YouSaid · the spoken record

Roland Griffiths

lines on the record: 196
first: 2022-12-09
most recent: 2022-12-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And those are very different but very similar. And so in the literature on classic mystical experiences, there's a differentiation between introvertive experiences that is internal experiences versus extrovertive in which all things become alive and you're in the world. I think it's important to recognize both are true and there's great value in both. And of course, leads us directly to some of the queries about psychedelic experiences. So our laboratory has focused on research in which we've given a psychedelic, mostly psilocybin, under conditions where people are asked to put eye shades on and listen to music. So it's an intentional and container to produce an introvertive kind of experience.”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, movement, yeah, but all focused on staying awake to the present moment. Example like yoga, you know, yoga could be that, but very often it becomes a routine practice that is certainly about the body, but it's not about that blending integration of moment to moment awake awareness with what you're doing. And that was a significant gift to my own practice because it got me out of an introvert of practice and that is focused inwardly as meditation does to an extrovert of practice in which you're still holding that sense of aliveness and degree of awareness, but it's also projected into the world or it's projected back from the world, however one might experience that. But it's really the enlivening of everything.”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Host of practices that just brought those same sensibilities into moment to moment awareness. And some of those were bodily practices, some of them were variations on meditative practices.”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know Jessica Dib, who is, her central practice has been breathwork, and that is kind of this structured breathing practice that brings you into presence. But she also teaches a series of courses. And what I would describe, I'm not sure how she would describe it as embodied awakening. And so at the point that I encountered her, I had 15 years or more of sitting meditation practice. And so I had that kind of discipline down. But that's a very kind of narrow sense of practice, right? I mean, you're sitting on a cushion meditating and the objective is to bring that into the world. But how to do that is a little bit mysterious. Jessica, as a teacher, had a whole”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Tara Brock and Jonathan Faust are local to us and interested in the work that we were doing. And so my practice has turned more Buddhist. I like the insight meditation practice because it strips away any theological or dogmatic practices. It doesn't appeal to magic mechanisms or supernatural phenomena. It's very worldly based, but yet it still has some of the flavor of the other kinds of traditions in terms of the enlivening quality of it. And it's a much easier practice to understand and rationalize from a scientific worldview. So I did that and then I got involved with a local teacher who”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Traditions, I started, and I was drawn kind of most prominently to Buddhist practices. So I worked some with Alan Wallace, who comes out of the Dalai Lama Tibetan school, but probably just pragmatically ended up spending more time with Vipasa meditation as taught by the insight meditation center and they have a retreat center in Barrie, New York.”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Prospective study because you'd have to identify conditions under which those experiences can be elicited reliably. And so that is the power of psychedelic drugs is that, you know, not in all people, but in most people you can occasion a set of phenomenological events that have definable phenomenology, definable experiential aspects. And so that leads us to be able to study those effects prospectively with kind of the tools of empirical science that's made much more difficult under conditions where you can't reliably occasion the experience. After my initial engagement with Siddha Yoga, then I started exploring other meditations.”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the same would be true of breathwork under some conditions. Particularly in some people, breathwork can result in also similar kinds of changes. It's just that there's so much variation among meditators or breath work practices. And I'm guessing tuning fork massage therapists. It's hard to mount.”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Experimental work that needs to be done is once we have a good signal of what accounts for that pure awareness state under 5MEO and if that can be replicated with tuning forks then you want to compare brain activities during that time. And so in principle there should be a way to examine those similarities and conclude what's operative under both conditions. And the same would be true of meditation states. But our understanding of the nature of these experiences is so primitive and our mechanisms for inquiring about brain structure, not structure network complexity. Are so crude at this point that I don't think science is up to the task to fully answer that. But that is the project that is unfolding. And there are many laboratories that are interested in just that.”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Presumably, whatever these experiences that are occasioned with psychedelics are producing interconnectivity and network changes within the brain, right? And that accounts for the experience. This is from the kind of the reductionistic neuroscience viewpoint. And so then the question is, well, yeah, what other conditions can occasion those the same critical network changes. And so you could imagine, or I could imagine, that with tuning forks, you know, different frequencies going into different ears. I mean, that's a very unusual set of conditions. You're totally relaxed. You're totally comfortable otherwise. And so it would be really interesting. And this is part of the competition.”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Guru has these remarkable powers of transmitting something and how that's transmitted and how much of it is expectancy effects versus not, but there are hundreds of accounts of some of these most outstanding or notable gurus in which people without any expectation come to awaken or have profound experiences in their presence. So I don't know what, I mean, that's one of those things that makes me kind of deeply curious, but so far we don't have any... Anything that approaches scientific proof that that occurs or can even occur reliably? So it's part of what needs to be investigated. And that would get to kind of the longer term. Project of the endowment on spirituality, secular spirituality, and well-being.”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not at all surprised. You know, these altered states of consciousness, some of which we've come to know through psychedelics, you know, can also be elicited under any number of other conditions and presumably prior to psychedelics, that's exactly what happened. I mean, so if you look into mystical traditions and meditation traditions, yeah, these things can happen. So we're biologically wired to have these experiences, and we just don't understand the optimal conditions under which they occur. So, you know, the guru experience is interesting in the city yoga tradition, there are all kinds of stories that really don't seem to make much sense unless you actually believe that the”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then fall back. Awareness of awareness practices are prioritized in some traditions as kind of being the ultimate. I certainly can't claim to have any kind of stability with respect to pure awareness practices. But it comes to a point where you're in the field of awareness and nothing is arising. There is nothing within that field of awareness other than awareness itself. And so the body drops away, thoughts drop away, and you're in a state of pure awareness. Sometimes those experiences are magnificent. They can almost be described as Sachitananda and its consciousness and bliss. And they're very interesting experiences. Some people claim that 5MEO DMT under right conditions comes closest of all the psychedelics to producing such experiences, although mileage may vary. There can be a lot of variations in those kinds of experiences.”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You said No, it's different than open monitoring. So that's open monitoring would be more like a sense that you're watching your mind and you're watching things arise in consciousness. Like”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I hate to say it. Yeah, I almost kind of look forward to some of these surgical interventions. Now, recently I just had a procedure, liver embolization, which is essentially they go into the abdomen and inject some kind of glue into some of the venous structures of the liver. And essentially it just knocks that liver. In this case, my right liver lobe out. And so I was talking to the surgeon and saying, look, can I do this without anesthesia? And he convinced me that that was not the right idea. Because there'd be real significant pain that they couldn't manage. But I tried. It's almost like, yeah, it's... You lose this opportunity to be away for something really interesting and important.”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“cloth curtain between you and the Cyril field so you're not looking at anything but a curtain and then you're just laying there for the procedure. It wasn't a big deal. I think that the anesthetics that they give are because people get so tense and anxious that they don't want to experience anything. feel them mucking around in my chest to run the catheter, but it wasn't a big deal and they gave me local anesthetic. So it actually turned out to be fun. I have enjoyed that. I've had also some sustained MRI procedures that were similar. I actually reached amazing degree of pure awareness practice during some pet scans.”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's what's going on, you're flat out. You're in a surgical operating room. You're late. Flat on the bed, they actually put some kind of hood over or some”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Procedure, they usually anesthetize people with fentanyl and with a benzodiazepine, and then they use a local. And I said, I don't want anything other than the local. You know, let me stay awake for this. And it was an incredibly joyful, interesting kind of experience to have.”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It varies? I mean, the core of it is, yeah, I mean, the practice would be anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour or more. And during some periods of time of the initial diagnosis and some of the procedures, when my sleep cycles were totally dysregulated, I spent hours actually at night in gratitude meditation. But it's just leaning into the joy of what this experience is. And in fact, it's kind of interesting some of the most clear experiences of present moment and joy have been at times where I've been undergoing surgical procedures like already had two intravenous ports placed because one became infected.”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yet the diagnosis was made late November, so Thanksgiving was in my mind. But that's actually the core of my practice. It's gratitude practice. And it's gratitude for the preciousness of this experience that we're having right now if we allow ourselves to get out of our mind enough to have it. And that, of course, is the truth. By the narrative structure of what we think is going on, and we get caught up in that, and then we lose track of the magnificence of every single moment, if you just allow yourself to enjoy it, appreciate it for everything that it offers. That's my go-to practice. I've been doing gratitude meditations every morning since the diagnosis. And I think that's the core way of leaning into this. I dropped the phrase every day as Thanksgiving because it's so associated with turkey. But it is about the preciousness of life.”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The diagnosis to be a blessing, it's an opportunity for practice. But when people ask me how I'm doing, I commonly say never better, but there have been serious weighing about whether or not I wanted to engage in treatment and what kind of treatment and at what cost to staying awake and being present and doing the things that are still our most important for me to do. Does that answer the question, Tim?”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I think it's that that has sustained me. And people ask me, well, you know, I tell them I have this cancer diagnosis now. And they say, oh, I'm so sorry. That must be so awful. And my response to date has been, no, you're not understanding. This is something I'm more alive. I'm more awake. I have a much deeper sense of equanimity and joy than I think I ever have had in my life. And I'm sharing this with my partner. And what a tragedy it would have been had I walked out of my house the morning at the colonoscopy and gotten run over by a bus. I mean, you know, it would have been a lost opportunity to awaken to a degree that I previously considered myself. But this was order of magnitude different. So I consider”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With psychedelic experiences, which also can be spiritual practices. But I think that enabled me in a way that I wouldn't have predicted, and I'm kind of humbled that I've been able to achieve the level of equipoise and well-being from this to date, but I don't know what the future holds for me. So I'm kind of humble. I don't want to overclaim that I got this nailed. But at least initially, what came up is an intense practice of mindfulness in which I could see these different psychological rabbit holes. If you went down them, you're not going to be happy. And I was able to identify those as soon as they came into vision and just choose, and I'm not going there. That's self-defeating.”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The experience and the practice should be gratitude for the preciousness of human life and everything that I have. And I think with that came almost this immediate awakening, this clarity, you know, okay, I'm going to reset my life priorities now. I mean, I looked at my to-do list and go, okay, maybe half of those things are just not that important now that I have some kind of constraints on my life horizon. So there was a level of clarity that came into focus. And then I think I would have to credit my long-term meditation practice. And there are other practices as well that I've done along the way that we could talk about some other time. But my long-term spiritual practices in combination”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Retrospect, a longer than ideal callback time for the colonoscopies. Mine was at five years, but I'd had polyps before. And I think in retrospect, I wouldn't encourage anyone to follow that. There's fighting it. I'm going to beat this sea, go into war with your body over it. I'm going to kick all the cancer centers out because my one of my daughters said to me on the one of my first days of treatment, she said, Dad, kick cancer's ass. And I appreciated that thought. I mean, because positive thinking is really good health outcomes. But I didn't want to go to war with anything. But it wasn't about to roll over and be dead. I mean, then it really quickly came to me that...”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was like shell shock. There was just okay, what do I do with this? And then in very short order, over a few days, I started exploring all of the places where I could go psychologically with this diagnosis. And one, of course, would be just sheer out fear or panic. One would be depression. And I woke up, you know, this is in that first few days at one point in the middle of the night with this kind of deeply flattened affect and thinking, what is this? And I thought, well, if I went to describe this to someone, they would surely say, oh, you're deeply depressed. I thought, okay, yeah, I can see how that can happen. And that's not a good place to go. You know, and then there are other things you can. You could choose to be resentful. I could have chosen to be upset at my provider that had”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pay attention to factors that support my well-being. I went in and remarkably came out with this stage four colon cancer metastases to liver. And initially, I just was Marla, my now wife, and I were just kind of thrown into a situation where this couldn't possibly be real. This had to be some kind of dream. And so I think I spent a couple days there not being able to even process the reality of that. And then when subsequent tests came back confirming the highly suspected metastatic aspects of the disorder, then kind of the full implications of that came upon me. And what I would say is initially...”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The awakening to the huge benevolent mystery and how one wants to put language around that is completely up to where you find yourself in culture, but that can be done from a reductionistic, scientific perspective, or it can be done from a full-on God encounter. I mean, it's benevolent mystery that seems to be at play here, and that's my experience of this, is quite akin to what many people would call God.”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yesterday, just kidding. Because, you know, I think the culture needs to develop institutional structures to hold and support and work with these kinds of experiences in a way that doesn't undermine culture more broadly. And I think these substances can do that. So I see it as this co-evolutionary opportunity that our cultural institutions need to co-evolve and learn to support this. And so that could be some number of generations. But ultimately, the basic message that I have is let's awaken me in this larger awakening project. And there are many, many, many people already on it. And it takes different forms. And it's not just psychedelics. But it is.”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's what I really want to communicate about my own experience along with the invitation to have others join me, hopefully without the thermal diagnosis, but join me in the celebration because we deserve it and in the largest sense what my deepest desire is is to Have that sensibility awakened in humankind all over. I mean, we need that for the survival of our species ultimately. It leads to this sense of wonder and pro-social tendencies and mutual caretaking. There's no easy way to get there and the way to get there is certainly not to dump LSD in the water supply because these”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Find out well before most of the listeners here will know. So I'll know something you don't. And I'm really interested in that. But at the same time, I don't know what happens. But what I do know is that this gift we've been given to be these sentient creatures walking around being aware that we're aware with just a little bit of contemplation miracle is not an inappropriate descriptor of where we find ourselves and how this has come about and why we've been gifted with this opportunity is unknown to us, but it should be a source of incredible gratitude and joy and celebration.”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going through an experience of a lifetime here. And it's one of just astonishing celebration and joy. And I would say, just with respect to how I feel about my own very probable impending death, that it's not that I hold strong ideas about the continuance of life or consciousness and certainly not reincarnation or classic heaven. I don't hold those beliefs. I feel agnostic toward the idea that we truly don't know what's going on here. So it's like this. I'm really curious about whether there's any experience. And after death, and it's kind of exciting that I'm going to have the opportunity.”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With respect particularly about how people with terminal diagnosis, what their attitudes about death and dying and why the anxiety and depression they're experiencing becomes less is probably multifaceted. So the therapeutic effects there correspond with the mystical type experiences. They're probably insightful type experiences. There seems to be very often a decrease in fear of death and there's a tendency toward the belief that there's something, and that can take incredibly different forms and different people, something that may survive death. And whether that's a full-on theological compatible account, or whether there's some just mysterious sense that there's something that endures after death, that belief tends to be enhanced.”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Changes in how someone proceeds, so a metaphor, you know, you send someone from some sheltered background, they come from a tightly evangelical community that believes in literal interpretation of the Bible does not believe in evolution. They go off to college, they take a couple biology courses, and they go, okay, this evolution is a thing. That understanding, I don't know if that's reversible. I mean, once you come to insight of that being true, or you come to an insight that you're in an abusive relationship, that the person that you feel closest to is actually truly abusing you. If that's true, if it's a real insight, then that can be irreversible. And so those kinds of mark changes can occur.”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And studies in healthy volunteers that the magnitude of the mystical type experience, the completeness of that correlates really well with the enduring positive changes in moods, attitudes, and behavior. Now, it's not completely determinative. There are other features of the mystical experience or of the psychedelic experience that we've also developed questionnaires to probe that also appear to be really important in one very important one is psychological insight. One can have an experience that is absent features of the mystical experience, but is given to some kind of profound new understanding about how one's holding themselves. With respect to whatever the problem is, and those experiences of insight can also result in abrupt, irreversible.”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And create incredible psychological destabilization subsequently. But the mystical type experience has that. It has this component of the preciousness or the sacredness of the experience. So there's something about the valence of this experience that's absolutely precious. And then it has this noetic quality, the sense that the experience is absolutely true. There are other features, positive mood, very often a sense of love or gentleness, openness in transcendence of time and space and ineffability, but those strike me as lesser important qualities to the enduring nature of these experiences. But we now have shown across a number of different clinical studies with clinical outcome measures.”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Several things, but we use several different descriptors for the nature of what we think are some of the transformative effects of psychedelic experiences. Eco-dissolution is one, but my sense of that is it actually misses some really important components that are captured in what we call the mystical type experience. So the mystical type experience has one factor in it that is equivalent to ego dissolution. It's the unity of all things that can be experienced as the absence, the void, the complete void that is completely empty, yet completely full at the same time paradoxically, or the sense of the interconnectedness of all things, but in being interconnected. Personal self can dissolve or is just part of a much larger whole? That's a piece of it. But having an ego dissolution experience can also occur under conditions of extraordinary”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To deal with the nature mind in this case with the intention to bring that off the cushion, to bring that out of the practice into moment to moment life. And that is the ultimate objective. I take that to be something that some people might identify as enlightenment, and I certainly am not making any claims to having achieved that flawless moment-to-moment state. But that is the invitation. How do we keep remembering what these teachings are? How do we keep bringing ourselves into the astonishing celebration of the present moment?”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Out and you say, Well, can I put up with some craving that I know is going to be time limited? Can I put up with some tiredness or whatever it is? Damn right I can. I mean, the payoff is much too great. So there's this sense of personal empowerment. And the other thing is, so these experiences with psychedelics inform the meditation practice. They inform a deepened sense of mindfulness. Let me also just remind us It's called meditation practice.”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So through these experiences, not only is there a landscape of consciousness, there's a willingness to engage, interact with those fearful objects of consciousness that Godzillas, if you will, knowing that it's going to enhance your fear initially, but by pursuing that, you're going to end up resolving the problem. And that's precisely what happens with the addiction. So the person who's identified themselves as an addicted cigarette smoker really has made a choice that they can't bear the suffering, that they know that they could experience when they quit smoking. They know that they're going to crave and they fail to do that time and time again. And here they're having just faced down Godzilla, you know, you come back.”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To engage with something that feels like it's suffering so you don't end up approaching the Godzilla. And incidentally, sometimes a dozen have a clown face that has the most terrifying face that your psyche could possibly create for you.”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Oh, that makes a whole lot of sense across a number of therapeutic indications, not to mention our studies with healthy volunteers, very often people come out of these experiences empowered, a sense of self-efficacy, a sense of freedom of choice seen the vastness of the decisions that they could choose to make and that are available to them that had previously just been foreclosed. Most dramatically, people who come in identifying themselves as addicted cigarette smoker, addicted alcoholic. And through these experiences, they come out saying, wait a second, I actually have agency here in a way I didn't appreciate. I can choose. There's another piece of the psychedelic experience, and that's a willingness.”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Perhaps I don't know, but perhaps psychedelic experiences that had negative valenced qualities to them and how I learned to navigate those could have been very important to me in how I came to find myself navigating the diagnosis”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the nature of things that can arise in consciousness, in the wise use of how to pursue or hold those in a way that you don't end up identifying, particularly with the negative constructs that arise is a peculiar thing. But when something negative arises, be it demonic figure or something like that, that tendency is wanting to avoid it, to escape it. And if you try, it's just going to chase you forever. And you'll have an absolutely miserable time for the entire duration. And if you're able to turn and be deeply curious about its nature, then it starts to change. So it really is this. Invitation to face what initially appears to be the dark side of things, the most frightening things. And I would have to say terminal cancer diagnosis might well qualify as emblematic of such an experience. And so perhaps.”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The psychedelic experiences and what I've learned about the nature of mine converge incredibly with the meditation experiences. But I have to say that sometimes characterized as Psychedelics is the crash course in mindfulness. I mean, it really is. It's such a powerful teaching in a way that comes across much more forcefully, at least for me than meditation practice. But once I can see that through the lens of a psychedelic experience, then I can bring that into meditation. So I think my meditation practice has undoubtedly deepened because of that. There's a lot of overlap. I guess what I would say is that psychedelic experiences have often for me now more intense, both positive and negative experiences kind of embedded within them. But that makes them ideal for learning to navigate the nature of mind.”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Consciousness that's deeply informative. And one gets those learnings, if you will, with psychedelics in a very powerful way because psychedelics can be so destabilizing to any normal sense of consciousness that at times one feels that one is walking along the razor's edge between insanity and transcendence. But one recognizes the feeling that that's a very precarious tightrope to walk.”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That we want them to take is one of interest and curiosity if something fearful arises be it demonic vision or just fear the right approach is one of interest and curiosity and to approach in spite of the fact that the hair on the back of your head may be standing on end because if that's inspected deeply enough, one finds that those experiences change. They're objects of consciousness. They can be very informative and there's absolutely no reason to run from them. There's every reason not to run from them. And nor do you want to fight them because all that does is reify them, empower these objects of mind into something that they're not. They're part of the play of broader.”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But what I would highly suspect is that it has a lot to do with my long history of meditation practice, and it's informed by some of the experiences that I've had with psychedelics. So with regard to the meditation, there's a real training of the nature of mind watching one's mind de identifying from the voice in the head and making optimal choices about how one wants to proceed in one's life. The same is true with a psychedelic experience. In fact, that's exactly what we do in preparing people for a psychedelic experience. We give them a crash course in mindfulness, telling them that all kinds of phenomena may emerge during the session.”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's interesting to me now in where I find myself with this terminal cancer diagnosis and reflecting on how I'm managing that personally and as we've discussed, the sense is one that I have a sense of equipoise and balance curiosity wonderbration for the preciousness of life. And the question that has emerged to me but to others watching me is how do you account for that? Because one might think that a terminal diagnosis would be devastating. And I think I can't possibly know how to account for at least how I've managed that diagnosis over these first eight months.”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, it meant to me that the nature of the mystical type experiences is confirmed. It fits with what I know about meditation. And it's quite amazing. It wasn't totally unfamiliar territory to me, though. I mean, this was. territory that I had explored in meditation. So it wasn't brand new in that sense, but I'd also been meditating long enough, sometimes hours a day and at this point for years. And what I realized is the coherence of that experience and kind of the tuning of it was remarkable because I'm all too familiar with spending hours meditating without such experiences.”
2022-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT