This transcript was machine generated and may contain errors.

Joe Moore (5:21): Hi, everybody. Welcome back to Psychedelics Today. Joined by Jackie Tileston at the University of Pennsylvania. How’s your day?

Jackie Tileston (5:30): Good, great. How are you?

Joe Moore (5:31): Wonderful. I’m so happy to be here. This has been a fun, wide-ranging conversation already, and I’m excited for more. So you are part of the Penn Psychedelics Collaborative, part of the group that kind of brought this thing together? What is it?

Jackie Tileston (5:50): Well, it was started by a group of post-grads, PhDs, doctoral students in different degrees like bioengineering and nursing, and they were really trying to collect all of the people on campus that are interested in psychedelics, so students, faculty, researchers. That original crew has since moved on, and we’re just kind of trying to keep the ball rolling, you know, as new people are entering the research field, as new students come in. Like, how can we keep everybody in communication with each other?

Joe Moore (6:35): Generally universities have that silo effect and it’s really difficult, so it’s fun to know that y’all are pioneering that. I discussed this concept at Stanford with some people, and they were like, “Yeah, we don’t know anything that’s happening.” There are some efforts, but it’s challenging to keep up with a big organization and what everybody’s up to.

Jackie Tileston (6:58): Yeah. I mean, I think it helps that we’re not a particular school or department. We have members in all the different schools, and ideally, our long-range fantasy would be to have a program or a center that was truly interdisciplinary, so it’s not siloed in one research group’s interests. The reality is you have people fighting for funding or something like that, whereas we’re just trying to keep conversations open.

Joe Moore (7:33): Yeah, that’s fabulous. And I had a great time at your conference a couple years ago. Really wish I was able to make the last one. But it’s so great, and it’s such a good building for it. Super fun. So is there more coming in that regard?

Jackie Tileston (7:51): We are holding off for this year, primarily because all the conferences we’ve done so far, there have been three, have been all volunteer with no outside funding or funding from the university. So it’s been very grassroots, and a lot of those students have moved on. So we’re trying to kind of recalibrate and stabilize a little bit and see how much interest there is, but we have so many requests, like, “Those were the best conversations.” Yeah, because, you know, the one that I organized for metaphysics, bringing in Christof Koch and Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes and Valeria McCarroll, they would never have been in conversation with each other.

Joe Moore (8:40): Super important, obviously, for so many reasons. And you also have a number of classes that get taught in this kind of collaborative. Can you speak about that?

Jackie Tileston (8:53): Right now, in terms of the Psychedelics Collaborative, there’s only been the one class that I teach. I’ll be doing it next spring for the third time. It’s called Psychedelic Paradigms and Practices, and we’re trying to do everything in one class, so we cover neuroscience, therapeutic perspectives, Indigenous voices, metaphysics, the mystical experience, meditation.

Joe Moore (9:21): In like a normal three-credit program?

Jackie Tileston (9:23): It’s a normal three-credit class, once a week. And I’ve had funding from this really amazing program on campus, the SNF Paideia Program, that has allowed me to really bring in top scholars in the field, so that you don’t want me as an artist teaching the science module.

Joe Moore (9:44): Nope.

Jackie Tileston (9:45): And we’re just looking, not as part of the collective, but growing out of that, in the spring there will be two new courses, one in nursing on psychedelics and another in philosophy. So, I mean, in my fantasy world, each week of my syllabus would actually be its own course in the respective department. So hopefully that will come eventually.

Joe Moore (10:15): So what’s your role here at the university?

Jackie Tileston (10:21): I’m a professor in fine arts.

Joe Moore (10:23): Great. All right, so how does one end up in the arts and also psychedelics? One of my bad jokes is, eventually, if you do too much LSD, you end up as a tie-dye artist, but some people end up in different positions.

Jackie Tileston (10:39): Yeah. I mean, my trajectory into this was primarily through my interest in mysticism and non-ordinary experiences.

Joe Moore (10:50): That all came first?

Jackie Tileston (10:51): That all came first. Like, for 30 years I’ve had a meditation practice and an Ashtanga yoga practice, and been studying nondual philosophy. And about 2019, I started teaching a class called Mystics and Visionaries: Art and Other Ways of Knowing. I started with Hilma af Klint, the Swedish mystic artist, and kind of branched out. We looked at Buddhist art, tantric art, psychedelic art, a lot of outsider artists. So any artist that really worked with non-ordinary states as part of their creative process. And it just so happened that the scholar who was doing a PhD on mysticism that I invited into my class the first time was David Yaden. So David Yaden not only brought a particular lens into that class, but when he left here, he went to Johns Hopkins, right? Working on the mystical experience in psychedelics. So my interest in psychedelics was really sparked by trying to understand its relationship to the mystical experience.

Joe Moore (12:09): There’s all sorts of fun stuff there. Have you been keeping up with some of the debate and discussion from, you know, Jeffrey Breau from the Center for the Study of World Religions? And I think Paul Gillis-Smith is doing some stuff. I just got sent a really interesting paper by some Scottish folks that really kind of tried to make us not use the word mysticism anymore. And I don’t know what the answer is. I just think we need to have better terminology and use it better.

Jackie Tileston (12:39): Yeah. I mean, I think it’s so interesting. I saw an article on, like, mystical fictionalism, or, you know, can we leave mysticism out of this? And on the one hand, I think it would be useful to have language that didn’t trigger scientists. On the other hand, I think that these kinds of experiences have been happening as long as our species has been on this planet. Every tradition, every religion, every philosophy has accounts of the mystical experience. These are not fictional. They’re not crazy. They’re happening all the time. I think the interesting and maybe problematic thing for some of the clinical researchers is that they seem to be inevitable with the psychedelic experience. So, you know, you’ve seen all the studies of people that are taking psychedelics for anxiety, depression, ADHD, whatever. In the trials they do better when they rank higher on the Mystical Experience Questionnaire, and the researchers don’t love this. They just don’t, because if you are a materialist, a physicalist, those experiences don’t exist. They’re not real. So how are you gonna talk about them or make sense of them? And I think one of the things I’m interested in is, A, how can we change the language so that the researchers are actually seriously willing to look at it? But maybe also we’re talking about a bigger ontological paradigm shift that has to happen, which is from the materialism-first group of researchers to consciousness first. It’s a huge ontological shift, and I think we’re seeing scientists like Donald Hoffman, Federico Faggin, philosophers like Bernardo Kastrup all actually aligning with nonduality from the East, with idealism in Western philosophy, and the psychedelic experience is buzzing around this. And to me, those are the conversations that are more interesting to have.

Joe Moore (15:09): Totally. Like that Scottish paper, I’ll probably have the authors on soon. It’s pretty much like how they defined mysticism was this in-crowd clique of individual cases, and then we’re gonna build what mysticism is around 12 samples, as opposed to this broader global religious thing.

Jackie Tileston (15:31): I mean, I think it is worth looking at, you know, what exactly do we mean by the mystical experience? A lot of it comes from William James, from Stace’s questionnaire. I recently was preparing a talk on mystical experience and metaphysics for a psychedelic training program, and that was one of the first things I did, was look at, like, here’s the MEQ, here’s the Nondual Awareness questionnaire, not exactly the same, here’s the 5D altered states questionnaire. And the range across them is much wider than the classical qualities of mystical experience that William James would have recognized. And I think especially in psychedelic research, that’s important. So I would agree. I’d love to see this paper.

Joe Moore (16:31): Let’s keep it a living debate. I’ll try to send it over and connect you with them.

Jackie Tileston (16:34): But I think the other thing that I’m kind of interested in is, we keep trying to apply these models to the psychedelic experience, and I’d love to see a kind of reverse engineering of the experiences coming from psychedelics to create a map or a model that way.

Joe Moore (17:01): And of course, some psychedelic experiences would have to kind of inform this passion. Was that a watershed moment for you, or did you already have that experience from nondual meditation practice?

Jackie Tileston (17:15): Yeah, I mean, I came to psychedelics really late. It was a combination of being interested in the mystical experience from that perspective and realizing I didn’t have that experience. I had not had any psychedelic experience. Coinciding with the kind of cultural shift, reading Michael Pollan’s book, like so many people, made me realize that what I thought I knew about it was mostly standard PR from the Nixon era. And then so many people I knew, right around the time of the pandemic, were really actively seeking out psychedelic therapy. Most of it was underground because they were desperate, and it was kind of the confluence of these things coming together for me that made me say, “Okay, I need to do some field research.” For me, because of the long history in meditation and nondual philosophy, what I encountered in psychedelics was more of an affirmation of a worldview. I didn’t have a big ontological shift, or what Jeffrey Kripal would call a flip, because I was already in a kind of worldview and practices that accept and cultivate non-ordinary states of consciousness.

Joe Moore (18:47): Right. I think one of the things I got really interested in about you is this nondual perspective, and it wasn’t just from, “Oh, here’s 5-MeO, now I’m a nondual person.” There’s a lineage that you were interested in. I only had maybe three credits on Kashmiri Shaivism in my undergrad, and I don’t remember a ton, but I remember it being very influential for me. It’s like, oh, this is very straightforward. Thanks for simplifying it, guys. But how do you usually explain this nondual thing when you’re having this conversation with people?

Jackie Tileston (19:31): I mean, the first thing I try and do is, in a very general way, nonduality is referring to the idea that everything that exists, including the cosmos and the peacock spiders and you and me, is part of one unified field, that there’s only one thing. However, this is something I touched on in the training I was talking about. If you start looking at Buddhist lineages, the Vedanta lineages, the Kashmiri Shaiva lineages, their version of nonduality is actually not the same. There are a lot of overlaps, but there are a lot of differences to parse out. Like, we have to be careful not to throw all of those traditions into one nondual basket, because there are so many debates among them. We also have to be careful, like, it sounds a lot like analytic idealism, but there are some differences there too. But I would say the one thing is the idea that consciousness is the primary foundation of existence, and matter and the material world arise from that. But again, there are differences, like in some Buddhist lineages where the foundation is emptiness, not a form of divine intelligence as in some nondual lineages. And this is where, for the purposes of psychedelic integration and the metaphysics in psychedelics, it becomes really important for me to understand what kind of experience someone has had and how we are framing it on the other side. For example, some of these nondual traditions consider the world and the self to be completely illusory, to be a hellscape that we need to escape from, and so there’s a kind of up-and-out transcendent approach to this. And the tradition that I’ve studied most, Shaiva Tantra, posits that everything that exists is a divine emanation of that one consciousness, therefore is it. So famously, and I don’t wanna get too geeky here, but in his Tantrāloka, Abhinavagupta actually critiques the Advaitins, saying, “You’ve divided the world into maya, and Brahman as the only thing that’s real, which sounds a little bit like you’re a dualist.” This is a debate that goes back, like, 1,200 years. So for me, where that becomes important is in this idea that if you come out of a, quote, “nondual experience” on 5-MeO or some other psychedelic, and on a high enough dose most psychedelics will bring you there, and you encounter a worldview that dismisses this world as an illusion, that can really precipitate an existential crisis. It can become a form of ontological trauma. And interestingly, I follow some psychedelic forums online and some nondual forums online, and I started noticing a parallel with the version of nonduality that says none of this is real, you don’t have a self. You’ll see these, like, awakened dudes on YouTube referring to “this body-mind,” like, “There’s nothing left of me. I have no ego,” almost as a form of dissociation. And it’s really different from, say, the nondual tantric perspective where everything, including the stuff that is grotesque and awful, is a divine emanation. That you and me and the world and all the beauty and all the hideousness is all it, just manifesting from a source of consciousness.

Joe Moore (24:23): It’s interesting. I bring up often that people in meditation communities can have similar risks to people in psychedelic communities, and people get hospitalized from meditation retreats. It’s no joke. It’s real.

Jackie Tileston (24:38): Yeah. Well, Jules Evans’ Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project, and I think Johns Hopkins has a center for challenging experiences opening up, modeled their facilities and program on Cheetah House, which was designed to help people who had destabilizing meditation experiences.

Joe Moore (25:06): Right. It’s Josh Lipson and Roman Palitsky, they’re doing a lot of that, and yeah, they’re using these houses as models. I think it’s super important. And, you know, some people are like, “Oh, there’s no risks here.” It’s like, well, that’s not true, and it deserves careful attention. As much as I want the drug war to end, I also think we need to know how to handle this in a hospital if it comes to that.

Jackie Tileston (25:32): Yeah. Well, if they’re framed and handled and integrated properly, there is usually not a need for a hospital. But, you know, we talked about this earlier, a lot of the people doing the integration work don’t actually have the metaphysical framework to help the people they’re trying to help.

Joe Moore (26:02): I’ve accessed therapy through platforms like Headspace, and these folks don’t know what to do with me. And it’s like a CBT person, you know. God bless CBT, but what are you gonna do with somebody like me who’s put his brain in the laundry machine so many times? Not that I’m all that exceptional. I’m sure there’s plenty of people who are further out than me. But it’s gonna be a challenge for psychotherapy as a profession to keep up with this. And not to mention, once this is clinical, how are we gonna handle not only the strange mushroom experiences, which seem tame relative to, as we discussed a lot earlier, this 5-MeO integration? I started being in these spaces a little bit more recently, and the enormity of something that can happen in 10, 20 minutes is crazy. Once you’re everything, what are you when you’re back in your body?

Jackie Tileston (27:13): Yeah. I mean, I think that’s gonna be one of the biggest challenges for bringing these kinds of medicines into the clinical space, because they’re seeing them as medicine in a clinical space, but they can’t actually control what’s gonna happen. And as we know, people are having these profoundly life-changing, I’ll say metaphysical instead of mystical, experiences. And often the people who are clinically trained, who in the future will be the ones legally allowed to be in the room with them, have literally no capacity to navigate the experiences with the participants. So I think that’s gonna be a huge learning curve.

Joe Moore (28:03): So you would encourage, if somebody’s doing this stuff clinically, that hopefully they have experience?

Jackie Tileston (28:11): You know, it’s been an ongoing debate, whether it’s through MAPS or other trainings: does someone need to have had a psychedelic experience in order to guide someone through that? People make all of these analogies. “Well, I get heart surgery from someone who hasn’t had a heart attack.” And I’m like, “Well, yeah, but you probably don’t go to a sex therapist who’s never had sex.” The analogy I like to use is that the guide, the person in the room, is like your Sherpa, and I want the Sherpa who’s been to Everest 10 times and back. I don’t really need them to make my yak butter tea at base camp. I need them to know the way and help guide me through the experience, before, during, and after.

Joe Moore (29:14): I think largely the psychedelic space is in agreement with this. It’s just, how do we handle this logistically and legally? And that’s interesting, because if this becomes an ethical and moral decision, then are people going to break the law to serve their clients better in a clinical frame? I would hope the answer is yes, they’re willing to do that, but we’ll see.

Jackie Tileston (29:42): Yeah. Well, I think it would be great if the aboveground wave that’s gonna be happening as regulations change actually invited in the wisdom elders of the underground, who’ve been doing it for a long time and know what best practices look like. And I think places are starting to do this. Like, yes, there’s a lot of shady stuff in the underground, but there’s also a lot of wisdom and knowledge that often the newly minted clinical psychologist who’s done a three-month class on psychedelics, and maybe they had one experience as part of that training, they got sent to Jamaica or something, they just can’t know the range of experiences.

Joe Moore (30:31): The Holotropic Breathwork training traditionally is two years at the minimum, and there’s no drugs there. And they want you to do a lot of experiential work through that whole thing. And I have some intuition that that’s one of the better training programs, that kind of structure. That’s kind of what we modeled ours after. And we encourage people to get a lot of experience, and keep getting it, because you’re not done at any point. I think there’s something about getting stuck as a therapist. You think, “Oh, I have it all solved. I don’t need to do any more.” But then maybe you’re limiting that dynamic interplay with the client. So it looks like 5-MeO-DMT is coming in a clinical capacity, and it looks really exciting to investors because it can be delivered in a couple hours and you’re playing pickleball, which is crazy. How do you see this? Do you think it’s gonna be a little rocky?

Jackie Tileston (31:43): I mean, I think all of the new protocols are gonna go through a really rocky period. I think that the clinical research population knows more about MDMA, LSD, and psilocybin than they do about 5-MeO, experientially. And I think the differences are gonna become apparent really soon. And I think it’s just really, really important, as we talked about, that the companies that are doing these next phases of trials are consulting the people who know what’s going on, who can guide them and act as consultants in how to train people to sit with 5-MeO specifically. Just as microdosing to a heroic dose of psilocybin has an incredible range of experience available, the same is true of 5-MeO, and I haven’t seen clinical trials that look at what it will be like to do low-dose, titrated, stepwise 5-MeO as part of a therapeutic protocol. There are several underground therapy groups that are talking about the stepwise protocol. There’s the Pattern Project in Canada. And especially in Canada, where it’s not illegal, it’s in this gray zone, you have really experienced psychotherapists working with low-dose 5-MeO with their clients, and they have so much to teach the aboveground clinical research world as another model than just the mid dose and the high dose. But that’s also what’s really exciting. There’s this range of possibility of how 5-MeO specifically can be used therapeutically that we just haven’t even scratched the surface of.

Joe Moore (34:08): Agreed. I really hope the assorted pharmas are gonna pay attention. And I do know for sure people are getting consulted and contracted on these things, and I think that’s helpful. Once the money motive is there, it becomes challenging, and we need to really pay attention to that, everybody. The model I like quite a bit is, does the therapist necessarily need to be there? When I think about ketamine, when I think about 5-MeO, I’m like, well, we need to definitely make sure they’re physically safe and really comfortable and emotionally safe. And then once they’re able to converse, then we have time with the therapist. But is that 10-minute acute period necessary? Maybe, maybe not. We have to identify all that. And then how do we create these really enriching containers for landing? Right now with Spravato, you’re typically in a super boring medical office for two hours, super high, or medium high, ’cause it’s not really that big of a dose. And that’s kind of somewhat wasted time in a clinical environment. So I think the design sciences and art have a lot to offer. Have you bumped into my friend Elysa Fenenbock from the Stanford d.school yet? No? I gotta introduce you two. She’s taking a really interesting design approach to the whole topic, and that’s been really fun to chat with her about. Do you have an idea for what an ideal clinic landing room might look like after you’re done with the therapist? Give yourself an hour to unwind and maybe do some clay sculpting.

Jackie Tileston (35:55): Yeah. I mean, I think we already have models of, like, spa-type yoga studios, or just places that are less clinical. I think the kind of living room setting is fine. A lot of the clinics are trying to make it less like a doctor’s office and more like a comfy living room. Should it be a living room? Well, no, probably not. But again, I consider, for example, 5-MeO to be an incredibly sacred experience. There are a lot of people coming for therapeutic purposes that don’t want to be invited to think about it that way. So you want a space that feels neutral enough that they’re safe, warm and inviting, but not setting up some kind of belief system in terms of how they’re decorating the place, right? That’s already been an issue in studies. Is there a Buddha on the wall? Is there a mandala on the wall? We’re setting too many priors. Take it away.

Joe Moore (37:20): I don’t feel safe if there’s not a Buddha in the room. Kidding. I’ll be fine. It’s funny, hearing Matt Johnson and others talk about that. I think those are important critiques, but how do we do that in a way that doesn’t embed things or trigger people? And it’s all the way to the music, right? If I’m playing Wagner for somebody of Jewish descent, that’s not really very kind. Should think about that.

Jackie Tileston (37:47): Well, I think the idea of psychedelic design is complicated, because you’re talking about designing an experience. We’re not just talking about what it looks like. We’re talking about the soundtrack. We’re talking about the relationship with the therapists, the therapeutic alliance. We’re talking about the physical decor, the space. I think I read that one of the UC systems was setting up a rooftop garden for their…

Joe Moore (38:18): UCLA.

Jackie Tileston (38:19): Maybe. I was like, “Perfect,” because you can’t do a clinical study out in the woods. But if you have a rooftop garden, you can have a clinical study take place with access to nature. Perfect.

Joe Moore (38:35): LA is actually a pretty perfect environment for that, ’cause you’re not gonna get too much rain. Weather’s usually fine. Yeah, that’s clever. I need to follow up on that. That was a really cool thing they were building for a bit. I saw some photos. Did you?

Jackie Tileston (38:53): Yeah. Or maybe they were probably AI renderings. I don’t think it had been built yet. But I was still like, “Yeah, that looks good.”

Joe Moore (39:01): Right. Endlessly complicated, but also endlessly important. I see so much marketing for so many retreats, and it’s sometimes fascinating, other times triggering, where I’m like, “Oh, really? You’re gonna do that while you’re all in white clothes?” So for whatever it’s worth, I get triggered by the white clothes thing.

Jackie Tileston (39:22): Well, see, that’s tipping towards the ashram thing, and that’s gonna trigger some people. I mean, I think, for better or worse, what we’re ending up with is the neutral spa space looking like a kind of West Elm meditation room. Maybe that is the best scenario. I don’t know.

Joe Moore (39:45): It’s funny, and maybe it’s one of the least offensive things for the broadest population.

Jackie Tileston (39:51): Exactly.

Joe Moore (39:52): You can’t go full IKEA. But you could, and you’d tell us what happens. So let’s talk about art.

Jackie Tileston (39:59): Okay.

Joe Moore (40:00): So one of the fun conversations we had a few years back was about the concept of psychedelic art. Is psychedelic art just trying to put down a portion of your vision? Or what should psychedelic art be as a category?

Jackie Tileston (40:22): Yeah. I’m gonna try and talk about this without sounding too judgy or elitist. But I think that what people love about psychedelic art seems to be encountering a sense of recognition. Like, “Oh, dude, I saw that.” And I think I heard Alex Grey talk about that, that he really loves it when somebody says, “That so perfectly captures my experience,” and somebody feels validated and affirmed and excited by seeing that reflection. However, for most artists I know, the last thing I wanna hear is, “Dude, that’s what I saw in my experience.” And again, I’ve had a career for decades as an artist before I ever took a psychedelic. One of the things I found interesting was people often would say, simply because I used a high-key palette and work abstractly, that it felt psychedelic to them. And I would kind of roll my eyeballs, because what I’m picturing is, “Oh, that’s what you think psychedelic art is?” I think for me, the biggest problem I have is that it can very often veer towards something like an illustration of a trip report. It’s kind of the equivalent of, in the Renaissance era, you might go on a grand tour of Europe and send a watercolor postcard home of what Venice looks like to your friends who didn’t have the opportunity to take the trip with you. And so I feel like that’s what most psychedelic art is or veers towards, trying to capture the geometry, the visions, the spirits. And that’s not something, as an artist, that I’m interested in. I’m more interested in using abstraction as a language to invite the viewer to access these non-ordinary states or contemplate things that may not have language, and have a direct experience, which is actually a concept in Nondual Shaiva Tantra, that you have first-order experience, which is what happens before you have language about it or start making thoughts about it. So I’m also really interested in, if we think of the mystical experience and therapeutic medical use as the two main areas of psychedelic research right now, I’m really interested in what’s happening with reviving the early studies on how psychedelics can affect creativity, problem-solving, neuroplasticity, creating new patterns of thought. And so Bruce Damer and his work at MINDS is really interesting to me. That’s maybe more exciting than the idea of more super hyperrealistic AI-generated psychedelic art. How are psychedelics being used in conjunction with creativity and research, as part of the process and not necessarily the output? If that makes sense.

Joe Moore (44:06): My favorite topics, actually. So Fadiman and Harman and a few others were doing that in Palo Alto ages ago. And for those who haven’t heard me say it 50 times before, the idea was that they would feed people LSD in a particular container, and they would solve two to four problems after the peak of the LSD was done, stuff that they were stuck on for six to nine months. And so what I like to say about this is I seeded the ground for Bruce to be able to do the Center for MINDS, ’cause I just told the story for so much time. Then he got some money, and it’s awesome. I’m really excited that they’re doing it. My primary critique is, do we need to understand the neurological basis for what’s happening with psychedelics, or should we just be trying to implement this technology that seems quite proven, as much as possible, so that we can have thousand times better batteries and solar and nuclear and whatever else, so that we can lose as few species as possible over the next couple decades? That’s what I would insist on, if anybody wants to talk about it.

Jackie Tileston (45:22): Yeah. I think they’re gonna go hand in hand. We’re finding out now about so many creatives and scientists that had some sort of breakthrough idea or experience in conjunction with psychedelics. And so, like you said, that’s always been there. And the neuroscience is going to now try and explain how that happens through their own particular lens, and I think that’s fine.

Joe Moore (46:00): Oh, totally. We need both.

Jackie Tileston (46:02): When you’re talking about growth of dendrites and the neuroplasticity window and all of that kind of stuff, it adds credibility and a different kind of approach to understanding than just the idea that somebody had a good idea. I have no doubt that there have been a lot of bad ideas had on psychedelics.

Joe Moore (46:26): Right. So there’s just so much priming that went into those techniques that Fadiman and Harman had. And at Burning Man, I’ve had plenty of bad ideas.

Jackie Tileston (46:43): Yeah. Well, I think it’s also important that somebody like Bruce Damer is already an expert in his field when he gets a download about the origins of the first cell that he can then put forward as a legitimate scientific experiment.

Joe Moore (47:04): Have you chatted with him yet?

Jackie Tileston (47:06): Only a little bit. I’m trying to get him for my class next semester.

Joe Moore (47:10): Good. He’s unbelievable. Bruce, do it.

Jackie Tileston (47:12): Please do it. Or like those architects in Fadiman’s study. They were already architects, they were already working on a set of problems, and then they took on these particular project sets that they were working on.

Joe Moore (47:26): Right. They were stumped for a while. So, deeply primed on the problem.

Jackie Tileston (47:33): Yeah. There was one of them, actually visualizing, I think it was a multi-block building that would have multi-use parking, and he actually saw exactly how many parking spots were in the parking lot and what angle they were at, and then walking through a doorway and being able to count the number of metal rivets in the frame. That kind of stuff is bringing their ordinary knowledge to a whole other level.

Joe Moore (48:10): When applied to mathematics, physics, assorted engineering problems, once we can employ this at scale, you know, I always say, “Let’s do General Electric first,” ’cause they have all the resources in the world to deploy this tech rapidly.

Jackie Tileston (48:28): I think it’s important to think about the problem-solving, psychedelics as an ally, is still gonna happen with people who already have a great amount of expertise in their field. I’m not gonna solve any mathematical problems, right? But it doesn’t mean I’m not having some creative outlet or input from the experiences, and vice versa.

Joe Moore (48:55): Yeah, absolutely. That’s all part of the set and setting concept. If you have 20 years’ experience in engineering but you’ve been unable to solve this thing, it’s gonna be really interesting to see what happens. I’ve been looking at how I can make this happen in Colorado for a while. But, you know, resources. There are only so many projects I can take on, unless somebody wants to help me start the institute. We’ll see. But all I can do is put the ideas out and hopefully people start running. So, art. I love that we pivoted into actually solving problems. There’s just so many things to solve. So art brings me to Burning Man. I’m a fan of art. I don’t really know what I’m looking at often. I go to Burning Man, and I have all these Waldorf guys showing me around, and they become my best friends. So they have a very different experience of art. And they’re like, “Oh, look at this. Look at it up close. Look at it from a mile away. Do this, do that.” And I’m like, “Whoa, this is a totally different experience.” And I’m kind of curious about the utility of a sort of art education for appreciating the world in a different way, and perhaps how that relates to a psychedelic experience or therapy. Is it a sort of trained flexibility?

Jackie Tileston (50:44): Well, I mean, a lot of contemporary art feels alienating to what I call a civilian viewer. There is a lot of work that feels like you have to know something or be educated to understand, like, why is the urinal in the Philadelphia Museum of Art? That takes a certain amount of knowledge or education to understand conceptually why that is considered a work of art. So I think there’s a spectrum: art that requires some information and knowledge and education in order to access, and other art that doesn’t require it at all, and artists are constantly figuring out who their audience is and what they think art should do, ’cause that’s not a given. And so if you were asking me to make a work specifically for Burning Man as opposed to a contemporary art museum, well, I’m not an artist that works on commission, so that’s a moot point. But it’s more like, are you gonna change what you’re doing for the audience? And I would say at a place like Burning Man, a lot of the work has an element of spectacle to it, right? It has to be built and functioning and unbuilt in a very short period of time, and it’s trying to get people’s attention. And I think that’s fine. It’s not what I want for my own work or how I make my own work, so I probably will never have work at Burning Man. But I think the advantage of the work that I’ve seen, mostly online, from Burning Man, although I have some friends that have done projects there, is that they are geared towards a sense of awe and wonder and humor, and I think those are all really powerful things that a lot of contemporary art is not really thinking about.

Joe Moore (53:24): Yeah. Too big of a topic, the Burning Man thing. But you’re right, there are certain containers for certain art. Is it a useful thing? I think it’s a way that people can start to feel expressed. There’s a way that we can actually think through concepts. Mostly when I’m thinking about stuff, it’s what could be really funny. I’m kind of stuck on the humor thing, or cute. But yeah, I wonder about the psychedelic audience. We have this kind of gearing towards comparative religious study, but we don’t necessarily have even the basics of art history or anything like that. We have the conversation about a museum dose that we’ll receive sometimes, but is that really how we’re engaging with stuff? I don’t know. I think that could be a nice practice for people.

Jackie Tileston (54:36): Yeah. Well, I think the general public can go into a museum, go into an art gallery, or encounter something and be open to it, be open to having an experience that they wouldn’t have had if they hadn’t encountered that art. You could see that as a parallel to the psychedelic experience. Aldous Huxley’s idea of the reducing valve, that what psychedelics do is relax some of the constraints and allow us to receive and perceive in a wider spectrum of consciousness. That’s not unlike what art can do. And so if someone’s open to the psychedelic experience, they are theoretically also open to whatever art can offer. It’s a similar state of openness, of just being willing to be curious.

Joe Moore (55:45): When you encounter med students that come over here, and you’re like, “Oh, what do I do with you?” How do you try to present the art world?

Jackie Tileston (55:58): Well, right now I’m teaching a variation of my Mystics and Visionaries class that’s slightly more experiential. It’s called Mystics Lab: Creativity and Other Ways of Knowing, and not one student in the class is from fine arts. So I actually have students that are in neuroscience and English literature and cognitive psychology and political science, and it’s very varied. And I love that, actually. It’s sort of like with both of my classes on mysticism and psychedelics, all I know the first day of class is that you’re the ones that typed “mystics” or “psychedelics” into the search engine, right? And here you are. One thing that I have found is an interesting overlap between both of those classes. I realized that I kind of have to start with what I call the reality problem. So with the mystics class, I often start with Hilma af Klint, who is a Swedish visionary artist who was channeling information from the High Masters, who gave her directions on these paintings, this incredibly beautiful, luminous body of work. If you’re a staunch materialist, probably from the engineering department, and I’m telling you about an artist that’s channeling paintings, your first thought is, “That’s impossible, and if it’s impossible, then she must be crazy or deceiving us or something.” And the same with non-ordinary mystical experiences. If you don’t believe there’s anything but matter, and that consciousness is a random epiphenomenon of brain function, then these mystical experiences and psychedelics don’t make any sense either. So in both classes, I kind of talk about, here’s the dominant paradigm. Here are some alternatives to that paradigm. And in order to even humor the idea that these experiences are real and not the function of psychosis or merely chemistry, we have to just be open. And the artists aren’t necessarily more open than the other students, ’cause what I’m asking them to do is just at least question the idea that the dominant paradigm is the only one. In some cases, it’s really helpful when I have skeptics in either class to have them encounter thinkers like Federico Faggin or Bernardo Kastrup, who can actually articulate a consciousness-first position without using mysticism or woo. That’s really, really important. One of my favorite YouTube conversations is when Christof Koch, who was the head of the Allen Brain Institute and is one of the top neuroscientists studying consciousness, has an experience with 5-MeO, and he writes about it in the intro to his book, Then I Am Myself the World, and is in ontological shock and seeks out Bernardo Kastrup, and there’s this great two-hour YouTube interview. And it’s this incredible experience of somebody trying to make sense of it from a materialist paradigm. And he’s one of the few rare scientists I know of who at least publicly will say, “I had to change my mind.” Right? He’s the one that bet a case of wine with David Chalmers on the hard problem of consciousness. It’s so beautiful.

Joe Moore (1:00:19): Whoops. Also, I would advise everybody to consistently reserve the right to change your mind at any point in the future about anything. Why not? What does that cost you?

Jackie Tileston (1:00:31): Yeah. There’s a great talk, I don’t know if it’s a TED Talk or some other talk, but a neuroscientist named David Eagleman, from about 10 years ago, I think. He gave a talk called Possibilianism, and so I actually ask my students to watch that before the first class. I don’t actually need you to believe anything, but you have to be a Possibilian.

Joe Moore (1:00:56): Yeah, and that video with Kastrup and Koch is super good. I think you sent me that, and I finally got to it last winter maybe, and it was so good. Just the authenticity. You could feel him the whole way resisting in the conversation with Kastrup, but eventually he’s like, “Okay.”

Jackie Tileston (1:01:19): Well, as a follow-up to that, I don’t know if you’ve seen any of the videos from the most recent European, I think it’s the ICPR conference. They had a metaphysics panel hosted by somebody from Bernardo’s Essentia Foundation, and they also had Anil Seth, who’s one of the top neuroscientists and a staunch materialist, and Christof Koch. And it’s a beautiful, brilliant conversation. And there’s this one moment where Anil is talking about something, and Christof Koch is on Zoom, so he’s on a screen that’s 50 times the size of the people on stage, and he’s like, “Have you had the experience of becoming one with everything?” And Anil starts talking, and he goes, “No, I’m serious. Have you had the experience?” And it’s just this priceless moment, because he is somebody that’s investigating and asking questions. And Anil hilariously said that he has had the experience on a psychedelic, and that he told his lab to do an intervention if he came back not a materialist. Protecting against the belief change, right?

Joe Moore (1:02:46): So interesting to have the fear ahead of time of your worldview changing. But also I think there’s a difference between having the experience and then being convinced intellectually, right? Kastrup has it worked out fairly well. A lot of the quantum people do. Alfred North Whitehead worked it out quite well, that experience is primary. It’s a challenging thing. I think we’re making progress. UC Berkeley just had a conference on consciousness, which is interesting. I am always challenged by the word consciousness, by the way.

Jackie Tileston (1:03:25): Well, ’cause you have to ask whoever’s using it what they actually mean by that.

Joe Moore (1:03:30): I hate that part. It feels insulting, but I really mean it. I wanna understand you.

Jackie Tileston (1:03:36): We don’t agree on a definition of matter or life. It’s not only the consciousness people that have this problem. Agreeing on what we’re all meaning by the words we’re using before we start the conversation helps. But I think I mentioned that I’m doing this online course with Christopher Timmermann called Unlocking the Psychedelic Mind. And one of the things that really intrigues me about it, he’s very interested in consciousness and meditation, and what psychedelics can teach us about that. And he’s really setting it up as, neuroscientists tend to just look at the data, kind of the quantum physicist’s version of “shut up and calculate,” whereas quantum physics is actually quite weird and spooky and mystical. So he’s talking about balancing the neuroscience with the phenomenology, what it’s like to actually have this experience, and listening to the people having the experience, and then having those different modes of study and research inform each other, rather than one side discounting the other.

Joe Moore (1:04:56): Right, as opposed to putting you promptly into a DSM category, actually trying to figure out, with my tools, can I understand this?

Jackie Tileston (1:05:05): He used the term neurophenomenology.

Joe Moore (1:05:07): I like that. I think we can make it pretty far in that kind of a thing. I think we will run into limits, like we already kind of are with a lot of our tools. But I think we can go pretty far.

Jackie Tileston (1:05:22): Yeah. I mean, we can go much, much further than we are now. Science has stopped at where it can measure, and that’s gonna keep changing. But then we also have the consciousness-only folks’ alternative approach. But I think the reality is we’re talking about this enormous mystery. And I kind of agree with the idea that with our neurological, biological structure, we can only understand so much. These meat brain-body things, as amazing and phenomenal as they are, are limited.

Joe Moore (1:06:14): Some would call us monkeys with sharp teeth trying to figure it out and not kill each other. And I think we’re doing okay. But yeah, there is a certain limit to what our hardware, our wetware, is gonna be able to do. And we’re making these psionic devices. It’s a joke I won’t explain to everybody. But I think there are so many interesting avenues and traditions that we’re not looking at that I think eventually will get attention and continue to help us.

Jackie Tileston (1:06:46): Yeah. I mean, “ineffable” is used all the time, and yet we do find language. We’re trying to find language for that which is prior to language. And I think in the scientific realm, in the consciousness research realm, there are gonna be the same limits. Even if one has an incredible experience on 5-MeO or some other psychedelic, or on the meditation cushion, how do we translate that into something that is effable? I love that phrase: we keep trying to eff the ineffable. But it’s what we can do. It’s how we can communicate what these are to each other.

Joe Moore (1:07:32): Yeah, absolutely. And so we can begin going gentle on each other. I like the kind of Ram Dass thing: in the end, we’re just walking each other home. We try really hard here, but that’s kind of what we’re doing. Okay, so anything you feel like we urgently need to include? Or a concluding thought for folks out there?

Jackie Tileston (1:08:04): Well, I guess something that we both think a lot about is, what are the implications of this? And I am hopeful that the more people’s paradigms shift, expand, transform, the closer we get to the possibility of saving the species and the planet. I work in the contemporary art world, and there’s a lot of emphasis on politics, identity, research-based practices. And I’m like, I’m not not making political work. Nothing’s more political or socially relevant than what your worldview is. And I think that psychedelics have certainly accelerated shifts in worldview in a positive way more than any other educational system we have. All the studies about scientists and religious professionals becoming slightly more pantheistic, maybe, or gaining a sense of environmental awareness. Or, on an incredibly simple level, you can hear spiritual leaders or idealists talking about how, if you truly have the felt experience of connection to everything, you’re going to be incapable of bombing your neighbor. It just won’t happen. Now, that’s a very utopian vision, and I know it sounds a little bit like “just dose the White House,” but I do think we’re seeing profound belief changes with people having these non-ordinary experiences, and that’s how social change will happen.

Joe Moore (1:10:16): And it has really caught fire in the last three years, even two years. So I think: get educated, be safe, and be good to each other. And where can people learn more about the Collaborative and your work?

Jackie Tileston (1:10:32): I think pennpsychedelicscollaborative.org is our website, but if you just Google Penn Psychedelics Collaborative, you’ll find us there. And my own work is at jackietileston.com.

Joe Moore (1:10:51): Thank you so much, Jackie. I hope we can do it again. So many untouched subjects.

Jackie Tileston (1:10:56): Thank you.

Joe Moore (1:10:57): Thank you.