Jerry and Julie Brown - Healing Through Mystical Experience
Psychedelics Today
Psychedelics Today, LLC
4.6 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 18 August 2020
⏱️ 66 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode, Joe interviews Jerry and Julie Brown. Jerry (Ph.D.) is an author and activist, who served as founding professor of anthropology at Florida International University in Miami for 42 years. Julie (M.A.) is an author and integrative psychotherapist, who worked with cancer patients with a focus on guided imagery. Together, they are co-authors of The Psychedelic Gospels: The Secret History of Hallucinogens in Christianity.
They talk about their blogpost on Psychedelics Today and inspiring studies: Walter Pahnke's original psilocybin study at Marsh Chapel and Roland Griffiths' recent studies at Johns Hopkins and the amazing results at each, Robin Carhart-Harris' MRI analysis, and some of Julie's successes using guided imagery to empower 3 cancer clients to heal after conventional cancer treatment was ineffective.
They talk about guided imagery and the body's ability to heal itself, how mystical states actually help heal people, how disease starts in the mind, Ancient Greece's psychedelic Rites of Eleusis, and their own personal life-changing psychedelic experiences related to Johns Hopkins' 5 common elements of mystical experience.
And they talk about their most popular book, The Psychedelic Gospels: The Secret History of Hallucinogens in Christianity, which highlights images of mushrooms and psychedelic art found throughout Christian history (all the way back to Gnostic Gospels), and their possible relationship to the birth of Christianity and the story of Jesus.
Notable Quotes
"The questions are: Can psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy be used not only to alleviate the psychological anxiety (as we saw at Johns Hopkins) and the depression, but can it also be used to facilitate the physiological healing in cancer patients, as Julie has done through facilitating mystical experiences? That's a big question. The second one is: in time, are we going to see what today, is long-term costly, clinical psychotherapy of a variety of different modalities, eventually be enhanced by short-term, much more affordable psychedelic psychotherapy?" -Jerry Brown
"In astrophysics, dark matter, which they say makes up most of the universe- it can not be directly detected or seen. It can only be implied through the gravitational effects that it causes. So, in psychology, mystical experience cannot be easily accessed, but it can be reliably created both through psychedelics, and as Julie's work has shown, through guided imagery. In other words, hidden from ordinary consciousness, mystical experience manifests from the dark matter of the mind to facilitate healing." -Jerry Brown
"F. Scott Fitzgerald, the author, said there's no second acts in American lives, but fortunately, psychedelics is having its second act, and I think if we do it right this time, we can really integrate it into our culture, both in a therapeutic setting, and [also in settings] modeled after the Greek Eleusinian mysteries, where healthy people can go to explore psychedelics for personal growth and for spirituality and creativity." -Jerry Brown
Links
Website: psychedelicgospels.com
The Psychedelic Gospels: Evidence of Entheogens in Christian Art presentation on Youtube
About Jerry and Julie Brown
Jerry B. Brown, Ph.D., is an anthropologist, author, and activist. From 1972 to 2014, he served as founding professor of anthropology at Florida International University in Miami, where he taught a course on "Hallucinogens and Culture." Julie M. Brown, M.A., LMHC, is an integrative psychotherapist, who works with cancer patients. They are coauthors of The Psychedelic Gospels: The Secret History of Hallucinogens in Christianity, 2016; "Entheogens in Christian Art: Wasson, Allegro and the Psychedelic Gospels," Journal of Psychedelic Studies, 2019; and "Mystical Experience and Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy: Insights from Guided Imagery Therapy with Cancer Patients," Psychedelics Today, May 28, 2020.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, everybody. |
| 0:14.0 | Welcome back to psychedelics today. |
| 0:16.1 | This is Joe Moore coming at you from Breck Ranch, Colorado. |
| 0:19.7 | Today on the show, we have Julie and Jerry Brown. |
| 0:22.9 | Jerry has been on the show before, and Julie and Jerry contributed to our blog recently. This episode, |
| 0:29.3 | we get into some interesting stuff around how mystical states can heal and perhaps how they |
| 0:36.7 | might even be able to heal, you know, more obvious situations |
| 0:41.0 | in the body as well. |
| 0:42.5 | We'll kind of get into that in a bit. |
| 0:45.0 | Julie hasn't been on the show before, but she's a psychotherapist, now retired, has done a lot |
| 0:50.3 | of work with cancer patients over the last bunch of decades and has done a lot of guided |
| 0:55.2 | imagery, which I think is really interesting. And I think there's some value here and some |
| 1:00.7 | correlation that all of you interested in psychedelic states might also be interested in. So |
| 1:06.3 | hope you enjoy this episode. Thank you, Julian Jerry, for joining. And please let us know what you think. You can email us at Psychedelics Today, email at gmail.com. |
| 1:16.3 | We've got a huge Facebook group to search Psychedelics Today group on Facebook and you find it. |
| 1:22.5 | And yeah, we're all over social. So definitely please hit us up. |
| 1:27.4 | And if you want, we've got a lot of |
| 1:30.8 | education over at the Psychedelic Education Center. So psychedelic education center.com. Some courses are |
| 1:37.4 | becoming CE approved. So stay tuned on that. And we've got some free classes there and more and more coming soon. So we're |
| 1:47.5 | just planning to expand that a whole bunch. So hope you check it out. I think that's it for |
| 1:52.3 | now. So enjoy this episode with Julian Jerry Brown and we'll see you on the other side. |
| 2:00.5 | Hello everybody. Welcome back to psychedelics today. Today in the show we have |
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