Hello! Welcome to Adventures Through the Mind. This is a podcast that explores topics relevant
and related to psychedelic culture, medicine, spirituality, and research, and always with the
underlying inquiry of how we can work with and through our psychedelic experiences to become
better people, not just for ourselves, but for all those with whom we are nested in relationship,
presently and across time, human and non-human alike. I'm your host, as always, James W. Jesso,
and today's guest is with Wade Richardson. Wade is the author of the book The Psychedelic Mind
Meld, Telepathically Exploring Shared Consciousness, which came out in December of 2024. Now, I don't
have a physical copy of it, so you probably see a picture of it on YouTube. I'll pretend to have it
held up in my hands here, but I really enjoyed it. Initially, I was called to it for a couple of
reasons, one of which is that in the sort of larger milieu of talking about psychedelics right now,
there are some things that are very common, very easy, and effectively zero risk in talking about
when it comes to psychedelics. And there are some things that go far enough out that it starts to
get kind of questionable whether or not people will, you know, feel as though I'm either the
legitimacy of psychedelics are being compromised or that person's legitimacy is being compromised.
Basically, it asks bigger questions than the mainstream is ready to give simple answers to,
or well, than the mainstream is ready to grapple with. I'm sure mainstream can give a very simple
answer to the question of telepathically sharing psychedelic states. And the answer to that is,
it's not real. But as you'll hear in this interview, and if you've already read the book,
There's, and well, you know, okay, let me back up a second. If you are someone who has explored
psychedelics for a long time, chances are you already know these things can happen. At least
we can experience something akin to these things happening. I know I have. So when I saw this book,
I thought to myself, wow, what an excellent opportunity to bring this sort of like more fringe
aspect of the psychedelic discussion to the podcast here and sort of as a as a consequence
into the discourse and i also thought to myself besides just being interested in it that i was
pleasantly pleasantly uh maybe touched i was i was pleasantly uh jesus what's the word here
engaged by the title of it for reasons that you probably know if you're a regular listener of the
show. So you can probably assume given that Wade is now on the show today, that I really enjoyed
the book and it felt like it offered something worth bringing to the podcast here. So that's
what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about psychedelic Mindmelds.
This includes sort of, you know, what they are, what can happen within them, some of the utility
they might have for us from healing trauma to spiritual experiences to sort of telepathic
contact, right?
So sharing explorations of psychedelic realms to making shared contact with other states
of being of consciousness, super consciousness or other beings in other levels of reality
to even relational intimacy, deepening relational trust and sexual pleasure, sexual ecstasy.
And we also talk about what all of these things say about, you know, if these experiences are
happening, what does this say about the nature of reality? What does this suggest about the nature
of reality, about the nature of consciousness? Additionally, we're going to talk about some of
the concerns, some of the harms that can come from this journey, this kind of journey work,
some of the risks you run when you choose to go in like this, whether or not you're facilitating it,
or if you're just with a friend or partner. These things include psychosis. They include
a number of different things that we'll talk about in the interview. We explore them. We explore
things like sexual transgressions or violations. And we also talk about it from a practical
perspective, a little sort of touching on some advice about this work. And it is work. You'll
see what we mean when we get into the interview of like the challenge that can come with accessing
these kinds of states with each other, this sort of telepathic contact through psychedelic
exploration. Now that's mostly it for the intro. I will mention to you that you will probably notice
right away that Wade's voice sounds a little weird and that doesn't look like it's a video of him if
you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify. And that's because Wade Richardson is a pseudonym
and I have anonymized his voice and face in order to protect his identity. Now, if you don't think
I did a good job with that, like if you feel like it's a little too hard to hear, I'd love that
feedback so that I can maybe do, you know, have it be more clear in the future. But if you think I
did a good job. I'd like that feedback too. So just as a heads up, that's going to be a part of
your video or listening experience. And that's it. That's it for the intro. So without further ado,
this is episode 199 of Adventures to the Mind with Wade Richardson exploring the psychedelic
mindmeld. Enjoy.
So
Welcome to Adventures Through the Mind.
Yeah, thanks. I'm really happy to be here and have a chance to talk to you, James.
I'm also excited about it. You know, when I first, well, so there's a, there's an arc of how I came to your book.
The first is that I saw the title. I can't remember where I saw it listed online. I was like, well, that seems interesting.
put a little mental note, you know, like put it, tabled it in my mind sometime after that,
I see some posts about it and I'm like, okay, this is great. Let's, let's, let's move into this.
This sounds like a very interesting concept and also something that's not really talked about for
a lot of reasons. One main reason being like the things that we're going to talk about today are
pretty, you know, you could say beyond the sort of mainstream narrative, even just the general
narrative of psychedelics predominantly today, but even to the point of at some points being
outright transgressive to the sort of the structured sense that we have as a global
civilization now, sort of like the dominant culture of the North and the West as to what
reality is and what mind is and what consciousness is. And so on top of that, when I read your book,
I really enjoyed it. I appreciated that it was a book that wasn't written for a general audience
or people early to psychedelics while simultaneously containing a bunch of really
great information for that group of people if they chose to read it. So I thought it was very
well put together and I really appreciated it and I really appreciate you agreeing to come on the show.
Thank you.
I'd also like to say that I always get like an extra tinge of sort of like
egoic gratification or maybe like the sense of being seen somehow when I stumble across somebody
having cited my work in the book, which I came across when I was reading it. So thank you for
that as well. Yeah, you're welcome. And I really appreciated your book and your insights as well,
you know, in terms of, I think it's an important piece to basically bring in some deep psychology.
And of course, Jung is a hero at this type of subject in terms of, you know, shadow work and
what that looks like. And I think you did a really good job of capturing that in your book,
Decomposing the Shadow. And yeah, how we work with mushrooms and that it is work. You know,
this is not, I mean, of course, you know, psychedelics can be used recreationally.
And there's a variety of other ways that they can be used. But if we really want to take a deep dive
into consciousness and our own self and exploring ourselves, it's work and it's not easy work.
Yeah, absolutely. And when it happens to be easy, oh, what a gift, you know, like so many times it's like, okay, I'm ready. I'm ready to do the deep stuff. Like I'm ready to face this. I'm ready to do all the stuff. And then all of a sudden it's like, no, this one's just going to be about joy and beauty and leaning in and crying tears of gratitude. Like, oh, thank you.
Yeah. So your book has a lot of material. And I don't mean that in a way that it's like for the listeners, like, oh, shit, that's a lot. It's like it has a lot of really great information. It's structured extremely well to deliver that information in a way that is like ongoingly sort of, you know, back reference to the central thesis of like what you're exploring in the book, as well as progressively.
So each section sort of nicely builds upon and sort of expands the work that you're presenting.
And I doubt I'm going to, well, we're certainly not going to get all of that information in this interview.
Plus that would take away from the exciting opportunity for listeners to eventually become readers.
And I don't even know that it'll end up being as well structured as your book, but we'll see how it goes.
And somewhat tongue in cheek, I'm going to start off with what I think is probably the most important question
for the someone who wrote a book called the psychedelic mindmeld, which is,
are you a star Trek fan? Oh yeah. Yes. Yes. Yeah. And okay. I say that jokingly cause I love,
I love star Trek. Uh, so any opportunity to get to bring it up, I do bring it up of course,
for people who aren't savvy mindmeld is a, is the term that they use in star Trek to describe
a certain technique from one of the sort of races, alien races, or I guess species, alien races they
use in the show to talk about sharing one mind, two minds becoming one. And so with that, let's
get into the first real question, which is, Wade, what is a psychedelic Mindmeld?
Well, I mean, if we're going to start with Star Trek, we'll start there with the Vulcan Mindmeld,
because that certainly was the inspiration for the title.
And for those people who are familiar with Star Trek,
there's been a number of times the Vulcan mindmeld has showed up
across the different seasons and genres, if you want, of Star Trek.
And what we witness when we see the Vulcan go in to do the mindmeld
with whomever they're doing the work with,
it's a complete sharing of consciousness
where there's basically a psychic exchange that occurs in terms of viewing someone's past history,
possibly past trauma, possibly future events.
But there's also a physical exchange.
And when we watch the Vulcan mindmeld in particular, it's an emotional exchange often.
And it's like feeling into someone else's pain.
I can't think of all the instances of the Vulcan mindmeld now, but there's probably some moments of joy which are certainly possible within the psychedelic mindmeld.
But as you know, being human is very difficult.
And it's just being in the human vessel is challenging.
And most of what arises in the psychedelic mindmeld happens to be painful or related to suffering and trauma.
But that exchange happens in the Vulcan mindmeld.
So there is this physical exchange of emotion and, uh, you know, not unlike what, you know,
empaths, uh, might experience without using psychedelics, just to kind of clarify that,
you know, the telepathic space, uh, is something that, you know, goes beyond using psychedelics
and, uh, shows up in a variety of other ways elsewhere.
So I've, I've heard that there being a clear description or a clear, um, delineation between
science fiction and science fantasy, where science fantasy is just making up all sorts of crazy stuff
with scientific lingo. And then science fiction is attempting to use legitimate, possibly quite
legitimate scientific ideals or concepts or premises, and then expanding upon them to create
a kind of a fictional world. And, you know, in a lot of ways, the Vulcan mindmeld really has had
a kind of an allure of science fantasy to it. Oh, it's nice, but it's, you know, tele telepathy.
But what's interesting that you're speaking to, and it's something that I've had not intentional,
like it didn't intentionally go in there, but I have, you know, incidentally had experiences
during psychedelics where both myself and the person in the journey had the real clear sense
that despite the fact that there wasn't any sort of, you know, real time active priming with what
we were saying or doing, having had a sense of sharing mind, sharing consciousness, or,
I mean, there's lots of ways to explain this away perhaps, but kind of seemingly
inexplicable moments of like synchronicity with each other in what we were thinking,
feeling, seeing, perceiving. And so it was very interesting for me to hear you go in such depth
about these kinds of experiences and like taking it, you know, a little bit away from the sort of
reference to Star Trek and more into the sort of the content of what might happen during an
experience. And I want to, I want to ask you about the sort of the possible uses of this with respect
to going through darkness and so on and so forth in a little bit, but I want to hear a bit more
about like, what does this actually like look like? I don't mean that from the outside, although you
could speak to that but from the inside what kind of things might transpire between people in this
shared consciousness psychedelic Mindmeld right well there's a long list of things that can be
shared but before we jump into that i'm kind of curious because um you know it's one of those
things where i think what you're describing in terms of your experience with uh having telepathic
connection that was non-intentional and, uh, you know, something that spontaneously arose,
I think is the case for a number of people around the world to have done psychedelics,
you know, say with friends or in groups, uh, or even in ceremony. Um, just to say that,
you know, it is something that is not that unusual, uh, for, you know, the listeners out there who
think this might be some kind of one-off thing. Um, and in saying that, I'm kind of curious to
hear just a little bit more detail about the experience of what you had, uh, in terms of that
telepathic connection, if you can be more specific. Oh, uh, I mean, if I were, I'd have to like kind
of dust off a little bit of something here to go into too many specifics, but one that comes to mind,
uh, right away is, um, an experience I had many years ago, not, not with a psychic, you know what,
this was a little bit more of a reckless time in my life when this happened, but I was exploring
some sort of something that was being sold online as like party something, you know, it was some sort
of research chemical that we had no idea what it was, but it was, you know, getting sold online as
fertilizer or something stupid like that. And me and a friend of mine and myself, we took this and
laid there for what we didn't realize ended up being like multiple, multiple hours. And just
mostly with our eyes closed and our heads touching, and then having in what we had realized in
hindsight, because at least I have no conscious recognition of like us actually talking with each
other, sort of opening our eyes, it's many hours later and realizing that for the course of that
hour, we had just built this crazy story in our minds of like this epic journey that we went on.
And when we started describing what we experienced, we realized we had just
experienced the same epic journey with our eyes closed and not saying anything,
lying there for, you know, a couple of hours, maybe more, but I assume it was about a couple
of hours. And that being my first sort of like, holy shit, holy shit moment when it comes to like,
What just happened there?
And of course, at the time, I was a little bit more reckless.
So I was just like, oh, that was wild.
Cool.
Let's go wander the city.
Didn't really think too much about it after that, other than that being just a cool experience.
But that would be one example of a sort of shared mind experience I've had.
Yeah, well, that's certainly it.
You know, and I think that's happened to a lot of people.
And they don't really have a context to put it in.
So they don't really think much more about it in terms of the implications of what these experiences mean.
terms of you know where does consciousness reside and how are we you know capable of sharing
consciousness um but maybe before yeah we drop into that going back to your question um yeah i mean
like i said there's there's a long list of possibilities and um i'll try to keep this brief
uh just kind of giving a bit of an overview and so we'll start out what you know physically it
would look like and uh generally it's going to be two people lying side by side you know either
on a comfortable floor setting or in a bed and holding hands.
And just to clarify, like it's not necessary that people are touching each other to have
telepathic connection.
I mean, there's lots of examples of people sharing telepathically around the world in,
you know, different countries or different locations.
So just to be specific on it being a non-local phenomenon.
But at the same time, what touch engenders is the possibility of dropping further in to what's happening physically with the person in terms of where their energetics are at.
And it also creates a focus because, of course, as you know, working with psychedelics, it's easy that our mind wanders into different places in the trip.
And by having that human touch, it's a reminder of I'm here to work with my partner to establish a telepathic connection and to drop deeper into shared consciousness.
So that's what the physical piece is.
What's interesting is that the telepathic connection in terms of the psychic sharing, and I want to distinguish between physical sharing and psychic sharing.
They're overlapping, but they are kind of distinct.
is that, funny enough, in terms of the physical piece,
it can actually show up similar to the telepathic mindmelds
or Vulcan mindmelds in Star Trek,
where the hand reaches up to the other person's head
and there's this kind of thing going on.
That has actually happened to me on a handful of occasions,
but it certainly isn't necessary.
And when that happens, it's spontaneous.
My hand is moving there beyond conscious choice.
It's not like, oh, it's time to do the mindmeld and I'm going to stick my hand on this
person's head.
The body is moving beyond conscious choice.
And so with that, I'll drop into the physical exchange that can occur.
And I want to clarify that it's not unlike doing other forms of healing work.
You know, like I've worked with an osteopath.
I mean, she's more trained as a massage therapist, but, you know, through all of her work, she
basically works as an osteopath.
And this is not unusual for really good intuitive osteopaths where they can tap on someone's head or tap on a part of the body and just drop into the energetics of another person's body.
Then to where there are energetic blockages and start doing various forms of massage work.
And so this modality looks very similar to that.
And in that case, it's not like the mind is consciously dropping in in terms of, you know, following a set pattern of like, I have to do this in order to kind of feel into these various things.
It really is kind of intuitive feeling or sensing in where the energy is coming beyond the intellectual or, you know, ego rational mind.
And it's like the bodies become tuning forks to each other.
And there are certain resonances, again, which speak to blockages often associated with trauma, but also, you know, the challenges that the ego creates for itself in terms of, you know, navigating reality.
And when I say that, uh, I'm referring to, you know, the stresses, um, you know, people
being really neurotic.
And of course there are chemicals that are associated, uh, with these states of, of mind
in terms of, you know, influencing adrenaline and those various types of chemicals that
then get stuck in the body and cause us problems.
So again, at the physical level, what can happen is that like tuning forks, one body
will tune into another or both at the same time.
And yeah, the body spontaneously begins to move and drop in and physically massaging out these blockages, which can often be very painful and very deep in terms of the work, not unlike rolfing.
So there is that element.
And what's interesting is that while doing that type of work, and it's not necessary that this happens either, it is possible for the psychic connection to drop in too, where there's a possible sharing of consciousness.
and just to give you an example it's like okay so now my body's dropping in starting to massage
someone and i may actually feel into the trauma that's being released and i may actually see a
visual that i may actually relive the trauma and so for an example my wife and i were in a really
severe accident uh years ago and she suffered a leg injury so we're doing a session together and i
drop in and, uh, I'm attracted to where her injury is in her leg and I'm lightly massaging it. Cause
it's actually, you know, still even, you know, many, many months later, it's still, you know,
fairly damaged and not wanting a deep massage. So that's also interesting too, that, you know,
my body's intuiting not to go too deep into the injury, but I go in and all of a sudden the next
thing, my whole field of vision turns black and I'm just screaming at the top of my lungs. And now
I'm actually reliving her experience of the accident and the trauma associated with that,
even though I'm not visually seeing the accident. And then that blackness, so to speak, kind of
dissipates and my field of vision returns to the room and to, you know, her. And what's interesting
is that both of us actually see this black smoke leave her leg.
Now, I'm sure, you know, in terms of material reality,
the default reality, there wasn't actually smoke,
but at some ethereal level, we'll say,
there was this release of something within her
and related to this trauma.
We later joked about, you know, it being a form of exorcism.
So yeah, that, that's, you know, dropping in at that level.
I have in other cases dropped into people's traumas where I've actually seen, you know,
uh, with one person I was working with, for example, uh, a police action in England that
he was unfortunately a victim of.
And yeah, I saw him in this stadium, uh, you know, a soccer match and all of what was
happening there and the horrors of that, which also led to screaming and, and yeah, just again,
working through the release of that.
Um, and while in that space, it's sometimes possible that I'll end up seeing, you know,
this is kind of strange too, but like with an x-ray vision into the other person's body.
So working with the same person, I saw into his lungs and, uh, saw how polluted they were,
you know, as a result of smoking both tobacco and marijuana for, well, basically decades,
and that he had damaged his lungs severely. And so, you know, all of these things are possible.
And then, of course, in the terms of the shared consciousness, if we want to kind of step into,
you know, a deeper level. Well, let's take a pause there. Just hang there for a second,
because I do want to go to this deeper level. But, you know, what you had just said about sharing
psychically brought up another story of an experience I had totally without psychedelics.
And I don't know, I feel like I'm maybe about to reveal myself as being a lot more
what other people might describe as woo than I normally present myself.
I have a friend of mine who says like, look, I'm not woo woo, but I'm one woo, absolutely one woo.
And I spent a few years training with a Reiki master to become a Reiki master and teacher.
for a while, I actually did Reiki as like a service. And I have a number of memories,
but one in particular comes up where I was working with someone. It was always hands off and just
like following where the hands needed to go and so on and so forth. And then paying attention to
what came up in my own mind and coming out and being like, hey, so when I was like working over,
you know, these areas, I had this sort of image come to mind and I described this kind of dynamic
image, these things that were happening in my mind. And so like, does that mean anything to you?
And then immediately start crying and then reveal to me that what I just said spoke directly to this
issue they had been facing with a family member, which I knew nothing about at all. I didn't even
know this person. And that, I mean, the way I understood it at the time was like, oh yeah,
I was tapped into their energy field, to their sort of experience. And it was being filtered
through my own. It was being filtered through my own lens, but I was detecting something and what
sort of affirmed that it wasn't just my own mind, that my own mind might've been creating what it
looked like, but I was tapping into something beyond myself was the response. And I'll, you know,
I'll ask you a more sort of, you know, quote unquote critical question in a bit, and I'm sure
I could try to explain this away, but instead I will just say like, that was another example of
sort of for me one of many at that time of sharing kind of like a psychic a psychic level of shared
consciousness yeah no absolutely and you know that's my point and what i was saying earlier
that psychedelics are not necessary to do this type of work although i think because they are
such powerful amplifiers they amplify the work and they can take us farther than probably most people
could ever go without psychedelics.
Because as you're describing those stories, I think energetic healers like yourself working
with Reiki, but also, again, this osteopath person that I've worked with, she described
a number of, because we've talked about the book, and she's described a number of cases
similar to yours where she would be working on someone and she would begin to see things
about the person and then mention that to the client afterwards.
And yeah, each time they were real hits in terms of, you know, someone who had had a negative impact, usually a negative impact on the person's life.
So that, yeah, that's definitely a thing.
And again, well, just quickly, it really speaks to our porosity and how consciousness, yeah, is not just centered in the brain.
And it is kind of in the ether, so to speak, and that we can all connect and move through it.
And one thing I really want to highlight is, and this is something that was just introduced to me recently, was the Telepathy Tapes, which is a podcast that speaks to nonverbal autistic children, which are constantly in telepathic states.
And, you know, they've run a number of tests over the years, and they're scoring 100% on these tests.
I mean, this is telepathy tests that go beyond anything else that has been done before.
And it happens that, you know, telepathy is one of the most studied phenomena in the scientific world.
Funny enough, a lot of people don't know that.
Interesting.
But if you get into Dean Radden's work, you can see that there are millions and millions of data points that stretch well over 100 years on telepathy.
But all I have to say is, you know, with my point is that, yeah, psychedelics are not necessary.
People can take a very deep dive like these nonverbal autistic children and adults where they're in constant telepathic connection.
But again, for those of us who are not connected in that way, psychedelics are a really useful tool to explore consciousness and this phenomenon.
And my sense is that if you start asking people, it's a pretty weird thing to ask.
Like, have you ever had like a telepathic experience?
And depending on who you ask or where you ask it, you might get some strange looks or some
sort of like social clap back in some way or another.
But I think when we start asking people about these things or sharing experiences, I imagine
like a lot of people are going to be like, you know what?
And then they have an experience too.
I know this happened and I'll ask you a little bit later about disincarnate entities.
But at some point in my sort of, I don't know, I had an instance where I was like really grappling with the, you know, the reality or unreality of disincarnate entities and started asking around to people whose perspective I trusted, who hadn't really ever spoken to me about it, yes or no.
And every single person I talked to was like, well, actually, yeah. They all kind of had like experience. Excuse me. Well, some people I asked, they're like, I have no idea what you're talking about. But a lot of people that I asked were like, yeah, actually, you know, there's this, this and this and these instances. And this is what I sort of generally believe, but they just don't talk about it because it's a weird thing to bring up.
And I think this kind of telepathic mindmeld experiences, psychedelic and otherwise, might be one of those things. Psychedelics being one of the few places I think where you could actually talk about it and people won't be like, what's wrong with you? They'll be like, oh, that sounds like a trip or something, you know?
Yeah, well, it's interesting because with the telepathy tapes, you know, there's quite a few hours of interviews and, you know, scientific study behind them.
But one thing that does come up repeatedly is how there is this societal distancing from the phenomenon.
And there's a lot of negative attitudes out there.
And so, you know, you would have parents who would be telepathically connected to their children and even teachers that would be telepathically connected who would then bring the subject up only to find out that they would, you know, be turned into a pariah and, you know, basically outcast and treated terribly because they even suggested the possibility of it, which is just horrible.
So, you know, in writing the book, it was kind of, it's one of the reasons I wrote it was just to normalize and validate the experience of those out there who are also having these experiences and also to, you know, offer a framework.
Obviously, it's a rough framework because there's a lot, you know, in terms of consciousness we don't understand, but, and a lot of mystery around that.
But, you know, a rough framework to help people begin to understand what's happening and normalize it so it's not so strange and alien to us.
you were about to go into another another aspect that could arise in the mindmelds
you had talked about physical you talked about psychic and i feel you were about to go into
somewhere else can we go can we go there now yeah yeah so shared consciousness and so you know this
is kind of that i guess you know one of the higher levels of what's possible with the mind
where you know both people are fully communicating and aware of each other in the psychic space
and can possibly journey to other realms, you know?
So I've done this most often with my wife,
which is kind of interesting.
She was someone who, as a teenager,
made the mistake of, you know, taking psychedelics
at the behest of this boy who was, you know, she was into.
And they went to like a roller coaster park
and she never even got on a ride,
but had one of the most horrific, you know, events of her life.
Unfortunately common.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, it is unfortunately common.
So never wanted to do psychedelics again.
And then she met me and there's, you know, lots of stories in terms of how she eventually dropped in.
But when she did actually the very first time, you know, we took mushrooms together, laid down on the bed together.
We're journeying, you know, she just totally dropped into the psychedelic Mindmeld, you know, naturally if you want.
And yeah, you know, like we've had these different journeys.
And, you know, I opened the book with the one where one of our very first journeys was journeying to a fractal version of Japan.
You know, and this may be, you know, past life stuff together.
It's always hard to be certain of these things.
But we found ourselves in this ancient tea house drinking tea together.
And it was, you know, clearly Japan.
We're wearing kimonos and everybody around us is Japanese.
And it was awesome, you know.
And it's just like, wow, who would have ever guessed that was possible, right?
In your book, you mentioned something about super consciousness, like shared super consciousness
experience.
What does this mean?
Well, I would, yeah, certainly with super consciousness, this would be an example of
journeying into other realms or dimensions.
And, you know, so if we want to think of super consciousness, you know, it's one of these
things where it's a difficult thing to kind of play with words because we have overlapping
phenomenon and how they're described in language.
Sometimes they're a bit distinct from each other.
But, you know, there's super consciousness is kind of a broad category that, you know,
I think is inclusive of, say, the collective unconscious that Carl Jung describes, you
know, where we find the underlying, you know, history and, you know, present, future.
of humanity and all of their experiences and the archetypes that are underlying the symbols that
underline our existence as humans. Basically, you know, a realm that in a sense creates
the material world. So I would say that that is, you know, a layer of super consciousness,
you know, the Akashic Record, you know, made popular by the theosophists, but, you know,
going back to Hindu scriptures, this idea that all events for all of living beings,
sentient beings throughout the universe, both past, present, and future,
are located in the Akashic Records, which we can then, as humans, access.
So which means that I can access the past lives of various other people,
whether it's connected to my soul or not.
That means that I can connect to, you know, large archetypal phenomena like genocide, which I have done.
And, you know, whether that's people who suffered in Rwanda, the Jews in the Holocaust, you know, what happened in Cambodia with the Khmer Rouge, you know, there's this underlying archetype.
And humans are very connected to it because genocide is not unique to any one people.
It's something that has occurred throughout history.
Even the Catholic Church, of course, has been involved in committing genocide, you know,
back in the Middle Ages when they went after the Cathars and went into villages and wiped
out whole everybody, you know, women, children.
And the Pope, of course, this weird story, a general came to him and he's like, well,
there are Catholics in this, you know, in these towns.
And he's like, well, if they're Catholics, it's okay.
They'll go to heaven.
So it's okay if you kill them, you know?
So that's how weird this stuff gets, right?
And, uh, yeah.
So that's, you know, those are just some examples of what's out there.
So, of course, I cover, go ahead.
Well, I was just going to say, I cover, you know, more examples in the book.
Definitely.
Yeah.
And in a, in a well-structured and progressive way, as mentioned earlier.
Um, so, I mean, you kind of just, you kind of just spoke to it slash around it.
So I might be asking you to repeat yourself, but maybe in a more directed way, which is,
you know, like, how do you, how do you like personally, right?
You know, how do you explain this phenomenon that this happens?
Like, I guess a sort of a sister question to that, and you can either blend them or answer
them separately or either doesn't matter, which is like essentially what these experiences
maybe reveal about personal consciousness, reality in general. But how do you personally,
how do you explain this phenomenon from the perspective of what is existence, what is reality,
what is consciousness such that these kinds of shared telepathic mindmeld connections are
possible? Yeah, well, I definitely drop into that consciousness is pervasive throughout the universe,
But basically, the universe is made of consciousness.
And if we want to, you know, dare to throw the word God in there, because of course, everybody has their own idea of what God is.
There's a lot of baggage in there.
But that God is all pervasive and that consciousness is God and that we are all of it.
You know, in a sense, this idea of unity consciousness and that we are all part of it.
We are all interconnected.
And it is that interconnection which allows these types of things to occur.
So you are me.
I am you.
And that's where I drop into talking about non-dual experiences in the book and that there are these tiered levels of non-dual experience.
So at its simplest level, I mean, as we start to break down the barriers of, you know, selfhood or, you know, being an individual, we reach in at an empathic level, as we've been talking about already, into the experience of another person.
And, you know, maybe I'm feeling into what emotion someone else is feeling.
And, you know, there's lots of empaths in the world that can, of course, relate to that.
As we move further, we reach into, you know, feeling into the energetic blockages.
That's another non-dual aspect.
And then we jump into shared consciousness and journeying together.
That's becoming even more non-dual on this continuum.
And then at a certain point, it's possible to drop into a non-dual layer where I'm aware of the material realm.
And let's say that you and I are doing a session together.
And I look at you, and you are me.
There is no separation, even though I'm aware that there is a material existence.
But I feel and my experience is that I'm all of it.
And then to kind of drop into the final stage is to just completely drop the material realm altogether, which can also happen in the mind mill.
But of course, at this point, you don't know if there's anybody else there because there is nobody else there.
Everything is one.
And the only way that you can kind of confirm that you were in that space together is after the fact where it's like, yeah, I dropped into the non-dual, lost all track of material existence.
The ego is completely dissolved where there's no conversation or dialogue in my mind anywhere anymore.
And it's just absolute pure awareness where you, it's kind of strange to say, but you actually do experience just being God.
It's like the Godhead.
It's absolute.
And, uh, and that's, yeah.
So in that context, I really see the phenomena as, you know, we are human beings.
Um, if you want, uh, individuals with our kind of own unique fingerprint on the infinite
hand of God and that we're all connected ultimately to the Godhead.
And it's like, it's kind of like one finger, you know, touching and holding another and,
but it's all the same body and reaching into each other.
It makes me think of a meme or like a single frame comic I saw, which was a person standing on a cliff and there's a hand about ready to flick the person off the cliff.
And then there's a hand on the other side of the cliff to catch it.
And it's like the hand flicking is God.
The person is God.
The sun is God and the hand catching is also God.
I guess that is kind of like a non-dual little comic there.
But that, I mean, I find that way of looking at the world actually, or the way that I understand myself in the world, that's kind of, it's pretty close. It's pretty close. And this is something you speak to, I think, pretty well in the book.
There's a certain level of like conscious ambivalence that is kind of necessary when it comes to whatever stories or models or ideas we have about what is or isn't the case or what did or didn't happen or what is or isn't real, especially coming out of psychedelic experiences.
And so with that in mind, I'm going to ask you a question, which I think, I think is a, to me, if I would ask this question, I'd be like, damn, this is a hard question. I don't know how to answer it. So, you know, like, no problems if you're not, if you're not into it. But the question is essentially this.
If you were to steel man yourself, your own perspective, and the steel man is like the
opposite of a straw man. A straw man is where you create a really floppy, shitty argument that the
person isn't saying, and then you argue with them as if that's what they're saying. If you steel man
yourself where you like make the best possible argument, your own argument and say like, okay,
I'm going to recognize how great this perspective is. It's all logical and rational. And then debate
that what is your best argument against the validity of there being a shared telepathic
experience like do you have any sort of ways in which you go yeah but it could also be
and and what is that and why well yeah it's interesting you know i would say that it's
kind of difficult to come up with much of an argument in terms of the shared telepathy especially
if you go into it without any intent, like you're not trying to create something in advance,
right?
So, you know, because it's one of those things, if we plant something in the subconscious,
we might manifest that in conscious experience dropping into the mind belt.
So let's say that we drop in and with no agenda, and that's, you know, I'd recommend in the
book.
I think, you know, after you've done this for long enough, you can start to play with being
more, I guess, I don't know, centered around playing with little things in terms of trying
to manifest specific things.
But generally, let's say, you know, we're trying to take a scientific approach.
So we go on no agenda.
And, you know, from the ultimate science perspective, you wouldn't even know each other.
You've just been introduced.
You take psychedelics together.
You have the experience.
You're not talking.
You could even have an observer ensuring that, you know, nothing is being said.
And then afterwards, you write down all of the journey and you look for what has overlapped.
And often things are so specific that it's like, you know, in my mind, very conclusive.
And certainly that's what we're seeing with the telepathy tapes I mentioned earlier.
There's no denying, based on the scientific methodology that they're using, that this is a phenomenon.
Now, I think where it starts to get a lot more blurry, you know, playing with the steelman idea, is when we enter realms where we're meeting entities or, you know, discarnate beings or spirits, souls, whatever you want to call them.
And then at what point is that a real phenomenon?
And what is the nature of that phenomenon?
I think there's a whole bunch of possibilities there.
And just to give you a sense of that, and let me just also say that it's also hard to say that it's not at all a thing.
Because when two people, again, without an agenda, this would be something that happened just recently with my wife and I,
we're doing a session together, starting to drop in telepathically.
And my father, who passed some time ago, shows up for both of us.
You know, and it's kind of one of those things where, you know, my wife was not connected to my father at all.
She only met him a few times.
We live in different cities.
And, uh, and yet both of us, and at the very same time he shows up for both of us.
So it's one of those things where, you know, we didn't invite him in.
We were both happy that he showed up and he showed up with this amazing loving bliss, which, you know, is all about a full reconciliation, which I described my challenges a little bit in the book with my father.
Um, but it's kind of strange how so many of them have been resolved after he's passed away.
That's just his own story.
But the point being is that, yeah, I mean, you know, there, there are these interactions.
Um, and there's a certain energy that my father had that, you know, I completely relate to.
And that was my father, even though we didn't visually see him, it was an energy that showed up.
And yet, you know, and again, what's also interesting is that discarnate beings are always communicating telepathically.
So that's another thing that I think that's important to highlight is that that is a phenomenon itself.
Now, again, where I was going in terms of the complexity of this, especially when doing the work alone, you know, we can drop into, you know, the unconscious dream state.
And we have these characters that show up, you know, for keeping track of our dreams, which with a little bit of effort, it's not that hard to do.
And, uh, well, who, who are these dream characters?
Are they real beings that are showing up in our dreams or are they just a projection of
our unconscious minds?
And I don't, I don't have a good answer for that.
I don't know the answer to that.
You know, it's, it's one of those things.
It could be one, it could be the other.
Another possibility is that when we're eating various, uh, discarnate beings, and I mentioned
the one, you know, like with King David in the book, um, that that's something for whatever
come up a lot for me and it's like, okay, so I have this encounter.
I'm going to list off a bunch of possibilities.
One is, um, and probably the least likely one, I was actually King David, you know,
so I'm actually reliving a past life experience and, you know, I could create a long story
about that and I've come with a big mission to do something on the planet now.
And I I'm up there.
Like I, that's just one possibility.
Another possibility, and this speaks to what we were talking about earlier about, you know, the collective unconscious, unity consciousness, is that we can drop into the lifetime of anybody who has lived in the past, and I would argue even into the future, and I connected to his energy as it was lived, you know, over a couple thousand years ago.
That's another possibility.
Another possibility is that, you know, David is associated with an archetypal story.
You know, there's the David and Goliath stuff and there's various other things.
And without going into detail, but it's possible that I'm resonating at an archetypal level with part of his story.
That is also part of my story.
And that's what the connection is.
So there's something for me to learn about what is happening in my own life as it relates to archetypes.
Now, another possibility is that, you know, I am somehow connected to the energetics of a David, you know, internally.
So it's actually not David who is showing up.
It's some other being.
But that being, in terms of the energy that they represent, is showing up as David.
Now, two things are possible.
One is that it's a projection that I am placing as an avatar on the other being because of how I'm relating to the other being based on having a Christian heritage and having read the Bible.
Another possibility is that the being is actually reading into me to see what most will resonate with me and what I'm most comfortable with, and is actually wearing purposely the avatar of King David.
So all of these things are possible for everybody out there who's having these experiences.
And I also think that, you know, if we want to play with archetype, but there's also the trickster out there, you know?
And so who's to say that there's not some trickster out there playing this little game of like, oh, let's just play with Wade's mind just for some fun, you know?
So, and that's why I really highlight in the book, not taking anything too seriously.
It's not, you know, oh, yeah, this happened to me, and now, you know, in my psychedelic experience,
and I would say this is also something that can happen in life.
Now all of a sudden I have a mission.
I think we need to be very careful with missions.
And when encountering these types of discarnate being spirits, again, we can play a lot with labels,
I think the bigger thing is really to just kind of work with the energetics that they present.
You know, are they coming and sharing a love?
Are they challenging me in some way?
Are they dropping in and challenging maybe some fear within me that I need to overcome?
And again, just kind of coming back to the self and what do I have to learn from the experience?
How can I go deeper?
How can I evolve to become a more responsible, loving being?
Yeah, I really land or that last bit really lands with me because this is one of the things that,
Especially when, so I do some integration coaching for people.
Generally, people are reaching out when they've had either an experience that they can't talk
about really with anyone in their personal community because they don't have a lot of
folk around them or that they've had a very difficult experience.
And I've many times had someone come online into a call and they're very overwhelmed and
upset by something that they can't make sense of. And it's usually something really big. And this
sort of general sort of thing that's upsetting is like, was that real? You know, what do I do with
this now that I don't know if it's real or if it is real, then what do I do? And if it isn't real,
then like, what does it mean? And usually in those instances, I think, you know, there's a lot of
value in wondering about the reality of these things. But usually from like a triage perspective,
I generally go, well, like, let's just not worry about whether or not it's real. Like,
instead of having that be the thing we're focused on, like, what does it mean to you?
What did it feel like? What feelings came up for you? Like, now that you feel into those feelings,
like, what is the impact of this experience on your life now? What does that feel like?
Because you might not be able to feel like, almost definitely, you're not going to figure
out was that or was that not, you know, like a gray alien that actually, you know, visited me
in my mind, right? But you can absolutely figure out what did you feel, what is the impact of those
feelings and how you can work with those feelings in a way that can either at the very least bring
you back to baseline or serve as an important sort of arena to uncover lessons about yourself
and your life. And that's obviously a very pragmatic way of looking at it compared to
say maybe like yeah it's a very sort of like minimalizing to the to pragmatism of just like
application in your life but so when you when you had described it the way that you did I felt like
yeah that really landed for me yeah no and what you're saying really resonates with me too um
yeah but you know like we are we are kind of all connected to the dreaming of god
and we're all playing these you know roles uh you know and I think this is a key point as well
is that if we think of the starting point of the universe as being, you know, the zero-point field or, you know, non-dual reality,
well, how does God experience itself?
It experiences itself through duality and creating another.
And in that, because, of course, God, if we want to play again with that word, is infinite,
And throwing itself into material reality, which of course as humans for us is difficult, but God isn't someone who's thinking good or bad, ultimately.
From a non-dual perspective, there's no such thing as good or bad.
You know, it's our ego minds in the nature of living in duality that starts to create these distinctions.
And it is in living in duality that we are essentially, again, God looking at itself in the mirror, but in all experience, which means all experience in order to play that all out is all of the negative and all of the positive, all of the good, all of the bad, the evil, etc., etc.
So there's, and I frankly don't think there's someone on the other end of this keeping track of all of it. It's just, it's just playing it out as is. And people of course can talk about karma and I think that can turn into an interesting conversation on its own.
But, um, you know, again, it's how do we relate to these experiences?
And there was, um, uh, Richard Alpert, uh, Rom Doss.
And it was one of these things, I wish he had written a book on it, but it's just like a fairly short 20 minute talk that he gave.
And he talks about reality channels.
And, you know, there's this idea which has been quite popularized of, you know, that we are, we can see ourselves as a TV and we can tune into these different channels and consciousness is always playing.
It's just about how we tune in, you know, what channel am I tuning into?
So he talks about, you know, channel one being kind of our lived physical reality.
You know, I'm Wade Richardson.
I wrote this book on the psychedelic mindmeld and I'm right now talking to James Jesso.
And, you know, channel two being the channel of our psychology and, you know, it's like, why am I, why, what are the underlying reasons for me doing various things in life? Why did I write the book? For example, uh, it's the psychotherapy, you know, he likes to joke about it being the psychotherapy channel. You know, what about the traumas in my life that had informed who I am today?
Channel three is, you know, playing with the super consciousness.
It's the archetypal and all of the layers of archetype.
Channel four is the channel of the soul where, you know, I look within myself and through my experiences, you know, and, you know, various levels of waking up.
I see myself as a soul that's, you know, incarnate within this body.
And I look around the world and wait a minute, there's all these other, you know, billions of people out there and their souls and body.
it starts to get into the existential questions of, well, why am I here?
Why are we here?
And then channel five being the non-dual channel.
You know, as I said earlier, I look into your eyes, you are me, and there is no separation.
And then he jokes about channel six being void, which, you know, is for the Buddhists.
And of course, he wasn't a Buddhist.
But, you know, if we play with all of these different layers of how we can look at things,
I think they're helpful for integrating because there is no one and only way of looking at things.
In fact, there's a variety of way of looking at there and they all interpenetrate each other.
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Let's get back into the interview with Wade Richardson.
So let's talk about maybe like, you know, with respect to there being many different ways, different channels we could tune into on this next question or like to your address of this next question.
What do you see as the value of this? And I don't mean just like the general value of that telepathic psychedelic Mindmeld experiences can happen. But I mean, in the sense of going in intentionally to connect with another in this way, what is the value of this kind of intentional journey, excuse me, intentional journey in comparison and contrast to journeys that are
more focused towards the self rather than towards sharing.
Right. Well, I think there's a few layers to this. Um,
the biggest one is finding a new intimacy that is just unexpected and never
thought possible. Um, you know,
this is basically to become completely naked to the other and show all of
oneself, which, you know,
a lot of people are not going to be comfortable with and that's why I'm
suggesting it's an advanced practice. But in that space, we can find a loving connection that we
never thought we could find. And it's just, it's going deeper. And it's a deeper exploration of
consciousness. It's a deeper exploration of our porosity. It's a deeper exploration of us in terms
of unity consciousness. And, you know, we see deeper into each other. We see, you know, our warts,
You know, we see the other person's works more deeply.
But, you know, as we do the work and we drop into experiencing that ourselves and the other person is sharing in that,
I think it brings a deeper loving understanding of each other as humans and a deeper compassion, ultimately.
I think that's a big piece of the work is being more compassionate.
And I'm hoping that the more we can break down these barriers of separation is, you know, we're individuals.
Where, you know, you see, you know, particularly it really stands out in the United States right now in terms of greed, you know, Trump is all about world domination, you know, oh, you know, and who knows, like, you know, maybe in the next year or two, as weird as it sounds like there might be an invasion of Canada.
Like that's the way he's talking, right?
Yeah, I know.
And so, you know, you might be an American, um, and you know, in the not too far distant
future.
And of course that's highly unlikely, but you know, unfortunately it's something that
possible, you know, Canada and the U S have fought wars in the past, like going back a
couple hundred years.
And, uh, you know, it's, and it's my hope that, you know, the United States, the United
States wakes up because, you know, it is an imperialist country.
It's a neo-colonialist state that has, you know, throughout almost all of its history
gone around the world killing people.
You know, I mean, there's a mass genocide
in just creating the United States of the Native Americans.
And it's absolutely horrific.
And unfortunately, Americans do have,
wear the archetype of the warrior.
And, you know, so much of what drives Americans
is wanting to be number one in the world,
which is associated with greed and various other,
yeah, other various dark things.
And so, yeah, again, in my hope with this, and, you know, of course, there's others doing it in their own ways, to break down the separation of the individual and to see, you know, how much we have in common and that there is a need to be more loving and compassionate towards each other.
And, yeah, dropping more into what does the community, the world community need as opposed to, you know, the construct.
And ultimately, this is the funny thing with, you know, nation states is that it's a fairly recent construct, you know, the last really 300, 400 years.
And, you know, all this nationalism and people identifying as, you know, I'm an American, I'm a Canadian or whatever it is.
Right.
It's a bit ridiculous when you start to, you know, to zoom out and see the nature of what we are as a species and how interconnected we are.
So again, my hope in this work is a deeper, loving, compassionate relationing amongst humans.
I'm going to make a couple of comments there that are sort of like both to what you said.
One of which is, you know, you're talking about us in our connection with each other.
And I think to take it one step past that is also our connection with the non-human world.
Psychedelics are incredible for that.
In fact, I would say that that is a much less transgressive premise is to suggest that people
taking psychedelics might feel like they're connecting with a living, breathing being
that is a tree or a plant or the sky or something to this effect.
But that kind of our isolation or our sort of, what is it?
like Sky Otter describes it as the sort of like the tomb that we've encased ourselves in
by isolating ourselves from the womb of the world of the planet is one that is like very stifling
and a significant contributor, I think, on many levels to the problems that we're facing and
sort of continuously propagating on the planet. And I think that when I think about, you know,
shared consciousness or telepathic mindmelds. We're talking about other people and disincarnate
entities and this kind of thing. But I think a very legitimate case can be made to extend that
kind of phenomenon to interactions with the natural world and the various inhabitants,
non-human inhabitants of the natural world as an expression of a kind of telepathic mindmeld
or a psychedelic mindmeld. I mean, I'm not necessarily trying to put that on you or your
or your claims here, but that's something that I, I would,
I would extend it to in my own perspective.
No, that's beautifully said. And I absolutely agree with you. And, uh,
you know, this is something that's been happening more recently for me and like
post-production of the book. But, um, when doing psychedelics,
I've been connecting the stranger, this is going to sound, but to,
to planets, you know, within our solar system, dominantly Saturn. And I,
again, I don't know why there's a lot of mystery behind this stuff, but,
And also to planet Earth, you know, and it's a living being, of course, and we're creations at some level, of course, of the planet.
So, yeah, again, we are all interconnected and the planet and nature is part of that.
Yeah, it makes me think of Alan Watts, actually.
This is a, I was just referencing this in a section of the book that I'm presently writing.
And one of Alan Watts' perspectives is on the language we use to say, like, we come into this world.
When we're born, we come into this world. And he says that this is actually incorrect. In his mind,
we don't come into this world. We come out of this world in the same way that an apple tree apples
earth peoples. It does many other things, but one of the things it does is it peoples.
So we come out of this world the same way an apple comes out of an apple tree. And I mean,
then he also extends it to whatever the intelligence of the universe is that sort of like all of
existence as we, as we are able to observe it and see it, you know, comes, you know,
out of the intelligence of the universe. So too are we, you know, beings that come out of
the intelligence of the universe. Um, so it's, it's making me think of that there with your
connection with, uh, Saturn, you know, like whatever it is that, you know, brought the
solar system into being, if we are that, then there's a possibility to as much connect with
the earth as whatever it is that has us, you know, with our other celestial neighbors.
Yeah, no, that resonates again, too. And I just didn't add another layer of that. I mean,
yeah, the universe giving birth to all of us. So if you think, you know, if you're someone who
believes in soul or spirit, again, we can play with definitions there. But as the soul is
something that journeys through lifetimes, it's quite possible, again, I'm not going to be
definitive on any of this, but it's possible that, you know, we were born somewhere else in the
universe, and that we arrived as spirits or souls on planet Earth, and that planet Earth gave birth
to our bodies and everything that's, you know, happened throughout the species, throughout all
of our history on Earth. But at the same time, it's possible that we may have chosen to come and
work with Earth in whatever kind of weird, mysterious way that is occurring.
I mean, I think, you know, history will play that out over the course of, you know, maybe
hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of years yet.
But we are part of the evolution of all of that, maybe at both a soul level and at a physical
level, and that is potentially a co-creative process with the planet as a living being.
The other thing I was going to say earlier from your comments around, you know, like the one of the values of this kind of work is to sort of get beyond our the sort of encapsulation of the self and like start to really feel ourselves as and with each other is some work that was being done.
Antoine Saka and Lior Roseman, they did some research where they were going in and observing
ayahuasca ceremonies that were happening. I mean, this is a while ago, probably extra relevant now,
but ayahuasca ceremonies that were happening in the West Bank, so the Israel-Palestine zone,
and that they were mixed groups.
They were groups of people who were both Jewish
and Muslim or Palestinians and Israelis and also Christians.
And that they just happened to be in the same group.
Like that was the same circle.
And that despite the fact that the intention wasn't to,
you know, like process their relationships,
they were all there for their own independent reasons.
They tracked the experiences people were somewhat spontaneously having that were relevant to the deeply internally embedded conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
and some of the experiences they were having and how it created greater empathy and understanding
for each other and themselves in the conflict over time and the consequence that seemed to
accidentally have on conflict resolution. Because I mean, reading some of these experiences,
I come to tears. I don't think anyone with any connection to their heart could not
in reading some of these experiences. But the result being that they end up having a greater
sense of empathy for the consequences of decades, maybe hundreds, thousands of years of turbulence
between peoples playing out in the individuals today and themselves.
Yeah, I've read those studies and I'm filled with hope when I read those. And of course,
when you look at the conflagration of Israel-Palestine right now, I mean, there's so much more work
that needs to be done there.
I mean, it's just heartbreaking to see.
I mean, what I identify as a genocide now of the Palestinians.
Of course, a lot of people have mixed views on that,
but I just can't see it any other way.
I mean, it's just full-on mass destruction.
And when you start talking about moving them to another location,
I mean, that's not unlike what Hitler was talking about
in terms of moving Jews out of Europe to Madagascar.
Strangely enough, that was something that was on the table before the final solution.
So it's horrific what we're watching in the world right now.
And have watched for many years, right?
I mean, this is the thing, is that humans have done some really nasty stuff
in World War I and World War II,
And all the ugliness around that associated with, you know, European colonialist powers basically fighting for number one.
It's not like Germany was unique in any of this, right?
I mean, Britain was number one and it was just other Europeans vying for that number one spot pole position, which of course the US is now in.
And it's not like, you know, like Britain hadn't worked hard to get that number one by, you know, taking their position and extracting from the world and dominating elsewhere.
Yeah, they had committed their own genocides around the world, if they want to be frank about it. Of course, you know, in the West, we don't really read that history because they wrote the history and they've kind of de-emphasized or, you know, kind of written it out of history about how horrifically they treated, say, the people in India and various other colonies.
But yeah, that just speaks to the horrors of the world and how they're playing out in its very recent history within our parents' or grandparents' lifetimes.
Some of the worst atrocities in all of human history have just occurred.
If we look at that timeline, tens of millions of people dying in each of the world wars.
It's just absolutely mind-blowing and sad and terrible.
terrible so try not to be too playful here while simultaneously not wanting to
miss out on the ability to to still enjoy and appreciate play in the midst of tragedy
and crisis but i want to i want to take this talk of i'm like okay horrible shit happens
It happens on massive scale. It happens and it has cascading impacts across generations on whole peoples and on individuals. And it can be as big as war and genocide. It can be as minimal as, well, minimal.
It could be as sort of grand in our minds as war and genocide, but equally impactful for the individual person. It could be as simple as neglect or not being loved properly. We all have wounds and traumas. I think it was you quoted Viktor Frankl or you referenced him in his book. He had a metaphor, which was like all trauma creates smoke in the room.
And it's like, it doesn't make sense to compare traumas because it's all just smoke in the room.
And at some point it doesn't really matter what it is.
The smoke fills up the room and it's just as impactful on the individual.
So with that said, I want to go back to something you were saying earlier.
Like you've been talking about, you know, the possibility of this kind of work to help us, you know, better get beyond ourselves and be empathetic with each other, see each other, recognize our connections, you know, through and as each other.
But you'd also mentioned the possibility of doing sort of deep healing work.
And you talk about this in the book a lot, processing or healing trauma or wounds.
What is it about these, you know, what is it specifically, I suppose, about a kind of
psychedelic mindmeld type experience that assists this trauma or wound healing or processing?
Right. Well, if we think of trauma, again, as something that can lodge itself in the body,
and again, this is often associated with the chemicals that play when we end up living in the moment of the trauma.
So let's say someone is sexually abused or physically abused by a parent or a priest or some person, a teacher or something like that.
In the moment of the trauma, the body is flooded with a variety of chemicals, which are meant to help the person try to flee, to fight back, these various types of defense mechanisms.
And basically what can happen is that the chemicals aren't fully played out in the moment of the trauma.
They basically end up kind of lodged in the body.
course, with this psychological story of being traumatized, of the event itself, and how,
you know, the ego, in a sense, has been completely disempowered, and the person has been abused.
So again, this stuff gets actually caught in the flesh, and there's, you know, a lot
of really good books that I reference in my book about how this occurs.
And so when in the psychedelic mindmeld, you know, it's another healing modality, you
know, and I want to say that there's a lot of other various forms of healing modalities
there. I mean, we can get into yoga and various types of massage and breathwork, et cetera, that
help release these traumas from the body. So what we're basically trying to do is bring the body
back into health, releasing and processing that which is stuck in order for the body to kind of
return to its peak health, which is, you know, its peak level of homeostasis to be as functioning
as possible, you know, where we can again, enjoy life as much as possible and be engaged in life
as much as possible. Um, you know, dropping into our creative abilities, wherever they
may show up and how we connect to other people. Um, and I, you know, I've worked, we'll say in
environments, um, with a lot of traumatized people in the past and, um, it really stands out, you
If someone is really traumatized, how much it prevents them from living life, in a sense.
Of course, we see that most obviously with people who are caught up in addictions.
There's lots of different types of addictions that are not only related to substance abuse,
but the substance abuse is the one that stands out the most.
Alcohol, of course, being the most prevalent one on the planet,
I would argue the most destructive drug on the planet.
And, you know, there's a lot of research in various organizations and governments around the world that say the same.
If you look at the overall data in terms of, you know, people killed by drinking and driving, you know, domestic abuse, accidental death.
And of course, never mind the fact that alcohol is a neurotoxin and carcinogen that over time kills you.
And that's even in low to moderate, but, you know, consistent drinking over a lifetime.
So, yeah, I mean, there's these layers, right?
And one of the things actually mentioning substance abuse is that psychedelics can help people move away from substance abuse.
I mean, and there's lots of stories, and I've seen it personally with the work I've facilitated of people who were caught up in a form of addiction, whether it was alcohol.
And let's not forget that THC, as much as marijuana, I think, has healing capacities and can be used for medical purposes.
THC, unfortunately, is addictive.
And I know people who have smoked pot, you know, daily throughout their lives over decades.
And that's an addiction.
And I've seen people work with psychedelics and step away from those types of addictions.
Again, looking at greater health, seeing the body, and I mentioned this briefly in the book, as the holy temple.
You know, let's look at ourselves as divine beings and take care of ourselves.
And so, yeah, in terms of the mind mold, I think it's just one way to access that healing and how we can basically be engaged in that together where one person may not do it alone.
So, you know, you can drop into a psychedelic session on your own.
You can find your own healing.
Absolutely.
But when doing the work together, you may, you know, you may drop into something that the other person just can't access and open that up for processing and release.
And again, with a target of overall better healing and health.
And one of the things that you had mentioned in your book was the sort of possibility that, you know, when going into a space like that with another person and facing this, like these aspects of yourself that you can't otherwise get to on your own, or even if you were in your own experience, it's like managing and holding it can be very difficult.
There's something about in this kind of shared consciousness space that another person being there can really support the being seen and held in ways that even just another person in the room being compassionate but not being there like with you on the shared consciousness level just can't reach in the same way.
That's right.
But I also want to say, because there's so many layers here, and this is complex, advanced work.
And I really highlighted this piece in the book, which is the play of sexual energy.
Because sexual energy is something that is an innate part, a primordial part of who we are as humans.
And it's running through all of us in different ways at different times.
But it's something that we have to bring a real awareness to, especially when we're doing these types of sessions.
Because, you know, we see sexual abuse occurring, unfortunately, all over the place.
I mean, it shows up, we've seen it a lot in religions, particularly in the last few decades,
in terms of just exposure to what's happened over the many hundreds of years.
And I will say all religions.
But, you know, it shows up, of course, in school systems and in society more generally.
But unfortunately, it is also showing up in the psychedelic world.
It shows up in all sort of healing and therapeutic modalities and services in different ways.
It happens to be the case that certain domains of that have grappled with it much sooner and have had more time to set up appropriate guidelines to protect it from happening where psychedelics weren't privy to that.
until recently. Yeah. Yeah, no, that's true. And so, yeah, in working in these types of sessions,
there's a couple of things. First off, I think the most important thing ultimately is that
if you're going to work with someone else, you have to find someone that you can absolutely trust.
And, you know, there's lots of ways to kind of work through what that looks like. And I offer
various things in the book to kind of, you know, questions to be asking, you know, in terms of how
socially mature the other person is, how emotionally responsible and mature the other
person is. Are they in a place if something goes or becomes difficult in the session that they're
open to talking about that and repairing that afterwards? And there's all these different
layers, but I just want to highlight that that is an extremely important piece in terms of
identifying who you want to work with. And of course, once you do agree to work together,
Um, there are other layers in terms of, uh, discussing boundaries and of course, talking
with the sexual pieces, you know, sexual energy in particular.
Um, because you know, if the bodies start to tune into each other and start connecting
physically, this is beyond the mind.
Right.
And I talk about how there can be bumps.
And so this is very distinct from, you know, there's no sexual fond lane or no sexual engagement.
Um, but you know, like if the, if I'm kind of moving across your body, I might bump a
breast or, um, you know, a man's penis or something like that.
Now these tend to be just brushes that they are very rare that they happen.
Um, but if someone's not comfortable with this type of physical contact as incidental
as it is, um, don't, don't do this work.
You know, it's, it's as simple as that.
if you're not completely open to completely revealing all of yourself to the other person,
don't do this work. And I think that's one of the things, so who would potentially
benefit the most from this work? I would say that couples who are already very intimately connected,
who have high levels of trust, I think this is an incredible modality to go much deeper. I mean,
with my wife and I, uh, it's just, I mean, I feel like, you know, we're this power couple,
like we've just experienced this, these deep layers of intimacy that have brought us just that
much closer together. And it's just, it's absolutely incredible to be able to share that
with another person, especially, you know, in marriage where that person is with you day in,
day out. And so there's a real beauty to that. Um, so yeah. Well, and I think something else about
someone who you are married to or in an established, well-established intimate partnership.
I can say as someone who's now been in a monogamous relationship partnership for more than six years
that it gets more secure as things go on. And the sort of sense of how important and deep and
profound it was in the first couple of years is true. But in the, in the years, like following
that, those are the years where it's like, Oh, I really get a sense of like, how deep, like how
much work did we do? What foundations were actually here? Um, and that early on, it can be easy to get
the wrong idea about how much integrity a relationship actually has. Um, and then make
choices that might put you too deep with another individual. It's something I encourage people.
If you're dating someone new, you probably shouldn't take MDMA with them for a little while
because it might give you a distorted sense of how close you are, how deep that loving really goes
by sort of like chemically inducing it. And I think something like that could happen with
psychedelics based on the way that you're describing these mindmelds if you're not
careful. But once you're in that kind of like established, deep trusting relationship, you know
what it is to trust each other. You know what that trust, like what it really feels like at a really
deep level. And you're in a sexual relationship, the opportunity for that kind of exploration is,
is incredible the way you describe. And I think the reason I'm bringing this up now with respect
to the sexual thing and you bring up sexual energy, and this is one of the questions I had,
is that the challenges and from that challenges, the possible damage that is present in doing this
kind of work where sexual energies can come up and so on and so forth, where there isn't actually,
and it isn't appropriate for any type of actual sexual interaction with each other.
That itself is a kind of sort of challenge that can pose to significantly injure both or either party if it's acted upon.
And you speak about this throughout the course of the book, which is like one of the boundaries is like no actual sexual conduct with the person during or afterwards.
Can you speak a little bit about that?
Because I mean, like, how does one, I mean, you could say in advance, but how does one navigate the sort of appropriate sort of establishing a protecting of boundaries with another person in a situation where you're both intentionally efforting to dissolve those boundaries and merge as one, especially when it comes to potential sexual violations?
Well, certainly I think, uh, talking about it beforehand and I've really found because, you know, I was doing this work, you know, a long time before the book.
And I have to say, one of the reasons I wrote the book is that the briefings were so long.
I mean, you know, up to three hours just to help prepare people for a session to see if they would even be interested in a session.
Now it's kind of like mandatory reading, you know, like whether you want to or not, if you have to read the book because I'm tired of explaining this stuff.
Uh, you know, that does take hours and hours to do.
And a big piece, of course, is this sexual piece.
And I have an appendix at the back of the book that basically is an agreement about what is allowed in terms of boundaries and what's not allowed.
And I think part of talking about it ahead of the session is an antidote to the actual possibility of it happening.
Because it's like, okay, we know that this can happen.
We're talking about the fact that it can happen.
We're saying, no, it shouldn't happen.
I'm not saying that's a 100%, like that's going to be flawless for everybody around the world and doing this because, you know, it's not unusual that those conversations can happen without psychosalics and things still happen.
But again, I mean, you have to be very, very careful and know that this is, you know, dangerous territory or, you know, hazardous territory.
So talking about it's important.
Setting the boundaries is important because, you know, another piece of it too, like you go through.
what can be harrowing experiences, releasing trauma.
Like I've talked about the screaming, the yelling.
I mean, there can be throwing up and purging and, and it is a lot to go through.
And so it's like, okay, so you go through all of that.
Are you okay with like cuddling with the other person and holding the other person?
And I've, you know, almost everybody I've worked with, uh, in terms of, you know, you
go through something and then you hold each other afterwards has been highly rewarding.
You know, like, you know, that's reaching into, you know, those playing with chemicals again, right?
Like oxytocin and, and, um, I can't remember the list, but, you know, there's a list of feel good chemicals in the body that are naturally released because of human touch.
And it can also help to work through trauma, especially if someone was, you know, abandoned in their childhood or weren't touched, which is, you know, a pretty Western phenomenon, especially within, you know, the English, the Anglophone culture, not to touch children, you know, with, you know, in terms of being close as parents to kids.
So there's a lot of, you know, abandonment trauma out there.
So that's, you know, an important area where we can kind of find connection.
But again, like, are you comfortable with that or not? Establishing that in advance. And the appendix is there, you know, people may or may not use it and sign off on it. But at the minimum, it really needs to be talked about.
Yeah. I mean, interestingly, or not interestingly, what's the word I'm looking for,
remains being a very important conversation, clearly, especially when it comes to sexual
violation and what that does or doesn't look like. Because yeah, it can cause so much damage and so
much trouble. And in those spaces, so many things can happen. And especially if one isn't doing their
own real sort of like deep work in themselves. This is, had a conversation with, uh, Geronimo
from ISEERS and they do a whole course about, uh, ayahuasca facilitation for non-traditional
ayahuasca facilitators. So Western people. And one of the things I talk about is like,
there are these very specific pitfalls that most people, if you're not careful, you will fall into.
And one of those things is like just getting to a place where somehow, despite your best efforts, despite your best intentions, at some point down the line, some part of you has managed to convince yourself that these particular actions are good and healing and they're part of the work, but they're actually ultimately sexual assault and violation.
So there's a lot of work that has to be done relationally and independently, internally, to sort of like help protect ourselves from falling into these pitfalls or acting in ways that can cause damage to another person.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I would say that, you know, in the traditional societies, it's an issue as well, a big issue.
Because, you know, I spent years going to various ayahuasca ceremonies, you know, facilitated by various shamans, some, you know, out of the jungle, all who had been trained in the jungle, but may have been from other countries.
And guess what?
Oh, sexual energy, not talked about before a ceremony.
Never, not once, right?
And yet there's touch.
You know, the shaman and, you know, every ceremony I ever went to, the shaman is touching, um, the people, uh, who are present.
You know, of course it's done with, with healing intention.
Um, but you know, this gets complicated because let's say, uh, you know, there's a, and of course, you know, unfortunately sexually abuse usually happens to really attractive younger women.
Let's say there's a younger, attractive woman, and a male shaman comes over, starts doing work on her body, but we'll say, you know, not touching breasts, not touching genitals, right?
But, you know, but close, right?
Maybe touching a thigh, maybe even the inner thigh.
And, you know, this is where it gets really complicated.
Because now, speaking to the porosity and the telepathy of us as human beings, let's say that the shaman is working out of a genuine healing modality.
And he's doing this work, and intuitively he's reaching into these places within the girl's body and doing legitimate work.
However, this is a beautiful, attractive young woman.
This is a male shaman.
underneath all of that, which the shaman may or may not be conscious of,
oh, wow, this is a beautiful woman.
I feel attracted to this woman, but I'm not crossing any boundaries.
But yet there's this thought, this feeling, this emotion.
And because we're telepathically porous,
it's possible that the woman picks up on the sexual energy
dropping into her from this male shaman.
And I'm going to say that this is a possibility, right?
A real possibility.
She picks up on this, and now the touch,
Even though the touch is legitimate from a healing perspective, now her experience of the touch, there's a sexual layer to it that is uncomfortable to her, which is real to her because of this emotional thing that she's tuning into at a telepathic level.
And now she starts to create a narrative of sexual abuse because of what she is going through while being in the psychedelic space, which is already a very complex space to be in in terms of what's real, what's not real.
But I would say at a minimum, there was an exchange that was uncomfortable to her because of what was going on within each of each other.
And they were feeling into each other beyond kind of the conscious mind.
And of course, the woman that's experiencing it probably doesn't even have a sense of the possibility of this kind of telepathic exchange and her projection of creating a story or narrative around what transpired.
So I just want to throw that out there, that I think in some cases of alleged sexual abuse, that this is a thing.
Now, of course, there are, you know, definitely stories of real sexual abuse where people have crossed moral and ethical boundaries and have committed, you know, arguably illegal acts.
Sure. And very, very unambiguous, unambiguous acts.
Yes. Yes.
And I want to say comment on that, which is to say that in my mind, of course, like the shaman or the facilitator could have done their due diligence and then it still just kind of happened.
But the reality is like that shaman or facilitator created the scenario where that could happen by not having appropriately understood, like either have been, I guess, like set up the scenario where there was a conversation in advance that this person knew that kind of thing could come up or that there might've been touch or that they were able to say no or stop at any time.
Like it's the responsibility of the facilitator to make sure that all of those things are clearly communicated and your participants are aware of what their options are if they get into something that they want to have a no stop don't moment with.
And then also to navigate the complexity of somebody being in a state where they can't say no or stop or don't or not, you know, for the quindaro, the facilitator to not be able to recognize when those moments are coming up.
Like all of this is, it gets, it gets very complicated.
It doesn't start when that person is having a sort of like detecting their, you know, unacted upon sexual arousal that started well before they, they got to that point in my mind.
And I agree. And that's why I say it's so important that these types of discussions occur before ceremonies. And again, in traditional settings, I'm not really, well, frankly, I'm just going to say that I have yet to find one example where this is something that's talked about in advance in a traditional setting.
Now, that's not to say it doesn't happen somewhere where I'm not aware, but I'm certainly not aware of it. And yeah, no, I think it's absolutely critical. You know, and Stanislav Grof, as just one example, speaks, you know, about this on a regular basis.
the importance of, you know, being able to have the safe word of safe, being able to say stop or
don't do this. And, um, and, and being very specific about what that word is. And I go a
little bit further and it's like, if the person pushes you away, because of course, as you know,
in the psychedelic space, you know, I may not be able to verbalize just pushing away is enough to
stop. Right. Um, because, you know, let's err on the air on the side of caution and, uh, and yeah,
it's like maybe, maybe they didn't mean to push me away, but they did push me away. And that's,
I just have to accept that it's basically someone saying no.
Yeah. And, and, and this, obviously this, this is a very loaded topic, loaded conversation. And,
and I don't present myself necessarily as an expert in fully understanding these dynamics and
how to protect from them or prevent them or deal with them. Should they arise or what's happening?
Um, but it, at the very least, you know, I, I completely agree.
Like it's, it's incredibly important that these things that the possibility of sexual
energy or behaviors emerging, um, in a session, absolutely 100% needs to be talked about in
advance.
Um, and not doing so is at the very least, uh, at the very least a risky choice and at
you know setting somebody or somebody's up for incredible damage yeah no absolutely and it's
it's one of those interesting things like i worked with a man recently a younger man
and uh so we're dropping in you know telepathically and it's just you know very surface stuff um but
definitely kind of feeling into each other's energies and and then i roll over like spontaneously
roll over to grab his head, you know, kind of drop it into the, you know, what would be the typical
Vulcan wine mill. And he pushed me away and that's like, yeah, okay, we're done. Right. And I went
into a different room and, uh, let him continue on his own and everything was great. I mean,
there was no offense taken either way and we both had great sessions and, um, but yeah, it's just
like, Hey, there's a boundary there and I'm not going to cross it. So, I mean, that, that was
actually this, this whole talk around, you know, navigating, managing, protecting, establishing
boundaries was something I was going to ask a little bit later. Um, and before we, before we
end, I have another question about where things can go wrong, but I want to go back to, uh, issues
of healing trauma, just generally maybe just like processing old wounds or whatever it might be
In your book, you talk about sharing the purge. And I've heard Martin Ball, who you mentioned many times in your book, describe events like this where someone would be struggling and he would put his hand on their chest and then he would vomit.
and then later the experience of the participant was that like he was vomiting for them because
their energy was stuck or something um can you talk a little bit about this idea of sharing the
purge and the role that can play in the in the sort of like the healing uh potentials of a of a
mindmeld psychedelic mindmeld experience sure well i mean yeah just to give you a sense um
Where this whole thing started actually was with this very scenario where I was at an ayahuasca ceremony in Mexico, and I've talked about this quite a bit, with a close friend of mine, someone who was struggling with substance abuse, which was one of the reasons he wanted to try ayahuasca but didn't want to try it locally because, of course, professional reputations and everything, he didn't want to be found out.
Of course, it'd also be illegal.
So we found ourselves in Mexico, uh, you know, wanting to do some sporting events in a particular
town and a shaman that I've been working with called me up and she's like, oh yeah, we're
doing this, uh, ceremony in Mexico.
And I'm like, oh, where's that?
And she's like, oh, in this town.
I'm like, well, strangely enough, you know, talking about synchronicity, if you want to
drop into Coral Union and others, um, we're, that's where we are, you know?
And, uh, so it was the perfect opportunity to go to this ceremony for both of us.
And we went, um, the first couple of nights, um, he really struggled, which of course for
someone struggling with substance abuse is pretty normal.
So it was pretty dark and lots of vomiting and feeling very sick as the ayahuasca is
working to heal that, which he has poisoned himself with, which in this case was alcohol.
And, um, you know, we got into the third night and, and frankly, not much had been happening
for me, which, you know, I've been doing ayahuasca for a number of years already.
I was quite disappointed, especially, you know, given the, um, you know, the, the adepts that are
shamanic level who were there. And, um, anyway, so I'm, I'm sitting there and I'm like, okay, well,
third night, not much is happening. And why am I here? And while I'm really there for my friend,
you know, like I was really wanting to support him. So I, I dropped into a meditation and let me just
keep, just throw this out. Cause we haven't talked about it, but just being able to meditate.
of course, which a lot of Westerners are not that familiar with or not good at,
is a really important skill in terms of doing this work.
Being able to sit completely still and be okay with a lot of weirdness
and difficult things coming up, which may be physically uncomfortable,
is a really important skill.
So anyways, I'm sitting there and I'm meditating, opening my heart
to just kind of share at a very vague kind of general level with my friend
and really not having any expectation around that.
And all of a sudden, I feel like within a couple of minutes,
this massive surge of energy shoot up my spine and through my body.
And he's sitting to my right, and all of a sudden,
my right arm just spontaneously just reaches out and grabs his head,
kind of similar to Vulcan mind-melt thing.
And at that point, again, I've been doing psychedelics for quite some time,
so I was like, okay, well, this is really weird.
I don't know what this is, but I'm feeling okay with it.
And I'm pretty good with, you know, just observing the weirdness.
And so this is happening.
And then all of a sudden, um, you know, my body starts to quake, my arm is quaking and,
and, uh, my body's vibrating, but it's, it's very uncomfortable.
The next thing I'm crying, my eyes are like, I'm sobbing.
And there's just this profound grief pouring through me.
And there's no story attached to it.
I don't know what's going on, but I certainly am very aware of the emotion and, you know,
tears streaming down my face and it's all very difficult.
And while I'm holding this head, it's probably, you know, 20 minutes to half an hour.
Of course, it's hard to be sure of time in this context, but it was, it was a fairly long
time and eventually it ended.
And, you know, there are lots of other stranger things that happened the night.
I actually started breaking into fractal energetic yoga after that.
Um, but of course the big question is, well, what was that about?
So the next morning I asked my friend, you know, like, obviously we had this connection
and this strange experience.
What was it like for you?
And he described how he had a daughter who died.
I think she was about four or five from a disease and he was a physician.
And, uh, so you can imagine, right?
Like a physician not able to stop or prevent the death of his young daughter being a very
difficult thing to go through.
And, and he had never grieved that.
That's what he told me, that he'd never grieved the death of his daughter and that this experience was the first time in his life, well over 20 years later, that he began to reach into the emotional grief around her death.
And yeah, I mean, that's the depth of it, right?
Like something, something in terms of our co-creative connection, if you want to describe it that way, um, really open something up and released something that was very difficult for him and obviously was held very deeply within him.
Yeah, it's this, the shared purge thing is something that, um, that I find very interesting
and have for a long time.
I've also had a number of experiences in my life where I felt as though I was, I was grieving
on behalf of someone else or their energy was moving through me and have had that person
say later that they had that exact experience as well.
that it was as if I was like my grief, my crying, my emoting was like helping lessen the load of
how much they were moving. And I've also had the experience in reverse. So I think it's another
expression of sort of what's beautiful and possible between us when we sort of are able to connect
on that level. But when it comes to feeling things, processing things that are beyond
me, we'll say, like the me, what of sort of heavy, we'll just say energetic stuff,
energetic processing. I'm just using a broader term rather than emotions because emotions have
lots of different ways in which they manifest, like lots of levels from cognitive to
to social, to physical, to personal, you know. And so just saying energetically,
what of material that's arising that not only goes beyond individual contents, it's not just
my grief. And it goes even beyond sort of the grief, you know, use the example of your friend
there, you know, and the grief of the death of their child. And it goes into sort of a
transpersonal realm, when the individual or individuals in the mindmeld start to confront
or be flooded by, I guess I'll use a term of like transpersonal material. What does that,
like, is that possible? What does that look like? What are the sort of concerns and benefits
to something like that in a psychedelic mindmeld?
Well, that's a difficult question and I'll answer it the best I can.
And I'm going to give some examples, but I want to be very clear that I'm not being definitive in terms of these experiences and what they may or may not be.
So at a transpersonal level, I've connected, again, this is going to sound strange and I don't want to make much of it, connected to Gandhi or John Lennon and various characters.
know, like well-known characters.
And it's, it's one of those things that's really complicated because from an egoic point of
view, it's like, Oh yeah, I connected to John Lennon or I connected to Gandhi.
Right.
And, you know, it's easy to turn that into some big inflated story.
Um, and yet I'll just describe the experience, you know?
And so whatever that is, I mean, I love John Lennon's music, you know, like I adore the
music.
So there's already an energetic connection, if you will.
Um, because I just, you know, I, I loved the Beatles.
I loved his solo stuff.
And so, you know, what exactly am I connecting to when I'm going into this experience?
And I, you know, I listed a bunch of possibilities before, so I'm not going to go through the
list again.
Um, but at an experiential level, it was like, there was this outstanding grief, um, that
was associated with John Lennon, you know, the avatar we'll say of John Lennon and, and
I'm processing that, you know, and it's like this fractal energetic yoga and there's lots
of movement of the body and I'm profoundly crying.
And, and I, frankly, I don't know exactly why, like there was no immediate story as
it was attached to John Lennon's life.
And yet it was like this, you know, John Lennon, so to speak was present.
And I've had that, you know, it happened for a variety of characters.
You know, I, I mentioned Gandhi, uh, again, this King David thing.
I mean, that one's thrown me for a loop because, um, that showed up a number of
times, uh, years ago and it was, you know, so I read, let me also be clear.
Like, so when I was about 19, I read the Bible from cover to cover.
I had this whole thing of being concerned about, you know, whether heaven and hell
was really a thing.
And, you know, for quite many, many years I was like, yeah, it's not a thing after
reading how poorly written the Bible was.
Like there's a lot of wisdom in it, you know, like I have to say, it's a pretty
amazing book.
Um, but if, you know, if you think of it, you know, a lot of Christians see, well, it was ordained and created by God in a sense, you know, through man.
And when you read it compared to especially modern literature, it's not all that well written.
It's, you know, has its issues.
Uh, but the point being is that I read it, uh, many, many years ago.
Uh, of course I would have known who King David was, but what was interesting was that, you know, I, I, you know, don't well remember many, you know, decades later, the details of what I read.
And, uh, and in one session in particular, it was like, there was this whole thing with,
uh, David having wronged the Hittites, you know, it was very specific.
And I, you know, I couldn't remember what that was.
I had to go back to the Bible and look that up.
And David ultimately was responsible for, um, murdering, um, you know, at a distance,
one of his, uh, generals, uh, who was basically married to a woman that he ended up, um,
sleeping with, having an affair with.
And, and that was coming through and I, it was just the strangest thing for me, like processing that at an energetic level.
And that was very specific about, you know, an event that had happened in the past.
And, uh, yeah, so there's a transpersonal piece there again, you know, like, and I think the most likely possibility again, given that we can transcend time and space and we're connected to the all, so to speak, um, is yeah.
dropping into, um, another person's life.
You know, it's just that that's, that's possibly a thing.
And it's not like I'm the only person saying this kind of thing, right?
Like there's others who have dropped into the energies we'll say of other
characters and whether that's at a truly personal level or at the archetypal
level. I mean, I think that's a mystery and I'm not going to be definitive
about any of it because there is so much mystery around it. Um,
But another story, you know, if you think still of the transpersonal on a grander scale, you know, I've dropped into, you know, I mentioned genocide in the book, but I, more recently, I dropped into the sexual abuse of so many people in Thailand, you know, women, of course.
And, you know, it's one of those things I, you know, went to school in Thailand for a brief period of time.
I'm familiar with the country.
And, of course, all of the horrors associated with the sex trade in Thailand,
which strangely is a culturally accepted thing,
which has a very long history before the sexual tourism.
So it's something that is very deeply ingrained within the culture,
stretching back potentially hundreds of years.
And somehow I tuned into that.
Is that because I had been to Thailand and was familiar with it?
Or is this something at an art type level for whatever reason?
Maybe I was touched by something at an energetic level.
Let me just be clear.
I never engaged with prostitution while I was there.
And yet, of course, it's floating in the ether of Thailand.
It's out there more generally in the world.
But Thailand is a pretty central place for sexual deviancy, particularly for white middle-aged men.
um and so you know is it possible that i i touched into something just having been in the country
um and then it's yeah like just something i i'm going through maybe there's some some internal
part of me that needed to be clearing or healed is related to to that that i don't understand in
terms of my own unconscious so again a variety of possibility but wow like when i'm in that
experience it's like and i and i ended up verbalizing it out loud like too many penises
too many penises. It's just like, because, you know, it's one of those things I had a female
healer say to me many years ago, if men could just keep their penises in their pants, you know,
what a different world we could have. And it's true. You know, it's true.
So let's, let's, let's jump back a bit because we were talking about some of the things that can go
wrong with respect to, you know, sexual energy being present in the session and just be it
personal skill, personal disposition, or on the structural level of what did or didn't happen to
prepare for a session. The sexual energy can come in and complicate things and to the point of
causing significant problems. But outside of that, what are some of the other things that could
maybe go wrong here um what are some of the other things that might come up that could send a session
from really constructive and positive even if challenging to possibly damaging or um
cause causing or creating injury in in participants yeah well yeah one for sure is psychosis right so
So it's one of those things where with psychedelics, there is some risk, right?
It's not like psychedelics are risk-free.
Now, you know, people like Groff and others like him have done a ton of scientific research on psychedelics used in therapeutic settings predominantly.
And a lot of this research, as you know, reaches back to the 50s and 60s, and, you know, it's just starting again now.
But when you look at, and you have to remember that this research is big, right?
Like the thousands and thousands of case studies and, you know, clients and experimentation.
So it's not like we don't have a sense of what can really happen in a psychedelic session.
There's lots of data.
And one of those things is psychosis.
Now, of course, it's very rare that people end up in psychosis.
And even much more rare that if someone doesn't have a predisposition to psychosis, that they can end up in psychosis.
And, uh, yeah.
So all of a sudden someone's drops in and they're in psychosis.
You're in a session with them and it's just the two of you.
Um, and they want to run out the house, maybe naked.
Right.
Into, let's say a suburb or something like that.
Well, now you have a situation, right?
Because the dominant society is like, wow, there's a person running down the street naked.
Let's phone the police.
And, you know, depending on the circumstance, that's probably the appropriate thing to do if you're an outsider looking in, right?
Yeah.
Something's not right.
But wow, talk about traumatizing to the person who's going through it.
You know, this is the thing.
Like, you know, I've looked into this a lot in terms of the nature of psychosis.
And I have a lot of friends who are psychologists and the like.
and have seen psychosis with psychedelics.
And usually what's happening for the person who's going through it
is actually they're going through a form of egoic death
or some type of mass confusion.
Often there's an associated feeling that the whole world is going to end,
which is the typical egoic death or shamanic death.
So it's not an unusual experience.
But some people, because they're not capable of sitting with that,
have a really negative reaction to that,
And they drop into the psychosis as a trigger from that and completely divorce themselves from reality.
Where it may be possible that you're talking to the person and they can't even understand or know that you're talking to them.
And they can't communicate back to you.
I mean, of course, that's how bad it can get.
But you can imagine from the internal experience.
And again, I haven't had this happen to myself.
In terms of the full psychosis, I've gone through many shamanic deaths, but kind of went through and got out the other side without a problem.
But for those who struggle, um, again, it's this idea that the world is ending.
And so if they're confined in a space, which may be a very safe place, often they'd want
to bolt because they want to escape from that feeling.
Ultimately it's a feeling, uh, of the implosion of everything around them, their world.
And yeah, so now it's like, okay, so you now, now again, with the two people, someone's
dropping into psychosis. And now you're someone who is, you know, in deep with the psychedelic.
And again, I think this speaks to why this is such an advanced practice. But I would say that
generally working with psychedelics is tricky because again, this could happen to anybody at
any time. I mean, there's the proverbial, like I mentioned, you know, the high school student that
goes to a roller coaster park and take psychedelics. Well, wow, if you want to really attempt psychosis,
That's one, right?
But now you have this experience where you're, you know, now you have to take on this responsibility of care for the other person.
And, you know, I mentioned the various tools, you know, trying to talk to them.
And if they can even hear you, to remind them that psychedelic, you know, okay, so it's like you came over, we took a psychedelic together a few hours ago.
We're currently, you know, we're feeling the effects of that.
And within, you know, whatever it is, a couple hours, three, four hours, that psychedelic's going to wear off and everything's going to return to normal.
Which for almost everybody having this type of psychosis is true.
I mean, there are very rare examples where the psychosis continues.
Again, that's one of the risks with psychedelics.
But, you know, trying to normalize everything, create a safe space.
Remember, you know, we are telepathic beings.
So, you know, trying to bring a calmness to yourself in order that that's being mirrored
or you're trying to get them to mirror that calmness, um, I think is really an important
piece of that.
Um, possibly, you know, like bringing them back to their breath and it's like, okay,
try breathing, focus on the breathing or just kind of repeating that.
Um, depending on the situation, it might be good to put, you know, uh, your hand on their
upper chest to help them feel their own breath because a lot of people aren't going to be
necessarily good at relating to their breath, unfortunately.
So yeah, there's a variety of steps.
I go through those in the book in terms of dealing with these types of emergencies.
And again, yeah, you know, like I think, you know, you've read the book, you have a sense
like I want to be completely transparent with all of the amazing things that we can access
with psychedelics.
But man, there are some big challenges out there and things as unlikely as it is to go wrong, they can go wrong and be ready for it.
Yeah, I mean, truly, even in smaller doses, things can go awry.
But the higher the dose becomes, the more sort of chaos energy you're introducing and the more extreme things can get.
So with that, this is the final question, which is, do you have any words of caution or advice?
Like, I don't want anyone to think in listening to this podcast that there's any encouragement to try this out.
This is a sort of purely conversation about the phenomenon.
It's not necessarily a how-to guide or a sort of thumbs up, give it a go kind of thing.
But the reality is people listen to stuff and they're like, that seems interesting.
And they maybe do or do not want to explore.
Do you have any pieces of advice or caution for people other than reading your book, which
I think would be an excellent piece of advice for anyone even remotely interested in exploring
this kind of thing, let alone just knowing more about it.
Any pieces of caution or advice for people who are listening to this podcast going like,
oh, I'm interested in that.
you know, it's a tricky one, right? Because, you know, like introducing the book is,
it's a bit of a double-edged sword on the one hand. Uh, like you're saying, you know,
someone might listen to this podcast, not bother with the book, like, Hey, this is a cool thing.
You know, like, I'm just going to sit and meditate with my friend over here and let's just see what
happens, you know? And, um, so there is that thing, you know, and that, and I, and I strongly
recommend against doing that um and you know taking this work very seriously i do consider it
work um you know in some ways it reaches into shamanic work and i i don't self-identify as a
shaman but there are shamanic elements to it and let's face it shamans go through long
apprenticeships and and do a lot of work to uh become who they are um and so yeah like in terms of
doing this type of work. It's to have familiarity with psychedelics generally,
to have a lot of experience, especially with the ones that you're going to be using and
the doses that are going to be used. So that's an important piece.
Reading the book, I think, is really important. I mean, it's like put it out there to help people
navigate these things. And like we talked about earlier, I think a lot of people have had these
experiences and they're, and they, they're, they're generally spontaneous.
I think we can induce them.
That's the point of the book as well.
But so often it's a spontaneous thing.
And certainly that's what it was for me when I started.
Um, but it's like, yeah, how do we navigate this carefully and in a meaningful way?
Um, keeping in mind that, um, at a psychic level, um, people can, can drop into darkness
too, you know, and it's one of those things where, you know, there's going to be certain
people, particularly Christians and other religions that are fearful of sorcery.
And yet, at a human level, we're all sorcerers.
If I have a negative thought and say negative things in a gossipy way about a friend of mine
or a work colleague, I'm practicing sorcery.
I'm sending a negative energy into the world.
Unconsciously, we could say, but it is a real phenomenon.
And then, of course, psychedelics are amplifiers.
So there's the potential to amplify that.
So on the one hand, we can drop into healing and love, but a nefarious narcissist could go in a very different way.
And that's, again, why we have to be very careful in terms of who we work with and that we can trust them, that they're not a narcissist, that they don't want to screw with our minds and that they have positive intentions.
So there are those layers.
So, yeah, there's a lot of caution out there.
And to remind people that this is an advanced practice, not just to kind of willy-nilly, yeah, whatever, I'll give this a go.
So it's, no, take this very seriously.
And it offers a lot of really potent things in terms of, you know, who we are as humans, what we can experience in terms of exploring consciousness and the experience of consciousness itself.
So I think it offers some wonder to who we are as a species.
But yeah, there's a lot of things to be careful and cautious of.
Thank you for that.
Where can people buy your book?
Where can people buy The Psychedelic Mindmeld?
Yeah, so it's published by Inner Traditions,
Sino Park Street Press, so you can get it directly from them.
And of course, it's available online.
Simon & Schuster is the publisher, so anywhere that they distribute.
And yeah, I mean, there's Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and I should probably have the list memorized, but I don't.
But yeah, it's out there.
Just go online and do a search.
You'll find it.
And then the other, sorry, just the other piece of that.
Yeah, people are welcome to contact me.
Certainly for looking to the future, another book I would like to write is a series of stories of other people's experiences.
So I have my Facebook page, which is Wade Richardson.
So you can find me there.
And I'd love it if you shared stories with me.
And of course, there's also the Psychedelic mindmeld as a group within Facebook.
But I'm promoting people sharing stories of telepathy.
Well, your Facebook page and the, I mean, if there's a group link, I assume it's a private group to sign up.
I'll make sure whatever relevant links are in the show notes to this episode, wherever people are checking it out.
And Wade, I really appreciate your time today.
I appreciate your book and its contribution to the sort of larger exploration of consciousness, psychedelics, and otherwise.
And I really, really enjoyed our conversation today.
Thank you.
Yeah, well, thanks for inviting me, James.
And I've always appreciated your work.
I mean, as you mentioned at the beginning, some of your work is referenced in the book.
And so, yeah, I really appreciate the work you're doing, not only with the writing, but also your podcast in terms of getting, you know, really good information out there in terms of a broader sense of who we are as human beings and our psychology, the shadow elements and how to maturely approach the use of psychedelics.
Thanks for saying that.
I'd appreciate it, man.
And on that, we are, we're done.
So we'll cut.
Okay.
Hey, that was episode 199 of Adventures to the Mind featuring Wade Richardson.
The title of this book, again, is the psychedelic mindmeld telepathically exploring shared
consciousness, and you can get it on all major book outlets.
Brick and mortar is king.
So get in there, support your local bookstores.
I'm sure they can order it.
It's through a major publishing house or any of the online distributors.
And yeah, really excellent book.
Would highly recommend.
Um, if you'd like to follow Wade online, the links that he gave for his socials will be
in the, either the description of this episode or in the show notes at jameswjesso.com, which
will be linked in the description of this episode.
And if you'd like to follow or connect with me, you can do so via Blue Sky, Instagram,
Substack, and I have a telegram group and an email newsletter, and links to all of that
will be in the description to this episode as well.
So come follow me on those spaces.
I release clips and posts and little video stuff.
And I try to be online as best I can.
Social media, look, social media is not really my strong suit.
In fact, I could say that it's actually my weak point,
not only in the sense of producing social media content,
but in the sense of, or like regularly putting stuff out,
but also in the sense of like, I'm jelly when I get on there.
Like they got me, you know, like hooked right in the gullet.
They're just pulling me along.
The algorithm has me.
So I try not to go on there very often because of its impact on my attention and my time and
my mental health.
So I do put stuff out on social.
So follow me there if you can, if you manage to get on there and with self-control and
holy goodness, good for you.
That's a big accomplishment.
And otherwise, email newsletter is the best or substack once I start making one.
That's it.
I hope you may have noticed I am maybe a little bit more meandering today,
a little bit more verbose, a little bit less brevity, brevitus, bravato.
Not much bravado here.
Yeah, I've been this particular episode.
I'm trying to get back to being a little less formulaic.
I feel like that started to take over a bit.
And hopefully, A, you received that well.
And B, refer back to A.
And that's all.
Thanks for tuning in.
Next episode is going to be episode 200.
I got something special lined up for you.
So if you're not already subscribed, do so so you catch it.
And that is all for this episode of Adventures to the Mind.
Thank you so much for listening all the way to the end.
I've been your host, as always, James W. Jesso.
And it's been a pleasure sharing the non-local, digitally facilitated, shared awareness of
content consumption and enjoyments here on this podcast or something like that.
Until the next episode, take care and stay curious.
us.