Thomas Roberts, emeritus professor at Northern Illinois University and author of The Psychedelic Future of the Mind and Mindapps, describes teaching what he believes was among the first university courses devoted to psychedelics and the long stretch during which almost no colleagues followed. He recounts encountering the subject as a doctoral student in Willis Harman's human potential course at Stanford in the late 1960s, when married graduate students described experiences that did not fit his assumptions about drug users. Roberts lays out his multistate theory, which treats psychedelics as one instance of a broader class he calls mind apps or psychotechnologies, alongside hypnosis, breathing practices, yoga, martial arts and brain stimulation. He and Pinchbeck discuss the current expansion of psychedelic interest and Roberts's writing archive.
Guest: Thomas Roberts
In brief
- Roberts argues psychedelic culture is moving through a sequence of stages, beginning with psychotherapy and neuroscience, moving to religion and spirituality, and from there into humanities questions about truth, reality, meaning and beauty.
- Roberts holds that the final step is asking whether other methods can produce what psychedelics produce, which is why he frames them as one mind app among many rather than a special case.
- Roberts describes mind apps as installable on the mind-brain complex the way software is installed on a device, enabling it to work better and do new things.
- Roberts says colleagues at professional meetings told him they wanted to teach a course like his but believed it would end their careers, and that for years the main exception was Jerry Brown's cultural anthropology course at Florida International University.
- Roberts identifies his own goal as recruiting conventional academics into the field rather than only psychedelic-culture audiences, describing himself as straight-laced.
- Roberts says he has posted close to two hundred items, including talks, slide presentations and paper drafts, to Academia.edu, with a smaller set on ResearchGate.
Full text
hi everybody uh thanks for joining me I'm here with uh Dr Tom Roberts of the University of Northern Illinois uh Emirates Professor who I think had one of the first courses in a U. S University on psychedelics and is the author of many fascinating books uh my personal favorite of his books is um the Psychedelic psychedelic revolution of the Mind uh which left me with some ideas that yeah I still think about uh constantly in relationship to the Future and relationship to Consciousness and um but uh Tom was that your first book or your first book on psychedelics no um my first book is practically unknown it came out in 2006. and was published by an academic press in Great Britain of course this could change the early version of a lot of the ideas I'm still um trying to work with and improve um so 2006. um was almost no sales so yeah so you've been kind of reading the beginning of Mind apps which I guess is your last book uh I saw kind of your you know you discussed your history with the Alan Watts lecture and early conferences with uh Stan Groff and so on in like the 70s so you've been kind of involved with this movement for a long time now um and you know and that I mean you know it's become a little bit kind of almost like normal now that psychedelics are such a hot topic that people talk about psychedelic Revelation and how it like changed them and so on but clearly for you um it launched you on your whole path on your whole career uh maybe you want to talk about that a little bit yes I'm really lucky to have sort of stumbled into psychedelics um I I have wasn't interested in psychedelics at all early in my career I had a course with Willis Harmon in Stanford called the human potential and um he is someone who did some of the early work and psychedelics and in that class were a select group of graduate doctoral students in Stanford and a married couple were in there and they started talking about their own psychedelic experiences and this is the first time I'd ever heard anyone talk about the types of experiences and didn't fit in with what I thought I knew I had the usual view you know of the scaggy acceptance Scraggy old Doug drug addict kind of uh these are graduate students and and at Stanford and so that sort of got me interested in it and then just by good luck I happened to attend that was I was like 69 or something or what year was that oh 60 um 68 or 69 yeah but right in the middle of the whole shebang these the summer of love and all that kind of stuff was happening yeah yes in fact when I drove from the University of Connecticut to Stanford it was a year that when you go to San Francisco be sure to wear some flowers in your hair was on the car radio yeah I wasn't going to wear flowers in my hair but I was going to San Francisco so that was sort of a nice song along the way so you're a bit more of a straight laced kind of academic type oh yes I I was and I still am very much yes yeah and what I'm trying to do is to get other straight legs academics interested in the field because I had to influence them as well as the the Psychedelic culture in general which is certainly happening I mean there's been an explosive interest um you know which I want to talk to you about um but yes so um so maybe just describe kind of the development a little bit of your particular like viewpoints and ideas around the Psychedelic movement and I mean you must be very excited to see like this explosion of developments you know but you know I I also question whether like all of them are good but maybe we can discuss that a little bit well because it's very gratifying you know when I first saw caught my course I would be electronic with professional meetings and mentioned my course and afterwards there'd be one or two people who would come up and say I'm interested in that I wish I could teach a course like that at my University but I can't it would ruin my career now I thought when I taught my course I'd be breaking the ice and be a lot of people following right afterward to teach their but there weren't I was sort of out there alone um but the exception of Jerry Brown at Florida International he had a course in cultural anthropology that was largely about the cultural uses of psychedelics um sort of at the same time talk about the same thing my course was entirely on psyched dogs and it was part of a larger course so at any rate what I'm what I'm working on now is the development of his ideas and I realized that when I put my ideas and other people's together they formed a sequence and it started off with what we are now in Psychotherapy and neurosciences and what's what's emerging right now is the second stage where religion starts to pick up on us and of course that's because the mystical experience in Psychotherapy naturally moved people's curiosity over over to religion and spiritual revolvement right okay yeah what I'm predicting will happen is that people when people start to look at on spirituality and religion this will move naturally over to the topics that the humanities are interested in like what's truth reality what's the meaning of I Beauty credit questions and those questions pop up naturally when you start on your religion and that moves with people over the humanities and then the big step from there is to ask the question if there are psychedelics that can do all this for Psychotherapy and for religion and for the scholarship are there other methods that can do besides psychedelics and that's why I'm trying to get people to look at psychedelics as one I call a mind app or psychotechnology um within the whole field not a clearance you know things like them um brain stimulation hypnosis breathing the Martial Arts yoga hypnosis and all those things I I call them mind apps with the idea that just as we can install apps and our devices and have them do new things and work better we can just install my app and our brain mine complex and have them work better and do new things and that's the idea that I'm you're trying to get across in my next book that's the idea in this book here are the Mind apps multi-state Theory and tools for mind design um well all I'm sure it was there but I hadn't seen it as a sequence at that point now is to see that as a sequence of stages just like two days ago somebody sent me a very well designed website I'll send it to you called The Church of Silo methoxim home of the universal sacraments uh and apparently they're forming a new religion around a substance called cilometroxin which um they say celebathoxin is a new and novel tryptamine created in Vivo by sacred mushroom mycelium after inoculation before the fruiting stage of development mushroom substrate is fed five emeodmt the god molecule as a result of the introduction of the god molecule the fruiting bodies contain the silomethoxism the sacred synthesis represents a union or Union of spirit nature with science medicine and further symbolizes a return to our ancient Roots I mean this is probably you know just one of many things that we're going to be seeing I've never even heard of Siloam methoxone I'm kind of curious actually um thank you I haven't heard of that yeah yeah one thing I love about this field there are all kinds of people who are turning up new new ways or looking at things and sending them out to everybody else yeah this wonderful characteristic of the Psychedelic field before we get into your concept of Mind apps which I really love and think is fascinating I had a few questions for you one of your ideas that really stayed with me and I used a lot in my own talks and and uh I think I mentioned my book in one of my books was this idea of psychedelics as a second Reformation yes can you explain what what that means you know um for people yes well um when we think of the Reformation but we're really talking about is the the change of Christianity in Western Europe so I'm going to limited to that geographically and what happened of course was that one text became available through a movable print and gutenberg's press people could start to read the Bible and other sacred texts themselves and this was a movement from a period where before that religion was almost entirely um going to some sort of ceremony or participating in the ceremony or watching the priest do the ceremony and it was just it was a participation or just watching that's what happened with the printable text is people could start look at the tests themselves and of course that was the beginning of the of the Reformation Martin Luther when he translated uh from Latin to German and suddenly the Bible became available in the common languages yes that's exactly right right and what I'm saying now is just psychedelics move mystical experiences from up through um people here and there to make them available generally to the general population just as the printed texts made religious texts available to the general population and resulted in what we call the Reformation that we're now going through a Reformation that's brought about by psychedelics not by the printed word yeah I mean in the bible yeah I think the point that I heard you make it maybe one talk was you know when people were able to read the Bible they could read about the Visionary experiences that like Moses had with receiving the you know the burning bush The Ten Commandments or ezekiel's Chariot but it was still something that was completely outside of their existence and their experience and now people like you know by myself and I'm sure you also can directly have those experiences and try to sort of make sense of it for ourselves yes that's one of the points I'm making now this raises the question are those genuine experiences or are they sort of fake experiences and the way I handle that is um we if I I consider them genuine but if somebody wants to consider them a fake or not genuine they still can be useful instructional for example we teach people um in medicine and education everywhere else to have like practice sessions simulations so at the very least it's a simulation even if it's not genuine but if it is genuine so much the better so it's not a reason to do away with them whether you consider them um genuine or not genuine because they're still useful instructionally because you're going to say well this may not be a legitimate mystical experience but it gives us a good idea of one just as uh doctors have practice sessions you know in their concession and I I work with teachers and working with different practice sessions so at the very least it's it's useful instructionally whether I don't think that idea is going to be resolved at least not within decades because some people say you can only have a mystical experiences by doing this that or the other thing or if you're just lucky like August Huxley said it was gratuitous Grace just something that happened but even if you take that position it can be useful instructionally and say Well it may not be the real thing but it's a very close approximation I'll give you an idea of the real thing that's fascinating it's hard for me to understand that distinction because phenomenologically if somebody has the experience of like Unity consciousness of the dissolution of time and space of you know the voice of the Creator like speaking through them uh I mean what else do you need I mean that that I mean you know whether it's something that happens as the results of uh uh you know a trip to me and that's you know quite similar to serotonin or as a result of fasting for 10 days on top of a Mountaintop you know what's the actual difference well that's based on the assumptions of what makes something genuine is having the identical experience between the the soul cyber one and the sort of natural one but there's some people say it's not the the description of the experience itself it's the source that's important and the source has to come from God or whoever okay and so it would take that position then anything else is not legitimate it's a psychological theological position now I go with you and I say okay if the experiences are the same and the characteristics are the same out of the spine but some people say no you have to so for example some people say well you have to meditate for you know dozens and hundreds of hours before it can get there or you have to um believe in uh so-and-so leader in order to get there Terence Mc Kenna I used to joke about how you know people said oh you can't do psychedelics it's a shortcut and he was like well look in life you know you take shortcuts like if there's a way to get across the field you know if I'm trying to get to a town There's a shortcut I'll take it the shortcut you take you know you're not having the true experience then I guess yes so the Psychedelic future of the mind uh I was also very struck by the way you approached uh kind of suggesting a different idea of the singularity um because at the moment you know I think there's still a lot of belief in sort of techno Progressive circles but the future of humanity is you know we go to Mars we're going to be you know infused with computers you know we're gonna have ai chips in our brain and you were sort of suggesting that book that then maybe that's a different direction would be the neuro Singularity um well yes I think that and clearly we're we seem to be moving in those directions but that but they're the other direction too of um let's say um there's brain stimulation can be brought out through light and magnetism and under my own minor electrical um jugs and also there are are um um molecules that are light sensitive you can put those in the brain and then show the light on the brain and those molecules will light up and activate that part of those parts of the brain so those are all directions that we can go so so I'm sending everything from from Vision quests and a Native American um Vision quests through let's see these very technical things are all migrants and we should see them all as part of this same group of things not have seen them as a proposed but there are other ways of improving our brain mind complexes by installing these new apps yeah so you're saying that in the same way that a computer or a phone you install an app for like a translator or something and then when you turn it on you have a particular experience or access a certain type of knowledge and I mean one of the things that I thought was very interesting in both mind apps and psychedelic future of the mind is you talk about how maybe there's different knowledge that becomes available different different possibilities that become available in different uh you know Body Mind States or mind-body States that's a very intriguing uh idea because in a sense everything we know with a few exceptions we know it using our ordinary cognition and perception in our ordinary default mind-body state that you and I are in now although I'm not exactly that because I've been drinking some caffeine but that's close enough but so the question then is when we start using our cognitive and perceptual and emotional processes differently will we know things that way that we don't know now and I think this may be a clue of why some are and rare occurrences may be brought uh rare and odd because they occur in other mind-body states not our default state for example parapsychological things um if we looked for them in our ordinary default State remind them there but if we look for them in other mind-body states that may be where they reside the psychology of healing and what we call placebo effect may be something that exists more in other mind-body states than our ordinary default State and if you look at the the research on the placebo called the placebo ability it often is associated with a shift in a mind-body state by the way I use the phrase mind-body stick rather than State of Consciousness and I don't I try not to use the word Consciousness except in this very particular way because lots of people are using it but they mean very different things and so people get together and they talk about Consciousness they're often talking about different things but because they use the same word they think they're talking about the same thing so they disagree with each other because they have different meaning for the word so by Mind Body State what I mean it's what Charlie tart called and all the State of Consciousness or or I'd say a different program uh brain mind conflicts so what we when we could invent new brain mind complexes what will we learn in them I think most of them will just be kind of interesting but it might be very helpful um and maybe you know ways of using our minds in new ways so this is the big thing I would like people to start to think about is we are learning to produce our brain man complex in new ways and psychedelics are just one class of new ways you know but there's meditation and hypnosis and chanting in the martial arts and all those are other ways and so if you see them as part of a of a larger brain mind complex whole brain complexes that will look at all the different things we can do with our brain mind complex now I'm a very much of a fan of our ordinary default State I mean it most of the time I do emotional thinking but I think this is evolved for a very good reason to help us interact with reality I mean we've receive things and take things and if we don't see them right or think then we're likely become extent do I think our ordinary to fall asleep it's very good I just don't want to think it's the only good State that's the that's the little shift I want people to make at the end of the Mind apps book I saw that you had some kind of um ideas for kind of large-scale kind of institutional approaches to this whole area do you want to explain what your vision is a little bit or how you think that Society could kind of you know you know maybe in a way reconfigure around this kind of exploration well the two things one is um my uh syllabus to my class and I I'm very pleased to say there is now an association of professors in colleges and universities who are teaching psychedelic courses there are 50 plus members and then uh um this just started out in the in the last year and a new um people are joining but we're looking at people in colleges and education and just because this is we want to make a workable group and people are are suggesting books and activities and so forth and the second is a corporation and of course there are between 50 and 60 now publicly owned corporations that are trying to develop psychedelics I think they're larger going the wrong direction what they're trying to do is to develop a psychedelic drug that can be used and I have various very variabilities on the drugs that exist in existence but if you look at psychological psychotherapy the major part of it is the session played with the psychotherapists and it's the psychotherapist time and effort it really is the expensive and useful part of this and so when you develop a drug that you use just only once or twice and it's not going to be like something you take every day which what drug companies are after so I think they are making a point by trying to develop to think the developing the drug is the main step to make I think the main step is how to set up situations companies that will offer psychedelic services and there are a couple of those going on here now the ketamine seems to be the one that's catching on best um and of course because that's because that's legal yeah and so the question is how can we set up services and there might be I can say everything from an individual psychotherapist in private practice to to groups and to corporations that do it I mean just like oh I use beer an example for example we have a local um you know beer brewers we have big beer companies who have international beer companies and I think the same thing can be with soccer though I call it Services providing the the service of taking people on their experiences and helping them integrate them I think that's the direction of a bit things will develop although only one or two of the new companies are really going that that way now well it seemed that one of your perspectives that I also share and really appreciated was that you really are interested in the usage of it Beyond um sort of therapy and mental health uh um and so you know I I think you were talking with the Mind apps book about kind of like an organization for kind of like officialized Psychonauts um not just kind of therapists but people who can really um who you know I guess develop a skill or Mastery in these Altered States can you talk a little bit more about what you're conceiving and how that might work um well I could imagine that there can very well be a number of different organizations um for people in various Specialties of course it's quite clear now we are developing a medical instead of therapeutic specialties but I can and there could be religious Specialties now the religious effort is going to be a real problem because who has the right to say what you can or cannot do in religion and suppose um a religion starts like this when you mentioned to me that to start off with and it wants to use psychoactive drugs does The Drug Enforcement Administration have the legal right um to tell what people can or cannot do in their religions or is that fun or is that the freedom of religion issue and we have to we have to face those issues very much because we have our laws we now make the a lot of the religious use of psychedelics illegal and people can be jailed hard um there are of course there are a few churches now but it's not in a in a wide variety and some of them had to get special let's call it dispensations from the DEA and the FBA and other groups in order to use psychedelics in a theogenic way by the way I use the word etheogen not as a substitute or cinnamon per second dog but only to talk about the religious users I mean that Theo was right in the middle of that word and tell us what it's what it's about so I think of the psychotherapeutic uses of psychologist which is the one that's caught on now it's theogenic is um emerging and then I I'm kind of according to the word ideogenic that is the ability of psychedelics to produce ideas and that's the word I use up on the third stage the humanities stage but this religion problem is going to be a real problem over who gets to decide what a religion can or cannot do I I imagine for example I can imagine I'm either the Jesuits or a group of guns um getting into psychedelics for um theological religious reasons and or um for Psychotherapy reasons let's say a group of nons let's say the Dominicans want to open up uh I basically how people with second developed circular therapy which they would do with within their particular Christian framework now with the FDA say no you can't do that and here we have a group of nuns who want to do what they consider a religious or Jesuits a religious activity we have to over we have to figure out how to work that through in our society and with our legal system and what what I think is funny is it's what about universities for example I feel I know the word sublime which appears in romantic poetry much better from my own psychedelic experiences no so could we imagine a a course for students or graduate students in English literature or comparative literature in which they would they would be have a lab experience so they can understand romantic poetry because the word sublime or Sublime no I can imagine that situation but I don't see how it could happen I would not want an average professor of a 19th century English literature to guide people on a psychedelic session I think that was just terrible but who we need to develop uh people who can do that and just in the Psychotherapy they develop psychotherapists who convened psychedelic sessions we need to make the parallel moves in religion religious people by religious I don't mean associated with a particular church but I'm a spiritual that what's used now is is often um religion slash spiritual as one word or r slash S so I'm talking more about spirituality rather than religion in the sense of an organized organization so but who who should who could lead those and who should lead those I would not want you know any ordinary a clear instrument out there to lead his congregation or me in a psychedelic experience I don't think they're qualified for that so we need clergy who or or spiritual leaders rather who are capable of leading people on psychological experiences and then when we move up to the third stage and Humanities we need people who let's say in in philosophy and literature and the Arts who are known about psychedelics and their field to lead people in their fields that way so there's a huge amount of development to be done now that that big imaginary cooperation that I imagine is that one of the divisions they might have is to provide or to have people who are capable of leading psychedelic experiences and then make them available to these other groups like to religious to people or to people in the humanities and philosophy so that there would be people who are capable of leading and integrating psychological experiences with people who have particular interests like religious and scholarly interests so this I feel the development they have to have to face yet um I think we will get there I don't know what what speed I I was I think psychedelics I thought they would you're adopted much faster than they did so my guess is it's probably going to take a lot longer than I'll look to see what about the uh you mentioned the ideas you mentioned religion you mentioned Academia uh and of course therapy but what about the sort of paranormal um psychic kind of Supernatural you know kind of Dimensions that brought people often experience through psychedelics that that fits into my ideas that there are human perceptions and abilities outside of our ordinary default mind-body State and a way to to investigate them would be to try different mind-body states not just psychedelic but psychedelics and let's say progressive realization or hypnosis now what I find most intriguing is that so far what we've been talking about here and most people are and they talk about one of these nine apps at a time just psychedelics or just medication or just hypnosis now if we consider those as being ingredients we could combine them into new ingredients that produce mind-body states that have never been produced before it's like synthetic chemistry you put molecules together you come up with with molecules that have never been developed before and they're the synthetic elements that have been developed in physics so I'm suggesting synthetic Mind Body States but combining these various mind Ops apps and various recipes that will produce different mind-body states and and experiences that we have no idea what that might be useful for so like somebody might do an hour of holotropic breath work then 20 milligrams of DMT yes my own stroller off for example suggested that before people do LSD they do um MDMA to see if they're at home with altered traits of Consciousness and if they have a good experience then go ahead and let them have LSD as they don't like all their states of Consciousness then don't have them go to LSD but it's that it's that idea and then of course there's we have to figure out guidance instruments they're saying what kind of Mind Body State might be good for what person under what particular situations just as we do now with medicines we have all these diagnostic categories uh take this with this and take that for that we have to think the same thing about our mind-body states what what states do we want to produce with who or who and why and so forth so no creativity is so interesting because this often happens in Mind by States so nobody read your book no Peter Thiel or uh Zuckerberg and called you up and said okay I'm going to fund a billion dollar mind app Corporation this is the book they should read okay my apps or or as somebody said to a writer what's your favorite book and he said my next book and that's the way I feel too my next book's my favorite book of course now let's let's talk about things what is the book that you're working on now and I you know I want to commend you for being 85 years old and still productive I mean that's uh that's that's that's quite an achievement yeah sometimes I wonder if I want to go on but I keep on having the ideas I don't want to waste them to put it that way um so the the title is um we'll fill in the Psychedelic Renaissance and the subtitle is in four stages medicine and therapy one religion and spirituality that's two intellect to the humanities that three and multi-state design that's Florida and what I'm doing is presenting this overall view on in chapter one and then using challenge to demonstrate each of the others except they're not doing Psychotherapy and then neurosciences because that's covered beautifully now and anything I would write would be out of date by the time it's printed I just you know by me that field is coming on so fast you know every day practically this good stuff so what I do is I select chapters to demonstrate necessary religion and um and the humanities and multi-state so um it's just really to lay out it's one idea that's elaborated on throughout the whole book very cool and uh multi-state I think that in the mind Ops book you talk about kind of like a paradigm shift from single state to multi-state yes that that's where I first I got into the idea and I didn't realize quite how rich it was at the time that I wrote it and I've been elaborating on it since then so maybe elaborate a little bit uh for me like what does that mean exactly um well I think the big um problem is that um in general people think that all good thinking happens in an ordinary default mind-body State the one that you and I are in most of the time except when we're when we're sleeping and dreaming and what I want I'll call that the single straight fallacy um to suppose that all good thinking happens only in our ordinary awake mind-body state and I want to challenge that by saying that good thinking can happen in a lot of different mind-body states and I want to start with that assumption everything else Falls line you say well what are argues that my body says how do we get there and that's the Mind apps question how do we get there it can be developed put them in mind wraps in different combinations and come up with mind-body States and thinking cognition and feeling and perceiving that are different and never been experienced before you see this is an opportunity usually the human brain mind complex to produce a mind-body state that has never been produced before let's say you include uh brain stimulation um LSD and meditation very certain type of meditation let's put those together into new recipes and the producer Brian Mind Body state that's never been produced before of course there's not just the elements in the recipe but more of one unless you know like you're baking a cake or you're making a steward I like to use minestrone as a good example because they're all the different vegetables and stuff you can put in Minnesota and different combinations depending on what's available that season and I see um mind apps as being like the ingredients in Minnesota you can put them together in any number of different combinations and turn out a and not just a minnesotanic but a mind-body state that's never been produced before no I think most of these will just be curiosity I don't think most of them are going to be useful just in chemistry you can have all these elements you're putting together any number of different ways most combinations are just curious but there are a few that are really useful and I expect the same thing will happen with mind-body States most a lot of them do they'll be curious but a few of them might be very useful and I think um I think healing is going to be one of those and also no this is where the parapsychological abilities come in they may exist or be stronger than other students it's not only we're doing new uh abilities in other states but our current abilities might be stronger or weaker in other states creativity is a good example of that I studied Jim fademan and Bill Harmon did on creativity it was published way back in 1966 I couldn't believe it is an example of of solving problems in different mind-body Saints and I know you're aware of the creativity literature there's more and more occurring which Mind Body States come up with solutions to problems and that um who knows what what problems won't be solved in other mind-body states that haven't been invented yet this is an invention challenge it's to invent new mind-body States um in addition to using our current ones and to making them more healthy there's this whole other way of looking at things and saying let's present we present new mind-body states that have never been an experienced before by the way this should be done with utmost care I do not want to be this first subject for a lot of these possibilities but for example if you look at a meditation psychedelics they fit together very naturally natural parents so there's a good example of one that we have right now are there any specific examples that you could give me on what kind of a different type of knowledge that becomes available in a different my body state well that I don't know what is out there no I think that probably um a spiritual intensity or mystical experiences are the example that I'm most interested in and that we're almost as acceptable in our culture the parapsychological abilities are certainly uh inability John instead draws through the human mind is that our minds are like small parts of a much larger State of Consciousness if we can get into those other states of Consciousness and become more aware of the part of that whole holographic part of our mind this may be that our mind can go anywhere now I find his do more than I can accept except Stan is the psychotherapist and the person with the largest collection of humor experience that I know of so I've got to respect him on this but I find that I find it hard to hard to believe but I know I might very well be wrong in that case and of course he's not the only one who's thought about the holographic who in the mind little pieces of the big picture I mean I know he had experiences where people would start speaking in totally unknown languages or yes there's a great collection of abilities that may resist in other mind-body states but all those of course are brought up by psychedelics LSD in his case so what might other mind apps produce just as psychedelics produce all those amazing things what might you know brain stimulation through magnetism do who knows and we just don't know this we're like we're like you know um before the European sense that the world ended you know when you if you went below the equator where you'd fall off you know or there was no um North and South America we're like that with our brain there are comments out for us to discover and to create but um that's the that's the idea I'm trying to get across to people to see the the vastness of the human mind and we're stuck on this we're stuck on his own little island because there are these other islands around us like Medicare violence and martial arts islands and so forth but um you know a lot of there's a lot of other places we can go in our minds no I totally agree but I feel it's like really important to have like a new frontier uh that's not doesn't require like a you know technology materialism it does to a certain extent but it's not like getting to Mars or you know um it's also like um I mean we're still seeing territorial Wars like the war in Ukraine and I think it's also because people have a very limited concept of uh Frontier or of uh you know kind of uh they're limited by these old ideas that actually if we could see the the next Frontier for human development was this exploration of the inner inner dimensions of Consciousness uh that could actually shift the energy of global Society in a way yeah your work Frontier actually exactly the right word to use because it suggests going into an unknown area an unknown land yes and these are the unknown continents of the Mind that's a good phrase uh you sent me a log uh list of ideas that you had I guess some of them were generated during your own explorations of psychedelics I'm curious if there are any of those uh that are like your absolute favorites or really kind of uh novel ideas that that you know you you would love to see yes my my favorite is of course the biggest idea the idea of multiple mind-body States or multiple um um brain um brain mind um complexes because that's just a big one and then the the one of the last ones is of course um mind apps that is looking at these various techniques psychological techniques and biological techniques it's presuming different different mind apps and so that's that's the one I really like and then um I've I have an idea on Psychotherapy or rather um receivable ability um people talk about Placebo Authority as if this drug this that has no effect has had an effect on people well obviously if you give someone a a drug that doesn't have any effect and then something happens and you say it's because of this drug has no effect there's a logical problem in there that you're attributing an effect to something that has no effect so but something is happening and people do have um Placebo events I think we should call it the placebo ability because because of a civil effect it's illogical to call it and in fact that's something that has no effect but really what we are doing in that case was Placebo is having people kind of activate their Placebo ability and want to talk about the receivable ability we ask what mind States might be more powerful in and it is before a regular mind State and of course there's a belief that if the doctor gives you a pill um the pill must be good for you um and that that is a psychological a placebo effect it's not the effect of the pill it's effective of your expectations you send your setting basically and and so I suggest we start talking about Placebo Mobility instead of talking about the placebo effect and this brings an interesting thing you know there are Vegas nerves their nerves are basically they're called it's called the nerve but they're two of them and they go out of the brain and they go down and they plug into basically all the organs on hair uh main part of our body until there are connections between the what goes on in the brain and goes down in our body and the information goes backwards too so that this is the brain brain Body Connection now what I'm wondering about is this vagus nerve you say either plugs in to the brain or as it rises from the brain and it's part of the brain to sort of pulls on in our body now here's a question I'm wondering if we could activate and locate these areas with the vagus nerve arrives could we could we activate those through psychedelics or meditation or some other mind app and would this then result in our having moral control and a healthier gut so to speak and I would like people who are looking at on psychedelics um in the brain the neural scientists to start looking at the effect of psychedelics on the vagus nerve and where and the parts of the brain where The bragisner Ether arises or Condado which are however way you think of what plugs in there I think this would be maybe a cue to um improving our ability to voluntarily control our our guts and glands so to speak I would I really think there are great dissertations to be written on psychedelics and the vagus nerves have you heard of the uh the purse singer of the god helmets yes yeah I read about those a long time ago I haven't seen anything about those for a decade or more I guess have you grown into anything well I mean it wasn't the idea that you stimulate a certain part of the brain with uh electromagnetism and you had an experience of divine awe or connection or whatever or Terror you know yes and that's been enormously increased now with um you know caps that have you know two dozen or three dozen connections to the skill and they can activate various parts of the brain and also they can with magnetism and with these molecules that will light up on and be active when light hits them so you just have a molecule will go to a particular part of the brain then you shine a light in and a better part of the brain becomes active I'm wondering could this be a possible way of you know teaching people things like people have a hard time learning language or learning math would it be possible to to activate the brain and um also um you know there's this wonderful field of neurofeedback that I think amazingly had more attention to attention to it and that's the ability to um tick off pick up part of the brain that you want to be active and have the person imagine things thinking things and when that part of the brain becomes active a little light will come on it's it's biofeedback basic of the brain and um you can teach people to activate those parts of the brain by seeing you know a sound or a lighter or even a little bit of pleasure and so this is in neurofeedback is a whole list of bush people would I'm sure people are looking at that I haven't run across that very much and I think second how do psychedelics interfere or enter interact with neurofeedback I think there are great possibilities there again here's this example of taking two mind apps and combining them for their joint effect has anybody done kind of a catalog in a way of all the possible you know mind apps technologically and natural um I'm Michael Murphy the guy who founded excellent book years ago that looked at a lot of these things as of I suppose that's 20 years ago oh and there was a book from a professor from Southern Illinois University I've forgotten the name it probably is five or ten years old I I think this would be a wonderful project where a person right it would take a huge Foundation to do this and there could very well be a whole college with any University they looked at these various mind apps and how to use them how to put them together and things that how they might be useful where they wouldn't be useful and so forth I mean because every one of them well look well look you and I and all know all the research has gone on with psychedelics now let's say psychedelves as one out of 50 or 60 mind apps we can ask the same questions of every one of those other mind Acts and and that's to say nothing with the combinations right the the the possibilities are absolutely absolutely endless I really endless because they're all those possible recipes you can have of all these different ingredients and from mind apps and put them together in not only different combinations but different amounts than the combination this is a never-ending project did you ever look at uh Joseph Chilton Pierce's work at all yes um yeah and I met him on a talk once he wrote a book that's getting the idea I've forgotten the word he uses do you wrote a book called the biology of transcendence uh another book called The Crack In The Cosmic egg yeah I remember crack yeah he talked about I think when he was young he went through a stage after he lost his love affair or something where he went into this completely sort of Detachment state where he had the super abilities for like a number of months he had like super strength like uh super psychic powers uh and then that it then it faded out so it was like a mind shift you know caused by a tragedy or something uh but it was super fast super fascinating um to me that's an example of someone being in a different Mind Body state in his State probably emotional and physical and and coming up with different abilities in those States so the abilities that we think are rare are unusual or even quite impossible maybe rare unusual or impossible because they reside in different mind-body states and we'll just looked for them in our ordinary State now with some acceptances under some nice exceptions to that but basically when we look for a new ability only in our own this ordinary mind-body State we may be missing the fact that it doesn't exists in our mind body state it might exist in different powers in other mind-body states or it might not exist in our default mind-body state but may exist in other states so this is that unlimited view of the human mind that we have to start addressing cool well Thomas we'll be talking about an hour might be about time not to wind down uh it's been good to connect with you in this uh you know normal waking mind-body State uh and to kind of um yeah review your extraordinary work and amazing thoughts uh anything um you know you want to add and kind of like summation or conclusion or anything particularly you want to share with people I mean um you can also talk about where they can find your work and and so on you know if you want you know I I have a um a page on Amazon and oh if you look at my name include the b in the middle Thomas B Roberts there are dozens and hundreds of writers Thomas Roberts uh I'm in one one area and every now and then they'll say are you the author of this and it'll be some other Strat thing in some field I've never even heard because somebody's written I mean if they use like T Roberts imagine how many T Robinsons there are out there who are authors so include the middle initial and um also um I have a a website on Academia uh I think our email is available to everybody and I put a there are almost 200 new items out there that I put out there so our talks um similar Power Points some are early draft papers I've written now at the time I think they're really dressed I thought the final thing and then you know how it is on your right oh we've got to add this so you've got to you know I have the same thing so there are there are several versions the same idea that'll appear and it's called it's just Academia um I think it's I think a start edu it might be dot org and um and it's a very rich site professors all over the world put their articles out there and you can put in any topic you're interested in and find um people who are specializing in that field and everything they've written or a lot of things they've written on the topic so so that's that's really the best way to do it I'm on Research gate to a lesser extent but I have maybe two other two dozen articles on there cool and the main books um psychedelic future of the mind uh mind apps um anything else oh yes there's um there's some um psychedelic and spirituality now I I only have the Polish Edition to show you that but the the English one is psychedelics and spirituality it's a new title for a book that said uh previous titles so um the previous titles let's see this is the original title Bob Jesse and I put that up put this out okay but if it's the same so if you have this you've already got the other two okay cool right on oh well what they're you know little minor differences but basically that's it right well thank you so much it's great to reconnect with you and a big fan of your work and uh let's look forward to your next uh your next book well thank you for letting me talking about my favorite thing to talk about so have a beautiful day we'll see you soon
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.