The Nature of Madness: A conversation on psychosis, spiritual awakening, and psychedelics 

Really appreciate your perspective. Thanks for having these conversations and sharing.

Supportive and interesting. I like the conversation around words and language usage and mutual respect.

Very interesting, Thank-you 🙏🏼

Appreciate this a lot, thank you both. Im also a big reader and couldnt read for about a week after a ayahuasca retreat...except for Pema Chodron! everything else i couldn't cognitively process...

This is great!

I have to max the volume on my phone and can barely hear you. Need lots of quiet to hear you. Car passes by can't hear nothing. So I can hear at home not on the bus though even with earbuds. On the psychedelics for me based off my experiences they work so well because they can cause emotions to appear that in some people never existed before. Like that feeling of surrender or the feeling of oneness with outside and inside. I experienced these things long before psychedelics so it was not as profound for me as it would be for someone that never practiced self inquiry or meditation. Like the psychedelic in no way compares to what can be experienced through meditation or dreaming but it requires very little effort to make use of it. Beyond the feelings i.e. the interpretations or insights these can be highly flawed. The more mindful one is or more experience one has on the path the easier it becomes to just see the psychedelic experience as just that a psychedelic experience. The less mindful or experienced one is the more confusing the attempt at assigning meaning to an experience will be. One would think the experiences themselves are enough to deal with past traumatic experiences but they actually are not. One must work through one's past in a mindful manner. Otherwise confusion will follow. I always say if you are mindful then dependent origination will reveal its true nature. If your are not mindful then the assumption rebirth gods heaven hell spirits etc may arise. One can choose to believe in God as shinzen does that's cool. Life is all about choices. As long as one thing remains certain. Its a choice. There is no evidence period. I'll know when someone crosses the line don't know and may never know. Some questions have answers. Answering a question that has no actual real answer as can be seen by anyone that actually understands dependent origination leads only to confusion. And yes one can be highly confused and be enlightened. It just means they have more to learn about who they are as a sensory system and then learn that a sensory system has limits and then learn what those limits are. So dependent origination also deals with god and all religions. They too were taught at birth that draw that connection thats came because of dependent origination. Even your instincts are culturally derived. Thats dependent origination. Anything else is a half hearted attempt that shows a clear fear to deal with a certain aspect of dependent origination. So in my opinion psychedelics can help those with serious issues like depression. Maybe they have never felt love and thus have no real motivation to improve. Or they never felt surrender or oneness so they lack inspiration to put in the work. So the psychedelic since its a drug will force good emotions to appear and that is immensely powerful used correctly. But since people like to interpret psychedelic experiences it can be very prone to cause intense confusion to arise. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-qbNHTDE1iYg.htmlsi=vJeEpiZwPwuefwyJ Shinzen has a specialty it is limited in its range it deals with sensory experience not reality. Reality is studied and is the scope of phsycists and chemists not meditators. Also not in the meditators scope is what are we how do we work. Thats biology. As socrates would say you go to a mathematician if you want to train horses you go to a trainer of horses. You definitely should not learn surgery from a blacksmith it might not end well. And it definitely won't be pretty. 😅🤣😂 So the mind question is two fold in scope. There is the path of subjective experience and the path of neurobiology. Its why shinzen chose that instead of lets say... becoming a physicist or doctor. He looked at it as if it was a coordinate system. One line has one side mindful one side analytical or medtiation and neuroscience. Both concepts meet at rhe origin point or zero of one line on the coordinate system. The thing as a whole would involve every biology exercise or movement and subjective inquiry. I.e. we dont exist in a vacuum. Mind represents one aspect but environment represents another then genetics and then culture describes another. Its complex. But just dealing with subjective experience and objective analysis of how subjective experience arises then shinzen hit the nail on the head. He went for mindfulness and science. Nice move old man. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-lyu7v7nWzfo.htmlsi=B8QC0awCIM-9QZUo