Episode #3

Episode #3: Dennis McKenna Psychedelic Leadership Podcast.

Duration: 1:30:59

Laura Dawn: Okay. So, without any further ado, here is my intriguing conversation with Dennis McKenna. Dr. Dennis McKenna, I cannot begin to describe what an honor it is to be dropping in with you today. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Dennis McKenna: Oh, thank you Laura for inviting me.

Laura Dawn: Dennis, you have such a brilliant mind, and these are such interesting and strange times, and there’s a lot of people who are really struggling to make sense of this, what some are calling a planetary transition that we’re moving through right now. So, I just wanted to start by asking you what’s at the forefront of your mind these days? What are you tracking? What are you paying attention to? What do you think more people should be paying attention to? How are you making sense of these very strange times that we’re living in, just from a sort of larger macro perspective?

Dennis McKenna: Well, you know, I wish that I could apply this brilliant mind, as you say. First of all, it’s not as brilliant as you might think, but I’m as confused as everybody, you know, in a way I think we’re all in the same boat in a certain sense as a species of this individuals. I mean, obviously these times are very troubling. These are definitely transitional times. I mean, sometimes some people I’m just a curious monkey and just like the rest of us, I’m as confused as everybody. Maybe that’s not what people want to hear from my so-called change maker or an elder or a wise person, but I think that wisdom in part derives from having the wisdom to say, basically, I don’t know what’s going on any more than everyone else.

I have intuitions about it. I think that we’re in very critical time, historically, politically, possibly evolutionarily. I sort of fall back on one of my principle and that I live by in a certain way, and then I urge everyone else to consider, which is very simple. Anybody tells you that they haven’t figured out run the other way, but because I don’t think anyone has the answers and anyone who does claim to have the answers is probably diluted the fulfills and can propagate that delusion. I think we see a lot of that going on in the political arena and so on. I think we have to get very real with ourselves and realize that this year 2020 is a pivotal year, and in some ways it’s the year that the world, as we know it ended.

You know, my brother was always talking about the end of the world. Well, he got it wrong by about eight years, but I sometimes wonder what he would think if he were alive today. In a way I think he would be not surprised because we’ve always had this intuition that we’re coming up against a major transitional point, and it seems that the sender is falling out or maybe the right metaphor is metamorphosis. We have to go through a period of chaos and out of that, something completely different and more beautiful could emerge. You know, that’s the way life works, that’s the way evolution works, and we’re going through one of these cycles, whether we want to or not.

I think in some ways we’d all be more happy if things were normal, whatever that means, you know, and things haven’t been normal for a long time. It’s only in the last few years that it’s become clear to anyone who is honest enough to look at what’s happening and to listen to their own inner voice, that things are seriously out of kilter on many levels, on the environmental level, on the geopolitical level, you know, on a personal level, it’s just a time of chaos and transition. First of all, don’t panic. I think you have to have trust that this is a process. Secondly, we’re not in control. This is the thing I think more and more people are realizing in fact, we are not in control, but nature has been telling us for a long time.

You monkeys only think you’re running the show, and you don’t, and I think that nature, which I believe that nature is a sentient being, I’m a believer in the Gaia idea that the community of life on the planet is an intelligent, super organism. When this is not just woo-woo, New Age stuff. This is actually grounded in science, you know, there’s plenty of reasons to think that nature has been sending this message for a long time, that we’re approaching a tipping point, but we’re not listening very well. Nature is sending us more and more blunt messages to try to get us to wake up because we’re not very good at waking up. You know, so the messages are getting more and more strident. I mean, so now we have COVID.

I mean that one’s hard to ignore because everybody is involved in that, but we also have all these environmental disasters that are going on, which are clearly related to climate change. Climate change affects parameters, the expression of climate change, which is a long-term process is reflected in weather, which is a short-term process, you know, but the parameters that have contributed to these mega hurricanes, that we’re seeing. These unbelievable forest fires, the West coast, all of that, they always happen, but never with the frequency and severity that they’ve happened in the last few years and this is because of climate change. Climate change has created the situation to make all of these things much more dangerous, much more destructive.

So that’s a kind of message in a way I’m very dismayed that anyone with an objective view should be able to look at this and say, yes, there’s a real problem. To the extent that we’re able, we should try to mitigate the problem. I mean, maybe we’re not in control, but there are things we can do to help nature, and we’re so out of sync with nature that we don’t even accept that anymore, and there are people on the right side of the political spectrum and other sides that says, oh, there’s nothing happening. There’s nothing to see here, climate changes. Yeah, climate changes, it’s never changed like this, not in historical memory and really not in evolutionary memory. We have to wake up, we have to acknowledge what’s happening and do what we can, and this is also where the plant medicines come in.

I mean on the positive side, more and more people are rediscovering the plant medicines and the message that they bring to our species, which again is very simple, wake up. Wise up and recognize, first of all, that you’re not running the show and that we have to listen to the message being transmitted, which is basically that wake up and wise up much of what the challenge that we faced as a species has to do that we have become completely estranged from nature. We are separate from nature and that’s a dangerous perception to have because it’s not true. We’re part of nature, whether we want to be, or not. Nature doesn’t exist to be exploited; we don’t own it.

It doesn’t exist for our benefit, and so we have to re-understand how to partner with nature rather than separately away from it, how to reintegrate into nature and how to do what we can to help it survive because even though we are going through this tremendous period of change, you know, there are things we can do. More importantly, there are a lot of things that we cannot do that will make the situation better. So, in that sense, I see COVID, that’s a kind of a blessing. It’s forcing us to slow down. It’s forcing us to reflect on just what really is important and how do we fit in because our culture was overheating. It was going top speed, you know, with all the adverse environmental effects that, that entails. So, I think that COVID is another Gaian messenger, a messenger from Gaia, just like the plant medicine.

I think of the plant medicines as essentially ambassadors from Gaia. I think they’ve always been around, they’ve been under the stewardship and guardianship of indigenous peoples for thousands of years, but those people and those plants have always been kind of marginalized as colonialist capitalist societies took over declared that they were the owners of nature and that nature was there to dominate and subjugate, and the indigenous people are just like, well, no, but you know, who listens to us? Then all of a sudden, you know, within the last 20 years, maybe a little longer than that, these plant medicines have started to escape from their ancestral home.

Like ayahuasca has escaped from the Amazon and now has spread its message across the world, and I think, and other things like mushrooms and cannabis even, suddenly these plant medicines that were before vilified and condemned and even prohibited people are now saying, well, wait a minute, these things actually have virtues. They can actually heal us. They can heal people, and I would go so far as to say that they can heal societies. They can heal the planet if we’ll allow them to, if we’ll get that message and act on it. So that’s one of the good things at the same time, acknowledging that to reconnect with the plant medicines also creates its own set of problems. This has to be done very consciously, consciously and very carefully. For example, you know, I believe that ayahuasca is one of the greatest medicines that we have.

I think it’s capable of healing, an individual, a culture, a society, it’s a medicine for the soul and it can heal the soul on all levels, the collective and the individual, even the planet too, but the other side of it is in order to do that, I caught in an ethical quandary because like yourself, I got the calling a few years ago, that one of the best things I can be doing is bringing people to these plant medicines, you know, particularly ayahuasca. So, I’ve been involved in organizing retreats in South America, mostly, and I’ve seen incredible transformation. The people who come to my retreats, they’re not looking for thrills. They’re looking for answers for their own issues, as well as their conscious beings. They’re aware of all the issues that we face.

Yet at the same time, the ethical dilemma is look at the pressure that ayahuasca tourism puts on the indigenous communities, on the resource. ayahuasca’s now under a lot of pressure and many of these plant medicines are under a great deal of pressure. They’re being over harvested and human beings seem particularly talented in some ways at destroying the things we love the most, and that is what I think that’s what we’re facing with ayahuasca. We love it so much. We care about it so much that we’re actually depleting it from the planet. So, we on the plant medicine side and I’m not excluding myself, I’m very much including myself. We have to come to a wisdom about this and we have to find a solution. I don’t think the solution is to just stop using them because they’ve come out of nature.

They are offering themselves as a gift to the human species to help us wake up, to help us become better humans and better monkeys, better biological entities, and they’re offering themselves as they always have, but now they propagated their message on a planetary scale. If you’re going to use them on a planetary scale, then you’ve got to develop some new paradigms. You know, how can you do this and yet keep it, you know, you’re not driving these species into extinction, and so that is a problem. In that respect, I’m encouraged by the different decrim movements that are taking place in various municipalities and now, you know, legalization of plant medicines, particularly suicide is on the ballot in several States. I think this is a good development. In the first place, the very idea that we can declare any plant criminal is just absurd on the face of it. If there are any criminals in this relationship, it’s us.

You know, we have to answer for what we’ve done to destroy nature. We are the criminals, the plants are not criminals who had the authority to declare that these plants should be eradicated from the face of the earth, which was basically the agenda, the war on drugs or certain aspects of it. So, I think that the decrim movements are represent a waking up and getting away from this idea. I like to talk about the right to symbiosis. Symbiosis is a relationship between different species that can be mutually beneficial, and you see that in our relationship with plants, you know, not just medicines, but all the things we get from plants. This is an example of symbiosis plants basically just want to grow, they just want to spread.

It’s in our interest to grow and spread them because they produce things that we value, whether that may be food or medicines, we get benefits from having those plants and from growing them, and that’s basically their agenda, I think. You know, it’s not so complicated, but the decrim movements opens up the assertion about this right to symbiosis. I think that the right to symbiosis should be articulated, not as a basic human, right because it goes beyond human. That’s the very point of what symbiosis is. The alliances are with organisms that are not human and [inaudible 15:44], right. So, it shouldn’t be a basic fundamental organismic right to engage in symbiosis with any damn plant or fungus or frog or any other thing you want.

It should just be articulated as a right. So, the decrim movements, I keep wandering off onto tangents, but the decrim movements are hopeful to me in the sense that these communities should, you know, bit by bit they’re beginning to recognize that no plant, whatever planted is, no plant or fungus should be prohibited or outlawed. You know, it’s just an absurd notion and it’s emerges out of this poisoned Judeo-Christian notion that we own nature. We don’t own nature. That’s the main thing, and these things decrim movements are hopeful because if it gets going, yes, I like to bring people to South America and hold ceremonies. I like to participate with them and you know, an exotic vacation and all that, it’s all very nice, but I am cognizant of the impact that it has.

So, I think I’d like to reverse that equation so that in every community, all throughout the land, there are centers. We won’t call them psychedelic centers. Let’s call them wellness centers or health centers or something like that, where you can go and you can learn to be a better person. You can learn to be healthy, and on the menu among the services offered are psychedelic therapies, whether mushrooms or whatever, that should be part of it, but that’s not the whole thing. They’re really wellness centers, and they would be established to treat the mind, and the body of psychedelics are an important tool for doing that, but they shouldn’t necessarily be all that these centers are about, and if these centers, there are many of them already, but they’re underground, they’re basically illegal because they are using psychedelics, but with decrim these centers could come out into the light.

They could operate in the open and then you could reverse the equation. So instead of bringing people to South America, to the medicines, you can bring the medicines to the people and you can work with the indigenous groups to say, well, we’ll help with financial support or advice or whatever to help you develop and grow this resource in a sustainable way, and then you have a market for it. You know, it’s the old capitalist thing, but instead of bringing the people there with all the environmental impacts and social and cultural impacts that has, you can bring the indigenous medicines and the indigenous people to North America, and it’s a much more viable model.

Laura Dawn: Wow, Dennis, you just touched on so many important topics. There is so much to unpack there. I’d love to ask you, Dennis. I heard you say we erroneously believe that humans are running the show here on the planet, but it’s actually plants that are running the show. I’d love for you to unpack that statement. What does that really mean? Maybe you could explain our symbiotic relationship that we have with plants from a neurochemical level and how working with psychedelics and sacred plant medicines directly help us to completely shift our perceptual view of reality.

Dennis McKenna: Yeah. First of all, they do happen to make, I mean, I often emphasize to people that the language of plants is chemistry. That’s how they mediate their relationships with everything in their environment, because they are great chemists and they don’t have behavior. Plants substitute biosynthesis for behavior, and they often respond to challenges in their environment by chemical means, you know, and they make a tremendous array of these molecules that are basically messenger molecules. Some of them happen to fit into our neural receptors. You know, I mean, I think that what they do is they open up parts of our own minds, our own consciousness that was always there, but we had no way to access to it.

So, plants are not necessarily carrying the message. They’re enabling us to make the discoveries within ourselves, you know, and it seems like they’re carrying the message, and maybe in that sense they are. They’re allowing us to step out of our reference frame. This is what psychedelics do they let us step temporarily out of our reference frame and look at our existential situation from a novel perspective. That’s why they’re therapeutically so efficacious because that’s, you know, mental illness like depression, anxiety, trauma, all of these things, addictions, these are basically diseases of habit and diseases of the, you know, sort of incompatible reference frame that you build for yourself. Neuroscientists call the default mode network, right?

There’s a lot of talk about the default mode network. I had another term before that term became popular. I called it the reality hallucinations. We are all immersed in our own reality hallucination. It’s a model of reality that we inhabit. Not reality itself, it’s a model that our brains construct to make it possible, to live in reality, and a lot of what our brains do, it takes in information from the outside, through our sensory portals, right, and then it processes that information, it links it to associations and memories and all of this internal processing that goes on, and then it sort of extrudes, if you will, a model of reality, which is the movie that we create for ourselves, our own story, you know, we are the producers directors and stars of our own movie, but a lot of what the brain does in this process, it’s as much about what it excludes from reality.

There’s a process in neuroscience called neurogating. This is very important part of the default mode network, it’s about what it doesn’t allow in. You know, and Aldous Huxley talked about this in different terms years ago, he talked about the reducing valve, and the brain in a lot of ways is a reducing valve. If everything got in and you had no way to process it, you’d just be confused all the time. It would be a blooming buzzing confusion. So, the brain by creating this default mode network or this reality hallucination brings order and makes it possible to cope with it, makes it comprehensible. You can operate in this model of reality.

It’s important to remember that it is a model, it’s not reality itself that you can operate within this, but then you have to also be cognizant of what you’ve sacrificed in order to make this work, and the psychedelics give you that opportunity because they temporarily disrupt the default mode network, or they disrupt the reality hallucination, and they let you look at them from a different perspective. In a lot of ways, they, I say that what they do is they bring the background forward.

You know, indigenous people I think are less prone to this, especially if they’re not literate because for them, the background and the foreground almost doesn’t make sense. You know, their experience of reality is much more immersive, but for us in the West, particularly if we’re conditioned by literacy and there’s nothing wrong with literacy, except that it does impose this way of looking, this separation between you and what you’re observing and the psychedelics contemporarily abolish, then you realize, oh, wait, I’m not separate. Oh, wait we are all one, oh, wait, everything is one, you know, there is no separation.

Laura Dawn: I so appreciate what you’re sharing here, Dennis, and what’s really interesting to me is that there’s such a strong overlap between what you’re saying and what quantum mechanics has been discovering for many years now that we’re not actually as separate as we perceive or believe ourselves to be, and people like Tesla once said that if you want to understand the secrets to the universe, you have to understand energy and vibration and frequency. So, I am so curious your take on this. Do you think that psychedelics and plant medicines help us to sort of lift these veils of illusion so that we can peer into quote unquote the true nature of reality?

Dennis McKenna: Yeah. Yes, I do. I think that that’s what they do. I mean, some people are just naturally, you know, they have this out of the box way of looking at things and so they can look at phenomena and have insights about it that are normally close to this, but I think psychedelics also facilitate that very often for just ordinary schmucks, like us who are not necessarily genius. I like to say that you can think of psychedelics, they’re scientific instruments actually. They provide a lens through which you could look at the world and see it in a way you’ve never seen it before, and it’s not just that you’re stoned and all this bulk.

No, actually, after you come down, if you reflect on these insights that you have particularly looking at processes in nature, right if you go back in an unstoned state after you’ve had the insight and you look at a process of nature that maybe you would counter during your psychedelic experience, you can look at it and say, you know what? It’s still there. I saw it, now that I’m not stoned, I can still see it. It was always there. I just didn’t see it before. So, I think that the psychedelics are tools just like a microscope or a telescope, and this is often being said, you know, the cliche is that psychedelics are to the study of consciousness what the telescope is to astronomy as the microscope is to biology. Psychedelics are as important as all the tech that we create for probing nature. Psychedelics are a long neglected tool in that respect.

They are as powerful as any of these instruments that we might build for this purpose. It requires putting yourself in a receptive state, you know, granting yourself the time and the situation to look at what’s going on without making judgment about it, just experiencing that. There’ll be plenty of time later to make judgements about it, to try and make sense, but just open yourself. This is a different way of experiencing things, and for us, it’s very hard because for indigenous people, I think that indigenous people are more or less in this kind of state all the time. They are much more aware of the, or maybe the right word, just unaware of what separates them from the external world. You know, because there are all the time, pretty much cognizant of the fact that they’re immersed in this natural world, these natural process.

I would also say children are very much the same. You know, again, before the age of literacy, you know, I mean, literacy is a two-edged sword in a certain way because most of us are literate. Most of us grew up in a society and cultures that valued that, but in order to function in that again, this particular default mode network that you construct for yourself or this particular model of reality, you know, it’s very constraining. It discourages looking at things in a broader perspective.

You’ve always got that narrator and the storyteller that lives inside your head, that’s telling the story, and if you can just shut that down temporarily and just let the universe sort of engulf you, I guess that’s the right term without making any judgment, then you learn a lot and you learn something that’s fundamental, and when you look at it in the cold, hard light of scientific discourse, following the experience, you realize that it’s valid. I mean, you look at it and the insights are that, you know, we’re not separate from other phenomenon, we are part of it. Everything really is one, we’re an organism having our metabolism, but we’re also living within the metabolism of the Gaian organism, and it’s a valid perception.

I mean, we’re taking the long way to your original question, but this comes back to the question of plant intelligence and generally intelligence in general, built into biology, especially I personally think intelligence is built into matter at every level of organization. You know, and if you look at what we know about every level of organization, but particularly biological system, you can’t not be astonished at how much sense they make. You find these elegant solutions in nature. That doesn’t happen because somebody designed them that way. I’m not a believer in the intelligent designer idea. Nature itself is the designer and there’s not even necessarily consciousness involved.

It’s just that things occur, things fall together in a way that makes sense, and particularly in biology. So, you see the most elegant solutions showing up. It’s not like something decided one day that they were going to do this. It just emerges spontaneously, and you know why, because the ones that don’t work, they don’t make it, you know, and plants particularly, you know, I mean, people say, well are plants intelligent? Well, yes, they are. Not in the way that we’re intelligent. You know, they don’t have brains, they don’t have nervous systems, but they’re intelligent in the way that they optimize their relationships with everything else around them. You know, and if that’s not intelligence, I don’t know what is, I mean, we could do well to take a leaf, no pun intended from plants because we don’t do that.

We often do not do that. Plants have a way of just coming up with the best solutions, you know, to their particular place in space and time, and they do a lot of that through chemical processes. What’s called the biology signal transduction processes, signal transduction is, as you can tell, it’s a communication technology or phenomenon probably, but it’s a specific kind. It’s about information that is carried by molecules exchange from an originator to a target.

It involves a molecule traveling from the originator to the receptor, and of course in the brain, this is what the brain is all about, but you see the same kinds of processes going on in the ecosystem as well on a macro cosmic, macro environmental level. In fact, many of the molecules that are in our own nervous systems, the neurotransmitters, which are basically their function is signal transduction between neurons, but those same molecules occur in plants and fungi and everything else, and they may have been precursors and have a very similar function. I mean, these plant secondary compounds are the neurotransmitters something Gaian mind essentially. So yes, they have intelligence.

Laura Dawn: Yes, exactly, and it just doesn’t seem like a coincidence that at the same time, we’re witnessing crisis on so many fronts that we’re also witnessing this explosion of interest in psychedelics and sacred plant medicines, and aside from the pandemic, you know, we’re also witnessing an epidemic of depression right now, and I’d love to dive into that. We know that banisteriopsis caapi ayahuasca vine is an incredibly powerful plant teacher in its own, right. Even separate from its combination, with DMT, from the chakruna leaf or other plant add mixtures, but I’d love to dive into how ayahuasca works as a natural antidepressant.

Dennis McKenna: Okay. Well, in the case of ayahuasca and the beta-carbonlines, it’s a multifactorial picture here. It’s not simple. There are various mechanisms of action. One of them is simply that some of the beta-carbonlines particularly this one called tetrahydroharmine. There are basically three different major beta-carbonlines in ayahuasca. One of them is tetrahydroharmine, and tetrahydroharmine, the others are harmaline and harmine and there’s basically just a trace of harmaline in ayahuasca, there’s a low level, but harmine and tetrahydroharmine are the basic major beta-carbonlines in ayahuasca. They both have multiple effects on different systems. Tetrahydroharmine is an SSRI, it is a serotonin re-uptake inhibitor.

So, it has that in common with the standard pharmaceutical antidepressants, like the SSRI classes are generally, it’s not that specific, you know, and inhibits that re-uptake of serotonin and some of these other neural transmitters like norepinephrine and epinephrine, so on. So, it has that effect, but it also has a longer term neural modulatory effect, and that’s why I think it’s more efficacious as an antidepressant and what it does, this came out of the study that we did with the UDV back in the nineties, it actually increases the abundance of the transporters themselves of the serotonin transporters, you know in pharmacology it’s called up-regulation. In other words, they up-regulate the serotonin transporters so that’s like making the process of re up-taking the neurotransmitter repackage it and re-releasing it more efficient, and it’s also a longer term effect.

A SSRI effect will, you know, acutely help with depression, but this is a longer term effect, and it actually reorganizes the cortical networks in a certain way, so that essentially, they work better. When we made this discovery, when we returned the UDV study, this came up, you know, we took platelets, which is a sort of peripheral model of the central nervous system, and we ran all sorts of receptor binding assays in the lab in vitro and discovered that tetrahydroharmine in the UDV subjects, we found that they drink on the average every couple of weeks and compared to controls they have this elevated abundance, up-regulation is the best term to apply to it, of the serotonin transporters, and we thought we were just puzzled by that, but one of the questions we had when we started out this work, is there some biochemical marker or something different about ayahuasca drinkers from non-drinkers that sets them aside on the biochemical level that we can measure on a biochemical level?

It turns out we found this different and we thought, well, what does that mean? We didn’t really know, but we started to get into the literature, and we found that pathological deficits in the transporters, there were a number of papers on this. In other words, people that lacked sufficient re-uptake inhibitors whose re-uptake was down-regulated more than it should have been, had all sorts of pathologies associated with that.

Particularly depression, like major depression, alcoholism, homicidal tendencies, you know, just a number of things indicative of serious long-term mental health dysfunction, and so that was an interesting finding that we found in the literature, and then it made sense when we considered the outcomes of the subjects that we had worked with in the UDV, because they had almost all come to the UDV in a state of existential crisis, you know, life crisis, very often having to do with alcoholism, but also, you know, not just alcoholism, but alcoholism with tendencies to violence, and there’s different kinds of alcoholism.

They came to the UDV usually because a friend in the UDV urge them to come and they took ayahuasca. They have these regulatory experiences, you know, terrifying experiences, actually in a lot of cases where they saw their existential situation and they saw where they were headed, and they realize that, you know, you’re going off track here. You’re going to go down if you don’t change things. Interestingly, these experiences almost always have the redemptive aspect to it because they looked into the depths of their despair and their depression or mere trauma and their anger and all of this stuff, and then usually at some point in the proceedings, they had the regulatory vision of either Jesus Christ, you know, because these folks were Catholic or almost as often Mr. Gabriel, who was the founder of the UDV.

One guy described his experiences, he said, I was in a canoe, we were going through some rapids and I was terrified that the canoe was going to turn over, you know, and I looked ahead in the canoe in front of me, there was Mr. Gabriel standing in the bow and it was like, at that moment, I knew that I was going to be okay, and many, many people describe these kinds of experiences, you know, and they were. So, we have this neat correlation between changing behavior, right which we know ayahuasca does the insights and all that can change behavior, and we have a biochemical correlation, the modulation of the serotonin transporters.

It’s almost too neat to believe, but there it is, you know. So, the conclusion is that ayahuasca, you know, if you take it regularly it can actually reverse these biochemical deficits and rebalance the brain re-equilibrate the neurotransmitter balances in the brain. So, it does that. We also know that harmine, and I don’t know about tetrahydroharmine, but harmine also can stimulate neurogenesis. So, it stimulates nerve growth, especially in the hippocampus, which is the area of the brain that trains the memory and this sort of thing.