Transcript disclaimer: This transcript was generated by computer software and may contain errors, omissions, or minor inaccuracies. Please refer to the audio recording for the most accurate version of the conversation.

[00:00:07] Joe Moore: All right. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Psychedelics Today. This is Joe Moore. Kyle Buller’s here. We have two extraordinary guests deeply in the Eight-Circuit model frame, along with other things that we’re going to get into today. Dr. Doug, Dr. Rachel. Could y’all share a little introduction with our audience before we jump in?

[00:00:34] Douglas Wingate: Sure. My name is Dr. Doug Wingate. My doctorate’s in traditional Chinese medicine. I did postdoctoral studies in clinical neuroscience. So for the last fifteen years, I’ve maintained a clinical practice really focused on integrative neurorehabilitation. So working with a lot of people who have history of concussion, brain injury, stroke recovery, those sorts of things. I’m also a licensed psilocybin facilitator in the state of Oregon. So I was the third person in the United States to receive that license. Co-founder of Seven Gates Sanctuary, a licensed service center in Oregon, and have since then facilitated a few hundred journeys for individuals legally with psilocybin.

[00:01:14] Rachel Turetzky: I’m Dr. Rachel Turetzky. I got my PhD in clinical psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. We’re specialized in depth psychology, have further training in psychedelic-assisted therapy and ketamine-assisted therapy through, initially through Sage Institute in Oakland, which is now Alchemy Community Therapy Center. We’ve worked with MAPS for close to fifteen years as an adherence rater on their MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD studies. And with respect to the Eight-Circuit model, I studied with Antero Alli in his Eight-Circuit Brain course, and I’ve just been using it on my own practice and now professionally for the past close to twenty five years.

[00:01:58] Joe Moore: Outstanding. Didn’t know you had time with Antero. That’s awesome. And Doug as well.

[00:02:05] Douglas Wingate: Yeah, I also had a chance to study with Antero a couple times when he offered that course and before Robert Anton Wilson passed when he was teaching online through his MaybeLogic Academy. I had an opportunity to study the model through him as well.

[00:02:20] Joe Moore: That’s great. I recorded a long time ago with Lance Boucher, maybe, Boucher, who was involved in MaybeLogic.

[00:02:27] Douglas Wingate: Okay. We all went by avatars at the time, so different handles. So over the years, I’ve been able to connect and reconnect with some of the people that were involved with that, still stay pretty connected with a good number of them. But some of them, if they don’t recognize their handle…

[00:02:50] Joe Moore: Awesome. Cool. So we’re going to talk about a bunch of things today as it is. This episode is coming out on Maybe Day, July twenty third. Where do we want to start? Can we explain Maybe Day a little bit?

[00:03:07] Douglas Wingate: Yeah maybe day was was established after robert robert anton wilson’s uh passing as kind of an homage to him so each year since then a lot of people who were actually involved in the MaybeLogic academy or other people who peripherally knew robert anton wilson worked alongside him learned from him over the years It’s just kind of an opportunity to celebrate a lot of his ideas and offer new ideas or how we’ve been working with that, sitting with a lot of those things. So a lot of individuals collaborate and put together materials. And it’s just an opportunity to kind of recognize a lot of what we’ve been able to learn over the years from his inspiration.

[00:03:52] Rachel Turetzky: And I would also maybe add just to explain so that being called Maybe Day, the idea of maybe refers to his MaybeLogic and the importance of holding models lightly. And so you use playfully instead of, you know, refer to dogmas as, you know, just fixed beliefs and indoctrinated ways that we view the world. And so Katmint is being able to playfully, flexibly, fluidly be able to kind of hold our models lightly, see from different perspectives, the idea of reality tunnels. We all have our pre-programmed, in a sense, beliefs about the world, our experiences as they’re filtered through our nervous systems. And we’ll get more into that later about the concept of metaprogramming and being able to consciously question those and update them explore different ways of experiencing ourselves in the world and our identities and sense of self.

[00:04:58] Joe Moore: Thanks for that i one of our friends started going by katma recently as a last name and i had to ask And it turns out not related. So I had some explaining to do with that question. Yeah, and I personally have been a giant Wilson fan for a very long time and just really appreciate his work and, you know, and Turo’s work. And it’s just really cool to see that you two have been able to bring this forward quite a bit. And I guess before we go too deep, let’s talk about What else got launched today on the twenty third? Can you all explain the course that we’re launching with you all?

[00:05:41] Douglas Wingate: Yeah, so we’re launching our certified metaprogrammer course. So this is taking material that Rachel and I have been working on and have published in our book, Eight-Circuit Ascension, and more recently, Eight-Circuit Ascension workbook as well, and taking the foundations of that and uh throughout the the book and throughout the text it references how this can be employed or integrated into psychedelic practices and how psychedelic substances play into the framework and so this course is is our offering of uh compiling that together and so that people can really deep dive into it have an understanding and also have a concept of how it can influence or be integrated into somebody’s psychedelic practice.

[00:06:36] Joe Moore: Brilliant. And Kyle, you’ve been kind of helping put that together on our website and stuff. Do you have anything you want to add about what you’ve observed or questions?

[00:06:48] Kyle Buller: No, I’m excited for it. I think I mentioned I feel like I’m coming in a little blind today and I think I’ve done that on purpose because I kind of want to learn a little bit more through everything but yeah I’m excited for this course and excited for you guys to teach it so yeah I am curious though you know you guys are talking about Robert Anton Wilson and I’m sure there’s some folks listening that have no idea who that is and I know Joe you probably talk about him tons on the show but a little bit here and there yeah wondering if anybody can share a little bit about who Robert Anton Wilson is.

[00:07:27] Joe Moore: Who Bob was?

[00:07:30] Douglas Wingate: He was a bit of a, well, he was primarily a philosopher coming at things with an approach of what he referred to as guerrilla ontology. So taking concepts and ideas and presenting them in a way that would kind of stir things up to loosen up the way that we perceive the world or how we may hold on to particular belief structures or imprints that we have early in life that influence how we take a look at the world. And so a lot of his work was aimed as in particular, His book Prometheus Rising was really geared toward the Eight-Circuit model in particular. But across the board, I mean, he was a prolific writer, very close with Timothy Leary, who was also really a key developer in the Eight-Circuit model as well. So those two were very close and collaborated. Around these ideas. But yeah, he was really a unique human being. He also did what you refer to as stand-up philosophy. So he would go up and integrate and weave in a lot of comic relief while exploring really deep and sometimes ideas that were aimed at stirring things up a little bit to get you thinking in a different way than you typically would just to promote self-analyzation and taking a look at why you think about this. And then you can have an opportunity to reflect on that and see whether or not it really serves you.

[00:09:08] Joe Moore: And there’s some great videos of him on YouTube. So if anybody is interested, I just listened to this man speak for hours. He’s just encyclopedic knowledge of so many different topics and how they’re interconnected and just an absolute brilliant storyteller and teacher. I think worth noting is he was afflicted with polio at a youngish age and became very bookish as a result of that. And I think went to school to study engineering and fell into Alfred Krzybski. Is that the name? Krzybski. And Krzybski general semantic theory. So he had a lot of kind of engineering meets kind of linguistic critique, which is lovely. Mm-hmm. And then spend a lot of time in conspiracy and poking fun at it. Say, no, that’s super crazy. That one’s a little less crazy. But, you know, always in a lighthearted, fun way as they’re like fun kind of belief structures to play with. Belief systems—maybe BSs. So let’s talk about what kind of utility might people get out of… So let’s talk about psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists, trying to kind of adopt a little bit of Eight-Circuit thinking. Why is that useful?

[00:10:35] Rachel Turetzky: I mean, this could be a good opportunity to, for those not familiar with the eight-circuit model to explain what are the circuits. So let’s start there. So it’s in terms of like, so the eight-circuit model, it’s eight different dimensions of consciousness or, um, personal development in a sense. So the first four circuits, pretty much the most developmental models map pretty cleanly across the circuits. We all experience that relatively linearly, right? So circuit one is the biosurvival circuit that’s imprinted in infancy. It’s about how safe you feel in the world. Were your needs met as an infant? Did your caretaker attend to you when you were crying? I feel like especially in you know, certain generation with the cry it out, there’s a lot of attachment issues that I see coming up in therapy because of that. Um, then circuit two, the emotional territorial circuit, that’s when, so as an infant, there’s really no sense of separateness between the infant and, and the caregiver in the world. It’s just very, this kind of oceanic consciousness where there’s no separation, no sense of self. Circuit two, if you think of like the terrible twos. Um, where a child about two years old starts to understand, oh, I’m separate and I have agency and I can influence the world. And so that’s when they start to, you know, throw tantrums and in a sense, very innocently start to manipulate their environment, learning that they can and, um, learning the power of the word no. Um, and from that imprint, it’s the sense of like, are you, you know, do you take on more of like a top dog, bottom dog kind of place in the pecking order? In society kind of forms there. Circuit three is the time binding circuit, has to do with logic, reason, rational thinking, map making, symbolic ways of coding and understanding reality. Circuit four is the socio-sexual circuit, where relationship imprints morality your place in your role in society, how you show up in relationships, institutions, things of that nature. So again, pretty much across the lifespan, most people are going to have that kind of an experience. Then you get into the transpersonal circuits or the upper circuits. And so those people may or may not have, when they do happen, if they happen, then it can be nonlinear. So it’s not necessarily happening from C five, six, seven, and eight in order. But circuit five is the neurosomatic circuit. That’s if you think of, so it’s like embodied bliss. So like in circuit one, you imprint this feeling of either safety or like, I want to escape my body. That might affect how you’re, you experience circuit five, where you can feel safe enough to go into these bliss states. Things like, you know, cannabis might induce that, tantra, yoga, ecstatic dance, drumming. Those are like very Circuit Five experiences. Anything else that, you know, get creative states like when you’re doing art. On the shadow side of it also could be sort of an escapist, like when you maybe finally discover something that maybe can become unhealthy or you get addicted to that because you don’t want to be in your body. So that’s like the kind of the line you have to be careful with Circuit Five where you get like blissed out and you just want to stay there. Circuit six the meta programming or the neuroelectric circuit and for the way that we work with the model and our as our course is called certainly training certified metaprogrammers we take that as the lens where the whether you’re working on yourself or facilitating guiding others through this process you’re stepping into the role of the metaprogrammer and that’s where you bring your um your belief systems or bs into conscious awareness where you start to question um you know all the things that impacted us um through our development that um like just as even from infancy like our families our parents our families and our cultures um the media the music we listen to the art everything around us how it on you know, even on an unconscious level to a conscious level, shapes who we are. And a lot of that’s out of our awareness. So it’s really questioning our conditioning and who we are and our identity. Is it really aligned with who we want to become? And so we’re not, you know, stuck in what happened to us and we get to choose, you know, who we want to become in the future. So that’s the metaprogramming circuit. Circuit seven starts to get more expansive where we get into in Jungian psychology, the archetypal realms is circuit seven and circuit eight are maybe a little more controversial in, you know, modern psychological and scientific culture in general, where it’s, you know, having experiences with ancestors or side phenomena, psychic experiences, precognitions, you know, those who practice witchcraft or the occult when they experience entities or you’re doing DMT and you have entity encounters. So that’s all in that realm. And then in circuit eight, that’s the most expansive state. That’s when, for example, using 5-MeO-DMT and somebody has the experience of ego dissolution or hypnosis or that feelings of oneness with all that is and that loss of the sense of self. So that would be the non-local quantum metaphysiological circuit experiences of circuit eight. And also the near-death experiences that would also fall into circuit eight. Doug, do you want to add anything there? And I muted you, Doug. Yeah. Still a bit muted on the hit the left button there. There we go. Sorry about that.

[00:16:56] Douglas Wingate: Yeah, absolutely. So one of the nice things about this framework is that it does encompass a lot of what’s kind of established and builds upon developmental psychology at the same time, bringing in transpersonal realms, transpersonal psychology, and that type of thing. And the interaction of how those come into play. So like Rachel mentioned, these sort of imprints that we can take at different developmental stages and how these impact how we perceive and navigate the world around us. So we carry these things sometimes from early childhood, these imprints that have happened. And they can become pretty rigid unless a lot of self-work or as we talk about with some of the psychedelic-assisted therapy components how those can help those in different experiences of altered states of consciousness or what we consider the the upper circuit experiences can catalyze the opportunity for change or re-imprinting of of some of these things that we tend to carry with us and healing through those processes if it makes sense Another way that we’ve started to take a look at these is also sort of as different forms of intelligence types that we have. So the one that most people are pretty familiar with is like the idea of how emotionally intelligent somebody is. Is somebody fairly emotionally intelligent or is that an area where they could really use some work possibly because that wasn’t modeled for them early in life. And so that might be a growth edge for them. And so you can kind of look at the different circuits as these different intelligence types where circuit one really focuses on somatic intelligence or pre-verbal really embodiment. So how our relationship to our body. And again, as Rachel said, how that shows up in terms of safety, how safe we feel in our body, in our environment. Circuit two has a lot more to do with emotional intelligence. So how we navigate those things. Circuit three is more of our logical deductive reasoning that kind of comes online around late childhood and um how heavily we may lean into that we’re a very what would be considered a circuit three heavy culture um and then circuit four could be seen as uh social intentional intelligence so how we navigate our social environments and the expectations around that circuit five can be seen as uh sensory intelligence or an awareness of how we can utilize and amplify our experience of our sensory perception and how immersive we allow ourselves to be. Circuit six, a metacognitive intelligence where it’s really focused on self-reflection. So again, as Rachel mentioned, our ability to take a look at it and really analyze or think about why we think about things. Kind of that recursive method to allow for change if it doesn’t really make sense. So this is a real key point. If somebody is working with different methods, a lot of your classical psychedelics fall into eliciting what would be considered a circuit six or a metacognitive state where we can start thinking about those imprints. Circuit seven can be seen as kind of a collective intelligence where that archetypal material comes up. And then we refer to circuit eight also as unitive intelligence, where you do have that expanded state in the center of this recognition of interconnectedness with that which is beyond our physical body or physical form. So that oneness with the universe, with the world, with all.

[00:20:42] Kyle Buller: Amazing. Thank you for that. I’m kind of curious, as you guys were explaining this, my mind was going to some of Stan Grof’s theories around his map of consciousness and his cartography of the psyche. Is there anything that I guess really kind of catalyzed this framework for Wilson and Leary and those folks? How are they kind of conceptualizing that? A thing that I was thinking about was like Stan’s perinatal birth matrices and like what was coming up in sessions made him think about like, we need a new framework here. So I’m curious if there’s any bit of a backstory around how this all kind of came together.

[00:21:19] Douglas Wingate: Totally. And one of the contributions that Rachel and I kind of added to the model, because a lot of the time when Leary and Wilson were originally developing this model, a lot of that is certainly with Leary out of his work with psychedelics, you know, in a clinical setting, the early psychedelic research that he was involved in. And similar to Grof, they were doing things around the same time. One of the contributions that we’ve added to the model in terms of emphasizing the discussion of what Grof brought into some of that. Grof’s work really focused on either either end of the spectrum of within this model. So the basic perinatal matrices that he describes that a lot of people are accessing during psychedelic states or during the holotropic breathwork altered states of consciousness. This kind of ties into what we ended up referring to as circuit zero. But really, in the original model, falls within what we consider the receptive subphase. So Leary delineated three subphases within each circuit. There’s receptive, where you’re first being exposed to this type of material. Then there’s integration, and then there’s the transmission phase. So once you integrate something in, you’re able to kind of embody it, make it your own, and then discuss it in a different way that makes sense to you or may be helpful for other people. So Grof’s basic perinatal matrices falls into what would be considered the receptive phase of circuit one or the somatic experience, where the prenatal experiences can have these vast but completely subconscious influences on not just our frame of mind as we grow up and develop, but also our body. And so we go into that and discuss how since that time, There’s been a lot of research showing just how impactful the prenatal and perinatal experiences are from everything from hormone regulation and immune system development to development of our psych states and psychological state and how we look at things. And then people accessing those in the altered state of consciousness, Grof’s other end of the spectrum would fall into a circuit seven, circuit eight territory where they’re in these altered states of consciousness, very expanded states, and then being able to reaccess that. So that’s sort of this component of re-experiencing and opportunities to re-imprint or work through that material and heal from it. I guess I got off track to talk about Grof and less about where Leary and Wilson were coming from. I kind of mentioned that a lot of this was initially developed out of Leary’s work with the psychedelic work and his research. And then I think just Wilson, Leary, and others around the time too, trying to make sense of these altered states or expanded states that people are experiencing, certainly with psychedelics. But so Rachel mentioned things like yoga practices, meditation practices, and things like that. They don’t really fall into certainly the traditional psychological framework of the time, but were very real human experiences. That have been documented for centuries, millennia by shamans and other people who utilized psychedelics and these practices within different cultures. So they’ve existed, they’ve been talked about, but they hadn’t really been uh brought into any sort of functional framework to really talk about them and this is also a lot of the reason that we’ve put a lot of work on trying to bring this conversation into this the psychedelic-assisted therapy realm as well is because in a lot of the trainings that are happening right now there’s this verbal recognition there’s a recognition that people are experiencing these altered states you know people will have archetypal Experiences with family members or lineages or generations or entity encounters and things like that, but there’s not really. What do you do with that? Where is that coming from and how can you effectively integrate that in make meaning out of it? And what do you do with it from there? So we found that this model lends itself very well to that. Rachel, do you have anything you want to add to that?

[00:26:01] Rachel Turetzky: No, that was the origin of everything, was just having, as a psychonaut, having been exposed to this model, knowing about it, working with it, knowing its utility. And why reinvent the wheel, right? Once I got into more of the academic side of things and working with psychedelics professionally, studying them, just knowing that this exists and it’s kind of in obscurity as part of a counterculture artifact. And wanting to update it and bring it out to the world so that it could be of use to so many people. Even just normalizing different experiences that people might have, where in contemporary psychology might be pathologized. If you have a certain type of therapist or psychiatrist who just views certain types of experiences as you have an ancestor encounter or you tell somebody that you see an entity, you know, they’re going to maybe slap a label on you. And so, or even my own experience, um, with, before I knew what like lucid dreaming was or what, um, an out of body experience wasn’t having that spontaneously, you know, and just feeling like, am I going crazy? And, you know, so just to have something like a framework that like, oh no, that’s what this falls into. And it helps with the meaning making process to explore it more deeply, to understand what’s going on. Both psychologically or psycho spiritually. So it’s just a great tool that hopefully can now be explored through a wider audience and can benefit the psychedelic communities.

[00:27:45] Douglas Wingate: Yeah, so a lot of our work was in putting together our book was really focused on demonstrating and substantiating how this has just really been verified over the last fifty years when the model was first developed, first presented, that the research is just built on that more and more. So like I said, bringing in the perinatal matrices, but also the research in terms of the impact on prenatal experiences. And with circuit one material or somatic intelligence material, how the early life experience and early life imprinting has just further been developed and discussed. And so when this model was first put out there, a lot of the verbiage didn’t really exist. And it can make approaching that material, some of the earlier material, a little bit difficult because they were coming up with terms or mashing terms together to try to talk about what they were wanting to talk about epigenetics wasn’t really a thing epigenetics falls into circuit seven territory where we were having this direct influence and almost dialogue with our genetic material you know how to influence that everything from diets exercise to the way that we think about things influences our genetic material and its expression we understand that now they didn’t understand that then with circuit one material attachment theory was In its infancy, it wasn’t really talked about. Polyvagal theory falls into that. A lot of somatic psychomotor psychotherapy approaches, these body-based approaches, there was some of that existing as well, but the verbiage, the dialogue wasn’t really happening. And this material has just really been more substantiated as time has gone by. And so our work was heavily based on pooling that together and demonstrating that, hey, now we’ve got all of this research and all of these conversations happening that just really backs it up and that it has really stood the test of time.

[00:29:44] Joe Moore: Yeah, so a thing, maybe Rachel brought up this idea of these thoughts, frameworks being kind of countercultural artifacts. I think, you know, twofold here. Tim doesn’t get enough credit as being a major influence on the development of psychology generally, right? He was a world leading psychologist before psychedelics. And then, you know, psychedelics happened, made him more of a lot of things. And he had a lot of time to sit and think while incarcerated too, right? Like that, you know, really tragic amount of time in prison. But we got some really good writing out of it. Could either of you kind of bring up any helpful insights around Tim’s legacy here? Rachel, you want to?

[00:30:38] Rachel Turetzky: Just again, like similar, like just what you were saying, he’s not, I think if anything, when he does come up for a lot of people, he’s demonized, um, sort of like, he’s like the fall guy for the whole scheduling of psychedelics and, and that it just really, um, you know, obstructs his legacy in a lot of ways. And so, and I think it’s just taking a moment right now, just maybe day to honor him and Robert Anton Wilson, Antero Alli, John Lilly. Our friend and colleague who we collaborate with, David J. Brown, who is really lovely as like a direct lineage bridge to hearing personal stories. He’s a very good friend with all of them. And so, yeah, I mean, he was a brilliant Harvard psychologist, Tim, and he wrote like this book that’s still in use today on interpersonal personality.

[00:31:34] Douglas Wingate: Um he yeah the test is still used to this day right interestingly enough it just really doesn’t get recognized he doesn’t get the credit on it

[00:31:43] Rachel Turetzky: Yeah, I think the test also like when he was in prison right is like he actually created the test that so he was able to get himself in like the most minimum security um part of the prison because he obviously knew the answers and what to say because he broke the test um.

[00:31:58] Joe Moore: It’s such a wild life.

[00:32:01] Rachel Turetzky: And it’s cool because because of David and our publisher, who original Falcon that published Leary, all of their Leary, Wilson Antero and now ours, but to hear all the stories from him. Firsthand and what’s fun about Tim and all those guys really is, you know, sometimes they say like, don’t meet your heroes because they’re like very different than what you expect them to be or they might disappoint you. But from the stories that, you know, we’ve been so privileged to hear, like they absolutely live up to what you would expect them to be and just such free, interesting people.

[00:32:42] Joe Moore: Yeah it’s um yeah and it’s it’s a long weird exquisite horrifying and amazing story um you know as they should be i suppose and you know wilson fascinating character like just wrote a lot did a lot of thinking um did a lot of reading this whole stand-up philosophy thing folks should kind of um i don’t know almost consider him a more psychedelic carlin sometimes.

[00:33:10] Rachel Turetzky: And carlin timothy leary also apparently i was talking to nick our publisher nick archer and he was saying tim was also a stand-up comedian and he would go perform yeah and carlin is is on record as saying he was a big fan and massively influenced by wilson as well and and i went that direction wow cool um.

[00:33:33] Joe Moore: Yeah, and it’s just something that I think a lot of folks can’t wrap their head around is, okay, this person who is an engineer kind of philosopher, why would he have anything helpful to say about psychology? Well, first off, he has a psyche, probably. Best we can estimate, did have one. And spent a lot of time around a lot of people doing interesting things. And he did experience substantial loss was a daughter murdered? Is that the story? Right. When she was quite young, right? She was working, I think it was in a, was it a thrift store or? Yeah. Maybe a teenager. Teenage years.

[00:34:23] Douglas Wingate: But he also, so he did have a PhD in, I think it was psychology. It was, it just unfortunately was at a, a school that I guess they lost their accreditation. So he just sort of never referred to it, but that’s what Prometheus Rising is. His, his book on the eight-circuit model was, is a just rewriting of his dissertation.

[00:34:45] Joe Moore: Hmm. I love that. Yeah. Kyle you’ve read nothing by robert anton wilson at this point interesting have you.

[00:34:56] Kyle Buller: No i feel like i probably should after this.

[00:35:01] Rachel Turetzky: Oh my God, yeah, plenty to get. We’ll have a lot to talk about and there’s a lot of what’s great too is just a lot of experiential practices that he gives so just different ways to play with your your experience of reality what is you know really questioning what is that and Um, so especially for, uh, the younger, um, viewers to, you know, like for everybody, anybody, but like just having, being at a formative age to explore that I think is so advantageous.

[00:35:31] Douglas Wingate: Yeah, and I think also he really did the work in terms of exploring these different things. I mean, everything from certainly psychedelics, but exploring other systems, meditation systems. He was a huge practicer of pranayama and different occult systems and ritual systems and diving into… Things like Lilly’s work with sensory deprivation and you know he’s written multiple articles talking about all of the different experiences he tried to expose himself to basically as many as possible in his own search for what consciousness uh has the ability to lend itself to or just the the expansiveness or what are the limits of human experience. And he really did that work. And a lot of material goes into that. Some of his books, Cosmic Trigger series, it’s a trilogy, goes into his personal experiences with these different practices and explorations. And yeah, he spent his life exploring the human experience.

[00:36:37] Kyle Buller: There’s like one book or starting point for folks like me who haven’t really dug in or to direct them.

[00:36:46] Joe Moore: Go ahead. What was that?

[00:36:48] Douglas Wingate: Prometheus Rising, for sure. Prometheus Rising, definitely, if you wanted more information about the Eight-Circuit model, that’s a great standing point. That was my first exposure to Wilson as well when I was seventeen. I picked up Prometheus Rising and it changed a lot of how I looked at things and it was just off to the races from there, pretty much consuming anything that he had written. If you want something a little bit more broad, I suppose, and also it’s a bit more autobiographical. The Cosmic Trigger is a great starting point for a lot of people too, and I know a lot of people have said that that was their sort of introduction to the material, and it does give a lot of the overview of his other works because his other books go in a lot of different directions depending on where your interests may lie. So I’d say both of those are really great starting points. And also, Joe, I’m curious, because I know you studied the Eight-Circuit model as well. So would you like to share anything about your book?

[00:37:48] Joe Moore: Well, I loved your book. Like, I think your book on Eight-Circuit is super helpful, kind of framing it. You had very specific examples. Like I have, yeah, I was about to do a two, the originator kind of info psychology, exopsychology book. The Leary books were helpful, interesting, useful. I think don’t start there. If you’re not really familiar with Leary’s work, don’t start with Leary’s work right away. It’s funny, it’s weird on purpose. It’s like every single sentence could be challenging you by design it’s not necessarily a clean like here’s what we mean and you all made like a really great kind of walk through of what is this concept why are we doing it how can we test it how might it show up um so yeah i definitely advise reading reading your books to start with I think and throw Ali’s kind of angel tech was useful in that regard, which I haven’t read yet. Tragically, the circuit brain more updated more practice is really into how to work with the model apply it. Right. And I, you know, there’s a lot of folks that haven’t really dug into the history of psychedelia ever. Right. So like, have you read Leary or, you know, sorry, Lily.

[00:39:21] Rachel Turetzky: Yeah. We run into a lot of people who have never heard of Lily. And that’s tragic. Yeah.

[00:39:27] Douglas Wingate: He invented the flotation tank and did early personal and other experiments with, with ketamine. So he’s definitely a brilliant figure that more people should hopefully now, hopefully more people hear the name and want to look into him, Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer. It’s similar to reading Leary though. It’s kind of abstruse, heavy book, but… Like I mentioned, with Leary, there’s a lot of what we refer to as Learyisms. There’s a lot of new words that you’ve never heard before. Like I say, compound words of different concepts that he’s trying to put verbiage to. And it can be a trudge to get through it and really try to… It’s an investment if you’re going to try to decipher what he’s talking about. Brilliant material, but not the easiest.

[00:40:19] Rachel Turetzky: And also just thinking about the time, though, where he’s hiding sort of, like, you can reprogram yourself with LSD and other drugs. And having to hide that in the language of metaprogramming and the other concepts that he was putting forth.

[00:40:35] Joe Moore: Right. And yeah, there’s like a certain style that probably pervaded from psychedelic books, I think from around sixty seven through probably the mid nineties, where it was often like that kind of packed with these kind of interesting turn of phrases and, you know, knowing what was in the water at the time so kind of cultural kind of touch points historical touch points um there’s so much and you know i i don’t know if i no i probably didn’t disclose this to you too yet but i for years and years and years i would listen every single night like almost all day to everything that psychedelic salon podcast had up so it was all the recordings of leary lily raw mckenna etc shulgin like so many of these amazing minds and so like i was already kind of steeped in leary before i even started to read leary right that guy’s funny like you know not a clean story either i’m chatting with zach about tim a while ago and it was it was interesting like you know there’s some hard parts of the story but it’s also like nobody ever did this before like this is a first time thing the president made you you know, America’s most wanted man, the most evil man in America, you know, good for him for hitting that target. But it’s really challenging for a human to deal with that, especially when you’ve already kind of put LSD on a pedestal, which is, you know, amazing, but it also can make life a bit more challenging too when you do it too much.

[00:42:23] Rachel Turetzky: Although there’s that video that’s now kind of gone viral where he’s asked, do you have any regrets? And he’s basically like, I should have done more psychedelics and made more love.

[00:42:37] Joe Moore: Right. Have you guys bumped into Didi Goldpaw yet? Is that how we say your last name, Kyle? LCSW in New York State wrote a book called Embrace Pleasure. And the idea was that a lot of people just have anhedonia, just can’t receive pleasure. And you have to kind of heal that. Um and it can take a long time to heal that yeah and um you know she’s like you know at the end of the book like okay you healed it you got pleasure what’s what do you do next you get more pleasure was her answer cool like hedonic engineering right into like a c-five categorization in the eight-circuit model is the being able to really go into those pleasure states.

[00:43:28] Douglas Wingate: Yeah, hedonic engineering was a term that Leary had used and then Wilson adopted as well to talk about exactly that, rediscovering your appreciation for pleasure, for joy, for rapture and awe and how that really is lacking for so many or shut down for so many early in life. And it can really take a lot of work to rediscover that.

[00:43:57] Joe Moore: Mm hmm. Yeah. And just to be clear, like when Didi says pleasure, it’s not necessarily exclusively a sex thing. It could be just really how much you like coffee or peanut butter or something, too. It’s just like being with that moment, that thing. Kyle.

[00:44:16] Kyle Buller: I was just gonna say and from like a neo Jungian perspective kind of talk about that from like a golden shadow. You know, it’s like we typically want to like hang out in the repressed content of like the darkness. But what about these light aspects where it’s like hard to actually embrace love, joy, bliss, all these good feelings?

[00:44:36] Rachel Turetzky: And that’s one of the nice things, like when I was doing the adherence rater work with maps is just witnessing sometimes the most therapeutic experience some of these people had was all of a sudden in this state, they were able to experience what probably for most people would just be like normal, you know, just feeling normal. But for them, because they were in such a low state, like all the time in chronic survival mode, that all of a sudden just all of that being lifted. And so to just experience life without anxiety and fear and just what that is like, you know, so the therapy is the positive experience because you’re just, when you’re in locked into such a, um, you know, dark worldview, it’s, it could be so liberating.

[00:45:26] Kyle Buller: Well, it makes me wonder too, just about like people’s perception around therapy, right? It’s like, sometimes people come in and I noticed this sometimes like, where they’re like, what if I enjoy this? Like, what if I’m not doing quote unquote the work, you know, where I’m not digging into like my childhood or, you know, my relationships with my parents or, you know, stuff like that. And I wonder just like how, yeah skewed that is sometimes where it’s like we always need to be working on this like really tough stuff where it’s like maybe also the work is learning how to embrace the good in life too and.

[00:46:03] Joe Moore: The FDA tells us it’s a negative experience it’s actually bad if it feels good that’s what the fda told me.

[00:46:12] Rachel Turetzky: Yeah, I think it’s yeah. Well, yeah. In the in the maps work, it was called it was tracked should have been tracked as an adverse event if it was pleasurable.

[00:46:21] Joe Moore: We need to change the government a little bit. They’re thinking on this. We were founded by Puritans. Um and i i i grew up in massachusetts my joke is that everybody born in massachusetts was given a puritan hat at birth so we could keep that tradition going um and puritanism is the sneaking suspicion that somebody somewhere is having a good time and you know we have to kind of get over that it’s not okay to think like that i think um part of that discussion rachel is around diversion like they’re worried oh people might like it and therefore it might escape into the wild like people out in the americas might start doing ecstasy it’s like oh what if but that’s.

[00:47:07] Rachel Turetzky: Interesting to hear that perspective because having worked as an adherence reader with maps for so long um so it I would watch the recordings of the therapy sessions and we had, you know, sort of thinking in terms of like quality control. Did the therapist hit certain items that they were supposed to talk about at some point in the sessions? And so, and it brings in the idea of like, like graph of the, the sorry, I’m having a brain fog, inner healing intelligence. And so when you go into these experiences to have approached it with curiosity and that everything that comes up is relevant and therapeutic. So even if that is a positive experience, um to just be able to because sometimes that is the most healing thing if again you’re stuck in chronic fear and just constantly activated and then all of a sudden that lifts and you’re having like this is what it feels like to feel good and that’s gone you know that is extremely potent as medicine and so trusting that that’s coming from somewhere in your psyche that’s needing to be expressed So that’s I’ve not actually heard of that, Joe, that that was something that the FDA flagged as an adverse reaction in those studies.

[00:48:29] Joe Moore: It was part of like the FDA rejection discussion. And yeah, it’s it’s fascinating. And yes, like anhedonia is kind of a disease where we can’t actually experience pleasure and, you know, flagging it as an adverse event just seems complicated. I think yeah we have a long way to go uh and you know that that discussion like you not knowing necessarily about this part is interesting to me too for a handful of reasons um but you know the world may never know the actual story here So why? I think we’re coming closer. Like, why might people in helping healing professions, medical and adjacent, why might they want to know about this? Like, why might it be useful for them?

[00:49:25] Douglas Wingate: So we really try to lean into the practical elements in our written work, and that’s a lot of the reason that we released the workbook as a follow-up as well. The main book certainly has different exercises, different perspectives, different things that you can do to explore this. But to actively work through that. And I can say with my facilitation work with psychedelics, with psilocybin, it’s for people where it’s a right fit. Like I said, I work with a lot of people who have history of traumatic brain injury and stroke, and we’re doing more of a psychedelic-assisted neuro rehab type thing. So integration looks very different from people who are coming in with anhedonia or longstanding depression or just wanting to explore themselves deeper or healing from grief and things like that. But a lot of the practicality of the model is if beforehand we always do preparation, if we have an understanding of where people might have an early imprint or or how what sort of lens they use in perceiving the world and navigating the world, then one that can be it can lend itself to having an understanding of what sort of material might come up during a journey, for sure. It can also provide different exercises, different ways to explore that beforehand so that there’s a little bit more awareness, which can be brought into intention and the work and going into the journey. And certainly afterward, if somebody has had a large expansive experience and say it’s a circuit seven experience and they do have some sort of entity encounter or lineage encounter with their ancestors. Having the tools to take a look at that, knowing that one big contribution of Ontario’s work with the model was the idea of verticality. There’s an inner relationship between the higher and lower circuits and the lower circuit works can really work to ground or help with integration process. So if somebody has a disembodied experience, a very expansive experience, coming back into the body and bringing that in to go about their job the next week, like how do you do that if you just had a complete dissolution of self and suddenly a recognition of being interconnected with everything, but you have to go back to your day job how how can you help bring that not forget it you know recognize that but also effectively integrate that in and so uh for instance you can work to with uh embodied practices to help build circuit one material somatic intelligent type material If there’s sort of a dysregulation or somebody is feeling really scattered emotionally, you can help with that integration process by bringing in different exercises or different perspectives that have to do more with emotionality and emotional intelligence circuits who work and things like that. It’s incredibly practical once you have an understanding of how these things interrelate and that they’re not hierarchical in any sort of sense that one is better than another. These are basically all uh capacities that we have access to a lot of people may not access what would be considered the the higher transpersonal circuits unless you catalyze that through some sort of practice because it’s not really culturally recognized we don’t have those those rituals or rites of passage or anything like that really built into our culture but once you do um have access to that or have access that how those things interplay with everything else that we already have and as i mentioned those early imprints and being able to the the transpersonal experiences being catalysts to initiate change in that so if somebody has an early life imprint that’s really negative so you know in infancy their the world was not safe their their home life was not safe their um Their parental figure wasn’t really there. It was neglect or whatever. That creates a deep wound. And the understanding that these more expanded states allow for reassessment of that and healing from that. So there’s a lot of different practical elements that we get into and explore. And the workbook is a really great tool that I’ve found in the integration process when I’m working with people who have had these expanded states with psychedelics. Rachel, you have anything you want to add?

[00:54:12] Rachel Turetzky: Yeah, like Doug said, we do kind of break down what can be most helpful for identifying, you know, what is the person wanting to work through if a certain trauma comes up, where that falls in their development and then being able to categorize in a sense, like, well, which therapeutic modality could be most helpful for that type of re-imprinting work? But also when working with psychedelics, like, you know, what is the intention? So if there is like a circuit for or whether it’s anhedonia or maybe there’s like a marriage counseling. So MDMA for either of those. So knowing that that’s like a circuit for a circuit five, you know, intentionally direct you towards using a certain compound where like with metaprogramming, you know, psilocybin or LSD would be appropriate to, you know, challenge your sense of self and reality and for those types of explorations low dose ketamine for circuit one and or high dose ketamine for circuit eight so even just the dosage just knowing like what type of state that that’s going to induce so it can help to be a framework for just what’s appropriate to use what dosage to use what the desired outcome is that you’re working towards.

[00:55:32] Douglas Wingate: Yeah there’s a real similar thing with psilocybin too in terms of dosage you know there’s discussion robert carter harris talks about rebus the relaxed beliefs under psychedelics and how that can be initiated by classical psychedelics and um there’s dr saffron has built uh kind of expanded on that to include uh he refers to as cebus supported beliefs under psychedelics and dosage with classical psychedelics can really make a difference in how deep you go and what sort of experience that catalyzes. So very low dose or micro dose of psilocybin would fall into the CBUS, the supportive. You’re not really breaking an experience open so much as an opportunity to support where you’re already at. So it can be really helpful. You know, there’s all kinds of evidence with it helping with depression and things like that, but it’s not necessarily going to catalyze breaking out of a very rigid, long standing pattern that we may have. And that’s a conversation that I have a lot with a lot of people when they’re asking about different dosage and whether or not microdosing versus a full journey is appropriate. Whereas the higher doses with psilocybin can lend itself to the self-reflective, the metaprogramming component, or very high doses. Of course, you can also have ego dissolution type circuit eight, unitive intelligence type experiences too. So yeah, doses definitely brought into the conversation when it comes to the different circuits. You can go, Rachel.

[00:57:00] Rachel Turetzky: Just as zooming out to also just that psychedelics are a huge way to activate different circuits but that it’s also like this is a great model just not limited to psychedelics like we’re saying with um like yoga practices mystical practices magical practices um just like in in the occult for example different systems that what’s you’re deconditioning yourself and um you know allowing yourself to explore different um expanding your perceptions and what is reality and so it’s a framework for psycho spiritual traditions as well. So not just limited to but I think especially with some like nowadays, psychedelics is getting more mainstream, different magical practices getting more mainstream and similar like what is a magician, you’re basically a meta programmer, right? So it’s a great model, not limited to psychedelics and clinical work, but just for your own personal self development.

[00:58:04] Douglas Wingate: Yeah, a couple of examples that I use for that is that holotropic breathwork, of course, was developed by Stan Grof when psychedelics were rescheduled and not accessible. And that can act as a very similar catalyst and very intentional in opening up to Circuit Seven archetypal type experiences. Uh and then sensory deprivation a lot of john lilly’s work with flotation tanks sensory deprivation tanks i’ve done dark room experiences where you spend two weeks in in the dark with no exposure to light and your body starts producing it endogenous dmt to where you’re experiencing a psychedelic experience you begin having very intense visual hallucinations after just a few days of that and uh and it’s really interesting to see how these type of experiences and catalysts can come in from different directions and that yeah psychedelics is just one available tool a very potent very effective tool for that but just one tool.

[00:59:02] Joe Moore: Lots of different tools and doorways.

[00:59:05] Kyle Buller: Doug, you mentioned that this isn’t hierarchical. And I think maps and frameworks, I think, are really important. I think I was talking to a teacher years ago. And it’s like, having a map when you’re lost at sea is really helpful. Navigate these like different terrains it is really helpful to have a framework but i’m sure there’s some folks that look at this and they look at it as hierarchical right or like when we think about psychedelic experiences people are always pushing towards i need to have the mystical ego dissolution um you know because that’s where the healing is how do we like navigate like if somebody’s coming in understanding this framework like how do we help them navigate just expectations around like yeah maybe we don’t need to work on these like you know circuits five through eight but you know maybe sometimes people look at and go well isn’t the whole point is to have circuit aid of like you know ego dissolution and that non-like logical circuit open and being more expansive yeah.

[01:00:08] Douglas Wingate: Uh I mean it’s non-hierarchical in the sense that if you have As I mentioned before, each one of these are types of experience that have bore themselves out over centuries. They’ve been discussed, but what’s considered upper circuit, circuit seven, circuit eight type material is kind of rarefied air because, again, culturally, it’s not really discussed. There’s not really protocol for it. Bringing that into everybody’s life. So a lot of people have not had those experiences and developing that can be very beneficial to have a greater understanding of if it’s like circuit eight, understanding the interconnectedness of everything. We talk about how quantum physics really changed the way that we take a look at the universe. And if you have a greater understanding of that, that’s another lens, another perspective that wasn’t available to you before. And so they’re non-hierarchical in the sense that proper integration brings all of those in so that we have ready access or at least an understanding of those possibilities and those lenses. It can be pretty easy to at first glance think of them as i mean there’s even the phrasing of lower circuits with circuit one through four and higher circuits as more transpersonal states with circuit five through eight um that verbiage is used and they’re laid out in the order that we do from from one to eight because they are generally speaking broader in scope in terms of the how much understanding and information it encompasses so circuit one is very body based it’s very localized in the body and as we develop through circuits two three four that’s that’s an expansion of our personal self into our first it’s a non-delineation between caregiver and the child and this oceanic um sort of connectedness there and lack of understanding of self and there’s a separation of self and then there’s interaction with the nuclear family or your your family and then the social realm and then you broaden that out to understand that you’re more connected with other individuals outside of that and more interconnected with people as a whole and then there are uh connections that we have with the world around us as a whole in in nature and an understanding of that, and then the expanded state around circuit eight, where there’s a oneness with everything. And so there is this broadening as you work your way through. But the way that we we talk about how they all interact, each one of those are different lenses and available ways of looking at things, and each one serves a different purpose. And so If you have done some work, you have some exposure with those, you have integrated those in a way, each one of those types of intelligence kind of has a tool. There are situations where it’s appropriate to. To self-advocate with with more emotionality versus more linear logical situations and those are pretty well recognized everybody has developed those capacities not everybody has had the opportunity to necessarily develop the metacognitive processes um the Sometimes we just haven’t had those type of experiences available to us. And so when doing a lot of this work, if somebody has not had those experiences, it can be very eye opening and another component that they can bring in into their healing process.

[01:03:58] Rachel Turetzky: Also the importance of so the quote comes to mind shop would carry water so you have this this peak state this you know you’re like oh i just took a heroic dose and i had this amazing experience I have to chase the next high, chase the next peak state, but what is the purpose there, right? So after you have that experience, what are you doing to bring that down to you still have to exist in the world, you still have to function and survive and live your life and interact with others. And so I think instead of just chasing the peak states, the focus should be on the integration as these circuits or dimensions being a whole human so that everything is in balance. And so I feel like just shifting that or think of somebody who, you know, have these experiences and now think that they’re somehow special and like they’re this enlightened person. And that’s like a form of like I had all this ego dissolution. And yet that becomes an ego experience in and of itself. So then to be able to ground that in the lower circuit so that it informs and enlightens your everyday experience and the way that you interface with the world and with others.

[01:05:15] Kyle Buller: Thank you for that. You’re talking it also okay i guess kind of reminds me of like a lot of the the chakra systems as well um and i wonder how much they like kind of pull from some of those eastern philosophies?

[01:05:27] Douglas Wingate: There’s definitely some Overlap my first book uh Circuits and Shen pulls from my background in traditional chinese medicine in some of those eastern systems and i do draw some parallels between the chakra system and the eight-circuit model and there’s certainly some parallels there’s no doubt i mean leary had written about eastern systems he had a book um he did his interpretation of the Tao Te Ching he did an interpretation of the I Ching which is the system that i’m writing more on right now and some of the correlates between that um so there’s no doubt that there was influence there and yeah i have explored some of that in some of my work.

[01:06:09] Joe Moore: Cool. Well, let’s remind people about your book and the upcoming class or the class that’s now available one more time.

[01:06:18] Douglas Wingate: Sure. The book is Eight-Circuit Ascension, A Guide to Metaprogramming and the Multidimensional Self. And then earlier this year, the workbook for that was also released. So the Eight-Circuit Ascension Workbook. What’s the subtitle on that again, Rachel?

[01:06:36] Rachel Turetzky: The Course to Change Your Brain and Increase Intelligence.

[01:06:38] Douglas Wingate: Yeah. So those are published through Original Falcon Press, available on any book selling platforms. And then the course, do you want to speak about the course again, Rachel?

[01:06:51] Rachel Turetzky: Yeah, so it’s fourteen lessons. So we go into the eight-circuits in addition to our own edition of circuit zero, which is where we bring in Grof’s perinatal matrices and talk about just the powerful impact that on development that pre and perinatal state has on just life. How we’re affected by, for example, when you think of, unfortunately, like a child who had, you know, an alcoholic mother, for example, which there was a recent study by Robin Carhart-Harris, right, on actually psilocybin.

[01:07:27] Joe Moore: I don’t think it was by Robin, but there was a recent study that came out in the last couple of days about psilocybin potentially being beneficial for prenatal alcohol exposure. I don’t know. Yeah,.

[01:07:37] Rachel Turetzky: It was just like putting it how that impact can really have lasting effects on a person’s life versus somebody who’s, you know, mother was very conscientious about her diet and taking care of herself and created an optimal environment. So we add that to the course as well. We get into um, you know, like the concept of metaprogramming and what your role would be as a metaprogrammer. We talk about applications in psychedelic-assisted therapy. Um, let’s talk about chapel, perilous and ontological shock, spiritual emergencies that can come up and how to navigate those and how that comes into the model as well. And different tools based on different, different circuits are working through some of that as well.

[01:08:24] Joe Moore: Kyle, do you know the term Chapel Perilous?

[01:08:28] Kyle Buller: No, I haven’t heard of it before.

[01:08:31] Joe Moore: Let’s spend just a moment on that, Doug, if you could, and then we’ll wrap it up here.

[01:08:36] Douglas Wingate: Yeah, Chapel Perilous is a literary term. I don’t remember the origin of it. Rachel, do you remember where it originally came from?

[01:08:43] Rachel Turetzky: Yeah, it’s King Arthur and the legend of the Holy Grail, the Knights of the Round Table.

[01:08:48] Douglas Wingate: Yeah. Wilson did use that as a literary way of describing experiences that were so destabilizing that you feel lost or like you’ve lost yourself and it can be very disorienting. This can often happen with expanded states of consciousness, altered states of consciousness, psychedelic experiences, where it’s a lot of just foreign material and you don’t know what to do with it and sometimes people can get get lost in chapel perilous for extended periods of time it can take quite a while especially if you don’t have the framework or somebody to talk to who has previous experience in navigating these these experiences um where yeah where you can just feel very very lost like you’ve lost yourself and uh and there are a number of tools and like i said we bring in In parallel, in that discussion, Grof’s discussion around spiritual emergencies and how those can come up, and then explorations with ontological shock, just these experiences that are so shocking to our nervous system and to the way that we think about things that it’s destabilizing. And having the tools to explore those and help integrate those in and kind of re-find ourselves is how we… Work through that material.

[01:10:09] Rachel Turetzky: And at the end of the course, once you pass all of the quizzes and exams, you’ll be eligible for the certification as a metaprogrammer. And also if applicable, if you’re seeking CE credits, we’ll be offering those as well.

[01:10:26] Joe Moore: And I believe we came up with the title, the Eight-Circuit Model of Consciousness and Integrative Framework for Psychedelic Assisted Therapy. For that, Psychedelic Education Center, everybody. All right. Well, thank you all. This is awesome. I’m really excited for the class. I’m going to try my best to make time for it. You know how it goes. But just excited we can make it available and help revitalize this really important stream of thought.

[01:10:59] Rachel Turetzky: Yeah, we’re really excited.

[01:11:01] Douglas Wingate: Thank you.

[01:11:03] Rachel Turetzky: Loved having this discussion and being able to talk about it.

[01:11:07] Kyle Buller: Yeah, and I think it’s super important for people to have these frameworks, right? Because Doug, as you’re saying before, like some of these programs are touching on some of the transpersonal aspects. And like, I keep thinking about that, of like how psychiatry and psychology might be like kind of shaping the psychedelic future, but also what happens with the experiences. And as I always say, trauma and everything is a trauma, right? It’s like, sometimes there is that weirdness and help people make meaning out of it. So awesome to like, yeah, get education in these different frameworks so we can best support our clients. So thank you.

[01:11:52] Joe Moore: All right. Until next time, let’s hang out backstage for a minute and yeah, take care, everybody.