Have your psychedelic experiences taught you a lot about the future, consciousness?

Certainly my psychedelic experiences helped me to understand how the mind works much better than I would have otherwise.

And also give me a whole different perspective on life, the universe, and everything.

I think I ended up much less of a hardcore, rationalist materialist than I was before I started on psychedelics.

I did start at age like 15 or something, so I've been out of the wild.

What? The DMT or acid?

Acid acid, okay.

There was a lot of acid when I went to college.

In temple or in Oregon?

No, it's in Western Massachusetts.

I went to a place called Simon's Rock College.

It was part of Bard College.

But that was, yeah, I mean, certainly that was well before I was 20.

I tripped on a lot of different psychedelics.

And you do get the clear sense there that human understanding and the reality that we think is the beyond and all is a very limited portion of the total mega universe or whatever you want to call it.

And I sort of had that inkling earlier because I was meditating a lot as a kid from having read a bunch of my mother's books on Chinese culture and Buddhism.

And then I read Uspansky's Russian mysticism and so on.

So through meditation, I'd already started to get into states of consciousness that made me doubt like the absolute reality of myself or the 40 space now continuum.

But psychedelics definitely drove the point home, right?

And probably had some to do with your vision of today, to a certain extent.

Well, certainly. It's very hard to go back and say what would you think if you hadn't had this or that experience, right?

Because if I hadn't done psychedelics, I might have gotten deeper into meditation because I'd already had the idea to early study of Buddhism, to like quest beyond our conventional understanding of what's real.

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