 Hey there! If you're into the conversation about psychedelics, please come and attend our live Healing with Plant Medicine Masterclass on September 7th. This event will kick off our Spirit Medicine Walkers course, which Rick Strossman is also a part of. You can RSVP the event using the link in the description, and please enjoy the video. At the very least, we must enlarge the discussion about psychedelics. Psychedelics are quickly growing in public curiosity as millions discover their value in healing personal traumas, creative problem solving, and transforming awareness in powerful and often mysterious ways. Some even believe they may be a gateway into different dimensions, where others suggest they promise the key to our collective healing as a whole. But the question is, what are they, really? Today, we intend to find out. Joining us to really break it down is none other than Dr. Rick Strossman. Thirty years ago, Rick was the first North American physician-scientist since the 60s to perform scientific studies on psychedelics. During his trials, he administered approximately 400 doses of DMT to nearly 5 dozen volunteers. His work set the stage for the psychedelic revolution sweeping North America, and today, he is here to share the magical wisdom that he's learned with all of us. And stay tuned till the end, because we'll share with you how you can watch a massive Q&A with Rick personally, along with a full-blown psychedelic educational experience. Hi everyone. Wow, it's a good-looking crowd. Okay, in order to understand psychedelics, first let's explore our modern understanding of consciousness. There are several approaches available, but two models, useful for our purposes are Freudian and Buddhist psychology. Freud taught that there are three mental locations for ideas, memories and feelings. One is the conscious. We access this information easily, and working with it occupies much of our day. We are conscious of these things, aware of them. The pre-conscious, sometimes called the subconscious, contains things available only after a little effort. We deal with the pre-conscious when we try to remember, for example, the name of something. It's at the tip of my tongue, and it comes to mind a moment later. Then there is the unconscious. Memories and feelings, which no matter how hard we try, are simply out of our reach. Unconscious mental content influences our behavior and feelings, and by extension, our perceptions and experiences. We know the unconscious exists by its effects on us. It's not uncommon for us to do, say, or feel things. We know aren't good or true, but still cannot change. The source of these inner conflicts and how they play out in our lives can only be guessed at. Dreams, Freud taught, provide hints as to what is buried in the unconscious, and that's why dreams are important in deep psychotherapy. Buddhist psychology can also really help us understand how psychedelics work. This ancient system teaches that consciousness consists of a handful of mental functions, functions which become clear through the practice of meditation. These are thinking, feeling, perceiving sensations, the body, and our habits. The end result of these separate functions working together is the sense of someone being conscious. This could be everyday normal waking consciousness, or some altered state brought on by meditation, psychedelics, dreams, near-death experiences, and so on. Alexander Shulgin was the father of modern psychedelic pharmacology, how the chemical structure of psychedelic substances alter our minds. When lecturing, he illustrated the different kinds of psychoactive compounds with these symbols, an up arrow, a down arrow, and a star. The up arrows are the stimulants. They give us more energy and focus, like your morning coffee, and they affect only one or two of the mental functions we've just talked about. This narrow range of effects may help us to resolve some psychological issues or provide new insights by making, say, things in the pre-conscious easier to remember. But their limited benefit is outweighed by their medical and psychological side effects. The down arrow, on the other hand, makes you relaxed, sleepy, and slows your thoughts, and are known as depressants. Think alcohol, the most popular of these sedating substances. Like the stimulants, they affect only one or two mental functions, and while they likewise might help, for example, thin the barrier to the unconscious, side effects like abuse and addiction cause a lot of problems which are all too common. Now, the stars, on the other hand, are the psychedelics, and change every mental mechanism, especially perception, thought, and emotions. Maybe because of their sweeping effects on our psyche, they are also the most helpful in gaining greater self-knowledge, as well as making it easier to put into practice new ways of living our lives. You'll notice we are using the term psychedelic rather than entheogen, or even plant medicine. Psychedelic has going for it the fact that it is neutral. Psychedelic means mind manifesting, or mind disclosing. The name doesn't imply any goals, or good or bad effects. More to the point, psychedelics manifest or disclose what exists in your mind. Only you can have this exact experience, because of who you are, exactly. Your life experience is in education, your emotional and physical condition, your beliefs, hopes, and fears. But what about the name entheogen? Well, it assumes a lot, and this limits its appeal and universality, meaning generating the divine or God within. Entheogen assumes that there is a God, or a spiritual force or forces, but not everyone believes this. And a spiritual experience may not be what they're looking for. Say in the case of a hardcore atheist, who, by the way, still might benefit from, or even enjoy a psychedelic experience. Entheogen also implies that those spiritual forces, or even God, exists within us, that the information or the source of that knowledge is generated from and resides within us. But many people believe such knowledge comes from an outside force, a God who is separate from us. And while we can approach God, we never become identical with God. So someone with these beliefs may shy away from ingesting an entheogen, who likewise might also benefit from a psychedelic experience, because it's not part of their fundamental worldview. And if the goal of taking an entheogen is to have a spiritual experience, what happens when we don't? Is that our failure, a failure of the entheogen, or a failure of the beliefs attached to the term? As far as the term plant medicine is concerned, this is particularly useful for us today. And it falls in between entheogen and psychedelic on the neutrality scale. These are plants that may include psychoactive compounds. This term may be an important one for the adoption and recognition of the healing benefits of psychedelics found in or derived from plants, specifically when performed with the proper intention set and setting for beneficial medicinal purposes. In the psychedelic experience, our senses are magnified in a supernormal way. We may leave behind our bodies with our minds now free to wander further inward or outward than ever before. We feel powerful emotions, joy and sorrow, ecstasy or terror. We may merge or unite with all of existence and time and space disappear. Or we may see and communicate with the usually invisible, seemingly spiritual beings who share their knowledge with us, help us or even heal us. Psychedelics are chemicals that have strong subjective effects which alter one's perception of reality and sense of self. They work by altering what our neurotransmitters send out or receive, specifically our serotonin system. The most important receptor for psychedelics in the brain is the type called the 2A. This receptor marks an important distinction point when comparing classical psychedelics to compounds which offer some similar subjective effects. A compound like MDMA acts by allowing our brains to be flooded with large amounts of our natural serotonin and activates many different types of serotonin receptors. Classical psychedelics like LSD, psilocybin mushrooms and DMT, responsible for more otherworldly experiences, supply our serotonin 2A receptors with something a bit different from normal serotonin. Just similar enough to fit. But to what degree the effects of psychedelics come from the unique nature of these serotonin like chemicals interacting with our 2A receptors, or simply how the brain reacts to having just 2A receptors stimulated and not the other ones, is still a question scientists are trying to answer. Attachment of a psychedelic to this receptor triggers a sequence of electrical and chemical events within that nerve cell. In addition psychedelics promote nerve cell growth and connections among cells, what's called neuroplasticity. So these better connected nerve cells may fire more or less frequently after the psychedelic binds to them. The information encoded in these patterns of activity now spreads to countless nearby neurons eventually affecting entire brain centers. To that end dense concentrations of the necessary 2A receptors occur right where you would expect them to be. Part of the cerebral cortex linked to thought and vision, hippocampus for memory retrieval, and the limbic system, the emotional brain. Another circuit worth mentioning is the default mode network, which relates to who we are, our sense of self, what we believe and feel, and how we interact with the inner and outer worlds. Psychedelics cause the DMN to function more randomly, in a less rigid manner, and this is felt as a loosening of the self's bonds. These ideas, beliefs and habitual emotional and behavioral reactions. At the same time the DMN becomes more responsive to new information. Now our self sees ideas and feelings in a new light, attaches greater or less meaning to them than before because of the DMN's greater sensitivity to input. Alternative opinions and assumptions may make more sense and change feels more likely if not inevitable. Things about us and the world become truer than before and easier to act on. These effects of psychedelics, of course, are apparent to anyone who observes their own psychedelic experiences, yet for some of us it's satisfying to have scientific confirmation of what we already know from our own experiences. Now all of this becomes especially valuable when we discuss the factors that make up what you actually undergo during your trip, set, setting and substance. Set is our makeup, who we are at the moment, physical, mental, spiritual and even nutritional. It also includes our education, beliefs, past experiences along with our preparation and goals for this particular session or journey. What do we want and why? Now setting is the physical environment, laboratory, nature or a city for example. It is also our social environment, such as being alone with others. Setting also includes the set of the people around you. Are they supportive or critical, friends or strangers? Are they depressed or angry or happy and lighthearted? And are they under the influence of any psychoactive substances themselves? We've learned so much over many decades about the critical role of set and setting. We can align these factors so as to make positive outcomes more common and reduce negative ones. Given the right set and setting, research shows that psychedelics may reduce depression, substance abuse and alcoholism, disordered eating, domestic violence, the risk of former prisoners returning to prison, antisocial and borderline personality disorders and OCD. From the wellness perspective, they may increase creativity, spiritual growth, meditative power and appreciation of music and nature. Finally, besides the all-important set and setting, the subject of substance is not just what kind of psychedelic you take, but also there's the matter of dose. This could include enough for a full-blown trip or a microdose. Microdoses may be so small that they have no effect at all, but have taken daily for some weeks may produce subtle yet meaningful changes. A slightly higher dose may produce effects like the up-arrow substances, sharper focus, more energy and elevated mood. Slightly higher doses yet, while not fully psychedelic, indicate to us where we might be heading. Research today is finding that psychedelics can support us in achieving certain psychological and spiritual goals when taken in the right circumstances, along with facilitating both mental and physical healing. If psychedelics can rearrange our psyche into greater health, so might the body follow suit. This could be especially true for those disorders where psychological factors play a significant role, asthma, irritable bowel syndrome, pain, autoimmune diseases and more. It's for this reason that it's so important that if we're venturing into the psychedelic universe, we do so with the right set, setting and substance. And this is exactly the reason why we've collaborated with Rick inside of spirit mysteries with Spirit Medicine Walkers. This is a full-blown 30-hour masterclass that we've created to provide you with the ultimate psychedelic knowledge to guarantee you have a powerful and healing journey. Along with a special Q&A with Rick, we also have an exclusive interview with Arithmia Shaman and explore thoroughly setting up and navigating ceremony among many other things and take the first step to becoming a Medicine Walker yourself.