This is an important discussion about harms, and what we should be doing about them. Josh and Roman are working on a major study at Emory University to answer some of the basic and outstanding questions we have about psychedelic risks and cases that can be challenging to recover from. We have a lot of work to do characterizing these experiences, and developing appropriate treatments for helping people bounce back more quickly. 

This is a special episode featuring two of our favorite organizations. DanceSafe and Shulgin Foundation. Listen to Joe Moore record with the heads of these orgs and learn about how you may be able to buy some art to support them. This is a singularly important history and partnership. 

My friend Mareesa joins us again on PT to discuss art, integration, psychedelic experiences without drugs, the heros journey and her smaller sphinxes that may start touring the country!
Enjoy!
Here are some machine generated shownotes if you find them useful!

Show Notes

Sphinx Gate began as a pair of monumental 34-foot sculptures at Burning Man. Now, Mareesa Stertz and her collaborators are developing smaller, portable versions that could bring the experience to festivals, conferences, and communities around the country.

The installation is designed as a sober rite of passage—one that draws on psychedelic experience without requiring anyone to take a drug. Participants move through four portals centered on the mind, body, heart, and destiny. Along the way, they are invited to identify a recurring personal story, notice how it lives in the body, meet it with greater compassion, and consider what might exist beyond it.

Mareesa and Joe explore how the project draws from the Hero's Journey, Carl Jung's concept of individuation, participatory art, ritual, somatic awareness, and the riddles traditionally associated with the sphinx.

They also discuss the importance of community in psychedelic integration, the stories and inherited beliefs that disrupt self-trust, and why healing is rarely the result of one dramatic experience. The conversation expands into peer support, the Global Psychedelic Society, the risks of presenting psychedelics as a quick fix, and the challenge of remaining fully human as artificial intelligence becomes more embedded in everyday life.

Kyle and Joe interview Rachel Turetzky & Douglas S. Wingate about their perspectives on the Wilson\Leary 8 Circuit Model of consciousness. They recently released a CE approved program on Psychedelic Education Center to train therapists on this model and how to integrate the 8 Circuit Model into your clinical therapy practice.

In this episode:

• Maybe Day and maybe logic: Honoring Robert Anton Wilson and learning to hold beliefs, models, and interpretations more lightly
• Reality tunnels: How biology, experience, culture, and conditioning filter our perception of reality
• Robert Anton Wilson's legacy: Guerrilla ontology, stand-up philosophy, Prometheus Rising, and using humor to destabilize rigid beliefs
• Timothy Leary beyond the caricature: His early work in psychology, the development of the Eight-Circuit Model, and the parts of his intellectual legacy that are often overlooked
• The first four circuits: Bodily safety, emotional territory, language and symbolic thinking, and social and relational conditioning
• The upper circuits: Sensory and somatic intelligence, metacognition, archetypal and transpersonal experience, and unitive states of consciousness
• Metaprogramming: Identifying the beliefs, imprints, and automatic patterns shaping our lives—and developing the capacity to revise them
• Circuit Zero and Stanislav Grof: Prenatal and perinatal experience, the basic perinatal matrices, and the lasting influence of early development
• Normalizing unusual experiences: Archetypal encounters, ancestral material, entities, out-of-body experiences, synchronicities, and other phenomena that conventional psychology may struggle to interpret
• Psychedelics and re-imprinting: How expanded states may loosen entrenched developmental patterns and create opportunities for psychological change
• Pleasure as therapeutic material: Anhedonia, chronic survival states, the "hedonic intelligence" of Circuit Five, and learning to experience joy without treating it as a distraction from the work
• Clinical applications: Using the model during psychedelic preparation to identify intentions, developmental imprints, and material that may emerge
• Medicine and dosage selection: How MDMA, ketamine, psilocybin, LSD, and 5-MeO-DMT may produce different experiences depending on the intention and dose
• Integration and verticality: Grounding expansive, archetypal, or unitive experiences through the body, emotions, relationships, and everyday life
• Chapel Perilous: Understanding destabilizing experiences, ontological shock, spiritual emergencies, and the process of reconstructing meaning afterward
• Beyond psychedelics: Connections with yoga, meditation, occult practice, Chinese medicine, chakra systems, and other psychospiritual traditions
• The new course: The structure of The Eight-Circuit Model of Consciousness: An Integrative Framework for Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy, including its 14 lessons, practical exercises, assessments, certification, and continuing-education options