Exploring Cannabis, Psychedelics, and Spirituality with Pioneer Stephen Gray: A Global Awakening of Consciousness

Sebastien Fouillade: 0:00

Stephen, welcome to Leadershipedelics. It's a pleasure to have you here today.

Stephen Gray: 0:05

Happy to be here with you and discuss this material.

Sebastien Fouillade: 0:08

Yeah, so you're the author of three books, including your latest book Hopps. Psychedelics Can Help Save the World. You've been on this journey I was reading for 50 years of spiritual and sacred medicines, your community organizer, leader in cannabis ceremonies as well. You accomplished a lot and it's an honor to have you here on the show. I love the book. I mean, I haven't read it fully, I started reading it and I just love how it flows, and you've got contribution in there from like 25 amazing voices and I can't wait to dive in Good. So how's your day going so far? I'll keep it. I'll start after all this.

Stephen Gray: 1:05

No problem so far.

Sebastien Fouillade: 1:07

No problem, so far Good.

Stephen Gray: 1:09

No demons have appeared in the corners of my mind.

Sebastien Fouillade: 1:12

That's wonderful. What are some of those daily practices you've done today to keep you aware and awakened? Well?

Stephen Gray: 1:26

nothing formal, actually. I don't know what to say about that exactly. I just have my normal sort of morning routine have a bath, shave, eat breakfast, drink coffee, look at the New York Times online and a couple of other sources just to see what's going on in the so-called world, that kind of thing and played my guitar a little bit for 15 minutes or so this morning.

Sebastien Fouillade: 1:56

It's always good therapy, you do have your practice and the guitar, and you've been working with music for many years, right?

Stephen Gray: 2:12

Yeah, in one way or another I used to teach elementary school music. I was a music specialist and I've had some sort of semi-pro, you know, kind of more toward the amateur side of semi-pro, I suppose you could say groups or one group in particular. Back in the 90s we played a fair number of gigs, but they were all at sort of I don't know the lower end of things. Supposedly, I guess you could say we played a couple of downtown clubs and we played at some smaller festivals and that sort of thing.

Stephen Gray: 2:45

And yeah, and I made three albums of kind of sort of like ambient music. I don't even know what to describe it. It's busier than ambient music, but it's still kind of focused on a meditative angle or whatever.

Stephen Gray: 3:02

And now I just play a little, get together with my buddy, adrian, every week and play some songs. We both play guitar and sing and do some harmonies with each other and some soloing and stuff like that and pick simple songs to work with and we make it into a kind of what I call a ceremony light L-I-T-E idea where we start with a gong and sit for a couple of minutes, have a couple of tokes of cannabis or offer some prayers, actually, or dedications to friends that are going through cancer or whatever, and then we have like literally I have one toke to start off with, adrian often has two and then we sit for another, sit in silence for another five to ten minutes and then we play songs for about an hour and then we repeat that process and do a second half, as it were. So that's about what I'm my involvement with music these days yeah.

Sebastien Fouillade: 4:02

Oh, it's a beautiful involvement. You just reminded me of another book you wrote, the Cannabis and Spiritality book, which I really love seeing that because I just feel like reconnecting with the cannabis is a spiritual ally, is not something that we're exposed to in our society today. Like, when did you kind of going back to your journey? When did you realize or discover cannabis as a spiritual ally? Like, was it always obvious?

Stephen Gray: 4:42

No, I had. I really liked that plant from the moment I first encountered it although, quite honestly, you know we don't need to go in this direction in our conversation but it can be a tricky ally as well. It's often referred to as an enhancer or an amplifier, and I like the term non-specific amplifier, which is a term that's occasionally or often applied to psychedelics in general. So what that means is that there's a chemical explanation for that or biochemical, but what that means in the real world is that it amplifies any experience that you have potentially Right, and that includes your thinking. And so if you're already going in a certain direction, it can amplify that direction, and if that direction is self-sabotaging, for example, like negative voices that you're telling yourself, it can exaggerate or exacerbate those out of all proportion and make them seem really serious and really real and so on.

Stephen Gray: 5:53

And so I actually believe that cannabis triggered a relatively brief period of bipolar what they used to call manic depressive at that time, where I'd swing back and forth between feeling like I was kind of on top of the world, couldn't imagine how I ever felt differently, and then something would happen. It's all completely ego-based, right. It's like somebody says something to you or something doesn't go quite right, and the next thing it's a couple of weeks of being depressed and feeling completely useless and going. I guess I don't know how I ever felt any different or ever will feel any different than that right. So it is a bit of a tricky ally.

Stephen Gray: 6:36

But when I was in university I read a little book I don't remember the name of it now, but it pointed out the kind of the spiritual connection. So I've always kind of had that in the back of my mind. But then, starting I don't know about 15 or 20 years ago, I started thinking of cannabis more and more as this potential spiritual amplifier, you might say. And then it began to dawn on me that just what you said a few moments ago, which is that in general people aren't aware of that side of its work, which takes a particular kind of focus and practice to evoke, I guess you could say. And yet it has thousands of years of that history, in Asia primarily.

Sebastien Fouillade: 7:24

Yeah, no, I appreciated that I could feel the awareness and the nuance when you were talking about working with the music and it's like you know it was very disciplined in your approach and there's a clear intent and prayer, and so I could see some of that work like seeping through. It's like, hey, no, you know, it's like we're working with the plant, but we're also aware of what we're doing and how we are approaching it, which I think it's that's really important and talking about. So when you run, one of the things you do is you run cannabis ceremonies. Uh-huh, Now, how does one of the ceremonies usually take place, Like? Is it similar to other psychedelic ceremonies, or I'm just curious what your process is, or if you can, share some of the highlights there.

Stephen Gray: 8:17

Well, it kind of arose organically over time. Excuse me, I got a cough, sorry, yeah, I well, let's see, not specifically related. I've been around a lot of ceremonies, a lot of different kinds of ceremonies Buddhist meditation, ceremonies of different kinds, native American church, peyote prayer ceremonies, the Santo Daime. I've been at the what do you call them, mestizo shamanism in the Maloka type ceremonies down in South America. I've been around all kinds of environments, of circles and different things like that and I just kind of organically put it together. It actually started when I was putting together and, by the way, I'm not, I don't call myself exactly the author of these books, these last two. I call myself editor and contributor because there are 17 other contributors in the cannabis book in 25, as you mentioned, in the new one, the House Psychedelics can help save the world, so. But I wanted to do it. I wanted to give people in the cannabis book some sense of what they could do if they were going to hold their own ceremonies. So I had some pretty good ideas but I hadn't done it much. I'd done some very small things, kind of almost informally, with one or two or three or four other friends or whatever. So I organized, I thought I need I need to have more hands on experience to be able to give people some good guidance for that, so I got like 10, you know, really interesting, good, solid, mature, psychedelic type people together and and did an all day one where we also had a light edible to kind of keep us in the zone for longer, and and so what we did with that was we combined silent, follow the breath type sitting meditation periods of short five, 10, 15 minutes, and mix that up with things like some guided meditation, like breath, breath, breath, breath guidance and I have a favorite one where you visualize a white light coming in, et cetera and work with that and a couple of other similar practices and also sound practices. I have crystal bowls and a couple of other different instruments and one of those shrewty boxes that do the drone, you know, and so we do some own chanting oftentimes.

Stephen Gray: 10:51

The whole intention and purpose of it, though, is to get you, to get one to focus outside of one's thinking mind, and this is irrelevant to the psychedelics as well, although strong psychedelics really don't leave you a lot of choice. If you get into your head, you're just going to be in major trouble. As Martina Hoffman, one of the contributors to the book said once about ayahuasca is the only way you can meet ayahuasca successfully is by completely surrendering to it. That's when what we used to call back in the day with LSD, which was the primary psychedelic of the late 60s, early 70s and was referred to as acid, more likely than an LSD was a bummer and a bum trip or a bummer. And that would come about because you got stuck in a place that scared you and you got into a narrative about it and then as an amplifier just sort of amplifies that out of all proportion and it makes it seem terrifying or whatever you know.

Stephen Gray: 12:00

So with the cannabis ceremonies the whole focus is about getting out of one's head as much as possible, which is a real challenge for almost everybody. But that's where, in my view and I'm certainly not alone in that view where this particular plant spirit ally does its best work, which is when you get yourself out of the way and just surrender to her, and that requires a certain level of focus or discipline to practice letting go of the thoughts. And it's particularly challenging with cannabis, unlike, say, other psychedelics, I think, in the higher doses, especially of those psychedelics you're not going to be. Most people generally are not going to be like taking notes and writing things down. It's like you know it's got you and it's taking you into a powerful place, right? Cannabis, for you know, except an extreme dosage, dosage situations, overdose or whatever doesn't compel you like that. You can step out of it or never get into it, for that matter, you know. And the tricky part is that it does stimulate creative thinking for so many people and that can seem very compelling.

Stephen Gray: 13:16

But the problem with that is and this is just universal teaching, especially articulated well by Buddhist teachings is that the thinking mind is also the ego's primary strategy for avoiding that surrender, for avoiding opening into the divine truth of how things are, when you're not in your head spinning stories about what's real and what's not real, right? So there's this kind of fine line thing going on. You know where you think you're having these wonderful thoughts, and maybe you are, but at the same time they might also be functioning to create a smoke screen between you and what you might call unconditional reality, or things as they truly are, without your overlay of opinion or whatever that is, or belief, right? So that's why in the ceremonies I really encourage people to when they recognize.

Stephen Gray: 14:13

A thought come up, no matter what it is, whether it's like the most brilliant thought you've ever had or whether it's like, oh, I'm a loser. You know, just for that little chunk of time, rare time when we're together, let it go, let that thought go, and you know it may come back in 10 seconds or a half a minute or 10 minutes, but that's the practice. That's actually basic meditation practice. You know, follow the breath, gently, follow the breath, notice when thoughts come up, don't judge them, release them and come back, because that's where the gap is. That opens us up into potential connection with quote unquote reality, right?

Sebastien Fouillade: 14:52

Yeah, yeah, no, this. This reminds me of the, the TM transcendental meditation training. I don't know if we talked about talked about the type of meditation last time, but I thought maybe we did. I don't know. Is it is your meditation practice, transcendental meditation, or or, yeah, no meditation.

Stephen Gray: 15:13

With all due respect to TM and I did do it back in the 70s I got my mantra word and all that. Yeah, yeah, I consider that no offense to the TM people, but the repetition of a mantra it's a particular type of practice and it's, it's one of the practices that helps focus the mind. Buddhist, buddhist teaching or Buddhist practices also have some chant practices and some visualization practices and things like that. Some of them are quite elaborate actually, but the ultimate practice in in the way it's taught in in Tibetan Buddhism anyway, and I think that's generally what you know, people that really understand awakening would agree with is that it's silent mind, you know, like emptying into room roomy, the great Persian mystic poet he's got all kinds of wonderful lines about that is like silence is the language of God.

Stephen Gray: 16:12

All else is poor translation, he says. And then other things like don't let your something, like don't let your thoughts cover the moon of your heart, let go of thinking or let silence take you to the core of life. Silence meaning allowing that busy mind thing that, as I say, creates this sort of overlapping filters, you know that just create a smoke screen or almost a wall in a way, between us and the divine reality that exists eternally and everywhere, all the time. Right, that's what we're aspiring toward, and so actually I got rambling on that and forgot the question was yeah, no, the question was around meditation and meditation.

Sebastien Fouillade: 17:01

And I like the clarification because I've always felt when I practice I still practice TM, but I practice understanding that it's a tool to almost keep keep part of your brain busy, but you're almost using that part of the brain. Using, I mean you're using that tool, using that part of the brain and while you're using it it's using that part of the brain.

Stephen Gray: 17:28

Exactly, that's what I that's. What I was alluding to is that in a sense and again no disrespect meant, you know to people practicing TM that in a sense it's kind of like training wheels Because, as you say, you're replacing one thing with another with another thing. But ultimately then you know, even in the way the Tibetan Buddhist Vajrayana practice was laid out by my teacher, chukyam Trungpa, was that you start with what they call shamatha practice. Shamatha is a Sanskrit word that means dwelling in peace, and that's the practice. You sit straight so that your energies move easily. You don't make a big deal about that. You don't have to be in full lotus or anything like that. It's not meant to be like this sort of sacred, holy practice or anything. It's just simply a way to discipline the mind, to have enough presence of mind so that when you see the thoughts come up, as they inevitably will, you just look at them in a sense and then let them go. So and use the breath as the medium of returning to present and the breath. There's nothing better than breath, obviously, because it's going on all the time, 24 hours a day, part of the autonomic nervous system. You don't have to breathe, breathe, breath, breath, breathes you, right, so it's not something that you have to put your mind on, of course, right, so it's. It brings us back into into the quote reality of being present in the space we're in. So thoughts come up and you just let it go immediately, right, you know, in our particular practice I mean, I could make a big long story about it, but the sort of simplest way to say it is that particular that teacher chug him turn.

Stephen Gray: 19:15

But when he came to America, you saw how busy people's minds were, and so the first thing he did with his students this is a story I heard was he just had them sit with them, I don't know for how long, an hour or two, three a day, I don't know. And then he said and these were the just as few people had gathered around him in the very, very early days of his arrival in in the United States. And he said so how was that? And they said, oh, yeah, well, our minds were all over the place, you know. And they said, okay, then let's, let's add this Pay gentle attention to your breath, don't hyper focus on it, you know. Just make it like a third of, or a quarter of your attention. The rest, eyes open, just being in the room, because we're, again not trying to create some holy practice here. We're just trying to create a practice that allows us to connect more with our real selves, in a sense, by seeing that thoughts are just stuff that arises, they're just temporary, they're just little vapor things, their little clouds that come up, you know. So then he did that for a while and he said and then he said, okay, so how was that? And he said, oh well, that was better, but our minds were still kind of busy. So he said okay, let's add one more little thing here.

Stephen Gray: 20:25

You don't know, you often aren't aware when, the, when you start thinking, you know it's like you suddenly, it's like falling asleep. You know you can't tell when you fall asleep, right, you know, I've tried, I try, and then I go. How will I know when I'm actually falling asleep? And the next thing you know it's three hours later and you're waking up, right. So it's like that, when, oftentimes, when you, when, when you fall into, you know going off into your head, when you're not really there, in a sense, right, you typically don't notice the beginning of that, but at a certain point you notice that you have been thinking, and it doesn't matter whether it's 10 seconds or 10 minutes. At that point he said just mentally, label it, thinking so it's really clear that you've been in your head, not in, not present in the room in that sense, and then just let it go and come back.

Stephen Gray: 21:14

So, and and the way Tibetan Buddhism teaches that that kind of a practice is, at the beginning, practice Before you.

Stephen Gray: 21:23

Maybe, if you're in, you know, following the Vajrayana three vehicle or three Yana path. You get into some more elaborate practices later. But the ultimate practice which I never went that far but so I didn't actually do it, but it's called Mahamudra practice, mahamudra meaning great, and I think that it's almost the same as the original Shama to practice. So it's like you're coming back full circle to just being present, right Is the sort of the final practice where you let everything go, all the practices, all the concepts, everything and just practice being present. So that's what I'm trying to focus on because cannabis, so where cannabis is so helpful? I think potentially although again it's challenging because of the of the tendency to get the mind going to for a lot of us If you can channel that energy, that increased energy that you're gifted with for that little chunk of time there, then that amplification process allows you, or capability allows you, to go deeper than you might with just your quote. Unquote, sober sitting meditation right.

Sebastien Fouillade: 22:34

Yeah, I can definitely relate to that experience as well. I've never tried cannabis until it became legal in Washington and I was meditating already and I was like cool, let's try these together. And I mean it just helped me go much deeper and the mantra was gone very quickly. I mean it just like I love your analogy of the dream and falling asleep actually not an underdream, but falling asleep. It's like do you know when, when that happens, and that's basically what, what happened, and it wasn't much. It doesn't need to be much necessarily. That's a good point, yeah, yeah.

Stephen Gray: 23:17

A couple of summers ago I did a three day solo meditation retreat.

Stephen Gray: 23:23

I've been to friends cabin, so just starting at nine in the morning or whatever, not brutalizing myself, you know, not whipping myself or lying on a bed of nails, you know, just getting up and having breakfast and then sitting, you know like not starting at four in the morning or something you know Anyway, and then doing, you know doing out all day into the evening till about nine at night, with a lunch and dinner break and maybe a walk to get some exercise for a little while.

Stephen Gray: 23:53

I did that for three days and on the end of the third day, round about dinner time, going into my evening meditation, I had a couple of puffs, not super strong, and I sat and I thought, oh, this is actually the same, it's just slightly enhanced, it's exactly the same, that's so. So one of the terms I like to use for cannabis is I like to call it a reality medicine. You know, when it's done that way, it just it's not like it takes you off into some other arbitrary, you know, altered place. If you pay attention, if you can relax and calm your mind to, you know, a significant degree, hopefully it takes you more deeply into this moment, you know, so that if you're sitting outside and you know you hear the birds or you're looking at the flowers or whatever, then you appreciate those things potentially more deeply than you do normally when you're sort of kind of casual about them, oftentimes, right.

Sebastien Fouillade: 24:56

Yeah, no, that's beautiful. Now it's just switched now to psychedelics. Yeah, yeah, and because that's that's the latest book you coauthored and in the introduction I was reading your, you felt a pool. You felt a pool to write a book. Can you talk about? You know that pool that you felt and what brought that pool upon you?

Stephen Gray: 25:22

Yeah, sure, well, you know that one can go way back to when I was a young man as well. I, you know I could again make a long story about this, but trying to keep it brief for the purposes of our conversation here, I was aware of the spiritual potential of psychedelics, you know, when I was 20 or whatever, most people weren't doing them that way, although they would tend to give you those kind of experiences anyway, oftentimes, even if you didn't pay attention to what's now considered to be du regur, set and setting. Attention to set and setting I assume most of your listeners will have heard that term or viewers by now, but just in case the short version is set is everything you bring to it, your intention in meeting that medicine, and the setting is the way, the situation you actually do it in. So nobody was thinking, nobody knew the term, particularly although Timothy Leary and his friends had already come up with that term by then. But most people weren't paying attention to that particularly and doing it in any kind of circumstance. But it was known that you could have these experiences with LSD as again, particularly in those days, you know what you might call spiritual experiences. And then I read a really interesting little book that I still have in my shelf behind me here called Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment, and he worked with LSD a lot and pointed out how you could open up into you know that again, unconditional reality, if you want to call it that. So I did have a couple of experiences back then when I worked with LSD that way, but really it was much later when I started to get interested in well, actually it was Terence McKenna that twigged me. So you know, I tried to avoid making this too long of a story, but I'll, okay good.

Stephen Gray: 27:20

So at that time we're talking late 60s, early 1970s there was a maybe you'd call it a meme going around in the sort of alternative communities, the psychedelic communities in particular, then. Not that they were actually communities, but people were using them, was that? So maybe you've had this experience of holiness or the divine, or the ultimate reality or whatever you know, for a couple of hours or whatever, on acid or some other similar substance. But what are you going to do with that? Like, the mere fact that you've had that experience doesn't necessarily change your life, right? You know, it's an insight, it's a moment, so to speak, and you have to figure out how to live that, and so how are you going to do that? And if you're serious about it, what are you going to do?

Stephen Gray: 28:10

So for many people it was some sort of a meditation practice, and that's what it was for me. And so that was part of what got me interested in Tibetan Buddhism, like how do you actually ground these experiences into your daily life that way? So, and once I got involved with the Tibetan Buddhist community and so on, they weren't encouraging the use of psychedelics at all, because they seemed to be part of that scattered mentality that a lot of people were prone to in those days, and so for 10 years I didn't do anything. But then I found out. Then I came upon the work of Terence McKenna, and McKenna put the two back together the two meaning spiritual practice and psychedelic use and pointed and he pointed out, that you know communities all over the world tribal communities etc. Had been using these substances for spiritual and healing use for thousands of years oftentimes. And that got me back on that path, and then it just kind of went from there.

Stephen Gray: 29:11

I did a couple of ayahuasca sessions in the 90s, got in around about 20 years ago, got connected to the Native American Church, with the peyote prayer ceremonies and those people can create an amazing container for that kind of work and, more recently, the ayahuasca santodime ayahuasca using Santodime Church, which also has a very strong, safe container for doing that work, and so I just got more and more involved in them as time went along, and then I got asked to help organize this conference in 2011 that I'm still doing now, like 13 years later, called the Spirit Plant Medicine Conference here in Vancouver, and so and through that, I just got connected to a lot of really interesting people, some leaders in the field you know Dennis McKenna, wade Davis, chris Beige all these different people. So many of the people that have spoken at the conference are also in the book. I think 14 of the people that are in the book have, at one time or another, spoken at that conference. So I just got more deeply involved in psychedelics, and one simple way to answer your question is that I might even have put yes, I think I did put this in the intro to the book that you know we and this is actually central to the purpose of the book is, or the mission of the book, you might say, is that we are in a difficult situation on the planet.

Stephen Gray: 30:42

That might be an understatement.

Stephen Gray: 30:45

We're arguably at a crisis moment, a nexus point actually Several of the contributors, particularly Chris Beige, allude to that in the book, but it's something that's being talked about a lot in spiritual work and environmental work and psychedelic work and so on is that and certainly indigenous people have been telling us, telling this to us for 500 years or more is that this is the crunch time. We've, you know, abused the planet so badly and overrun it with, you know, more than 8 billion people on it. Our future depends on a consciousness change. Our future depends on enough human beings recognizing our actual relationship to the planet and to spirit, recognizing that we are, as the one contributor to the book, taysa Nyonka-Porta, calls it, a custodial species. We are responsible for the welfare and the care of this planet and people all over the world historically have understood that in tribal communities, that they are embedded in the world and responsible for maintaining and caring for the world around them.

Stephen Gray: 32:03

But we, for a whole bunch of reasons that we don't want to get into, I don't think in this conversation, in these quote, unquote, dominant big civilization cultures etc. Etc. Have lost that connection. That's a whole story that I've. I'm very interested in some of the origins of how that probably developed. But you know that could be a long discussion.

Sebastien Fouillade: 32:27

Yeah, I am too, but you're right.

Stephen Gray: 32:30

Yeah, well, let me put it this way really briefly, then. There's a lot of people talking about this from different angles. One this is you might call this a fable or an origin myth. Almost Up until around the time of Christ there were pagan cultures all over Europe, the Middle East and many other places that were essentially free of the kind of repressive dogma that the Christian Church brought in.

Stephen Gray: 32:56

People like the science fiction novelist Philip K Dick called it the Black Emperor or the Demi-erge, the, the false, jealous God that wants. It's the control, it's the control element or mentality in human beings that thinks by controlling the outer world one can control oneself. And it's not true, it's a grand illusion. But when people gain power they attempt to do that. So they become extremely heavy-handed and authoritarian and dogmatic about that. So this idea is that perhaps for the last 2000 years or so we've been kind of frozen in under the thumb of the patriarchy, of the authoritarian mentality, the control mentality. But that has come to a head now.

Stephen Gray: 33:48

So where psychedelics come into that is that if they're done right for most people that use them, they reconnect you to that lost connection of our embeddedness and everything, to spirit, to planet, to earth, to other beings we start to.

Stephen Gray: 34:09

It's often said that psychedelic users tend to become more concerned about the environment, for example, than they were before that.

Stephen Gray: 34:17

So one way that I think of it is that when we've come to let's if you take the metaphor of an illness, let's say a cancer when the patient is in a more advanced or serious or grave state of illness, strong medicines are required.

Stephen Gray: 34:36

So psychedelics are the strongest medicines we have, the strongest modalities, you might say, not in a sense, putting down any other way of just simply meditating or whatever, but because of this amplification capability, it's like they allow us potentially to go into the deeper places that are already there. We just have shut them down before right. So they're really important right now and also, for that reason, really important to be stewarded and educated about carefully and responsibly and humbly, without greed in a sense. You know you have to be careful that corporate interests don't take over this work too much or medical bureaucracies don't completely take over this work, etc. Etc. So, yeah, that's kind of the answer as to why I got into it and why I consider these substances so important is that they just simply are amplifiers and they're these amazingly powerful tools if you know how to channel it, if you know how to use them and work with them.

Sebastien Fouillade: 35:47

Yeah, no, true. Was there a specific moment that you can like go back to where you're? Like I gotta bring those people together. I gotta share that message. Like, was there like a moment, like crystalized in your mind of like that you received a calling or you talk about Chris Bash, bash, bash. Yeah, bash in there was supporting you and your journey?

Stephen Gray: 36:16

Yeah, Well, chris is. If any of the other contributors to the book are going to watch this, happen to watch this, then you know, not no offense to any of them, but Chris is key for me in that sense. So there wasn't a moment that I made the definite decision to do it and sort of you know boiling up in my mind for at least a couple of years to participate in that vision. I guess you could say, share something about that. And Chris has spoken at our conference three times now. So I first, he first came in 2018, and I also interviewed him for my YouTube channel and you know I had a fair amount of communication with him and he has this remarkable book called LSD in the Mind of the Universe and I, for one thing, I just love the guy. He's a wonderful human being, so kind, very. He walks the talk. You know, it's not just. You know a bunch of ideas, and so I have an immense respect for Chris. He's a really intelligent guy as well. So he was a really good writer, a really clear writer. He does not flowery, but he's really clear and his visions are real. I mean, his understanding is real, in my opinion. So, for your viewers' benefit, basically, I'll give you this sort of a hopefully under-50 word version of that. He was a. He's now retired. He was a professor of religion and philosophy, I believe, at Ohio State University in Youngstown, ohio. That was his career.

Stephen Gray: 38:09

Early in his career he decided to undertake the Stanislav Graf protocol of working with LSD, which is a safe place, safe container with a sitter, high dose eye shades to keep out external light and a carefully curated playlist of appropriate music, and then do that, like on a Saturday, and then, on a Sunday, spend the whole day transcribing it carefully, even putting the headphones back on again. So go, oh yeah, that song triggers that memory of that particular vision, et cetera. He did that 73 times over 20 years and with 500 to 600 micrograms of acid, which is LSD, which is very high dose for most people. Basically, what he describes is that in each one of those 73 encounters, the first couple of hours were often very difficult, I think he said even extremely painful sometimes, because he had to let go of everything he associated with the identification of Chris Beish, the Chris Beish ego. Who am I, what am I, what do I know? All that stuff he had to just dissolve out of that ego death they call it right. But then it went even deeper than that. He had to kind of in a sense die to his identity, even as a human, like the species ego, but for whatever reason he was able to hang in there for that without freaking out calling 911 or whatever. After two hours he broke out into what I sometimes refer to I think he refers to it once or twice as the vast intelligences of the universe.

Stephen Gray: 39:52

Over that 20-year period they increasingly strengthened the downloads that he got as he learned to become comfortable in that zone. Because it was very high energy, like literally. He said one time he took him a year to recover after one of the sessions because literally it's like lightning going through you. I guess it's physically incredibly demanding. He said I wouldn't recommend anyone doing this. He said I don't even think I'd do this again if I had the choice to do lesser dosages.

Stephen Gray: 40:27

But I think it was completely worth it, because what he started to download was especially in the later third of those 20 years was that we are going into a death and rebirth cycle on this planet, that hundreds of thousands of years of development and karma, et cetera, et cetera, and accumulated knowledge and wisdom are all coming to a head right now and that we are on the cusp of a vast, radical change on this planet. It's likely to be very difficult for a time. It's often compared to a birth, where there's immense amount of pain for the mother and then there's blood and screaming and everything, and if you popped in from another planet where they didn't do that and looked at this, you go holy. That's a terrible thing, but then outcomes new life, right. So that's what the kind of vision that Chris and actually many other people, including the indigenous people that I mentioned earlier, have had, a similar kind of a vision that this is the crunch time we're going to go through what would probably be very difficult time in terms of letting of the death, so to speak, of these ways that we've been living and working on this planet that are dysfunctional and non-sustainable. So letting go and the dying and falling away of all that could be very difficult on the material level. The climate itself is making life difficult, obviously, and we'll probably get increasingly extreme, but what it's pushing us to do is to wake up to who we really are and then start acting like that custodial species that we are supposed to be. So the reason for the book and the reason for these medicines is that they potentially well the medicines I mean.

Stephen Gray: 42:26

But the mission of the book is because I think what's likely to happen in this next several decades is that people are going to become increasingly unanchored to things that give them stability and status quo, comfort and that sort of thing, and we're already seeing that this is a chaotic culture we live in, with no overarching vision for who we are. This is an odd one. Christian religion used to be the dominant force in a sense, and although, in general, most people practicing that religion didn't really know their true selves, it was a set of beliefs up here still provided a degree of moral value. Right, and if you look back at the 1950s sitcoms, for example, they were extremely narrow and they were the middle class materialistic life, but they were morally focused. The good father would have some message for his wayward children like oh son, this is the lesson here.

Stephen Gray: 43:46

So we've become increasingly unanchored, and so there is studies are showing there's a great increase in depression and anxieties among younger people, and so on and so on.

Stephen Gray: 43:58

So people need a message that's believable, that's understandable and that shows that we're not just going to hell as a species, that we're actually going into a transformation time, and so the more people can get that message and then make it real in their practice hence psychedelics again the more the species has a chance of creating what one of the other contributors in the book, dwayne Elgin, calls, excuse me, a mature planetary civilization. Dwayne's chapter is really interesting because he doesn't even mention psychedelics. He lays out what he thinks could happen in the next 60 to 70 years, where the increasing difficulty over the next several decades leads to increasing creativity, innovation, determination, eviction, the rise of our best qualities to deal with extreme difficulties, survival will kick in more and more and so the best of us will come out more and more ideally. And that, if things go well, if enough people get the message and act on it and work for it, then we may be able to start. We may see the evolution or development of a mature planetary civilization in 50 or 60 years from now, but who knows?

Sebastien Fouillade: 45:27

You touched. I mean that's what I love of this book. I mean there's so much in it and I've just scratched the surface and it's just really well written everything, all parts of it, and like everything I was reading, I was like, oh, this is great, but it's also a fine line and you touched on that when putting a book like that together, because you don't want to come across as like, hey, it's Doomsday, we're all going to hell, and at the same time, you want to talk about what we can do, moving forward. And at the same time and you touched on that, I think, even though the book is called you know how Psychedelics Can Help Save the World. You mentioned in the introduction they're just one of the actors, they're not the. It's not just about psychedelics, and so I'm really curious how you approached that balance as you were editing the book and maybe some of the choices you had to make as you were putting this together. I mean that must you know. There's an art to that and I'm curious how you went about it.

Stephen Gray: 46:41

Okay, sure, thanks for the question. Well, first of all, as I mentioned earlier, a lot of the people who are in the book are people I already knew from the conference over the years and I thought those you know. So I knew what they had to say in general about these medicines. So that was the starting point for a lot of them and secondly, then I put it out to them when I communicated with them via email or whatever. This is the mission of the book. The mission of the book is to address our crisis and how psychedelics can be of use in that. And, by the way, just for a point of clarification, I include cannabis in that pantheon of psychedelic medicines. Sticklers, chemists or whatever would say whoa, no, no, no, no. Psychedelics are substances which act on the 5-HT2A receptor system or whatever. I'm not a chemist, whatever I don't. I only know that much. And cannabis does not, and in fact, not all of the Kidamin as well.

Sebastien Fouillade: 47:48

Yeah, some others, you include Kidamin.

Stephen Gray: 47:50

I'm not sure if peyote even does, because it's not a tryptamine hallucinogen, I don't actually know that. But in any case, functionally speaking, in real world terms, I consider cannabis a psychedelic. Psychedelic from the Greek means soul or mind manifesting. The other term that's sometimes used is entheogens and meaning in theo, meaning God, gen, meaning generate, so generating or connecting to the divine within ourselves. Cannabis can do that. So I don't want to go on about that right now, but there are two chapters in the book by people who work with cannabis that way. And so, as far as what you call the fine art of putting it all together is, as I say, it was really a lot of people that I already knew and then putting out that kind of overarching mission to them so that they understood that they were in their chapter, that they would write. They would either indirectly or directly, but often indirectly, put it in the context of that larger picture. So Bill Bernard, for example, a wonderful guy, wonderful writer, he's a professor in, I think, austin, texas, and he's also the head of a Saddodime church there, the ayahuasca people, and he uses this word in his chapter. Actually, the chapter, I think, is called Becoming Divine, so he's taking the more directly spiritual angle on it and he uses the word divinization. That that is the goal of work with psychedelics is to become divine in that sense, to connect with our true selves. And they say at the almost other end of that continuum you have Dwayne Elgin with his chapter where he doesn't even mention psychedelics. Just that, here's what's probably going on. And then Chris Beige, of course, who has the big vision of the death and rebirth cycle and explains that so eloquently and articulately.

Stephen Gray: 50:09

Zoe, helene I know I've known Zoe it's actually pronounced Helena, I believe I've known her for years. She's helped me find great women to speak at the conference and she, her thing is psychedelic feminism. In fact I think she says she coined the term psychedelic feminism. So she, you know, her chapter addresses psychedelics but also and you know how they work in certain ways but also the need for gender balance. You know that the work isn't going to proceed very well without that full recognition of gender respect and balance, parody, etc. Etc. Because in a sense that's one of the things that psychedelics do is they. You know, the macho guys may not like to hear this, but in a sense they feminize you. You know, because you know if our culture is overmasculinized, for both men and women, I would say, in the sense that we don't necessarily trust our feeling senses, our intuition, as much as they are there to be accessed, you know, opening up to how we feel our way into the world rather than think our way into the world, and that's a disease, you might say, that affects pretty much everybody. So psychedelics potentially open up the receptive in us to experience things, you know, at a deeper level, felt experience at a deeper level. So I mean I could go on, but there, you know, everybody comes at it from a slightly different angle.

Stephen Gray: 51:52

Throughout the book, ray Davis, the wonderful, legendary anthropologist, holder of the prestigious Order of Canada, written many books like two dozen or more books on cultural and biodiversity on this planet and worked with psychedelics a lot. When he was younger he was actually one of the kind of pioneers. He was an early. It was before the hippies kind of really got rolling, I guess. Well, maybe not before, but before he probably did. I was decades before most people did and he did it in South America as an anthropologist. Anyway, he writes about the history of some of these pioneers Richard Shultes and so on and then puts it in the context, because he weighed, has had, probably still does, but has spent, you know, much time with indigenous people in South America and knows a lot about how they, their worldview and so on and how psychedelics were part of their culture, what we call psychedelics. So he writes somewhat about that as well. So yeah, just many, many different angles, even at the very, very end.

Stephen Gray: 53:06

I wanted to put something about maintaining your sense of humor, because if you take any, take all this stuff too seriously, and especially oneself, then you're just missing the point on some level. You know, I think I just recently say something like I can't listen to anyone who doesn't have a sense of humor. So Adam Strauss, who's a wonderful psychedelic comedian, has this fantastic one man show that he's been doing for about 10 years called the Mushroom Cure, about how psilocybin mushrooms helped him manage and I don't know if cure he used to work here anyway in his title there but his extreme OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder. Yeah, so he's in at the end and actually the very final chapter. Even after that I think it's yeah, it's very the last one.

Stephen Gray: 54:00

Bruce Daimer, who's an amazing, brilliant guy, has done software programs for NASA, for example. You know just, he's just like a brainiac guy but also incredibly sensitive, like tuned in to, you know, energies. In that way he's very open about this. I'm not giving away any state secrets here. He was definitely borderline autistic or somewhere on the autistic spectrum growing up, but really tuned in to energies. You know that most people weren't picking up on at all. Anyway, he has a chapter in the book as well and then I knew this little anecdote from him and I asked him if he would write another little short chapter for the very end and it's a story about he knew Terrence McKenna personally and also I think he's holding Terrence's archives, so he's very connected to Terrence.

Stephen Gray: 55:00

And when Terrence died of a massive, terrible frontal lobe brain cancer of some kind or another, inoperable et cetera, et cetera, when he was about 52, I think something like that, and he was right near the end, when he was almost gone and he was not lucid a lot of the time, you know, drugged et cetera, he something like this, he sat up Bruce wasn't there but he got this from. He knew the people who were there in the room with Terrence who, if anyone knows his work had been sort of the great psychedelic philosopher, you know, and a lot of speculative philosophy, a lot of really wild and interesting ideas of where we came from and where we're going as a species, et cetera. The end of time, the meeting with God, all these really fascinating ideas, much of it in a sense speculative. So he sits up you know, this is I don't know how long very near the end of his life, like, I think very near, and he says sort of wide eyed, and he says psychedelics, they're not about all those ideas, they're not about that stuff at all, they're about love. And that's basically how the book ends, except for a little in conclusion chapter from me. Yeah, so that's the other aspect of it.

Stephen Gray: 56:27

In fact, julie Holland wrote the intro for the book Pardon me, not the intro, the forward, and that's what she, that's her focus in the forward. Is that what you know? In fact, she quotes an old pop song called what the World Needs Now is Love, sweet Love, right, you know, and that's central, because that's, you know, the sort of power of love is what's often, well, almost always, to some degree or another, buried in us. You know, the sort of universal compassion you might say, which ties in with one sense of appreciation deepening with the psychedelics as well, is central to the change that it seems we need to go through on the planet now.

Sebastien Fouillade: 57:17

Yeah, I love what you're. I love what you're touching on, everything you're touching on. The light-heartedness also that you touched on is really important. It's something I know we have a mutual acquaintance. I attended his ceremonies as a Native American chief and he would always finish the ceremony in the morning with jokes but jokes where you learn like teaching jokes.

Stephen Gray: 57:48

Yeah, that's good.

Sebastien Fouillade: 57:49

And I was like you know, like after you've done ayahuasca and gone through the surrender and gone through you know all the different phases that you know many people go through when they work with those medicine. Bringing it back to that light-heartedness is important. It's important because you know, with a light heart and the journey we have ahead of us, I think those two go together like we have a lot of work to do.

Stephen Gray: 58:18

Yeah, absolutely, it's central. Well, in fact, light-heartedness is a nice way to put it. I like the word joy, just that simple little three-letter word. Joy, I think, when I say think I don't live in a state of, you know, bliss and joy all the time, but I, you know, I dip in and out of that kind of state. Sometimes I like to think that I'm in a state of quiet joy, as I call it. But I know enough about it from my experiences, and as do many people, if not almost everybody, has had some experience of joy.

Stephen Gray: 59:00

Well, I think what the teachers are saying, the great teachings are saying, is that is our natural state is to be in a state of joy. But it's not. You know, some, like skeptical people or cynical people even, would maybe say oh yeah, well, that's very nice and sweet. You know, do you want to walk around in a state of joy? But it's like seeing the world through rose-colored glasses. It's a grand illusion in this tragic world. No, that's not it. Joy is, I think, you know and again, speaking from a partial understanding, quite honestly, as I understand it, joy is our natural state when we have freed ourselves from all the burdens that we lay on ourselves. So lightheartedness in a sense is a good word for that too, because it's a lightening of our burden, right, but it's not. It's not, you know, self-absorbed, or you know kind of like, oh, I don't care about the world because I am happy. You know, it's the opposite.

Stephen Gray: 1:00:04

My old Buddhist teacher was really good on that.

Stephen Gray: 1:00:06

He talked about, you know, allowing yourself to be touched by the world, and he said that that joy in an awakened person is mixed with sadness.

Stephen Gray: 1:00:15

And if I understood it correctly, what he meant is it's not sadness for yourself, it's not like, oh, poor me. You know, it's sadness for the tragedy that the gift of life, the gift of that joy, the gift of that ability to be at peace and thoroughly embrace this life, you know, in a connected, joyful, compassionate, creative way, is beyond the reach of almost everybody to one degree or another. And in a sense that's the tragedy of this life. Is that the ego mind that has made up its own. This is why I mentioned this demiurge way back near the beginning of our conversation, that the false God that thinks it knows and tries to control. We're all trying to control our lives to one degree or another, but by letting go of that control we discover the true gift of life. I believe, and that's, I think, what makes an awakened person experience this mix of joy and sadness just as well, for caring for the world in that sense. Right, I love your world, you know.

Sebastien Fouillade: 1:01:26

And there's plenty of opportunities for that joy and sadness right now. And yeah, you just took me out to why I'm not necessarily watching the news anymore because you know, I just feel like I mean there's a lot of manipulation in how the news is delivered to and but the sadness, I mean people are like well, you're sticking your head in the sand. I'm like I'm not, it's just, it's like I know what's going on. I'm very well aware it hurts. There's a lot of work to do. It hurts. I don't need to be necessarily reminded every day with manipulated propaganda. But yeah, no, I really like how you brought that mix. Or your teacher, your teachings, his teachings brought that mix together of joy and sadness.

Sebastien Fouillade: 1:02:23

So there's, yeah, there's a light heart. At times that's needed, but there's, you know, that awareness that we're, we are connected and we're not achieving a full potential. And that's even sounds wrong when I say that, because when you know what I'm saying, our full potential, it means you know, like there's biohacking and trying to reach higher and higher and but like as humans, like we had, we're amazing species and you talk about that in the book, the term not you, but somebody else custodial yeah, that was Jason Young-Coportas species, can you? You touched on that already. Can you expand a little bit? Is it? Who are you the custodian of? Who?

Stephen Gray: 1:03:10

yourself, our buddies and the well, that's the starting point and let me, don't let me forget you know if I lose my train of thought on your question there, but I want to take a slight you know angle on that. In terms of what we were just talking about, the joy and the sadness, I think what we're going to see going forward is that there will be increasing seductions to feel fear and anxiety and confusion, and so what Buddhists sometimes call mind protection will become increasingly important. I think and again, you know I'm not standing on the top of the mountain looking down and saying, hey, folks, I know all this, you know I'm enlightened or whatever, but I think I do have enough of an understanding to know that that we, we all, have this potential to remain in. Again, I'll quote my old teacher or reference him in our seats to hold your seat right. That is how we look after ourselves, what you might call self-care. So you have to start with self-care. You have to start with unburdening yourself of what's standing in the way of you and being a dignified, authentic presence on this planet which, as I understand it from the teachings and from my own glimpses and blah blah is a person who is holding their dignified seat, who is at peace.

Stephen Gray: 1:04:44

Basically, you know, and with that freeing up of the burdens that we've placed on ourselves, the chains that we've wrapped ourselves in, from the moment we were born and over many past lives, people would say we, we are able to stay present. And it brings it, naturally comes with compassion. You know, peace and love who are these old sort of two hippie words that went together? You know? And people, yeah, yeah, yeah, cutesy. You know love, and no, it's real. That's what people experienced when they had deep experiences with psychedelics was that, when you dipped into this timeless space of ultimate peace, even Jesus nailed not even Jesus, I mean, somehow it escaped the hegemony of the, of the authoritarians that Jesus said the peace, this is the peace that passes all understanding. There's no way to understand it. It's just who we are, when you can actually, when you've freed yourself of all those burdens and you can relax into that state of peace.

Stephen Gray: 1:05:52

I've elicited that in me and many other people as well, again, temporarily, but you go. Okay, now we know that's real, you know it's not a theory, it's not a belief system, it doesn't belong to any religion whatsoever. So we so that's our challenge going forward is, I think, anyone who's capable of it at all is to recognize that, no matter what's happening out there, we have the responsibility and the ability ultimately to encourage, nurture, deepen and ultimately hopefully remain in that centered, holding our seat state while this other stuff happens, so that we can actually be of use rather than sort of victimized by our own terror or whatever the heck. It is right, and so I did forget the other part of your question now.

Sebastien Fouillade: 1:06:44

That's okay, you touched on it earlier, but I love this, the centering also like, I feel like we're so off our center as well, and it's the lives we live in puts us off that center. And some days we can feel it. We can feel how we're off our center. We wake up like, oh, I feel different. But like some people, I call it either center or baseline. But some people have moved so far away from that center or baseline that they've forgotten what it feels like and what I like. With the psychedelic experiences they bring you back to that center.

Sebastien Fouillade: 1:07:20

They're bringing back potentially creating from center, expressing that love from a place that is centered. So, as we move forward, do you think that the solution to our part of the great transition? I think you used the word great transition. Oh, you wanted to say something.

Stephen Gray: 1:07:45

I would just remember why. Part of your original question the moment ago was about what does this mean? To be a custodial species, right? So that's why I got a little distracted by saying that the first thing you got a custodial is oneself, right, that's self care, that's mind protection and all that. But then I was going to use an example.

Stephen Gray: 1:08:09

There's a wonderful writer named Martin Prechtel, p-r-e-c-e-h-t-e-l, spelled Martin but pronounced Martin. Anyway, he was a. He's still around, but for 13 years he was, for most of those, first of all trained and then for a large chunk of the 13 years, he was in a village in Guatemala and he was the shaman for the village, as well as a number of other involvements. He's actually half Native American from the US and he eventually had to come back because the juntas and paramilitaries were destroying all these villages and all his friends said you know, martin, you got to get out and take this knowledge with you and share it with the world. So what Martin said about those people and their worldview was like, just like almost everywhere in this bloody world, the missionaries would come with their humorless that's an important point attempt to convert people to their humorless, serious, you know, view of the world and the Maya we're going. We can't relate to you at all. You know you're telling us that we got kicked out of the garden. You know, for our sins. We don't see it that way at all. We see that we are in the garden, this is the garden, and we don't have to keep changing it and quote, unquote, improve it. What we need to do is love it and care for it, you know, maintain a healthy relationship with it. You know, be sacramental about the way that we do things and the way that we plant things and the way that we look after our seeds and etc. Etc. You know, and each other so that seems to be kind of like the central issue here right that we are in the garden. We are a custodial species and this planet now is our, this whole planet is now our garden. You know that's what people are trying to do by working toward net zero emissions and other environmental initiatives. That's all part of it.

Stephen Gray: 1:10:26

I just think, and as do many others, that the psychedelics can help in the sense that from the inside out, they deepen people's connection with you know, that love for the planet, that kind of joy and sadness mixed together like oh my God. I mean, I sometimes feel that way about what we've done to the planet. You know I mean this. You know, go back, I don't know, maybe not that far, but let's say a thousand years. I don't think you have to go back. Imagine what this planet looked like a thousand years ago covered in pristine forests, old growth forests, pure water, except for when somebody's cows were shitting at it and it poisoned the stream. You know, but in general, you know water, this incredible gift of life everywhere on the planet. You know pure, crystal clear water, clear skies. You know incredible nature everywhere, and it's been so degraded that that in itself is heartbreaking, you know, yeah.

Sebastien Fouillade: 1:11:32

So, it's.

Stephen Gray: 1:11:33

Our job, I think, is to whatever and in whatever way we can do it. It's not when one doesn't have to be sort of narrow focused on what that is. I don't know all the different ways that people can help. Maybe creating great art, you know, can help writing, you know nonfiction, fiction, books, environmental activism, you know, creating spiritual communities, whatever, you know, maybe there's a thousand ways.

Stephen Gray: 1:12:02

Or people just focusing on how they are in their personal lives with the people around them, without, you know, going beyond that. You know just treating people with respect and kindness, even simple things, just like down at the store. You know you go down to the corner to buy some groceries. You don't have to be humorless, you can say hello to those people. You know I end up, yeah, even though it's only you know, you're only with them for 60 seconds or whatever while they're, you know, telling your groceries. I get into conversations with those people, some, you know, as often as I can, if they're open to it. You know ask them how they're doing. You say, oh, I see you got your hair cut. You know that kind of thing, right? Yeah?

Sebastien Fouillade: 1:12:41

No, you answered many questions and one. I love it Because you do mention that sense of coming home several times in the book. I don't know if it was actually. I think it's in the book or in the when we talked before. But, like you know, psychedelics help you realize you're already home, you're our home, and that goes back to the custodial aspect you're talking about and the kindness I would add to that. You know we're so quick at judging now too, which just I see that every day now there's training somehow of, like, you know, just jumping on the sensational and judging and trying to make up your mind, and we've all been trained to just go after that. And I feel like it goes back to what you were saying earlier of like, maintaining our center and kind of awareness, but also, you know, not being caught in the strong currents that are around us.

Stephen Gray: 1:13:48

Yeah, one of the I keep referring to this, but this teacher took him drunk, and the reason is because he is the single most important influence in my life, even though he's been dead for 37 years or 36 years now.

Stephen Gray: 1:14:03

And one of the things he said was that a sign that you're actually progressing on the path if that's even a correct way of thinking of it is that you become less opinionated and that the opinions that you do have you don't take as seriously as you did before.

Stephen Gray: 1:14:20

And then again, as I mentioned earlier, somehow or another, after 2000 years of control from above in the Christian institution, real good teachings came through from apparently from Jesus anyway, and one of them was judge not, lest she be judged. And the way I understand that one is that it's an unarguable principle, which is if you're judging, that's a state of mind, that's your state of mind, right? Yeah, you know. So if you're in that judgemental state of mind, that's what you're experiencing, right? Yeah, so, regardless of the effect that it has on anybody else, it may have no effect whatsoever on them. In most cases it doesn't, because you don't have any contact with that person, you're just judgemental. But you're the one experiencing the judgementalness. So your judge, judge not, lest you be judged. I think means that judged in a sense by yourself.

Sebastien Fouillade: 1:15:28

Yeah, right, yeah. That's been on my mind a lot the last few days Because there's an event that's happened that's very polarizing, with a famous figure of peace and happiness and everybody's ready to oh the Dalai Lama.

Stephen Gray: 1:15:46

Yeah, the.

Sebastien Fouillade: 1:15:47

Dalai Lama. Yeah, and it brings the reactions to the event for me has brought a lot of sadness, just like you talk about. The sadness is like wow, it's hard not to judge. So the reaction of judging and then just being at peace and just observe, which I think goes back to a lot of the teachings we discussed too yeah.

Stephen Gray: 1:16:16

I think there's an important clarification regarding judgment, though. Buddhist teachings have a term called discriminating awareness. I think it's called prajna in Sanskrit Discriminating awareness. The word judging can be tricky what it actually mean, because you are in a sense, discriminating things like you could see things. Ideally. You're seeing things. If you're seeing things clearly, without the overlay of a judgmental mind state, so to speak, or opinions, but you're just seeing things as they are, then you're going to see malfeasance or whatever. So that's discriminating awareness, and it's not like we're supposed to just like oh, everything's all groovy. We're actually. The more we wake up and unburden ourselves of all these conflicting beliefs and concepts in our minds, the more we can see clearly in general, and that is that we can in a sense judge, but not in that way. Yeah.

Sebastien Fouillade: 1:17:40

I get it. I like the clarification. It's a good one because so many times people have had psychedelic ceremonies they have. One of the reflections you can have during those ceremonies is about judgment and you'll think about afterwards it's like what is judgment? And you'll have those deep reflection around judgment and I've gone through that a few times. Well, I shouldn't call it judgment then. I should just call it observing without judgment. But at the same time, I like the way you put it and when you're talking about a great transition that's upon us and you're talking about where we are bringing it back to the book as a race, a relationship with the planet that's taken care of us for so many years, us plundering the planet for so many years. There needs to be. There's a set of facts, irrefutable facts, and knowing where you're at. One calls it judgment. I guess clear judgment is important to help us move forward.

Stephen Gray: 1:18:52

Yeah Well, you mentioned earlier that it can be problematic paying attention to the quote news and I think I agree with you in general. But I think paying attention also to what's being said from wherever it's coming from, is also valuable for a lot of people, not everybody. Some people just do your practice, live your life with dignity and calmness and compassion and help where you can help. But for people like myself, I want to know what's going on around the world. I want to know what's going on, what trends are happening, like the rise of dictators or whatever. I do pay attention, I read them.

Stephen Gray: 1:19:45

I skimmed through the New York Times online edition, I skimmed through parts of the New Yorker. Alternate is another one that I pay attention to, et cetera, et cetera, along with reading books like the one I'm reading now called the Psychedelic Connection, stuff like the psilocybin connection, or great books on history or a new view of history, like this book that I just finished reading, what's it called? The Dawn of Everything, which is really interesting, not an easy read, it's long, it's a hundred pages. But these two authors, wengrohe and I forgot the other guy's name they point out that the narrative of that there's been a linear progression from the crude caveman life to this modern civilization that inevitably results in hierarchical structures, is not the historical facts. There have been cultures all over the place, all over for a long, long time, that have had a more or less non-hierarchical, community-based, more or less egalitarian, fairly free in that sense, anyway. So I read all that kind of stuff.

Sebastien Fouillade: 1:21:08

That sounds refreshing. I definitely took notice to that. When you talked about your daily routine, I was like, oh, that's nice, he's staying connected and he's reading the news and staying connected with the world as part of the daily routine. Moving forward.

Stephen Gray: 1:21:24

Because if you don't know just to finish up on that, if you're not hearing what the scientists are saying about melting ice caps and warming ocean temperatures, I just read something a couple of days ago that we had the ocean temperatures just broke a record of that. The world ocean temperatures are warmer than ever. Let's not hide our heads in the sand. This is the work they had, is that? Pay attention, look after yourself so that you don't get freaked out, or if you see yourself starting to get freaked out, you can at least recognize it and come back to holding your seat Then paying attention that the work needs to be done. When you can, let's do it, whatever you can do.

Sebastien Fouillade: 1:22:17

Thinking the vision of the book and going through that great transition forward. How do you see it that it could play out? I mean, with psychedelics I'm always trying to. This is more my thinking mind. It's like well, do we have leaders taking psychedelics? Then is there a ripple effect. How does the ripple effect of psychedelic plays out in a way that can make enough of a ripple?

Sebastien Fouillade: 1:22:56

It can turn into a wave and it can turn things around because it's, you know, like there's ceremonies that by nature, right now they're not scalable. This is my favorite way to experience psychedelics. Then there's what I call the pharma 2.0, who's got all those new molecules and everything that's trying to help people, on the other hand, in a scalable way. But there's greed in there as well. How do you see this play out in the next 30, 50 years? Oh boy, that's a big question.

Stephen Gray: 1:23:34

I don't know I don't know either.

Stephen Gray: 1:23:37

I don't think human.

Stephen Gray: 1:23:38

I don't think humans are very good at predicting the future in some ways, so it would be a little bit arrogant of me to and delude it, to claim that I do know.

Stephen Gray: 1:23:52

But you mentioned a term or something in that, in that the lead up to that question about you know the sort of filtering down idea. Now, maybe filtering through might be slightly more a way that I could relate to that concept a little more, but down in a sense also applies in the sense that, yes, you're right, the number of people that you know, compared to the 8 billion people that are on the planet who are going to be influenced by psychedelics and able to participate and have an influence on the consciousness change that needs to take place on the planet, are few, extremely few, right? So, yes, in a sense it filters out, but people are influenced everywhere. You know and this is another whole sort of theme, but I'll try to keep it brief I don't think it's a complete coincidence or random that an idea or a piece of information can be spread around the whole planet in a second right. So there's one of my favorite sayings I think I mentioned it in the intro is that was it Victor Hugo?

Stephen Gray: 1:25:14

I keep getting mixed up with my yeah, anyway, he was a 19th century philosopher and he said there's nothing, there's nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come right. And so the other way that I've been kind of tying that into the visions and the prophecies and all that is that people are saying that there's going to be room for the new vision to be understood as there's more of a, in a sense, crack in the way things are now and that that's what's happening. The stability and believability of the current way that we have been living and running this planet, so to speak, is becoming increasingly less stable and functional and supportive and so on. And, as that happens, there's the potential for people going completely haywire, of course, and following demagogues like Donald Trump and others. But this is why the message is so important to point out that there is this potential for an opening as well and that when we start to experience that opening, we realize it just simply feels far better to be connected to ourselves and to be experiencing some sense of that peace and that compassion and that participation in the healing of the world. Right?

Stephen Gray: 1:26:40

So, as far as I'm concerned, the notion that there's nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come will increasingly dawn on people. There's this one thing, in a sense, that we've been missing all these thousands of years, which is that we are, as the Buddhists would put it, buddha. Buddha, just, it's a Sanskrit word, it just means awake. It's like oh, that's why you mentioned coming home, because sometimes the psychedelics give you that experience where you just feel, ah, you can't explain this. It's the peace that passes all understanding, but it's real, it's unarguable, it's unimpeachable.

Sebastien Fouillade: 1:27:28

And yeah, I love that quote from Victor Hugo. I'll take advantage of my French roots here.

Stephen Gray: 1:27:37

Yeah, good one, good one.

Sebastien Fouillade: 1:27:40

It's wonderful because when I look at I'll go back to the Leadership Adelics show the premise of the show, which we've never talked with each other, and so the premise before the show, and so the premise of the show was to actually help people, communities and leaders manifest a better future for themselves, their family, their community and at work, and it's all entwined with psychedelics and leadership. And a lot of that was kind of a calling for working with plant medicine. And I read your book and I'm like, oh my God, this is much better than what I've been doing, meaning it's very educated, there's a lot of depth and people with tons of experience and history and teachings, but it's a similar idea of bringing about that change, empowering people to make the world a better place and to turn things around. And I love that people with similar ideas are rising up like those lights, those beacons, and it's starting to ripple through, and so I see the future as kind of a hybrid of some people will be able to work with psychos, psychedelics, and share those insights and help others in their journey.

Sebastien Fouillade: 1:29:17

But ultimately you also use the word feeling. I think one of the things that psychedelics do is they help us really feel that love feel, that connection, feel where we are really deeply and it's almost like a human right in my mind to be able to feel that, to be able to feel that coming home. But you can't mandate it on everybody. Everybody needs to find their own way. Everybody needs to find their journey. It's their own journey.

Sebastien Fouillade: 1:29:51

And so it's an interesting dynamic of how do we share insights but then empower people to find their ways.

Stephen Gray: 1:29:58

Right, of course people have to find it for themselves, but I think, just in general and psychedelic work is arguably a significant part of this going forward is that the more people awaken to who they truly are, the more that will influence everything around them. Right, because people are influenced by ideas. I mean, you just see it, you know, suddenly? I mean, I just heard something on the radio yesterday about this music festival, coachella, and for the first time in its history of that festival it's been going on for quite a while They've got two musicians already very famous in their own country, from India, and both of them have been incredibly successful.

Stephen Gray: 1:30:50

One of them, one of his songs or whatever has had like 100 million views on YouTube, right, so, like, in no time an idea can spread, and if it's a good idea, and so it's sort of like multiple level work in a sense, like, so somebody like that takes ayahuasca a few times and learn some things from it that can creep into their music either directly or indirectly, right, et cetera, et cetera. So that's the filtering down or filtering through potential. There too, I think, yeah.

Sebastien Fouillade: 1:31:25

No, I love that because you're touching on another thing.

Sebastien Fouillade: 1:31:28

I was trying to put the pieces together on how do we make this happen.

Sebastien Fouillade: 1:31:31

And there's always this discussion of legalization versus decriminalization.

Sebastien Fouillade: 1:31:37

And with legalization, a lot of time it's hyper controlled with kind of the medical industry and has to be tied to mental health cases and so on.

Sebastien Fouillade: 1:31:51

And then the decriminalization there's an aspect where it's like no everybody can benefit from those medicine and there's actually a really huge benefit for decriminalizing it and people crossing path with the medicine without them necessarily acknowledging oh my god, I've got a mental health issue, because a lot of times people can't even recognize that in themselves. So if they actually cross path with the medicine from an entertainment, in a song, going to a grateful dead concerts and having some mushrooms, and they have that recognition, they have that epiphany they might never have had it otherwise. And so I feel that decriminalization is also another big part of the solution, with proper guard rails and training and community support, which I think is challenging based on how communities are organized right now. But I feel like it's going to take a while as well. And you call that in the book or several people call that out in the book. Maybe it was Dwayne who called that out. It might be like 30 or 50 years, I remember seeing that in there.

Stephen Gray: 1:33:07

Well, yeah, I think the message about that is like let's be prepared for this being an extremely unusual, unsettled, transitional time. We have to kind of go beyond, I hope, the entertainment mentality that the world is here to entertain us, that we can hop on a plane, regardless of how much carbon we use, just to spend a week lying on a beach in Puerto Vallarta any time we want. I'm sorry, but that's not necessarily what needs to happen now, and in fact I suspect there will come a time I don't know when exactly where that kind of travel will be restricted. I mean, that's just one of many, many examples. There's a wonderful book that's getting a lot of attention these days, called the Ministry for the Future, and it takes place about 30 years in the future, and the Ministry for the Future is a United Nations organization which is charged with a lot of responsibility and funds to legislate things like that, and so at that time, around 2050, recreational air travel with fossil fuel plane has been banned worldwide. Basically, you could travel from New York to Paris in an airship which will take you two to three days. I don't know if you said how that would be fueled, but obviously it would have to be much more environmentally neutral than traveling in a jet plane into that kind of thing. We're going to see an incredible amount of innovation. We'll have to it's survival, it's getting to be survival. So that's what I'm saying, is that I think what we're going to see and hopefully people will relax, breathe and ride with this that we're moving out of the plastic age, if you will, the thinnest paper, superficial entertainment kind of age, into an age of starting to take life more seriously, like connect with the real things more seriously, in a sense, even music.

Stephen Gray: 1:35:15

One of the I have a chapter later in the book called Something Like Inspirational Quotes, or Bringing a Home or something like that, and I think the subtitle was More Inspirational Quotes and one of them was Edgar Casey, who is this famous.

Stephen Gray: 1:35:28

He's known as the sleeping prophet, and from way back in the early 20th century I think he successfully diagnosed all kinds of illnesses that nobody could, by going into a trance state, in a sort of a sleep-like state or something like that.

Stephen Gray: 1:35:43

Anyway, I put a quote in by him that says music and sound will be the medicine of the future.

Stephen Gray: 1:35:52

So just like our relationship to music is actually sort of like a perfect example of the change that hopefully we're going to be going through and hopefully are already going through, is that music is used so cheaply and oftentimes listen to so casually and semi-initentively in the background while you talk or whatever, as if it's just part of the wallpaper, atmosphere setting, and that's fine too. My wife and I put on a dinner jazz kind of station while we eat dinner sometimes. That's fine, but I think what we're likely to see and what we need is to start increasingly relating to music for the power that it has, the power of musical vibration, partly in the words, but in the force of music itself and the beauty of music itself as a medicine and sound in the sense of crystal bowls or something that are not. You may be you wouldn't necessarily call it music in the sense of it's not creating a song or something, but it's generating a vibration which in itself, I think, can be influential, can be healing.

Sebastien Fouillade: 1:37:11

Beautiful and it's very healing and it touches the vibration, every cells in our body and you can definitely experience that with psychedelics. I mean when you experience music and psychedelics together, like it's like I never heard music before.

Stephen Gray: 1:37:32

You know, I was like cannabis does that too. Yes, it does.

Sebastien Fouillade: 1:37:38

And then creating music. Yeah, there's a lot, and we go back to where you started creating music with you taking a few hits of totes use the term of cannabis but that's also another wonderful experience. There's a self-healing aspect.

Stephen Gray: 1:38:00

You can create that with music?

Sebastien Fouillade: 1:38:03

Absolutely. Yeah, steven, we're pretty much at time. This has been a wonderful conversation. Where can people find your book and when is the next convention you're organizing?

Stephen Gray: 1:38:19

Yeah, thanks for the question. So the book's everywhere. It's on all the major online outlets Barnes, Noble and Amazon and all those and most bookstores, if they don't carry it in stock, will at least be able to get it pretty quickly because the publisher, Inner Traditions Park Street Press, is well-established in the field. They have a good distribution network and so on and so on, so it wouldn't be hard to get the book at all. You can even go to my website if you wanted to. Here's a quick way of doing it. Go to my website, stevengravevisioncom, so that's S-T-E-P-H-E-N-G-R-A-Y-Visioncom, and right there I think it's on the homepage it says order book or something and if you click on that it gives you links to four or five of these places and just sends you there. I don't actually sell it from the website, so I still just get my crummy little dollar a book royalty. So I don't care about that, but it does point people quickly to where they can get it.

Stephen Gray: 1:39:26

And the conference the website for the conference is spiritplantmedicinecom, In that order. Sometimes people have a hard time remembering whether they're plant spirit medicine or not. Anyway, it's spiritplantmedicinecom. S-p-m-c is the sort of acronym for the conference, spirit plant medicine conference, and we actually are now selling super early bird tickets for that. It's in November 3rd to 5th in Vancouver at the University of British Columbia.

Stephen Gray: 1:40:00

There's something, if it's not unique, it's close to unique or rare in the psychedelic conference world that many people have acknowledged over our 12 past years, which is we deliberately have everybody in the same room, so the 500 people or so are more in this one room.

Stephen Gray: 1:40:17

So we're actually going through a journey together. We even have a cannabis ceremony on the Saturday night Saturday evening where we do it like what I was talking about much earlier in our conversation silent meditation, sound journey, guided meditations send people to go stand outside the building for a couple of minutes, have a couple of puffs, come back in and silence and do that for about an hour and a half and that helps build the energy for the Sunday because people come back further opened already from that experience. So, yeah, tickets are already like I think they're half, half, 50% off of the full price right now for the next couple of months or so, if people want to come and the website shows you. We have about two thirds to three quarters of our speakers up on the website right now. Got some remarkable people, as always and always really important as is with the book to hear from indigenous people, earth people, earth connected people. We have a good contingent of those kind of voices at the conference as well.

Sebastien Fouillade: 1:41:21

Yeah, I'm definitely interested and I saw the speaker line up and it looks great and I encourage everybody to check out your book. I'm really enjoying it. I've looked at I mean, I've looked and read a lot of psychedelic books and this one is definitely on top. No, I haven't finished it yet, but I don't think I'm going to change my mind. So thank you, stephen, for the time together and I wish you a great rest of the day.

Stephen Gray: 1:41:56

Well, thank you, Sebastian, and thanks for the interesting questions and provoking commentary that provoked further ideas, so I enjoyed having this conversation with you as well.