What happens when you’re injected with DMT for 40 minutes straight... on four separate occasions?
Alexander Beiner was one of nine participants in the Imperial College of London’s DMTx extended state trial — a protocol designed to push a human being to the peak of a psychedelic experience and hold them there. This is not a clinical breakdown. It’s a first-person account of what happens at the edges of human experience, and what you bring back.
We explore:
🩷 What the DMC-X protocol actually feels like — from waking consciousness to peak in under 3 seconds
🩷 Why "surrender" might be the wrong word — and what polyvagal theory, curiosity hacking, and cognitive flexibility teach us about navigating altered states instead
🩷 The nature of consciousness — panpsychism, Bernardo Kastrup, and why the DMT realm challenges materialist assumptions
🩷 Entities, fairy lore, and UFO abduction — are they the same phenomenon wearing different cultural masks?
🩷 How ideas actually emerge — the neuroscience of creativity and why good writing demands good research
🩷 AI, the legitimation crisis, and why the internet is running out of reality
YOUTUBE + TRANSCRIPT:
Transcript:
(00:00) Alexander Biner, welcome to the show. >> Thank you very much. Good to be here. >> How much psychoning or how much psychedelic experience had you had before you underwent the DMTX trial? >> Um, so I’d had quite a lot and actually all of us who were on that stage of the trial were fairly experienced and that was kind of the point maybe 40 or 50 Iwasa journeys and mushroom experiences and LSD experiences.
(00:26) So DMT extended state uh is basically as you mentioned it’s being injected with DMT intravenously. You’re injected for 30 minutes and then the trip lasts 40 minutes because it’s once they stop injecting you’re still full of DMT and then your body’s um uh processing it. I was one of I think there were nine of us.
(00:44) I think there were 11 and then a few people dropped out. So it ended up being nine people >> who were the the dose finding trial. So, we were like the guinea pigs for the guinea pigs and they wanted people who had um a fair amount of psychedelic experience to be able to report back on uh clearly on well what they were actually looking for was to bring us up into a peak experience and then plateau.
(01:08) So, keep us in the peak for as long as possible which they did really manage to do by the end. But, so each dosing was progressively stronger done differently. So it would be there’s something called a a bulis. They inject more of the drug first to kind of push you over a threshold and then they maintain a certain amount.
(01:29) So there was a I didn’t obviously see what they were doing with the pump because as soon as it comes in feel this like cold sensation and within two or 3 seconds it felt like a few heartbeats instantly at the peak. Well one yeah pretty much it was almost like being at the peak of an Iaska experience within a few seconds. It’s so extreme.
(01:48) It’s so such a you know you go from waking consciousness to a really intense psychedelic experience within seconds and usually with a psychedelic unless you’re smoking DMT which is probably the closest analog well I mean it’s almost exactly the same except that the injection is stronger and comes on faster.
(02:05) So I I I was quite experienced um going into it. >> We talk a lot in in the psychedelic um realm about this idea of surrender, but I think surrender is a really abstract concept. The closest that I’ve ever heard someone kind of get to a grounded version of that is that surrender is sort of adjacent to curiosity. I don’t know if you’d agree with that, but in terms of like training to to to be in those states, like what can you do? >> I I agree with whoever said that.
(02:27) Um because I think curiosity is one of the key capacities. Um and not just in psychedelic experiences, but um if anyone’s familiar or if you’ve ever heard of um poly bagel theory. Mhm. >> Um so Steven Porges uh is a medical doctor in the states and he has this theory that um about the vag nerve which kind of runs through the whole um a very important part of the nervous system uh this kind of ex curious exploratory mode.
(02:55) So if you imagine we’re like hunter gatherers we’re like we’re in the environment and we are wondering where the next uh bush full of berries is and we’re curious about what’s over the next hill. And then if [clears throat] a tiger pops up then we go into um I believe it’s I think it’s the vententral veagal then where we’re like oh okay fight and flight completely different mode of thinking.
(03:16) We’re not thinking curiously anymore. We’re thinking survival and how are we going to get out of this? >> And he argues that curiosity I call it curiosity hacking actually because I I teach it as a I use it myself and I teach it as a practice in courses I run where it’s it’s like whatever is going on as long as your life isn’t in actually in danger.
(03:34) switching into curiosity, intentionally cultivating curiosity. So if you’re feeling angry in an argument, becoming curious about the anger, saying, “Okay, interesting. I’m feeling angry right now.” You know, what is that? Like what? Like not >> I should be I should feel angry, I shouldn’t feel angry, just what what’s going on right now? And so in that sense, absolutely.
(03:50) I think it’s probably the most important thing. Um I used to run psychedelic retreats in the Netherlands. That was one of the key capacities, resources we would encourage people to cultivate in the preparation and during of course. So [clears throat] there’s that. There’s also flexibility, which is a little bit like cognitive flexibility is something that likely increases.
(04:10) There’s studies to suggest that it increases with psychedelic use. So that’s just being psychologically flexible. You know, it’s a bit like open-mindedness, but it’s more like being able to move between different positions and consider different possibilities and let something go if it’s not working and move. So it’s like you’re dancing with your experience and you’re not becoming overly attached or rigid.
(04:26) That’s something that psychedelics can really help us cultivate. But I think if we cultivate it, it makes navigating easier. Uh mindfulness is another um essential capacity. The ability to pay attention to your sensations and your thoughts and your feelings without reacting to them or making a story about them. Then just generally um breath, you know, just just simply just being able to regulate and >> notice your breath and come back to the breath.
(04:53) Um so actually a lot of the skills that you that we learn in >> meditative practices are very effective in the psychedelic experience as well. Now on the surrender thing, I also have issues with it in some way. Firstly, much of the time, yes, accepting what’s going on and allowing and being curious about it is the right move.
(05:16) The idea of surrendering all the time is one I disagree with because I think I’m trained as a a counselor in a more trauma-informed and sematic kind of modality. And so in a trauma-informed approach, you have if you imagine like a like a an infinity symbol, right? Like a figure eight on its side on the left side is where you feel resourced.
(05:41) So that example I gave of like, you know, find looking for the berries and we’re feeling curious and what’s over the next hill, >> that means we are feeling like resourced in the sense that we have what it takes to meet the challenges of the environment and we’re okay. Then we’re past in the middle of it. we go past our window of tolerance and then we are in um some kind of fight or flight or trauma response.
(06:01) So when you’re working with trauma, you don’t force you don’t say for example like this phrase that came out of the the research from the the 60s go in and through. Bill Richards has an example that he gave in a talk I saw once that of you know a participant saying in a psychedelic experience I’m feeling really paranoid and he’s like good good go deeper into the paranoia.
(06:23) In a sense that is actually how I often navigate my experiences but I don’t have a lot of childhood trauma. It’s not right for everyone and it’s not right in every situation. There’s also been times where I’m like actually no, what I need to do is open my eyes and take a breather and resource myself so that I can go back in.
(06:40) That’s the So that that figure that infinity symbol the idea is we go from our resourcing as far as we can past our window of tolerance until we notice okay this is too much for me >> because you can you can think of trauma is too much too fast can’t get away. So I go into it, here’s my edge, and then back into where I’m feeling resourced and connected and safe.
(06:58) And then I go back a little bit further each time. So what I always suggest is not just blindly surrendering or going in and in and through, but being conscious of where is my edge, where am I at? Like an inb breath and an outreath rather than >> you can’t just have only an inb breath or only an out breath. Like with surrender, you can’t just continuously exhale.
(07:18) >> Like nothing else in in life works like that. It’s a synergy. It’s about leaning in and doing the work with the experience or with the with the plant or with the fungus. In my experience, I haven’t really seen that. Sometimes that really opens something up and that’s what we need.
(07:34) But a lot of the time if we’re going into an experience to do deep inner work or metaphysical exploration, um we need to be leaning in with our own agency to some degree. >> You have to have that baseline safety anyway. like you have to have some level of safety and some um idea of what it feels like in your body to actually come back to.
(07:55) And it’s hard because like our lives just don’t um facilitate that. We’re around so much technology and um we’re just like constantly stimulated. And so that’s kind of why I asked you that question of like how do you train for this? because so much of um you know it’s it’s it’s it can become very intellectual and very conceptual um when we’re trying to understand like how to how to cope with really challenging experiences but actually like >> I wonder if so much of coping with challenging experiences experiences does actually come down to like
(08:29) lifestyle and creating enough of a baseline of safety that you um can go past your window of tolerance and then bring back some some data from that that expands that window of tolerance. I don’t know what you think about that. >> Yeah, I mean I think yeah, lifestyle for sure and and I guess it’s I guess what I hear you asking as well is about like uh practices in some sense or like what what we might do be doing in our lives to to facilitate that.
(08:58) And I think so I I think having what John Viki calls who’s a cognitive scientist um a an ecology of practices. So no no one practice gives us all the tools and skills we need. Right? So just meditation um for example people who only meditate sometimes they haven’t done a lot of work on their shadows because it’s not a relational practice where you get a reflection from others to see hey you’re being a bit of an [ __ ] in this area and you know in a really good uh you know say mindfulness monastic community that that could well be the case but
(09:33) most of the time it’s it’s very individualized in the west. So, but meditation equally like is is such an incredible practice for you know um being able to know ourselves and to to be present and non-reactive and so so kind of meditation as a practice and then even within meditation there’s contemplation and there’s mindfulness.
(09:56) Um so there’s like um or rather there’s like kind of concentration style meditations. So like a mantra and focus it or like you just just focusing on a candle or a flickering frame. Um and that’s a really useful practice for you know what you were talking about like the the level of distraction that we have in life.
(10:16) Um a concentration practice is really great because it means you know for example you just have a candle in front of you and this is how I learned to meditate when I was like in university. Um and you just focus on the candle and every time you become distracted you just forcibly focus on the candle again.
(10:31) So it’s just really simple practice and it’s just training focus and concentration >> and mindfulness is different. Mindfulness requires the concentration but mindfulness is pay attention non-judgmentally to everything that’s happening and observe. So you’re like laying out the welcome mat as John Kabaden calls it to whatever wants to unfold.
(10:53) That is more like zooming out and going ah like the concentration is like zooming in and then the mindfulness is like zooming out and saying ah what is happening. >> Now you need both of those skills again like the inb breath and the out breath. You need to be able to zoom in and zoom out at different moments >> and uh we need um you know people in our lives who can give us reflection honest reflection and who um help us to grow as we help them to grow.
(11:19) So we need good relationships um all the other aspects you know diet fitness all of the things that just kind of help us be resource as human beings. So yeah those are all key um and I then you know also movement and ecstatic practices to to move with the life force energy uh that will you know come up often in a psychedelic experience.
(11:41) So things like ecstatic dance or um I really like aod dynamic meditation uh or anything that involves screaming and laughing and just being a bit mental [laughter] for a bit you know just kind of that real like getting things out. Mhm. >> Um so, so there’s so many different there’s such an yeah again this phrase like an ecology of practices that’s what I think really is most useful and then exercise like you know um because that teaches you know team sports all these different things teach us everything teach us things and I’m not suggesting
(12:11) that we all because no god knows I’m I’m don’t have the kind of time where I can like do all of these things every week [laughter] like my team sports and this I mean I think you get a lot of that in the sort of like Silicon Valley techy world where everyone’s like optimized and biohacking and getting up at 5 in the morning.
(12:29) I don’t even know how many of them are actually doing that though. I think it’s nonsense. But but >> it’s own kind of sickness. >> It’s exactly it’s compulsive. But I think what it does, what it is useful about it is that it like for example I did um a breath work teacher training a few years ago partly because I love breath work and also because I realized that I wasn’t really like a lot of the practices and things in my life I was doing what was missing was um like energy and life force and just uh expansion and movement. And so I was
(13:01) like, I should do some I should do some ecstatic dance. And I just never I did one and I just didn’t go again. I thought, okay, I need something where I have a regular experience of that life force energy and you know that kind of >> yeah, that that experience of of being human. I need more of that.
(13:20) And then I eventually thought, well, actually like breath work is definitely that. And then I ended up doing a teacher training. So that’s, you know, it’s just about it’s about finding what’s missing um and then kind of filling the gap if possible. What changed for you uh in your concept of intimacy after the extended DMT trial? >> It’s a good question.
(13:37) Part of the journey for me was all around connecting to well connecting to myself, connecting to others. I had one particularly interesting experience which was related to my partner at the time like my relationship with her and my relationship with women and >> my relationship then with myself. And so it was there was a lot there was a big theme in the DM in the extended state trial.
(14:04) Now what’s really interesting and and I think pe many of us have this experience especially with Iawaska or DMT related psychedelics. Sometimes the lessons come years later, you know, sometimes the integration is really quite long and it’s not that you’re integrating the whole time, but you might have an experience and go, “Huh, I don’t know what was the what, you know, I go back and forth around it and then a few a few years later come back to it and go, ah, it was about that.
(14:27) “ Well, I guess what I learned, one of the things I learned or relearned is that to really like have deep intimacy with another, you have to have that deep intimacy with yourself. Um, and to really be able to go into those uncomfortable places ourselves so that when they come up with another, we can we can be present and not be shutting down and and kind of go into it.
(14:50) And I do think my capacity for that has increased quite a bit. Um, but that’s not just from the psychedelic like, you know, it’s they never exist in a vacuum. It’s not just from the DMTX. It’s also because of all the all the other therapy and groups, you know, workshops and and all the stuff I’ve done over the years. is it all sort of like combines together, you know, into one process.
(15:11) And I think that’s >> that’s true of people’s healing journeys sometimes, too. You know, it’s never just the one thing that did it. >> No. No. And and you know, you said before that like there’s all these different tools that you can have in in your arsenal, but really like the most important tool that you can cultivate is discernment about which tool to use.
(15:29) And I think when we’re we’re talking about like what we’ve done in order to change um our reality, it can become this like you can become really militant about people people do become militant around one particular modality often because they’re trying to sell a product and that’s the >> that’s the the landscape that we um that we live in.
(15:50) There’s a book called The End of Trauma by George Bono who is a he’s a trauma expert who’s run sort of a a trauma lab in Colombia um college in America for like 20 years. What he points out in his book is that cognitive flexibility, so that ability to be flexible with your own healing process is the number one indicator of how effectively people heal from traumatic experiences.
(16:16) And the thing is to have that flexibility often you need to have a kind of resourcing in your life and feel like you know you and and have an environment around you that supports it. But what that actually means in practice is that someone goes, “Okay, I tried a yoga class and like, no, it wasn’t really for me, but then they tried this other thing and then they tried IFS and then they tried CBT therapy and then they tried it seems like that attitude as much as anything else.
(16:39) “ And maybe also because with that attitude, you end up coming across a thing you actually need in in that moment or you combine lots of things together, you get something out of all of those different practices. um that is really quite an important well there’s there’s research to suggest that that that capacity of not just being fixed on one practice is is really quite important.
(17:00) Something else I’ve been contemplating lately is that like people don’t really have the or create the time and space to actually think almost like for themselves. Like we outsource so much of our thinking to um technology and you know something that you write about in your book is like the internet is this big thing.
(17:16) We need to talk about the fact that like the internet is this big thing and it’s like really affecting the way we live. You know we we log online to our social media platforms and we’re in search of some kind of answer to something like you know how do I lose weight? How do I grow my hair? how do I have a better relationship? And then we come across people with all of these opinions and we forget that they’re actually just opinions.
(17:38) Like th those those people are um speaking opinions, not nec necessarily laws or truths. Um but we mistake them for being truths and then we get further and further away from what our own truth is. And so if you’re doing like deep healing work and you’re existing in a culture where like everyone’s talking a lot about that, which at least seems to be happening on my Instagram feed, it can be really hard to like know what to what what to do next and whether whether you should stick with a practice or whether you should actually shift. Again, I think it
(18:05) just comes back to being like the number one skill is really discernment. >> It is really kind of like that. It has different rules. Identity is is fluid and you can’t you don’t really know who to trust. So it’s not it’s different to a DMT realm, but it’s got similarities. You know, now we have AI agents floating around.
(18:24) So they’re like the entities we encounter on DMT. We’re like, are they conscious? They seem conscious, but I know they’re not conscious, but do I know that? You know, so it’s just wild crazy world. It’s interesting, you know, people who didn’t grow up at the internet. So people of um, you know, of the the Booer generation, not all of them, but very often don’t have the immune system to know that an email is a scam.
(18:46) for example, or that someone is catfishing them. Whereas someone who has grown up with the internet, you can, you know, you can look >> and you know what to look for. You know, you can be like, “No, that someone from, you know, Brad Pitt’s not Brad Pit atgmail.com, I don’t know, like whatever it is, [laughter] you know, it’s just all of that kind of thing.
(19:04) “ So, and it’s it’s just obvious, but it’s not obvious if if it’s a realm that you’re not familiar with. And the other thing I think um the other thing that came up when you were describing that is the idea that we’re going through um a legitimation crisis which is a term from Habermas Jurgen Habermas who’s a sociologist >> and it’s like it’s so it’s such a fundamental thing that we don’t think of very often which is who has legitimacy in culture who has the legitimacy to prescribe medicine who has the legitimacy to decide what’s morally good
(19:38) or bad. And this is fundamental for any society, right? And now we’re going through this whole crisis where legitimacy is up for grabs, particularly in the space of in sharing information, whereas it used to be, okay, if you if I picked up a newspaper in like 1950, I could be like, okay, now I might disagree with the person, the journalist writing this piece, but they’re legit because they’re in this newspaper.
(20:04) They’re in the times, you know, and you know that that means that they have some kind of legitimacy. But now you can be an influencer with a million followers talking about anything you want and a kind of legitimacy is conferred on you through people simply listening. >> That is not a real well it’s it’s an open debate.
(20:26) Is that real legitimacy? Should it be real legitimacy? You know, is that better or worse than legitimacy being decided by like one old editor? Yeah. Or university or a bunch of like, you know, it’s also legit to say like the power structures that were gatekeeping legitimacy were massively flawed as well. And so we’re in this kind of wild west between time where we don’t know how are we going to define who’s legit and who isn’t.
(20:53) I I I can imagine that after your uh extreme DMT experience and also other psychedelic experiences, you have some theories around what you think the mind is, like this thing that we call the mind and how that is or isn’t informing what we think of as reality. So, I’m just curious to know like where are you at with that now? I know it’s been like many years since you released that book and you’ve kind of like you you’re exploring things outside of the psychedelic space now.
(21:21) Um but yeah, where are you at with like the nature of reality and like what the mind is and and um what the hell this whole thing is? >> What’s going on? [laughter] >> Yeah. Yeah. Good question. I I I change I I move around with this question. It’s like the biggest question. Um okay so nature of mind this is a position I’ve held for a while and then I think the DMT trial brought the question up again and writing the book also brought the question up again because I was wanted to explain to a wider audience the the the broad strokes philosophically of
(21:52) this question and so on the one hand you have people you have idealists philosophical idealists like Bernardo Castrip and uh um George Barkley who went who uh who was um in the university I went to um Trinity College Dublin he went there and so he was and I did philosophy as well and so he was like we did lots of him basically because he was local and you know that’s the idea that what fundamentally what’s real is conscious is mind is what’s real you the kind of experiencing is what’s real and matter like the screwdriver I don’t know
(22:30) I have a screwdriver I did I did this in flat pack that’s why there’s a screwdriver on my desk but [laughter] um >> good for Yeah. No, here we go. It’s so but this is fundamentally not uh of a primary reality. It’s secondary in the sense that I I’m having an experience of it. But what’s real, what’s primary is my experience of the screwdriver and the experience of hardness etc.
(22:51) It doesn’t exist independently of mine. So that is not the dominant view in the west and hasn’t been for the last 400 or so years. The dominant view is that what’s primary is matter and my experience of the screwdriver is secondary and it’s because my brain is made of matter and so this whole experience is just kind of an illusion created by the stuff physical matter.
(23:20) And then there’s pansychism which argues that actually mind and matter are the same substance. And that’s kind of where I sit. I’m a I’m a pansychist. I’m like consciousness and matter are indistinguish indistinguishable. They are kind of mutually arising and you can’t really talk about like for example if I had a uh if my brain just shut off right now I couldn’t be having the conversation with you.
(23:48) So there is a relationship between the matter and the consciousness. But I also don’t think my brain is generating consciousness. I think consciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality and that the brain is uh more a receiver of consciousness and that maybe any sufficiently complex system can order and structure the consciousness that is everpresent in in reality.
(24:15) So that means that um yeah that’s where I sit on it. Um I’ve definitely like the other the position of the only thing that’s real is matter I think is fundamentally uh the the source of the crisis we’re facing as a species like that I think that that misunderstanding of the nature of exper of being a human being is fundamental because what it does is it means that we value the quantity of things what can be measured over the quality of things what to be felt and experienced.
(24:52) And nobody actually lives like that. Like nobody thinks that their child’s life has a quantitative value, >> right? Insurance companies do because that’s right. >> But actual human beings don’t do that. And when when people are on their deathbeds, the most consistent thing that they say according to some um studies on this is, I wish I had lived my life the way I wanted to live it rather than what other people wanted me to do.
(25:21) Or I wish I’d spent more time with my loved ones. I wish I’d spent more time just what they what they what they regret is not having a depth of experience of themselves and of each of other people um because they adhered to somebody else’s ideas. So that also ties into it because actually if we orient towards quality what it’s like to be you then it’s a very different way of valuing uh anything right so that’s the fundamental shift that I think needs to happen um before anything else is going to change significantly >> and so connect that to the DMT or the
(25:57) the the psychedelic experiences like why why is it that that theory feels truest for what it’s like to be Well, I mean, so if you go at it from the other side that everything is just matter, then when you encounter when you have a deep experience on a psychedelic or you encounter an entity, the only thing that the hardcore materialist neuroscientist can say is that’s just your brain on drugs.
(26:24) That’s just a that’s just a kind of illusion of uh you know that the the entities are just your brain trying to make sense of chaos through uh creating kind of familiar kind of structures. >> Um which they’re not familiar at all really [laughter] alien and strange. Um, so there’s that. And so it just doesn’t feel like there’s not a lot you can do with that in terms of exploration or growth because you’re just like, “Oh, it’s just like a video game.
(26:56) None of it’s real.” And I don’t think that that is true. And also what it asks you to do is say that your lived experience is less real than what is being measured. Um, and what’s ironic is that most of what comes out of psychedelic research, unless it’s brain scans, and even those it suggest, you know, recently suggested that those might all be erroneous because that’s not actually the main mechanism.
(27:23) I won’t get into that right now, but is that they, you know, they give you a questionnaire after these experiences, you know, after the the DMT, after we came out of the DMT, about 10 minutes later, we would get an, you know, an iPad with like a scale that said like from 0 to 10, how much did >> it was like that.
(27:43) It’s like, and you’re just like, and you’re just like, oh, from 0 to 10, how much did you feel you were connected to the universe? Literally. and you’re just like and so that is the data they’re using. So they’re using my my experience, my qualitative experience and then they’re quantifying that to then come to truth claims.
(28:01) Now there’s nothing wrong with quantifying qualitative experience but what’s the error in my view is going oh the quantity the numbers and the stats that we can get out of that is more real than the quality of your experience because they came from an experience that I had and they don’t know how to go >> oh well we saw this in the EEG um you know uh scan that must have been that he was experiencing a mantis no that see a chinchilla.
(28:31) >> Yeah. Or in my case, hyperdimensional chinchillaas. They don’t know that. They just see a change of some sort, if they even do. >> I mean, that’s the thing with science though, right? Is like it’s it’s got to just throw [ __ ] at the wall and see what sticks. Like I think it’s hard to do experiments on these things and and maybe we need to have different scientists or more more intra disciplinary collaboration but um yeah like that’s the hard problem really of consciousness right is that you you can pull the brain apart and find the
(29:03) neuronal coralates for the color red but like you don’t actually find the color red and so the experience of color the color red remains this mystical >> thing moving sort of more towards the mind uh as as being the idea of your individual self like this continuation of the individual um version of Alexander.
(29:28) Um do you believe that there is like a conscious mind and then there is also uh the subconscious and there’s this like big realm of things happening beneath it. I guess I just want to ask you if you believe that before I asked the follow-up question because I I recently like had a conversation with someone and they were like, I don’t believe in the subconscious mind.
(29:45) >> So, I don’t know what anyone believes anymore. >> Yeah. Some that is that is a that’s a you know a difference between psychoanalysis and say psychiatry sometimes is that they’re like no there’s not there’s not Yeah, that’s fascinating that they the idea that there’s >> nothing below the hood. >> Nothing below the hood.
(30:02) No, no, I fundamentally think there is I I think Freud and Jung were absolutely correct. uh young in particular. I’m quite youngian. So, um absolutely I think there’s an unconscious and I think um I also think there’s a collective unconscious >> and um yeah 100% 100%. I I think it’s hard to deny but yeah I know some people do.
(30:22) So okay followup question to that then is do you think that it is possible to change the subconscious mind if if we agree that the subconscious mind is is is operating the the operating system that is below our awareness but driving 98% of our behavior like is it possible to go in there and and change it? >> Yes, I do.
(30:45) But what what’s interesting about it is that the the question that came up from your question was how would I know like my experience of changing my unconscious will involve my conscious mind. That doesn’t mean though that I’m not able to change it. Like if you imagine like it’s more like the unconscious of the ocean, right? And so I think there’s it’s a tricky one.
(31:09) I mean, part of me thinks that the the ability for me to change the unconscious is limited in a sense. Let’s take like cognitive behavior therapy for example. Right now, that works very much on the conscious level of the mind of changing behavior. And I found that really effective um for myself uh in in a bunch of different ways.
(31:33) >> And I’ve also done a lot of depth psychology and a lot of obviously psychedelic stuff really and I think you need both. I think you need to go into the depths and then you need to be able to uh change what comes up. Now going into the depths like in a psychedelic experience or through dream analysis or whatever it might be >> I am experiencing the unconscious and then I am kind of coming back into my conscious life with deeper insight into what’s really going on under the hood.
(32:01) And then I’m doing something like CBT to go, okay, this thought pattern that comes from my unconscious that developed when I was a child is no longer helping me get where I want to go. So I’m going to reprogram that thought pattern. Now that means that in my conscious waking life, I’m now I have the agency to not be dictated.
(32:24) The fact my unconscious is not dictating what I do. So actually as I’m talking about it I think the change really happens at the level of the conscious mind and and what what’s important as a as a lot of psychologists would say or psychoanalysts is bringing things into consciousness like we have to make like for example in a particular system a relationship to name the thing that is under the hood and then bring it into the light means that it can be worked with and then once it can be worked with it is going to have a different effect on what’s above the
(32:55) hood. But I don’t know >> how much we can influence what’s going on under it. about hypnosis maybe. Um I don’t know but like in in my psychedelic experiences no I mean sometimes to be fair what I’ve done is I will do some deeper structural work on my unconscious in a psychedelic experience >> and I will and it’s kind of hard to explain but I will it’s like deeper cognitive behavior therapy where you know and that’s part of like what’s happening is that we we’ll have a we’ll reframe an experience we had and you
(33:32) know so yes actually I’m I’m going to contradict myself yet again and say yes I think through through that kind of work we are in a sense doing that although again it’s conscious again >> I mean we have to like this is the problem with these conversations is like um or not this this these conversations but this thinking and I I can’t even remember whether it was like daycart or or which philosopher kind of nailed it but it was about like you know we’re we’re always thinking about thinking with our thinking muscle and it makes it
(34:06) really hard to see anything for what it really is when we’re interpreting it through >> um the thing that we’re we’re interpreting the thing we’re interpreting through the thing we’re interpreting it wi with that make sense there’s there’s way more articulate um >> uh pontification about that out there but it is like it is a hard thing is trying to talk about these these realms >> for example breath work is the only practice I’ve ever done including psychedelics where I will process something and it might involve tears or
(34:39) laughter or you know any other experience but it’s all through the body. It’s all sematic >> and I does there’s no real story or thinking attached to it but afterwards that thing is just resolved that just I no longer have that fear or I no longer have that um frustration or whatever it is. It’s just gone.
(34:57) Um, and so in that sense, >> so but you know what it is like when you so if you if you’re in a breath work session and you’re having a laughing episode, if something’s changed, then you must have some idea of like >> So yes, so you do know what it is sometimes, but sometimes and you might have had this experience as well. I think many of us have something will process in a deep in a deep altered state and I don’t know what it was.
(35:17) I’m just like, whoa, there was an intense like something of emotion came up. There was a processing and now it’s gone. I’m like >> and I don’t know what that was. Um, and I’ve actually had IASKA experiences where I’ve said like because I always had this dialogue with um a psychedelic, whether that’s, you know, me or it or, you know, part of me or synergy, but I’ll say I’ve been like, “What the hell was that?” And, uh, she’d be like, “Don’t worry about it.
(35:41) It’s too complicated. [laughter] You wouldn’t get it.” And I’m like, “Okay, cool.” You know, because so it’s like fine. Okay. But you know did did I you know I I just trust that probably it resolved something that was niggling away there in my unconscious or unresolved. So I do think that the missing piece might be that in different states of consciousness our agency changes and the nature of how we relate to the unconscious changes and but in in normal waking or in the range that we call normal waking consciousness it feels
(36:11) like there’s a bigger barrier between what’s conscious and what’s unconscious in an altered state that that boundary becomes more fluid but I still think then there’s even deeper levels of the unconscious always you know so I think Oh yeah. Yeah. It’s just always deeper levels. >> Well, as you were talking, I was thinking about uh you mentioned a lot like entities.
(36:32) What a big part of your experience on the extended DMT. And um I think it’s is it ter it’s Yeah, it’s Terrence McKenna has the taxonomy for DMT entities. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this, but he has like three options for what these entities can be. Um, one they’re these like semifysical but uh elusive sort of beings, you know, so they exist here but we don’t see them like Bigfoot or the Yeti or the unicorn or whatever.
(36:55) And then two is like the mentalist reductionist version which is that they are projections of our unconscious and that might be when you talk about being in an altered state um >> that might be a place where we can actually like pull out what’s in the unconscious like that and dreams because I guess sleep is an altered state as well.
(37:13) or like his third one is that um they are non-physical but autonomous beings. So those hypersonic chinchillaas, hyperdimensional chinchillaas that you encountered with um might actually be real like they might exist somewhere else and like have their own sovereignty and and through the the drugs like we tap into that. What do you think it is? And like I mean your answer to this question can also be like it’s not important to know which one of those it is.
(37:42) where I’m at with it is that they are in a sense semi-auton or autonomous and that but that they exist in let’s say a a realm of mind that we’re not usually connected to uh or in in some indigenous psychedelic using cultures in South America that the idea of reality is is quite different to ours in terms of it’s it’s based on perspectivism which is like it’s kind of what you named and it’s similar in you know I’m halfIrish and in Celtic uh mythology you get this as well that there are entities all around us all the time. It’s just that we don’t see them
(38:20) because our perspective is tuned into the wrong wavelength, let’s say. But by drinking Iwasa or tobacco or whatever other experience or tuning in in a particular way, >> then we are able to see what was there already. That’s very different to the uh the metaphysics that we get from Christianity originally of like matter like there’s like the soul is like breathed into matter like spiritus like spirit.
(38:46) It’s like you have dead matter and then the soul comes into it from somewhere a realm beyond that we don’t have access to and that’s really fundamental to well actually a lot of world religions that this is a whole other thing um which is in Leviathan actually my documentary um John Reviki talks about this >> the the fundamental shift that happened a few thousand years ago after the bronze age collapsed was that we moved from world views that saw all of reality as one circular hole where kind of bound by faith eight.
(39:18) And um then what happened was a shift into wait a minute, this is not the real world. This world of matter, this fallen world full of sin and violence and death and suffering, it’s not real. There’s a more real world somewhere else. And so in Buddhism, you have that like how do you get to the real world? Okay, you see through the illusion and you you come to a um a space of deeper reality.
(39:40) And in Christianity, it’s Christ proves that it’s not real because he becomes resurrected, right? And it’s like, ah, we can all do that if we align to him. >> You get it in Judaism of like this the this is the we’re going to go to the promised land. It’s like very like bound in history.
(39:56) It’s like kind of direction and linear like this is we’re going to get to the promised land. Um, you get it in Islam. You So, it’s a really it’s a kind of this idea that it’s really fundamental to how we think. Um, now even if we’re not religious, it’s like this, even the idea of self-trcendence, even the idea that we’re going to improve ourselves, all of it.
(40:16) It’s like there is a better, I’m not saying it’s not true either. I’m just saying this is a kind of a fundamental philosophical um idea. So with that, it becomes difficult to go if we’re encountering entities that we don’t normally see, where are they? So we would not naturally with that worldview jump to well they must exist in some other realm >> because >> we already have this idea that there is more there are there’s there’s more real metaphysical realms out there that we don’t know about until we die or until angels come and visit us or whatever it
(40:47) might be. So so we always they always come from the heavenly realm or wherever it might be or or hell right like angels and demons. Mhm. >> So that’s just an assumption, right? Because because the other example, the perspectivist example from, you know, um, South American indigenous cultures or some is no, no, they’re all around us all the time.
(41:06) >> There’s no here and there. There’s just a here and you just can’t see the here because you’re not tuned in properly because you haven’t taken the right drugs or you haven’t done the right rituals, you haven’t done the right practices. >> So which of those? I don’t know. It’s tricky.
(41:21) You know, even we even get that idea with the unconscious that we were just talking about. There’s a here, there’s this present moment, and then there’s something that is driving things from behind the scenes that’s more real, which is the unconscious. >> And that might be true, but it’s still a dualist worldview, right? It’s still dualist.
(41:37) >> And it’s not a given. Like, you know, you mentioned you had someone you were speaking to who was like, “No, I don’t believe that.” And that’s a it’s a legitimate position to hold as well. I don’t personally agree with it, but I think it’s legitimate. So, what are the entities? Um I think they I think they are independent of our perception of them but I think the form they take is not and you know my friend Dave Luke >> uh who is a parasychologist parasychology professor at the University of Greenwich >> he’s done lots of interesting work on
(42:09) this and people should check it out but one of the things he points out is that when people saw UFOs in the 1950s the the spacecraft had nuts and bolts on them like our technology and then as our technology became slicker and different now the UFOs are like chrome and sleek and kind of very different.
(42:30) So that’s really interesting, right? That that we have this and Graeme Hancock wrote a book called Supernatural where he he dives into this as well about like >> the the idea of encountering beings and entities is as old as time and happens all around the world and in many many cultures and in here in Ireland it would have been you know fairy encounters um where you know people would encounter these little people wearing oldtimey clothing.
(42:57) It’s always really interesting. There’s always like they’re always kind of like somewhat familiar but wrong. You know, they’re too small. They’re wearing the wrong clothes and they’re kind of alien and they’re different entities. You know, people really there’s there’s fairy nles in Ireland that um that have been around for thousands of years and people, you know, in in a in a country that is becoming more and more secular and was, you know, very very Catholic for a long time.
(43:26) Still to this day, people will kind of laugh about it. Be like, “Oh, yeah, up there’s there’s a fairy null up there. Yeah, I wouldn’t I wouldn’t go there at dusk.” And they’ll be kind of laughing about it, but they won’t go at dusk. [laughter] It’s like you kind of you don’t mess around with it. And that’s I find that amazing and beautiful.
(43:42) Um that that’s there’s that kind of power to these uh understandings. I want to shift away from the subconscious mind and into the conscious mind and talk to you about ideas and like how you come up with all the ideas that you do and bring back things from your experiences. But before we get there, I just it I would be it would be remiss of me not to just ask a few more questions about fairies cuz I feel like you might be the only person that I interview that >> um are fairies are they um in island like dangerous? >> Yeah, often. Not always. They’re they’re
(44:13) very often tricksters. So, right, >> they’re they’re not necessarily malicious, but they’re not good either, you know. So, yeah. Yeah. >> What will they do to you? >> Let’s say someone’s like walking home and they find a fairy null and they get kind of lured into it and they will have, you know, maybe they’re there for what feels like 10 minutes and they’re like offered some beer or something and they have a dance and then they’re like, I got to go home and then they get home and three days have passed, right? And
(44:41) so it’s like there’s this kind of time warp. The other common phenomena which is the same or very similar in the UFO encounter phenomena is the fairies wanting to interbreed with humans and to create to kind of have human fairy babies which are called changelings. And they’ll be like left at the door >> of um a house and then someone will be looking after this baby.
(45:05) But the baby’s always kind of weird and always a bit sick and kind of it never really quite survives. Well, it’s a really odd phenomena that’s also in the UFO. The a lot of the UFO uh >> phenomena is about, you know, interbreeding or being implanted sort of like um being implanted and invaded with something. And this is I mean, it’s fascinating.
(45:28) Again, Hancock covers this in Supernatural and there’s there’s other stuff out there in it. I I do think he’s right that this is the same phenomena taking a new form. The fairy abduction um phenomena and UFO abduction. It’s you know like for example when I was in Peru in my early 20s I went I went into Pakaya Samria which is like a nature reserve was really interested in all of this uh you know this crossover between fairy lore and UFO and folklore in other countries.
(46:01) And I was asking my guide if he had any stories and he had he like one of the you know one of them he had was about this you know there was a couple older couple who lived quite isolated and it’s always the way it’s always isolated pe isolated darkness so trailer parks without a lot of street lights and people by themselves and at night it’s almost always at night and the husband went out in his boat to sell some wood and then in the middle of the night while he was away he was away for a few weeks and then in the middle of the night there was a knock at the door
(46:27) the woman answered the door and there was uh what do they call them? Lobos. Like this kind of entity that they’re familiar with. It’s like all white completely white kind of humanoid entities. And then there was a few of those and a and what looked like a >> a regular womanish. >> And she was saying to the woman at the house like, “Come with us.
(46:45) We want to we want to take you somewhere. We want to show you something.” And the woman was like, “No, no, no. I’m not going.” And they had like a boat, you know, so sort of the UFO craft. They had a boat, but like you know, that’s an abduction experience. And she said no. And for whatever, you know, they wanted consent.
(46:57) So that was a bit different, but they were a bit nicer. >> Yeah, they’re very woke. [laughter] >> Yeah, that’s right. Woke aliens in the jungle. So, but you know that that phenomena is I I would be very surprised if that woman had ever come across um like a kind of contemporary UFO account, but that you get thousands and thousands of stories like that.
(47:19) So the if you take away the form and and look at just the aspects of the phenomena where like entities from a different reality or from this reality that we don’t normally see want to take us somewhere and often want to interbreed or implant us with something or whatever it might be. God knows what’s going on with that.
(47:36) I find it hard to maintain the the position that that’s all just your mind playing like I don’t know like it just seems it seems a bit absurd to me. Like I’m like there’s a phenomena at play so we should investigate it scientifically >> but it’s not scientific to come at it with the assumption that the only thing that’s real is matter and mind is secondary.
(47:57) Got to leave everything on open and on the table. >> I don’t know. It’s what we were saying before about there being like some kind of colle collect well we didn’t go into it but you mentioned that you do believe that there is a collective unconscious and perhaps that’s where we’re pulling out these um themes or these like motifs or the the the things that that tend to spread across all of those stories of um being abducted.
(48:21) I think it’s interesting too the like the interbreeding thing and I I wondered as you were talking about that whether that’s like some sort of like perverse like sexual thing that’s happening under the hood like people that being like a big driver of well like it’s what ensures the survival of our species but I think that there’s a lot more like sexual stuff going on under the hood than we um than we are obviously consciously aware of.
(48:43) And I wonder if that’s kind of like playing into playing into why people think that they’re being lured off to be bred with because like who knows if these things even breed. Like we don’t even know what they are. Like that’s a very human that’s a very human >> survival thing. Um uh like um thing that’s been superimposed onto something that’s probably more mystical.
(49:06) Um I read your book and I thought it was fascinating and you pulled together so many different ideas. Um, and it seems like now you’ve gone on to make this documentary which is sort of like almost a followup to the thoughts that you were chewing on in the book. Um, and I just wonder about the nature of ideas like how do you come up with your ideas? How do you make them manifest? What’s your research process like? How do you bring stuff back from psychedelic trips? A lot of questions in there, but just like >> whatever feels pertinent to talk about.
(49:37) >> Well, okay. So I I read this amazing book or I guess in my like early 20s called uh strategic intuition. It’s based on neuroscience and military strategy. Interestingly it’s it’s really interesting book. So the idea is that creativity is always a new combination of existing elements in our unconscious. And so what happens is that there’s four stages.
(50:05) Uh the first stage is examples from history that it’s written by a guy called William Dugen. And so first you have you have a library of experience and information and what you need is to make that library as full as possible. So Napoleon for example had read every recorded example of a military battle he could get his hands on when he was in military school.
(50:21) He was just he just had it all in his head. He just fascinated by it. So he read all of that and then the next stage is presence of mind. So you’re not trying to solve the answer. You’re actually paying attention to what’s going on in the world and the environment. So he in his one of his first battles where he was just like a corporal or something he had a Eureka moment.
(50:37) He had this flash of insight because that’s the third uh thing because existing elements combine. So he looked at the he looked at the battlefield and he saw that there was like a cliff and he saw that they were coming in on boats and he was like unconsciously his brain had gone you’ve he had some information that from some previous battle from like you know thousands of years ago that he’d read but in the moment it just hits you like a it just kind of hits you.
(50:58) You just know you’re just like we need to move the cannons up into the top of the >> thing. And his the other officers were like no what do you know? you’re just some young dude and of course like they lost the battle and had they done that they would have won. You could also take Picasso like so Picasso was an impressionist artist and if you look at Picasso’s paintings before he was like Picasso as we know him.
(51:17) They’re just like he’s obviously talented but it’s just kind of like bit mid. It’s just kind of doing what everyone else is doing, you know. And so he was at a a lunch with Matise and Matise’s niece was with them and she was holding an African mask because in colonial France it was the kind of thing that you could you know get cuz they you know had African colonies and Picasso saw the mask which was like very angular and kind of square like and he just was like couldn’t get his eyes off it.
(51:43) He’s like what is that? Where did you get it? I couldn’t really focus during the lunch and just was like I’ve got to go. went back to his studio and then cubism happened which is African mask plus impressionism equals cubism you know well simply of course it develops same with Google it was just um well what if with trying to create a search engine they were like well what if uh we took academic citations so the most cited thing is at the top and the least cited thing uh is at the bottom and combined it with Alta Vista which they were at whatever I think they were
(52:13) at Harvard MIT they just were able to download the entirety of Alta Vista and just apply that algorithm to it and that was Google initially and it was just a way better search but there’s two things that already existed together the examples just go on and on and on of that so and that moment of insight that Eureka moment that’s usually how I experience creativity like for example I was Lord of the Rings remake on Amazon a few years ago and I so I was like why are all the why are all the orcs speaking in a cockney accent from East
(52:42) London and all the elves are really posh and they’re all like uh blonde hair and blue died and then I just then what popped into my head was Nazi elves and cocky orcs and I was like oh yeah I really want to write that piece so often I get the title just the title of a piece uh I wrote a piece called a few years before that called indigenous narcissism that came up when I was at a festival and I was like oh yeah that’s good what is it you know so so sometimes the title [laughter] kind of cascades it’s not always the way
(53:07) but that’s my favorite that’s often what’ll happen but it’s because hidden within the title so that whole piece was about class politics I’m not really a Marxist but I do think class is a fundamental driver of social dynamics and so that’s why you know that was the Lord of the Rings one and so sometime it just things pop into our heads and I think that is the nature of creativity and then the fourth stage in Duggan’s model is is the courage and commitment to carry it through that you go you you have the idea but just having the idea
(53:35) we all have great ideas but then we have to go okay and you need the skills and the and the and the resourcing to go okay I’m going to put that into the world or I’m going to take the risk and say no no this is this is what I think is going on like uh like Picasso going okay this looks mad but I just I’m feeling like this is a thing I write fiction as well but I write creative non-fiction would be I guess the genre so it’s essays looking at cultural and social issues largely but also tech and lots of other areas and consciousness
(54:04) done in a in a format which brings in some of the techniques of you know fiction writing and is the New Yorker kind of pioneered this this kind of style so it’s like a >> it’s a non-fiction essay but it’s got creative elements in it and that then the very practically the after I have the idea then there’s a whole research phase because I need yeah you need to basically yeah you need to back up the thesis and also the more you read the the richer your idea becomes and there’s a there’s a journalist Ezra Klene New
(54:31) York Times and he said something in his podcast one time that I thought was great and really found very true like if you get stuck writing >> it’s almost always because you haven’t done enough research >> and it’s absolutely true because you don’t know what you want to say and That’s the stuckness.
(54:46) It’s not because of some kind of vague idea like there’s a writer’s block or something. It’s because you don’t have enough information in the tank to draw on and you have to do, you know, there’s no short I don’t think there’s really shortcuts to anything in life. And so the short the no shortcut to good writing is good research.
(55:01) You just have to go, okay, did I read enough of that book? Have I spoken to enough people about this? Have I interviewed enough people? Have I really dived into it? And then once you do that, that’s when you get those other little eureka moments where you’re like, oh, that’s how those things connect.
(55:13) That’s the joy of it for me is is the two things that are not connected and connecting them. And usually that’s where my biggest ideas come from is I go, you know, like the trauma piece. I was like for for months and months I was thinking not everyone’s that traumatized. This is [ __ ] I don’t believe this. I think the whole trauma narrative has gotten way out of hand >> and I I don’t know how yet, but I know like I I really have I don’t know.
(55:36) I have a strong feeling that there’s something missing here. And that’s like the journalistic hunch. And that’s why, you know, there’s a level of cynicism in my line of work. What need is this filling? And what in in filling that need? How much is being papered over of the complexity? Like internal family systems, IFS, that’ll be the next one, I think, cuz I’m like, everyone’s so into it.
(55:57) Where’s the gap? Where’s the contradiction? Where’s the uh whatever it might be, you know? So, so there’s just I just have a suspicion when people are really into stuff. >> No, I think it’s amazing. I can totally relate to it. It’s it’s almost like was the thing that was driving that question I asked you about the unc subconscious is cuz that’s such a buzzword.
(56:14) Um particularly when it comes to like any anything that is trying to be sold as a like um rewire your mind or um like a a course online. It’s it people are often talking about the subconscious and it’s just sort of dawned on me that like we don’t even know what that is. We don’t even know if you can access it.
(56:33) And so I like not that I was giving you a taste of your own medicine or anything before, but I just I feel like um I feel resonance with with that need to to you know look into cultural fads um with a skeptical eye and and ask like what’s well who is this benefiting? >> It’s about the you know it’s like you were saying before discernment.
(56:54) I think it’s unfortunately effective to assume that there’s some kind of mismatch or you know maybe even scam going on with that kind of thing because where my mind goes to is the easiest thing to sell that you can continuously say like well you’re doing it wrong is something that can’t be seen and can’t really is intangible like the unconscious you know it’s like >> I’m not saying everyone’s doing that at all you know I’m sure there’s people doing lots of good work but anything that is intangible and can be defined in many different
(57:26) ways and interpreted in many different ways is a really easy thing to sell people on. >> What do you think the future looks like? You know, we’re rapidly adopting AI. The internet isn’t slowing down. Everyone’s a digital entrepreneur with a personal brand. Like, what do you think? Where do you think we’re heading? >> So many of our assumptions and so many of our institutions are in flux.
(57:49) At the same time, I think there are human universals that will always be the case. One of them is that we want to feel what is most real and feel human connection. Now the internet as it is is increasingly becoming a place of unreality where like you said everyone’s um second self like their internet personality is increasingly it’s detached from their real authentic present self in the body.
(58:18) I I was writing a book about um or a book proposal about the way AI is changing spirituality and religion which because it’s moving so fast I turned into the substack series that I’m putting out at the moment in chunks and so I’ve thought a lot about that you know in the terms of how technology is changing our view on reality and always always has in some ways I think that’ll continue to happen I think we’ll see AI religions I think we well we already are but I think we’ll see bigger AI religions um AI is filling like a god-shaped hole in society some
(58:47) of us will go the full transhumanist route of let’s become the machine let’s upload our consciousness into machines and leave the human body and then others there’s a movement towards uh you know touching grass coming back into face to face contact that’s definitely that area that where I lean to and probably most of the people in my life who like you know hugging trees and [laughter] hugging each other there’s a kind of movement towards that and then also there’s a syn there’s a synergy and I’m interested in this I’m doing a few
(59:15) projects at the moment on this of how do we use AI I and for example like wearable tech to bring us back into connection with each other. So I think we can use technology for that and that’s at least on the tech side that’s how I can see things going. I think we’re going to see and are seeing a real rejection of the internet and AI in its current form with all the slop and all of the you know inability to trust what we’re seeing uh and a return to uh trusted sources of information and connection. So that’s each other, you
(59:47) know, people in the flesh, not online, not mediated online. That’s saying we’re kind of reaching a saturation point for for many. >> Where can people find your work if they want to follow you and um keep an eye out for this Substack series? >> Yeah. So probably the best place is Instagram. Um just Alexander_binder.
(1:00:05) So because I put I update uh on there when I have a new piece out on Substack. Um my Substack is the is the place I post most that and that’s um Kinos is my um creative studio and media platform. K I N OS. Uh but just biner.substack.com as well and then um people can can dive into the really weird world of AI religion.
(1:00:30) It’s really it is actually really fascinating what’s going on. Yeah. >> Cool. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate your time. >> Thanks, Paige. It was a lot of fun.
