006: Interview with Meriana Dinkova: Navigating Altered States

This is Entheogen: three human beings discussing generating the divine within while still being human beings. In this show we are honored to be joined by Meriana Dinkova, licensed psychotherapist. Thanks for joining us.

Topics:

- Meriana's work: preparing and processing

- techniques for protection and optimization of a trip

- the Bruce Lee technique: superheroes as archetypal guides or guardians to be called upon during altered states

- personifying LSD, mushrooms, and ayahuasca:

LSD: that's you. That's your shit. Deal with it. (Can cover a lot. Can be cold about it.)

Mushrooms: the little brothers, jokers. This is your shit and this is how it's funny. Lightness. The universe is a cosmic joke. Intelligent. Caring. At higher doses, less funny and more deep.

Ayahuasca: the great mother; the grandmother: wise feminine being who cares about you. These are the ways in which you're not your shit. Hard truths, e.g. shows you how you've harmed other people. Non-judgemental. Caring, wise. Supportive.

- 10 Day Plant Medicine Reteat With 3 Shamans- Peru; Apr 18-27th 2015 – Tickets

- future topic teaser: Sex Magic and Erotic Influence

005: A Positive LSD Story – Tangible Benefits of Entheogens

Recorded on January 19th, 2015

This is Entheogen: three human beings discussing generating the divine within while still being human beings.  In this show we discuss tangle benefits of psychedelic use.  We open with one our favorite Bill Hicks bits.

Topics:

   Francis Crick, Cricked

- Francis Crick, Nobel Prize-winning father of modern genetics, deduced the double-helix structure of DNA: may have been influenced by LSD.

- Kary Mullis, inventor of PCR, a scientific breakthrough that accelerated the sequencing of the human genome: "I found it to be a mind-opening experience. It was certainly much more important than any courses I ever took. [...] What if I had not taken LSD ever; would I have still invented PCR?  I don't know. I doubt it. I seriously doubt it."

- Steve Jobs: “Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.”

“When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and you're life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it… Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.” - Steve Jobs

Also: "Here's to the Crazy Ones"

Douglas Engelbart, early computer scientist, presenter of the Mother of All Demos, had "two LSD experiences."

- Kevin Herbert, early Cisco engineer: "When I'm on LSD and hearing something that's pure rhythm, it takes me to another world and into anther brain state where I've stopped thinking and started knowing.  It must be changing something about the internal communication in my brain."

References:

Interview with Patrick Lundborg: 60’s psych & garage guru, psychedelic culture scholar and author of brilliant „Psychedelia” and „Acid Archives” books, discussed in Entheogen #003

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer by John Markoff

"Shaking one's snow globe" with LSD: Entheogen 002: Psychedelic Research Renaissance, Part 2

004: Bad Trips

Recorded January 5, 2015

Topics:

• The feeling that it is permanent
• The 3x5 reorientation card: "your name is ___, you live on earth, you took a drug tonight... it will probably end within 24 hours."
• Haphazard ego death
• Kevin's tongue-numbing minty multi-dose
• No one has ever died from it

002: Psychedelic Research Renaissance, Part 2

Brad, Kevin, and Joe discuss: Dr Robin Carhart-Harris is the first scientist in over 40 years to test LSD on humans - and you're next

Stanislav Grof, 1975: "psychedelics, used responsibly and with proper caution, would be for psychiatry what the microscope is for biology or the telescope is for astronomy”.

Professor David Nutt: "I think it's the worst censorship of research since the Catholic Church banned the telescope.”

See also: Nutt calls the outlaw of entheogens "the worst case of scientific censorship since the Catholic Church banned the works of Copernicus and Galileo"

Carhart-Harris scanned test subjects’ brains with an fMRI scanner while they were on LSD, showing for the first time higher activity in the hippocampus, which is involved in memory.

Schedule I drugs: "high potential for abuse”, "no currently accepted medical use”, "lack of accepted safety” – LSD; really?

Carhart-Harris: "It's slightly hypothetical, but it's based on what we know about the way the brain works, which is that it settles into configurations of activity that seem to underly certain psychopathologies. Depression and addictions rest on reinforced patterns of brain activity, and a psychedelic will introduce a relative chaos. Patterns that have become reinforced disintegrate under the drug. I've used the metaphor of shaking a snow globe”

Carhart-Harris: "music can do a number of things. It can have a steadying influence, but it can also help facilitate emotional release.”

001: Psychedelic Research Renaissance, Part 1

- Kevin discusses his first encounter with the word Entheogen

- we discuss a recent article in the Daily Beast: Psychedelics Are Ready for a Comeback, featuring an interview with Tom Shroder, author of the new book, Acid Test: LSD, Ecstasy, and the Power to Heal

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"The whole idea that it was creating a generation of ‘valueless zombies’ or something or that healthy people would go crazy from taking one dose of psychedelics was never justified by the facts. It was never as dangerous as many other drugs that did become prescription drugs."

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