Alexander Beiner, author of The Bigger Picture, executive director of the Breaking Convention conference and a co-founder of Rebel Wisdom, talks with Pinchbeck in this excerpt from the Future of Consciousness course. Beiner participated in Imperial College's extended-state DMT study and contrasts two readings of the DMT realm: that its entities are genuinely autonomous, and the view associated with the Qualia Research Institute that the states correspond to shifting geometries of experience. He says his own interest has moved from that metaphysical question to practical application. He criticizes how far medicalization has crowded out the cultural and consciousness-change agenda of the earlier psychedelic underground, discusses the FDA's rejection of MDMA-assisted therapy as a setback for MAPS and Rick Doblin, and describes the psychedelic-assisted innovation work of the Minds organization founded by Bruce Damer.
Guest: Alexander Beiner
In brief
- Beiner says his extended-state DMT sessions left him with the conclusion that humans need to address their own problems before seeking information from entities.
- He argues that medicalization has absorbed most of the public bandwidth around psychedelics, narrowing them in the mainstream mind to mental health treatments.
- He attributes the FDA's decision not to approve MDMA for PTSD partly to campaigning by the group Psymposia, whose critique he says contained some valid points but was massively overblown.
- He recounts Bruce Damer's ayahuasca insight that life began in warm terrestrial pools rather than deep-sea hydrothermal vents, an idea Damer's team then published and which has redirected where NASA's Mars rovers look for life.
- He cites Kary Mullis's attribution of the polymerase chain reaction to LSD, while noting the claims about Francis Crick and the DNA double helix remain contested.
- He proposes a fourth wave of psychedelics built on reliable multi-day protocols that help experts in any field make progress on concrete problems such as solar panel design or education systems.
Full text
I know you're part of the Imperial College DMT study I know Anton who's a friend of mine who funded that study was really interested in this idea of like um validating the existence of entities whether there are some kind of subtle dimension in which uh entities that are maybe distinct from ourselves on some ultimate level communicating information to us um and then you have more people like um Andre from Andre sson name from qualia yeah who basically thinks that um you know the different DMT states are correlated to these different kind of like um geometries right like um and that ultimately it's not about an other it's just about these uh the different ways that your kind of neurological landscape gets kind of reconfigured as you go deeper which gives you know both a physical different physical experiences of a spatial inner reality and even a temporal experience also shifts with um yeah I'm just curious like what what do you think is happening right now uh around um you know this whole psychedelic movement and what it's kind of suggesting and revealing for the future of Consciousness yeah I mean so I mean look I yeah I was on the the DMT Extended State um study which I I I uh share some of the experiences in my book so I won't go into them in detail but um you know I was really curious about can we go into the DMT realm staying there for 40 minutes um you know multiple trips in and come back with useful information and in a sense yes but also the main message I got was like we have to sort our own out before getting information from Aliens or entities whatever they may be right so I'm my while I think it's very interesting philosophically to explore DMT entities and the nature of them and I celebrate it and I'm you know always fascinated by it and have my own thoughts on it my own personal interest is moved much more to the Practical how can which is the theme of my book How can psychedelic Consciousness actually change the systems we live in and the place I'm putting my energy right now is in yeah psychedelic assisted Innovation and problem solving because couple of reasons one is that I've always been skeptical of the medicalization of psychedelics of all the things psychedelics do hearing Health element is a really important one and absolutely vital and people should have that access but for me what's interested me the most and I think the the Psychedelic underground that I came up in of which Daniel you were a part with reality sandwich and all those Endeavors and I'm breaking up in the head you know there was much more of a an excitement that we had around uh significant cultural shift right Consciousness Evolution what it actually means to to imagine a new future and so so much of the bandwidth has been taken up by medicalization over the last few years that it's been hard to to get that message across um and the mainstream understanding of psychedelics has become mental health treatments and while they are that that's not all they are in fact it's not even most of what they are and so the recent FDA ruling uh which was a setback for maps and like like us um maybe just I like explain that yeah so so Maps uh is a multidisiplinary Association for psychedelic studies which has been working for about uh 35 years uh to get MDMA legalizers of medicine it's run by Rick doblin um to cut a long story short there were uh some activists a group called symposia which had a pretty big impact on the FDA deciding right at the last stage where MDMA would have been made legal as a treatment for PTSD they decided not to so there's a lot of complexity to it um symposia are not good faith actors they had some good points in their critique but massively overblown which is usually their their motor Sandi um and but what it has meant is that there's a kind of pause in the Psychedelic space and a kind of taking stock and there certain like hype bubble has been burst um and that's not a bad thing in a sense because we will get to psychedelic assisted mental health treatments there's a lot of other avenues that that's happening in um I would have much preferred if Maps had gotten there in this way but um what it has also opened up is the conversation around funders and donors around well maybe medicalization isn't the only route um and so so this organization I mentioned mines that I'm involved with that Bruce damer set up um is set up I mean just a brief like uh if you haven't heard of Bruce dber before his story is wild he had an i he was studying the origins of Life he's a very uh accomplished scientist was not outwardly psychedelic like he didn't talk about his psychedelic use he had an iasa trip where he um got an insight into the chemistry they were stuck on they so there it was it was believed until basically this paper that the origins of Life came from underwater vents like hot volcanic underwater vents um Bruce Damon the team that he's working with uh I think at UC Santa Cruz I could be wrong about that they were in the minority saying no actually we think Darwin was right life began in warm pools um sort of like hot springs and so in his iasa journey Bruce uh became these Proto cells so these polymers and he was being like torn as the as the spring filled up and uh In and Out of Water he was like being torn apart um basically and then he realized that it was it was the death and rebirth effectively of these Proto cells that was creating these complex systems that eventually became polymers and and proteins and then eventually life but life began as this kind of you know there as he said like there was no individuals there was just a collective spawning of of life right so he has his trip and then he has a breath work session a few weeks later and he calls up the lab and he's like and he like sketches it all out the chemistry and then he calls the lab and he describes it and they're like yep you've cracked it that's it that's the piece we were missing then that becomes a paper that paper gets on the cover of Scientific American uh and completely has destroyed the other Theory and what the crazy thing which I had realized until I saw the presentation he gave this weekend is that they went to in fact the the famous hot springs that are on the land burning man is on in near gerac um this kind of uh you might have seen them this is Hot Springs they did these special microscopic readings of the water and then when the lab sent back the imagery they had like the first imagery of these like Proto cells right um that were very much what he experienced and became in his trip so you go from psychedelic experience which by the way didn't just come to him Willy nearly he was already studying the field that's a really important thing right didn't just kind of download to uh anyone um uh then into science into proof of it um upends the field and because he works with NASA it's changed where the Mars rovers are going so in the next few months so they've changed where they're looking for Life on Mars because of this psychedelic trip right so that story is not the only story of of psychedelic assisted you know insights and Innovation there's also Carrie Mullis yeah with the PCR polymerase Chain Reaction he said that that wouldn't have come about without LSD maybe Francis Crick but it's kind of controversial who discovered the DNA double helix he said I didn't I wasn't on LSD don't publish that I'll kill you kind of thing after he died someone did publish it so it's really like no one really knows um so there's all these examples through history and so I'm very interested in okay how do we use psychedelics to solve real world problems like developing new type and more efficient solar panel or a new type of education system or whatever it may be so that's where um and so Minds calls that the the fourth wave of psychedelics and I kind of I think it may be um because there are um there's a lot of well we need new ideas like Terence Mc Kenna said we need mediumsized ideas um to save to save ourselves and I think if we can develop protocols that do that effectively and you can get lots of different experts in in different fields regardless of what they are and there's a 5-day process or whatever it might be that reliably gives people insights you can't guarantee they're going to have world changing insights but at least reliably gets them further in their problem than they were then that's where I really see like that's how psychedelics can change the world in a very practical way
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.