Avsnitt
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‘All the meds I was on for eight years through the VA did nothing for me whatsoever. From what I know now, psychedelic treatment is the number one way to treat PTSD in veterans. I did that stuff, and the next day I had my life back.’
In this final episode, veteran Albert shares his struggles with physical and mental trauma throughout his life and career, and how he received a surprising amount of healing from ibogaine treatment, through our psychedelic research study.
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‘This anger started coming over me, and I didn’t know what it was. As it reached an uncontrollable boiling point, it all came back to me. My step-grandfather had molested me and my handicapped sister. I got out my gun to kill him, then realized that he was already dead. So I wanted to blow out my own brains, and right then came a knock on my door, where nobody ever visits.
‘I didn’t make it to my social security office appointment at 9. At 9.02, it was bombed. 168 dead. When my paramedic student reached there to help, she was given a bucket to pick up body parts. Months later I went for that appointment to a different office. I was there for 2 minutes when I blacked out. Next moment I woke in the parking lot, and there was an explosion in my head, blood red, body parts flying towards me. That’s when it clicked.’
In this second part, Albert shares two mysterious stories of synchronicities that saved his life. In the first story, a lifeguard who he had a crush on was led by a mysterious mind voice to his doorstep in one of the lowest moments of his life. In the second, a chance phone call pulls him away from the Oklahoma City bombing, but months later the explosion strikes again, inside his mind.
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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‘I went down to the train tracks, and heard someone walking up behind me. I turned around. They both had bows and arrows with real razor hunting tips. “You’re our prisoner now”, they said, and started walking me to the train underpass. I knew in my heart that if I went there, I would not come out alive.’
Albert Hobaugh is a retired special agent, tactical operator, EMT-Paramedic and combat instructor. He was a U.S. Army Ranger and a federal investigator and undercover agent. He is the author of ‘Blacksheep Ghost: The early years: The Life and Making of a Special Agent’. Albert’s journey through PTSD and neurological trauma led him to seek an ibogaine treatment study at our psychedelics research center.
Here Albert shares his surprising and unusual life story: the difficult and adventurous story of his childhood and youth.
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‘I saw dead bodies, rotting and smelling in the heat. I realized that they had not been collected because there were mines planted all around, and I was walking through them.
‘The military found out that I was involved in secret anti-regime propaganda, and sent me to the war front. One night a rocket dropped on us. The shrapnel chopped the head off a running boy, but he kept on running without his head.
‘I was setting fire to a shop as a political protest, but the petrol got on my shoes and I caught fire as well. They arrested us and gave us 75 lashes with a hard rubber radiator tube. They took us prisoners to a big public prayer by a mullah, where I saw my father. I stood up and started challenging the mullah. They beat us and took us to a bigger prison where the in-charge molested the younger prisoners, and insects from the rubbish crawled over us all the time. They made us watch as they hanged our friends. As I was leaving after my year-long sentence, a guy at the prison entrance happened to see me and sent me back for one more year.
‘This girl and I were stopped and searched while driving with anti-regime leaflets. I was arrested again and given a death sentence.’
Hussein shares with me the stories of his rough childhood in Iran, fighting in the Iran-Iraq war, being imprisoned and sentenced to death for his anti-regime activities, and his harrowing odyssey to flee Iran through four countries with fake documents.
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‘I have narcolepsy. Sometimes in sleep paralaysis, I hallucinate that my visual world is split. The left side is reality, and the right side is a bad dream, and I am sliding towards it.
‘I met this blind woman who at some point started hallucinating technicolor light, then started seeing her hand as she waved it across her face, then other objects. I ran experiments, and her brain images looked similar to those of a sighted person looking at the same objects.’
Dr Jesse Breedlove studies mental imagery and hallucinations. We first talk about her own narcolepsy and sleep paralysis experiences. Then she describes her experiments on a blind lady with non-optic sight, the blindsight on ibogaine phenomenon from the previous episode, and her theory for what’s going on here. Then we talk about stretching the definition of ‘vision’, the pushback in the scientific community against such phenomena, and about neurodivergence.
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‘The traditional ibogaine ceremony of eating the ground root bark is a rite of passage for all males in the Bwiti tribe. They use it as an oracle. We have adapted it as a treatment for the diseases of the western developed world, like PTSD, trauma and depression. When an 18 year-old enlists in the military and conducts sanctioned violence for 20 years, they sometimes can’t get out and live a normal life without these psychedelic interventions.
‘On ibogaine, the participant often perceives that they can see through their closed eyelids and the eyeshade. I see them starting to peek through the eyeshade, and wave their hands in front of them to verify, and there’s disbelief at first. It can feel like a superpower, but also terrifying, because you can no longer hide from your visions. You can also see beings you know, or humanoid creatures. The ibogaine can also take on a voice and an entity that can be in dialogue and answer questions. And you can experience a life review, like a projected home movie, with your life memories and trauma.
‘I myself experienced being able to see the room through closed eyes and eyeshades, then I saw a six-foot-tall humanoid with a goat head. I could walk around and look away and look back, and it was exactly where and how it should be in 3D. These beings will often tend to you for the entire visionary experience.
‘The ibogaine asked me if I wanted to know how I would die. I am a death doula and comfortable around my own death. I said no, because I don’t want it to take away the surprise. It said, good answer, and moved on.’
Colm Walker is a veteran and the executive director of The Mission Within psychedelic retreat, where the patients we are studying at our Center for Psychedelic Research and Therapy (at the University of Texas at Austin) go for their ibogaine and psilocybin treatment. He shares his background and a description of their program, and what a typical ibogaine experience is like. Then we talk about a strange phenomenon that is allegedly common on ibogaine: being able to see through closed eyes and an eye mask, and we discuss the prospect of seriously scientifically studying it.
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‘1985, first year, second semester: Professor Ed Diener walks into the lecture hall and asks, “what do people want in life?” “Love, sex, money, happiness, a new boat, rock and roll, drugs”, the chalkboard fills up. He circles “happiness” and says, “I believe that all the other wants are about this one. I am studying the nature of happiness, and here’s my research.” I learned something life-changing in his class. He’d found two variables that mattered most in the pursuit of happiness: the quality of your relationship with others, and with yourself.
SQUID is such a simple but powerful concept that improves quality of life so quickly. So it has become the focus of my life to put on a costume and teach it full-time in the streets, instead of being a traditional professor.'
For years, Dr Mel Ganus, doctorate in education with a focus on applied psychology, has put on street shows in a squid costume to teach kids how to not get triggered by situations, and has co-authored a book about it with Dr Philip Zimbardo who conducted the famous Stanford Prison Experiment.
Dr Mel starts by asking who I am, why I’m here, where am I going and what do I want. Then she shares her life story and her experience of attention deficit disorder and neurodivergence, about how she was introduced to positive psychology, and the origins of her lifelong work on Quality of Life Experiments. We end with talking about psychedelic mushrooms and the connectedness of mycelium.
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‘I have really suffered mentally, and from mysterious chronic illnesses, which I believe are all an illness of the interface between body and mind: the nervous system.
‘As a kid, I had panic moments of fixating on my death, and would actually kick, punch and scream. On ketamine, my self disappeared, and I was left puzzled: what is awareness without a vantage point that it’s emanating from?’
Former Navy SEAL Chris Irwin was the first subject of my eye-tracking experiments at the new Psychedelics Research and Therapy Center at UT Austin. He has created the Rare Sense podcast and blog that shares his mental health journey. We talk about mysterious chronic illnesses, then I explain my eye-tracking experiments, and we discuss EMDR therapy. We then talk about our fears of death, and the self disappearing with psychedelics or spiritual practice.
Video version of this on Chris's podcast.
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'India was an intense and diverse chaos. I learned to say no to people in a way I never thought I would. But I also had the best time with the locals than any other country. As a Jew, we have the first monotheistic religion. Your polytheistic perspective is so different. In Judaism we read interpretations of religion a lot. But India is the birthplace of direct yoga and meditation.
'I once told a friend that I would feel lonely while traveling. He said, there’s being alone and experiencing your true self because you are not compromising. Then there’s loneliness, when your constant high expectations of experiences and socialization are not met. Being alone is the default, and if you learn to be comfortable with it, anything else is extra.'
Idan Yarom shares his experiences of backpacking through southeast Asia, including India, and the life lessons on communication, perspective, challenges and loneliness that these journeys have taught him.
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'In Israel, you are summoned to the military at 17. They have psychological tests to see if you’re mentally sound to hold a gun. Some people try to fake mental problems to avoid the military, so the system is very skeptical even when you do have real mental issues. I got into the Israel Defense Forces spokesperson unit that reports military news. I’ll say we try our best to tell the truth. I would travel solo to random bases and interview people, and sometimes got the craziest stories with just a couple of questions.'
After that I worked at the Tel Aviv Institute on national security. This last decade was one of the safest for Israeli security. Since 2019 we had about 5 elections, and Palestine was not a central topic in any of them. But there is a big difference in our perspectives. In Palestine they observe the Nakba day like a catastrophe or Holocaust, which in Israel is our independence day, the happiest day of the nation. Both sides have legitimacy, and we need to find a way to make it okay, but I don’t see a solution right now.'
Idan Yarom shares his experience as a military reporter in the Israeli Defense Forces and working at the Tel Aviv Institute on national security, then provides a recent history of Israel and Palestine.
Related: episode 7.2 · Life and Resistance in Palestine
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In science we make observations and extrapolate to natural laws that we believe are eternal. But what if the algorithm of the universe is constantly changing?
Link to my music: Causal Diamond
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At a recent camping trip, I share how I have traversed from the world of scientific reason and objective truths, to spiritual, unprovable, even paranormal truths. I would love to bridge these worlds, but it seems like they have intrinsic properties that make them want to stay separate, like oil and water.
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Humans tend to think of life as unfolding in one of multiple possibilities. But the radical idea here is, there is only one possibility: what’s really happening. Alternative possibilities and probabilities are an imagination that trap us.
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‘The world may appear to be limited by physical laws. But if it is what dreams are made of, it is unlimited, indestructible and endless.’
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'As a teen, I met a friend every year in a park at midnight on Christmas eve. One time as we were walking, there was a flash of light, and I went away somewhere. It felt like outer space, I didn’t have a body and could not move, and time stopped existing. Then I came back. My friend and I looked at each other, and knew we had both experienced the same thing. We started running, and a torrential rain began pouring down.
'There was tension at home, and school was constant fear. I felt repressed, and wanted intense experiences to break out of my shell. I hitchhiked across the country, worked for a traveling carnival and odd jobs, and was homeless. When you are vulnerable, the system stops protecting you. Looking back, I would have done it more gently and avoid some of the trauma, and be more normal and stable today.
'I kept having supernatural experiences, and I’m still not sure how to include it in my academic work. I once went into shavasana and lost consciousness again. It took me on a journey where I was a wanderer working in various spiritual communities. The universe felt connected to me and spoke to me, but it was sometimes scary to be absorbed in the divine. Most of the time there’s enough interference that my spirit is not in sync with the flow of existence. Magical coincidence is sort of like the extent to which they match up.'
Dr Brent Crosson is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches a course called Science, Magic and Religion. He is the author of Experiments with Power, about the clash of politics with the spiritual practice of Obeah in Trinidad, which won the 2021 Clifford Geertz Prize for the best book in the anthropology of religion. Brent’s interests lie in African and Caribbean religions, the intersection of science and religion, and the colonial regulation of religion.
We start with two stories on coincidence, about a motorcycle and an alligator. Then Brent tells me his life story, supernatural experiences, vagabond life, and studying Hinduism in India and the Caribbean. We talk about the connection between science, magic and spiritual practices, and I ask him, ‘what are your religious views, and what do you think will happen to you after you die?’
Intro music: Whale Song by Brent Crosson.
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‘Here in the US, money can do a lot of things that a relationship with God can, so people rely less on that relationship. In Haiti, there's less ambiguity about the effect of magic and prayer. When I was six, my grandfather brought my dead aunt back to life. This one US magician was showing his tricks to the Haiti kids, but they were not impressed, because they have seen more in real life.’
Othniel, my uber driver to a conference, is from Bahamas of Haitian parents. We talk about religion, satanism and witchcraft in Haiti. I ask if he has any spiritual gifts, and if he believes in meaning and purpose to life. It turns out that he is a pastor, and we talk about science and its dogmas, and the coincidences that brought us to this conversation.
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‘Two clones wake up in identical rooms, and are told that one is near a mountain, the other is near a lake. Either of them can ask, “Am I the one near the mountain, or the lake?”, and there can be an answer. But interestingly, a third person cannot even formulate this ‘which clone is which’ as a question that can have an answer.
Philosophy professor Dr Miriam Schoenfield teaches a course called 'Who am I?' I ask her: what do you think is your self? How did you become interested in the question of the self? I share my lifelong journey of questioning the self that led to non-duality, then we compare our perspectives on the self, subjective vs objective facts, dream vs reality and the continuity of the self over time.
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'I was obsessed with knowing the fundamental truths of the world, and became an analytic philosopher, focused on logic and rational thinking. After the wilderness, I began to feel that there are more, juicier, ways of connecting with the world, accessing information not available through thinking. I now suspect that we can't reach the truth by analysis. My colleagues think I should write a paper about it, but I don’t.'
I ask Philosophy professor Dr Miriam Schoenfield: why did you suddenly go off solo into the wild, and what internal shift did you experience there? I share a change happening in my life where I can sometimes feel the energy of trees, then we talk a lot about vibes in the context of living in a city.
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'I travelled solo in the wilderness for a year. It shifted my perspective on many things. I started seeing cities as ecosystems, and I began caring out of a love for the world. When I heard they’ll expand the highway, I had an immediate gut feeling: bad idea.'
Dr Miriam Schoenfield graduated from Brandeis university in Philosophy, Math and Neuroscience, then got her Philosophy PhD from MIT, and now teaches at UT Austin.
Texas wants to expand the I-35 highway running through Austin, but Miriam and her activist friends have sued the state in an attempt to stop it. Why does a philosophy professor want to prevent the government from building public infrastructure in one of America’s fastest-growing cities?
Some resources:
Submit your public comment about I-35 expansion.
Rethink35
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I air my opinions on isometric projection in Buddhist paintings I saw in Thailand.
- Visa fler
