Tetragrammaton So I've talked a little bit in the past, although not much.

I was part of a clinical trial for MDMA, so-called ecstasy.

A lot of people don't realize this, but it's methylene-dioxy, methamphetamine.

It's a weird drug because, first of all, it's completely synthetic. It doesn't exist in nature. When was it created, do you know? For the first time, I think it was created in like 1913 by Merck or something like that. I'm probably the date and the company wrong, but sometime around that. It's an old drug. Then it wasn't touched again. And then a guy named Sasha Shulgin and his wife, living in Berkeley, California, made it. Sasha and his wife would make compounds and give it to their friends, all these therapists

in the Bay Area, at a time when the Bay Area was still hit.

There is cool, but it's not as adventurous as it used to be. Maybe there's a new

generation, but so Shulgin would make these drugs, give them to his therapist friends, they would take

them and then they'd take notes. He actually wrote a book as the worst name of any book. It's called

Peekal. P-I-K-H-A-L. Phenal-ethyl-A-means I have known and loved.

Dumbest name ever for a book if you want people to read the book. In any case, MDMA,

Exstasy is not a plant medicine. It's also not a psychedelic, but it's what's called an

empathogen. And it has a very interesting

property. What's an empathogen? An empathogen is a molecule that makes you feel more empathic

for yourself or others, basically anything you focus on. This is the one, well, there's several,

but this is the one danger of MDMA, which is that unless you have someone to guide you,

you can fall in love with water on MDMA, which is that unless you have someone to guide you, you can fall in love with

water on MDMA.

Is that bad?

No, but it's the waste of some potentially more useful therapeutic time.

You can really start to develop a relationship to anything you place your sensory focus on.

So I think in general, used as a tool for like PTSD, where you're developing empathy for yourself,

or maybe even for your oppressor, that happens too, where people forgive themselves and others.

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