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Hi, I have surely got to claim, I love your site. The hues, the layout, the entire concept, they all move perfectly together. Anyhow, that's all I truly had to claim.

Good episode for sure.

I think we all need to be careful that discipline qua discipline is not taken as necessary mark for authenticity.

Like Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna, I'm not even sure these rituals and contemplative practices actually hold a candle to full-blown psychedelic shamanism. If you need a lifetime to gain unio mystica, then that suggests a poor approach.

Unlike James, the older I get, the less I have been fixated upon scientific criteria like measurability, falsifiability, testability, etc. (still treasured, but no longer considered epistemologically exhaustive).

Been here for a week over the Full Moon party with my wife and have excellent experiences up at the kangaroo bar. We have both taken mushies a few times back home and knew what we were in for. The atmosphere they create up there is the perfect place to enjoy this experience and they defiantly work! I had 2 shakes and my wife had 1. It will take a good hour to properly take effect so I wouldn't recommend smashing 3 or 4 of these because it will really creep up on you then!
Stay calm and put yourself in a happy calm state of mind and you will have something that you will never forget!

I'm philosophically Gödelian overall--and, like him, I tap into the vein of Western Platonism (e.g., Leibniz). I think you should, too!

To be sure, your view on mathematics is philosophical; it is not a self-evident conclusion and it is not neutral. Heck, it's not even the worldview of most mathematicians.

There is a reason Pythagoreans and then Platonists insisted on mathematical instruction--it offers a taste of metaphysicality. When we calculate pi, we are not measuring a "pattern" of the universe. It is a priori, not empirical. Moreover, it is incontestable. These are incredibly strange properties for a materialist to handle; so most, like you, tend to dismiss them. (In fact, a recent gathering of well-established scientists and philosophers attests to the strangeness of mathematics: [link]

Indeed, this is not "speculative blather," but rather investigation of what reality is. We use numbers daily; our science rests upon such "tools." (This led to even Quine including abstract objects into his ontology.) The normativity of mathematics (and indeed reason) is inescapable peculiar, at least from a materialist point of a view.

To ignore these brute facts is not a sign of being a "hard-nosed realist" or some such contrivance, but merely to prejudice oneself against a more encompassing inquiry. Furthermore, the inquiry itself has a personal affect, even if conclusions are never definitively reached. For instance, asking why THIS particular universe (i.e., a sequence of contingent events) exists can be edifying, because other possible worlds (e.g., logically consistent) are likewise feasible.

Howdy Y'all,

This is a reply to Jake's query about the full body nervous system tingling he experienced. I'm gonna use some really obnoxious language to describe this stuff, so bear with me.

I'm a massage therapist and yoga student with seven years practice of the latter, and I've flirted around with holotropic breathwork, vipassana meditation, and various psychedelic yadayadaya, and I've had a variety of different experiences of a similar nature.

I've felt something akin to some yogi's description of kundalini - a burst of tingling, sexually tinged energy running up the spine - the first time I performed an upward bow asana as well as when combining LSD, pranayama, and a moderate degree of sensory isolation. I don't mean tingly as in the uncomfortable sensation of a compromised nerve. This charge felt totally comfortable, even healthy.

I've also felt a heavy, warm, almost gooey energy travel through my body during holotropic breathwork sessions. Not at all like the feeling of flush in my cheeks when I'm embarrassed, this energy was much, much thicker and weightier.

I've also felt adrenaline rushes: swerving to hit a deer on the highway, or learning to rock climb and getting seventy-five feet off the ground for the first time. Adrenaline is nothing at all like the other two energies I've described. My experience of it as a physical sensation coursing through my body is muted, while my conscious experience is of telescoping time and a mind almost totally empty of internal monologue.

As a bodyworker, I've spent a few years working with the mystery of energy as a healing tool. I really don't know what it's about at all, but there are a lot of people in the field with very strong opinions about its nature and efficacy. A significant portion of them are total jackasses. Probably a blanket statement, but these are the Deepak Chopra groupies who can't even agree on which of the chakras in the yogic system are which. These people seem to me to be perpetually anxious, and frequently insist on their versions of reality. Receiving energy work from them, I often feel very little within my own body, while they babble relentlessly about what's happening to my aura.

However, I've also worked with a man who has spent decades studying Qi Gong, and my experiences of energy work with him are of a totally different nature. One day, not warning me what he was about to do, he stood across the room from me, and made a throwing motion with his arms. An invisible and fuzzy weight hit me in the chest (not strong enough to hadoken me across the room, but definitely strong enough to register in my mind as unmistakably real).

There's a confusing middle ground between these two extremes. I saw an energy worker for a while who talked far too much about pseudo shamanism and what I ought to be doing with my life, and seemed to have a lot more bluster than knowledge. But once in a session he used a pressure point technique that totally overloaded my nervous system. He ramped me up with more and more of this springy bouncing energy, until I rolled off the massage table in a fit of convulsive laughter that lasted for minutes. It felt remarkably like an overwhelming, springy bouncy energy I had experienced under the influence of DMT as well as with psilocybin.

I'm rattling off this list for two reasons. The first is to demonstrate the variety of supra-mundane energies that can arise in the nervous system with and without drugs. These are only the ones I've experienced in the past seven years or so. There probably are many more. I certainly had no idea they existed or that I'd be experiencing even one of them when I was 19 years old.

The second is to encourage people to seek these experiences out. Most people are justifiably skeptical of the existence of these energies. Some people are so committed to co-opting these experiences for the purposes of their own anxiety-soothing new age identity and philosophy that they push many genuinely inquiring minds away from the experiences entirely. So it's up to open-minded people with scientific minds, people hesitant to slap labels on things, people with a genuine desire for understanding to approach these strange nervous system sensations, track them down in the dark nooks and crannies of mysticism and shamanism, and bring them into the light for discussion so we can get better and better information on what they truly are.

But in discussion lies the problem. In this Podcast, y'all talked a bit about objective and subjective experiences. The way that I personally differentiate between the two is that objective experience is easy for us to point to. There's significantly less debate about what it is we're actually talking about. Subjective experiences are difficult to point to, difficult to describe, and spiritual guides have been saying for centuries that we just have to experience them directly rather than absorb someone else's story about them.

Some attempts to do so do not go well. Anyone who has taken a friend on their first psychedelic journey knows that that friends will spend a lot of time inarticulately babbling about the cosmic buddha frisbee that just sliced his brain in half. Some spiritual traditions incorporate a lot of metaphorical language into a blueprint of these realms, such as the Tibetan Buddhists and their bardos. This can be a useful framework for some, and an uncomfortable restriction for others.

However, I still feel strongly that discussion should follow the experience of these strange energies. For example, I love Psychedelic Information Theory. And while PIT is largely about objectively obtained scientific data, it came about because of people who, for example, smoked DMT, saw elves, did not stop at "I saw elves!" and progressed to "what are these elves?"

The more angles we can approach the nervous system from, the better able we will be to discuss these experiences. It's not easy, and people have been trying for millennia to do so, but we humans get better at everything all the time. I'm confident that we can build better and better models for understanding these experiences.

As a final note, I understand that the words "energy", "Qi", "mysticism", and "shamanism" have become dirty words to a lot of us involved in this discussion. I wish I knew words that could express these concepts without conjuring up thoughts of those ridiculous New Agers and causing knee jerk reactions.

Thanks for slogging through this preposterously long essay-comment. tl;dr?

Mathematics is not the answer, it is just a tool. There is a philosophical wing of mathematics that treats mathematical models of the universe as actual things, while I see math as a neat short-hand for describing the pattern of things. There are mathematicians who literally drive themselves insane trying to figure out if reality is a continuum or if it is made of discreet units of force (quanta), and trying to figure out how to model those distinctions with a single unified field (or something). To me these distinctions do not matter, I do not get wrung out over mathematical paradoxes because the math is not the reality, it is just a model of one part of reality. Don't get too philosophical about the implications of the mathematical models because all math is inherently incomplete in scale and scope.

Mathematics can be construed as a philosophy, but that it taking it too far for me. Mathematics is the language of patterns, and the language of describing patterns in the universe. You can get very philosophical about the nature of pi or phi or Fibonacci numbers and so on, but that does not mean anything, intrinsically, it is just speculative blather. I will take my mathematics without philosophy.

And when people start trying to dismantle my perspective by questioning the value of logic and reason then I start to think the conversation is over. This is why philosophy solves nothing, you can always peel the conversation back through some kind of semantic filter to question the "meaning of meaning" or the value of pure reason, etc., and never address anything real. A waste of time, mostly.

James,

Here is a tangible way "philosophy" must be included in your worldview, with far-reaching results.

Mathematics.

Would pi be pi, necessarily, even if this universe did not exist, even if the contingencies of this universe did not exist? In other words, are the first thousand digits of pi non-spatiotemporal?

Furthermore, you are using reason to argue, yes? What naturalistically validates the rules of reason?

@Eugene, mysticism is not philosophy but you can use philosophy to turn mysticism into an ideology (religion) instead of a practice (spirituality).

Next week's show is all about the points you bring up. Thanks!

Mysticism is not philosophy; it is an inner science with reproducible results. I wonder what you think anout my previous points James or Jake?

EL ESILO MAS ORIGINAL DE SKATE QUE VI EN TODA MI FUCKING VIDA
SOS UNA INFLUENCIA PARA MI
DEBERIAS CONOCER ARGENTINA HAY MUCHOS LUGARES INCREIBLES PARA PATINAR
GRACIAS A TU INFLUENCIA ESTOY PRACTICANDO UNA PROBA QUE LE LLAME NOSEBONE-IMPOSIBLE O HAND IMPOSIBLE

@dimitri, I dismiss philosophy because it is focused on building abstract arguments with axioms, it is mostly a practice of language and supposition, which is all hot air when you get right down to it. In short, you can create and defend any philosophy with no physical proof or evidence. Buddha had a philosophy and so did Hitler, so did Stalin, so does Donald Trump and Alex Grey. Which is right? None. Philosophy helps no one and contributes nothing. Philosophy is a refuge for scoundrels who want to preach "truth" without wanting to be burdened by the weight of evidence. Never trust anything a philosopher says, they deal in half truths and deception.

Physics is correct all the time, so I will stick with physics.

And yes, I wanted to go into military intelligence and psychological warfare, psyops was my main area of interest as a young man. I did not know about MK-ULTRA when I was dealing with recruiters and trying to secure a position in intelligence, but when I learned of it a few years later I wondered if I could have wound up there. As I said, once I realized the military did not know what to do with my areas of expertise, and could not promise me a career path in intelligence, I was done dealing with them.

Im 22 n my cousins 47 hangin out with him alot pretty much school'd me into all sorts of shit from meth to heroin from trips to dmt.. He doesnt do anything these days but smoke pot, and doesnt really tell me much about his teen years, but meetin a old friend of his who used to bend it for weeks on end with eachother told me he was the definiton of the word cracked. For fun they would toke and shoot ice, eat atleast 3 grams of M between them and drop like 20 or so tabs on any given day until this time he snatched about 40 hits from this acid dealer and ate them all infront of him.

I asked my cousin about that time and instantly i could see him already start to get nervous anxious started trying to switch topics, then he told me what happend, he wasnt having a bad trip he knew he was gone he said hes had mulitple bad trips but nothing like this, n he wasnt just on tabs too, vomiting blood, pupils actualy changed size one was smaller than the other(he had a picture his mate took that he kept hidden, he wanted to burn the photo but literally seeing one pupil the size of that little dot in the center of your eye compare to one thats looks like your buzzing is actually a fucking photo people think im talking it up but until you see this you just know what could have been going thru his mind.)literaly knowing this is the end, watching yourself die in a thousand different ways he told me that day he wasnt in hell or anything but a strange place.. A very odd place with the walls warping and shit, he had like a 6 hour talk with this great being he showed him his life and where he was going, the being asked him to either stay as his bitch or change his ways caus the next time they meet hes not goin to have another chance..seeing tears on a grown man as he tells you this sent shivs down my spine.. It actualy sounds more like he died than simply bad trip hey, hes half fine now/still very cracked, forgets his age thinks hes my age again, cant drink or it sends him abit loopy, and brings up the most fucking weirdest shit to talk about..
Most 'heroic' dose ive done was 7 tabs, a gram of mushis and couple hits of dmt later and id say im not the same and never will be again lol no bad trip or nothing i actualy enjoyed it but theres a big big difference in using acid to trip balls and actualy have a real mind blowing phsycadelic experiance.

How can you "completely dismiss Philosophy" ? Did I just hear you say that you "would have liked to be the guy running MK-ultra?" Wow.

Yall are spreading hateful thing about people you really don't even know. His artwork obviously represents something yall don't grasp of cant handle. Dumb people spreading negativity against someone with creative power spreading love and compassion. Disgusting

I hope you guys don't take this the wrong way, or too personal, it's sole intent is to serve as constructive criticism. I am a big fan of Steve, and listened to this podcast today for that reason, it's the first time I've listened to DoseNation. I can't recall which host it was, but I think I stopped counting at about the 20th time where you absolutely blatantly just interrupt Steve while he is busy talking, he just keeps on calmly while you have another couple of stabs and then finally let him finish. It was so awkward, and as a listener, very irritating and quite rude toward Steve. I don't want to sound like some troll, just want to bring it under your attention, if you want to develop your career as a show host I really suggest you work on this - allowing your host to finish his thought before moving onto your next question. Blessings.

Can't I just put this scramx on a friends leg? And then back on later?

That Shit Should Be BANNED From The U.S. I Hullacinated From One Hit. POINT BLANK PERIOD. Dont Smoke It.

Thanks alot! This episode was much appreciated. I'd love some more episodes of you guys just talking about these things, although I like the episodes with guests to. Also very good work with PIT James K, it really changed my view of psychedelics.

Any chance there is a transcript of this podcast somewhere?