A short clip from my recent podcast episode on Psychedelics, sketching out what I find to be the most mysterious and interesting elements of our human experience.

Through the deconditioning of our habitual thought patterns, psychedelics can offer glimpses into a non-conceptual, spontaneous and intuitive way of engaging with the world, akin to an infant’s perception or the Zen concept of ‘shoshin’.

Timestamps:

00:00 - Infancy perception

02:20 - Psychedelics and the conceptual mind

05:16 - Mysticism and Psychedelics

09:42 - Ego dissolution and Unity experiences

12:57 - You are the mystery

15:48 - the experience of spaciousness

Psychedelics confront us directly with the Mystery, raising deep questions regarding who we are, the nature of reality, and that cosmic itch of what the hell is going on anyways! Naturally, I find these compounds endlessly fascinating for they facilitate deep explorations into one's inner psychological world and how we cognize everything. I have personally found my relationships with the world and myself radically improved as a result of working with such substances, so in an evangelical manner I thought I would share the word here with this episode! Enjoy.

Timestamps:

00:00 - Experience is nature's fundamental given

03:49 - The Psychedelic Transformation

11:17 - Boundary and Ego dissolution

16:10 - DMT, LSD, Salvia and Non-dual states

17:48 - Psychedelics and the brain

21:09 - Politics and the War on Drugs

24:26 - Final remarks

a chat in the woods about the many rooms in the palace of Mind

I talk about how thoughts are basically notifications in your conscious experience + other funky stuff

Thumbnail credit: Al Margen Pagina

at 22:47 I forget to say endquote to the Anna Lembke quote I reference! Just wanna say so it doesn't seem like I'm inappropriately attributing stuff to Dr Lembke

Perhaps my most controversial episode so I may ruffle some feathers here! 

Essentially this is a discussion on the absurdity of the 'drug' taboo and how drug laws represent a profound moral failure of our modern social arrangements. This episode is atleast a partial attempt to correct for the nonsense that is often spewed by politicians and public figures on the topic of drugs - nonsense that misinforms the public and contributes to the pernicious myth of the self-destructive 'drug user'.

What I say here may sound counterintuitive and will certainly contradict alot of the received 'wisdom' that you often hear regarding drugs - so I would encourage you to critically examine any biases or prejudices that you associate with drugs and drug users prior to listening. Are these beliefs that you hold REALLY your beliefs? Or are they things that you've simply been told by certain authority figures, from schools and governments, who of course can always be relied upon to deliver impartial and trusted information...

The paper quoted in the episode is the following: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2050324520904540#:~:text=Results%20show%20that%20the%20majority,so%20in%20the%20past%20year.

00:00 - waffly intro (skip ahead if ya fancy)

01:25 - Intro

02:57 - the absurd paternalism of drug laws

06:05 - legal distinctions are political not scientific

09:05 - drug bias and media stereotypes

12:00 - the pathology bias

15:55 - transcending the drug stigma

18:00 - who can regulate my consciousness?

20:35 - We are all addicts for dopamine

22:47 - Final remarks

Hope you enjoy!

(you might wanna skip the first min or so if you don't wanna hear my waffly pre-amble about the podcast)

Attention can be thought of as the central locus of our conscious experience, its processes precede many of our most deliberate and conscious engagements with the world.

What we attend to is highly deterministic of what we do - through using the metacognitive tools of 'attending to attention' (which is really just mindfulness) one can gain greater insight into how they're attentionally oriented currently and whether this orientation is conducive to one's goals. These mindfulness tools also provide anchors which prevent you from simply being swept up in the ruminative tides of everyday experience - instead you become a more active participant in experience. To become 'mindful' is to notice the difference between seeing and watching, hearing and listening. It is the act of becoming a more astute observer of this curious thing we call consciousness. 

Basically this is a nice ramble on the dynamics of attention in our conscious experience. Various interesting and mysterious aspects of attention and experience more generally are discussed, I also touch upon the link between attention and learning plus a load of other tangents are entertained 

Episode art is credited to Ernst Mach

This episode delves into the deep philosophical question of who we are exactly? How have we been sculptured by evolutionary forces into the beings we are today? Understanding humans as the Darwinian product of 3.5 billion years of selection can shed light on the function of many facets of our cognition and behaviour. Viewing certain faculties as adaptations to recurrent evolutionary problems can enable us to appreciate where they come from and why we have them. Whilst this episode isn't a comprehensive outline of all our adaptive properties, I do discuss certain interesting elements of our evolved nature and the role of the natural and social environment in shaping the Sapien. 

I hope you enjoy!

Episode art is credited to M.C. Escher 

Discussion of personality psychology, different methods of categorising and measuring personality, outline of the 'Big 5 factor model' of personality : extraversion, openness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and agreeableness. I also explain how personality orients your perceptual frame of the world and biases your attention and behaviour. There is a brief discussion of how personality relates to political orientation as well. 

00:00 - intro

01:58 - personality and pathology

03:49 - complexity and personality

05:21 - the Big Five Model

08:00 - introversion/extroversion

10:08 - openness

14:03 - conscientiousness

15:39 - agreeableness

17:38 - neuroticism

20:54 - sociopathy and threat perception

24:02 - emotion regulation

26:19 - living according to one's personality

 I hope you guys enjoy this episode, for any queries you can contact me at [email protected]