Shamanism and Psychedelics

Episode Transcript

Dr. Rob (00:02.301)

All right, Michael Winkelman, welcome to the program. Thank you for taking the time to be with us.

Michael (00:10.638)

It’s very pleasure to be here.

Dr. Rob (00:12.555)

Yeah, I was hoping for those of us not familiar with the field of anthropology, what’s your interest in it? What are you contributing through your research? What are the burning questions that you hope to answer?

Michael (00:28.558)

A lot of stuff there. Well, anthropology is study of human beings, most comprehensive approach to studying human beings, biological, physical, prehistorical, evolutionary, contemporary. We often think of it as being a four or five or six field area of physical anthropology, biological anthropology, archaeology, cultural anthropology. Some people would throw in ethology, cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology.

Michael Winkelman (00:38.887)

four or five six people in area of physical anthropology, biological anthropology, archeology, cultural anthropology, ethyology across cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, humanistic anthropology, American anthropology, the other 35 different organizations that it’s an umbrella for. it’s a comprehensive study of human beings and pretty much all their manifestations. And I use it to study, you know,

Michael (00:57.55)

Humanistic anthropology, the American Anthropology Association has like 35 different organizations that it’s an umbrella for. It’s a comprehensive study of human beings and pretty much all their manifestations. And I use it to study healing and psychedelics and sort of exemplify this notion that we need to bring together the, know, phenomenological, experiential dynamics, the cultural dynamics, the biological dynamics, and ultimately

Dr. Rob (01:05.675)

It’s all right.

Michael Winkelman (01:08.807)

and psychedelics and exemplify this notion that we need to bring together the

Phenomenal experiential dynamics, the cultural dynamics, the biological dynamics, and ultimately the evolutionary dynamics. I’ve spent a lot of time to understand what is that clinical and laboratory sciences tell us about the dynamics of these science in terms of how they’ve, of that can be used to interpret something about why cultures use them in way they I’ve also been doing the other directory recently, is

Michael (01:26.648)

the evolutionary dynamics. So I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand what it is that clinical and laboratory sciences tell us about the dynamics of these plants in terms of how they affect our brain and how that can be used to interpret something about why cultures use them the way they do. I’ve also been going the other direction recently, which is how can understanding the cross-cultural patterns of entheogen use inform entheogenic science?

Michael Winkelman (01:45.495)

How can understand the cross?

Michael (01:56.62)

Indigenous practices not as just idle curiosities, but as kind of, you know, important empirical database about how to optimize the use of these plants.

Dr. Rob (02:07.819)

And what is an enthyogen?

Michael (02:11.776)

Entheogen, entheogen, well, I think etymologically it’s literally, you know, the God within. was coined as an alternative to terms like hallucinogen and psychedelic, which had, know, pejorative medical meetings and homipoliticized meetings. It was basically the notion, you know, across time and cultures, people take these substances and discover some kind of spiritual dimension and they…

often identify that as being within themselves. So, there are plants that put us in touch with God, however we come to know it.

Dr. Rob (02:44.543)

Yeah, this kind of a cross-cultural perspective that you take. When you look across Indigenous and theogenic traditions, what are the main elements that you see that they all share in common?

Michael (03:02.414)

Well, I’d had suspicions about this for years, in part because I had looked at shamanism cross-culturally. But it really came together for me when I put together this handbook of entheogenic healing that came out last year. 20 case studies done by anthropologists, seven of them on indigenous cultures, six of them on what we might say are more mestizo cultures, and then sort of postmodern and medical views. what was really striking about these indigenous practices

largely described in Mexico and Central America, northern parts of South America, and the mestizo practices is that they have a remarkably similar profile in how they approach the use of these substances. And what you tend to find across cultures is that you need to prepare, and the preparation typically includes either extensive food restrictions or literal fasting for a day or two or more, but food restrictions can be up for a couple of weeks beforehand.

Sexual abstinence you don’t have sex for some days before sometimes weeks before to weeks afterwards And you have to prepare yourself emotionally then the ceremony is a nighttime ritual overnight ritual and It involves basically, you know your family your family takes you you’re with your friends. It’s a community setting and With the the healer you typically, know everybody ingest the entheogen

in this nighttime ceremony and it may be potentiated with other plants, a diet, a purge, use of tobacco, the substances. And then singing, dancing, chanting music, what I would call the mimetic suite, engaging this ancient representational capacity of humans that emerged about a million and a half years ago. That basically allows us to express ourselves through the sounds of music, through the tones of music, through

pantomime, through enactment, through dance, these kind of things. And the visionary experiences then are thought to be the focus of how you determine what caused your illness and how to heal. So you have the entheogens basically as a tool for revealing the cause of the illness. And in this context it’s worth mentioning that in so many of these cultures they have this notion, well it’s not really the ayahuasca that heals. The ayahuasca puts you in touch with the spirits

Michael (05:21.41)

The spirits teach you the songs and it’s the songs that are really the healing technologies here. But the revelations through these visions basically are thought to tell you how to deal with the problem. What it is that you’re going to need to do and while this may involve aspects of the ritual and maybe even effects of the entheogen, the idea is that it’s telling you what you need to do to change your life and your behavior and how you relate to others.

and they address a remarkably broad range of conditions. On one hand, we can say, know, physical illnesses, know, various kinds of internal illnesses, lack of pregnancy or fertility, whole range of emotional conditions, social conflicts, often expressed in concepts of sorcery or witchcraft. And then finally, this notion that you have an integration period that may last for days to weeks.

And once again, the integration is a social reclusion period. You you eat at home, you don’t go out, you don’t go see strange people, you don’t enter into relationships, you don’t go out drinking, don’t, you know, go out and have, you know, your good old life. You stay at home and think about what it is you’re gonna change about your life. And you continue this period of sexual abstinence. So to me, this is kind of a cross-cultural profile.

that ultimately I think maps on very well to what I’ve been studying for years about the evolved psychology of ritual healing. And of course, of that is shamanism.

Dr. Rob (06:53.259)

Yeah, amazing. What is that, what is these commonalities? What do they tell us about the evolution of these practices?

Michael (07:03.874)

Well, I think that there’s a few things that are pretty clear there. mean, one I would point to is this sort of a preparation for the 5-HT 2A neurotransmitter-receptive system, the special serotonogic system that Carhart-Harris and others, Brouwer have looked at, sort of suggested that this system is not only what we all well recognize as being the primary system stimulated by

most psychedelics, but it’s also a stress adaptation mechanism. And it tends to be a mechanism that gets elicited when you have chronic stress that is then compounded with acute stress. And so this is when the 5-HT2A system kicks in and it provides a variety of different advantages. It reduces stress. It allows us to take different perspectives on the challenges we face.

provides various forms of emotional modulation and that it ultimately provides a variety of ways of enhanced learning, associative learning. So we’re basically by doing these preparatory things, stimulating this action evolved capacity for moving into a more adaptive approach to dealing with problems. Our normal serotonogic approaches, know, put up with it, tolerate it. And 5-HT2A is like, no, let’s just change this, man.

Dr. Rob (08:28.595)

It just changes the game altogether. And this is serotonin, right, that you’re talking about at the center of this. And serotonin is associated with reward, that kind of.

Michael (08:41.612)

Well, that’s more dopamine with reward. Serotonin, I think the first thing I would say about serotonin is that it’s a very special class of neurotransmitters that’s characterized as neuromodulators, which is to say it has the capacity to modulate the activity of many of the other transmitter systems. In particular, one of its major roles is the regulation of the dopaminergic system.

But one of the interesting things about the psychedelics is that in my understanding and this has not been widely addressed But it’s out there in the literature There’s really two phases of the psychedelic effects on the serotonin logic system. The first one is a stimulate serotonin It locks into the receptor sites. It’s highly resistant to the reuptake mechanisms. It doesn’t get removed from the sites And then the second part of it and this is more

well documented in the cases of volinvitor’s work. The second phase is this ascending discharge pattern that’s partially serotonogic but also is dopaminergic. And so eventually the second level effects of the psychedelics is to liberate the dopaminergic system. So this system is being primed by ritual. And in many cases we can see things like singing and dancing and fasting all stimulate

dopamine, the dopamine reward systems, the singing, the dancing, these kind of mimetic activities stimulate the endorphin system. Singing has been shown to stimulate serotonin and norepinephrine. And so apart from the psychoactives that are being used, all these different aspects of ritual are in essence stimulating some of the most important neurotransmitter systems of the brain to optimize their function.

before the psychedelics ever get into the system. And then you have this whole suite of effects that comes out of the singing and dancing, which is enhancing the bonding between people, enhancing the emotional dynamics of the person. And so these parts of ritual, I think, are very important in terms of how we can optimize the use of psychedelics. And so far, the psychedelic renaissance has taken the drugs, but they haven’t realized that

Michael (11:00.194)

Those cellulose rituals were a really important part of how to manage and optimize the effects of the substances.

Dr. Rob (11:07.243)

Yeah, that’s certainly a kind of a critique of current psychedelic use that they’re not really looking at the cultural context of how those drugs were used or how those plants were used.

Michael (11:23.424)

I would qualify that by saying we might want to call it the cultural context and that’s part of the reason why… it’s just a bunch of their rituals, you know, we don’t need to worry about the rituals. But from my point of view, it’s sort of the biogenetic structural context. And this is what is revealed by these cross-cultural similarities. They’re doing it basically the same kind of ritual format in all these different cultures. Well, the conclusion is it’s not really cultural. Sure, cultural.

sort of reinforces these patterns because they come from tradition, but the similarities across them, the fasting, the abstinence, the nighttime activities, you know, the social group, the drumming, the singing, the dancing, these have to do with how our brains function. And they have to do with how the ritual context could optimize the way in which our brains and our emotional systems are able to accommodate the effects of these substances. So,

Yeah, we need to come to a better understanding of what these rich traditions can tell us because right now, we got it backwards. We started eight in the morning and ended six in the evening instead of starting at eight in the evening and ending at six in the morning. And the other thing that should be obvious here that I forgot to make explicit is that you’re incorporating the dream cycle. And dreams are very important mammalian adaptation to enhance emotional adaptation, learning and memory integration.

So if we’re trying to sort of put the pieces together in a better way, running it through the dream cycle is taking advantage of our innate biostructural capacities to integrate information and process emotional dynamics.

Dr. Rob (13:03.083)

Amazing. I was looking over the notes. You mentioned kind of one of your current interests is Terrence McKenna’s book on food of the gods and his idea of this stoned ape theory, as it’s called sometimes, meaning that if we look back

back at our human evolution, there must have been a period where humans discovered some of these substances in plants and mushrooms and used them in this way to further their evolution in a sense. Can you walk us through that idea a little bit more?

Michael (13:52.907)

Okay, there’ll probably be a pretty long answer. So cut it and get me to clarify if you want along the way. So yeah, Terrence McKenna, you know, based on very limited scientific evidence, you know, enhanced visual acuity, you know, but mostly just, you know, noting what happened to people that took psychedelics in groups is that, you know, there’s this enhanced emotionality that goes along with it. And he was very well aware of the widespread use of, you know, psychedelics and theogens and pre-modern cultures around the world.

And from there it was like, okay, well, how far back does this go? And what were the implications? But his idea was basically that, you know, human evolution was enhanced, stimulated, perhaps even in some substantial ways underwritten by the effects of psychedelics. But, you know, this was back, you know, 35 years ago before we had really any clinical science on it. I mean, Terrence had limited data and a very acute mind and he intuited something

that I think is really right on. Now, how would have psychedelics contributed to human evolution? There’s lots of different ways in which it would have. It probably contributed to it in a somewhat passive way before humans ever began to try to figure out how to institutionalize it in ritual and shamanism. Why? Because there just all of these really important, you know, health enhancing effects of the serotonin analogues. I mean,

They stimulate neuroplasticity. You can rewire your brain. You can recover lost brain networks. You can stimulate the development of new neural networks. So these notions of plastogenesis and neurogenesis that are coming out today. I mean, we were probably benefiting from these effects before we ever really figured out what it was that we ate today that put us in this really weird state. What we know from the clinical research is that

Psychedelics tend to enhance sociology, they enhance extroversion, they tend to reduce fear reactions, they enhance bonding. There’s this whole suite of social behaviors that enhance our ability to live together in well-modulated, emotionally bonded groups. And so these first kinds of effects could have easily happened before humans ever figured out, okay, we need to use these deliberately.

Michael (16:16.834)

But the expanding clinical research suggests that what would have been the consequence of just the incidental incorporation of the mushrooms into the human diet would have been the increased ability to deal with illness, to deal with stress with the 5-HT2A receptor mechanisms, to be able to get along better with people. And ultimately, there’s evidence that they enhance problem solving. And in a curious way, these may have become even more important

as we became dependent upon culture. Because we know about human beings is that, our basic survival tool is not our teeth or our claws, it’s our ability to solve problems. It’s our ability to get along together in groups to create culture as the instrument for adaptation. And what has likely happened across long periods of human evolution is that these substances contributed not only to the creation of cultural systems,

but curiously also to this temporary suspension of them. And one of the big problems that we face is unlearning. You know, we get in a habit and we keep doing the same habit over and over again, even when we recognize it as a habit we need to break, you know, it’s like, it’s the unlearning part that’s difficult. And there’s good reason to believe that the psychedelics at least perhaps temporarily sort of wipe the slate clean, take us back to a more primordial form of information processing.

One of the ways in which it’s been discussed today in the psychedelic research literature is a shift from a trans-modal, top-heavy dominance over thought, where the frontal parts of the brain are telling everything down below what’s real and what to do and how to think about it and how to respond to a unimodal, a bottom-up system of the brain functioning, where our deeply embedded emotional and sensory and perceptual capacities are now

allowed to express their own intelligence. So one of the ways in which I’ve characterized this is that it may be that one of the benefits of using the psychedelics is that it allowed us to sort of, at least temporarily suspend the current software program, revert to the ancient ones, what we could discuss in terms of innate intelligences or, you know, our sort of functional operational systems and allow those systems to sort of come back to the surface to reprocess information.

Michael (18:42.486)

and to give us a new information, dump perhaps a new synthesis. Now, eventually these plants were incorporated into what we can broadly call a foraging shamanism. And I want to emphasize that what shamanism was, you know, in hunting gatherer cultures has very little, if anything to do with what people think shamanism is today. So reading my book, Shamanism, a Biopsychosocial Paradigm of Consciousness and Healing, you’ll get a notion of

what were the patterns of indigenous healing practices like before they became agricultural societies dominated by chiefs and priests. But eventually this was the context in which psychedelics were used in human culture. And here we probably had a very direct relationship between the evolution of shamanism and the effects of the psychedelics. And we’re gonna presume that over most of evolutionary time,

These were the psilocybin containing mushrooms, maybe also the Amanitas. But what we know from chimpanzee data is that they had nighttime ceremonies. I should have mentioned this earlier. This is what we’re connecting with. Chimpanzees do regular nighttime ceremonies, uniting the group together with the alpha male, picking a tree and start doing long distance calls and doing bipedal displays and calling the group together. And the group comes back together and they do a submission to the

dominant male, then they all get up in the tree together and they beat on the tree, they drum on the trees with their hands on their feet and they engage in vocalizations and have a good time. So this is sort of like the deep psychology of ritual healing and I think this is where psychedelics started to help bring the separation from what chimpanzees do to what we recognize in human culture. So eventually it was in the context of shamanic ritual that the healing capacities of these substances

were expanded through the whole visionary aspects that they create, through the emotional dynamics that they invoke, through the of bonding that they could create with others, and a whole dynamic of healing through what I would say elicitation of endogenous healing mechanisms. I mean, even today people say, well, that’s just the placebo effect. Now, you missed the point, man. The placebo effect is when what you think changes how your body functions. And so I think one of the

Dr. Rob (20:58.507)

Thanks

Michael (21:04.502)

important dynamics of the shamanic healing was the alpha male performance. Certainly some women were shamans, but in the shamanic cultures, they were traditionally males for the most part. And they do this dominance displays to confront the spirits. And it also has a secondary effect, the boisterous kind of noisy drumming at nighttime keeps predators away. They use drums to scare out, you know, wild cats to hunt them, you know, they don’t like that sound.

So we had this multifunctional protective dynamic going on. And this is where the psychedelics ultimately began to have their most central, deliberate, intentional use within human culture.

Dr. Rob (21:42.924)

Amazing. Well, that gives us that a whole different view of human cultural evolution, where the of the discovery and the use of these psychedelics from nature, through plants and mushrooms and perhaps other substances like frogs, right? Some frogs have psychedelic skins. That we start to see,

Maybe people were building these pyramids and temples out of their visionary experiences with psychedelics and kind of receiving these inspirational visions from the unconscious mind, what Jung would call the collective unconscious, and translating them into culture.

Michael (22:37.9)

Well, you know, there certainly are, you know, some agricultural societies, maybe with a complexity of chiefdoms where the use of entheogens were important. And Scott Fitzpatrick has a book, I think, Psychoactive Plants of the Americas. He’s got some interesting case studies there. But I think for the most part, when we are looking at this monumental architecture, you know, we’re way beyond shamanic cultures. We’re into what we would call priestly cultures and a whole different strata of

religious organization emerges and I would contend built upon clan systems, built upon a patriarchal lineage system that ultimately becomes like kingships where everybody is somehow within the king’s domain. But the king is royalty and nobility. It’s not the same…

genetic social cultural group of the rest of the population but the king is the vehicle to get to God and it’s a kingly, know ceremonies priestly ceremonies that you know get this I mean in the beginning the priests and the heads the clans were the same people the kings and the head priests were the basically the same people but eventually a whole new strata emerges that builds these pyramids and I think it’s a totally different, you know social power dynamic that’s going on

Dr. Rob (23:59.82)

Yeah, you have the building of class systems that then organize themselves in different patterns. like in the Maya hieroglyphs, you do see people engaging with psychedelics and kind of ritualistic calling in of the gods to, I guess, to inspire them or give them visions.

Michael (24:02.478)

Go ahead.

Michael (24:26.232)

Well, know, the Maya stuff is one, think, a little, you know, question or problematic. I mean, I think many people who are interested in these issues, you know, can’t come up with the definitive evidence, but it may be because we have to look for iconographic symbolic evidence rather than, you know, physical evidence. And certainly in some of the simple, you know, complex societies, there was still an entheogenic layer or element.

But what often seems to be the case is that, know, once you get, you know, the pyramids and these big buildings, the entheogens tend to be sort of circumscribed. Okay, this is for the elites to use. This is for the priests. You know, we have a secret ceremony and it sort of becomes, you know, no longer a common tradition. But I think that, you know, we can even see this perhaps in the Catholic Church. Jerry Brown’s book of the psychedelic gospels, you know, makes the argument, you know, there’s

There’s a lot of iconography that represents not only the clearly depicted Amanita muscaria, but other places where we get depictions of what are really close correspondences with detailed mushroom figures that are psilocybin. But the idea that I think becomes more prevalent is that these become increasingly cult-based rather than popular practices.

You know, the priests, the leaders do it, but not everybody else. So I did a special issue of the Journal of Psychedelic Studies in 2019. I think it was Psychedelics in World History and World Religions. So kind of look at a lot of the different places in which we see the, you know, the presence of these entheogens. But, you know, even today, you know, while many scholars of India, you know,

will agree that Soma was some important sacrament, know, it altered consciousness, we’re not concerned about that anymore. But, you know, one of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites, Cajurajo, 12 of the, or 8 of the temples, the major temples there, to get into the sanctuary, you have to step on a threshold, and on that threshold is a mushroom depiction about this big by this big, right in the middle of the threshold.

Dr. Rob (26:25.675)

So.

Michael (26:51.758)

And as far as I can tell, I’ve been the co-author of every article ever written about that. It’s right in plain sight. I’ve even corresponded with, you know, Jinn scholars about this because there Jinn stuff there. Oh, we’ve never heard of this, you know. And so I’ll send them photos and they don’t want to get back about it, you know. We contact Hindi scholars and look at these images. What do you think? Well, I don’t know. They’re just abstract representations. Of what? Well, they’re just…

Well, why do they put an abstract representation that nobody knows about in the middle of the threshold to the sanctuary? And then they cut off communication with this. But I think eventually even those religions that may have had entheogenic inspiration at the foundations, quickly lost them. And it became a reclusive priestly activity. So if you look at what the Vedas say, Somo was restricted for the Brahmins, for the priestly class.

So, you know, I think the idea that, you know, hierarchical religions want psychedelics not, you know, we don’t want everybody coming up with their own message from God. God already gave us the message and come to church on Sunday and we’ll tell you what it was.

Dr. Rob (28:03.404)

Yeah, so Soma, the nectar of immortality was only meant for the initiates of the people in the inner circle, if you will.

Michael (28:16.364)

And the other interesting thing is that the Vedas tell us that the Brahmins stole Soma from the Asuras. And the Asuras were the shamanic healer class of the Indus Valley civilization. So, I mean, there’s good reason to think that there may have been some kind of, know, entheogen-inspired practice that was part of the invading Brahmins. But what really became the basis of their practice, I think, was what they

took from the indigenous valley, indigenous valley civilizations.

Dr. Rob (28:51.532)

Is this a demarcation between animism and formal religion as we know it now?

Michael (29:03.244)

Well, I mean, to me, you know, my wife’s cats are animistic. know, wind blows a piece of paper and they go after it, right? There’s something there. I mean, animism, think is sort of an innate human attribution, that is to say, when there seems to be some purposeful behavior, there’s some reason for it.

even before we can conceptualize disembodied spirits as the cause of it, we were animistic. Animism certainly, I think, would precede shamanism. And to me, shamanism has a whole dynamic that’s distinctly different than just an animistic belief. It’s a whole complex, biogenetic complex of ritual behaviors that we can trace back to the chimps. So to me, animism is sort of like an interesting, you know, early part of how we might have started to believe about the world.

But we have very complex attributional processes that go way beyond animism in the sense that when we think that there’s something that’s out there causing a behavior, it has self properties, has cognitive properties, it has mental attributional properties. And we sort of attribute a lot of our own innate cognitive hardware to these perceived external events. So to me, the real shift is from a system that

was focused on the shamanic engagement, which had a lot of concern with animals. You may say, why animals? Animals were the most important powers in the environment. Those were the things that would eat you or protect you, you know, or give you something to eat. The transition, I think, was when we got to a level of social complexity in what we would call clan structures, or patrilineal descent groups became the organizing principle of society.

I think a lot of times when people loosely use the term tribal societies, what they’re really talking about is a patrilineal clan system. Rare cases, matrilineal, but most cases patrilineal because of evolutionary advantages for protecting your group. And so these eventually become sort of powerful institutions that control agriculture. And that from that basis, they create surplus

Michael (31:24.5)

and more complex political systems that either protect their surplus with the military or they get it taken away and they get subjugated by somebody else who did that first. To me that’s the basis of where we now understand religion evolves. It’s out of ancestor worship that was the basis of the patrilineal clan systems.

Dr. Rob (31:46.028)

ancestor worship. We can think of that as the seed of the evolution of this idea of God or God’s

Michael (31:56.717)

Well, I think as long as we understand that there was a whole pantheon of other kinds of spirits beforehand, but sure, that would be part of it. mean, some people would argue that we have an innate dominance hierarchy mechanism in the brain that just it wants to be fed a dominant figure there because it tells us that, I can’t take care of everything, but this guy can.

Dr. Rob (32:24.844)

and I’ll

Michael (32:25.448)

That’s just the seeds of it, think, would be the ancestor worship eventually becomes kingships, kingdoms, and then eventually evolves into the seed of monotheistic religion that extends God the Father and the brother and sister familial paradigm to include everybody at some level or another.

Dr. Rob (32:47.244)

I wanted to ask you about the coevolution of human beings and psychedelics, because it’s really a remarkable idea that nature gives us these medicinal plants, these substances that our brain is able to use, right, because we have the receptor sites for them. And so there must have been some kind of coevolution there that we were giving something to them as.

as a species as well as the plants were giving us feedback and to reshape each other in a way.

Michael (33:22.978)

Well, I’m not so sure that we shaped mushrooms. yeah, I mean, you know, they’ve been stable a long time. mean, you know, I think that the evolutionary process really has to do in terms of how our, you know, biological systems responded to these, what I would say, exogenous sources of neurotransmitters, which is to say, plant sources of brain food. And it wasn’t just that we had the receptors, but in many cases, it was that

Dr. Rob (33:26.444)

Yeah, they’re much older, right?

Michael (33:53.135)

we have the enzymes necessary to detoxify what are important metabolic precursors to neurotransmitters. There’s an interesting kind of paradox here. This idea of a drug instrumentalization paradigm, we evolved through using drugs. The idea that we were able to better adapt to these drugs. It’s been around in anthropology for 35 years. It doesn’t seem to be controversial if you talk about how

know, stimulus helps us survive and adapt. Doesn’t seem to be controversial if you talk about how painkillers allow us to survive and adapt. Doesn’t seem to be controversial if you talk about how antidepressants allow us to survive and adapt and that we genetically evolved and enhanced our ability to absorb these substances. But bring up psychedelics and it’s like, no way, man. They reject your paper every time. They won’t even talk to you.

You know, so there’s a big bias there in the evolutionary anthropology community that they’re willing to accept that all these other substances contributed to human adaptation and evolution, but don’t mention psychedelics, man. You’re not going to get published if you bring that up. So I think I’ve kind of alluded to some of these before, but I can be a little more specific and I’ll put it in the context of reversing Nancy, I mean, Pat Nixon’s favorite quote, you know,

Drugs are for people who can’t handle reality. We say bullshit. Reality is for people who can’t handle drugs. You can handle drugs, you can change your reality. And we’ve been doing this for millions of years. You know, what we see, I think, is the basic dynamic is that those human beings whose 5-HT, 2-A receptor systems were more developed, were more capable of utilizing this exogenous neurotransmitter source

and getting its benefits for stress reduction and problem resolution and, you know, enhance ability to devise new ways of interacting with others and greater sociability and greater imagination and greater inventiveness. And these are the ones that got to survive and reproduce and pass on their genes. So over time, the psilocybin sources, I think, served as an environmental stimulus.

Michael (36:09.43)

that basically selected for those of our ancestors that were most capable of using it. Psilocybin didn’t have to evolve for us to do it. We just had to evolve to be able to use psilocybin more effectively. And it’s kind of interesting when you look at the psychedelic drugs in terms of other animals use of it. You you put a monkey or a chimp or a dog or cat, you know, in a cage and give them the chance to self-administer.

a stimulants or know, depressants or morphine or opium and they’ll do it till they quit eating and kill themselves. Put the psychedelic lever in there and as soon as they figure out which one’s the psychedelic lever, they don’t use it again. And you know, I read this once in a book by a neuro pharmacologist named McKim, who just make like a one, two sentence statement, but you know,

Dr. Rob (36:49.804)

Is that right?

Michael (36:59.394)

But you know, the primates would not continue to self-administer hallucinogens. And I wrote that guy way back in the 90s, you know, but tell us more about this. No response. You know, so there’s like this, you know, I mean, we have the psychedelic Renaissance going on at the same time, there’s this still deeply embedded resistance to the idea that somehow these things had anything to do with what was important for us in the past. But I think they could have been the basic scaffolding of a

enhanced ritual system by which people got along better and had new ideas and could communicate those ideas and could implement them in a way that enhanced our ability to live together in more and more complex groups. Because one of the most important factors in human evolution has been group size. And the reason that group size is such an important factor in human evolution is that our most dangerous elements in the environment are other human groups.

And so what enhances group size enhances our ability to survive and reproduce even from a point of view of genetic diversity. So the psychedelics I think played a significant role in enhancing our ability to get along with one another. That should not be controversial to anybody who knows the clinical research and that literally across millions of years this enhanced capacity to get along with others through the use of psilocybin modulated ritual activities and

the worldviews that come out of it, the cultural frameworks that came out of it. And the interesting thing here that really fits in with this is that evolutionary theory today is really this notion, it’s sort of a bio-cultural evolutionary process. We evolve biologically, but at a certain point we started to evolve culturally, and then what worked for us culturally then turned around and affected biological evolution in order to enhance our cultural capacities.

And if our cultural capacities included imagination and model building and creating alliances and being accepting socially and extroverted, it’s clear that psychedelics would have had a very important role in enhancing our capacity to do this culturally and would have at the same time exerted selective influences on our genome for who can use drugs. If you can’t, you’re not as likely to pass on your genes to the next generation.

Dr. Rob (39:23.404)

Right. So how does a psychedelic experience change us, the individual, let’s say, a heroic dose of psilocybin or mescaline or LSD? Is the individual income different after that experience?

Michael (39:42.755)

Well, I I think I would first start off by saying, know, set and setting is always going to be a very important determinant. But so is biology. And the first thing is we’re going to have enhanced serotonin. I mean, there’s a well recognized but little study after glow effect, four to six week period during which, you know, there’s this enhanced emotionality and there’s an increase.

know, spiking patterns in the brain that reflect the specific kinds of effects that psilocybin or other 5-HT2A psychedelics have on brainwave discharge patterns. The other thing is that I think that in most cases, there’s going to be an emotional reset. And I don’t have all the clinical evidence to sort of back up this hypothesis right now, and hopefully someone will eventually do it. But I think that there’s going to be

a retuning in the parasympathetic system and a retuning in the vagal system. And that basically we’re going to go from a system that’s sort of highly labile and emotionally reactive and can either be sort of like a manic or depressive reaction to a system that’s more modulated, that has higher sympathetic level activation, but still has

good sympathetic responsiveness. So we have the relaxation aspect of the autonomic nervous system sort of being more modulated and the sympathetic one is going to be a little reduced in its extremes, but this going to be still responsive to the need, but it’s not going to be so much out of control. to go back to a point that I made later, although I maybe I didn’t elaborate on it, I think this is why sexual abstinence after psychedelic sessions is so important.

in the case of the entheogenic healing traditions. Because what the sexual activity does is it takes you to this real extreme sympathetic, parasympathetic excitation at the limits of the balance between just a collapse, then you fall into a parasympathetic rebound, and then you have to come back up. you have to, so you have these, you’re pushing the extremes. And I think that the implication of that is post entheogenic or psychedelic therapy sessions

Michael (42:04.184)

can help maintain the emotional modulation that comes out of it by avoiding sex. And the same thing we have to do with other aspects of your life. What else is gonna come out of this? think, know, intrinsically what’s gonna come out of taking the psychedelic is that you’re going to have an enhanced connectivity with your emotional dynamics and in particular an enhanced connection with…

what was previously largely or completely repressed emotional trauma. So one of the characteristic things that comes out of psychedelic experiences is, you know, recovering lost memories, you know, understanding the sources of problems, know, seeing why you became the way that you were, you know, understanding the roots of your addiction and things that just weren’t part of the consciousness beforehand. And I think this happens because the several phase effects of the psychedelics is

You you take out the top down control, you release the bottom up dopaminergic mechanisms, they give you this big emotional dump out of the limbic system and the sensory brain. And now you get all this information that you weren’t previously either privy to or had lost contact with. And so I think this stays with you for a while afterwards. And then hopefully you had a good…

modulation of that experience through integration afterwards. And so now you’re in a position to understand something better about your roots of your emotional problems and you’re in a more emotionally sedate state that is able to deal with the problems that are relaxed, know, autonomic nervous system balance mode and at the same time not as reactive to the provoking stimuli. The sympathetic nervous system is not going to be

set off as much. Also you’ve gone through a very intense kind of neuroplastic phase. So not only did you potentially create new kinds of networks to manage connections between things that might have been dissociated, repressed, but you also have the enhanced prolonged effects of this neuroplasticity to remodulate how it is that you’re going to be.

Michael (44:21.814)

And so it may be understood that this post-session period is to allow you to integrate these different kinds of enhanced emotionality, enhanced neuroplastic development, neurogenesis to create new networks, emotional modulation through the autonomic nervous system, know, resetting itself in terms of its parasympathetic-sympathetic balance, and then ultimately integrating these into a new understanding of how you’re going to live your life. Now, all of these things can be seen as basically

physiological, pharmacological processes. But the ritual envelope can be a very important way of modulating those influences. And perhaps the most important of these would be the music. How is the music going to transform your emotional state so that when you come out, you’re feeling that you’ve come to some really important understandings of what went wrong, but you’re in a good emotional state and able to be able to deal with it going forward.

Dr. Rob (45:19.146)

Yeah. This kind of bio-psycho-social perspective, the only question I would have is what about the of the existential experience of the individual? Does it alter that?

Michael (45:38.926)

When you say existential, are you referring to worldview, spiritual beliefs?

Dr. Rob (45:43.924)

Yeah, kind of your sense of yourself in the world. What is reality, for example? We know psychedelics kind of throw that up for questioning.

Michael (45:56.131)

Yeah, well, I mean, I think that, you know, the questioning part is good insofar as it may help us break down our adherence to outmoded beliefs about ourselves in the world. There’s also, I think, a lot of pharmacological reasons to see that psychedelics may give us this enhanced sense of connectivity with the world, that we’re all connected. And, you know, that may be a very pharmacological kind of activity.

One of the things that we know about it is that, in spite of the fact that the default mode network seems to be somewhat taken offline, that most of the brain has enhanced global connectivity. The brain is connected in a way that is not normally connected. So we see things in a more integrated way, which is why we may be inclined to see the world as now more connected and vibrant and even alive. I think the other aspect of this sort formical dynamic effect

has to do with stimulating this belief in the spirit world. And one of the things that I have long continued is that when we look at what the spirit world really represents in terms of a bunch of functional systems, it’s all these evolved social capacities to understand others, to intuit their points of view, intend what their understand what their intentions are.

to internalize their models for the self. mean, all these things are basically what we evolved in order to be able to become self-socialized into groups. And most of the dynamic of self-socialization involves emulating powerful figures. Why? Because we want to be powerful figures too. We wouldn’t have as much problems. I mean, know, infants growing up want to be like their mothers and fathers and caregivers because

They’re more powerful and they give them the things they need. So the spirit belief, I think, helps bring into another dimension of this, you know, maternal infant paternal dynamic of somebody taking care of us. And I think the spirit world is basically a dynamic in which whether or not it exists, it functions. I think that we can make, you know, the same arguments about

Michael (48:19.682)

how the spirits help us if we have some notion that there are these, you know, amorphous, you know, beings out there that, you know, might be able to help and normally don’t versus it’s just a higher developed aspect of our own self. So one way of looking at the effects of psychedelics is what I would call psychointegration. I proposed this term 30 years ago as an alternative to psychedelics. Psychedelic is mind manifesting.

hallucinogen means that you you’re seeing something that’s not there. But what we know is that we experience things that seem very real and they have emotional importance for us. And if we look at the overall dynamic of the brain, going back to this notion of the shift from the top down trans modal dominance to the bottom up unimodal discharges, what we’re getting is the revelation of all these unconscious modules dynamics operators of the brain.

getting dumped into the frontal cortex. like to think of it as like, you you’ve got all these little, you know, hidden programs or, you know, storage areas in the brain that you just don’t really get much access to. And then what happens under the psychedelic experience is that they’re all getting put up into the core processor of the prefrontal cortex and the default mode network. And then they’re being projected into their big, you know, television screen, this big old, you know, random access memory.

that we can see all these other aspects of ourself that we don’t normally get access to. And it really seems beyond ourself because literally physically it’s up here in the frontal part of the brain, not down here where, you know, the eye and the me and the other aspects of ourself or the unconscious aspects of ourself are. And so it seems like a higher being, but it may just be our own self integrated in a more effective way.

But so whether or not there’s really spirits out there or whether or not it’s just a changing dynamic of our brain, I think both of them can be understood as providing a context within which a more powerful, integrated, and functional entity is now capable of directing what we do.

Dr. Rob (50:32.106)

Yeah, I think that would certainly be aligned with the Vedic understanding of consciousness that everything is essentially consciousness. It’s simply like we compartmentalize it or shape it into different concepts and constructs. And it appears to us as many, many things, but it essentially is one consciousness, one awareness. Another question that you mentioned earlier, the animal aspect of kind of

I mean, I’ve always learned it as a connection with the ancestors, right? Because we evolved out of animals that we have that archetypal kind of feeling that we’re connected to these powerful animals. that in shamanism often, the shaman is connected to the jaguar or the eagle or the bear or some powerful animal in their visions and in their kind of their…

their magical powers, right, that they’re able to transform symbolically, I imagine, or maybe literally into these powerful animals and affect healing or certain effects that they want in the clan or in the tribe.

Michael (51:52.067)

Yeah, well, I think that the animals have a variety of different roles within the shamanic context. And I think that they’re particularly powerful tools for a couple of reasons. One is that, first, is that the animals are the most powerful elements in the environment for simple hunter-gatherers. And then secondly is that it’s been called one of our innate intelligences.

Sometimes a gardener called it a modular intelligence. even small children can infer the qualities of animals that they’ve never seen before, just showing pictures. They can tell which ones are going to be the nice ones, which ones are likely going to eat you. So we have an innate intelligence that allows us to understand a kind of symbol in a sense.

It’s an iconic symbol as opposed to an abstract symbol because there’s a direct representation. But there’s inherent meaning in animals. And this inherent meaning, I think, is what shamanism is able to exploit as a tool for self-development. So in the shamanic development, they typically are going through a period of crisis, of disintegration of the personality, of, you know…

compromised effectiveness and functionality in life and they end up, know encountering in their visionary experiences What must have been the greatest fear of our distant primal ancestors? being attacked Killed and eaten by wild animals. And I think that that’s got to be one of the deep archetypes of human consciousness Walsh Roger Walsh talks about that in his book on shamanism

Death and rebirth is really just part of our psyche. But in this context, the shaman just accepts his death or her death, and then afterwards the animals put the shaman back together. But these same animals that just killed the shaman now incorporate themselves within the shaman. And so now the feared object becomes part of the self, or at least an aspect of the self that’s accessible to the shaman.

Michael (54:13.836)

And so the shaman becomes empowered and healed through incorporating the feared object, in a sense. And so then this object then plays a couple of roles in future shamanic activities. The animals can negotiate with the spirits, the animals can go and recover souls, the animals can go and get information. I’ve read some stuff in Hindu psychology that talks about, know, our consciousness is like a vehicle that can be displaced.

And so the idea that we could place our consciousness into an animal, know, you know, sort of jives with the way in which shamanic cultures sort of viewed the capabilities of the shaman. They could put their consciousness into the animal to go out and do things, control the animal while the shaman was in their altered state. But there’s another important aspect of the animal in the shamanic practice, and that typically in the shamanic ceremonies, the shaman dressed up in the animal, the power animal that

He was, you so puts on the bear pelt. And so now the shaman is doing a ceremony and enactment in which the group is, you know, on the verge of being scared to death. I mean, the shaman growls and so you start to this emotional process going on in which all your deepest fears are being brought up. But then the shamanic ritual progresses to the point where the shaman controls the animals and the feared elements are now

under the domination of the shaman. So you get this whole group process of where you go in with concerns, you get scared to the point of being scared to death, and then you get that resolved and everything is taken care of. And so we often think of healing being at the group level, but I think we have to understand shamanic ceremony as community healing processes. And the animals were part of that empowerment process for the shaman and for the group as well.

Dr. Rob (56:06.934)

The other piece that I wanted to get to is this calling to be a shaman. Like, what is the pattern of selection or choosing a certain person to be a shaman?

Michael (56:26.392)

Well, there was a lot of different elements involved and largely overlapping. I think in many cases, there’s signs at birth, know, particular kinds of unusual characteristics of the person. It may be that they were actually somewhat physically dysfunctional. It seems to be a situation in some cases, clubfoot. There’s also the notion that, you know,

many shamanic cultures, was thought to largely pass in the family line. It may jump a generation, but you you were the son or daughter of a shaman. What we particularly note in the foraging societies, if a woman were to become a shaman, was largely because, you know, her father or grandfather, you know, was a shaman and often also the case that no male heirs took it, but women in particular were thought to have this lineage effect. Now that didn’t necessarily mean that you became a shaman.

The next thing was that typically, although not always, there was this life crisis. There was the shamanic illness. The shaman was in many early literatures called the wounded healer. The idea was that the shaman had something wrong with them and they underwent a series of psychological disorientations and things that might be, I think, appropriately characterized as even an acute psychotic episode.

and that it was in this period of breakdown where we come to this sort of, you know, sort of a bimodal outcome of these pivotal mental states. This is the term that Carhart Harris uses in talking about this 5-HT2A dynamic. You get to the point where you’re breaking down, you no longer can function, and now things that happen to you next determine whether you become, you know, a lifelong, you know, pathological case.

or whether you rise out of the circumstances, you empower yourself, you improve. And so here I think is where the shamanic ritual played an important role with this dynamic in that it gave this process of empowerment. First the drumming, the singing, the chanting, the dancing, these all have intrinsic, know, psychopharmacological effects that enhance, know, dopamine and endorphins, serotonin system, and improving the body’s ability to function.

Michael (58:54.47)

and within the context of the shamanic death and rebirth experience, then this animal entity comes in and now you reconsolidate your sense of who you are around this external but internalized powerful force. Now, in some shamanic cultures, there is indication that all males, maybe even all males and females, go through something that’s sort of like a vision quest.

And the vision quest might be seen as this sort of a way of engaging with this shamanic drama for the whole group. And what comes out of the vision quest is you do the fasting, you do isolation, you may or may not have a death and rebirth experience, but you come out of it with a spirit encounter. And that spirit encounter helps define what it is that you’re going to be with your life, who you’re going to become, what is your power going to be?

And one of those possible outcomes is becoming a shaman. So in that sense, in some cultures, it appears that like everybody has the chance, but only a few come out with the spirit qualifications because in many cases, they will say, you know, it’s ultimately the spirits who decide. And so if your grandfather was a shaman, then likely it’s going to be your deceased grandfather who is going to train you and is going to pass on the spirits that he had.

in order to help you become a shaman. But I think in all cases, there’s this sort of crisis period that may be more of just a vision quest or maybe just a full blown acute psychotic episode, the resolution of which empowers the person through the incorporation of animal powers.

Dr. Rob (01:00:38.572)

Now, if this is part of our evolution and our cultural evolution, are people still experiencing this, would you say? This going through the midlife crisis or the dark night of the soul? And they’re often put on medication or institutionalized instead of recognized as, this person is essentially playing out an ancient process of

Coming up, Shauna.

Michael (01:01:10.914)

Well, I would probably be a little reluctant to apply the term shamanism to a lot of what contemporary practices are, because when I look at the dynamic of shamans in the hunter-gatherer context, the long period of social isolation, prolonged period of sexual abstinence and fasting, the whole psychodynamic crisis unfolding during what we would call the adolescent years.

mean, all this precedes adult formation. And then there’s a whole complex of events that go with the shaman that involve the soul loss and recovery, the dynamic of fighting the evil spirits, even the dynamic of the shaman having the capability to kill others with his or her spirit powers. mean, me, the foraging shamanism had a very specific dynamic that’s…

In most cases, it’s very difficult to apply to the modern context. Now, is it something analogous or similar? Yeah, maybe so. But the fact that it’s a midlife crisis, not an adolescent adjustment crisis, is probably the first sign that we should think of it differently. But if they do all these things that foraging shamans do, well, maybe we should call them shamans. But every time I try to get someone who says they’re a shaman, they’ll

Well, read what I say about shamanism. How does this apply to you? Well, I’m a modern day shaman. Well, what parts of the shaman stuff do you still do? Well, I’m a modern day shaman. don’t do… Then you’re not a shaman as far as I’m concerned, you know. We need to call it something else. Now, maybe it’s too far gone. People are going to keep on using it, you know. No one’s going to care what the anthropologist says about the cross-cultural data. But even if you look at the classic, you know, death and rebirth experiences that were associated with the cults of antiquity.

yeah, death and rebirth, that’s shamanic. But the rest of it’s not. The rest of it doesn’t really have anything to do with how it was that the shamans were formed and practiced and believed and healed.

Dr. Rob (01:03:16.364)

So that brings me to the question, are there modern day shamans in, let’s say in traditional, more traditional or mestizo cultures?

Michael (01:03:28.108)

Well, you know, I read a lot about the Brazilian Pagé ethnographic reports that were written in the 60s and 70s. And I sort of picking through all the details and I found, you know, most of them there, you know, the ones that I didn’t find were whether or not they thought that they can transform into animals and did they kill people.

And so I contacted some of the authorities on this. They would not respond. I don’t know why. sent them an essay. Well, actually, had my shamanism book translated into Portuguese and wrote a new epilogue for it, which was based on Brazil. And I was wanting to clarify these points. I don’t know. But yeah, they may have survived into the near modern period. In my cross-cultural studies and in my book, I talk about what used to be called

the kung bushmen, nothing to call them the san, the duzhuangsi, but they had the numkhao si, the medicine worker, the medicine person. They were reported in detail in the 1950s, pretty much have all the characteristics of shamans, but they were a foraging group. There’s another group, and I point this out, I recently published a paper about the Chinese Wu,

and ritualists, you know, they use the term shaman to talk about the Chinese Wu. So I took my ethnological model of shamans, other guys applied it to the Wu and because they were recorded from, you know, thousands of years ago, the president say, well, this is a healer, this is a priest, this is a medium, this is a witch, you know, there are no shamans in this, you know, recorded, you know, history of the Wu in China. I say, the Wu is a ritualist, it’s not a shaman, but in…

Near contemporary China, there are some Ewenki groups that apparently migrated from Siberia 300, 400 years ago, and all of their practices pretty much still directly corresponded to the dynamics of a foraging shaman in the 1960s, 70s. Of course, they were still living a foraging lifestyle. They were herding animals. So can shamans survive into the modern world?

Michael (01:05:52.505)

probably only in a kind of foraging context. When you start getting to agricultural societies, the power dynamic of society shifts. Now it’s about agriculture, not animals. Now it’s about the cult of agriculture and the priest. And so an interesting thing that came out of some of my more in-depth analyses of many of the cultures of Siberia that were considered to have shamans was that in some cultures, they had what they were called

white shamans. And the white shamans were special in that. They couldn’t use a drum, and they couldn’t use the shamanic implements, and they didn’t do healing ceremonies. What they did was that they assisted the ancestor cults, and they were the key functionaries for the ancestor cults. But they didn’t do all the things that shamans were normally thought to do. So shamans at some point probably were usurped into

the ritual structure of these more advanced cults. And they might have continued to be called shamans in some sense, but they had to call them white shamans. Why? Because they didn’t do all the things that all the other shamans normally did. They couldn’t even go to their ceremonies or use their drops. So I think once again, know, shamanism is a dynamic very specific to what is the cosmology and lifestyle and ecology of hunter gatherer societies. In my most recent publications, I

articulate how that survives and adapts in simple agricultural societies. But by the time we get to politically integrated societies, the only left, the only shamans that are left are the ones that are in the groups that are being politically incorporated and they’re persecuted as witches and killed.

Dr. Rob (01:07:41.59)

Wow, I know in Mexico there’s a tribe known as the Huichol. I think you’re familiar with them. And to my mind, they kind of come closest to that model.

Michael (01:07:49.784)

Right.

Michael (01:07:57.913)

They do. They have a lot of similarities. I’ve actually talked a couple of times with Stacey Schaefer about that because she wants to use the term shaman for them. And I say, okay, here’s, I’ll say tomorrow, here’s Stacey, here’s my cross-cultural analysis of the shaman. How does this fit with what you do? Let’s do an article. And she’s like, well, I think it fits pretty good. You know, so, okay, it’s close, but, you know, I think most of the time, for instance, you know, the dynamics of the healing is probably a little different.

The dynamics of, for instance, that do the we show healers have the reputation of having the power to kill other people with their power? I don’t know. If you look at the we show dynamics, how they relate to animals, we are they go capture an animal and torture it as part of the initiation, but are they thought to turn into animals and be able to use the power of the animals? So I would like pick on little things like that to say, well,

maybe they’ve started to transition to something else. Another one is Mariela Basigalupo, the Machi of Peru, mean, Chile, the Machia, the Mapuche. And she’s always used the term shaman for them. In my cross-cultural analysis, they looked much more like mediums than shamans, although my data was not as complete. You know, some of the more recent data,

even suggest they look more like priests, you know, in some respects, although they still do healing. But, you know, there may still be elements that are there, but, you know, some of the things that shamans did, they led the hunt, they were thought to be able to call animals to the hunters, they led war parties, you know, that’s what foraging shamans did. So once again, I would say, is it fair to call these people shamans anymore?

Informative I think it ultimately is more, you know distracting and perhaps, you know mischaracterizing But once again, it depends on what is a shaman is a shaman anybody who can speak to the spirits You know is the Anan shaman that got arrested for invading the capital. Is that guy really a shaman? I mean if this guy’s a shaman then anybody can be a shaman I won’t argue with it anymore. But if he’s not a shaman, we got to keep going down the list and say, okay You can call yourself a shaman, but here’s the reasons why you’re not a shaman

Michael (01:10:23.63)

because it doesn’t correspond to the dynamic that existed worldwide in forging societies, which has all these direct correspondences to our evolved psychology.

Dr. Rob (01:10:34.976)

Got it. So we can still learn from these definitions of shamanism and their cultural context and their rituals, and also the kind of deduced the neurobiology that was happening through these ritualistic practices. This may help us then, like I’ve read some of your work where you’re

talking about how the use of psychedelics might be able to help us treat people with addictions or other social disorders. Is that the limit kind of our understanding of shamanism as kind of a translation into certain aspects of modern

psychopharmacology or treatment, psychological treatments or social group dynamics, is that pretty much it? That this is an ancient practice that’s been lost or is relegated to the past?

Michael (01:11:48.163)

Well, I mean, I think we have to look at, you one level, which is shamanic techniques, drumming, dancing, fasting, sexual abstinence, group ceremony, overnight ceremony, dream incorporation, soul loss, ideology, etc. We have all these little elements, you know, and then the other thing is shamanism as a complex. It has all those elements integrated. And so I think, you know, trying to think about bringing all these elements integrated into the modern world.

It’s very difficult, just beginning with lifestyle and things. the whole complex is difficult. But the elements, sure, there’s a lot of important elements. They’re, for the most part, not exclusively shamic. But for instance, one important one that has resonated with a lot of addicts is this idea of an animal power.

And one of the things that really, you know, made me think about this a second time and really come back and think it’s important is that a lot of addicts will tell you, I know I shouldn’t go down that road. I mean, literally, I’m not, I can’t walk down that street. I’m going to see people, places and things, and it’s going to be all over. I’m going to be back into it. You know, but that’s where the animal wants to go. There’s a beast within me that’s taking me down this street. So they literally conceptualize

this addictive dynamic as an animal within them. Can they learn to control that animal? Can that animal become something that is, you know, them that they have some kind of volitional control over rather than just somebody that’s running their life for them? So that kind of empowerment can be important. And I think it might also be important to consider other aspects of shamanic techniques. If you know,

If one of the things that comes out of ritual ceremony and altar states and the psychedelics is this modulation, I’m lacking the technical term here, but there’s a notion about this modulation between the parasympathetic and sympathetic system. And it’s a balanced level. If that is what comes out as a new reset where the parasympathetic system has greater expression and the sympathetic system is less likely to spike out of control,

Michael (01:14:00.793)

and you want to maintain that, then maybe sexual abstinence afterwards is very important. Because sexual abstinence takes you into the spiking of both systems, or sexual orgasm does. So, I mean, in traditional cultures, were some that saying, you know, sexual abstinence for weeks beforehand, sexual abstinence for weeks to a month afterwards. And you really got to reset this balance within the autonomic nervous system in order to have permanent, you know, benefits from it. So, once again, we can bring in the elements.

Dr. Rob (01:14:20.02)

have to.

Michael (01:14:30.19)

I mean, I think the drumming and the music, their shamanic techniques, I they’re very important. Emotional modulation. I think one of the important things about doing a theogenic work is the music. Everybody recognizes that, I think, in the industry, although I don’t think they necessarily recognize it for all of the right reasons that have to do with their evolutionary psychology. But just to give you an interesting example, John Hopkins University, where Roland Griffiths did all of his research.

I mean, they had a psychedelic protocol that produced mystical experiences, full-blown mystical experiences, and 70 % of their participants, using things like these mystical experience questionnaire and things like this. So in an objective measure, people were having mystical experiences. Were they prompted? Were they somehow influenced? Maybe so. But if you look at everyday use of psychedelics, maybe 15 % of people have

mystical experiences on their first use. So the John Hopkins Control Protocol produces mystical experiences. They don’t get mystical experiences in the control group, but mystical experiences are produced with the music plus the drug. So the music is very important. They have a music list curtailed.

to resonate with Western Christian ideology and emotions and it works very good for a good set of the population. But we shouldn’t forget that it is a set and setting effect, not just a strictly form a collogical dynamic. So music has to be brought in and we need to understand more about the use of music to move people through the entheogenic process. I know somebody who does entheogenic retreats and one of the principles they have is that

Early on, it’s sort of unsettling music, discordant music, stressful music. You know, really bring on the negative emotions and then open up a space that’s like less driving with the music. So you process your emotions and then further on you bring in music that’s designed to modulate a positive emotional situation. And so music can be seen as an important tool to move people through emotional states. And I’m sure the shamans do the same things.

Dr. Rob (01:16:49.292)

Thank

Yeah, I know we’re almost out of time. I just wanted to get one last question in about dreams. My students will not forgive me if I don’t address this. What is the role of dreaming in the shamanistic tradition, let’s say?

Michael (01:17:14.968)

Well, I think it’s clear that many traditions saw shamanic work as dream work. They called it dream time. And the idea was that you were going into basically the same kind of space that one occupies in dream experiences. By the very nature of the overnight ceremony, weren’t necessarily entering into the dream period. Anybody who’s tried to drive overnight without taking

Serious drugs have probably found themselves slipping into dreams once in a while much to their horror, right? I mean, we’re to go into these states So the shaman took you into the dream world by virtue of doing an overnight ceremony Probably modulated the experience of the dream by the use of the drumming And certainly enhanced the capacity of the dream like experience by the use of the entheogens So to me, this is another missing part of the current psychedelic Renaissance is that

We’re not doing it overnight to incorporate the dream period when our natural capacities for information integration are heightened.

Dr. Rob (01:18:16.844)

Were these typical dreams or more like lucid dreams and out-of-body experiences, those kind of altered states?

Michael (01:18:25.688)

Well, I I don’t have any real phenomenological data on that. You know, I suspect that they were more like lucid dreaming in my own experience, although I can’t say that I’ve had things that I would really characterize as dreams per se, but I have certainly got visualizations that gone on. And people report to the healer in the context of the ceremony what they have seen in their dreams. So they’re not obviously in the normal deep sleep cycles that follow dreaming or see dreaming.

Proceed and fold.

Dr. Rob (01:18:59.018)

Yeah, and I can certainly see lucid dreaming being a kind of a…

a skill I would say that the shamans would cultivate and be able to extend their awareness of the group and the situation.

Michael (01:19:18.868)

I can’t remember where I got this, but many years ago I read something and I think that it was more of a, you one of the popular books about lucid dreaming, but someone actually said that it seems that drumming before you do, you know, the dream periods does enhance the lucid dreaming ability. And it may be because you get this entrainment at a higher, you know, beat, because normally they’re doing six to eight beat per second versus, you know, Delta three beat per second. So it may enhance the ability to

maintain higher levels of brain waves during the sleep periods.

Dr. Rob (01:19:54.828)

And again, kind of that preparation, that ritualistic preparation for these heightened experience.

Dr. Rob (01:20:08.253)

experiences.

Amazing conversation. We’ll have to have you back when you have some time because there’s so much more we want to discuss. But thank you so much for taking the time. I’ll record a proper introduction to the interview so that people will know who you are a bit more and put the links to your books, to your articles, to your YouTube videos.

Michael (01:20:39.231)

If you put it to my website, michaelwinkelman.com, you’ll get access to most of my articles from there, many of them, and a lot of the books.

Dr. Rob (01:20:49.9)

And if you’re ever around town, let us know. We’re in DC.

Michael (01:20:53.998)

More yet? okay. Well, unfortunately, my next trip I think is canceled because of this big old race here. Unfortunately, I was gonna go through the US week after next, but we’ll see.

Dr. Rob (01:21:01.515)

Yeah.

Dr. Rob (01:21:07.862)

Get well soon, get well, and we hope to see you.

Michael (01:21:11.278)

All right. Thanks a lot, Rob. Take care.

Dr. Rob (01:21:14.092)

Thank you, Michael. Appreciate it.