- People who've used psychedelics are accused
by their friends and neighbors of "becoming nicer."
Psychedelics shift your basic awareness
of what perception even is.
There are a number of ways in which we shift our perception.
Meditation, fasting,
psychedelics is different than the others-
and the difference in the way it affects you
is the difference between walking up a mountain
or being catapulted to the top almost instantly.
You have enhanced capacity for understanding
a level of complexity of life that you didn't know you had.
It's a realistic question to say,
"What's the value of having expanded vision,
expanded hearing, expanded awareness in general?"
But it's the same question as, "Why should we go to school?
Why should we learn to read?
Why should we visit other countries?"
Because to transcend those limits shifts forever
the way in which you see the world.
I'm James Fadiman.
I've been involved in psychedelic research
and experience for over 60 years.
One of the great spiritual traditions
has people asking, "Who am I, who am I, who am I?"
And the answer, whatever your answer is, is limited.
'Transpersonal psychology' is a framework
which allows you to get a larger view.
It's simply a larger tool kit than conventional psychology
for looking at the central thing that makes humans, humans
which is consciousness.
It includes all of awareness,
all of consciousness, all human experience.
And it looks around for what are the tools?
Meditation is a tool.
Psychedelics are a different kind of tool
for opening up the closed box of awareness.
It's the natural evolution of consciousness to expand.
There comes a point for many of us as adults
where what we don't know feels dangerous
and therefore we stop looking.
Psychedelics break that pattern.
They break open whatever your system of belief is.
Now, opening up consciousness means
that everything is both magnified and clarified.
Think about it.
Psychedelics go to every cell of the body,
so when one reports that they can smell color or hear color
what they're saying is the parts of the brain that normally
are somewhat separated can communicate with each other
if we simply take down the little guardrails.
So that people report enhanced creativity
because they can think of more things simultaneously
and farther away from their original thought.
What they also are aware of
is their own relationships with other people,
particularly when they're being used therapeutically,
the negative patterns, the things that prevent
you being close to other people,
become painfully visible
because the central experience that we all strive for
is to be unified and connected to
a larger reality than ourselves.
Let's be clear, that like any tool, it can be misused.
Psychedelics not used carefully, are dangerous.
Cars not used carefully, are dangerous.
Most things not used carefully, can be dangerous.
The problem for psychedelics
is because the expansion is so strong,
if you have no support, or no background,
or no understanding, it's terrifying.
After a psychedelic experience, you are not only more open
but you are questioning very fundamental beliefs
that you have had without any particular knowledge.
'Integration' is a method of dealing with the overflow
of information that happens
during and after a psychedelic experience.
That time is a very fluid time where the brain
is still communicating more than usual
and it's a good time where someone can help you
put together these very unusual experiences
so that you can retain the insights.
We have a similar thing if you think about it,
if you're a refugee and you're coming
from one country to another,
people help you integrate into the new culture.
Integration in psychedelics is simply a version
of that more general kind of universal way
of helping people move from confusion to clarity.
There's a tendency to think of psychedelics
as a personal experience, but what we've found is
that people who have used psychedelics
are better members of their community.
They have loosened up the restrictions that keep us apart
from each other because one of the fundamentals
that we all have is a sense of identity;
kind of who lives in this box.
With psychedelics, what you realize is that in some sense
you also are outside this box,
so we are much more like trees
than perhaps we want to imagine.
Which is trees keep growing
in every direction unless they're impeded
but the natural is a full expanding in each direction.
That's perhaps the goal of transpersonal psychology
and it is the experience of psychedelics.
The experience of psychedelics is
that things will never be the same afterwards
because my Universe has actually opened wider.