don’t want to get lost in the details and make that your identity. If you fundamentally identify with this, you can carry on your individual roles, always grounded in this part, which keeps you ethical, honest, generous, kind, loving in the details of what you do.

Joshua: But the way you’re describing it is structural, and the direction I’m trying to push is, isn’t it a skill? Some people get carried away by their emotions all the time, they get blended, they throw things, but other people seem to be more self-led, very rarely get taken over.

Neal: Sure. So, just to be simplistic, you take a psychedelic to notice all this structure, the way it’s organized, and then you adopt a practice, meditation or something, to help you stay that way. In psychedelics, one of the biggest topics in recent years is psychedelic integration, which postulates: look, a psychedelic experience is amazing, but what’s the point of it if you forget it by Friday?

The old analogy is you go to an anti-smoking group on the weekend, and by the next Friday you’re smoking cigarettes again, because the whole environment impinges back on you. So both are important, with integration you have to stay in touch with the insight from Saturday night. You journaled all day Sunday, and then Monday you’re back at work. Monday morning you sit for 10 minutes and remember Saturday, and when you get up and go to work that morning, you say, “Geez, I’m so glad I did this, because if I hadn’t sat, I would have forgotten that thought I had about grandma on Saturday, it would have just been a deep memory, I’d never have noticed it again.”

Joshua: So you’re describing practices that help people develop more skill in unblending. One of the practices you identified is a kind of integration or journaling practice after a psychedelic trip, so you can notice more about the structure of your personality and become more self-led in the future, is that the idea?

Neal: Basically, I think, yeah. There are lots of other techniques to help you instantiate, give roots to the insight that’s so out of the ordinary, so different from the rest of your life, which tends to get forgotten. It’s like dune grass. The dunes get washed away in a storm, so the town plants dune grass, bulldozes more sand up, has a new dune, plants the plants, but the next storm washes away the plants. So, that’s psychedelic insights. What they do is put this ugly orange netting over the dune grass, and when the dune grass has finally taken root, they remove the netting. The netting is some technique that helps you remember Saturday night long enough for the insights to integrate into your life, so your life can reorient and rearrange itself around those insights rather than getting rid of them. You hold them in place, focus on them, integrate, so the rest of your life realigns to that healthier perspective.

Joshua: Yeah, I like that analogy.

Neal: A lot of different techniques to do that. Journaling is one, I’m not a big fan of, but it’s noticing. Meditation has so much baggage from the East, this idea of enlightenment, so intimidating, especially for Westerners, thinking “I can’t live in a cave for 40 years, how am I ever going to attain enlightenment,” and that’s also hierarchical and judgmental. So there’s a million different techniques for focusing, and psychedelics, by the way, is for noticing in the first place, just one of many techniques, and then what you do after is many, many techniques. The effort, the focus, the conceptual understanding of the framework, and what you’re trying to do within it, is much more important than whether you choose meditation or journaling or Santo Daime or psychedelics at home in bed. Those things are important to think about and notice, and the differences are important.

Joshua: Did you also notice the other aspect of firmness that’s really key, the idea of progressive challenge, because you’re negotiating the dose with the server, and if you drink too much daime, you won’t be able to remember what to sing, you can easily lose track of the lyrics and not be able to remain synchronized with the group.

Neal: So maybe that’s an effort to keep the dosage at a moderate level. I’m glad you mentioned that, there’s a big difference between the different strengths and dosages, and approach to psychedelics at different levels. I’m not, personally, my personal use of psychedelics, I’m not somebody who takes massive doses and wants to fly to Alpha Centauri and sit at the feet of God and touch the heaven of his garments. That’s not really my approach. My approach has been psychological, for personal insight, introspection, like I’ve already been talking about the whole conversation, looking within and seeing the ground of your being. I even contrasted that to mountainscapes, because I’m more focused on the internal approach. I’m sorry, I lost my train.

Joshua: What if we could measure your skill in unblending by how much psychedelic you can use and still remain connected to the group?

Neal: So, I like moderate doses, not overwhelming doses, and I wanted to give you this analogy, from Masters and Houston, who did the first large-scale research on psychedelics in the mid-60s. They identified four different levels and gave them specific names, but I’ll give them my own names. This one is sensory, visual, sexual, auditory, music, colors, visual distortions. These levels, by the way, can be attained through one evening as you get more and more into it, or over increasing dosages over weeks, months, or years, getting used to the process. It’s not all just about dose. This next level is the psychodynamic level, where you get into your history, your mama, your daddy, your childhood. This one I’ll call the Gaian approach, seeing the whole universe, holistic, healthy, perfect harmony of the universe, including the planet. And then this one is what you might call white light, or samadhi, or ego death, where you’re not really in touch with a sense that there is a self.

Those are all wonderful things to experience, frankly, but for me personally, I focus here. If I had to dance and sing a particular song, I couldn’t do it up here, I’d have to be down in one of these two levels, more likely, to keep my act together. So perhaps in a reverse way, the Santo Daime philosophy or methodology is to keep you at a moderate level, so you’re not out at Alpha Centauri. I haven’t done Santo Daime, so I’m not really sure.

Joshua: No, I think your guesses are accurate, but what I want to press you on is, wouldn’t there be individual differences in how much Daime you can drink and what level you’d be at?

Neal: And if, over time, you can keep your act together and retain your perspective and attention, then the novice user might be overwhelmed, but somebody familiar with the process might actually be able to sing and dance even on a significant dose.

Joshua: So couldn’t we call that a skill, your ability to keep things together under increasing challenge?

Neal: Sure.

Joshua: And is that skill the same as the skill of being able to stay unblended?

Neal: Related, but not the same exact application. If psychedelics are illuminants of attention, then those are two different ways that manifests: being unblended, and being able to retain your attention, maturity, spiritual maturity, and aging, hopefully in the right direction with the aid of these illuminants. It’s like cleaning your glasses, like that famous Blake quote, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, we would see the universe as it really is, infinite.” That’s what Huxley used for his book title, The Doors of Perception, about his mescaline, and that’s also like the band got their name. In a way it’s like cleaning your glasses.

Joshua: But that’s really the proposal in chapter 7, that we can measure this skill of unblending through looking at your ability to hold it together under increasing challenge from the psychedelic.

Neal: Yeah, but again, I’m sorry, it’s not my approach. I don’t think struggling to hold it together, or developing the skill to hold it together by being exposed to challenging things, I’m not sure tha t’s my approach. My approach is founded in love and relaxation and acceptance, not challenge.

Joshua: Okay.

Neal: There’s enough challenge inside you in the first place, and the approach to internal challenges is acceptance, breathing. If I’m focused on a challenge, let’s say dancing, it keeps me from the essence I’m trying to get to, which I might be able to get to through simple breathing and inner focus and meditation. So I’m being distracted, in a way, and I have to avoid the distraction, let all that stuff happen while I’m going down, down, down. I don’t want to be distracted, I want to be loved and released and relaxed down to the essence, that’s generally how we get it.

Joshua: People can use psychedelics for many different reasons, and the intention you say you’re bringing to your psychedelic use is totally legitimate, it’s just that the Santo Daime paradigm looks at it from kind of the opposite direction.

Neal: And you know, it’s an interesting perspective about the possible ways you can disengage, untangle, and disidentify with the mind. But I also felt there was something, and it’s one of the reasons I’m not really interested in Amazonian-based ayahuasca-type approaches, the separation of sexes, of genders. I found that to be… it’s different now, I think. Have you ever done a Vipassana silent meditation retreat?

Joshua: I’m not sure that I have. I’ve done plenty of other meditation retreats, but maybe not Vipassana.

Neal: Are you familiar with Vipassana?

Joshua: Yes.

Neal: So in that setting, at least the ones I went to, they also separated the genders, and it was less distracting, really, if I was sitting next to a beautiful woman, I’d be more distracted. So maybe that’s another reason I tend to do psychedelics alone, I find it easier to go inside, to zone in, go to the ground of my being, Huston Smith, I think, used that term. So I want to get rid of distractions, close my eyes, cry, cry. I love crying, what could be more healing than warm salt water. In the ayahuasca ceremony, I cried a lot too, I went twice, and I cried.

They teach you to focus, the first morning is focused exclusively on feeling your breath on your upper lip, four hours, they have meditation to practice what they’re teaching about attention. It was really quite wonderful, but it’s 10 days, and as the days went on they had different exercises, morning and evening, and they’d say, “Here’s the lecture, spend an hour practicing,” and during the practice hours, instead of focusing on what they taught, I would start thinking about things I’d done wrong, the way I treated my son, different mistakes I’d made, and I would cry, cry, thinking about my mommy and daddy, just crying. I cried so much I had to change my t-shirt.

In Vipassana, which is a silent retreat, you’re allowed to speak to the teacher during the lunch hour, a private session. I went to him and said, “I can’t concentrate on the exercise.” He said, “Remember what we told you the first day about meditation, how you get an itch on your nose, and instead of scratching it, just wait and say, ‘I wonder how long it’ll take before this feeling goes away,’ and by the time those five seconds are over, you have an itch somewhere else, so the sensation is transitory, don’t focus on it.”

And he said, in Buddhism, there’s not five senses, there’s actually six, and the sixth sense is your emotions, and it makes sense, because it’s visceral, it has to do with adrenaline and dopamine, it’s a bodily sense, internal. So just like the itch on your arm, your emotion will pass, and that was really helpful.

Vipassana is wonderful, I never thought I could make 10 days, it’s really eight because of travel time, but it was a spectacular exercise. The first day or two you’re done cataloging your mind, your many sins, your mom and daddy, two solid days of lecture and meditation, then you get into the essence, and that can be scary and difficult. People leave on the third day.

Joshua: Well, you’ve been very generous with your time. Do you have any questions for me, or is there anything else we should discuss?

Neal: I have professional questions for you, about the publishing process, whether you have an agent, if you’re doing public speaking, but this may not be the format for doing that, maybe we can stay on a little bit after and you can answer.

Joshua: Yeah, sure.

Neal: I love the book, and I wish you well with it, and I hope this conversation helps too, and let me know if I can help in any way, it’s nice to get to know you, so we can talk more.

Joshua: Well, maybe we’ll wrap it up, and I’ll just, we can continue after I cut the recording.

Neal: Great, thanks. Yep.