CIA and Salvia Divinorum w/ Kaleb Graves | Paranoid American Podcast 126

➡ Paranoid American, a unique comic publisher, has been exploring the mysteries of our world since 2012. They delve into topics like secret societies, forbidden technology, and occult symbols in pop culture. Their podcast discusses various topics, including a controversial plant called Salvia Divinorum, which is considered a powerful hallucinogen. The hosts discuss its effects, its potential misuse, and its possible weaponization by the military.
➡ The text discusses the potential of weaponizing Salvia Divinorum, a psychoactive plant, by adding it to the water supply. The active chemical, Salvin A, can be ingested through drinking or sublingually, and its effects can last a long time. The text also mentions the possibility of maintaining a disassociated state through continuous intake of DMT, another psychoactive substance. Lastly, it discusses the potential of weaponizing magic mushrooms, but notes that the active ingredient, psilocybin, breaks down at high temperatures and is less potent than Salvia or LSD.
➡ In the 1950s, R. Gordon Watson, a banking vice president with JP Morgan Chase, discovered psilocybin mushrooms and salvia in Mexico. He found these hallucinogens while studying mushrooms, and they were later popularized by his friend Henry Luce, who ran Time Life magazine. However, salvia didn’t gain as much attention as the mushrooms, possibly due to its stronger potency and lack of a ritualistic use like the mushrooms had. Watson’s discoveries led to a surge of tourists and researchers in the areas where these substances were found, which had both positive and negative impacts on the local communities.
➡ The text discusses the use and effects of psychedelic substances, particularly focusing on salvia and psilocybin mushrooms. It mentions how these substances affect the brain and induce hallucinations, but salvia doesn’t provide the same euphoria as other psychedelics. The text also explores the potential of these substances in creating new neural pathways and their overlooked therapeutic potential. Lastly, it draws a comparison between psychedelic trips and dreams, suggesting they might not be so different.
➡ The text discusses the experiences of lucid dreaming and using psychedelics, comparing the two states. It suggests that both can lead to exploration of different levels of the mind, and that the brain can surprise you even when you think you’re in control. The text also discusses the physical effects of specific substances and the consistent experiences reported by users. Finally, it suggests that these experiences might allow us to access places beyond our normal perception, possibly even after death.
➡ This text discusses the idea of spiritual purification and humility in various religions, suggesting that one must go through trials before reaching enlightenment. It also debates the use of psychedelics and hallucinogens as a means of spiritual exploration, questioning whether they should be used casually or with ritualistic preparation. The text further explores the societal and legal implications of drug use, and the potential for these substances to foster community. Lastly, it delves into the personal experience of using these substances, likening it to a loss of self-awareness and a profound sense of being.
➡ The text discusses the idea of making mistakes and seeking forgiveness, referencing religious figures and stories. It also talks about the discovery of hallucinogenic mushrooms in Mexico, thanks to a Bible translator named Eunice Pike. The text further explores the concept of wrestling with God and the paradoxes of the universe, suggesting that no matter how far we stray, we always have the option to return. Lastly, it mentions the controversial actions of missionaries trying to convert uncontacted tribes to Christianity.
➡ The text discusses the potential medicinal benefits of magic mushrooms, as experienced by an American tourist who claimed to have been cured of his physical and psychological illnesses after a trip. It also delves into the controversial relationship between religious missionaries and the CIA, suggesting that missionaries often served as intelligence assets due to their access to remote areas. The text also raises questions about the ethics of missionary work and the potential for manipulation by intelligence agencies.
➡ The speaker discusses their dedication to the Palestinian cause and the potential role of psychedelics in conflict resolution. They mention a study where Israeli soldiers and Palestinians used ayahuasca together, leading to some soldiers recognizing their actions as harmful. However, the speaker is skeptical about the political impact of such experiences. They also discuss the use of psychedelics in spiritual exploration and their belief that the categorization of drugs is a societal construct. The speaker concludes by recommending some of their podcast episodes on the topic.
➡ The speaker discusses the concept of evil, attributing it to greed and the desire for more, which they believe is embodied in capitalism. They argue that this greed leads to the destruction of the natural world, oppression of the poor, and corruption of individuals. They also mention their podcast and articles on psychedelic theology, and promote a sticker sheet product. Lastly, they express their dislike for both capitalism and communism, suggesting anarchism as an alternative.

As long as somebody is in hell, you can bet that Christ will be in hell with. Good evening listeners, brave navigators of the enigmatic and the concealed. Have you ever felt the pull of the unanswered, the allure of the mysteries that shroud our existence? For more than a decade, a unique comic publisher has dared to dive into these mysteries. Unafraid of the secrets they might uncover. This audacious entity is Paranoid American. Welcome to the mystifying universe of the Paranoid American podcast. Launched in the year 2012, Paranoid American has been on a mission to decipher the encrypted secrets of our world.

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And if these AI generated memes dare to make fun of me, they’re crossing the line. This is your expedition into the realm of the extraordinary, the secret, the shrouded. Come with us as we sift through the world’s grand mysteries, question the standardized narratives and brave the cryptic labyrinth of the concealed truth. So strap yourselves in, broaden your horizons and steel yourselves for a voyage into the enigmatic heart of the Paranoid American podcast. Where each story, every image, every revelation brings us one step closer to the elusive truth. Salvia Divinorum. We’re going to talk about that today with Caleb Graves, Part 2.

Another Salvia dividerum talk. And I want to preface this one. First of all, welcome to the show. But hold on, just sit, sit there and look pretty for a second. I want to preface this, that here’s a disclaimer. If you do salvia, you are probably going to end up in prison or in hell, and probably both, deservedly so, in the 40 some states that it’s illegal in. If you’re in the other 10 states, you should move immediately because you’re living in hell with a bunch of prisoners and criminals. So get out of there. We do not advocate.

In fact, this is a public service announcement from, I would call us the Anti Salvia Council. It’s the name that we were workshopping and that if any point in this entire discussion it sounds like we’re advocating or we’re having fun, it’s merely a role playing exercise to show you what horrible criminals headed to prison in hell would act like. Deservedly so. So that. With that out of the way, let’s talk a little bit about Salvada Veneram. How you doing, Caleb? I’m doing really well. Glad to be back. Sweet. And then I think we can both agree up front that Salvia de Vinarum is a CIA operation.

I mean it. Pretty answer. No. If we. If you just had us. If you had a lean yes or no. Even if it were 4,951. Salvia de Vinerum came from the CIA. Let’s just say that Salvia de Vinerum came from the CIA. You know, I’m gonna give it a yes on this one. Okay, well, we’ll get. We’re gonna wind all the way back there. So a few, I guess, early housekeeping rituals is that some people might not know what the hell Salvi is. I’ve even got close friends and here. Come. Get out of the window, man.

Hang out with me down here. Appreciate it. I’ll come inside. Um, Some of my friends that even like that are. You would expect to be well versed in many things taboo are under the impression that Salvia and K2 were roughly the same thing. Or that salvia and these sort of fake weed analogs that you’d find in a, you know, gas station. And how, like, how do you think that those things became conflated? Why would anyone think that Salvia divinorum, something used for hundreds and hundreds of years that grows naturally out of the ground. No chemical processing whatsoever that will send you to prison in hell.

But. But why would that ever be conflated with K2? You know, if I had to guess, it’s because people are just looking at green leafy things from the gas station in the early 2000s. They had some parallel time that they were being sold there. And they’re also both known for causing wild, wild, wild experiences. Definitely not what you’d normally find with cannabis. So that’s probably the two things that I expect is people just don’t look things up. And if you could get in the same place at the same time during their heyday, and they look pretty much the same and they feel.

They feel different when you actually do them, but the reputation they get, I can see how that might overlap. So let’s. Let’s rewind back just a little bit. Pretend that someone’s going into this completely blind. What is Salvia divinorum? So salvia, also known as the diviner’s mint, it’s in the same genus biologically as mint, like you’d have in a tea, is possibly the most powerful naturally growing hallucinogen in the world. It is so powerful that it can even put LSD to shame in the sort of experiences it causes for how little you have to ingest. Salvia is not a classical psychedelic.

It doesn’t have the same. It doesn’t work on the same, usually serotonin receptors. Instead it works on your opioid receptor receptors and causes these really, really profound hallucinations out of body experiences. Usually in contemporary America through smoking, but in indigenous history and traditional use through chewing large amounts of it and taking advantage of that inverse tolerance, that as you use it longer, you need less of it to get even more trippy. Why? Why? What the hell is inverse tolerance? How could you use more of something and require less of it as you go? That isn’t. That doesn’t sound like any other chemical I’ve ever heard of.

I mean, there’s a handful, there’s a handful of other chemicals that are like that and they’re especially dangerous for overdoses, as I’m sure you can imagine. But it is pretty rare compared to most chemicals out there. I’m not a biochemist, so I can’t speak to exactly what’s going on in there, but you can think about it. Something similar to like the placebo effect. So when you’re studying a new. Sorry, my cat is here. I’m going to toss her out real fast. Cats are not welcome. Aside from the one at the bottom of the screen. Besides that one.

No. And she’s a real pain anyways. So think about the placebo effect when you’re studying a new drug and just seeing if it actually can treat an illness or an injury or something like that. Sometimes when you’re giving a given a sugar pill something that’s not the medicine, your body responds as if it is the medicine and you can be healed that way. That’s what the placebo effect is. So you can almost imagine it like that, that your body is expecting. It knows this substance, it’s expecting a reaction, and so it jumpstarts that reaction for you before you even really have the full effects of the chemical.

That’s the analogy that I’ve heard. Maybe one day I’ll understand more when I start my doctorate, but that’s what I got so far. Okay, fair enough. I want to push back on it, but I realize you’re. You’re just putting forth what you’ve heard, not necessarily your own theory on this one, because I don’t. I don’t know if anyone could truly get a salvia experience on a pure placebo effect. If. If you could, that would kind of be wild, right? Well, I mean, so this, this is an ex. It’s not. I’m not talking about just a plain placebo effect, but this is probably more like I’ve taken shrooms enough times that when I smell the shrooms, when I smell that really distinct kind of poopy smell is what it smells like to me anyways.

A really earthy thing. My body gets ready, my heart rate is up. I start to see things a little bit shinier. Your body knows what you’re about to go through. And in the same way, your body goes through those reactions more faster with salvia than it would with something that has a normal tolerance like mushrooms. Your body knows you’re about to do this, and so it’s getting ready for you. Now, if you’re smoking, salvia really doesn’t matter too much because you’re already. If you take a strong enough dose, you’re already going to go to the moon or to, I don’t know, be a box of cereal on the shelf.

But that’s the best way that I can describe it, is that your body knows what’s about to happen and helps that along a little bit. I want to skip to one of the most important questions. I think of salvia and maybe mushrooms, too. Let’s start with salvia. How does the US Military weaponize salvia in an efficient way? If I had to. If I had to. You’re in charge. You’re in charge. And they’re like, we need to kill these. Whoever is on the bad guy list for that month. And your one resource is an infinite amount of salvia Divinorum.

How do you weaponize it? It’s got to be in the water supply. It’s got to be in the water supply. Really? Oh, yeah. It’ll last way, way, way longer if you have that buildup through the water. Salvin A in particular, which is the active chemical. Yes, in particular. In particular. I mean, this is what. How a lot of indigenous Mazatec people use it is through a tea. And because they have that reverse tolerance built up, it’s a lot stronger for them. But if you’re. Does it survive your digestion or does it only work sublingually. Does it have to be absorbed into your bloodstream through your mouth or could you actually just drink, like, drink it and eventually feel it? You can drink it and eventually feel it too.

It’s much, it’s much faster and stronger to smoke it below that. It’s much easier to like quit it. Have that little chunk of it between your tongue and your, and your cheek and your jaw. But then, yeah, if you drink enough of it, you can get to the same, you can still get to the same level. And if you’ve got that pure, that, that, that pure active ingredient, you don’t have the taste. If you chew it orally, it tastes it. To me, it tastes like the bitterest grass I’ve ever had in my mouth. I didn’t even know grass could be bitter, but that’s just the best I got.

Rubber too. If, like, you imagine like an old tire that was flaking out in the sun and you just took like a bunch of those chunks of flakes and just threw them under your tongue. That’s a good, that’s a good analogy. I hadn’t thought of the rubber bit. Yeah, that is a taste in it. But I think what’s most important is that when you drink it or if you have it in your mouth like that, that’s what makes it last the longest. If you just use this like a gas, you’d, you’d be able to get away with, you’d be able to come out of that trip pretty quick.

But if you were building that up in people, letting that reverse tolerance work as they’re using the water supply and you put a ton in all at once, you could get somebody high for a very, very long time on Sal and have a lot more that you can get away with in the meantime there. I’m going to just oversimplify, but there was Rick Straussman. I believe he did a lot of DMT experiments and one of those, or at least one of the branches of one of his experiments was essentially an IV to maintain a very, like, minute, but, but a very noticeable amount of DMT at all times.

And I think that this might even go back to like some CIA John C. Lilly experimentation stuff. But the, the premise of that, I believe, was that you could just stay indefinitely in a completely disassociated state and then they would just reduce it long enough to come back, take some notes, have a conversation in the sandwich, and then just dial it right back up again and just stay there for like 24 hours. 48 hours is that also possible with Salver? I don’t know. I, I would guess, I would guess so. I don’t know of anybody who’s even thought about trying that because it is such an.

In DMT is an insane enough experience. You get the dissociative element, it’s even more insane. But I, I guess you could, I just guess you could do that. DMT has no tolerance in your body, so the same amount Matt is fine the whole time, but if you got a reverse tolerance, you could probably crank it up there pretty quick. I think because it lasts so much longer in your body, it would just take a little bit longer for you to get down to earth than the 45 seconds with Strassman’s experiments. Okay, so I mean, water supply.

Are we just creating pure havoc with your resources here? Like how are we going to get our bang for our buck? You’re just going to terrorize people and make them. What is that economy crash or something because of it? I mean you can do that, you can do that, just create mass havoc, which I think, you know, Om Shinrikyo tried to do that with LSD before they created the sarin gas in Tokyo. Like it’s a. They wanted to bring about the end of the world and they thought LSD was a perfectly good way to do it.

So I, I mean that’s what part of what the CIA was trying to do too was see if they could use hallucinogens to do this to people on the battlefield. But yeah, if you get high enough up there with dissociatives, you can get to the point that you stop breathing, that you’re not able, you have to do some manual breathing and you can’t do that anymore. You can choke on your own tongue. So it can also be lethal on its own and high enough doses, but you got to get up, up, up there over time. It’s nothing that your average gas station blend or tea is going to get you to.

Would you say that some like 600x elephant killer salvia could ever get you to swallow your own tongue and die from it? I mean, yeah, if you have enough dissociatives of anything that can happen or that’s one of the big fears with why you need a trip sitter for things like 5 Meo DMT, the frog mucus, the frog venom. Because if you get high enough up there, you can throw up and not realize it or have a lot of saliva built up or yeah, just start chewing on swallowing your own tongue. It can happen. Is this sounds a Little bit like if you take too much lsd, you’ll peel yourself because you think you’re an orange.

But I guess choking on your tongue happens to just normal sober people at a non zero amount every day or year. Right? Yeah, I mean it’s this. It’s more of that. Like, you know, those stories about LSD I always think are kind of funny because we have very. They’re so elaborate. But like if you take a Valium, if you take too much Valium, which we prescribe for sleep, things like that, that, that same thing can happen. Or if you’re, if you take too high a dose of MDMA, doesn’t matter if you’re, you know, I’m talking like 600 milligrams, like a crazy.

A pretty high dose. You can. There’s examples of people who have chewed their tongues because it creates such tension that they start choking on the blood. And these are just physiological reactions. You don’t even need to throw in any hallucinations in there, which is what, what really media trying to create a mass hysteria psychedelics or other drugs want to do is those stories that have the hallucination element instead of these things that might help us with harm reduction for just know how much you’re taking and don’t take too much. Which seems like a reasonable plan. Okay, well, if you had a weaponized magic mushrooms, this is the same deal.

You just, you just fill the water supply with shroom juice and call it a day. I think, I think you’d have to because unlike, unlike salvia, I mean psilocybin breaks down once you get to about 160 degrees Fahrenheit. So if you try, Nobody ever been able to smoke a mushroom and feel the effects. You really. There are people who told me they have and I don’t know, there might be something. I don’t know there. But that’s one of the things that you gotta be careful about. When I’ve seen people who have made mushroom omelets trying to get, trying to get trippy and they assume they were cooking that up in jail because that’s where people that make mushroom omelets are and belong.

Right. All in jail all end up universally. Everyone goes to jail. Yeah. So that’s. It would probably have to be the water supply again because yeah, if you tried to, if you tried to aerosolize it, it just wouldn’t. And you need a lot more than you need for salvia. You need a lot more than you’d need for lsd. It’s just a Much Psilocybin and psilocyne are just much, much less potent psychedelics or hallucinogens than Salvi or lsd. Are there? I’m assuming the answer is yes. But I guess part of the question is do these exist? And if so, why aren’t they so popular that I haven’t seen them, but like just pure sovereign A isolate or pure psilocybin isolate? Yeah, I think the reason for psilocybin is just, it’s, it’s hard.

I mean, it’s an extra step that you don’t need to, to go through the extraction process, which from what I’ve heard from the chemical textbooks is no harder than extracting DMT for Ayahuasca use. But when it comes to salvia, you again, you really don’t need that much. You’re talking about a very, very, very, very small amount that if you could see the amount of, of the pure isolate that you’re using too much, you’ve already got too much. You make it sound like fentanyl. I mean it kind of, I mean if fentanyl was far less likely to kill you, then sure, but like we’re talking about mill, we’re talking about millionths of a gram, similar with lsd, where if you’re seeing it, it’s already enough to get you high.

I wanna. And the reason that I was asking about the weaponization of Salvi and the weaponization of mushrooms and because we learned about both of them from the same guy, essentially. Right. And we’ll get much, much more into detail on this in a second. But Robert Gordon Watson is the guy that if you look up all the old EROD reports that start getting uploaded in like the 90s, but I think the research was from like the 60s and 70s or 80s, where, where does this all fall? Like when, when did the world, the Western, the world that counts, the Western world.

When did we learn about magic mushrooms and salvia? Yeah, so this would have been in the 1950s for the most part. R. Gordon Watson, the banking vice president with JP Morgan Chase, decides that he’s, he’s a little bit bored being a rich dude and he wants to do some, some amateur mycology. He loves studying mushrooms. And so it was in the 50s, especially 1956 and beyond, where Wasson went down to Mexico and found psilocybin mushrooms in their indigenous use and habitat. And then he brought, at a later time, Albert Hoffman, the discoverer of lsd, or as he would say, the person LSD discovered, brought him down to Mexico as Well, same place, same area, and you end up finding salvia divinorum there.

So two different, highly potent, though obviously salvia, way more potent than magic mushrooms, Natural hallucinogens in this same area. And these two titans of psychedelic research really stumbling upon salvia use together. So the difference between those two, as I understand it, is that the same mushrooms or variations of that mushroom could already be found worldwide. They were already all over the United States, they were in Europe, they’re in Asia. They’re pretty much everywhere already. But salvia only existed in this one teeny, tiny little geographic region that they just happened to come across. It was a complete coincidence that they even found salvia there.

They were, they’re looking for mushrooms and they were like, oh, yeah, by the way, we got this other thing too. And Watson’s just like, oh, yeah, let me, let me hear about that. Is that, is that pretty much how that played out? Yeah. So one of the problems that you have with trying to do a lot of this anthropological and biological research is that you’re dealing with all of these, these indigenous languages. They’re not Spanish. A lot of indigenous people in Mexico and Latin America don’t, Don’t speak Spanish. Why don’t they just speak American? That’s a good question.

They are in America, after all, north and south, wink, wink. But these. So you, you, you end up in this situation where you start describing what you’re looking for. And some of these words overlap. So some of these languages don’t have a word for mushroom that’s different than a word for leaf or plant. They’re the same sort of idea. So if you were to describe in a, a rough translation, English, I’m looking for, for the thing that pops out of the ground that makes you see spirits in God and people that hadn’t been using psilocybin mushrooms or, or psilocybin mushrooms also weren’t, as I remember, weren’t in season when they were seeking it out.

Other guides were like, oh, I know exactly what you’re talking about, and leads them to salvia, or as they, they believed was a representation of the Virgin Mary popping out of the ground, ready to give them a divine experience. So what other drugs did he find that we haven’t heard about? I mean, was it just mushroom and salvi and that’s it? It almost seems like maybe he found four or five other things and didn’t put them on the report. Yeah, those are the ones that, I mean, plenty of medicinal, plenty of medicinal substances as well, because, you know, being A being a businessman, he wanted how you could.

How you could sell these things, how you can make a profit off of them. Though that softened in him when he saw how badly that affected the. The towns and villages that he kept visiting. Huh. They. They were impacted negatively from making sweet cash out of cow poop. You. Well, you ended up having some situations where. Like Huatla Deja Menes, where magic mushrooms were first brought to the attention of the American press. You had all of these. You had all of these hippies who were coming in and not being respectful to the people that lived there.

And there were often fights. There were examples of a lot of racial violence. People constantly kept having to go to jail because of it. And so you ended up in this situation where like, like, like a lot of tourist traps. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Myrtle Beach. Yeah, yeah. From what I’ve heard, Myrtle beach really, really was a rough place in, like, the late 90s, is the way it was described to me. And they’ve cleaned themselves up. So if you can imagine, like, the same way a beach town, if it got way too popular, could bring in the wrong characters.

That’s sort of what were happening in these towns too. But you also had some government researchers, you had scientists coming in, and a lot of this money didn’t end up going back to the actual people who lived there and ended up going to these tourist groups who had come in from other parts of Mexico. Okay. Yeah. I mean, it just sounds like hippies ruined it. That’s the. Really, the. The leading. Right. That’s the lead. Is that hippies ruined it. There’s a shocking amount of things from the 60s and 70s that hippies ruined for the rest of us.

Yes. Okay. So here, I’ll show a little bit of my hand too. And I think tapping into maybe a previous discussion, but from my understanding, the reason that we know about magic mushrooms and not about salvia de veteran, for the most part, is cause Robert Gordon was. Or Gordon R. Watson. I always. I hate people that have, like, two first names. Like, it’s whatever I say it is. That’s me, man. I have two first names. So what I’ll usually call him Watson. Wasson gets back to the States, and he happens to be friends with Henry Luce, who just happens to run Time Life magazine.

And he’s like, hey, Henry, check this out. We got mushrooms. We got this new salvia thing. And for whatever reason, Henry Luce really latched on to the magic mushrooms. And Henry Luce was in Skull and Bones and he was in the Century Club and he had like some very high like friends in high places. But he and him and his wife end up kind of like becoming the ones that make magic mushrooms a thing almost begrudgingly by Watson. I think Watson was kind of like, you know, I showed it to my friend and my friend’s hyping this thing up and I’m kind of.

He’s kind of being cringe about it, but I guess I’m like along for the ride. So he kind of plays along and it gets advertised in Life and it get in Time and Readers Digest. And this is where we learn about magic mushrooms. And this is like late 50s, early 60s. All right. And then it just, it continues from there. It gets popularized. Your mom knows about it, People are talking about it in the work cooler and stuff. Why did Salvia not also fought? Was it just Henry? L didn’t like salvia. So then the world doesn’t know about salvia.

But Wasson discovered both of them at the same time. He himself didn’t do either of them right. He didn’t try either. So to him it’s just like, hey, I found these two new drugs that people don’t know about. Why the hell did Salvia not make an appearance until the mid to late 90s? Yeah, I think I’ve thought about this too. And I think part of it is that there’s a reason we have so much mushroom paraphernalia from the 50s and 60s. It was kind of a, a groovy little thing. The same way that you might see a lot of mushroom stuff being sold at like home goods or Target.

It was part of the aesthetic that people were using. And then part of it too was that the, the ritual from Maria Sabina that was around this mushroom Wasson got to witness and record and actually had before this article published about this ritual. So there was this sort of mystique about the way this was a sacred substance that it could put you in contact with God or the gods. And Wasson and Hoffman didn’t really have that same experience with Salvia especially. It didn’t create these all immersive visions for the people that they were talking to. So I think part of it was the mystique, part of it was the aesthetic.

And, and, and part of it was I think that there were more people who saw the potential for how you could use psilocybin mushrooms that maybe they didn’t see that potential in salvia. So one of the guys that popularized it in the mid-90s, this guy, Daniel Siebert, and he starts self testing and then I think he’s the first one to identify and isolate salvin A, which is the main chemical in Salvi, Although there’s also like salvin B I hear now. And who knows if there’s even more reports on that are the craziest I’ve ever seen on Salvary and be on B.

Yes, A cup if they’re true, because they’re all Internet stories. A couple rogue chemists just wanting to know what it did. But please continue. If you look up there, let me ask you, does Sovereign be objectively exist or is it theoretical? No, it does exist. Okay, so salva be exists. It’s just the trip reports are. Who knows if it’s legit or not. Yeah, you’d have to isolate it. Like in A. It comes in salvia, but it’s in such small amounts, it doesn’t make a huge impact. Like there’s other psychedelic substances and magic mushrooms, but they’re in really, really small quantities.

So, yes, I believe it is possible a rogue chemist decided he wanted to try part B of salvia. But there’s no, there’s obviously no way to really prove that when you got just trip reports on the Internet. Okay, so anyways, Daniel Siebert, I believe he’s the one that sort of indirectly starts getting people to ask more and look more into it. But outside of that initial discovery and some initial findings, it’s not like he became some huge Wasson or like, like some huge advocate. Right. He doesn’t turn into Johnny Salvia seed or anything. Or salvia clone, I guess would make more sense.

Yeah. What, what is it about salvia that even the people interested in it seem to not be as passionate as people that discover almost every other psychedelic known to man? Well, I mean, it’s not. When you look at studies on how it affects people, and we talked about this in the last. In our last part as well. It’s just not as universally pleasurable when you’re using classical psychedelics. Lsd, dmt, psilocybin, mescaline. They tickle those neuroreceptors that make you feel very, very good, even if you’re, you know, dealing with inner demons or whatever is going on during the trip.

Salvia is just a trip. It is, you know, it’s so. It’s almost impossible to describe that. It is far more, in my experience, far more hallucinogenic, but not nearly as much fun. I’d rather have it not nearly as much fun. I’ve Had. I’ve had bad or difficult trips on classical psychedelics that are challenging but still feel good. Euphoric, I think that’s the word is that Salvia is non euphoric. Yes. And, and when you don’t have that baseline euphoria to get you through, you know, becoming a iron bar on a fence, on a hill for all eternity, that becomes a more difficult experience to get through for a lot of people.

But shouldn’t, and here, I guess here’s where I’m the most curious. Shouldn’t that mean that it’s better like, I don’t know. I mean, I know you were saying before if LSD and, and Salvia were trying to compete, Salvi is like leaving DM or it’s is leaving LSD in the dust, right? So like there is almost a competition in terms of who gets attention for research, who gets attention for pop culture reasons just in general. So isn’t Salvia though? Doesn’t that mean Salvia is like the hill that you would want to climb, that is the K2, not, not the fake weed K2, but like the mountain K2.

It’s like a thing that you would aspire to know more about and study more about because it specifically doesn’t have euphoria because the people that might be obsessed with it and want to do it more often, they’re not addicted to the euphoric part of it. They’re addicted to something way crazier, which is like, like a true psychonaut experience. It’s almost, it’s almost easier to be like, yeah man, I’m gonna become a psychonaut and just do LSD or dmt. Like I don’t know how much of that is just dopamine release, right? Because yeah, one of the other studies on, on LSD from Albert, not Hoffman but Hoffner, one of the earlier adrenochrome researchers also was in the psychedelics, but he was making a lot of these same cases that when you don’t have the euphoria then people assume that it’s not working.

But really the euphoria might. And this, even the hallucinations themselves and the, the neuroplasticity where like you get synesthesia, that all of that might just be these fun happy side effects and that none of the actual. It helps you look at the world a different way, it helps you quit drinking, it helps you, whatever it like changes your life. Those life changing trips might have absolutely nothing at all to do with the visuals or the audio. Are you talking to God? Are you Feeling great. It might just literally have made new neural pathways that felt good at the time but, but the neural pathway was the part that counts.

And it almost seems that salvia is the part that like if you’re serious about creating new neural pathways you would do salvia and look at everything else as if it were wine cooler. That’s an interesting perspective. I hadn’t thought of that before. I think part of it probably is early hallucinogen and psychedelic research was very, very rooted in said in the last part. I’m a Baptist pastor so this is what I spent a lot of time in. But a lot of the early research was based around Christian religious ideas. And so a lot of it was based around having those euphoric visionary experiences, encountering God, all of these things that was assumed to be the thing that caused healing.

This is before we knew about neuroplasticity. This is before we knew about the anti inflammation effects of psychedelics. And some of that research still goes on today in places like Johns Hopkins, which I have a lot of disagreements with that if you’re feeling good, that is going to get you to the end result of being a better person of having your, your ails cured. And yeah, I think, I think that we might have. There are plenty of plant medicines like salvia that have probably been overlooked because we assume the only kind of healing has to feel really, really good while we do it.

I mean the, there’s, there’s a reason that dream analysis used to be the main thing of psychology was like what do your nightmares mean? Your nightmares can tell you a lot about your daily life, the struggles that you’re wrestling with, whatever, but they don’t have to feel good while you’re doing it. Well, interesting segue here. Or tangent. More what’s the difference between a trip and a dream? Yeah, I’m, I’m writing a chapter for a book right now that that looks a lot into, a lot into this. I don’t see a ton of, I don’t frankly see a ton of difference.

People have dreams. When you look at surveys, people have dreams at some point in their life that determine decisions that they make that say that it changes them as a person. I think it’s really funny though that as a society we’ve kind of made dreams like oh yeah, we hallucinate pretty often while we sleep and that doesn’t mean anything. But in the ancient world like that, that was the thing that is how you had a window into a different world. It was their equivalent of being on DMT for a long period of time. So, yeah, frankly, I don’t, I don’t see a lot of the difference.

And some of my dreams have been just as intense as some of my trips before. Is there a version of lucid dreaming as applied to, you know, being awake and taking psychedelics? Like, is there a way to lucid dream your way through that? Like, being. Well, could you rephrase that? Like being a. Being aware you’re in prison or hell, one of those two things. So that’s the only place you get psychedelics. Sure. But the same way that somebody can train themselves in their waking life, their sober waking life to do like reality checks, for example. You familiar with like a reality check for lucid dreaming? Okay, so the point being is that once you are lucid dreaming at some point, if you can figure out your reality check and then go into a lucid dream.

To oversimplify, it could be like, I can fly now. And now you’re flying and you’re like, now I’m beating up my school bully, you know, Sam Preston from second grade. Screw that guy. And you’re like, bam, bam, bam. You’re punching them like. And you can just conjure up anything you want at will. You kind of have control over your environment. Yeah. Now apply that to someone just dosed you with mushrooms, someone just dosed you with LSD to get that same level of I, I can fly now. And, and not, not like. Because usually it seems the other way around.

Usually you hear these horrible stories where someone’s like, the LSD tells me I can fly now. And then they try to fly without realizing, like, nah, dude, not in real life, but in this weird reality that you’ve currently created. So I guess is there a lucid dreaming version of that? Yeah, there’s, there are, there are a lot of examples, especially if you’ve used psychedelics for long enough or in a lot, a lot in a row. You get your sea legs with it. You can kind of explore it a little bit better. There’s always going to be parts of your, there’s always going to be parts of your mind.

You’ve got the, the ape part up here, the human part up, up here. And going back deeper in your mind, you got your limbic system, the more lizard bit and your spinal cord and hind brain. That’s that really, really old, we just got a spine stuff. So there’s different levels to it where, where I think you might be able to better, you might be able to better navigate or even conjure things with psychedelics from up here with that, that human eight brain bit. But sometimes you’re always going to have. I mean, you see this with a lot of lucid dream stories too.

The brain will throw things at you to keep you on your toes. No matter how good you’ve gotten at this, it’ll do something that freaks you out. I had a dream a few nights ago which was a lucid dream, because I’ve been practicing with that. And I told the people in my dream, you know, it doesn’t matter if we finish this story, because you’re all just figments of my mind. And when I wake up, you won’t be here anymore. And one of them looked me dead in the eyes and said, if that’s the case, how do I remember my childhood? How do I have a memory of my childhood in your dream? And I had to wake up and do a little bit of philosophy there of where that came from.

I was lucid dreaming and my brain fought back that you don’t. You’re not totally in control here. And I thought that was hilarious. Well, in, in the Matrix context, that’s when you, like, bump up against the edges. And now all of a sudden people are being aggressive towards you. They’re like, pushing at you in, in the crowd or whatever, right? So whenever, yeah, whenever. The. I’ve heard that described that way, that in the. In a lucid dream, that once the dream masters or whoever’s running the show, once they like, realize that you’re breaking the rules, then all of a sudden the.

The world kind of fights back against you a little bit. And one of the reasons this is completely subjective and I won’t get too much into my own subjective tangents, but people describing their dreams to me, I’ll give you like 30 seconds to a minute. And if it doesn’t get, like, really good or, or like very strange, then my mind will drift. Like, it’s no, like, not personal, but my mind drifts. If you’re saying, like, man, here’s this trip story. Maybe I’ve got like three to five minutes of interest involved to, like, hear you out. What is that? Is it just.

Is it just my own personal bias or, like, why would someone care more about a trip report than just reading dreams all day? I think part, I mean, part of it is the mystique that, like, everybody dreams, not everybody does acid or DMT in their life. But I think because when we’ve done some, some imaging of people’s brains when they’re on psychedelics, there’s a lot of overlap between the dream state, especially dmt, There’s a lot of overlap between the dream state and the psychedelic state. So it might just be that. That these unspeakably bizarre elements of the brain were awake enough to actually see them, remember them, categorize them, and spin them back in a way that can captivate people or is insane.

But we tend to forget the incredibly weird parts of our dreams by the time we wake up. So that might be part of it too. There’s one other thing, too, about a lot of different psychedelics that I read from, like, criminal forums, like prison forums and stuff. Sure. Where very specific substances have these common physiological effects. For example, there might be yawning on some of them. There might be, like, you know, when you’re coming up or going down because, like, you might get sweaty or you might, like, start laughing, or there’s all these things that regardless of what you’re thinking of and seeing and feeling like, everyone’s body seems to react the same way.

There’s also something called form constants. And form constants represent, like, different visual patterns that people see that falls into like. Like a. Like a cracked glass pattern or a spiderweb pattern or different geometrical patterns. So there’s like all these categorizations where you can almost say, like, oh, it has quality AB and not quality C. Right. And almost every different dimension. And then there’s another one where it’s like, what. What are you feeling? Not in a euphoric way, but do you feel like your body’s exploding, imploding, being pushed, being, you know, like, stretched apart? And that these are also seem very, very consistent.

And then in, specifically in salvia, there’s these very common reports of people being pressed and squished and, like, stretched out into infinity and things that you don’t know. Like someone doesn’t hit a joint and be like, man, I feel like I’m being thrown across the room right now. It’s just not a thing. Is why is that. What is it about salvia that has that effect? Are there anything else that gets reported the same way? Yeah, we talked about this, some of this briefly in our last part too, that, like, when they were first doing a lot of salvia research before, you had all these online trip stories that people would come out of in multiple studies, multiple studies came out of these trips and said, I was in this carnival, and here are the sort of colors I saw so that the.

The place you’d be going to was the same sort of place which I. I found really, really bizarre. And yeah, the mood, the, the way that it affects your body, the feel, feeling of being stretched and pulled and flattened and you know, the, the scientific answer I think that would be given is that, oh, you know, some what’s working on your do not your dopamine, you’re opioid receptors and so you’re just losing touch with how your body really feels. But I could be true. But it’s so vague that of course it could be true. Yeah, right.

There’s so much. There is. I love my science, I love, I love my, my empirical research, but there are real limits to it. And that’s where I think that like when you listen to indigenous practitioners for years they’ll talk about different substances. Ayahuasca, magic mushrooms, salvia, mescaline, morning glory seeds. All these different substances have their own spirit. There, there’s a way, there’s a certain type of experience it’ll take you on that you need to get used to. You need to start feeling out and get building a relationship with. And I really do, I really, really do believe that even datura, there’s examples of that of like for 99.99% of people is a hellscape.

But for people who for years get to know it, it can have an entheogenic effect for them. Most mostly people who live in the Indian subcontinent. But I really do, I really do. This is not what I’d say in an academic setting, but I’ll say it here because you have such a fun platform. I really do think that they’re almost taking you down paths of the mind, taking you down paths of the spirit. Another dimension, whatever you want it to call it, these special doors and special guides that take you to special places that of course will have these similarities because they’re the same sort of spirit sort of thing leading you down that.

Is that, Is that place real? Is that carnival real? If so many different people, without being influenced by each other are all saying they went to this carnival, does that mean it’s a real place? I. I think so. I really, really do think that there is. That there are places beyond ourselves, places beyond ourselves where our minds can go in altered states and maybe we go when we die or I really do think there are, there is more to this world than what we see and that when we use psychedelics, when we dream, when we do meditation, near death experiences, that we are really experiencing something outside of beyond ourselves.

Do you think the same way that hippies ruined, I guess this region, was it just Oaxaca, Mexico is that where they, they ruined or was it. I mean hippies ruined a lot of places the same way hippies ruined Mexico. Do you think that they could ruin the carnival? Yeah, I think, I mean that is, there’s, there’s a reason in a lot of these, in a lot of religions that before you get to heaven or before you go into the spirit realm or before you encounter the, the big, the Buddha lands, all of these different places, you got to go through a purification bit.

You gotta, you got your, you got your time to work off your karma. You got your purgatory. You got to go through some really trips to really get to know the path and then we’ll let you in. I, I think there, I think there really could be something to that. Not letting these places having, having ways to keep you out if you’re not ready, like, you show up and you’re like, all right, I’m ready for that euphoria now. And the, the salvia entities are like, oh yeah, you’re one of those. Go through this door. Yep, something, something.

And that’s one of the big motifs of psychedelics and hallucinogen’s plant medicine across the board is the trickster motif that, oh yeah, this is going to be a good time. You’re so ready for this. And then it’s, it flips on you and again is about, it is about creating humility, a humble approach to these things that never to think that you’ve got it all figured out. If there’s one thing from across spiritual traditions that, that the gods, the spirits, the ancestors, whatever, aren’t a huge fan of, it’s you thinking you have it all figured out and so they need to cause a little mischief to remind you you doubt.

So do you think that I’m trying to figure out a phrase the way the phrases want, but you think that people should have to go through fasting rituals and meditation and studying and like put, like put yourself through a little bit of hell before you were in prison, before you were go and do one of these, like any of these trips or, and then I guess, let me, let me rephrase it. What about is just like you got off work, it’s Friday, you turn on your favorite movie and you just take some ayahuasca or you just take some fill in the blank versus let me go and find a shaman.

Let me make sure I follow all the shaman’s rules. Oh, the shaman said I’m not allowed to have chocolate for 24 hours before. Okay, let me make sure I do that. Yeah, I, I mean I’m, I feel a lot, I feel very torn on this question because I. You shouldn’t. There’s a right answer and there’s a wrong answer. Well, I, I, I have seen, I have seen how in my opinion, all good things lead people into community. All good things lead people into connection, intimacy, love with each other. So if just doing it on, doing something on the couch alone doesn’t lead you into community and connection, I don’t think it’s a good call.

But that doesn’t mean that I think that you need to go through a, a particular, a particular set of rituals that someone on TripAdvisor said you’ll need to go through before your Peruvian San Pedro experience. Fair point. And I agree. I think that’s actually a really good litmus test on if something’s beneficial or not. I’m sure it doesn’t. It’s not like an absolute rule that, like, there’s probably exceptions, but that’s a great one. That’s a great one. If it leads to more community. But also some of those like ayahuasca retreat rules that, you know, I’m kind of implying that it’s almost like a forced community.

It’s like two parents force their kids to hang out together just because it’s convenient for them and not necessarily because the kids like are friends with each other. It’s, it almost has one of those feels to it. And I would also, I’ll just point out maybe that the, the isolating part of this is, is because you’re a criminal, like literally like for up until, you know, maybe recently on some substances, but for the most part, you might be the only person in a 10 mile radius legitimately that is willing to risk their freedom in order to explore these other dimensions.

Right. So if, if the, the system, the state, man, it’s all about the state and society. But it always. The system. Yeah, but it forced you to be a recluse and to do that by yourself or to find like a small little group of other criminals to also do that with. So it’s almost like we, we were playing with a stack deck against us. And yes, there was never a chance that psychedelics could have created community in a way that wasn’t allowed or fabricated. And as we meander back towards CIA and psychedelics a little bit. Well, yeah, I mean, isn’t that what Richard Nixon talked a lot about with the anti war movement? We can’t criminalize being part of the anti war movement, but we can criminalize the Drugs that they use.

You can break up this really strong community of people that said, how are we more free by carpet bombing Cambodia? How are we more free by sending tens of thousands of our boys to die overseas? And. And he couldn’t make that illegal, but he could make what we’re leading people to these questions, leading people to these communities. He could make that illegal. Well, that actually leads to another great question. Why are so many drug addicts so lazy and unwilling to fight for our country? That’s a good question. I mean the highest good of every single human being should be oil reserves somewhere between Africa, Asia and Europe, right at that nexus.

Or various other minerals in Indochina. Bringing those home should be the highest value of any. Any American, certainly. And opium. And of course the pharmaceutical companies do need their opium. What about this motif of like becoming an inanimate object? Explain exactly how that feels to someone that has never felt it. What is it like to be. You said a box of cereal on the moon. What is it? How do you know that you’re a box of cereal the way the best. Again, I’ve gotten decently good at analogies, so apologies for another one. When I talk lecture about these.

But. But it’s almost like when you hear a clock chiming in the distance. It’s noon and it’s on the 10th chime and you realize you weren’t paying attention to it, but you realize the clock is chiming and suddenly you realize that there’s been 10 chimes. You’ve probably had that experience before. It’s almost as if the things that make you conscious, the things that make you a self aware being, like attention. Attention is important for that. Disappear for a bit and then come back and you become aware of the fact you were. That it was gone for a bit.

It’s really, really wild to try to explain or it’s wild enough to experience, but that’s the best that I got is like everything except beingness is gone. The cell, all the things that create self awareness are gone. And then you can only look back, like in the past tense, become aware that was happening to you. Do you think Jesus will forgive you for doing salvia? I believe Jesus already has. Absolutely. Do you think Jesus is happy with you that you’ve done salvia? That’s a good question. Are you my dad? Because that sounds like a really my dad question right there.

Yeah, I think so. I don’t think that. I really don’t think that psychedelics, dissociatives, any of those things are. There’s nothing Morally bad about a plant? There’s nothing morally bad about a substance. They just are. And the fact that I want to explore these good things that are out there, I definitely don’t think is a bad thing at all. You think Jesus’s dad would be happy with you? Yeah, I think so. He put all this here, right. Like it’s. It’s been hanging out, waiting. I mean, I. When you think about all of the different ways that these substances, salvia included, made their way to us, almost as if they were waiting for a conscious little ape being evolved out of Africa to have the kind of neuroreceptors and the sort of brain structure to chow down on it and have this insane experience.

It definitely feels like the opposite of a trap. Like a loot, Like a loot. Grab a loot chest in a game that you’ve. You’ve stumbled upon something that’s about to level you up and make this a much better experience. I mean, isn’t. Forgive the bad analogy, but isn’t this just Adam talking about how great that freaking apple tastes and why God probably wanted him to eat it all along? Because. Because look at how great it tastes. There’s this. I’ll give you one better. There’s this cool idea in Catholic theology called Felix culpa, or a fortunate fall, that the only way we could truly have a full experience of existence, to see the.

The beauty of the universe and all that it is, was to have that knowledge, was to do the thing we weren’t supposed to do and have the opportunity to journey back to being in union with God. That the journey is the journey is the point. So, you know, what? If. If this is something that is. If this is something that’s wrong, then I’ve done. I’ve still done my best and I think I’ll get some mercy. And it’s been a really fortunate path back since then. This sounds dangerously close to Sabbathian or maybe even like Crowley in occultism, that if Jesus died for our sins, then why not.

Why not sin a little bit? So he didn’t die for nothing. Isn’t that sounds like the logic there? Well, it’s less. I mean, one of the. There’s a great. There’s a great theologian who, who tried to blow up Hitler named Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Cool guy. And he talked about how sometimes in the world we’re not given all the information, we’re not given all of the data, but we still have to act. Even if you don’t know what the right thing to do is. Not acting is acting. You got to make a choice. You got to have the courage to make a choice.

And so I think if we do our very best to be a good person, if we explore all the options we have, we seek out all the data we have and we decide something isn’t wrong and we do it and it ends up being wrong. There’s space for grace for that. But that’s a little bit different than, no offense to Crowley, sometimes seeking out the very things he knows are wrong on purpose for the point of making that juncture in human experience. So I said, you want to make sure you’re. What is it? Your ideal fall.

What was it called again? A beneficial what if you want your fortunate fall to make sure it just hits every fortunate fall branch on the way down. Oh, God. The kind of thing that you don’t do more than once or maybe if you do that’s looked down upon. Like I’m on my fifth fortunate fall right now. It. Well, it’s, it def. I mean, if you look at the Adam, if you look at the Adam and Eve story, the mythology there, people, people have talked about like, it being like God turning on all of the hot plates on the stove and then leaving a four year old there and being like, do not touch the hot plate on the stove and just leaving the house for a few hours.

And now we’re not allowed back in the kitchen and now we’re not allowed back in the kitchen and being like, well, that’s kind of, that’s kind of messed up. Like, you don’t, you, you shouldn’t really do that. That’s, that’s something that’s even there in that very first story is. That doesn’t seem, that doesn’t seem very fair. Are you being critical of God? Hey, look, I hang out with a lot. I hang out with a lot of rabbis. I hang out with a lot of my Jewish friends and they have much more of a tradition in the Jewish tradition of telling God that he’s.

He might be a little bit rude in this situation, but I think for a Baptist to be adopting though. Yeah, I don’t really, I don’t really. I think God is strong enough for us to be able to. I mean, Jacob, Jacob, Israel in the Bible is really, is really lauded, is really awarded for wrestling with God, fighting with God. And I think that these sort of like, Isn’t that Old Testament? Yeah, so what? Old Testament’s still in that thing, right? It’s still in the, it’s still in the, it’s still in the books. But I mean, you see, you see this, you see this with so many of the characters in the Gospels too, or Paul who are trying their very best to follow God and screw up fantastically badly denying.

I feel like Paul would have smoked salvia, no question. Absolutely. I think if he had had the option, he would have been in on it. But, yeah, I, I, at the end of the day, at the end of the day, I just read a great quote from somebody, some Russian Orthodox monk that as long as somebody is in hell, you can bet that Christ will be in hell with him. So that all. For all of these paradoxes, for all of these, these wrestlings, we’re going to be sitting with the great beauty of the universe and the worst things the universe has to offer at the same time.

So even, no matter, no matter how bad we go, we always have an option to come back. I wasn’t expecting so much blasphemy from a pastor. A lot of this is in the Bible. People don’t know that book’s a little bit crazy. They get the same five verses from their local minister and think, that’s it. It. There’s some wild, there’s some wild, wild stuff in that book. I, I seek out churches that just focus on Revelations and nothing but. But so far it’s, there’s just this one group in Waco, but it’s like a far drive currently.

So talk. Let’s, let’s get more into Bible stuff because it does relate to mushrooms and the salvia and the Wasen. You mentioned two names that I’m largely unfamiliar with. One was pike, one was Wyclef, which I think was the rapper from the Fugees. How does he fit into this? So back when Wasson was trying to find his sacred mushrooms, his hallucinogenic mushrooms, this started with, of course, the fly agaric mushroom in Europe, when he realized, like, oh, you can eat this and it will, it’ll show you some things. And so when he was trying to find, when he heard that there might be hallucinogenic mushrooms in Mexico, he learned about this through a missionary, a evangelical teetotaling, didn’t believe that you should drink alcohol.

Little lady named Eunice pike, who was a Bible translator in Huatla de Jimenez, very, very rural Mexico. And he just asked, do you have these mushrooms? And she was like, yeah, they’re everywhere. They’re all, all of these people use them. They’re used in these rituals. And she was a Bible translator with Wycliffe Bible translators or earlier called the Summer Institute of Linguistics, which, full disclosure, I attended the version of the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Go ahead, give. Give the pitch and do your promo code. Do the whole thing. What’s the website? No, I’m not doing. I’m not doing a pitch here.

Yeah, well, you know John Allen Chow, the guy who tried to go to North Central island in the Indian Ocean and got. Got killed. Go on. Yeah, he was a classmate of mine in this Bible translation courses. Is that your current claim to fame? Like, I’m. I’m not exactly famous, but I know a guy. No. Well, I wish it wasn’t because, I mean, it was a really. It was a really traumatic thing when he. He did die. I had talked to him about going to. About him saying he wished he could go to that island and bring everyone to Jesus.

And I was like, hey, fun fact, you might not need to do that. But yeah. So just full disclosure, I went. I went to the. The Wycliffe Bible Translator summer camp in undergrad to learn linguistics. Met John Allen Chow. And that is the same Bible translation network that all the way back in the day. All the way back in the day, Eunice pike was a part of trying to translate the Bible and incidentally helped the world learn about magic mushrooms. Is this a Baptist organization or is it just generic Christian. Generic fundamentalist. Christian fundamentalist. Okay. Yo, very funny.

That if you don’t. If you even these. The reason that they’d want to contact uncontacted tribes is like, you know, if they don’t hear about Jesus, they’ll go to hell. So we gotta. We gotta make them Christian a little bit against. A little bit against their will. If they want to be uncontacted. That sucks for them. We’re going in. See, I’ve heard the exact opposite before. I’ve heard that in. In all of his grace that God slash Jesus slash Holy Spirit. Because trinitarianism is the only true way to heaven. Right? And we both agree on that.

100 As a Baptist, I’m sure, but that. Yeah, like. Like you have to follow all those different rules and that if you don’t, then you’re pissing one of the three off. I’ve not heard that exactly the same, but they definitely have different rules that they got that they’ve passed on in different ways. I’m curious though. What is it that about a fundamentalist? You said that if you were to drink alcohol, she’d probably turn her nose about you. What. What would give mushrooms a pass? You know, that’s really Interesting. I just, I just published a paper about Eunice Pike.

I have a signed copy of one of her books on my shelf. She was a really. I went through all of her old archives, went through all of her old letters in Texas. And it seems that I think she was aware of mescaline. I think she was aware of lsd. And this was during the same period these were still being researched as medicines. In fact, LSD, this was like a military only chemical in the 1950s. Not necessarily when, when, when Hoffman was publishing on this. This was still during the time period they were doing psychiatry experiments.

This was during the same time that the chemical companies were trying to see can we make money off of the psychiatry here. But I say that because there’s one particular letter. After Mushrooms got popular, the, the Life article, like you said, from Lawson, got really, really popular where she talks about this American tourist who comes to Hula Deja Menes and tries the mushroom and he sees the resurrection of Jesus and he goes back and he’s pharaoh in the ancient world. And he writes, he, he, he has what we would describe as a bad trip. But then when he gets back to the United States, he writes a letter back to what Leda Jimenez that says that he no longer has any physical or psychological illnesses anymore, that he took this trip and he came out the other side and he has a new lease on life.

He’s a different man. And so, and so pike seemed to be aware, even though she was so anti alcohol, seemed to be aware that psychedelics, magic mushrooms at least could have medicinal capacities. Which should tell you something about how the category of drugs is totally made up. Up, totally made up. If someone like her could see the benefit of a substance like this. The category of drugs is an artificial one that we were sold, not one that is a actual depiction of what chemicals are and what they do for us. So you’re more of a theologian than I am.

So I, I know I’ve heard this before and I went on a tangent, but I’m bringing myself back to it. I believe you said the missionaries are afraid that the babies and other people that don’t know about the good word are going to go to hell unless they hear about it. So you go and you spread the word and that way they can go to heaven. I’ve heard the exact opposite. And I thought it was like Catholic canon, but who the hell knows? But what I heard was that in God and all his graciousness would never send somebody that never had the chance to hear the good word.

He wouldn’t just condemn them to hell because they didn’t get a chance. It’s only if you got the chance and you didn’t take it, now you go to hell. So it always racked my brain of like, does this mean that if a missionary goes to a country and they’re a crappy missionary and they only convert 10 out of a hundred people, and technically they’re responsible for sending 90 people to hell? Yeah. No, that is. That is a theology that some people have historically believed. And like I said, all. All theology is whatever paradoxes and contradictions you eventually become okay with.

And so some people eventually became okay with that paradox, that contradiction. But it’s not what. It’s not what the. The most fundamentalists in America would believe. Okay, all right, let me steer us all the way back to CIA. Eventually. So pike was this uptight old lady fundamentalist Bible thumper that told Wasson where he could find magic mushrooms. Interesting, fully, objectively true statement, right? Yes. Yes. She was a nice woman. To be clear, she was a nice woman. The other. The people in Oaxaca, in Huatla de Jimenez, once threw a chair at a missionary and broke his nose.

But they really liked her. She was the only missionary they tolerated. But I just wanted to throw that fun story out there. Do you think just because she was old, she got a pass? She. She would tended to be really generous, Cooked meals for everybody, taught people how to read. So generally. Generally wasn’t just there for the Bible thumping. And when you think about it, if you think about somebody giving, if you were to give your whole life to try to make sure somebody else doesn’t go to hell halfway across the world, you have to at least love them a little bit, even if it’s misguided.

Maybe. I don’t know, man. I think it’s all hubris. Like what? What? Why do you think that you’re so special that you saved me from going to hell? What’s in it for you? Yeah, there’s. There’s. There is always a. There is always a part of that. But she was. At least. I just want to throw out. She at least seemed, from the letters I read, to be a reasonably nice old lady. So that probably helped. We’ll say altruistic. I’ll give you that. I’ll take. So you mentioned that she’s this lady, she works for the Wyclef Bible translators.

But then you also told me when you first email me about this, that Wyclef was a CIA affiliate. What do you mean by that? How can you make such a claim? So there’s not. So it’s important to, it’s important to say that Wycliffe, sil, these groups, these, these missions groups using more clear language on this, they were, they were definitely friendly to American intelligence and friendly to the American missionaries, or not missionaries, the American military. Wycliffe had US military aircraft equipment transferred to them from the government. Wycliffe missionaries knowingly hosted military and intelligence people at their different mission sites.

They often went to really, really, really isolated places. So if you’re looking for someone to give you intelligence on isolated areas of Vietnam, isolated elements of Mexico, isolated elements of Peru, these places that, you know, this is when America and the Cold War is really afraid of the commies and they’re afraid of the commies in these places. That’s, that’s the sort of people that you’d want on your side. But there are also examples where Wycliffe was able to work, SIL was able to work in Vietnam, in the Philippines more easily because they agreed to do some more anti communist work.

But these allegations have dogged allegations of working specifically with the CIA, which we can’t prove, but seems, seems like there’s a lot around. It even led to at one point, a missionary in 1981 named Jet Bitterman was murdered in Colombia by a left wing militia because they believe that he, a Bible translator, was part of a CIA network through his Bible translation company. I mean, it’s kind of interesting in modern day. I’m not talking about like Middle Ages, although I can go on plenty of tangents. But now there’s so many countries or regions where Christians have to kind of be in hiding, right? They have to hide the Bibles that they’re smuggling in.

Otherwise it could mean big, big trouble for them. Is this because in, in 2025, being a Christian in a remote area where there’s not a lot of Christians, it’s almost like, and this is how the CIA gets in, like once you allow the Christian missionaries, the next to follow is going to be American intelligence. Yeah, American intelligence and the American military. Like I said, it’s difficult to say that there, that, that there’s been plenty of allegations, but it’s difficult to say Wycliffe worked directly with the CIA. You just said it. Wyclef works directly with the CIA.

What’s more, what’s easier to say is in the church, the church investigation, this is the same one that uncovers MK Ultra with, with psychedelic experimentation is that we know that at least 21 missionaries work directly with the CIA as intelligence assets, particularly because they had access to these, these really remote areas. One very interesting example, not Wycliffe, but showing how powerful missionary stories could be. There was a missionary named John Dooley In 1956, interestingly, the same year that Wasin came to visit, Huala de Jimenez dually wrote a book called Deliver Us From Evil that made up a ton of fake stories about torture in Vietnam, that the communists were torturing all, torturing all of these Catholic Christians.

And that was one of the primary forces that the American military establishment used to justify military force in Vietnam. So it’s very clear that missionaries as a whole, exactly like you said, are often the tip of the spear, where if God and country are combined, and they very often were for these people, it’s very easy to see them going in to spread the gospel. But we’ll add anti communism in there. And of course that means the CIA, USAID used to be very involved in intelligence as well as military general military work. So. So we do, we do see missionaries and in some cases Wycliffe Sil missionaries in particular, working with intelligence and working with the mission and working with the military to bring the tip of the spear of missions being backed by American imperialism.

Isn’t every religion just like an intelligence network? Slash inside trader discord. Isn’t that like every single religion? I mean, you have very different versions of religion, often in the same places where you have the imperial version of religion, the official state sanctioned version, and then you have what everybody’s actually up to. So in Mexico, you know, you got the Catholic Church, which was often very anti communist, very anti indigenous, this big colonizing force. And then you also have Catholicism backing up the Zapatistas, who have their own autonomous anarchist like thing going on in Mexico as well.

So it can be used either way. Who’s right? As an anarchist myself, I go more for the anarchist side of things. Disgusting. Here’s we, we had a lot of the difficult discussion, a lot of like challenging areas. Let me just give you a couple like softballs. Palestine versus Israel. Palestine. Are you talking about who’s gonna win or who. Who’s deserves to win? Deserves to win. And if I have anything to do with that, will win. Are you going to. Are you boots on the ground? Are you going to be like dosing the IDF with Salvorin A in their water supply? No.

Though there is an interesting study on ayahuasca trips in shaman settings with IDF soldiers and Palestinians that might be worth checking out for you tell me more. Did like they, they Got them together and they all tripped together. Yes, yes. There’s. There’s a couple. I have a podcast episode about that, actually. It’s really interesting. But yeah, I have worked very, very hard for years for the Palestinian cause. Organized a solidarity fast for Palestine as a minister. Slept in the basement of St. John’s Episcopal Church right outside the Capitol. Met with the Middle east advisor for John Tester, who is the State Appropriation subcommittee dude for the military.

See, I’m very dedicated. I’m very dedicated to a solution where Jews and Palestinians can live in peace, but that Palestinians get justice. Do Palestinians really push gay people off buildings to kill them? As somebody who has a large number of queer Palestinian friends, just as it would be in the United States, it depends on where you are, depends on the sort of people that you’re with, of course, as well you have, as I’m sure you know, Israel for a while, funding Hamas, funding extremist groups, and not to fight back against these secular, more secular Palestinian liberation groups.

I don’t think it’s an inherent part of the Palestinian liberation movement to be anti queer. Definitely. Do you think psychedelics could have any role in the solution here? Or is. Is this a completely different realm? I think that there’s always a. I think that psychedelics are a tool that can be used in many, many different ways. Positively, positively in this. But, but what I found from these articles was that it was often the case that IDF soldiers would take the ayahuasca and realize one of them said he saw himself as a Nazi, that he had kicked in this door and taken this innocent man and every.

He had committed a crime against humanity and he cried about it. And then he took no political action to fix any of it. That it’s. It’s just all about peace and love now. So when it comes to the political solution, I’m a little. I’m a little more negative about it, but I don’t think that means it’s. It’s. Can’t have a role. I mean, he cried about it. What else was he supposed to do? I don’t know, like, you know, actually enact some, some political change. There’s plenty of IDF veterans right now who are fighting against the war as it’s going on right now, who work with Bit, Selim or other.

All of these other human rights groups. They’re able to do it. So that’s what I would have thought are. There’s a few different scientific organizations in Israel in particular that are doing like heavy work in psychedelics. In fact, I think some this not to their credit, but some of the early synthetic cannabis derivatives were all created in Israel or by like Israeli students that came over to the States to study. Is there any counterpart in Palestine? Are Palestinians doing anything cool with psychedelics? I mean, you do see the sort of people who are using. The sort of people who are using psychedelics are often doing it in the West Bank.

There are people, Palestinians, seeking to heal their communities to do, to do underground treatment. But especially when you have your education system thoroughly destroyed or don’t have the funding or the safety and are in a militarized space, it’s a lot more difficult to do this above ground work that can get you sent to America rather than this underground work of therapeutic. The underground therapeutic work it probably like. I mean, if you believe in the whole set and setting thing too, maybe the West Bank’s not the first place I’d suggest somebody try out psychedelics just because the set and setting is maybe the literal worst place on the entire planet in order to do that in, in pr.

I mean, I can imagine in previous years, you know, Terence McKenna was in Jerusalem for a little bit, tripped on psychedelics in Jerusalem, in the West Bank. I was just reading that in his biography from MIT a couple nights ago. But I think in times when it’s not heavily militarized, you got the Church of the Nativity where Jesus was supposedly born. You have the hillside where the angels allegedly showed up to the shepherds. You’ve got a lot of beautiful history, architecture and land that I can imagine in times of peace, you know, you could try to see those angels again, something along those lines.

I don’t know if this is just the Baptist in you or the Catholic in me, but it does seem like so much of what you’re saying is heretical, like just, just amoral in general. And I’m curious how, how do you basically like square that circle? How do you like, how do you convince yourself that you’re not being a bad person? By doing psychedelics and by advocating for Palestine. Let’s start with psychedelics first. Sure. With psychedelics. The way that I explain it again, I’m adding a chapter, I’m writing a chapter for a book right now on this very topic.

And I’m one of the only people who was willing to say outright, yes, psychedelics are a good thing. If you were in prison and a criminal and headed straight to hell, is what you would say. Of course, of course, if you were going straight to hell. But for me, I see, like I talked about with dreams earlier, we have all these different ways of experiencing something beyond ourselves. You can see descriptions of meditation experiences in Tibetan monks who are. Seem very much like psychedelics, seem very much like psychedelic trips. I want to see him do a 600x salvia hit.

Well, maybe not quite that intense, but they’re, they’re. I mean there you see all these stories of like. Oh, you do see stories actually. That’s. I’ve never thought of this. Of feeling like their bodies are twisting or flattening or crushing or expanding. I think there are many, many, many spiritual tools, technologies that have been given to us to explore, explore the spiritual world and explore ourselves. And I don’t think psychedelics are unique. Like I talked earlier with about Eunice pike being this, this woman who wouldn’t even drink alcohol. But even she said maybe there’s something here medicinally, maybe there’s something that can be used here.

Our category of what we call drugs is totally made up. It is not a real moral category. It is something that people in the 60s made up to justify oppressing free minded people. I’m going to misquote this as I always do, but it’s what like the medicine is the dose or the medicine makes the dose or that potentially anything could have some sort of a healing or poisonous quality to it. It. It all just depends on the dilution of it, which gets I guess into like holistic pseudoscience. Or am I. Is. Is holistic medicine pseudoscience? I think you got that.

As we mentioned earlier, that placebo effect that a lot of people do experience healing on it. But I don’t know why the body does this, but it can be the body doing it to itself. But you got to believe it. You got to believe it for the magic to happen. I think it’s a good place to end us. Where you mentioned earlier that you’ve got a really cool podcast episode about IDF soldiers doing psychedelics with Palestinians. What other cool episodes have you recorded recently that people should check out? Yeah, recently. I mean the. I got the holidays coming up right now, so I’m thinking about my research on the 1970 Christmas happening where the Brotherhood of Eternal Love dumped tens of thousands of doses of LSD on a riotous birthday party for Jesus in Laguna Beach.

That’s a fun one for me. I just did one on MDMA in Dallas. Dallas was the place to do MDMA in the 80s and it was a former Catholic seminarian just shortly away from becoming a priest who is the main guy who got it on the market. And where was the primary place people were taking mdma, Southern Methodist University, a Christian school. So those. Those would be the two that I’d bring up especially for people to check out. Another. I’m going to squeeze another question in here. Screw it. What about give unto Caesar? Or there’s like another variation of that, which, which is basically, observe the laws of your land if you want to.

I’m. Now I’m paraphrasing Jesus, but the premise, I believe, is that follow the laws of the land which are separate from me. Is. Is that implying or else. Is that implying or else you’re doing something morally reprehensible or was that just like a pro tip? Like, hey, bruh, if you don’t want to get hassled by the state, you know, just give unto Caesar. Yeah, I’ve got a. So the full quote is given to Caesar, what is Caesar? And unto God what is God’s? And Jesus looks at a coin and he says, you know what’s on this coin? Well, it’s the image of Caesar and what’s on your body, it’s the image of God.

And so you can give Caesar what belong, what belongs to him. His. His money, his imperial force, all of his power. But he can’t have. You. Don’t give the imperial force, don’t give the emperor your loyalty, your ultimate integrity. That belongs to you, that belongs to God. If. Let me. Okay this. This will be my last question. If drugs aren’t demons and if alcohol isn’t demons, and if God. If. If the natives in South America that didn’t believe in Christ and didn’t want to receive the good word, if they are not demons, then what are demons? The demons even exist.

Like, where does bad stuff come from if it’s not from, like, horrible, you know, like natives and drug users. There is only one demon named. Named. Actually two. There’s two demons, but only one that’s explicitly named as an. A clear enemy of God, and that is mammon or money. You cannot serve God and money. And you hear in the New Testament the love of money is the root of all evil. That’s not. Well, coming from a Baptist, definitely not a Protestant. A Protestant would maybe argue that money is your reward for how good you are doing and that this is like Jesus showering you with rewards.

No, that. I’m a liberation theologian. I got. Again, we got Christmas coming up. Mary said. Mother Mary said, cast down the mighty, lift up the oppressed, Fill the hungry with good things, and send the rich away empty. That’s Luke 1:52,53. The thing that creates the most evil in this world, the demon that we can see all around us, is the desire to hoard more, more, more. It’s why we are demolishing the natural world. It’s why we go overseas to conquer other nations. It’s why we step on the necks of poor people all around us. That desire for more, more, more.

That greed, as I think the greatest, the greatest expression of demons that we see. You can see some of these people who have been so corrupted by money, and you just wonder, how does a person get like that? How do you get a Jeffrey Epstein? How do you get a. How do you get a. How do you get a Jeff Bezos or an Elon Musk who looks down on everyday people so much? That’s where I think the real demons lie. And you know what? If we had a. If we had a. If I had a chance to do a exorcism on any of these people, I would take that chance.

So capitalism, if you had to, like, sum up in one word, capitalism is demons. Yes. I’ll take that. Capitalism. For episode three, we’ll have you and your best friends, AOC and Bernie Sanders and Al Gore, all four of you guys can come back and try and convince the rest of the world that communism just hasn’t been tried the right way yet. Oh, no, Communism sucks too. You got the. Like I said, anarchism. That’s what you got to go. Okay, Anarchy. Yeah, sure. The anarchy that lasts for all of five seconds until someone’s like, hey, man, leave that door open.

And then the anarchy is gone immediately. Again, I mentioned the Zapatistas. The world is a big place with a lot of experiments that many of us have never looked into how they’re going to. Fair point. Where can people find you? Where. Where do they actually go to listen to all these other podcasts that you got going on? You can find my podcast on Spotify or on Apple Podcasts or Podbean at Just Psychedelic Theology Podcast. You can also find my article, which has more things about the CIA and other fun stuff. Some of my other articles on psychedelictheology.com and then if you just want to message me, email me@ psychedelictheologygmail.com I’m always open to a chat, too.

All right, I think this wraps up another episode of the Anti Salvia Council. And our parting words. Don’t jump out that window. No, don’t do it. Your favorite conspiracies, all sticker sheets. There are known American stickers. They’ll make you smile and snicker False friends and secret society all of these and more on sticker sheets. Explore the unique with paranoid American sticker sheets. Unearth tales of cryptids, cults and mysteries through each sticker. These won’t last last long. Get yours now@paranoidamerican.com American stickers, cryptics, cults and killers. Killers. We got all your favorite conspiracies. All that sticky sheets. Now a North American snickers make you smile and snicker secret society all of these and more on our sticker sheets.

What the heck are you waiting for? Discover the extraordinary with paranoid American sticker sheets. From cryptids in the night to cults out of sight each sticker is a unique find. Get yours now@paranoidamerican.com paranoia yeah I scribbled my life away driven to write the page will it enlight your brain give you the flight my plane paper the highs ablaze somewhat of an amazing feel when it’s real to real you will engage it your favorite of course the lord of an arrangement I gave you the proper results to hit the pavement if they get emotional hate maybe your language a game how they playing it well without Lakers evade them whatever the cause they are the shapeshift snakes get decapitated met is the apex execution of flame you out nuclear bomb distributed at war rather gruesome for eyes to see max them out that I light my trees blow it off in the face you despising me for what though calculated and rather cutthroat Paranoid American must be all the blood spoke for real Lord give me your day you away vacate they wait around to hate whatever they say man it’s not in the least bit we get heavy rotate when a beat hits them thank us you’re welcome for real you’re welcome they ain’t never had a deal you’re welcome man they lacking a pill you’re welcome yet they doing it still you’re welcome.
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