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

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

“So Bob had started the Council on Spiritual Practices that was very interested in primary religious experiences. And in particular, those brought about what Bob would have described as entheogens, which would be psychedelics. So he was very interested in the nature of these transformative experiences. And he started this organization, the Council on Spiritual Practices, and had a meeting at which Bob Schuster attended, and there was some discussion about launching research with psychedelics.”
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
“Wide ranging interests and was really a creative individual. So he was one of my few colleagues who really showed interest. It turns out then that he ended up being invited to a meeting hosted by Bob Jesse.”
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 don't remember the specific time, but it would have been the same thing. I've gotten involved with meditation. And Bob, it just had a lot of native curiosity. And so he would have followed up. Well, tell me about that, you know? And he'd be pressing me for details. What is it? Yeah, what are you doing here? And I think he was intrigued with that. He never got involved with meditation, but he 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
“This would be 97, 98. When I'd go to meetings, and my colleagues would say, well, yeah, what's new? And I said, oh, well, I've really gotten involved with a meditation practice. And you could just see their eyes glaze open. And it was 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
“And how that fit with other meditation traditions and where in the world does this fit within the literature on spirituality and religion? But it seemed really important and of interest to me so much so that I considered dropping out of Hopkins altogether and going off to the meditation ashram and really diving into meditation and this tradition. But I didn't feel secure in doing that. I didn't understand enough about that tradition and where it fit into kind of a wider field. So I did a lot of reading about meditation, about spirituality. And then I came to be introduced through a good friend Bob Schuster, who was head of the National Institute on Drug. at that time and had been one of my few colleagues who were actually interested in my involvement with meditation.”
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
“Looking out the windshield And so that seemed fundamentally important to me. And there was a level of feeling disoriented because I didn't understand what the nature of the meditation tradition I was involved in.”
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 I've never looked at the car. Yeah. How is that possible? Yeah. Never, yeah, never looked under the hood. It never occurred to me to look under the hood.”
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
“No, no, this is about the nature of mind. What the hell's going on? And that raises big questions. I mean, that's the only thing that we really know. Is our minds, but in our culture, we never pay attention to that. And I thought, Jesus, how could I have lived my life this long?”
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, my interest in meditation. Became super compelling. I started reading literature on different meditation traditions, on different religious traditions. And it seemed to me. Important to me, and it really functioned perhaps as a kind of midlife crisis by comparison my interest in. Conducting new studies on set of hypnotics just seemed of much less importance been there, done that. I could write other grants. I could get more funding for that. But so what? Other people could do that. And here was something new, a shiny new coin to look at.”
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
“two thousand six But we started the research back in two thousand. And started thinking about it back in the late nineteen nineties.”
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 that's part of what emerges with meditation is this mindfulness and catching yourself. And initially when I would hear that kind of judgmental stuff, I was so identified with it that it was very difficult to dissociate from. But once I saw it for what it was and say, wait a second, I don't need to hear that. And then that kind of judgmental voice would just dissipate over time. That's just one example of what goes on within our own self-talk. If that is not who you are, if there's a larger sense of self behind that, then you needn't allow yourself to get beat up like 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
“If that voice in my head were to be amplified brain on speaker, it would just be really embarrassing to hear what was going on. And I thought I was apparent at the time and treated my relationship with my children as a huge privilege. And I would never talk to my children the way that that voice spoke. Was talking to me, right? And I would say if I heard a parent talking like that to their children, I would have a lot of judgment that would come up instantaneously. I mean, that is not how to nurture a child. And I'm thinking, but what? This is my relationship with myself? You know, good. God, let's get this straightened out.”
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 was so identified with the voice in my head. That's all I knew is. And I guess I could say, yeah, I'm feeling badly about that because I should have done differently. But what I couldn't see is that that's just occurring within a larger field of consciousness. And that voice in my head was not me, that there's a sense of awareness that resides behind that. And when you start paying attention to that voice and realizing it's not you, then all of a sudden the game starts changing. I can remember when I first got involved with meditation and starting to pay attention to. That voice in my head, and it was brutally judgmental. I mean, it would say all kinds of, it was just self-judgment, but, you know, you're stupid. Come on.”
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
“Well, but that's what science is. I mean, it looks so orderly and it looked clean and it was a discrete behavioral measure. And so it was really attractive, less seductive, but not everything works out. But that's the fun of science is you can follow your hunches.”
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, and that may change factors such as heat and things like that. But it turned out not to be very interesting with respect to understanding the nature of the addictive behavior of nicotine. But my first postdoc student in that area, Jack Henningfield, actually came to be very famous in the whole area of nicotine dependence and he was co-author on the Surgeon General's report that recognized nicotine as a drug of addiction. So I'd gone down into nicotine and at that point I'd already switched and started to do work with caffeine because there were lots of people then who were involved with the nicotine stuff and I'd gone down this blind alley looking at the puffed topographies.”
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's highly relevant, and that is because we know that whatever you're delivering via a lung is going to depend on the delivery device. One of the things that we observed is that the puff duration decreased systematically as the cigarette was smoked. And we thought, oh, that's interesting. Maybe there's a satiation mechanism in there. And maybe there's something subtle about the cigarettion.”
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
“Puff topography. We did, and that turns out to have been a blind alley that I spent a whole lot of time focused on what actually is the nature of controlling the individual puff.”
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
“Well, with each puff of a cigarette, there's a profile of how people draw on that and what the duration is and the intensity of that puff. But then you also have the inhalation, the inhalation depth and duration, all of which is relevant to extraction of nicotine out of 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
“For me, at least Yeah, so we ran a number of studies looking at the role of nicotine and the control of cigarette smoking. And we went down a rabbit hole in looking at detailed behavior analysis of puff topography.”
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, oxycoda and so on. But yeah, I've also been someone who follows my interests. So whatever is of most interest to me, that's where my research has led me. And so I got really intrigued first with nicotine, again, as a model for understanding self-administration. And at the time that I initially got involved with nicotine, it wasn't considered to be an addictive drug.”
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 we developed methodologies that continue to be widely used for assessing abuse liability of drugs. And many of those procedures were subsequently adopted by FDA and then mandated to be conducted, trials conducted by drug companies that were bringing new compounds to market. Because they don't want a compound brought to market that has.”
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, Ben Spass, beans, valium librium. Sleeping medications. So that was one area of specialty that I had. I'd worked as a consultant and done a number of drug companies sponsored trials looking at novel drugs for their abuse liability.”
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, and I established as a full professor at Johns Hopkins, a very conservative medical institution doing rigorous research and garnering funding and stature international acclaim for my research mostly on drugs of dependence. And at that point, I had done considerable work with sedative hypnotics. That was a primary focus.”
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 I'm a full professor at Hopkins in the Departments of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, well established in psycho pharmacology, international reputation. Dealing primarily with drugs of abuse, successful in funding and already had published probably hundreds of publications at that time. So I was well established in the field.”
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
“Initially there was just some sense of calm and well being. And then curiosity about where this could go were I to get more systematically involved in it. It was like, what is it to stare into the mind when you've never considered your own interiority, if you will? And that's where I was. I hadn't paid attention to the nature of mind other than believing and identifying with the voice in my head that would come up and tell me, you know, oh good job or, you know, you really screwed that up.”
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
“Yes, she starts a regular meditation practice, the month long retreat in and of itself probably wasn't pivotal to her, but she got more deeply involved in meditation. And as a consequence, I became more intrigued. And so I started, I took instructions from her. What do you do? I can remember the first meditations that I did, it was in the evenings after I'd come back from a run, and I would sit down on a pillow in meditation posture and just try to be present with that. But at that point, I didn't have any firm instructions in meditation. But I thought, you know, there might be something here. It might be intriguing. And it became intriguing enough to me. To go to a program down at this meditation center. It was a weekend program.”
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 mean, we subsequently came to live together. And I don't know whether we are living together at that time. We might have been. As a matter of fact, I think we were.”
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 would almost be like I don't know saying, yeah, you could go to jail for two months. It sounded like potential torture, but yet I had thought about meditation as being something that potentially could reveal something about myself and something I thought I should know more about, and that is my kind of interior experience, and that maybe there was something to this. So there was both this sense of fear, but also intrigue.”
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
“A good friend at the time got involved with Siddhi Yoga. She started attending this local meditation center and I thought, that's interesting because I'd had a prior interest in meditation but never got it. And then she called me up one day really excitedly saying I'm going on a month-long meditation retreat. And I answered. I thought, oh my God, what in the world would that be like? And there was this kind of mixed feeling I had. One was almost fear. It's like, that sounds like torture. I couldn't meditate for three minutes.”
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 had better things to do and that there wasn't any value in this for me. And so then decades later that situation changed.”
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
“Classes from a meditation teacher in Minneapolis and set upon myself to try to meditate each day, and it just was aversive. It was no fun.”
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 it could be paying attention to. How the back of your hand feels. It could be paying attention to what's happening within your mind. There are thousand different approaches. But what one is instructed to do is to pay attention and to stay awake to where your mind is. And so following your breath turns out to be very difficult if you sit down and you're told, just stay with your breath. And if thoughts arise, just let them go. That's a trial by fire.”
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, the basic instruction with meditation in most traditions is you have an object of focus that might be breath, it might be a visualization, could be with eyes open and eyes closed, but you're initially invited to Put your attention on a single object and pay attention to it. And so that could be breath, watching the in-breath and the out-breath. And that sounds like a simple thing, but it's not at all.”
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
“Okay, so it could be By lights it could be feelings that emerge, could be imagery that comes up. There's a whole variety of what we might call the play of consciousness, whatever can appear in consciousness can come up. If with meditation there may be unusual features to that or those experiences may come up more intensely than you would otherwise expect. One of the keys in meditation, what is learned in meditation is the ability to look at the nature of mind To really understand what it is that's going on in your 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
“What's going on in terms of subjective experience? And indeed, that's the nature of the hard problem of consciousness. And ability to understand the validity. Of self rapport. But I got the concept that, wait a second, you know, there might be something here, but the language used to describe it is going to be metaphorical probably because there's no way to verify that what is being reported is correct. But then some years later, when I started having these very significant meditation experiences, all of a sudden that became really intriguing to me”
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
“No, no, that's accurate. Although back in graduate school, when I initially tried meditation, and I did only for maybe several weeks, I actually got the concept that there might be something interesting here, that people had developed these methodologies over thousands of years to explore inner experience. My training at the time was strict behavior analysis. Which generally ignores inner experiences being irrelevant because it's not measurable and it was thought really to be a nuisance variable. I would have a mentor who would say words are just your mouth kind of flapping around. That's the only behavior there is there because you don't have a third person account.”
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 realized I was looking at my own eyes and with that understanding, and this wouldn't be commonly held within the tradition, I recognized that I was the guru, that I was no different than the guru, that the guru was just a mirror of who you are. And with that kind of understanding, I was able to join the community in reverence to the Guru because it was in reverence to this kind of deeper interconnectedness that the Guru was reflecting back. And I was able to Phnom, you know, bow in front of the Guru because I was bowing to myself. That kind of shifted a frame of reference that allowed me to engage in that community. And then I started more serious daily meditation. But I became just deeply intrigued with that whole area. And then had a period of time in which it really became a primary focus of interest to me.”
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
“From the beginning until I had actually what I considered an astonishing initiation experience in which I at one point sat before meditation session, this was just in Baltimore and the way city yoga works again. The guru is revered. There's a seat at the front of the center, you know, and if the guru is not present, which the Guru I don't think ever visited the Baltimore Center, then a picture of the Guru sat there. And I was looking at this picture. And all of a sudden, the eyes became alive. And I was looking into the picture and I was looking into these eyes that were looking right back at me. And I thought, this is fascinating. And as I looked more closely,”
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 religious traditions of which I had almost no prior affiliation and interest in, I ended up having experiences in Siddha Yoga, having experiences with the teacher of Siddha Yoga, and this is a tradition that puts high value on this relationship, even on a subtle level between the guru and the disciple. That part really threw me and was kind of repugnant to me.”
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 I began meditation about nineteen ninety three. Rather quickly deeply involved, had a regular meditation practice, got involved with Siddha Yoga community, and became incredibly intrigued by the altered states of consciousness that occurred through meditation, interesting phenomena that arise. It really turned my interest for the first time on inner experience deep inner experience. I'd had some curiosity about meditation back in graduate school, but it really never took. This time when I got involved, it did take. It was interesting really deeply intriguing to me, got me reading the literature on comparative meditation traditions. It rang very closely to spirituality.”
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, my involvement in meditation started in about mid 90s, and that opened that spiritual window for me that made me very curious about altered states of consciousness.”
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 that was not the crowd in which I was involved with. And my friends who had tried psychotics, none of them were psychedelic enthusiasts. And so it was really a non-issue. I got to graduate school. And it was clear that research wasn't going to go on. sixty eight research of that type was not going to go on it never occurred to me to be thinking and career wise that that would be an interesting thing to do and because my limited experience was not particularly impressive I had no particular interest”
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
“Well, it was slammed shut within the academic center University of Minnesota had conducted trials on LSD some years before, and it was already taboo at that point in terms of research was a third rail in terms of discrediting yourself for being interested in psychedelics.”
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
“No. So marijuana usage was much more normative than in many situations than alcohol use. And there certainly was experimentation with psychedelics. I was neither drawn particularly to marijuana and, as I say, had a few experiences with psychedelics, none of which were of particular interest to me. When I went away to graduate school to study psychopharmacology, and that is psychoactive drugs, and that was sixty eight that I went to University of Minnesota, the door had closed.”
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
“Probably a sophomore in college. And had a few experiences, but they weren't particularly compelling experiences to me. They were not the kinds of experiences that we now know we can elicit pretty reliably under optimized setting conditions and with proper support. They were not that. And that's actually quite usual with psychedelics. These can be just very disorienting, confusing experiences. Those few experiences were something that didn't make a deep personal impression on me in the way that we now know that we have people coming out of our session saying that was one of the most In my college cohort, I don't know what percentage had exposure to psychedelics.”
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
“Let me talk about my personal experience with psychedelics. So I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 60s and invariably within my cohort I was exposed to marijuana and I had A few experiences with a psychedelic, probably LSD, never psilocybin. They were done under recreational circumstances with friends. They were not meaningful experiences. How old?”
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