Episode #20

Episode #20: James Fadiman & Jordan Gruber Psychedelic Leadership Podcast.

Duration: 1:22:01

[Intro]: My name is Laura Dawn, and you’re listening to episode number 20 of the psychedelic leadership podcast featuring my conversation with both Dr. Jim Fadiman, author of an all-time classic, The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide, alongside Jordan Gruber and they both co-authored a new book called Your Symphony of Selves: Discover More of Who You Are.

Snippet: We have a definition that goes something like selves, also called self-states, or recurring patterns of mind, body, chemistry, perception, beliefs, intentions, and behaviors in human beings to conclude.  First, the idea that mental health is being in the right mind at the right time has never been more valuable and true. These ideas have been around and a lot of different formulations in many cultures and many different groups but the basic idea that you are or ought to be a single unified self hasn’t been questioned for over 100 years.

The coping mechanisms that the traumatized self has developed to protect itself need to be honored, and to see if they’re still necessary. That’s why we are a little concerned when people talk about the best self or a core self because there are times what one might call a very peripheral self, is exactly who you wish to be for that amount of money.

Our basic theme is just that awareness heals and once you have an awareness of everyone telling me you’re crazy, if you think you have different cells we do because everybody does, including the healthiest people alive. We just think a lot of things become easier, and there are all sorts of implications for performance and longevity, and health. There are applications in every area of life because this is a core fundamental precept of psychology that we think is just inaccurate that there’s a single cell.

When you think about yourself, do you consider yourself to be one unified self or is it possible that you have multiple cells? And if you did consider yourself to have more than yourself would that be a sign of pathology or an indication of health? Adopting this notion that we have more than oneself is what Jordan and Jim call healthy multiplicity, and it directly sits at odds with the current prevailing notion in the fields of healthcare and psychology, that we have only one unified self. In this episode, we’re going to dive into what they call the healthy selves model described in their book Your Symphony of Selves, and explore questions like if we have more than ourselves how many selves do, we have and are all of ourselves an expression of ego? Can one of ourselves be our higher self? What if we don’t like one of ourselves that seems to wreak havoc on our lives? Should we give that self a backseat amongst our entourage of other selves? Can one of us be a different age or even a different gender than our other selves? And how does this concept of multiple selves fit in with Shadow Work or childhood trauma or working with psychedelics? 

This is what we’re going to talk about in this episode and so much more. So many of you are familiar with Jim Fadiman’s work, you’ve probably heard his name, he is a legendary figure in the psychedelic movement. As I said, he’s the author of the Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide, a book that I read, so many years ago. He’s a professor of psychology, he taught at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology now Sofia University, which she helped to co-found, and you’ve also heard of the term micro-dosing, which is hitting the mainstream in such a big way. Now, that’s a term that Jim Fadiman coined, and he’s also known for the popular Fadiman protocol which he created, which became even more popular after Ayelet Waldman published her book called A Really Good Day: How Micro dosing Made a Mega Difference in my mood, my marriage, and my life, where she followed the Fadiman protocol and wrote about it in her book and how it completely transformed her life. 

So, we’re not going to talk about micro dosing in this episode, although I am planning on having Jim Fadiman back to record again, where we dive deep into all topics related to micro dosing, as well as the fascinating studies he conducted back in the 60s around psychedelics and creativity, which, as many of you know, is an area that I’m also currently studying. So, I talk about the Fadiman protocol in my free eight-day micro dosing course. If you haven’t yet signed up for that, you can find that on my website at liveryLaurade.com on the freebies tab, alongside my music playlist for psychedelic journeys and beyond one playlist of which I highly recommend for micro dosing morning flows.

And Jordan Gruber is also just such a brilliant mind and an excellent writer and he spearheaded this project, this book, your Symphony of Selves with Jim and it’s a book that I highly recommend reading. And I’ve just been so enjoying connecting with and getting to know both Jordan and Jim on Clubhouse over the past few months. So, for those of you who are on that platform, many of you are probably starting to hear the name Clubhouse pop up more and more, because it’s becoming such a popular platform. I host weekly rooms in the psychedelic clubhouse, primarily on Tuesday evenings between six and 8 pm PST, and I’ll include links to my clubhouse profile in the show notes. But it’s livefreelaurad, which is the same as my Instagram handle. And if you want to join in on the conversations I’m hosting around psychedelics and micro dosing, leadership, mindset, creativity, flow states, entrepreneurship, all the fun things, just check out my profile, and make sure to follow me and receive all the notifications for when I open up a room on the Clubhouse platform.

And so, before we dive in, I just want to let you guys know that I have just a few spots left for my three-month micro dosing mastermind program and I’ve been receiving a lot of applications for this program. And I’m taking the time to interview each person to make sure that I’m curating the right group for this particular cohort that starts in June and runs through until the end of August. And this is such a unique and special program primarily geared towards people who are either already in the psychedelic space. So, I have a few integration coaches, a few micro dosing coaches, guides, people in the plant medicine retreat space, and some entrepreneurs in the space as well. And I also have many transformational coaches who have slightly different offerings, but they’re all interested in potentially offering micro dosing to their clients. So, this is for people who want to go beyond the basics of micro dosing, who want to deepen their daily practice and cultivate a micro dosing practice to tap into flow states, unlock creativity and weave more ceremony into the fabric of our everyday lives.

And what makes this program so unique is that we’re also including five mastermind sessions, exploring a range of topics related to entrepreneurship, particularly around refining your core message, cultivating your thought leadership, expanding your offering, whether that’s coaching or online programs, and building a platform to extend your reach of positive influence. So, I’ll also be sharing my frameworks and content that weaves science with wisdom teachings because the foundation of so much of what I teach is rooted in Eastern philosophy. But I’m also taking a step back and showing people how I create my frameworks how I leverage my morning micro dosing practice, to cultivate mindsets that allow me to expand the boundaries of what I believe is possible, and how I work with psychedelics and sacred plant medicines to hold a vision for what I’m creating in my life and how I transmute that vision into reality. 

And so, I also have a lineup of some incredible guest speakers who will be joining us for the program, including Minesh Gern, who’s a Psychedelic Neuroscientist who I featured in episode number five. And so, this program is designed and created for people who want to explore how they can be of service on the plant medicine path, and come together to cultivate lifelong relationships and connections to other people who are also in the psychedelic space.  So, if you want to apply for the three-month micro dosing mastermind, you can find more information on my website livefreeLauraD.com And because I’m still going through applications and interviews, I’ll put an extension on the early bird discount, and I’ll be leaving you off with a song that I just love called the Inner Worlds by Gamma and I thought Inner Worlds was just an appropriate song for this episode as we explore our inner world of multiple selves. 

And I’ve had some potent psychedelic moments with an eye mask and noise-canceling headphones listening to this particular song. And so of course, it’s also included on one of my four music playlists for psychedelic journeys and beyond.  Without any further ado, here is my fascinating conversation exploring healthy multiplicity with both Jordan Wilbur and Jim Fadiman. 

Laura Dawn: Welcome Jordan Gruber, Jim Fadiman, it’s a pleasure to have you both on the podcast today. Thanks for joining me.

Jim Fadiman: It is a real pleasure.

Jordon Gruber: It is. We’ve been waiting for this for a few weeks now since we first got closer to Clubhouse. So, this is exciting for it to happen.

Laura Dawn: Yes, it’s been so nice connecting with both of you on Clubhouse and I’ve been appreciating your book, Your Symphony of Selves: Discover and Understand More of Who You Are. So, I’d love to just dive right in and maybe you could just lay out the basic premise, your perspective on multiple selves and maybe you can describe why this perspective is so beneficial.

Jim Fadiman: Well, the perspective of multiple selves is we’ve observed how people are, and how they are, have internal multiplicity. And the way we make this kind of screamingly obvious, is, have you ever argued with yourself? And everybody goes, Oh, yes, and then we say, who is the other person. And then there’s this kind of quiet moment where the theory that they only have oneself just didn’t work in this most basic moment. And so, when you start from there, you’ll begin to understand that what you are is an internal multiplicity and that one of the goals you have in this life is to have different selves, the different parts of you work harmoniously and that’s why we have a title called A Symphony of Cells. Because in a symphony, all the instruments or the groups of instruments are quite different but what they’ve learned is by cooperating, and listening to each other, and supporting each other, you have the magnificence of a symphony.

Laura Dawn: And so why is this such a radical notion? And how does this so fundamentally go against the common prevailing models in current psychology, which seems to point towards more of a unified self-model? 

Jordon Gruber: Well, it’s not that radical a notion is one of the things. This was the way that American psychology held the way things were until about 1910. So, we go back to William James, the father of American psychology, and he had this idea of social selves. And you had as many different social selves as you hung out with different people in different places and different things. And that’s pretty much how everybody thought about things until the idea got driven underground for various reasons that we may or may not touch, then you sort of only saw it in things like Sibyl, and cases of extreme what’s become called multiple personality disorder, and later dissociative identity disorder. But the whole time, there were always obvious things with a kid, you can’t teach them unless it’s a teachable moment, which means unless the part of them that is teachable, you can’t teach them. And, to conclude, first, the idea that mental health is being in the right mind at the right time, has never been more valuable and true.

So, these ideas have been around in a lot of different formulations in many cultures and with many different groups. But the basic idea that you are or ought to be a single unified self hasn’t been questioned for over 100 years. And, starting with Jim’s realizations, and then looking around, we came to see that if you just look at the people in your lives, that you know, and yourselves, you will realize you are not always the same person in the same self-state, the part of me that is going to hang out with my daughter’s friends, is not the same part of me that hangs out with my friends, or with people who are implying and so, we use nice terms like cell states to describe it scientifically. But fundamentally, people are inconsistent. And when you realize this is one of the reasons you can be more compassionate to everybody in your life and including yourself.

Laura Dawn: So, what do you think are the drawbacks then of the prevailing notion that we are one unified self, especially from the perspective of how we treat mental illness in the Western culture. Are these current models psychologically damaging, do you think?

Jim Fadiman: It’s limited, damaging is probably a little strong though I would go for it. But what we’re seeing is very simple, do you think inside yourself, and I’m now talking to everyone listening to us that you’re always consistent? And the answer is no. And in fact, there are times when you say to yourself, I can’t believe I did this. I don’t know what got, I’m just not this way. So, we notice when one of our other selves is doing something, if we are close to anyone, including children especially and we say, are they consistent, and you say, my children are well behaved, except I noticed when they’re with this particular friend, they get wild and crazy. Or they’re usually wild and crazy and exciting, and I’m so impressed with their adventurousness. But when they’re with certain people, they become like little church mice. And so, you’re used to seeing people switching into an appropriate self. And if you believe that’s pathology, then you’re believing that your natural attributes, your skillset, are somehow defective, somehow that you’re wrong for having normal capacities and of course can damage it.

Jordon Gruber: And the other way it’s damaging is just trying to shove people into being one thing, I mean, we get two different types of people, get a lot out of reading the book. One of them is someone who realized is this long-term pattern they’ve had with their wife or their partner, and even though they knew about parts, now, they sort of understand and the other person is, we have all sorts of people who say, my whole life everybody tried to stuff me into one box, into being one thing, and in high school they told me, I had to be just this thing, but I was this and this, and this, and this. And so, when the parts of you that you have been suppressing get to come out, it’s a huge relief, and they feel a lot better, and everything starts to work better, you can’t have the full life you’re capable of until you realize that you’ve got these cells, and they’re real, and you have to learn to work with all of them.

Laura Dawn: So, it seems like step number one is awareness; that awareness is key here and that simply acknowledging that we have multiple selves is in and of itself very beneficial. But going beyond that now, what are some of the ways that we can get to know our various selves a little bit better?

Jim Fadiman: Well, there are a few chapters that give you that. Well, we have some terms, one term that’s very popular in the culture now is called being triggered and that’s when you move from a socially acceptable self into something that you and maybe the other people don’t like. When you, for instance, have a family event, you say, don’t discuss religion with Uncle Albert because Uncle Albert has this perfectly lovely person who has a position on religion that the rest of the family disagrees with. And once Uncle Albert is triggered into that side of him, he can’t get out, he doesn’t have the skill to let go of that part and so everyone suffers and we all know that situation. So, the nice thing about discovering yourselves is, it’s more like saying, if I had cells, how would I explain to myself all these behaviors that I have now very complicated notions about? And the answer is, it’s much easier. One of the reasons that we did do this book, one of my children, in particular, kept saying, Dad, you got to do this book, it makes life easier. And so that’s fundamental, which is allowing what we see to be obvious to be acceptable, not the worry of self-discovery but the pleasure of self-discovery.

Laura Dawn: Yes, it’s so interesting. Why do you think that this concept of multiple selves has such a dark shadow cast over it? Like you said, for the past 100 years, it seems this has been used to point to pathology. So why do you think that is?

Jim Fadiman: Well, let’s go back a step, which is the negative term called Disassociation, which means, of course, the separation of individual selves sufficiently, so they’re not working well. The obvious word that that comes from is called Association and association is the way we normally are, which is the parts of us not only harmonious but understanding what’s the most useful self. So, if I am with my eight-pound dog, or I’m with a colleague who’s a neurophysiologist, I’m going to behave differently and I have to know the difference or else, my dog on the one hand will not accept me and the scientists will run out of the room. But we know better, we know how to move in and out of these different aspects of ourselves, and being conscious that is what’s going on just makes it easier.

Laura Dawn: And so how would you define that to be fundamentally different than just saying, well, we’re intelligent human beings, we are in a different situation and situations differ. So, we show up with adaptability towards situations and that more just allocating it to a mood or a behavioral change rather than a self or a personality.

Jim Fadiman: It’s more and it’s more literally, physiologically, there are shifts. When you move into different cells, you can feel in your own body, you have a different emotional state, we say my stomach tightened. Now we’re talking that’s not a mood that’s a shift in the way you are preparing your body to act. We have these stories, and they’re true of the 125-pound woman who looks out the window, and she sees that a car is rolling very slowly down the hill, and it’s about to roll over her child and we know she runs out, she picks up the bottom of the car, she pushes her child away with her foot and it’s over. And of course, that’s remarkable. And then the people from the local tabloids show up and they say, lady, would you mind picking up the car again, so we can do a photograph? And she says, Are you crazy? 

I’m a 135-pound woman, I can’t pick up the back of a car. See that’s a story which, if I tell it, it’s not considered unusual. But what you’re seeing is a shift that’s much more profound and much more useful. Biologically, any people, for instance, feel they have to dress for work and that’s including during this last year when working was at home, and there were lots of jokes about working in your pajamas. But for most people, they would get into their [inaudible 22:36] work clothes. So that could be their work and then at the end of the day, they would take off their clothes, and they would be their home person. We understand instinctively what we’re just making a little more visible.

Jordon Gruber: So also, Laura, Dawn, to answer your question, we have a definition that goes something like selves, also called cell states or recurring patterns of mind, body chemistry, perception, beliefs, intentions, and behaviors in human beings.  We are comprised of a set or constellation of these. So, most people, when they start feeling into it, even without having to name them or anything, they’ll go, yes, there are several general parts of who I am.  One of the authors that we learn from in England and read Accardo talks as these as majors. However, you want to cut it up, when you see the patterns, you get that there is something to the cells, that’s why we say each cell has its innate value, its agenda, you can’t just get rid of it, and it’s part of who you are. 

So, we do think that people do go through some pretty, extremely different self-states. I mean, another example that Jim likes to talk about, and so do I, is this patient in a mental institution who had the pathological type of mental personality, and in most of his personalities, if you drank orange juice, he would get terrible hives, but if he was 11 years old Timmy, he’d have no hives. [Inaudible 24:08] If he drank current, she says to me, I had no hives, and then they brought another one of the cells in to run the show to the front of the body as they say they need to get the hives again. And all this was reported by Dan Goleman in the New York Times.  So, we don’t dwell on this in the book, because we don’t want to sensationalize, this is like the movie Split. 

And people with different personalities have different superpowers. And we’re not saying it’s like that, but different eyeglass prescriptions, different brain scans. We think that part of what separates us when we don’t have the theory is that you can observe the different cells of someone in your life pretty easy once you start looking for it. So, there is a utility to thinking of them as patterns, even if other people like to think of them as sort of capacities that come online and offline and small minds. They get wheeled in and wheeled out that was the sort of thing that appealed to Sam Harris the other day, but we think there are these patterns and you sort of have a feeling for which the cells that show up the most often in your life are and maybe some that you’d like to see a little bit more often.

Laura Dawn: What was the name of the first author that you mentioned in the UK?

Jordon Gruber: Rita Carter wrote a book called The People We Are, we just sent her a copy of the book, we hope she likes it.

Laura Dawn: Cool. Thanks for stating that. What were you going to say, Jim?

Jim Fadiman: I was just taking a different example and I was wondering; do you speak any other language?

Laura Dawn: I grew up in Montreal, and my French could be better, buts it’s there.

Jim Fadiman: Montreal is wonderful because in Montreal, as you know, people will speak half of a sentence in French, and then they’ll do the rest in English. But if you go to a place where you either are speaking French or speaking English, what we know and there’s research is literally, you will have a different tonal pattern to your speech than your French will be, maybe faster, maybe slower, but a different pitch, but it will be as if a different personality is your French word. That makes sense to you.

Laura Dawn: Yes, it makes a lot of sense. And I guess for me, it’s just learning how to make this applicable for example, Shadow Work is such a popular topic right now, how do we apply this model to Shadow Work, for example?

Jordon Gruber: Well, it depends which level you’re speaking about the shadow on, if you’re talking about the big, scary union archetype that we all face on some existential numinous level that is always frightening. You need people like you who work with people on other levels. If you’re talking about, some of ourselves are still in the shadow, and therefore we’re not integrating them and we need to bring them out. We need to find out what they need and how to heal them. That’s sort of more of how we would think about it. And just to say about [inaudible 27:05] young very briefly, Jung wrote his doctoral dissertation on his cousin’s case of multiple personalities. And then he was very close with Freud. And he studied with Piaget, and Paris was a big player in this. But then when Freud kind of put the kibosh on the whole thing, [inaudible 27:21] you took it internally, both with his archetypes, including the shadow, and his idea of autonomous complexes. And if you read on the book about how [inaudible 27:29] Yang talks about autonomous complexes, they sound a lot like what we’re talking about cells, but he didn’t stay there or dwell on any of that.

Laura Dawn: Jim, do you have anything you want to add to that? 

Jim Fadiman: Well, I’m always a little concerned when people are saying that there are parts of themselves, that is defined negatively. Because I’m thinking of what it’s like in grammar school, if you’re the kid in the class that gets picked on, it’s very hard for you to have a very good self-concept. Because around you, you’re being treated as if you’re inferior. Now, it may be that it’s a racial issue, it may be a linguistic issue, maybe a social class issue, but you end up confused because, in some situations, you’re treated as one kind of person. And in a different situation, I’m remembering when my brother, my older brother, came back from college, and he was very happy and very successful in college. And after several days of being home, my parents accused him of being very selfish. And he came up to me in our room, and he said, with real tears in his eyes, he says, at school, no one thinks I’m selfish. I don’t know what’s going on. Why did they do that? 

And what was more than likely is the situation shifted, and the behaviors that my parents requested, were not coming through. And so instead of saying, here is a different way of behaving, because you’re now in college, and you’re learning about yourself, they gave him a label, the selfish person. And when we start labeling any of ourselves, we do them a disservice. And so, if Shadow Work is simply finding parts of yourself that if you think of the stage, being in the shadows, all that means is the house lights aren’t on you, but you’re still a full-scale character. You may be the lead. But if we consider a shadow, something disturbing or dirty or unworthy, then that part of you does that doesn’t support the whole system. The whole system is the whole person.

Laura Dawn: So, you say that there are three premises to this perspective, one that we all have selves two that different selves are truly different and inherently valuable, and that it’s easy to see beyond the self. So, looking at point number two different selves are truly different and inherently valuable. Looking at this through the lens of trauma, or the wound itself, you’re talking about this example of going to school and having these traumatic experiences. And let’s say that that cultivates an incredible self, let’s say, narcissistic, for example. So, how do we bring this into the model of, maybe there are parts of myself that are self-sabotaging, or that aren’t optimal or treating other people with kindness? How do we rectify these concepts?

Jim Fadiman: Well, there are possible, if I have a growth on the side of my foot called the Bunyan. That means walking is painful. Now, I didn’t just say the area around my Bunton. So, I get hit for that Bunyan, okay, and I go to a specialist. And similarly, if their selves are sabotaging, the whole house, that you get professional help. And but one of the things to keep in mind, and we often undersell the part of us that’s traumatized, is the coping mechanisms that the traumatized self has developed, to protect itself need to be honored, and to see if they’re still necessary. Okay, for instance, we let go of beliefs and attitudes throughout our life. When I was teaching people, kind of self-help system of affirmations. And I would say, can you change a basic belief? And a lot of them would say no because they’d had psychotherapy. And I would say, well, imagine, do you remember, who thought that when someone else put their tongue in your mouth, it was disgusting. And there would be this moment of recollection of when you were, 10, 11, 12. And then some older kids were already somewhat sexual. And you didn’t know what was going on. And then a couple of years later, you look back, and you saw that you had indeed let go of a lot of beliefs about the way people should behave.

So, one of the things that we see in therapy when we’re not trying to stuff everybody back into a little box that they don’t fit in is to see what does the traumatized part of the self has that is worth keeping. So, it can be helped and supported. But one that isn’t a trauma victim, one has a self, that’s a trauma victim. And that’s a very different attitude. It’s, again, think of a family and there’s one child who is very upset. You don’t say, well, we’ve got to get rid of all the children. You say, wait a moment, that’s not correct, let’s give the traumatized child extra help and support. So, for instance, one of the things you do is with a child who feels on load, and you give them a pet. And what happens is the pet loves them. And they, in turn, being loved and a lot of people recover. We have a whole [inaudible 33:46] we have systems in prisons, where you take, quote, hardcore criminal psychopaths, and you give them pets, and they end up being able to practice safely, the kinds of feelings that they haven’t had before, and the other parts of their selves might be just fine. And so, the healing gets faster when you know what you’re doing, and you’re not trying to heal a whole self when only one part is a problem.

Laura Dawn: But if you heal that self, wouldn’t you say that healing brings you back into sort of wholeness? Maybe the word wholeness isn’t the right word here, but if you’re healing that, isn’t that coming sort of back into alignment with your core self, it’s like this interesting juxtaposition of like, compartmentalizing another self. But what happens with the healing of that self and not you’re saying that that self that was once wounded is also growing up alongside you and evolving?

Jim Fadiman: I want Jordan to take this but I have an image that would make it easier if the violin player isn’t doing a good job and get some special help. So, the violin section works the orchestra doesn’t much into a single instrument.

Jordon Gruber: So, I wanted to say just a couple of things. First, one of the people in our book has a saying that if you have a problematic part of yourself, you’re not a bad dog, you just have a bad dog. And if you have a bad dog, and this is us, now, you’re not going to put it down. Because that doesn’t work, you’re going to find ways of working with it and loving it, you’re not going to put it in the shadow and turn off the lights and not feed it. Because that’s going to make it even crazier and vicious and young, and others have talked about if you try to push something like that, it will come back up. But when Jim said he wanted me to take it is, when you went back, Laura Dawn, and said, it has to be your core self, what we’re saying is that there isn’t necessarily a core self on that level. 

We’re saying that there is much different self that together creates sort of a symphony or a constellation of selves, whether or not you have a high self, or a single self, or a super-spiritual self, or sort of a lot of people are trying to get in touch with or whether you are more like the Buddhists who want ultimately no self or the Dallas to think you just go with the flow, that whole question of core self and a single self. That’s a Sam Harris put it is orthogonal to our inquiry, we’re just trying to do psychology and based on observation, say, everybody has these day-to-day pragmatic selves, when you know, it’s true, and you learn how to more easily shift into the right mind at the right time, your life gets a lot better. Now I would never try to talk anyone out of their connection with the high self, or let’s say, the mycelium mind, or whatever it is, I have experienced the goddess herself in a pagan ritual once, you know, I’ve had these numinous mystical experiences, but that’s not the level that my day-to-day selves operate. The guy who is almost late with paying the bill, it’s always due at the end of the month, and had to get that in before I finished this interview. He’s reliable, and sometimes he messes up. But you know, my high self, if I have one can help him, he’s got to jump in and remind us know it’s time for that. 

So, you know, whenever we see people talking about essential selves, our core selves, or, indeed a lot of the most powerful systems for working with selves available, like IFS, focus on a single self, which is sort of the beacon that you use to harmonize all yourselves and Gurdjieff says something like that as well. But what we seem to feel is out, as soon as people get focused on finding contacting being part of that high self or dissolving themselves to the point where what we’re talking about doesn’t make sense that they’ve kind of left the level of ordinary pragmatic, what’s going to be helpful.

Jim Fadiman: So, Laura, what we’re also saying, is almost all of your questions, deal with people who need some kind of therapeutic support. We’re actually, and that’s what most of the book is about the way people normally are, in normal situations, in healthy situations in highly creative situations, in superbly amazingly magnificent situations, and how understanding selves makes all that better. So yes, therapy is important, but for most people, and it’s tricky, because I’ve been a therapist, and I began to see that everyone should have therapy. But then when I was simply a professor, I noticed that actually, most of my students would never show up in therapy and never should. And why we call it observation. So, as we’re looking at the way the world is put together on the healthy side, and then to see perhaps, if that can help the therapist’s side as well. And we think it does, but it’s not central.

Jordon Gruber: Although it does offer some really valuable insights, like in the integration phase, right after psychedelics, or, you know, for the next weeks or months, knowing that someone has different selves and one of them might have gotten whacked out for whatever reason, then you can focus on that part and work with it. But it just makes things a lot easier.

Laura Dawn: Right. It’s almost like everyone can just take a deep breath and relax a little bit, okay, I’m not as crazy there’s not as big of a problem as everyone is sort of making it out to be.

Jordon Gruber: Well, that’s what the thing about talking out loud to yourself, you’re not supposed to because it’s a sign that you’re crazy. But first of all, nearly everybody and I mean everybody talks aloud to themselves. And second of all, if you talk aloud to yourself in other than the first person, it kind of tones down the amygdala and bumps up the neocortex and people are more effective and happier, less stressed out. So, it’s like, let’s take advantage of these built-in things.

Jim Fadiman: Let’s stay with talking to yourself for a moment. Because every once in a while, and I am a psychologist, but I’m not a great fan of contemporary psychology. But now and then there is this study, and one of the studies is that people who talk to themselves in the third person know, Jim, you have to get ready for this event with [inaudible 40:31] is it going to be visual? And do you need to kind of put on your podcast shirt? So, I’m talking to myself? Okay, now turns out to people who talk to the third person on almost every measure of mental h