Episode 194 Dr. James Fadiman – You Are Not One Self: Microdosing, Multiplicity and the Mind

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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Human Experience Podcast. My name is Xavier Katana, and today we’re going beyond the comfortable answers to confront ideas, contradictions, and defining moments that shape who we become.

Expect an honest conversation, challenging perspectives, and questions that might change how you see yourself and the world around you.

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The human experience is in session. My guest for today is Dr. Jim Fadiman. He is a psychologist, author, researcher, and one of the most influential voices in the modern study of psychedelics and consciousness. He earned his bachelor’s degree at Harvard.

and his master’s and doctorate in psychology at Stanford, where his graduate work examined LSD, perception, and therapeutic change. He later helped establish the field of transpersonal psychology, and co-founded the institution now known as Sophia University.

He’s the author of The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide and with Jordan Gruber, Your Symphony of Selves and Microdosing for Health and Healing and Enhanced Performance. Jim, it’s a pleasure. Welcome back to HXP.

Well, it’s wonderful to be back. It’s been 11 years and we can now continue our conversation.

11 years, can you believe that? I mean, that is an immense amount of time.

it just… it expands so quickly, you don’t know where it goes. You close your eyes, and it’s gone.

Well, when you’re working with psychedelics, time has a… it stretches a bit.

So we have enough time to do what we’re here to do.

Right. And we’re going to get into psychedelics. I first want to talk about your book, Symphony of Selves, because you make some very interesting, what would you call them? Just takes or.

uh… comments that you… you… you… you say that we have multiple selves, that there’s more than one person inside of our head. Um… you think that this assumption might be wrong.

what does that mean? How did… first of all, how did you move from the study of psychedelics to this idea of multiplicity?

I’m not sure that they were necessarily connected. I believe that, um…

Simply, when you work with psychedelics, you are very interested in consciousness.

other people’s and your own, and when you begin to notice that your consciousness is not.

is not kind of coherent, that it doesn’t necessarily make sense that you make mistakes, that you do things which in the moment you know are wrong, and you do them.

You find yourself apologizing for something that another part of you really did.

And you then begin to look at not the theories.

Because theories are inherently restrictive in what they.

They suggest, and theorists are even worse.

Because they get defensive if you suggest their theory is inadequate.

So I tended to rely on experience.

bolstered, then, by looking for examples throughout, first of all, the psychological area, where I knew something, and then with my co-author, Jordan Gruber, we looked at the possibility.

That if the self were indeed multiple, at least the healthy self, that we would find evidence in other thinkers, in other systems, in other disciplines.

And so we did.

So it became then so self-evident.

I’m.

That we wondered, how did anyone ever miss it?

Hmm, I mean, it’s a really interesting perspective to take that we have more than oneself, like, what distinguishes this idea from.

A dissociative identity disorder. What’s the difference?

Yes, notice the term that you use, disassociation.

This association was how the self was, how the mental illness was viewed.

And that’s what Freud began to learn about in his early career. And we’ll see what happened when he changed his mind. But disassociation is… suggests, obviously, that health is association.

If you think of a telephone cord or a cord that has a lot of little wires inside it.

Each of those is individual, but the thing itself, when it’s wrapped in insulation, is a single thing which we call, you know, my cord, and I plug it in, and it has a lot of different attributes. So physically imagine.

That your mind is a complicated set of those cords, and that there is a certain amount of communication between them, and there is a certain amount of ignorance between them as well.

That looks like what people report about their own inner life.

Mmhm.

Mm-hmm. I mean, please continue, like, so, what makes a self different rather than a mood that I might be in, or a social role, or a temporary brain state?

Well, let me give you a kind of classic one-line answer to a question which I know you’ll come to, which is, can I show myself that I’m not a unified being?

Okay?

Mm-hmm.

Now.

Now here’s here goes ready.

I’m ready.

Have you ever argued with yourself?

Absolutely.

And do we assume that that’s true of most of the people we’ve ever met?

I mean, I would presume that that is the case for most people, sure.

Who is the other person?

I mean, that’s a great question. I… I don’t… I’ve never distinguished, I’ve never… I’ve never actually placed that. It’s always been just a… my own voice in my head.

Yes, but who’s it speaking to?

It’s myself, it’s me.

So you are speaking to yourself, is that right?

Right.

That’s all I’m saying. Are both of those you?

Yes.

Are there other things that you have noticed about yourself that there’s that kind of space where you’re observing yourself? You ever observe yourself?

Yeah, of course.

Have you ever noticed, for instance, when you’re lying and you know you’re lying?

Right. Yeah.

Part of…

continues to lie.

Part of you has a probably different moral position about it.

Right?

Sure.

Okay, so now we have established that, at least in your case and in mine, that there is a dialogue inside the mind.

that actually is very important for a healthy flexible mind to have.

Remember, evolution…

Doesn’t really care about your theory, but it cares about your survival.

And it turns out it is better if an organism can fully be in different directions at different times.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Now, let me give you the other kind of visual.

And it’s wonderful when you see it.

There and now and then before AI, this actually you saw it. The story is the woman and her child are out in the front yard and the child wanders off.

And the next thing she notices is that the child is in the street.

And a car…

whose brakes have failed in some way, is slowly rolling towards the child.

Okay.

She runs out.

The now, just before the wheel starts to crush her child, she picks up the back of the car, grabs her child, and puts the car back down.

Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Then, this is a real case, the National Enquirer.

a a.

a kind of sensationalistic magazine some years ago, comes up to her with the photographer.

And says, is this really what happened? And she says, that’s exactly what happened.

And then they say, well, would you mind just picking the car up so we can get a photograph?

And she looks at them, and she says, I weigh 132 pounds. There’s no way I could possibly lift that car.

Mmhm.

And they say.

Well, because I’ve actually dealt with these guys, they said, well, could you just kind of pretend you’re doing it?

Mm-hmm.

So what’s going on for that person? Why that what happened when it was clearly something beyond her strength and her understanding of her strength?

Now, we also see it.

And in a less kind of emotionally, you know, charming way, when someone playing American football.

Has a brain concussion and continues to play.

Or breaks a collarbone and continues to play.

Right.

What happens is some part of disassociation occurs.

So that the person who wants to continue playing is able to, and the part that has to deal with the injury is… is basically not given the center stage for a while.

Now, again, let’s go back, because you used that nice word, disassociation. That was the way.

people thought of mental illness was when the parts.

Stopped associating, stopped helping each other, stopped working in agreement.

And that ended up with a mental hospital. For instance, there’s a term we say of people who cut themselves. They’re known as cutters, okay?

And they literally harm themselves.

Mmhm.

A part of them doesn’t like that.

and a part of them has some other other need and that’s a that’s a very that’s called a mental illness.

Because the cells are not only not cooperating, they’re literally destroying.

The body.

Right.

Um, okay.

So what happened in psychology?

is that was generally understood, because it had a certain obviousness. People…

are aware of their own.

other selves, and their other selves… there isn’t, like, a dominant self. There isn’t, like, a super terrific, kind, smart, wonderful self at the center.

Mmhm.

It’s when you are doing things that you are aware of, particularly ones that go against your moral code, you’re aware that you need to.

to deal with that, to make amends with that, to make it work for you.

You know, um…

What do we say? Oh, I love the term and we have it in English. I was beside myself.

What does that mean?

Yeah, that’s a good question.

Well, I know I’m supposed to be answering the questions. But hey, I’m pushing you a little here, because it’s these kinds of.

inner restrictions that say, well, but there has to be just oneself.

Well, there has to be a flat earth or else we would fall off if it was round.

But that’s not true.

Mmhm.

So…

I always opt for what seems to be visible.

palpable, emotionally understandable, rather than a theory which somehow negates that.

So, if I can observe my different selves, then what part of me, or who is observing? Who’s doing the observing?

Well, um, one famous author whose name I lost at the moment says, all I do in my mind is I bring together.

the board of directors.

And they let me attend the meeting, in my mind, when we are discussing something of importance.

So that’s a metaphor of what the way he was seeing his own mind.

As if there were a number of.

I’m.

parts of it that had different agendas. Have you ever been in a relationship with another person that you were either turned on to, or more than that, and another part of you thought this was the damnedest foolish thing you’d ever seen?

Mm-hmm, yeah, sure.

And we don’t… and as you know, if you look back through your life, sometimes the part of you that said, this is ridiculous, won out, and sometimes the part of you that said, I don’t care.

I want it.

And that that comes out. Okay.

These are just a number of examples so that you can begin to look at yourself.

There’s no evidence.

That there is a single, unified self.

there is considerable evidence that there is divisions within the human psyche, and I use the term selves because.

they… they… that’s the way they think of themselves. The person in you who says.

I know this is going to be terrible, but I want that woman, and I’m going to do something really terrible. It’s going to ruin a relationship, but I want, want, want.

Okay. We know that person.

Mmhm.

That person thinks they’re a real person. They don’t think they’re a part or a mood or a expression or an emotion.

they think that’s who I am right now, and there’s a part of me that’s a stick in the mud that says, she’s married, you can’t have her, it’s illegal, whatever it is.

And those parts have equal valence.

Just as a board of directors, everyone gets one vote. Now, in the real board of directors, people who have a large ownership in the company get more than one vote, but everyone has one vote.

So that seems to be the way it is.

And then once, if that’s so, where would we see it? And then the rest of the whole book.

Basically says, well, let’s go to poetry, let’s go to religion, let’s go to philosophy, let’s go to metaphysics, let’s go to a whole lot to literature.

um…

And let’s see if we can find it. Now, let me just give you one that, again, we all know, Jekyll and Hyde.

Jekyll and Hyde is the story of a person who has oneself, who’s.

what we would call a normal straight person and oneself that’s really quite terrible.

Mm-hmm.

And the story…

Which came to the author.

in a kind of a dream state. He did not think this through. He saw this… this…

this difficulty.

and wrote it out and it became immeasurably popular.

Because people could…

Relate to it.

Okay.

Yeah.

So you’re saying that we have these different parts of ourselves that we move in and out of and come out of us at different moments in time, and we can argue with them, can have a conversation with them in our in our own heads.

And, I mean, what does that conclude? You say that modern psychology has missed something, or gotten something completely wrong. What did it get wrong, or what did it miss?

Well, um, what happened, and let’s do a little history. Remember, I said Freud and the other people around him, um, who were discovering what we would call modern psychopathology.

And dealing… basically, they all got it. And the question for them was.

In the mental hospital, you could see the disassociation.

And the question was, from the people who worked in mental hospitals, they said, yes, of course there is disassociation, there are these parts, but only in pathology.

The people in the world, like, say, William James, who didn’t deal with pathology, said no.

We see it in everyone. Because we’re actually looking at everyone, we’re not focusing only on the pathology. We’re also looking at the person who’s the.

Who’s observing the pathology?

And this is a very…

It’s hard for people.

I’m remembering I was asked to give a talk about this kind of thing at a mental hospital.

Uh, to the… to some… some subgroup that invited me.

And I showed up and I was in the elevator and there was a little poster on the back of the elevator.

and said, you know, Dr. James Fadiman, 3 o’clock, room etchette, and it didn’t have the title of my talk. It had a different title that was kind of a vanilla title.

you know, advances in understanding psychopathology, which is who would ever bother to go to that if you’re in a mental hospital. Okay.

And I looked at that, and I wondered.

And I turned to my host and said, what is this? She said, there’s a unit here.

where they specialize in multiple personality as a severe pathology.

We didn’t want them to know you’re here.

Because they really are deeply committed that only their patients have this inner division.

Mm-hmm.

Kind of like, you know, like going into a church and taking the doorway of a church and pounding on it, as Martin Luther did, with a list of things that the church wasn’t doing very well.

Not surprising the church didn’t like that.

So, so when you have… remember, if you have a theory that you’ve spent time and energy creating.

Right.

or buying into.

And someone says, you know, the only problem with your theory is it’s not true.

You’re for most people.

at least in this in the mental health world, their first response is defensiveness.

So once you can see that you have something you said made them defensive, you then get to look at what’s going on.

And that’s why I came up with that little… that little moment of, do you ever quarrel with yourself?

Once you get that you are clearly you on both sides, but they’re really a genuine argument.

It becomes much easier.

to take in the rest of what I’m saying.

Right.

Now, again, what happened to Freud is suddenly he said, oh, no, there’s no disassociation.

It’s only a self, and there’s a… there… well, there’s kind of a disassociation, but we won’t call it that. There’s an ego, there’s an id, there’s a superego. So, yeah, there are parts of the psyche, but not the way you’re talking about it, where they have some kind of, um…

stature and understanding of each other.

What happened?

Mmhm.

Well, what happened, and this is a little technical, is part of Freud’s early theory was that this… his clients, young children, a number of them.

reported being sexually either excited or abused.

by their parents.

Mmhm.

Now, understand this is now turn of the century Vienna. It’s not exactly the 60s.

This is a very uptight culture.

This is the culture where you could live with your wife for your entire 40, 50 years of marriage and never see her naked, okay?

Wow.

And they had certain night dresses which had slits in them should you want to do something together.

Okay.

OK. OK.

So here is Freud seeing these children with their childhood memories of sexual impropriety.

But.

These are the children of his clients, of his social set, of his friends.

There’s a dilemma.

And he resolves it by a very nice sleight of hand, which is, yes.

Everything they told me, I can understand from my theory, but it was all in their imagination.

They had a fantasy.

of one or the other of their parents being sexual with them.

And with that, for some reason, disassociation went away too.

And Freud kept to his three-sided self without ever.

really pointing out that this was just a kind of bizarre way of describing the way people really were.

So there we are.

So, explain to me what happens when one part of ourselves becomes destructive or dangerous to itself.

First of all.

The rest of the cells try to prevent it from, like, literally killing them.

I’m thinking of someone who.

Um.

This is a real case.

Person is in therapy and he is has not told.

his therapist that there’s a part of him which is very pathological.

And the pathological one says to him.

If you tell him, I’m gonna hurt you.

And he tells him, and then he wakes up, and there are cuts on his arms.

Okay.

Mmhm.

That’s a real problem. That’s what psychopathology is. It’s a part of you that is really dangerous.

and needs professional help. You may have to drug the whole body.

Or lock it up.

In order to protect yourself.

That’s what the notion is in a mental hospital, is you are there to be protected from some part of you that’s too dangerous.

So the mental hospital is… and how do you know when you’re…

when they let you out.

Okay, when I was teaching graduate students in psychology, I said, okay, here is your…

Your conundrum for the day. You have admitted yourself to a mental hospital, you have pretended you’re a patient, because you really want to study what goes on inside a mental hospital.

Mm-hmm.

um and you are there for a couple of months and then you’ve gotten your notes and you’re going to get your thesis or your novel or whatever it is and you then go up to the lead doctor and say excuse me I’m actually not a a crazy person I’m a sane person and I would like to go out.

And then can you guess what happens next?

They’re told they’re wrong, you know, they’re crazy.

Right?

So, here was the problem I gave my graduate students. How do you prove.

To this, in a mental hospital, that you are sane.

It’s very hard to do.

And what…

Well, what you get is the system is rigged.

The system is rigged.

Okay.

you know, what is a… um, well, we’re seeing it today. We’re seeing, you know, the ICE says, you know, you’re an alien, you’re a criminal, and we’re gonna throw you into something which resembles a medieval dungeon.

And you say.

Actually, I’m a citizen. I’m a voter, and I live with such and such. And they say.

We don’t have to believe you.

And if you say that again, we’re going to hit you.

Okay?

So a system that protects itself.

has pathology as an unsolved, unresolved problem.

And what we’ve done in psychology and psychotherapy and psychiatry and medications is to try to work with those parts of us.

So they are either calmed down or helped or improved or in some cases there is an actual effort to kill them.

And I mention that in that way because if you think of them as your inner family.

Which one?

will voluntarily kill itself.

Because the others think it’s a good idea. Nobody.

So the problem is when you have… then there are pathologies where the pathology is that I am separate from the rest of you, and I can kill you, and I will. Well, we have to hospitalize all of us.

to do that.

So what I’m saying — and I don’t want to stay with pathology because normal human behavior is far more interesting.

is how do you notice when you have made a shift from self to self?

Let me give you a very simple example. Do you have a pet?

No.

Okay, have you ever had a pet?

Yes.

Okay, dog?

Cat.

Okay, when you spoke to your cat, did you use the same tone in which you’re speaking to me?

No.

Why not?

Because it’s my cat.

Right? Because your cat.

needed to be spoken to in a way that the cat understood.

Okay?

So have you ever spoken to a part of yourself?

In that same way where you needed to have a different tone, because there’s no rule of thumb that says all the parts of you are either the same age or the same sex, even.

I’m just thinking of a very powerful case that was written up.

This was what’s called a true multiple, which is they really were very, very separate.

um…

And.

The separations were so ex… were… were…

The person was in the hospital.

kind of prison hospital because they had raped someone. This was a male body.

Hmm. Okay.

And as we discover more and more of who the inner world is, it turns out that it was a female.

within the self that was actually the rapist.

of a female.

So it got very complicated and it made a very fascinating book.

But it simply suggested, because among the alters, as they called them.

Mmhm.

There were some who spoke different languages.

Right.

There were two different artists. One only did portraits, and the only one would never do portraits. It was just too frightening.

So when we see that in pathology, all pathology is is extreme cases of normality.

So, for instance, if I am interested in.

and say photography, and I’m down somewhere, and there’s something interesting happening in the sky, and I really want to do that a lot.

I am…

Healthy enough so that either I will do it or I will.

somehow kind of rationalize with other parts of me that it’s inappropriate to do that right now. It’s not a pathology, it’s that I happen to love a sky that is an extraordinary experience, and I’d love to preserve it.

There’s no pathology there.

There’s no pathology when part of me wants to go to the gym and work out and part of me doesn’t.

There’s no illness. There’s nothing wrong with that.

what I would call normal, sane behavior, which is you work it out.

If you don’t understand that there are parts of you.

two things happen. One is you excessively blame yourself for things that one of yourselves did wrong, and the other, which is probably more common, is you blame someone else entirely.

for something they that one of their selves did at one time.

Many families…

We’re now moving into fall. We’re going to have Thanksgiving. We invite the family, but we don’t invite Uncle Abner.

Why not?

Say some of the kids we love over Amber. He’s funny, he gives us jokes, he brings little secret candies.

25 years ago.

He cheated.

Me, the father, in a business deal.

I’ve never forgiven him.

Okay.

How much of him?

even 25 years ago, was this the entire being? Was this just one bunch of cheating?

Wrapped up with a few legs at the bottom.

Right.

Of course!

It was a part of Uncle Abner that couldn’t resist.

And let’s assume that the father’s totally right here, okay? That Abner couldn’t resist taking advantage of some weakness in the father, okay?

Mmhm.

Now, I don’t know about your family, but I know that there are one or two members of my family who stopped talking to the rest of us for various reasons.

And I think my brother said it very nicely about a cousin.

He said, “Cousin John is really wonderful, except when we discuss real estate.

Now, we happen to be on the board of a very small real estate company.

And because his.

He was unable to behave very well in that setting.

And things worked out so that he was thrown out of the company.

And a number of people stopped talking to him.

He was a lovely, charming, interesting guy.

Um, PhD in English, uh, fascinated by, um, he would, he…

volunteered, he also became a lawyer, he volunteered to help people in prison who couldn’t afford lawyers.

And lots of people didn’t talk to him.

Not an unusual story.

It happens a lot.

Well, it particularly happens if you assume.

that if someone does one thing wrong the entire being therefore has to be rejected.

Now, it doesn’t make sense. Now, if you have children.

You know better.

I actually have… I mean, I actually have dogs that have no moral sense at all. They steal from each other.

and the one that is, you know… and they steal back from each other. And the only fights they’ve ever had, we’ve had them for about 10 years, has been over stealing food at the wrong time.

When the other dog really hadn’t finished, like, biting it.

And suddenly there’s this massive amount of barking and snarling and so forth.

where the social structure breaks down now they steal from each other when it’s when they can.

But we don’t punish anyone. One is they don’t know the term stealing, they just know I’m a dog, and that’s what dogs do with each other.

And two is, um, we are aware of the multiplicity inside animals as well.

And if anyone has ever had a pet, particularly a cat, cats are wonderful for letting you know.

that you’re a wonderful person, or get your goddamn hands off me right this second, I’m gonna slash you, and you’ll never, you know, use that thumb again.

Right.

Right?

Yeah.

But do we say that cats have inner multiplicity? No.

Because if we don’t have inner multiplicity, certainly cats don’t.

So how does trauma affect this whole perspective?

Well, trauma is an injury to.

certain let’s say in some percentage of the whole set of beings.

I mean, that’s kind of like saying, well.

There’s eight of us in the apartment house and there’s a fire on the first floor, but it’s only affecting one bedroom.

Don’t worry about it.

Okay, we don’t do that.

We say, no, a fire affects the entire structure. We all have to cooperate and try and help.

And if one of us happens to have set the fire, then we have to do something to restrict that person.

And when you begin to study.

what happens inside of people in reality, very often there are what are called kind of imprisoned parts of the self that nobody wants to let them out.

Again, often in more severe pathology where everything is just more visible.

Remember, pathology is not like, oh, different.

You know, it’s like red is different than yellow.

It’s not that there’s well you got to really understand that yellow is honestly red it just has had a very hard childhood okay it’s not true.

The parts have agency.

And so forth.

They also are very helpful.

Because you have parts that are very… I’m afraid to confront this person.

But I’m not. I’ll do it. Okay.

And then you confront that person and you say, wow, I didn’t know I had that in me. Remember that phrase?

Mm-hmm, yeah.

English, when you look at how language is used, it’s trying to express what people actually experience.

So those are where you find some clues.

Now let’s be another thing is people talk about being in a.

state in which they’re able to be creative.

um…

and this will show you how old I am, it used to be that writers often would say, before I can settle down to writing, I sharpen 8 or 10 pencils.

Which means you knew what a pencil sharpener was, and you knew maybe what a pencil was.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

What they were saying is they were getting in the mood.

They were getting into the place in themselves in which they could, say, write or paint.

And we all understood that.

In fact, we have another, we have that term.

What is… what do we normally mean? What’s a conventional sense? I’m… I’m not in the mood, or I’m in the mood. What.

Want a hint?

Yeah, I’m.

Okay.

What are we talking about?

Here, I’ll give you the hint. Honey, I’m not in the mood, okay?

Right. I think I know what we’re talking about.

So…

And we, who are in the mood, okay, that part of ourselves has to then deal with the reality that it’s not going to go the way it’s intended.

Okay.

So we deal with ourselves all the time and not understanding that makes life very puzzling.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. So, would you say that major life transitions, like adolescence, parenthood, war.

grief, things… do that… do those things create new versions of ourselves?

Or new cells, perhaps. And the answer is, we don’t really know.

New selves.

Because selves don’t know when they’ve come into existence any more than you remember birth.

But we see in healthy people.

They… they cooperate with their inner selves, whether they’re aware of it or not. Pathology is usually a break… it’s like a family breakdown.

There’s a term in psychology when you deal with a family.

Somebody in the family is called the identified patient.

Okay.

Yeah, I’ve heard of this.

And in plain, in personal psychotherapy, the identified patient is who the therapist sees.

And therefore, the view of the family is entirely from that point of view. If you do family therapy, which is much, much harder, because everyone gets mad at you for.

calling them on their stuff.

The identified patient usually is not the sickest person in the family.

But a family dynamic.

Um, imagine…

You’ve grown up in a family and there’s like three kids and you’re say the middle kid who gets neglected.

And you’re not doing as well in school as your siblings are doing.

And so your parents say, well, it’s okay, you’re just not as smart as they are.

Okay.

Now…

you understand that the child has to bring that into reality.

How do you?

How do you begin to see that if you’re not as smart as your brothers, maybe the easiest way to understand that is you’re not smart.

And…

Your grades then will begin to show that.

Let me give you the opposite story because it’s one in my family.

I have an older brother.

And he was, um…

until maybe fifth, sixth, seventh grade, I’m not sure, an average student.

And if you said to him, are you smart? He says, no, I’m just average.

And if we looked at his report card, and there were report cards, which had, like, 10 or 12 little items. There were content items, it was, it was, how were you at recess? Um, how were you with other kids? How were you in geometry? How were you in, in history?

And you had like A, B, C, D, E, F.

And he had basically, if you looked at one of his report cards, it was C’s in everything.

He was average in everything.

And he had proof.

Mm-hmm.

We couldn’t push him because, hey, I’m just average.

Okay?

Then he read a book about really smart collie dogs.

a writer named Albert Payson Tourillon, and their dogs always were doing things like, what’s… what do you need? What are you doing? Oh, you’re taking me in this direction. Okay, we’re going a mile and a half. Oh, there’s little Johnny stuck under the tree. My God, Lassie, you’re so helpful.

Okay.

Those kind of stories where the dog is always terrific.

And my brother said to my parents, I want a dog.

I want a dog like in the Albert Payson Tourjean books.

And my parents said.

They said, I don’t know if they said it quite this way, we don’t really want a dog.

And my brother said, please, please, please, just as nagging as he could be. And my parents…

Said, okay, but you have to get three A’s on your next report card.

My brother collapsed in tears.

because that was impossible because he was average.

And he had the statistical proof.

And he wanted a dog.

He wanted a dog very much.

Guess what his next report card looks like?

Straight A’s.

Not quite.

It was close.

And we got this not really very smart, but very sweet colleague.

Okay, now what happened is his cover had been blown.

He now speaks, I think, four or five languages. He has, I think, three master’s degrees and a PhD.

Oh.

He’s written a — he’s actually a member of an African tribe because he created the only history that that tribe ever had.

That was his dissertation.

In short, he got stuck.

Once he wasn’t average a whole lot of other things had to change.

Now, do I believe that he thought he was average?

I do.

He did.

You know, it made sense. Someone, you know, if you look at any group of people, somebody has to be average.

But if you’re seeing that the self is quite pliable and that other selves are around, it makes it easier to understand.

Yeah, I mean, I’m starting to get it. I think I get it. So, you know, I have a good question, I think, is, you know, is this illusion that we’re a single, separate self related to another illusion that we’re somehow separate from other people?

From nature and from the world around us.

That’s part, but how did we get to that? Well, one of the unfortunate sources of misinformation was Christianity.

that Christianity.

takes the position that you’re you know there’s only one God very bizarre position at that time in the world.

And here was the very fascinating part of Christianity. All the others were wrong.

So everyone’s wrong except you that has only one God. And if there’s only one God, it’s not unreasonable to assume there’s only one self.

Mmhm.

And things go downhill from there.

So, when we were… when Jordan and I were working on this book on cells.

The problem for us.

was how much could we kind of put into the book without making it monstrous.

Because since it looks that way, once you start looking at it, you see it everywhere.

It’s like once you see.

that the world has got a lot of injustice, it becomes more visible.

If you’re a biologist or a…

or mycologist, you begin to see, say, mold in places you would never have noticed it because you don’t know how to look for mold.

So we specialize.

And the reason that we wrote the book is it makes life saner. And also, there are two things that happen. Once you understand that you have a number of selves.

One is you can forgive yourself.

Okay.

Right.

Um.

Just thinking of something dishonest I did that I’m up for confessing and I have not reached that level of.

of humility. But I can remember things I did that were dishonest.

Am I proud of them? No.

Would I do them today? I hope not.

The person who did them totally understood the necessity of doing them.

Well, actually I will give you one.

I was interested in psychedelics. I was in graduate school at Stanford University. This was during Vietnam.

My reason for being in graduate school was about 85% not to be…

drafted and sent to Vietnam and 15% some interest.

And I became fascinated with psychedelics and what they said about things like spiritual systems, psychodynamic systems, art, philosophy.

And my psychology professors didn’t have much background in any of those, and didn’t have any interest.

And I didn’t want to say too much about what was… I was really thinking, or they might…

realistically say to themselves, he really isn’t…

he doesn’t like what we’re doing, he doesn’t believe in our religion, so to speak, and if we throw him out, it’s not our problem if he goes to Vietnam.

So.

I didn’t respect them.

Because I didn’t think they knew much of what interested me, and so I wrote.

A paper for a class.

And then there was another class, and I thought, well, I could use that paper. I actually used the same paper for four classes. I just put a different header on it. And it reinforced my feeling that they didn’t know much.

Mmhm.

And I was considered a perfectly good student.

So one uses parts of the self.

Judiciously.

Just as if there was — if you were running a company and you have 25 employees, they don’t all do the same thing. That’s ridiculous.

You pick the ones that best at what they do and you help them do that better. That’s the same as inside of yourself.

Right. Jim, we’re approaching the end of the first hour, um, you know, and I have to bridge this into psychedelics, or I’m gonna get a bunch of comments saying, why didn’t you talk about psychedelics with the person who.

Like that.

who…

Founded basically you’re the father of microdosing, so how does it relate when a person takes a psychedelic and this idea about our inner self?

Well, let’s briefly go through high-dose psychedelics, which is.

what got them banned.

And what you discover at one layer, as you’re letting go of your identity, as you understood it, you can see other parts of yourself, you can accept parts of yourself, and then you realize that all of these selves are part of a larger.

Kind of, um…

family, or company, or cooperative. And then that also can dissolve into seeing that you’re actually connected.

to the actual physical world. And you asked at some point earlier on about connecting to nature.

And one of the things that is clear in most psychedelic sessions that have any outdoors is you identify with being part of the natural environment.

Now.

To Indigenous people, it sounds like.

It’s kind of the most obvious dumbest thing in the world. Oh, you found out that when you breathe in and breathe out that the air is kind of all around you.

When you are in the natural world and understand that you’ve always been in the natural world, it is, for many of us, a revelation.

And then you begin to let go of that identity.

And that the natural world is simply made up of organisms that all are made out of energy.

And that you are made out of energy, and that at this moment.

I’m in a physical human body, but at the edges of my body, my skin, there’s atoms flying off of skin.

There’s also atoms flying in. I’m breathing in.

So I’m part of a dynamic that is that is incredibly obvious when you get the identity and identities out of the way.

So imagine that you’ve grown up.

In a very nice house, but the windows have all been blacked out.

And for some reason, somebody leaves the door open.

and you go out and there you are at the beach.

And you are aware that suddenly you are part of this much larger world.

which includes the ocean, which is larger than you can envision.

Well, with psychedelics, you can let go of the house.

That you were brought up in. And you can let go of that you’re separate from the beach.

And then you begin to realize that.

The part of your organism is always dying and always being reborn, and then, wait a moment, if that’s true of a small part of the organism, could that be of the mind itself?

Now, there happened to be…

seriously thoughtful religious experiences, and like Buddhism, which suggests that the self is an illusion.

And that you are part of everything.

Now…

Intellectually, being part of everything is not hard.

when you actually are part of everything it’s like.

It couldn’t possibly be any other way.

And when you return back to being somewhat.

um, identified with this little puddle of flesh. You recall that you… you don’t recall really what you experienced, but you recall that you remember having had that experience.

So that’s high doses, okay?

So the self or selves becomes a subset.

Yep.

So that Jim Fadiman speaking.

PhD, blah, blah, blah.

is a subset of a larger being, which includes all the Jim Fadimans, and probably existed before and may exist after him.

just as a tree.

doesn’t, you know, each apple.

Doesn’t just say I’m a tree.

It says, well, I’m kind of part of a tree, but I also am separate, okay?

So there we are. So microdosing has nothing to do with any of that. Microdosing is, it turns out, simply…

enhances.

the awareness of your own.

Thoughts?

and feelings, and it also enhances the physical body.

to…

Function.

in a healthier manner. So, literally, at the cellular level, it seems to, um, correct imbalances.

Mmhm.

Literally, when people say, when you say to yourself, gee.

I feel better or I feel good. What feels good?

Well, literally, when you’re physically saying that, if you’re coming out, say, from a cold, or from an operation, or a quarrel.

Huh, I feel better.

Everything feels great.

Microdosing seems to work at that level. It doesn’t have any visual excitement. There are no giant anacondas that eat you like with ayahuasca. There’s no revelations of your trauma really.

relates to your grandparents’ trauma that they never told you about. There’s no great insights.

But if you feel better.

And your depression goes away.

or your neuropathy goes away.

Or…

a number of other conditions stop getting in the way of the body being better. Um, you will find that microdosing is probably.

the safest and easiest way to do that.

Mmhm.

So let me give you an example which is many people who are listening have either are on, were on, know people who are on antidepressants. Okay they really should be called emotional suppressants because that’s what they actually do.

For most, for many people, they don’t work well.

And for people, they work well, they find it’s hard to get rid of them.

Okay, so there’s some problems.

But if you’re depressed.

You’d rather be…

If you understand antidepressants, you would rather be less depressed and the cost of that is also being less happy.

So a lot of people on antidepressants say, yeah, I don’t feel as bad about bad things, but I don’t feel good about good things.

Either.

Microdosing works differently.

People who are what we call…

They’re what we call depression resistant. They’re resistant to treatment, which means the things that they were offered didn’t work.

So what we get is somebody microdoses because they’ve been depressed, and within a week or two, they.

Are not only feeling less bad, as they would with antidepressants, but they’re feeling more good.

So they’re feeling less sad and more glad. And the statement…

that I’ve gotten in literally several hundred reports over the years.

It feels like I’m back.

I’m back to the person I was before I was depressed, and before I had antidepressants.

That’s remarkable.

Now, that’s mental… see, mental illness is a kind of funny game, which is…

Some place, 20, 30, 40 years ago, someone said, hey, what if mental illness were really physical?

What if depression was a physiological problem that we could.

handle with a medication.

Well, that doesn’t make any sense at all, because depression is your whole life, and it’s about your past, and it’s… well, let’s just try.

And so we’ve had a series of antidepressants were a improvement over something that was much worse that had lifetime negative physical effects.

But it was a notion if we can make mental illness, which is kind of ethereal, into a.

theory into it by a theory that it’s all physical. Everything’s physical.

Then we can…

give you physical things.

Now, when you have an antidepressant, if you have an honest.

Mmhm.

broker here.

And you say, well, how long will I be using this? He says, well, if it helps you for the rest of your life.

Now, what he doesn’t say, and if it doesn’t help you, after a while, you won’t be able to stop taking it anyway.

Talk about incredible marketing. Imagine you’ve got a product that you buy forever.

Whether it works or whether it doesn’t.

Fantastic.

What happens with microdosing is with depression, for many, many people, they say after four to six weeks.

Wow, I’m not depressed.

That’s really wonderful.

Thank you, microdosing.

And they get on with their lives. Other people, it turns out.

Do the same thing and but a few weeks later depression creeps back in.

So they microdose again.

Now, when I was first faced with this, I thought, because I had a friend who I…

Told about it, and she microdosed her way out of a long depression.

And she got so excited, she turned on all her depressed friends.

And then six weeks later, she gave me this problem. Why are some of my friends saying they’re not depressed? Thank you very much. And others of my friends are saying, well, my depression’s coming back. Should I microdose again?

And I thought that is an ideal experiment that is so terrific from the sciency side.

So I…

And she said, well, why do you think there’s a difference? And I, being a real scientist, inside, said, I have the faintest idea.

But since I’m also…

someone who just is interested in other people’s points of view, particularly when they have more information. I said, well, they’re your friends. What do you think is the difference between those two groups? And we talked for a while.

And what she said was.

oh you know the friends of mine who.

Stop being depressed.

their lives were working pretty well and my friends who their depression returned their lives aren’t working very well.

So, therefore, we began to understand.

The difference between some conditions can just be healed and others have to be approached differently.

Right.

I mean, the last time that we talked, microdosing was less of a trend and something people were experimenting with. And now, you know, there are studies conducted that you’ve conducted on.

Okay.

On microdosing and we have all this data that we can present that it is beneficial. There are companies that produce products that use substances that are not antidepressants to deal with depression.

like ketamine therapy.

Is, you know, you’ve spent a lifetime of work studying psychedelics, microdosing, and now the nature of the self. Is there a conclusion that you think.

Yup.

That we’ve gotten wrong like that’s.

Yeah, yeah.

Certainly not my idea, but one of the things that is common when Indigenous people.

Asked or asked.

I’m.

You lived in this forest for 10,000 years, and it’s better than ever.

We’ve been here 60 years and we’ve destroyed…

70% of the forest.

Would you like to advise us?

And they said, yeah, you made a fundamental error. You thought you were not also the forest.

You had a theory of identity.

that ended at the end of your fingertips.

You also.

Had another level where you denied the parts of yourself.

that were more open to this kind of normal understanding.

And you built whole systems to press yourself farther and farther away.

One from being in nature and two in being with each other.

So the two things are fundamentally connected.

Yeah, so the notion, remember we have a notion in the West that the highest form of being is an isolated individual.

I did it myself.

Right?

that… that, um… should one ever imagine that, as someone pointed out, oh, did you… what’d you do yourself? Well, I built this company from scratch.

Oh, really? Did you use any of the roads?

What do you mean?

You know, the roads that get to your place.

Did you use the electronics from somewhere?

Did the people you hired, did they go to, were there schools? Was that necessary? And so forth and so on. And it’s obvious that you didn’t do anything yourself.

Well.

That error…

gives you one unfortunate other thing, is I’m an isolated individual.

If I hurt you.

I’m not hurt.

Okay.

Imagine that.

You are a father, and your child does something that you disapprove of, and you hit them.

Hmm. Okay.

Doesn’t, no problem.

You’re not harmed.

And we know that’s false.

That you actually are in…

in, you know, interwoven with your child, whether you understand it or not.

So the fundamental error of the individual assuming they are individualized.

Instead of that they are porous, that they are able to understand that they are part of a matrix.

That they’re not necessarily a family, not necessarily a religious group or a nationality.

But if they at least walk outside.

Oh.

Well, it turns out that, um, one of the… one of the things we’re learning about depression is if you go and actually literally hug a tree.

that there’s an electrochemical.

Shift.

That’s measurable.

Uh, it isn’t that the tree is interested in healing you.

But there is something about getting back into a larger rhythm.

That is healing. Why do we want to go to the beach?

Why do we like the beach?

One of the reasons is there is something about being in a part of a very large thing.

That is…

that is releases us from our being individual. Because when you look at a, let’s say a sunset, we all agree, fabulous sunset. There’s very little of your identity in that awe.

It isn’t that, oh, that’s the way Jim Fadiman sees the sunset.

Gee, I bet if he were, you know, Danish, he would see it differently. We don’t do that.

We just relax and allow the natural reality that we cannot avoid being part of.

Um.

Become more visible.

And one of the things that happens with higher dose psychedelics is it’s easier to do that.

um…

I gave a talk somewhere, and a woman afterwards said, hey, Mr. Fadiman, I want to give you a word. I said, okay. Psychedelic.

I said, what’s a psychedelic?

She said, there’s a bunch of us that every quarter we get together and we take psychedelics and we take a hike.

And we go out in nature and we love it.

I thought she really…

got something very serious there. She understood that one of the things that she needed to break the illusion of separation was a psychedelic help.

So, that’s… if you’re answering, what’s our problem? Our problem is that we think other people, or other countries, or other races, or whatever it is, um, can be harmed without harming us.

Yeah, that’s huge.

And we’re now historically — because who knows when this will be heard — historically, we, the United States, have attacked another country. And they control a little teeny piece of the world, tiny piece of the street called the Strait of Hormuz.

The fifth of the world’s oil goes through.

And…

The country that was attacked said, you know.

We can’t handle that we’re being attacked by a country 100 times as strong as us militarily, but we control this little teeny bit of land, and we’re going to close it.

And it turns out that the rest of the world will suddenly notice.

that any constriction in the movement.

of a little bit of land constricts the whole world.

Yeah.

So… so that’s, again, that’s a kind of poetic way of looking at it, but the idea that you’re… that you can be unaffected by what… what you do to other people is the greatest of illusions.

That’s very profound. Beautiful. I love it. Jim, we’re reaching the end of the main part here. I want to wrap all of this together. You know, is there something that I could have asked you that I didn’t?

Can you give us a conclusion? Can you wrap, can you bow tie this all for us?

Reality just doesn’t work that way.

I love it. Yeah, I mean, you know, I finish a book, and at the end of a book.

Um, the nice thing about a kind of science-y book, you end all science books the same way, which is…

we know this much, but there’s a lot more to be known, and more research, and give thee more money, more research is necessary. That’s my favorite way, that’s the kind of religious end. You know, when you do a prayer, you end it and you say, Amen. When you write science, at the end you say.

And the words amen are spelled as we, more research is needed, meaning knowledge doesn’t get delineated, doesn’t end.

And one of the… when you’re reading the history of science, every once in a while, somebody gets to be famous in history for saying, well, we now know enough about all that. It’s pretty much over.

And there’s somebody really famous that says that about physics.

just before almost everything we know about physics becomes known.

Remember, we used to think that the Earth wasn’t — that everything around the Earth was secondary to the Earth.

We had the heliocentric model before that.

Yeah, and it looks that way.

Until you look more closely.

Or, if you have an experience.

Where you let go of that which prevents you from seeing the interrelationship of all things.

Now, then you come down usually from that experience, including if you’re a spiritual being with 20 years of experience, you still go in and out.

And then you have to say, well, if I believe my own experience, which felt more real than this.

I must try to live somewhat closer to that.

And that’s how we begin to make progress. Well, how about if I look at Uncle Abner, let’s go back to multiplicity, if I get that there’s part of Uncle Abner that’s just awful.

I can take that in along with Uncle Abner.

And then he can come back to Thanksgiving.

And he may even say, hey, 25 years ago, Bill, I cheated you on that house deal. I’ve been ashamed of that ever since.

Poof!

the barrier goes down so the barrier is there and you always can bring it down.

And that’s what’s fun about the work I’m doing.

Uh, with… with microdosing is people say, here’s a condition.

For which Western medicine and maybe even Eastern medicine says there’s no treatments, no medication, and no therapies. Let me give you one just as a nice puzzler to think about. Tourette’s syndrome, we’ve all seen a movie of somebody twitching.

and saying things. Okay, Tourette’s is a little more subdued than that, but it’s very real.

and no treatments, no medication, no therapies, and I get a letter from someone that says, you know, when I microdose.

And when I microdosed the first time.

I had an hour.

without any ticks.

Without any twitches.

The first hour I’ve had that since I was eight years old.

Mmhm.

That gets my attention.

That’s what I’m working on. And I am in touch with him, and he’s just wonderful.

And we’re… see, we’re exploring by letting go, for instance, of that psychedelics are about the mind, the mental.

That’s a…

Suddenly, you open the door.

And the door turns out, when you open doors, and you look out.

That’s step two. The third step is you step out. And then there’s a lot of other things that happen. So no conclusions.

But the doors are open.

And as someone said, if you if it looks like a wall.

It just might be a door in disguise. Try opening it.

I love that. Jim, I think we’re going to wrap the main episode here. Guys, for everyone listening, we’re going to wrap the main part of the show here, but Jim has graciously agreed to stay with us for a bonus conversation.

We’re going to get a little more personal, a little more curious, and wander into some places we haven’t explored yet. If you’ve enjoyed spending this time with us, and you’d like to keep going, you can join us in the bonus conversation at thehumanxp.com slash.

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