Brian C. Muraresku: Could Jesus Exist Without Psychedelics? | Mayim Bialik's Breakdown

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Dionysus is not the god of wine.

He's the god of delirium, ecstasy, frenzy.

They went into fits of madness, not alcoholic stupor.

That was the whole point of that religion is to be possessed by and become one with the god.

It is not a metaphor.

Brian Mororescu is the author of the bestselling book The Immortality Key, a groundbreaking dive into the role psychedelics have played in the origins of Christianity and Western civilization.

We have the actual Greek text talking about visionary hallucinogenic wine.

At the exact same time the Gospels are being written.

Were there communities of paleo-Christians carrying over some of that intoxicating wine from Dionysus and using that in their version of the holy Christian mystery?

Wine was a drug in ancient Greece.

Wine was routinely mixed with plants herbs spices, seeds of opium and cannabis, henbane and black nightshade, which Dioscorides described as visionary and hallucinogenic.

What do you think is real?

If you experience a psychological death before your physical death, then upon your physical death something about the psyche may in fact survive.

To confront God face to face in the Old Testament, no man shall see me and live.

Humanity has been experimenting with these altered states of consciousness through all these archaic techniques for a very, very long time.

The only lesson I've learned is life is a waking meditation.

The things that we witness day to day are mere shadows of the reality of the cosmos that we inhabit.

Once in a while, people poke their head above ground and see the world for what it is.

Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.

And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

And welcome to our breakdown.

This is a place where we break things down.

So you don't have to.

Today, we are extremely excited to welcome someone whose hobby has changed his life and ours.

Brian Marescu is a lawyer.

I mean, he's a lawyer.

That's what he does by trade.

However...

He has a degree in Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit.

Like we all do.

And he lives in Washington, D.C., but he wrote this book called The Immortality Key in 2020.

And it became a New York Times bestseller, which is awesome.

But this book has exploded.

He's been in a lot of places.

You've seen him around.

He introduced the book on the Jeroboam experience and he's been featured kind of literally everywhere.

Notable publications such as Forbes, Rolling Stone.

I mean also he's spoken at Harvard Divinity School, at Yale.

Lots of podcasts like Jordan Peterson, Gwyneth Paltrow's podcast.

Everybody wants to talk to Brian and we finally get to.

So Brian, welcome to The Breakdown.

Thank you very much.

Let's break it down, guys.

Thank you for having me.

We're very excited to have you.

Me too, man.

And mostly me because I'm obsessed with your book and it's right here.

Thank you.

I mean, we should explain why it is that this became so popular.

We could explain why it became so popular.

I would like to say, because people are searching for meaning and people are searching for why we're here.

And Brian... Here in the podcast.

No, here in our existence.

And Brian, you have tapped into something that begins as a very interesting historical journey but really becomes a conversation not just about psychedelics but about literally the nature of reality.

So...

Here are the things we want you to think about as we go forward.

These are the questions that we want you to know we would like answered today.

Okay.

Is Western civilization only here because a female sorceress is giving people psychedelics?

That's one question.

Off the top.

Could Jesus exist without psychedelics?

Could Christianity exist without psychedelics?

Is Jesus actually the Greek god Dionysus?

And finally, why did they take away our drugs?

This is all pretty easy stuff.

There are some questions underneath, but, you know, just the basics for now.

That's your primer.

Why did you want to pursue the immortality key?

You're a lawyer with a fun hobby, but this is a very elaborate hobby.

So talk us through literally your origin story.

How far back do we go?

I mean, you know, wherever you like.

So I was a farm boy from Philadelphia.

I grew up in northeast Philadelphia the middle son of three boys to a working class family and never thought that I'd wind up in prep school.

But thanks to a scholarship from the Jesuits, I found myself at 14 years old studying Latin and then studying Greek.

So it wasn't it wasn't my choice.

Latin rarely is your choice.

It wasn't my choice either in middle school.

Latin is nobody's choice.

You studied Latin too?

I did in middle school, yes.

For how long?

I went to a strange junior high school.

Oh, fantastic.

I still remember some conjugations, but anyway.

Any Greek?

No Greek, but only I'd studied ancient Hebrew.

So some interesting overlap with origins of alphabets.

We can talk about that.

So so, yeah, Latin was mandatory, which I didn't know what to make of.

And then Greek came along and I just I really I really liked it.

And I sucked at math and I like science.

But when I sat down with a Latin or Greek text, it just it came very, very easy for me.

And that wound up becoming like my path to college.

So I was awarded something called the Bean Scholarship, which is awarded by Holy Cross College every year to two high school students who show some proficiency in Latin and or Greek or both.

And then Brown University heard about that.

And I got recruited by some dear friends to this day and some mentors to continue studying dead languages in Providence, Rhode Island, which wound up becoming some of the best years of my life.

So that was the origin.

Got it.

And you ended up studying law because you like legal things?

Because I didn't want to be broke the rest of my life.

Got it.

There were two options for me.

By the time I was 21, I'd had eight years of Latin and seven years of Greek, and I should have done a PhD.

So one half of me wanted to be a classics professor the rest of my life, and the other half wanted to be a priest.

And then I realized that I like women, and I don't want to be broke.

So neither was a good choice for me.

Okay, so I wasn't going to ask this till later, but I do want to ask now, were you raised religious?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Catholic.

Yeah, I went to 12.

Well, if you count kindergarten, I went to 13 years of Catholic school.

A lot of people go to Catholic school and they're not religious, nor do they have a belief in God.

But this resonated with you.

The Catholicism that I was given resonated because like nothing was ever dumped on me.

I always say that, you know, I got lucky, I think.

And then when the Jesuits came along.

If you're not familiar like, it's a very like intellectual pursuit.

And so, you know, I learned about catholicism and christianity like through the lens of a rigorous scholarship, like really rigorous scholarship in linguistics.

And it's funny, like they were teaching me greek, not in an effort to teach me the new testament, which was written in greek, but like they were teaching me greek so i could read homer.

And so there was this like even at a young age i noticed that this weird like um dichotomy between the pagan languages and then what would become the language of the church.

But like the irony is the, the jesuits were just trying to teach me language and there was no expectation whatsoever that that, you know, foster an interest in in catholicism or the bible, or jesus or or anything else.

It was just, you know, um pursuing knowledge for the love of knowledge.

What made you want to become a priest, like at that age, what was like when you saw down that path, what was appealing about it for you?

I'm an introvert, I guess.

So I liked being surrounded by books.

And I thought, oh, that could be a good opportunity.

Maybe a monk instead of a priest, to be more precise.

I enjoy time with books, or at least I thought I did when I was 20.

And now I enjoy nothing more than spending time with my daughters and my wife, which is a big change from when I was 20 and clueless.

Did you feel like it would have... access to like a spiritual awakening by spending that concentrated time studying?

Like what did you see, you know, what would the books lead you to?

Like did you imagine that there were sort of some secrets to the universe that would be unlocked through that path for you?

Oh, yeah, definitely.

Yeah.

Like that's when I was reading Greek, that's the message that came through to me.

So I'm I'm picking up a text and you're diving into the mind of somebody who lived 2,000 years ago, 2,500 years ago, and you're getting to actually see how they think and formulate thought. and so a lot of it's crazy a lot of the pagan greek stories are just crazy stories of gods and goddesses and heroes but then you know you start to hear about different things like the ancient mysteries and hear about their philosophies and you hear a little bit about plato and then you realize how deeply spiritual plato was and how the the ancient greeks would approach philosophy as a spiritual path and as a way of life and so like all these ideas are bubbling when I'm a teenager and I thought, oh, well, there must be something in these books that we've forgotten because I was beginning to learn about an ancient Greece and even like an early Christianity that I think like misses the radar for lots of people and I thought, you know, the language might be the key to figure out more about this.

For sure.

This is a good time for me to tell you that I was given your book along with Peter Kingsley's books.

And I read him first, which I think is good.

It was a really beautiful entry point to then read your books.

And I consider those not just because a mutual friend gave me both of those, but because...

They go together in ways that are interesting and complicated.

And I want to bring it up now and I think we'll probably circle back to Peter Kingsley, because he's Peter Kingsley and everything circles back to Peter Kingsley.

But you know your experience and his arrive at a very similar place through two very different paths.

And this is interesting to me because...

You're taking this from an intellectual perspective, but it's interesting to also know that there is a little bit of religious sensibility to you.

Right.

And Peter Kingsley comes at it from a completely I mean what I would say is like a dropped in experience of having access to something from another time and another plane that even he didn't understand as a child.

Right.

So it's kind of interesting though, that I'm just giving you a heads up that this, may you know, intersect again.

You're exploring.

I mean, do you want to say anything before?

I don't mean to just like drop Peter Kingsley and then move on.

Only that I'm a huge fan, which I hope he knows.

Yes, well, you know, I would hope prophets have fans.

If you're wondering, I would start with In the Dark Places of Wisdom.

Interesting.

Feel free to Google that and I think that'll take you on your fun first journey with Peter Kingsley.

Right and also you know.

My next question is I want you to start to explain to us a you know what this specific and controversial corner of kind of like the intersection of Western civilization and, in particular, the worship of the Greek god, Dionysus right.

And the striking overlap with the worship of a young Jew named Jesus.

And you know there's, There's a, there's a real tendency.

You know, when I was reading your book, it's very easy to keep trying to dismiss everything, because the rational mind keeps coming in.

And I kept trying to, you know, and I'm an intellectual person, so I kept trying to do the math.

I'm like, well, that time doesn't track.

But you have to be able to sort of like pull back, change the lens and be able to say if this is how culture is transmitted through people and ideas over time and space, and this man Brian, has literally traveled through those spaces where is this intersection?

So I'd like you to start with The Mysteries, and this is Mysteries with a capital M.

This is a huge part of the first, basically half of the book in terms of understanding what was going on in Greece when we talk about this transcendental experience called The Mysteries.

Right.

So when we think about ancient Greece or maybe the ancient world in general, I feel like for a lot of people we think about mythology.

We think about Greek mythology, for example, and the gods of Olympus.

Like Zeus.

Like Zeus, who hurls thunderbolts at people when they act bad, and Poseidon, who throws waves at you.

And we had this false impression that the Greeks were basically superstitious idiots.

And they believed in these fictitious gods who interfere in human affairs in a total whimsical way.

And we often forget that the Greeks were also the people who developed things like philosophy and the arts and sciences, and the foundations for a lot of what we take for granted today.

So there's a lot to unpack there.

The Greeks also... came up with the word skeptical.

The Greek verb skeptomai means to look around.

Don't take things on face value.

So, like these were intensely linear thinking, very rational, reasonable people who you know in the public forum yeah, there were public sacrifices and there were formulaic prayers and there were sacrifices to these invisible gods.

But, you know, for...

For the thinking Greek person who was just as spiritually curious as the people in this room.

Where do you go for answers?

And there were venues to search for those answers.

And so you know, the Greeks wanted to pull back the curtain and find out the mysteries of life for themselves.

So they had to see it to believe it.

And for those who actually wanted to see and to experience something that was actually meaningful for them, they had the ancient mysteries.

And that's a capital M. That's a capital A and a capital M. Right, yes.

Yeah, so they had these mysteries, which comes from the Greek.

So mistes comes from the verb muo, which means to close your eyes or keep your mouth shut, because the number one rule about the mysteries is that they're all secret.

So everything we're talking about is trying to unpack clues and leads that were left in the record and the literature, and passing references from people like Plato and the best and brightest of the Greek and Roman worlds.

So we're doing our best to reconstruct what was a very meaningful experience for these people.

And there were lots of different mysteries with a capital M.

The most famous were the mysteries of Eleusis, which to this day is a small town in mainland Greece northwest of Athens.

Every fall equinox, it would call to tens of thousands of pilgrims from around the Greek-speaking world and they would show up in Athens, make this march to Eleusis.

They would go to the doorstep of Demeter's temple.

They'd drink a potion, a magical potion, and they would have as they universally describe as one of the most profound experiences of their life.

They had a vision and through that vision They made contact with Demeter and Persephone and, in some cases Dionysus, later in the classical period.

And they all claimed that it erased their fear of death.

Through this single experience, the culminating experience of a lifetime, only once in your life you'd make this pilgrimage, have the potion and basically become immortal.

So that's where the title comes from.

It was an immortality machine.

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OK, we have to stop here for a second because I first want to clarify.

We we know these things happened the way we know that Plato existed.

Right.

This is not just like something that's like passed on in folklore or you know.

A lot of people dismiss things that happened in the Old Testament, for example, because like it's just fantasy and legend.

These were things that we know people were going like.

There are many, I don't want to say extra biblical sources, but that's how we describe it when it's things that are you know.

But these things, historically, we know these events happened.

Meaning this was not that long ago that we can't know that people wrote down.

Oh, when there's an equinox, we all got together.

Like these things happen.

We can translate them.

You can translate them.

These things happened.

We don't know what happened inside the mystery.

We don't know what happened inside the torch-lit sanctuary of Demeter's temple.

But it happened.

We know it happened.

It was very, very famous at the time.

It's becoming well-known again.

Like Eleusis, this same town, it's called Elefsina in Greece today.

Last year, it became the European capital of culture.

So even today, of all the towns in Europe, last year it was highlighted as a particular place that received EU funding to celebrate the legacy of these mysteries.

I went with the crew here and for a series of lectures and activities.

We had an amazing time on the site watching a recreation of the pageant between Demeter and Persephone as the full moon was rising in the hills in Greece.

So like, yeah, this is a very well-known historical fact.

So the main points that you kind of hit on just in this very brief start to a conversation about this.

So something, there was an ingestion of something.

And even a one-time experience was putting people in touch with, you fill in the blanks.

Putting people in touch with the way they describe it, the secret to life after death.

This is where... Nothing too extraordinary.

So I mean again it was illegal under penalty of death to disclose what you witnessed inside Demeter's temple there in Eleusis.

However, Plato got away with saying that whatever he did witness...

He did so in a state of perfection, and he called it a holy and blessed vision.

And Pindar, for example, who's one of the most well-known lyric poets from the time, says that whoever sees these mysteries before they die understands the end of mortal life and the beginning of a new life given by God.

So there's clearly something about a vision.

There's something about encountering death.

Sophocles says that only those who visit Eleusis will have life after death, and for the rest there's an evil lot.

So it's not fun for those who aren't initiated.

So you mentioned that people only get to go there once in their lifetime.

Right.

How is it determined when they go?

Right.

So this is my favorite response to any question about the past.

We don't know.

We really don't know.

I try and be as honest as I can when I'm talking in the book.

But I can speculate.

So the tradition that comes down to us is that typically, yeah, this was only once in your life.

Professor Ruck, Carl Ruck, who wrote The Road to Eleusis in 1978, which inspired my own investigation.

He calls this the culminating experience of a lifetime.

And in the sources that I've read, it's typically in the middle of life.

Although it's open to everybody, it's open to men, it's open to women.

How do you know when the middle is?

That's the thing.

We don't know when the middle is.

Yeah.

When's the middle for us?

I don't know.

10 years ago.

My role on this podcast is to speculate and for her to say, we don't know.

But Like, do you feel called?

Is there consultation?

Once you go once, don't you want to go again if you've experienced this?

Like, if there's, you know, is there a record?

Like, do people try to sneak in again?

You're like, maybe.

They put on a different hat.

Like, I'm ready for my experience.

I want another mystery.

Here's what we do know.

So you would make two visits.

So, whenever you felt called, whenever the Spirit moved you, you would make a very long pilgrimage to Athens.

And so some people came from nearby.

Others came from any place in the Greek-speaking world theoretically, which could be as far west as Iberia.

I don't think they came from that far.

And after Alexander the Great, that could be as far east as in what was then Persia or India.

I doubt they came from that far away.

But theoretically there was a very long pilgrimage and you showed up on your first visit to the temple.

You became a mistes and a sort of a stage one initiate.

You didn't drink the kukiyan, the magical potion, you didn't have the vision in demeter's temple.

Only on your second visit did you then become eligible to be in a pop days, which is greek for, like the one who has seen it all.

So you made at least two visits but like, why you showed up in the first place is anyone's guess, and i think that you know this.

Uh, this thing we're talking about survives for like 2 000 years, by the way, so it, like it, goes through all these different transformations from 1500 bc to the fourth century AD.

It's a very long stretch of time, as long as Christianity itself has been around.

So you can imagine the different permutations Eleusis experienced over the ages.

And at some point in the classical period we're talking like after Plato 5th, 4th centuries BC in Athens, there is an element of spontaneity and the secret begins to leak at some point.

So there was hunger for this experience and it does leak.

This is where I was going to go next.

I'm like, you've traveled for weeks.

You go back to the place that you've come from and you're like yeah, they told me not to say anything, but they're all the way over there.

Like what I experienced was pretty crazy.

Like how am I not going to go tell somebody about this?

And that's where Dionysus comes in.

So I think you know it was a sacrilege to experience that vision outside Demeter's temple, at that very physical site in Eleusis, because that's where the mystery took place.

It was supposed to live there.

Yeah, according to Demeter herself.

In the hymn to Demeter, this Homeric hymn that survives from 2700 years ago, she instructs the royal family of Eleusis to construct a temple in her honor there, so that humans could become gods and goddesses.

So it had to be there.

But if the experience was that powerful, you have to figure at some point— Someone wants to franchise.

Yeah, there's got to be a branch somewhere.

Yeah.

And branches there were.

So...

Obviously, many of the aspects that you described of this experience and what people reported have a striking overlap with what many people report from significant, powerful psychedelic experiences.

And, you know, in particular, and, you know, you're very you're very clear about this in your book.

You open I mean the book really opens with a conversation about you.

So much of the expansion of our understanding of clinical assistance with trauma, with death, anxiety and how you know people like Rick Doblin are picking up where you know.

Decades ago research was starting to go to try and find out.

Is there a way to understand essentially our purpose here in the ways that The Mysteries was doing, in a different way?

There are non-psychedelic ways that you talk about in the book that people also achieve phenomenal states, especially in Greek times.

The Dude Who Would Lay in the Darkness.

Can you please?

That's a much better title, by the way.

The Dude Who Would Lay in the Darkness.

Talk about the dude who would lay in the darkness, and also what that meant in terms of the practicality of how you seek this mystery.

Right.

So we're coming back now to our friend Peter Kingsley.

I'm going to suggest the dude who lays in the darkness as a follow-up to him.

So he introduced me to the concept of incubation.

And incubation...

Probably the practice of incubation is a pre-Socratic method.

So before Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle and all the thinkers that we're familiar with.

So before them, in the pre-Socratic world.

This practice developed probably somewhere in what is today Asia Minor, on the west coast of what is today Turkey.

And You know, it can be very complicated or very, very simple.

I love, I listen to Peter's lectures as well.

And so he's trying to describe how to do this incubation method, what it means to lie down and to enter into the underworld.

And he says, you know, this is his prescription for Greek Western meditation.

Lie down and die.

And it's that simple.

There's no multi-part system.

There's no doctrine.

There's no complicated dogma.

The practice of incubation was lying down in what he describes as a cataleptic state of trance where time and space begin to disappear and the past and the future are as present as the present is to us.

That's his formulation for what incubation is.

You're essentially putting the body to sleep or killing the body temporarily so that the spirit can roam free.

No drugs?

No.

And Peter is not a fan of the psychedelic hypothesis.

Many classical scholars are not.

I completely understand it.

Newsflash.

I've never had a psychedelic experience myself, so this is all foreign territory to me as well.

I have practiced incubation and different contemplative exercises.

Is there like a guided meditation script that I can like pull up on Headspace for that?

Yes, it's 17 hours of dead air.

Well, when you talk about the underworld and I'm curious if there are descriptions of that, because in the book The Way of the Shaman, which tries to bring shamanic journeying practices to a layman's audience, they talk about the underworld and traveling to that to do soul retrieval.

And there's like specific drumming that can help you get into that trance state.

And there's a visualization exercise which you are intentionally leaving this plane and traveling to other planes.

I picked up that book at 19, when I was in undergrad and living in the dorms while everyone else was partying.

It made for a great conversation starter.

You would have been a good friend in college.

So yeah, what, I mean, what is, as much as you can talk about, what is that process?

Or what is the underworld in this description?

So same question, same question.

The point of the process, the whole point of incubation is to enter the underworld.

And, you know, again, we call it the underworld.

You can call it the other world.

You can call it the beyond.

In Stranger Things, they call it the upside down, which is my favorite reference.

I really like that, actually.

So in the upside down, The whole point is to test the limits of consciousness.

And so, if consciousness does not in fact emerge from the physical brain, if consciousness precedes biology, if it was there before our incarnation, if it's there after our physical death, what are the limits of consciousness?

What can we do with this stuff?

Outside waking consciousness and dreaming, are there other states to be experienced?

And so it was Peter's interpretation, Peter Kingsley, of this incubation method that you quiet the senses in order to descend.

This is not a technique of ascent.

So you're not going to the heavens.

You're going into the dark place, the dark places of wisdom.

You're lying down and going into the underworld to meet she who shall not be named, which is Persephone.

The goal is to have a meeting with the goddess Persephone, in Kingsley's terms, who actually gave birth to Western civilization as we know it.

So... Also no biggie.

Not a big deal that Pythagoras, for example, did practice incubation.

He had an incubation chamber in his basement in his home in Italy, where it's believed that, in addition to his theorems, his mathematical theorems, Which are also kind of a big deal

Which are kind of a big deal.

For those of us who do like math...

For the math nerds, it's kind of a big deal.

It's a little big deal.

Well, he was pulling out theorems, but also, you know, apparently he was being gifted these things by the goddess.

And these gifts were bestowed on people like Pythagoras and others, so that Western civilization could be born.

And we can talk about what's happened to that lineage since.

Yeah, I mean, also...

It's not just Persephone who's down there.

You know, this appears in Kabbalistic texts.

And it's something that, I mean, I feel like that's the next book I want you to write.

I want to write.

You know what happens at the intersection of Greece and you know ancient Judaism.

Let's do it.

Yeah.

No, but this...

You know, there's many... I mean, there are Kabbalistic meditations that take days, literally days.

And, you know, there are mantras and, you know, things and ways we get there.

Most of them are formed around language and the alphabet.

Right.

And the use, in particular, of vowels.

And it's a whole thing, which I would love to talk to you about another time.

But... there is a universality to what you're talking about, right?

And so for Peter and also for Immortality Key, it gets really, really specific.

But I'm also very interested in this notion of That quieting is something that people talk about now a lot.

Really?

Obviously not at the level we're talking about, but even outside of psychedelic experiences, holotropic breathwork.

I practice Kundalini yoga.

Some pretty bizarro things happen that as a scientist, I cannot explain, right?

When I'm completely sober and just breathing, right?

Your choices now are living in ancient Greece and being part of the mysteries.

Right.

Or laying in a dark room and doing some sort of process, which, you know, did you get there?

I want to know.

I mean, I'm sure you got somewhere.

Yeah, I've gotten to dark, shadowy places where I can lose sense of time and space and that sense of self.

It's not all that complicated, which is kind of the point of this tradition.

I don't think it's supposed to be complicated.

You can really overcomplicate this stuff in some of the yogic sciences.

Who, me?

Overcomplicate something?

Not you personally.

Well, you'd be surprised, right?

I studied Sanskrit, by the way, for many years and practiced yoga.

There's some complicated science.

Oh, yeah.

There's some very, very complicated science and dogmatic even in some cases.

And then I was really intrigued by this alternative tradition, because the concept of the invitation to lie down and die you know, it takes three seconds to say and zero seconds to do is a very like.

It's a very alluring prospect that instead of you know, days long Vipassana retreat right.

Or a long pilgrimage into the woods which can also be fun that you can simply just, at any moment in time, just lay down, shut down the senses and see what happens.

Now the mind is going to trick you and the mind's going to play with you, because it never goes silent and quiet.

And that's ego and Yeah.

But that's also the holy grail of practicing meditation for decades on end in the Buddhist discipline the search for the quiet mind.

And so things are going to come up, thoughts and emotions.

And I think the more you do it like any exercise, like a physical exercise, I think you begin to be able to witness those thoughts and emotions float merrily by and the deeper you go into that darkness.

So in your sessions...

Did you feel like you were given things?

Like, did you get Pythagorean type information?

The Marescu theorem?

Yeah.

A squared plus B squared.

Yeah.

Never anything so specific.

I always walk away with stillness and peace of mind.

And just one follow-up to that because it's something you said about it not being that difficult.

Yeah, my experience is when you are able to start to access it, it is something that you can then return back to more easily because you've found where it is a little bit so it's like a practice that builds on itself.

How was that similar to your experience and, if so, has it helped you interact with the normal world?

Because i'm very curious about the.

Yes, we have these mystical experiences, but like what do we bring back?

Yeah, I think that's one of the other grails of any contemplative practice, right?

And it's sort of like the inherent paradox in action and contemplation.

Anybody can disappear and contemplate in peace and quiet when you're like raising children and trying to be a member of society and doing podcasts with your friends in Los Angeles.

You have to be alert and awake and carry some of what you do, pick up and experience, in the upside down.

And so the only lesson I've learned doing this for maybe 15 or 20 years, is that life is a waking meditation or a lucid dream, in a way, that the phenomenal world is a lot stranger than we often realize, and that the more you can practice that stillness and enter into the underworld on a daily basis, the more you can bring that back into what seems like hardened reality, but which, in essence, is the same timeless sense of eternity that you find in those states of contemplation.

And so bringing an awareness of the eternity of the present moment, like right here, right now.

I feel like we're engaging in a very contemplative conversation, a bit of a meditative practice, just by slowing down and being aware of the eternity in between each syllable.

I'm saying right now.

I'm having an out-of-body experience.

That's what happens when you talk to Jonathan.

He's not done asking questions.

I want to circle back to this, but I know because this opens up and we'll just use this as a little foreshadowing.

I just want to talk about the body of Christ.

I know you do, but I'm going to just lay a little foreshadowing, because what Brian is talking about introduces questions about the notion of reality.

It introduces questions about the notion of our perception of any given moment versus you know what is concrete actuality.

What are we co-creating?

How is our perception impacting the way that we interact with the world around us?

And can that be changed?

And then, of course, that naturally leads to are we in a simulation?

But we're going to not go there yet and go to the body of Christ.

Okay.

So...

There's many parts in The Immortality Key where I really felt like you're weaving this unbelievable tapestry right.

But sometimes you get to these points that are like, yes, I was waiting for him to get there.

And this is one of them.

So, you know, I'm I'm a person who was raised, you know, in a traditional, you know, Jewish faith.

And you know I also grew up around a lot of non-Jews and you know we're a small part of the population.

So most people I interacted with were actually, you know, Christian.

And I would always ask people to explain to me what like, what is like?

How are you eating someone's body?

Like the body of Christ and the blood of Christ?

And how are you drinking?

And not in a, in a, in a critical or judgmental way, but like conceptually.

I'm a very spiritually inclined person and I ended up, you know, studying Hebrew and Jewish studies.

And so like, I ended up actually getting to study some about early Christianity.

Like, and this was always a sticking point for me.

And I would ask.

Whenever I would meet a Catholic, I was like when can I be close enough to them to ask what do you think it is?

Because I was always very curious.

And, um, through no fault of their own, most people don't know how to answer it.

Like when I would ask people, like, what is it?

They'd say like, oh, it's like, I don't know.

It's like a metaphor.

And your book- That's not Catholic doctrine.

That's the exact opposite.

And again, this is not to disparage Catholicism or the structure of how people are taught.

The people that I interacted with believed in it, did it, participated in it, but I had never gotten really an explanation.

And I don't mean an explanation that makes sense to me, because I don't accept Christ as my savior, but I want to understand what other religious traditions do.

So when we got to this part in your book, I got very excited because you literally explain.

I mean, people need to read the book to go on this journey with you.

But you get us from the mysteries.

It takes a while to get there, but you get us to how and why people transformed this religious experience, this mystical experience, this experience that doesn't need a God or a dude telling you what to do.

You are able to communicate how we arrive at what the actual purpose of sacrament is, what it means to ingest the body of Christ and the blood of Christ.

I would like you to share with us as best as you can how we get there.

Okay, so the next book will be a lot shorter, I promise.

It'll be a highlights reel.

So it's funny when you were talking your sticking point about.

What does this mean as a Jewish person?

Sure.

So there is a line in the New Testament which I know, you know this uh, that that reflects the same sticking point.

Because uh jesus, as a good young jewish boy, you know, he was preaching to jewish people and in the gospel of john he's, he's beginning to describe for the first time what it means to eat his flesh and what it means to drink his blood.

And very beautiful greek, i would say poetry more than prose.

And this beautiful greek poetry, jesus is introducing his Jewish neighbors to this concept.

And I want everybody to go Google John 6, 60.

So the sixth chapter of John, or you can even look it up there in verse 60.

In the sixth chapter of John- That's a lot of verses.

It's a hell of a book.

He needs to shorten it too.

In John 6 60.

The reaction from the Jewish folks around him is basically what the hell are you talking about?

This is hard.

That's what they say.

This is hard.

This is a sticking point.

The Greek word for hard, the sticking point, that's the Greek word for sticking point.

The Greek word for hard is skleros.

It's where we get like a... Sklera.

Sklera.

Skleroderma.

Sklerotic, right?

Yeah.

So the Jewish people literally said, this is a sclerotic idea.

There's no way that we as Jewish people can accept what the hell you're trying to describe here.

And obviously there's a Jewish precedent for the Last Supper, the final meal before Jesus's crucifixion, right?

However, the way that Jesus describes this cannibalistic meal would be the first instance in Jewish history of the consumption of human flesh at the dinner table.

That was not a Jewish idea.

It's a very, very pagan idea.

It's a very, very Greek idea.

And it would not have been a surprise to any Greek speaker of the time anywhere in the world.

When Jesus says in Greek in the sixth chapter of John whoever munches on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, which is really important.

The verb tense there instead of will have, will go to the afterlife, will be immortal.

It's in the present tense.

Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life right here, right now.

He says in the Gospel of Thomas the kingdom of heaven is spread upon the earth, but no man can see it.

And I think those two ideas go together very, very well.

The invitation from Christ.

The invitation to all Christians and there's two and a half billion of them, by the way is that Christ is present in you.

You become one with Christ.

You become God.

The Greek word for this is apotheosis.

You literally become a god by literally consuming the flesh and blood of Jesus.

It is not a metaphor.

It is not a symbol, despite the fact I include this in the book that 69 of American Catholics do not believe that the ordinary bread and wine becomes the flesh and blood of Jesus.

And if I were Christian, if I were a cat, I would be so into it.

I'd be like, this is it.

Because that's how I practice my Judaism, right?

Like, I get it.

I mean, it's not my thing, but I get it.

It's a cool idea.

So interestingly, my 10-year-old daughter is about to receive her first communion.

What's that like to be Brian Varese's daughter about to receive your first communion?

That's why you're making a documentary.

We have very interesting conversations on the way to and from church and she's pretty excited about drinking blood.

Did you tell her it's not a metaphor?

We're explicit about the fact that... Did you incubate her and make her die before she could live?

Yeah, times are weird in Bethesda right now.

But we have.

I mean it's funny to talk about this stuff with, Because I learned I did it when I was eight was my first communion.

So it's wild to talk about this stuff to children.

How do you talk about religion to children?

Were you raised religious at a very young age?

I was...

I was raised traditional.

My mom was raised very religious, which means there was a bit of a ricochet.

I took on more observance in college, which is also, you know, its own, yeah.

Well, I find it very difficult to talk about this stuff with anybody under 40.

Okay, so take us back to how we get there from the mysteries.

So the through line is this figure of Dionysus.

And I'll try and be, I'll give you a condensed version.

So you have the mysteries of Eleusis that we've been talking about, this once-in-a-lifetime event where you drink this magical potion and you're absolutely convinced that you have cheated death and that you will have an afterlife.

Also, ladies ran that.

Yeah, yeah.

We'll get back to it.

Just as a quick footnote, The Mysteries of Eleusis was a rite of initiation exclusively for females.

So by females for females in the distant past.

Men were only allowed in later in time, in the classical period.

They kind of ruin things sometimes.

They always do.

And, to that point, the religion of Dionysus, the Mysteries capital M of Dionysus, in some sense totally distinct from the Mysteries of Eleusis.

Although when I was speaking with another classicist, Fritz Graf, he's quick to point out that elements of Dionysian ecstasy were making their way into the Mysteries of Eleusis.

At some point, there's this figure, Yachos.

A statue of him is carried by the pilgrims to, And Persephone herself resurrects from the underworld in the temple with this baby Iakos, this baby Dionysus.

So she gives birth in the upside down and comes back with the god of theater, madness, and ecstasy.

So Dionysus, despite that link, has his own completely separate mystery cult.

And it's run by women.

It's run by minads.

And the minads are the female devotees of Dionysus who, in order to become one with the God enthusiastically the Greek word enthusiasm means to be filled with the essence of the God in order to become one with not just Dionysus but their fellow worshipers and the spirit of the earth herself.

This is what E.R.

Dodd says, one of the most conservative classicists.

It's a really cool line.

In order to do that, they drink his blood.

Go figure.

This should be ringing bells for people who were listening two minutes ago.

It's a familiar concept.

So this was not an alien concept in ancient Greece.

Timotheus of Miletus, who lives 400 years before the birth of Christ, refers to wine as the blood of Bacchus, the blood of Dionysus, the Haim of Achiu.

So we know for certain that the sacramental drinking of the wine would have been associated with the blood of Dionysus, going back centuries and centuries before the world had ever heard about this young Jewish boy.

So it would not have come as a surprise to anybody when they hear this story about the invitation to drink my blood.

I'll give you one very specific example to tie the world together, from the pagan Greek world to the Christian world.

Also in the Gospel of John, which the scholar Dennis MacDonald has a great book called The Dionysian Gospel which I reference throughout my book.

John's Gospel is awfully Dionysian because it makes these very explicit references to Dionysus.

So explicit, in fact, that it's hard for me to walk away from John's Gospel, not thinking that he really meant to communicate to Greek pagans.

That was the audience of the New Testament, by the way, before there was a Christianity.

It's hard for me to think that John wasn't actively trying to recruit people who were familiar with these mysteries in Dionysus into this new, not a reincarnation but a reformulation of the Dionysian mystery.

And how do you do that?

There's only one way to do that, which is through wine.

Wine is the single thing that connects the Greek world to the Christian world.

And I should point out that our wine today is very different from the wine of yesterday.

Tell us about the wine of yesterday, Brian.

So the wine of yesterday, good question, Mayim.

The wine of yesterday is not called wine.

There's a word for wine.

It's called oinos.

You see that word in the New Testament.

There's another word for wine that's used from Homer down to the fall of the Roman Empire for a thousand years.

And that word is pharmacon, where we get the word pharmacy, obviously.

So wine was a drug. in ancient Greece and in other cultures around it, by the way.

They inherited this idea from predecessor cultures.

So wine is a drug.

Why is it a drug?

Well, because the Greeks had no word for alcohol.

The word alcohol, as you listen to it, alkool, it comes from the Semitic, by the way.

It means to enliven or refresh.

It's connected with these distillation experiments that were happening far after Christ, 8th, 9th centuries A.D., So we don't have any hard liquor as a species until that period of time.

But before then, in order to account for the potency of wine, it had to be something other than ethanol, what the fermentable sugars release to create the bubble and buzz of alcohol.

So they called it a pharmacon, because wine was routinely mixed with plants herbs spices, toxins and occasionally— Think sangria.

Yeah.

It was a party drink.

It was a party drink with some oranges.

So again, this is not news and not a surprise to anybody.

Wine is a mixed beverage, and sometimes you mix it in order to serve medicine.

We have the writer Dioscorides, for example, this Greek pharmacologist.

He's called the father of drugs.

I call him the father of drugs in the book at least.

I just call him dad.

Okay.

I call him Dio.

So Dio in the first century, the same time the gospels are being written, he has all these wine recipes.

And sometimes it's to serve medicine.

And he's throwing funky things like henbane and mandrake and black nightshade very deadly plants into the wine.

And in the case of black nightshade, he says that this plant causes not unpleasant visions.

So we have the actual Greek text talking about visionary hallucinogenic wine.

At the exact same time, the Gospels are being written.

So again, this is not news to anybody who would have heard the Gospels.

And these are some of the things that inform the sacramental drinking of blood.

So it raises the question, maybe not at the Last Supper itself and I don't go there with Jesus but in some Greek-speaking communities in some places around the Mediterranean at some time in the first, second or third centuries AD.

Were there communities of paleo-Christians who were in fact carrying over some of that intoxicating wine from Dionysus even hallucinogenic wine from Dionysus and using that in their version of the holy Christian mystery.

In other words, did the pagan sacrament of Dionysus become what we now know as the Eucharist?

Beautifully summarized.

I still think you should have written the whole book because you have to go on the whole journey.

Because also some of the and this is just a fun thing for people to know you literally go all these places.

You take the journey.

You take the physical journey.

And you meet with incredible experts.

But you also meet with, like some of my favorite kinds of scientists that exist, which is, the scientists who look at old vessels to see what drugs and liquids were in them.

And basically you get to meet and talk to, you know, experts throughout all of these regions.

And you literally like there's.

That's literally a job to be a scientist to look up like there were lizards in here.

There was this plant in here and it's literally piecing together.

I mean, it's like this field of, like archaeo, like botanical, like it's just this unbelievable journey that you go on.

So I just want to be really clear that the notion that you know for Christianity and for Catholicism in particular, the notion that it is not metaphorical that when you ingest this wafer right, which is what it is now, I have not, I've heard about it.

I think it looks like a Trader Joe's rice cracker is what I'm picturing.

Or like the thing they put in your gelato, but circle.

It's like a thin waffle.

That's what I'm picturing.

I have no idea.

I've seen it in movies.

The thin waffle of Christ.

It's the thin waffle of Christ.

So there's this... The Trader Joe's island.

That's right.

It's like when they let you taste a dip.

I think it's like that.

So this is not metaphorical.

There is some notion in Catholicism, right, that has entered Christianity.

There is some notion that there is...

There is something you can put in your body that lets you experience divinity meaning.

In the present moment, you get to touch something bigger than yourself, right?

And the overlap then, is that notion of when we learn about the mysteries with a capital M.

Something is put in your body That allows you to access something in the same way.

And it's strikingly similar.

And that's kind of where I want to go next.

It is strikingly similar to what many people experience, even from one in particular.

If we're going for one dosage, it's usually in a clinically regulated and, you know, supported environment.

People are able to ingest things and it is now becoming much more acceptable to talk about, to think about, especially for therapeutic reasons that can put you in touch with something bigger than yourself in ways that can change your life right.

Are we experiencing, you know, what you might say is an inevitable, you know, kind of revolution.

That is linking us back to the Greek mysteries.

Right.

So big question.

So in the modern clinical experiments, I start the book this way and I end it this way, too.

Although I've changed my thinking a little bit.

What I sense in the psychedelic experiments happening today is a very, very faint echo of what was happening in the mysteries.

But to be honest, that insight is what really propelled my investigation.

It wasn't until 2007.

I didn't know anything about psilocybin, magic mushrooms um, but when i, when i, when i read that article in the economist called the god pill, which was published in 2006 i read it a year later that was my first introduction to these modern day experiments.

And the that, that statistic that, like two-thirds of the volunteers would want to uh, you know, explaining their single experience, a single dose with psilocybin, as one of the most meaningful experiences of their entire lives, if not the most meaningful experience over the course of a single afternoon.

Like the it's it's a short article, but like it hopped off the page at me in 2007 and i thought like, if i had to come up with a modern day definition of the ancient mysteries, that would be it.

Like a, a life transforming experience um, that often takes place in terms of death and rebirth, but happening seemingly in an instant.

There's something miraculous about the magic of that experience.

And so it was that circumstantial link and that tangential link that sent me looking for evidence, because if people can experience this today, it stands to reason that our neuroanatomy hasn't changed, that this was happening not just 2000 years ago, but maybe this is more interesting to me 20000 years ago, 200000 years ago, and most probably precedes our species.

Almost certainly this kind of experimentation precedes the human species, going back three 400000 years into archaic hominins.

So I think this is a very, very long- Now we know what his next book will be.

It'll be shorter.

It'll be one sentence long.

Lay down and die.

You've talked about that psychedelics are helping us understand what's real.

What do you think is real?

That's good.

I think...

Yeah, and again, this is textbook Platonism, by the way.

So Plato not.

Unlike some of the Eastern disciplines.

He's most famous for this idea of the archetypes and the allegory of the cave that we're all sort of trapped, shackled underground, staring at mere shadows of what is reality.

There's a They Might Be Giants song that talks about it.

Can we play that later?

Yes, I would love to.

We can't license it.

So that's the idea that they picked up on that the things that we witness day to day are mere shadows of the reality of the cosmos that we inhabit.

And that once in a while, people turn around, poke their head above ground and see the world for what it is.

Again, this is textbook Platonism and would go on to influence a lot of Judaism and Christianity, by the way, and Neoplatonic thought.

So if that's what we're being told, and again, you know, Plato didn't invent that idea.

I think that comes from experience, the shamanistic experience that had been passed down to the Greeks and through all the high civilizations, from Egypt to Sumer, to Persia and India, China and places far beyond.

I think that humanity has been experimenting with these altered states of consciousness through all these archaic techniques for a very, very long time.

And I think, bit by bit, through trial and error, folks have begun to realize that there is something to this upside down.

And I think when people experience the upside down And often, even today, describe it in terms that are a bit shocking, as something more real than real,

That phrase pops up a lot in the transcendental literature.

It pops up a lot in psychedelic literature that you have an experience that it seems otherworldly on the one hand, and supernatural, but it's also oddly familiar and more real than real.

Well, I hate to step in as the neuroscientist, but we do know a bit about what that feeling is.

Tell us.

Well, it's in the prefrontal cortex.

It's the default mode network.

It's the parts of you that literally know where you are, that you're connected to something else, that you're not connected.

So I don't mean to say that it doesn't exist, but I'm saying that there's.

We do know that there are specific compartmentalizations that our brain creates, right.

And there's all these incredible imaging studies that are mostly looking, I would say, in favor of understanding the positive impacts right of these kinds of experiences, not just from drugs but from altered states in general.

But this is one of my favorite things when people talk about, you know, especially like magic mushroom experiences.

And I'm not talking about the clinical variety but, like you know, as I call it, like trip and balls and Joshua tree, which is great,

Like for some people, if that's their thing.

Amazing, you know.

But there's this especially, you know you hear it a lot from, often from teenagers, or you know.

It's like everything seems so clear.

Like it was so like, I could feel everything so clear.

It's like, yeah, well, because a all external inputs are being, you know, regulated.

So like I can't, but I'm also the person who will explain love as just chemicals, you know, but I'm deeply spiritual, but there also is there's, there's a substrate, right.

And I do believe that that existed before homo sapiens, right?

Meaning this is all, you know, kind of developmental and evolutionary biologically.

It's coded and, you know, much in the way that language is coded for us.

I would hold, and I think you would as well, that this kind of experience, the potential for this kind of experience, we have the substrate for it.

These are all the different ways, right, that we can tap into it.

Jonathan would like to go back and talk about Jesus' blood and wine.

And I don't want to stop him.

So, sorry.

Well, this is actually a great intersection point.

Because then we're going to die before we die.

That's next on my list.

Next in my document.

I don't want to be overly simplistic.

But I, you know, for people listening, sometimes you're listening to a podcast, you're doing a variety of other things and it's easy to sort of maybe gloss over points that are there.

But you know, may need a little bit of highlighting.

Yeah.

So, at the risk of being overly simplistic, what I hear, or what I heard in the explanation, is that there is evidence that the blood of Christ ingesting that is really ingesting— And the flesh.

And the flesh.

I don't quite understand the flesh fully, so I'm going to talk about the blood.

The flesh is weak.

What I heard is— He likes me more.

That's funny, man.

Depends on the day.

Really depends on the day.

I'm hilarious in Hebrew.

Okay.

There's evidence.

You went and saw and met the researchers who are looking at the containers of the wine.

And the priests.

And there's evidence of some form of psychedelics in the containers of this wine that by drinking it

We're not actually drinking Jesus's blood and want to make that clear.

What we're saying is that drinking the wine that has hallucinogenics in it is giving people access to a divine experience.

Is this accurate in terms of like a general summary?

That was a fair summation.

I just want to be careful for those who are doing their dishes right now.

But I'm not saying that Jesus was serving psychedelics, nor am I saying that Christianity was founded on psychedelics.

I wrote this book in search of actual evidence.

And to date, to the best of my knowledge, there is no evidence, concrete archaeobotanical data, to prove that the wine of Dionysus being consumed in Greece was traditionally hallucinogenic and spiked.

Nor is there any evidence whatsoever although I'm looking for it that the chalices, the Eucharistic chalices of early Christianity, were likewise spiked.

What I did include in the second half of the book was actual data to prove that yes, in the ancient world there was spiked wine that you could, with a very straight face, call hallucinogenic.

And I'll just take 10 seconds to explain that in the Villa Vesuvio, which the entire second half of my book hangs on, this discovery which happened like more than 20 years ago and just kind of went unacknowledged and unnoticed, there was an Italian archaeobotanist.

There's always one dude.

In every chapter, there's like one dude who's like, why is no one listening?

And Brian's like, I'll listen.

This is one Italian Marina, one Italian lady who at the time was, but no longer is, an archaeobotanist.

Which is another irony I try and explore in the book is that, like so, few people are looking at this, and even those who did are no longer doing it.

And so like it's crumbling before our face, all this data and evidence.

But Marina Cialdini, She went to just outside Pompeii.

There was this excavation site, the Villa Vesuvio, the House of Vesuvius.

It's called that because we know Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD.

A lot of what we know about the ancient world was because of that eruption.

It preserved lots of things in Pompeii and Herculaneum and elsewhere.

There's also a song about that.

I want your Spotify playlist.

It's just in her head.

She has all the lyrics that have ever been written in there.

So what they find are giant, not unlike this giant wine jars, humongous wine jars full of grape seeds.

And as a trained archaeobotanist, it's so well preserved.

The dahlia had been waterlogged.

It's so well preserved.

She can see the seeds and plant material just sitting there.

And she's able to identify like 50 species of plants, the vast majority of which are medicinal.

Among them, she finds seeds of opium and cannabis and those witchy plants we talked about, henbane and black nightshade, which Dioscorides described as visionary and hallucinogenic.

So with a straight face, we can say there was something like psychotropic wine in antiquity.

We don't know the context.

We don't know if Christians would have availed themselves of this, or the Dionysians or others, but I'm hunting for more evidence of this kind of wine.

So what's interesting to me is that the description of what happens when you ingest something and get to be one right.

And know the mysteries of the universe or feel connected or understand.

That notion is replicated conceptually when you think about the non-metaphorical nature of the sacrament, meaning you're not metaphorically ingesting.

You are taking something in for the express purpose of being one with it, because it opens a window to your understanding of reality.

Yeah, I would say for the followers of Dionysus before Jesus.

There's your proof that this was not a metaphor for them.

They went mad.

Dionysus is not the god of wine.

He's the god of delirium, madness, ecstasy, frenzy.

They went into fits of madness, not alcoholic stupor.

They went into fits of hallucinogenic madness, ecstasy, possession.

They were totally possessed by the god.

That was the whole point of that.

Religion is to be possessed by and become one with the God in a non-metaphorical fashion.

Again, potentially oversimplifying.

But how is that happening in your, you know, either evidence or estimation?

It has.

I mean, the one thing that jumps off the ancient sources is the wine, the blood, the blood of Dionysus.

It has to do with the wine.

In addition to the wine, Dionysus is often compared to the ivy.

And so we don't know if ancient ivy is the same as our ivy, but there are sources... Poison ivy.

There's this quite poisonous, quite... quite spectacular ivy, that does weird things.

It deranges the senses, say the ancient sources.

So there's something about their ivy and madness.

They are consuming things to enter into wild states.

I don't know what they were consuming, but they were consuming something.

This brings us to the point that Mayim was saying, that we are hardwired to change our perspective and have altered states of consciousness.

And so what I'm hearing is that, while we don't know that the Christians were delivering this altered states of consciousness to their followers, that some version of that was intended to like.

It's just.

Well, I mean no, I think what I would say and I obviously would defer to you on this.

You know, when we sort of think about what a religious experience is right,

Why we have religion.

You know, and I have an 18-year-old.

We talk about this all the time.

What are we wired for?

You know, are we wired, you know, and we were literally having this conversation last night.

Yeah. what is a rational experience and can it include a mystical one?

And do you need God?

Do you need religion?

I'm not asking you to answer this because that's my job, because he's my kid, but you'll get to it with yours, I'm assuming.

But this notion of You know, my rabbi who's, you know, pretty high on the mystical scale, you know, would teach us, like, if God didn't exist, we would just create God.

And there's a comfort for me in knowing that there's something bigger than me that I'm going to keep trying to name.

I'm going to give it a ritual.

I'm going to bow or I'll eat this or not eat that.

I'll dress like this.

I'll speak.

I'll say that I'll go to this synagogue, whatever it is.

I don't have any authority on a religious experience.

And I don't believe Christians do or Muslims or Hindus or anyone, right?

So you've talked about, you know, religions being less about sort of the symbol's and more about the experience, right?

The intuitive experience.

So I think that's kind of what we're circling, right?

Everybody's trying to get there.

We're all trying to get there.

And at certain historical points in the existence of humanity, we group together for reasons.

We have tribes.

We eat this.

They don't eat that.

We scar ourselves with tattoos.

They don't.

Whatever it is.

But it really is.

If you pull back, it's about a singular experience and connection with something bigger than ourselves.

So is that framework?

It is that.

And it's also the fact that the ability to, or the experience of getting into an altered state, to find some form of divinity seems to come from some sort of substance, while also ingesting some sort of concept or story about the experience.

Because people were told their entire lives that they're going to go have this experience.

Correct.

Yeah.

And so it seems as though our modern day traditions are some sort of combination.

Now we've removed the psychedelics for the most part from going to church or from other forms of mystical experience.

Yet we're seeing those pop back up now in the experimentation and the renewed interest in psychedelics which I think we should talk about as a society.

I'm not there yet.

We're getting there.

Again, a little foreshadowing, but...

It seems to be a combination also of the myth story, folklore around said experience and the fact that we can get there.

You know, even in the terms of you know, hearing about you can lay down and die.

We have to first be introduced to the concept before we can then take that concept, implement it for ourselves and change our ordinary reality.

Because most of us are stuck in some form of this is just all I know.

And until we are introduced to the concept that there can be something else, we have very hard time breaking out of that.

Correct.

Yeah, that's a very important point to make is that and Joseph Campbell says this that myth is the flip side of ritual.

And so, while today we might be seeing the resuscitation of all these archaic techniques or classical techniques, psychedelic or otherwise, resuscitating the ritual in the absence of the story is not going to work.

Say that again.

No, that's an important point.

Resuscitating the ritual in the absence of the story.

That's what the Greek word myth means muthos it means story.

Resuscitating a mere ritual in the absence of a story is not going to work.

You put it perfectly like in the ancient world pagan Jewish, Christian.

You were born into a world where this stuff was real.

You asked about what is reality.

Reality is what we make of it.

And I totally take your point on the, on the neuro-anatomical substrate of this experience.

I get it.

But it's how we attribute meaning to things through life experience.

And a big part of that is through stories, right?

A lot of what you do is storytelling, right?

I'm a storyteller.

And the way that we tell stories very much informs the way that we interpret this experience.

And so in ancient Eleusis, you grew up in a world where your relatives had this experience, and they wouldn't tell you the details, but they basically say that was the most incredible thing I've ever seen.

It was in the water.

No, but meaning like, it was just like, it floated everywhere.

It was in the same with Dionysus and same for the early Christians where, even in the absence of psychedelics,

They were dealing with a lot.

There's a lot going on.

It was a tough, tough, tough time.

So they were having meaningful experiences, prophetic experiences, visionary experiences.

I mean, Paul in his letters talks about being caught up in the third heaven.

Peter is described as being in a trance.

These guys were having meaningful experiences.

They could not explain, but they lived in a world where that was real, it was expected.

It was not anomalous phenomena.

This was.

This was real stuff.

Well, it's it was.

It was to the point of you can't reenact the ritual without the narrative.

So the question for me is is there a narrative that is applicable in modern day society that can be reenacted?

Or are we so fractured that you know we can't have overarching narrative that will then allow us to experience a mythological or mystical experience that we seem to be fundamentally hardwired to need?

Right, yeah, we don't have it.

I don't see evidence of it.

I mean the fact that 69 of American Catholics interpret something as symbolic.

That is core to the faith, that is the central defining feature of the faith points to the fact that the story isn't working, that the story is out of odds with the ritual.

And so, I mean, how that story comes back, I'm not really sure.

They should ask your daughter.

She's got stories.

Well, can you bring it back without the psychedelics?

Because if people are not experiencing the mystical... you know, visions and feeling.

Right.

The psychedelics are a tool like any other tool.

And, I think, a rather ambiguous tool depending, because it's so much dependent on the set and setting, which folks have heard, your mindset and the circumstances under which that experience happens.

And so in order to derive benefit from that kind of tool, you know, let's not forget the set.

Let's not forget the mindset.

So how do you prep the mindset?

Growing up in a materialistic world where magical things don't happen and we're all neurotic.

Suffering from anxiety and depression is not the best way to go into an experience.

And for someone who's never explored their psyches, right?

Psychedelics are that which make manifest the contents of the psyche.

And psyche is the Greek word for soul.

So those who've done no soul work, never gone to therapy, never thought about their dreams, never looked into the dark, never lied down and died.

I don't think you're going to have a very pleasant psychedelic experience, nor should you even think about it.

So can you talk a little bit about that?

I don't want to say, like Brian, tell us the dangers of psychedelics because, like I don't, and I think I think there's people you know far more qualified than you or I, let's say, to speak to that.

But I would like you to speak to the dangers of psychedelics kind of from this perspective.

Right.

What are the things that we're trying to have access to that needs more of a story around it?

Right.

I mean, I can speak from the ancient record.

There were dangers in Eleusis and the rites of Dionysus.

I can say that for sure.

That wasn't always a pleasant experience.

The experience of God, it can be an experience of bliss.

Often it's an experience of awe, which includes some fear and trembling.

And I think that that often gets overlooked in the psychedelic literature or in religious literature that you know to confront God face to face in the Old Testament, no man shall see me and live.

Mm-hmm. is pronounced to Moses.

So like, what does that mean?

We can't, so if we are looking for God through these entheogens that make the God rise within you, what are you actually looking for when the sources tell us that you shall not look at the face of God?

And if you do, it will obliterate you.

You get consumed.

That's the whole point.

This is self-annihilation.

And there's a Greek concept around this called kenosis. is that self-emptying.

As you empty the self, you begin to discover things not just about the small self, but the capital S self.

And that is my definition of God.

I think that when I look through the ancient sources, they all describe God as not something to be learned about, not something you read about, not something you debate about, like increasing levels of knowledge that you attain in order to achieve that godhood.

By emptying the self and by deconditioning the self, by returning to a state of infancy almost thereby, you find that god within you, find that divine spark that's talked about in esoteric Judaism and Gnostic Christianity and the Sufism of Islam and all the world's traditions that by emptying the self you have that God experience.

And that can happen spontaneously or it can happen over the course of many, many years.

That's powerful.

I want to specifically talk about one aspect that is featured really prominently in the book and also is something that Peter Kingsley talks about.

You know, the way I sort of sum it up is if you die before you die, you'll never die right.

And this was a huge component of the mystical experience specifically in ancient Greece, or that you talk about in the book.

It's also a key component of many transcendental experiences.

And, you know, you hear people talk about ego death.

You know, you also hear people just not talking about ego death, but just it feels like death right.

And it's terrifying.

And it doesn't feel like the tripping balls in Joshua Tree variety.

Talk about what it means and what the Greeks meant when we talk about if you die before you die, you'll never die.

And what does that mean for us?

Yeah, I mean, we're harping on the same point again and again, like death.

I mean, if I had a nickel for every time I heard that, Brian, like, what are you, my therapist?

Yeah.

That'd be a fun experience.

So death is not pleasant for a lot of people.

How you think about death, for example, might inform the kind of experience you have on psychedelics, ready or not for it.

It might inform the kind of experience you have through a kundalini yoga meditation, which can also be very dangerous, by the way.

It's described as a dangerous discipline in the yogic sciences, kundalini in particular.

You can have trippy-ass, horrible experiences.

You can also have nightmares and bad dreams every single night when you enter into altered states of consciousness.

What are your nightmares trying to tell you, right?

What is your relationship with mortality and death?

And what are your neuroses and psychoses you struggle with every day?

These are things that need to be brought to the surface in order to figure out what's going on here.

So I think that...

Dying before dying.

Is this I mean?

I know it doesn't make sense on the surface, but if you experience a psychological death before your physical death, then upon your physical death something about the psyche may in fact survive.

So the survival of the spirit or the soul in the absence of a body.

So that phrase comes from a Greek Orthodox monastery at Mount Athos in Greece, St.

Paul's Monastery.

But I think it harkens back to like a very living tradition that goes through the entire Greek world, deeply into ancient Greece.

And you find this concept of death and rebirth, dying before dying in, like all the world's traditions.

It's probably a prehistoric tradition.

We've talked about this a few times already.

I think it goes back probably tens, hundreds of thousands of years.

Those who have gone to a near-death experience and returned from that.

This is a prototypical shamanistic journey.

You die to the body to be reborn as a new human being.

What we're talking about is that's resurrection.

Well okay, so we arrived at resurrection, which is also linking back to this notion of what do you bring down from the mountain, right?

When you open your eyes and you open your mouth, what are you going to say, right?

And so for me, that connected so beautifully with this, right?

Let's just call, if you die before you die, let's just call that whatever this experience is, right?

And it could be the mysteries.

It could be drugs.

It could be holotropic breath.

Whatever that, if you die before you die.

What does it mean to never die, right?

It means that you have... Stay in the matrix.

You...

For me, what I hear when we talk about never dying is that whatever you experienced when you did die right.

Whatever you experienced has transformed you so deeply, changed you so completely that every interaction you have and Peter Kingsley lives this way, right.

Every interaction that you have is always touched by that, right?

You don't have fear.

There's no more fear because you've done it, right?

And you get to then exist with that knowledge.

So when we talk about having these transcendental experiences, it's like you know, as my yoga teacher says, I don't care what you do for an hour on the mat.

I care what you do for the other 23, right?

It's so, it's beautiful to have these experiences, but what does the rest of your life look like?

To me, that's what never dying me.

And normalizing it, I think, and making it even more accessible.

We recently gave a talk on the intersection of science and spirituality and we got feedback about people who have had what they call spiritual awakenings small spiritual awakenings.

And what that means to me is you begin to have slightly altered perception from what your ordinary reality is and you begin to see sort of some people call it behind the veil, some people call it extra sensory some people's life start to fall apart and you're like i'm not on the right track, there's some sort of other thing for me, And they begin to shift out of one state of being into another state.

And some of that comes like, as you said, with an enormous amount of panic, because that's all they know is this thing over here.

That is their reality.

And then they start hearing what is intuition, for example.

And they start hearing guidance like hey, by the way you're going to, you know your life is going to slowly fall apart and you shouldn't be terrified because there's something else waiting for you.

But until you experience that other thing waiting for you, you begin to be quite terrified.

And I think there's overlap there in the psychedelic experience and the transcendental experience without psychedelics, in that if you're going and journeying into some unknown place, you have to sort of give up, give over, similar to a death, where i'm no longer going to be in control and i'm going to look outside of myself for some other experience that i will hopefully be held in and that can create a larger sense of trust in, in the uh, in a god, in a universe, in some sort of other experience, Whatever that may be.

That's why I start the book with Dinah Baser, who grew up as an otherwise secular Jewish woman.

Describes herself as a staunch atheist and at a loss of words to describe her transcendental experience on psilocybin, said it felt like she was bathed in God's love.

And the one lesson she came back with what she came down from the mountain with was this idea that she won't die, at least not the way we typically understand it that it has to do with time, reorienting our sense of time and space and Newtonian physics.

She says that basically, she encountered this sense of always being like now and forever, this timeless sense of eternity in the now, which sounds like mumbo jumbo, but to her was- That's us.

Maybe not to some listeners either.

To her, it felt very, very real.

Back to your question about what is reality.

Reality is the things that make us feel like it's true.

To her, it feels true that she misunderstood time before her experience.

Afterwards, she reorients herself under an entirely new worldview, an entirely new physics, an entirely new way of understanding the world.

We don't understand time very well.

And so this dying before dying experience that could actually be a daily practice.

It could live in the infinitesimal distance of one moment to the next.

So we have direct experience with talking to someone who had this experience, because we spoke to Elizabeth Krohn with Jeffrey Kreipel.

Oh, nice.

And so we spoke to someone who had a near-death experience.

She was struck by lightning.

Previously, not a religious person, not a person who believed in that there even are auras or that there are ghosts or extrasensory perception.

She had a series of physiological changes that happened to her, some of which we can attribute to what happens when you're struck by lightning and your shoes are literally blown clear off your feet.

However, she acquired synesthesia.

She acquired a lot of again a lot of interesting physiological things that we can perhaps explain.

But this near-death experience had a tremendous amount of overlap with a transcendental experience, right.

She believes she spoke to God for two weeks and was out for just a couple minutes on the pavement.

But this notion, you know, rings very true in terms of that experience.

You know, as we were talking about the overlapping Venn diagram of DMT, you know the drug DMT and near-death experiences.

There's a tremendous amount of overlap, right?

And so, again, my question is, okay, that means chemically we can figure out, right?

What's DMT acting on?

What are the receptors?

What's the down regulation?

What's the up regulation, right?

But But in terms of the psychology, in terms of the human experience of it.

Right.

That that to me is what is so fascinating.

Right.

And for me, it's all about just we're all we're trying to get to the same thing.

And these are all the ways that we can get there.

Can you talk a little bit more about resurrection in particular?

Do you see that as metaphorical?

Do you see that as, you know, is there a literal resurrection that we can imagine?

The same way that we can imagine that you can ingest the body and the blood of Christ to be one.

What role then, does the resurrection play in this narrative for early Christians?

Right.

So, oh, that's a big topic.

In Judaism, too.

I mean, so I was taught that the resurrection was a physical event.

Correct.

And that is the traditional understanding in Judaism as well.

The dead will rise.

And that you too, as you accept Christ and as you consume his flesh and blood and become one with him as a good Catholic, that you too will experience a corporeal, a physical resurrection at the end of time with all the others who have been invited to heaven.

We put dirt from Jerusalem into, like my grandparents, who were Orthodox, you put dirt from Jerusalem into their grave, if they're not buried in Jerusalem, so that when they rise they will be closer to the land where they will need to be.

Like for real, we put it in the coffins.

Go on.

So there's physical resurrection.

Right.

So I'm not sure what to make of that, but that's what I was taught.

I believe in the power of yeah, not just resuscitation, which is different but yeah, the resurrection of the spirit.

And I think that it's... Of the spirit.

Of the spirit.

I think it feeds into this notion of death and rebirth into something.

I think our bodies are wonderful vehicles.

They're fun to play around with.

I wouldn't want to be trapped in a body for all of eternity.

And again, this has to go back to... I answer this way because it goes back to time.

So if you're thinking about heaven or the afterlife, again there's all these concepts of time and space, even in just in that taxonomy right.

So like...

One notion of everlasting time is just that everlasting, that heaven is just like this, and time goes on and on, and on forever.

And yes, you would need a physical vehicle for that.

Maybe that's the case.

In some of these mystical and transcendental experiences, the message that comes back time and again is that time is a bit different.

Then we understand it.

And that you may not need a physical vehicle if, in fact, you're breaking the confines of space and time.

And in a timeless sense.

How does consciousness, what is the vehicle that consciousness inhabits in timeless eternity?

Which is not just a really long time, but it's uh, it's the, the sense of awareness that exists outside of time, and so eternity is the thing that we miss from day to day, because thinking and time cut out our perception of of that now, which is why you can go to sleep at night if you're very, very tired, wake up the next morning and seemingly no time has gone by, because the mind isn't there to interpret time the way it usually does.

So i think that that's that's how i think about everlasting versus eternity.

So So the way that you just solved the issue of a physical resurrection is the way Elizabeth Crone would say it, that you can slice into time like it's a seven-layer cake.

We always exist.

We always have existed.

We always will exist.

Anytime that you choose to have a conscious experience or are having a conscious experience, you can place it on an X, Y and Z plane, if you'd like.

But it's not a requirement for your existence as it were.

This leads to the Akashic records, right?

Where there are people who believe that there's a collective consciousness, right?

That simply exists that you can slice into.

And if you learn the proper mental state and you can get there in a transcendental state, you can access all information that is, has been and ever will be.

He believes in the Akashic records.

I just proved it.

That's what it means in Sanskrit, by the way, Akashic, Akasha.

It means outside time, outside space.

Well, instead of going down into the underworld, you go up.

I mean, you go out also.

Out and up.

Yeah.

Or maybe you go in to the upside down.

Also very possible.

I just want to footnote this.

I mean, this stuff is really hard to talk about.

I think we're all experienced.

You're doing great, Brian.

We're very proud of you.

We would recommend you for other podcasts.

Likewise, we should do this again.

But, like you know, we're having trouble like talking about this stuff and the folks around us, I think, are having like a tough time following, because it's really tough to language this stuff.

And that's a really important point to bring into any concept of religion, philosophy, or God.

I did this video on YouTube with a friend of mine who has a channel called After School.

It's called The God Paradox.

And it's about this notion that it's really hard to talk about God.

And I quote, like, St.

Augustine, who says that If you understand anything we're talking right now, you're nowhere near to what God is.

If you think you understand, you're really, really far.

That's actually Talmud also.

It's literally directly from the Talmud.

Exactly right.

As soon as you think you're right, you're wrong.

And I think we're all simultaneously right and wrong about all this stuff, because it's really hard to language.

We're talking about non-rational processes, exactly what Elizabeth experienced, what you've both experienced throughout your life, what listeners have experienced.

It's hard to language this stuff.

So, just at the risk of being overly simplistic and languaging things, Summing up the conversation on resurrection, you know, what I heard is we can be outside of time and space, and that may be the safest explanation for it, but i can't help but wondering if it is also about this, the awakening and the resurrection we have in these mini deaths that we have before we actually die and give up the body, and that it's small versions of recreating ourself away from a stuck uh paradigm, stuck perspective, starting to expand consciousness, etc.

Correct?

Yeah.

I mean this is why I sometimes say that like absent an acute crisis, for all the reasons that we've talked about, like I really don't think people should consider a powerful psychedelic experience before the age of 35 or 40 or older, because there's so much dying to be done before then.

That is the age that you are allowed to start studying the mystical traditions in Judaism.

That's why I borrow that.

And I think it's very, very wise because from zero to 35, you have lots of dying to go through.

You need to have your heart broken at least a few times.

You have to have two kids.

You got to have a couple of kids at least.

That was my biggest death experience so far has been having two daughters.

Sure.

Try actually giving birth to that Brian.

On the floor.

Try squeezing a watermelon through a garden hose with no drugs.

Right on the floor, right?

Yeah.

Very spiritual experience.

You know what?

I love talking about birth.

But a very spiritual experience, which involves self-hypnosis.

I mean, I chose to do it this way.

This is not an accident.

But yeah, that's a spiritual experience to also reinterpret pain.

And human existence is pain, right?

We're suffering.

We're in a state of suffering.

You know, we're trying to escape that loop.

But, you know, satanama, like that's, you know, as a woman...

This brings me back to what I wanted to ask.

As a woman, we get to experience it in a different way, even if you don't have children.

I would hold that, you know, there's a tremendous amount that women hold that is different.

And even if you choose not to have children, your body has a rhythm that is echoing life and death, monthly right.

I wonder if you can touch on, and then we'll, I'm trying to be mindful of time.

I wonder if you can touch a little bit on the specificity of the female aspect of these traditions, why you think women were responsible and meaning could be responsible for this.

What was special about that?

And Besides, just the march of culture leading in the direction of stronger bigger better, you know faster being perceived as male.

What happened in terms of the female experience when we talk about these mysteries?

Right, so everything we've discussed about the ancient mysteries, we sort of buried the lead.

Well, we sort of mentioned that they were initially female mysteries, but when it comes to the mysteries of Dionysus and even early Christianity too, these were heavily female-led ceremonies.

The women were the driving force of these experiences, despite the fact that the church would step into the shoes of the patriarchal Roman Empire and kind of keep marching forward in the 4th century.

That all happens in the 4th century historically.

AD.

This is when the church becomes bigger and more bureaucratized administrative, and it takes on a lot of the power structure of the very male-heavy Roman Empire.

It became institutionalized.

Yeah, but before then, there is no institution.

There's no Bible.

There's no widely accepted canonical version of the New Testament.

There are no physical churches.

There's no basilicas until Constantine famously converts in 312.

So the earliest Christians are meeting in private homes, Just like this.

They're going into necropolis and catacombs underground to commune with the dead.

That was the early Eucharistic experience, and that was almost to a fault.

I mean, it was led by women.

So women, as the heads of households, were the early patrons of the early house churches.

They were called house churches in which the meal was served.

And a lot of that probably had to do with also medicine, because that's what a lot of women historically.

That's what you do when you tend home, right?

You're cooking, you're taking care of, because men are out doing the things that they're doing, right.

Right.

So there has to be this overlap.

Well, in order to feed people, by the way, not just 2000 years ago, but think about 20000 years ago.

So there's this very blurred line between, like diet and cuisine and medicine and pharmacology and drugs and these sacraments.

Like you're essentially talking about our relationship with, with the earth right and the ecosystem by which we're surrounded, like to have no knowledge of that before pharmacies came into existence, was was to spell certain death for people, and it was typically the domain of women, who carried a lot of this plant knowledge and this herbal lore, folk medicine from prehistory all the way into the classical civilization.

So it's not a surprise to me that women were involved in receiving and storing and distributing the ingredients that would go into the Eucharistic meal.

Right. in these house churches.

It's no surprise to me that it was female minads who kept Dionysus alive for centuries, or that it was female priestesses at Eleusis, through these noble families, who kept that alive as well, because they were inheriting traditions from deep prehistory where it was women who would typically brew these magical potions, mix these magical wines for millennia, untold millennia.

It was all about women.

And also you think about, you know, historically how women who have visions are treated, right?

I mean, you can take it all the way through.

You know, women now reclaim the term witch.

You know, a lot of people are still practicing various forms of, you know, witchery, as it were.

But that was really a really powerful part, you know, of this book to realize also, you know how many aspects of our experience also get institutionalized and, you know, taken over when patriarchal structures in particular, and in many cases religious patriarchal structures you know, come into play.

Also, if you look nowadays at the resurrection for I should use a different word, but the resurgence is more accurate of the healing arts and people who are doing somatic release and finding trapped emotions in the body and helping guide that through the predominantly that's a female focus,

It was women.

It's all you know 95, 90 women who are, And men find the formulas and the you know the things and they publish the books.

But yeah, Peter Levine, we had on said you know he owes it to the women before him and the female traditions of somatic healing and you know the healing arts that allowed that.

Last question.

And, you know, you talk about this in the book, but I'd love to hear your perspective.

And I don't mean to ask it in a sensationalistic way.

You've chosen not to partake of psychedelics, you know, partly to sort of maintain some sort of academic legitimacy, meaning so that you're not seen as an advocate.

You know like I'm doing this so that you will do this.

And my hunch would be if you ever did it, I hope that you never tell anyone.

Meaning no, because I hope that if you were to have that experience, that it would be one that wouldn't have to be broadcast.

Except for us.

You should tell us.

We want the exclusives.

No, but I am curious, you know, if your decision to not partake, you know, which I think makes a lot of sense, has that shifted?

Or, as you hear more about, you know research and especially you know these sort of clinically controlled and really beautiful experiences that people have in facilitated ways that really are, in a sense, customized in terms of what your needs, desires and goals are.

Is that something that's changed for you?

Yeah, I mean what I should do someday is just auction off my psychedelic virginity to a charitable cause.

I think that's the best use of my virginity, which is still the case.

I would take a lie detector on that.

But yeah, it may not be broadcast at some point.

But yeah, at first it was a great desire just to be objective.

And also, like all the books I was reading, was a lot of white men talking about their relationship with God on drugs.

There's a lot of literature there.

I didn't want to write another one of those.

But now, like, you know, it's been a few years.

And I don't know.

My views are, like, shifting a lot when it comes to this stuff.

I think I've tried to describe to the best of my ability how I feel about it now, which is I find psychedelics deeply ambiguous because of the lack of the story.

I think that's it.

So, like, my ideal scenario would not be in a lab in Baltimore or anywhere.

You want to trip balls to Joshua Tree?

Yeah, maybe Joshua Tree.

Yeah.

Well, nature.

I mean, nature is a huge component of it.

And I think that's part of the story.

I think that's how we experience these states is typically in nature.

So how do you do that safely?

How do you do that with the right story?

With which compound, by the way?

Like, you know, I find dozens of compounds throughout the book, none of which are very safe.

Let's just eat a lot of eggplant together and see what happens.

I'm down for that.

Yeah.

Egg plantaholic.

Sign up for Mayim's retreat to Joshua Tree.

Yeah.

No, but as I say, like in Los Angeles, like you can't swing a dead cat without finding an ayahuasca.

You know ceremony and experience.

And I also know people who go to South America and have a very different kind of experience.

But yeah, it's very...

Yeah.

Well, to that point, I don't know.

Like you know, as a as a white kid from northeast Philly who grew up Catholic, I don't know what my story is.

I don't know what my container is.

It's not in the Amazon.

It's it's it might be in Joshua Tree.

I don't know.

I don't know where.

So I'm kind of looking for it.

And you know, in fits and starts the pictures coming together, but I still I'm looking for the story.

I'm looking for the container.

And as a culture, I think we definitely do not have that at the moment, but I'm looking.

What do you think, in terms of culture and society, that the resurgence of psychedelics and the interest in it says about us as a culture, or points to?

Well, it could have disastrous consequences, but however— But there's a need there, right?

Yeah, there's a clear need for transcendence.

I think the need for transcendence is built into who we are.

There was a psychologist Siegel, who talked about it as the fourth drive, after food and drink and sex, is that there's this need for transcendence, sometimes through drugs.

But I think that we all have that urge to step outside ourselves, step inside ourselves, into the upside down, to try and figure out what this is.

And I think the common perception is that this ain't it.

Whatever it is from day

[The Immortality Key: Exploring the Psychedelic Origins of Western Civilization and Christianity]-[Brian C. Muraresku: Could Jesus Exist Without Psychedelics?]

📋 Summary

The Immortality Key: Unveiling the Ancient Mysteries

The Mysteries of Eleusis: A Gateway to Immortality

The Dionysian Connection and the Eucharist

The "Upside Down" and the Nature of Reality

The Crisis of Modern Meaning

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📖 Transcript

[The Immortality Key: Exploring the Psychedelic Origins of Western Civilization and Christianity]-[Brian C. Muraresku: Could Jesus Exist Without Psychedelics?]

📋 Summary

The Immortality Key: Unveiling the Ancient Mysteries

The Mysteries of Eleusis: A Gateway to Immortality

The Dionysian Connection and the Eucharist

The "Upside Down" and the Nature of Reality

The Crisis of Modern Meaning

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🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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