 Joseph West lives in Tucson, Arizona with his three children and his partner Catherine Kincaid. Together they own and operate private group psychotherapy practices in both Tucson and Salt Lake City. This the practice specializes in psychedelic integration and psychedelic assisted therapies. Joseph is passionate about creating safe contexts for the use and exploration of sacred medicines and technologies both natural and synthetic. In past years Joseph spent time working as a real estate professional, an accountant, a stay-at-home parent, and a sociologist. His social scientific research on early Mormon history was published in the journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. Joseph is a co-founding member of the Mormon Transhumanist Association. Joseph West. Psychedelic medicine should be understood as a sacred technology and as a relatively safe and contextually reliable means to the experience of personal revelation understood in terms of Mormon belief and discourse. Stepping back for a moment to frame the talk in terms of the conference theme I want to talk about Joseph Smith and the problem of centralized authority and centralized access to revelation from God. I begin with a throwback reference to a talk given in 2013 at this conference by Don Bradley called Joseph Smith and the Technologies of Seership where Bradley argued that Joseph Smith understood his seer stones as technological tools. I jump off here because for one reason is that it introduces the idea of technologically enabled access to the divine which I'd like to say more about later and second the use of seer stones in early Mormon history illustrates and demonstrates how the problem of centralized authority began as a problem of decentralized access to revelation and I'm referring here to the story of Hiram Page who in 1830 the year the church is organized shows up with his own seer stone and was receiving alternative revelations to Joseph Smith and in response Smith announces that he had received revelation which basically stated that he's the only one authorized to receive revelation and so this story kind of illustrates the problem. Joseph Smith's solution to the problem was to centralize access to communal revelation and to mandate the pursuit of personal revelation in the affirmation of that which is revealed to the authoritative figure. Okay so revelation in Mormon theology I want to talk briefly about this concept and say there's two key ingredients to the experience of revelation. First is a non-ordinary state of consciousness. This is a term that psychologists use sometimes but I give some examples from the scriptures of instances of revelation that kind of illustrate that and then the second thing and more important that I want to talk about is this phrase from John the Revelator the spirit of revelation is the testimony of Jesus and the testimony of Jesus I assert should be understood as a disposition towards faith in the atonement of Christ where the atonement of Christ is understood in authentically Mormon terms to refer to the work we do when we take the name of Christ upon ourselves and participate in the labor of reconciling reconciling conflicting desires towards greater mutual fulfillment and joy seeking to knit our hearts together in unity and love one towards another as it's put in Mosiah 18. The testimony of Jesus or disposition towards faith in the atonement of Christ is an enabling factor that enables creative vision of possible futures in which conflicting desires are reconciled. Okay and just related I want to read one part this is just one part of the Mormon transhumanist affirmation. We are disciples of the gospel of Jesus Christ which is to trust in change toward and fully immerse our bodies and minds in the role of Christ to become compassionate creators as exemplified and invited by Jesus. Okay that's all the theology for now. I want to talk about psychedelics. What are psychedelics? The term psychedelic is translated to mean soul or mind revealing. It's usually it's a chemical substance a medicine that's ingested in somewhere or another and usually the intent is to induce a non-ordinary state of consciousness. Other names like hallucinogens, plant medicines and entheogens. An entheogen means generating the divine within and I did want to give us a little bit of a sense of what's some practical things. At our practice we offer psychedelic integration services which is when clients integrate past psychedelic experience with a trained or licensed therapist and then there's also psychedelic assisted therapies which is when clients integrate ingest the medicine with practitioners and the only psychedelic assisted therapy that we offer currently is ketamine due to legalities but there's there's all kinds of research and trials on a psilocybin and MDMA and and we use the protocols that are developed in this research you know in what we're doing and kind of like how we do the the therapy. Okay some research findings where is the clock okay here we go. So okay there's so there's too much research to highlight but I'm gonna just give a couple highlights of the research on the use of side psychedelic medicine for the betterment of well people so there's lots of research about how psychedelics can treat extreme conditions like PTSD and trauma but I'm talking about that's a term that's used in advocacy is psychedelic medicine for the betterment of well people and I want to plug this talk if you wanted to look it up it's an hour long but the statistics that I get mostly come from this it's a very recent and this is what I want to say about that. So the the study that I'm going to talk about is over you over several years has been eventually been hundreds of participants what he calls healthy volunteers I'm sure that's like a psychological profile and they they administer the medicine which is psilocybin they you kind of like lay there on a couch or a comfortable chair with an eye mask and headphones and then you have this experience and most of the data they're collecting is it so it's a very internal experience this particular research and the data they're collecting is like surveys after the fact okay and so I want to just highlight my some of my favorite findings in the majority of healthy persons studied psilocybin occasion mystical type experiences associated with enduring positive changes in attitudes mood and behavior one month after the initial trial 78% of participants reported that it was among the five most personally meaningful experiences of their lives 83% reported that it was among the top five most spiritually meaningful experiences of their lives so this is after a month of processing it and they still think this and these positive effects are sustained in most subjects for at least 14 months probably longer and then this is kind of like a side little statistic but it's one of my favorites that I that I found which is the majority of persons who go into this this ceremony or study identifying as atheists no longer identify as atheists one month after having the experience so that gives me kind of like a slight shodden Freud feeling for my atheist friends if you're interested in retaining your atheist identity I you should avoid psychedelic medicine but anyway okay so we've talked about theological underpinnings and research findings and I'd like to tie the theology and science together by describing what scientists think is happening in the brain during the psychedelic experience think about the discussion on revelation revelation is the experience of a non-ordinary revelation is the experience of a non-ordinary state of consciousness in which practical clarity towards atonement with and by Christ is attained okay so in the brain there's a part of the brain called the default mode network and the default mode network plays a crucial role in the development of social functionality the perception of time remembering the past and simulating the future and the separation of self and other within the default mode network is the singulate cortex and the medial prefrontal cortex which are both rich in serotonin receptors and which also happen to be the post-synaptic site of the psychedelic activation under the influence of a psychedelic these two areas do something called decoupling under acute psych psychedelic doses when these two areas within the default mode network lose integrity or decouple from each other the subject the subjective experience generally falls into a category some scientists call oceanic boundlessness which is a feeling of oneness that refers to the dissolution of ego boundaries and associated with positive emotions ranging from heightened mood to sublime happiness and serenity or grandiosity this sense of oceanic boundlessness is also part and parcel of the mystical experience which has been defined by psychedelic scientists according to various criteria including a sense of oneness transcendence of time and space and no edit quality in a deeply felt positive mood okay so the non the non ordinary state of consciousness normally attained through psilocybin use in this case psychedelic use is just by the nature of the experience conducive to what I was talking about this this the testimony of Jesus or this disposition towards faith in Christ which enables a creative vision of the future and I'm saying that's kind of what revolution revelation is so let's see oh well it's just my last slide it's not going but there we go okay in conclusion Mormonism mandates the pursuit of personal revelation as an answer to the problem of centralized community communal authority psychedelic medicine offers a safe and reliable means of experiencing deeply revelatory states of consciousness Mormons interested in receiving either personal or communally authoritative revelation should therefore understand psychedelic medicine as a sacred technology a tool that can be used in the quest to understand the divine thank you hello hello thank you Joseph would you also include less sexy psychedelic medications like antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications and bipolar medications in this realm or do you have I don't want to use a nasty word like puritanical but like a purity problem with those types of things because they're not as natural oh well I'm a natural versus synthetic no I don't think they're I don't there is a there's a lot of people that think the natural substances like mushrooms that psilocybin is like the the pure thing and the synthesized things like LSD is not I'm I don't feel that way but in terms of the antidepressants and other kinds of medications I think that those aren't defined those don't fall under the scope of the definition of psychedelic medicine hallucinogenic there's a couple things I should probably know some of the list be able to list some of the features but but yeah so no I don't think that antidepressants are considered psychedelic medicine just by definition not by uppity nuts or anything how do normal people get signed up for psilocybin trials like that yeah no I think that it's a the it's really hard I mean there's only been a few hundred people in these trials so so you know I think there's a legalization process there's cultural movement towards that but no they're not accessible I mean even the ketamine assisted psychotherapy that we do you have to be indicated that it's a prescription and and so yeah there's an accessibility issue with that for sure that's where my question was going we have a new law passed in Utah just to this latest legislative session to try to open up to some experimentation at least here in the state of Utah and of course Oregon has its laws but I was wondering how you operate in Arizona because I'm not aware of any such law in Arizona yeah well so we're a licensed practice and so we're not we don't do anything that is illegal so we have a ketamine a cap clinic ketamine assisted psychotherapy and we're you know developing protocols there in anticipation for other medicines as they become available hopefully but yeah that's a big a big time open question I mean if we were involved with a trial a research trial that was approved we may be able to do some of the work at our practice but we haven't pursued that really yet so thanks Joey