YouSaid · the spoken record

Brian Muraresku

lines on the record: 94
first: 2021-08-15
most recent: 2021-08-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Too many Excel sheets. What we say falling in love, right? We say fall in love. What does that mean to fall in love? You are surrendering to an intelligence that is beyond us. You could say a god-like intelligence. Richard Rohr, the Franciscan friar I mentioned, in the universal Christ, he writes a lot about how the divine for you is often encountered in the other. In fact, how could it be otherwise? This is bedrock sacramental theology that you find the God in the things in your life, as well you should. That's the proving ground for identifying as God, rather than creating a relationship with God.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While my wife and I fell in love and made babies, we didn't type up an Excel sheet and figure out the best way to go about this.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, but I can plagiarize Joseph Campbell, which is good enough. Joe Campbell says that I don't think what we're looking for is a meaning of life. I think what we're looking for is an experience of being alive so that the experiences we have on the purely physical plane will have resonances within that are those of our innermost being and reality. You talked about the true reality, absolute truth. These are all constructs. And I think they're constructs that are made day by day and acquire this aura of factuality. Remember in Clifford Geertz's definition of religion, we're all just faking it until we make it. And I think a lot of that has to do with moods and motivations and feelings and emotions, which is not to discredit facts and figures. But I think that meaning, meaning making is a very subjective process.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Into irrationality. Same thing Nietzsche's talking about in his exploration of Dionysus. And so I think Kingsley just stands apart as one of those books, reality, that my life was never quite the same after reading that”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the irrational to the ancient Greeks, especially the Pre-Socratics. Here we are talking about AI and God and these entangled philosophical questions. The best I can read Kingsley is that Western civilization is a product of a gift from the goddess Persephone. And this is not a hippie. This is a pretty gold standard classicist who went on to write a couple of books. One is in the dark places of wisdom and the other is Reality. What better way to title your book, where he talks about these ancient techniques for exploring the irrational. The same thing Karl Ruck was talking about after compiling all this data in the road to Eleusis, Ruck says that the biggest challenge is trying to convince his colleagues in the late 1970s that the ancient Greeks and indeed some of the most famous and intelligent among them could enter so fully.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's Daniel's romp through contemporary shamanism. And it's his very well-told experiences with everything from psilocybin to eboga being initiated by the Buitis. And it was the first time I'd read any firsthand accounts, aside from Jeremy Narby, any first-hand accounts by a New Yorker, by the way, about the potential for these compounds that I'd been ignoring for far too long, obviously. And so that's when I started revisiting the road to Eleusis and looking through the anthropological literature, reading everything Gordon Wasson had ever written that Carl Ruck had written. And it sent me down a pretty weird rabbit hole until I found Peter Kingsley, which is my second recommendation. So Peter, again, he's not a fan of the psychedelic hypothesis, but what he does is, I think, expose the value.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Proposed by David Lewis Williams at the University of Witwatersnd, the same university where Lee Berger is, by the way, in South Africa. So these ideas are old. But what Graham did in that book is just it's well worth your time. It's well worth a few reads, actually. Because it was after that that I discovered breaking open the head by Daniel Pinchbeck and a lot of other books that just kind of blew my mind.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mentioned a couple of them, but. So I knew nothing about psychedelics before 2007. And it was in hearing about some of the first psilocybin experiments at Hopkins. And then shortly thereafter, I went down this rabbit hole. And so the first set of recommendations all kind of fit in that time period in my life, 2007, 2008, it started with Jeremy Narby, the cosmic serpent DNA and the origins of knowledge. It was a total impulse buy at the Barnes& Noble on 6th Avenue in New York and wound up introducing me to Supernatural by Graham Hancock. That convinced me that there was a long story to psychedelics, that he tried to prove in that book and that we're still trying to prove. I mentioned the connection between ritual psychedelics and cave art. This is the neuropsychological model that was first”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pythagoras had built one in his basement and would lie down motionless, apparently, for long periods of time, and what I think they were trying to do was tap into and trying to answer this question in their own, you could call it a scientific way, actually, less religion than science. And what they would discover or try to discover was a state of awareness that is somehow beyond life and death, beyond waking and dreaming, where you can be aware of the senses but also in touch with another reality at the exact same time, what Kingsley calls sensation. That, I think, is definitely worth exploring.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I am attracted to Lanz's notion of biocentrism. I mean, it's difficult to walk away from the double-slit experiment, not wondering why we seem capable of collapsing that quantum wave function. It's very, very weird giving rise to even weirder ideas about superposition and spooky action at a distance and things that MIT guys know a lot better than me. But it seems to me fundamental. Maybe consciousness is the fundamental thing. I mean, weirdly, some of these ancient incubatory practices. I talked about Peter Kingsley before. So he's not a proponent of ancient psychedelic use, but is a proponent of these ancient rites of incubation that were practiced by Pythagoras, Parmenides, Empedocles, other pre-Socratics. And so what were they doing? They were trying to get in touch with consciousness. They were entering into suspended states of animation in these cave-like settings.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this three pound lump of jelly inside our craniums that can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space. It can contemplate the meaning of infinity. And it can contemplate itself, contemplating on the meaning of infinity, that peculiar self-recursive quality that we call self-awareness. So this is the hard problem, right? This is the unknowable, the unknown at least. I don't know. I have no good answer for that. Aside from you,”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And McKenna loves this the sylphs and the boulder grinders and the sprites and the ginns and elementals, every society has them, it seems to be fairly universal, and they largely exist in folklore, mythology. This is what Jacques Vallet writes about so wonderfully.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You would like Julian Janes. Julian Janes writes a great book, The Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It's this theory that the ancient Greek mind was very different from ours, and that when they heard the muses, or the gods and goddesses, for that matter, they would hear them as voices in the head and hear it as an internal god figure offering commands, which they couldn't ignore. So were they walking schizophrenics? It might be one way to talk about it before the breakdown of the bicameral mind. But it's a provocative theory, largely untestable. But when you're reading ancient Greek and Latin for that matter, you can't read it very long without bumping up against these discarnate entities. They're everywhere. And they survived. They persist across time, which is even stranger, not just in the form of all the things my daughters like, like fairies and gnomes and elves.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Homer's epics. They begin by invoking an alien. They invoke a muse, Andre Moyenepamusa Polutravanos Malabola. Tell me, O Muse about the man. So Homer is an inventing poetry, he's channeling poetry, epic poetry from an alien intelligence. Maybe that intelligence has felt a little unrecognized in recent years.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you're the first person to ask me about aliens in eight months. So it looks like I'm going on the record. Go. I'll drop some J Allen Heinek on you. So Heinek involved in Project Bluebook famously says in 1966 when the long awaited solution to the UFO problem comes and we're assuming that UFOs have something to do with aliens. But when the long-awaited solution comes, I believe it will prove to be not merely the next small step in the march of science, but a mighty and unexpected quantum leap. In other words, I do not think that we're dealing with flesh and blood beings in nuts and bolts crafts. I think it's way, way more complicated than that. If anything, it takes me back to the ancient world. It takes me back to this invisible college of beings, of apparent higher intent. It takes me to the geniuses and the muses. So the first document in Western civilization, Homer's...”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Techniques of antiquity. And again, Nietzsche writes a lot about the rationality of Dionysus having its place in society. If anything, these biochemical discoveries, I think, point us back. They point us back to Dionysus and they're responsible incorporation of the irrational into our otherwise society of rational people and our kazooistry.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we're living through something and we're living through the unchurching of America, and it's the rise of the spiritual but not religious, the inheritor of all traditions, but the slave to none. There's a rise in the unaffiliated, the nuns. I think it was like one-third of millennials. It's probably much higher now that don't affiliate with any religion. So in that sense, God is absolutely dead. But maybe not the God that we were trying to define at the very beginning. You know, so Nietzsche also looked forward to the Ubermensch, which would be a fully realized human being that despite the death of God did not fall into nihilism and amorality, existential despair, all that great German stuff. And there are some commentators who talk about this eternal recurrence that just maybe by incorporating some of these techniques, not necessarily doctrine and dogma, but I would say the technique.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was a cranky German who knew a lot about Dionysus, by the way. He did. Which is why I like him. So certainly there's some truth. To the mortality of God. I think Gallup put out a study only a couple months ago where church membership is now officially in the minority in the United States at 47%, according to the most recent poll. That number was closer to 70%, only 20 years ago.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It came along at a time in their life when I think they were ripe for it, especially George Harrison. Highly recommend the Martin Scorsese documentary about George Harrison. For them, I think it was exactly the way we ought to investigate it, which is, well, mind expanders, this is what psychedelics do, right? That which makes manifest the contents of the mind. In the absence of an experience like that, and it can be in a three-day fast, it can be laying down in a cave, it can be in ritual chanting, it can be in a sundance, but in the absence of that kind of experience at the right time in your life, it may otherwise be very difficult to find entrance to that kingdom of heaven, which I do think is here and now, getting right back to the very beginning. If we are actually to participate in that eternal principle, how? And when?”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One person's crutch might be another's bungee cord On that mind Think about Paul McCartney. I mean, we might not have some of the better Beatles music in the absence of LSD. And what did Sir Paul say? He recognized the dangers inherent in it, but that he did it with a very specific, very deliberate purpose in mind. He wanted to find the answer to what life is all about. And I'm not sure what Sir Paul is doing this week, but he's probably not doing LSD. Speaking back to my theory about these substances being catalyzers of spiritual introspection”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm with you. So Elusis was known for three things the legomena, the dromena, the dichnumena, the things said, the things done, the things shown. If you can pack that all into your AI interface, I'm in, Lex Friedman.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a fairly damaged person, and yet who among us knows what was happening in Western civilization between nine hundred and thirteen hundred, let alone twenty five hundred years ago. So this is, in many ways, the profit of the psychedelic renaissance saying that history has lessons. And I don't think they're superficial lessons. I think it cuts to the very core of how and why Western civilization came to be born.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anticipation, ritual preparation. In fact, some of the early church fathers made fun of the Greeks for essentially just piquing people's curiosity and revving up the anticipation, which has something to do with the outcome, by the way. But in other words, I think we need to create a new mythology around this. I don't think you pop into a laboratory. I don't think you pop into a retreat center from one day to the next. I think that in my own case, I feel like I've been preparing 12 years for psychedelics, and I'm still preparing, including in today's conversation. I'm learning new things. And I'm willing to explore it together with the computer interface. But I do think ritual is a gigantic part of this. And even McKenna would say that. I'll paraphrase him by saying that if you'd met someone who didn't know where they were between the years 1995 and 2005, you would describe them.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The sacred recovery, right? The archaeology of consciousness and these states, these archaic techniques of ecstasy that were practiced across time, I think that's a winning combination. Part of what I do in the book is just I try and lay out the set and setting. That's often talk about psychedelics. I mean, so maybe psychedelics in the right AI environment is going to work. I think it'd probably work a lot better with that myth and ritual incorporated. So the reason Elusis worked for 2,000 years, and let's assume the psychedelic hypothesis has some merit to it. But I think the reason it worked is because you were born into a mythology. You were born into a story about Demeter and Persephone, and you waited your entire life to meet them in the flesh. So you weren't just preparing for a few months. It was a lifetime of expectation.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wonder how Terence McKetta would answer that question. No, he looked to shamans as kind of the scientists, the high magicians of the high archaic past and the far-flung future. I'm not going to discount. You know more about AI than I do. So I'm not going to discount it. But I do think that AI paired with”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Help orient our minds, bodies, and souls towards the irrational, right? We talked about McKenna's invisible world that seems to have this symbiosis with our own and perhaps has this higher intent for us. You could very well just take catalog of your dreams and that would do it too. But psychedelics seem to be particularly fast acting, particularly potent and very reliable, especially in the clinical studies. And so I looked at them as biochemical discoveries, like Huxley did. Maybe it's once in your life or infrequently. But maybe that's the beginning of a genuine introspection and a life well-examined as the ancients always instructed us.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that's all well and good. But what if you don't know where the house is in the first place? What if you've never had a mystical experience? What if religion is anathema to you? What if you hate God? What if all these words mean nothing to you? And they probably do for many, many people. And it's perfectly understandable. I think that we've lost the coordinates to these irrational states. Again, that we're prized throughout antiquity and that continue to be prized by the mystical communities, even in big organized religion. It just doesn't filter out that much. And so psychedelics, in my mind”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, if not, and this is going to sound weird, but maybe not, if more so. I look at psychedelics as a catalyst for spiritual investigation, not as the superficial means to an end. I think their value is in kind of serving as a Google Maps for the kingdom of heaven. Also, Ram Dasa's teacher said that when he was offered psychedelics, it'll get you in the room with Jesus, but it won't keep you there.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Locked up in the language, and we're somewhere between science and religion here, including legally. So the FDA's one route to this, what excites me about psychedelics is the First Amendment. What is this going to mean for religion? The freedom of religion being the first thing that's mentioned in the First Amendment before freedom of speech, freedom of assembly. If America is known for anything, it's a refuge for religious pioneers. And so we already have the Native American church, Brazilian spawn churches that are using psychedelics, but what would happen if Judaism or Christianity or Islam were to begin incorporating the very ritual, very sacred and discreet use of psychedelics as part of their liturgy. So not replacing the Sunday Eucharist in the case of Christianity, but part of the extra credit dimension of the faith.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While those with ontological angst in that case, great. Maybe there'll be a future DSM qualification. There's no doubt that things like psilocybin MDMA. Are useful for things like anxiety, depression, end of life distress, PTSD, alcoholism, you name it. And it's largely because of the clinical research that MDMA and psilocybin will probably be legal in some FDA regulated way in the next five years. But, I mean, again, I start the first page of my book with this question. Why do psychedelics work across all these different conditions? And the best that I could find is the meaning, right? Tony Bossus at NYU talks about psilocybin, for example, as meaning making medicine, which is interesting because it puts it somewhere between a therapeutic and, again, this ontological instigator. What is it about psychedelics that creates these mystical experiences or mystical-like experiences? You can call them emotional breakthroughs. You can call them moments of awe. I do think we get...”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's how I start my book with one of these volunteers from the NYU psilocybin experiments, this woman Dinah Bazer, who's an atheist. She still describes herself as an atheist. And yet, as one of these three and four people who walked away from this experiment transformed, she says that her experience of psilocybin was like being bathed in God's love from an atheist. I asked her why she uses the word God. Why not the love of the cosmos or the universe or mother nature? And she says, well, frankly, we don't know about any of this stuff and that God makes sense to me. She's still an atheist. But it's the way she describes that as kind of like the way your mother's love must have felt when you were a baby.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Effects on people's lives, and they walk away feeling like they're more loving, more compassionate. The science of all talks about the welling up of cooperation and resource sharing and kindness and all these strange things from this single chemical intervention, which seems to reduce us to automata as if enlightenment can be flipped on like a switch. And yet there it is. There's the data. And I don't see how you walk away from that. I mean, I completely understand Sam's position, but I think there's a reading of religion, particularly the mystical core of the big faiths and especially these ancient mystery cults, which do speak, again, to those moods and motivations creating this aura of factuality that these volunteers never walk away from, permanently transformed, just like the ancient mysteries.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was incredible. Carl Ruck, the professor, joined us, as a matter of fact, for one of his rare public appearances We went deep. And Jordan is very well read, obviously, on the psychedelic literature. He had just had Roland Griffiths from Hopkins on the podcast. And it's one of Roland's figures that Jordan I, again, just like the language of Aldous Huxley, it's hard to move past the following statistic. Over the past 20 years of the modern study of psilocybin, Roland will tell you that about three and four of their volunteers walk away from their single dose of psilocybide and high dose, saying it was among the most meaningful experiences of their entire lives, if not the most meaningful. And Jordan says, what do you do with that? How do we, I mean, how do we synthesize that? Here we are quantifying the qualifiable, the unqualifiable, and yet these compounds have dramatic”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yet I also love science and I love the historical process of weighing this data. I love the chemistry. I love the biology. And for me, I think this was the message of the ancient Greeks. And I think this is the world in which paleo-Christianity was born. I think there is this meeting ground between science and religion, which allow for the, if not the discovery, then at least the near identification of the ultimate reality, which is another way to describe God, right? This being of being, it's the transcendent mystery.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think science is one way, and religion is another. And I think there's actually a sphere where they intersect. There's a way for religion to be observable, testable, repeatable, falsifiable. When I look at the ancient mysteries, that's what I find. I think I find people exploring alternate states of consciousness and arriving at conclusions based on that exploration and deriving deep meaning from that, which, yes, our feelings and emotions are very hard to quantify, but nonetheless, these are the things that govern our lives. I mean, I don't know a parent who isn't motivated by the love of their children. Everything I do at 40 years old now is pretty much inspired by my love for my two daughters. And I can't prove to you that I love them. I can say it. I can show you behavior, but it's very hard for me to weigh and measure that. So not everything is so reducible to this quantifiable reality.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You feel like you know the point behind existence. In other words, I think it comes down to experience, like Joe Campbell was talking about, like Aldus Huxley mentions about experience and intuition. I think this is how we connect to God.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is complex. What does that mean? That religion has to make you feel something, these moods and motivations. But it can't just do that in the way that sex does that for us or sports or ultimate fighting or the World Cup or going to a concert. So we get all that emotion in these experiences like that. But that emotion has to be concomitant to a deep existential insight that answers this question for you in the morning. I know why I'm here. I know why humans are here. I think I know what the meaning of life is. That's what religion is. And if you find that meaning in science, then that's your religion and that's fine. But we need to be more honest about that. Your epistemological model is weighing facts and figures and you think that's why you're here on this planet and you find deep meaning that's okay. Religion is the thing that makes you feel, right? It has the aura of factuality.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the most complicated we can get on this is the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. But I think it's worth defining our terms when we're talking about God and religion. So religion religio from the Latin means to bind back. So to bind us back to some meaningful tradition, to bind us back to the source. Here's a mouthful from Clifford Geertz. Religion he defines as a set of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions in such an aura of factuality that those moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we seem to be able to produce quite easily inside the lab at Hopkins NYU and elsewhere with psilocybin. I think this is kind of part of Huxley's prediction about a time when we would have legal access, safe access, efficacious access to this material that would allow for insight in an afternoon. And what do you do when millions of people can become mystics in an afternoon?”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“that would allow for large numbers of men and women to achieve a radical self transcendence and a deeper understanding of the nature of things in other words that this revival religion he says would be a revolution Allen Watts comes along and says that there's nothing more dangerous to authority than a popular outbreak of mysticism but I think this is what Huxley was pointing to and he talks about religion in these terms about being less about symbols and returning to a sense of experience and intuition and Huxley says that he envisions a religion which gives rise to everyday mysticism and he talks about something that would undergird everyday rationality everyday tasks and duties and everyday human relationships in other words religion has to mean something and these these altered states of awareness”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Huxley has to stop you. He stopped me in my tracks, Aldous Huxley. So in 1958, he pens this op-ed of sorts. And it just, it reads incredibly prescient because I really do think in many ways as the fog of the war drug is ending and finally lifting, that we've kind of come full circle back to the late 1950s, which might sound strange. It'll make more sense when you hear what Huxley said about psychedelics. And so he was looking forward to a revival of religion, which is why I subtitled the book, The Religion with No Name. And to him, to Huxley, this revival wouldn't come about through televangelistic mass meetings or photogenic clergymen, as he says, but he points to the biochemical discoveries, such as we have today.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was the opposite. In fact, dying before dying, which is the immortality key, by the way, it's not psychedelics when I refer to this key. I'm referring to this notion that's preserved in Greek on petanis prinis dentapanis otan petanis if you die before you die, you won't die when you die. For some reason, the ancients prized that experience, and we talked about the mystics of Sufism and Kabbalism and Christian mysticism where you have this same self nodding, this death before death, the divine nothingness, right? For some reason, the mystic saints, visionaries, and ancient philosophers, they ran to death. And the one message I wanted to try and communicate with this book is how they viewed life, that it can only be fully experienced, fully embodied in the wake of a really intense, perhaps terrifying.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wonder what life would look like in the absence of the fear of our mortality. I wonder how we'd interact with one another if there was relatively little or no fear of death. I really do when it comes to Becker's work and others. If the ancients were known for anything, it was running to death.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The afterlife that only those who went there became immortal. And Cicero says that at that point you essentially live with more joy and die with a better hope.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, from what we can reconstruct, they would make that pilgrimage 13 miles northwest of Athens to confront their mortality. Remember we were talking about Homo Naledi and in South Africa, this recognition of self-mortality, the deliberate disposal of the dead. Plato talks about the real practice of philosophy being the death and dying process. So in some senses you went to Eleusis to die and to experience a death before your death. We talked about this with Terence McKenna as well and this, how the psychedelic state seems to share something in common with the near death or out of body experiences or these ecstatic experiences, whether through wine or beer or otherwise, you went to Ellus to die. And it was said that only those who had witnessed this vision, whatever vision was to be witnessed in Demeter's sanctuary, it essentially vouchsafed you.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing that Athens ever produced, so not democracy, the arts and sciences or philosophy, but the vision that was encountered at Eleusis, perhaps through the ritual consumption of a potent psychedelic over hundreds and hundreds of years, thousands and thousands, if not millions of initiates, pilgrims, who would walk from Athens to Eleusis to encounter this vision, it seems to have been not just an important part of Greek life, but the thing that made life livable, such that as these mysteries are about to be exterminated by the newly Christianized Roman Empire, there is this passage in the ancient literature that talks about these, in the absence of these mysteries, life becomes unlivable abiotos.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So again, I would say it is the centerpiece of ancient life, not just the mysteries of Dionysus, which we've only talked a bit about, but the mysteries of Eleusis were probably the most famous and longest lasting of these Greek mystery rites. And just to put it in simple terms, the best definition for a mystery religion, as the name implies, is something secret. Muo from the Greek means to shut the eyes or to shut the mouth, to keep quiet about this stuff. We're always teasing details from the archaeological and the literary record, and we're kind of just grabbing at these secrets. But Elusis, which survives for like 2,000 years into the Christian period from about 1500 BC to the 4th century AD, it's kind of this centerpiece of Greek life. Cicero, the great Roman statesman, calls what was happening at Eleusis the most exceptional and divine.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Audience, that's something very specific is being communicated here. What's being communicated that you just might find in early Christianity what you hold strong to in these mysteries of Dionysus that you may have inherited from your parents, your grandparents, your great-grandparents for centuries. There was a perfectly good religion. There were perfectly good mystery cults in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. And here comes this new untested illegal cult illegal of a dozen or so illiterate day laborers that go on to convert the empire in a few hundred years. The answer to that... Extraordinary growth is not psychedelics, but I do think it's visionary experiences and I do think it's this continuity from the pagan world into early Christianity.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Known about the Greek district of Elis on the Peloponnese, and in Ellis around the Epiphany every January, the priests of Dionysus would deposit these water basins, empty basins in the Temple of Dionysus. They'd return the next morning and find them magically filled with wine. Now, on the island of Andros, it's even more interesting around the same epiphany date the gods gift day, Diaz Theodoscia, the wine would emanate from the temple and run like a river for a week, and you can Google the Bacchanal of the Andrians, a wonderful painting by Titian, which hangs in the Brado, and you'll see a river of wine behind these people having a great time. This exists for centuries and centuries before the wedding at Cana and before Jesus begins his public ministry with what these scholars call the signature miracle of Dionysus. It would not have been long lost on the Greek author.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A good combination, by the way. So I shy away from that controversy in the book. I'm perfectly willing to accept Jesus as a historical personage. You know, we have the multiplicity of sources, although it's a generation after his death. But we have the Eucharist being described in the four Gospels. We have it being described by Paul in 1 Corinthians. But when you read John, it does read a bit differently than the other Gospels. And in my book, I rely a lot on the scholarship of Dennis MacDonald, who writes a fabulous book called The Dionysian Gospel. And this is again why the Greek matters, because once you start to analyze the Greek of John's Gospel, it seems to be a presentation of Jesus very much in the guise of Dionysus, the most obvious example is the wedding at Cana, right? That only occurs in John's Gospel, the famous transformation of water into wine. Now, again, to any Greek speaker of the first century, they would have”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source