OCEAN MALANDRA talks about the renewed interest in psychedelics and their applications in mental, spiritual and physical health. He is a widely published freelance environmental journalist and travel writer who divides his time between Northern California and South America. His work has appeared in over 30 different media outlets, including Vice, Lonely Planet, USA Today, Mongabay, Earth Island Journal, High Times Magazine, Parabola Magazine and Paste Magazine, where he wrote the environmental column EarthRx. He is also the author of the Moon Travel Guide series to Colombia. His new book, co-edited with neuroscientst and Harvard researcher, Natalie Dyer PhD, titled “Infinite Perception: The Power of Psychedelics for Global Transformation” is an anthology of voices from the front line of the Psychedelic Renaissance.er, PhD.
Dr. Natalie Dyer, PhD, is a Research Scientist with Connor Whole Health at University Hospitals, President of the Center for Reiki Research, and serves on the Scientific and Medical Network board. Natalie completed her doctorate in neuroscience at Queen’s University and postdoctoral fellowships in psychology at Harvard University and Harvard Medical School. She has published many scientific papers and book chapters on postmaterialist science, psychedelics, and the therapeutic effects of integrative medicine practices, including yoga, acupuncture, mindfulness, and energy medicine, and is co-editor of the book Expanding Science: Visions of a Postmaterialist Paradigm. Natalie is also an energy medicine practitioner and teacher with clients around the world. Her passion is in understanding and addressing mental and physical health from a psychospiritual perspective. She lives in the woods on the east coast of Canada with her husband, artist Louis Dyer, and their daughter.
We discuss the history of psychedelics along with current research and the future of their use in enhancing a wide variety of health and wellness challenges. Ocean brings a great deal of personal experience with shaman ritual as well as scientific research to the table in a frank discussion about human potential in body, mind and spirit.
I really didn't get into psychedelics until I was older and I was actually look I was suffering from a depression and I was looking for ways out and I started to read about the same thing I this this ayahuasca which I'm sure you and your listeners have heard of famous Amazonian psychedelic and how it's used in a ritualized medical setting and how it had been helping people with various mental health issues and at the time I'd also started practicing meditation and other things but the call of the the ayahuasca I was strong are you curious about discovering ways of making your life better then welcome to my podcast I'm Bob Nickman and this is the exploding human. Listen in while I talk with all kinds of people in the fields of personal growth health and healing alternative therapies psychology spirituality environment and the future I'm looking for those answers that make life better for everyone you'll meet cutting edge practitioners doctors artists filmmakers business people and those who have overcome challenges the brave curious anyone who's out there helping us humans to explore expand and explode hey welcome to the exploding human my name is Bob Nickman my guest today is ocean millandra and we're gonna be talking about psychedelics among other things ocean is a freelance environmental journalist and travel writer who splits his time between northern california and south america and he along with dr nadily dire phd has written a book called infinite perceptions the role of psychedelics in global transformation we're going to be talking about the different types of psychedelics from LSD cell-sive and peyote masculine a little history how they've been used in indigenous cultures how they're being used now some of the scientific research that has come to the forefront in recent years and a seeming resurgence in the interest and use of psychedelics to treat mental health issues and depression and a variety of other things so let's jump into it this is ocean millandra ocean millandra i'm so glad you're here i'm in southern california you're in northern so we have another california podcast happening today and we're going to be talking psychedelics folks whoo and as i was telling ocean before we started my first introduction to psychedelics was through the um through LSD and timothy leery finding out about that in the 60s that's when i sort of discovered what that was and then later learned a little bit more about uh things that were less lab-created so we're going to talk about all that stuff how did you get started in being interested i know you're an environmental journalist so that's sort of fits in with all this i think how did you get started to getting into psychedelics and finding out more about it well hello bop and thanks for having me on the show it's a pleasure to join you from um you're probably in sunny california i'm here in foggy california no there's two california's even in the summer at least two at least yeah so you know i my name is ocean i grew my parents were now they would get upset if you call them hippies they considered themselves beatnicks and uh oh you probably you probably know what a beatnick was right absolutely yeah so beatnicks um for those who don't know they were kind of the literary countercultural movement that preceded the hippies and a lot of people feel like the hippie movement kind was kind of based on i will see this they they were kind of a literary more intellectual movement and then the hippies became a more musical popular movement like it became more but everybody but they were some famous writers and they were actually some of the first people in the west to experience with psychedelics as well there's uh a book called the ahi letter between uh bros and alan ginsberg were bros who wrote the naked lunch um which that book was about his drug addiction right um if anybody's familiar with that book he went to columbia and he went looking for this fabled uh psychedelic which is ayahuasca uh to cure himself and that was way back in like 1949 um and then of course you know people experimenting with lsd at the time like you said in the sixties uh and that became a major second i was became a major part of the hippie movement and so ayahuasca kind of grew up to some degree around psychedelic culture that's pretty amazing as a kid uh i suppose to see that uh i did not so i can only imagine what that was like so your parents um were were into that kind of stuff obviously that uh um was um you know like a normal thing to to see that so you were already sort of open-minded in terms of what it could do or what what it was for um i personally um what was incredibly curious about what would happen uh taking certain things and i experimented as a youth uh not like over the top necessarily but enough to go um oh this is certainly another way to look at the world and i would say the benefit was uh the things that most people took very seriously were not that serious and the things that um and then there were then there were the things that were important that nobody talked about those became a that that's the thing i became the most aware of doing that stuff and then there was also the silly recreational aspect that uh was uh as i would say this is some fun giggly stuff it's funny because there are all those aspects right but i really like what you just said the stuff that is there and people don't talk about right so um that the kind of hippie uh psychedelic movement went kind of underground for a while what we're experiencing right now is what it's like the psychedelic renaissance right and um i think a lot of that has to do with the fact that there are all these problems that we don't quite have a concrete solution to and that ability of of psychedelics to kind of bring up other it's something that i get into in in this book uh psychedelics bringing up other possibilities and um some of those possibilities can just make you laugh i mean because a joke is that right a joke is just something you never thought about you see something in a way you never thought about it before but that but an insight and the solution also works the same way how old were you the first time you tried any kind of psychedelic and what was it my first psychedelic yeah so you know when you grow up around a bunch of like i grew up in san francisco as a kid and um honestly Bob when you grow up around a lot of people who you've used a lot of drugs it actually makes you kind of cautious or it did for me because there's like some people and i was just like yeah i don't want to be that fried do you know what i mean oh there's a lot of casualties and we can talk about that because like there's people that should not be doing certain things and certainly not to the quantities right so i even though i grew up around a lot of stuff i wasn't one of the people that was just like totally open with it i was cautious and i really i mean i experimented but i really didn't get into psychedelics until i was older and i was actually look i was suffering from a depression and i was looking for ways out and i started to read about the same thing i this this ayahuasca which i'm sure you and your listeners have heard of famous amazonian psychedelic and how it's used in a ritualized medical setting and how it had been helping people with various mental health issues and at the time i'd also started practicing meditation and other things but the call of the the ayahuasca i was strong so that's pretty much when you tried did you try to do it with sort of it as a ritualistic kind of thing first yeah i did and i kind of prepped for it like i said with a lot of like meditation and stuff like that and i honestly um yeah and i i don't recommend this but i just kind of ordered the different components online and cooked them in my apartment in san francisco and um like i said don't try that at home kids but um eventually though i ended up going to south america and i ended up drinking ayahuasca in different contexts and actually volunteering at a retreat center in peru my career as an environmental journalist kind of evolved out of these travels to south america and over time as i was doing like reporting in indigenous communities i got deeper and deeper into drinking ayahuasca in more more and more traditional settings and the whole thing just kind of evolved so in a way psychedelic and my main psychedelic has been ayahuasca although i've also experimented with mushrooms and lsd and all kinds of other things but in a way ayahuasca has been kind of my psychedelic path well i've heard some some wonderful things about it um i that's one i never did because i don't do any sort of mind altering stuff anymore right um i'm one of those people that um moderation really isn't in my vocabulary when it comes to that stuff so you know i to me anything that would alter my alter me from the neck up i don't touch it anymore um you know i i really went down that uh that path a little hard particularly with alcohol and uh weed but i also did you know and a lot of other things and so i don't do anything and as curious as i am about it i i don't want to uh you know jeopardize that sort of clarity that i that i have but that's just me personally that's why i was asking or talking about why some people probably shouldn't do that if you're somebody that's you know got it maybe an addictive past or personality type because you know if a little is good then i want to do more to the point of my own detriment so um that's just sort of telling my audience a little bit about me and i'm not against any of this stuff i think it's great uh for the for well it's great if it works you know i'm on the side of what works is what i always say uh that wouldn't work for me just because i don't want to you know change what my lifestyle is at this point but um i have heard some wonderful things and also in terms of depression there was a woman in san francisco i think her last name is Waldman who wrote a book about uh microdosing lsd and and helping with her depression so i'm like well if that worked do that you know that sounds that sounds awesome so what happens in the brain this is what i was fascinated when i was looking at your bio that ask them about what happens in the brain because that i was always curious it's like what i hear i'm sitting here i'm a certain guy in a certain reality and now you know i take this i take the substance and these things open up color and sensation and warmth and maybe even at the deepest level it's an understanding that sort of love is the underpinning of all of it yeah i think you you really you really hit the nail on the head and um and actually you know that clarity that you're talking about is kind of the goal of all these things right and so if you feel like you've there's many ways to get there it's just that a lot of people are having trouble you know i just read a news report yesterday i don't know if you saw this surgeon general of the united states um said that there's a crisis among parents and i clicked it and 50 nearly half of all parents are too stressed to function i don't know if you saw this was like in the news yesterday and um so i think that the interest in psychedelics right now right now is to actually it is in that medical sense it is in trying people are looking for a way to gain that clarity because like a lot of people would love to have that there's a sense and when you talk about stress that it's um inevitable and there's no way around it right that there's a it's a pervasive kind of illness i think societal illness and you know there's a this headlong sort of got to get it done attitude and if i don't i'm going to fall behind and everything's balanced on the head of a pin because happiness isn't even in the equation some sort of happiness to me is a byproduct of how you live not something to seek necessarily it's uh the the thing that kind of comes with a a life of certain types of behaviors that lead to that lead to it as a byproduct and and stress is certainly not a part of that it doesn't it you know and and what are you stressed about that's what that's what i would ask anybody that's super stressed it's usually you know my my time is taken up in survival mode money status what other people might think though you know some of these things you can you can really shift i think by changing your perception of what's going on and that that to me is one of the upsides of psychedelics it changed you know it's changes the perception absolutely and that's uh that's really um key to what you ask what's going on in your brain you are you know with something like ayahuasca or like LSD there's a lot of visual stuff going on but to me what's more valuable and actually they're not separate a lot of these visions are tied to like what you said these kind of insights and perceptions into what it is that's causing you stress in your life whether you are too worried about money or whether you are too caught up in your uh look how other people see you in psychedelics you tend to realize on a deeper level when you're on psychedelics how these things are affecting you and in in many cases uh upsetting you're causing misery right and so that's to me that's their most powerful therapeutic uh but application is the insight that they give you into yourself uh in terms of things that you have the power to change to make your life uh happier and more stress-free and to have more clarity and to have more to have less less problems with other people psychedelics really bring up all this stuff and that's um that's one of the reasons why that i think they're they're less likely to be addictive you know because unlike things like alcohol that kind of numb out problems you know we drink we drink alcohol to forget or we drink alcohol too well i think it's to feel good and to really put you in the moment that's really what it does you're all that other stuff is shut out and you just like exactly i mean i've had i've had my bouts with drinking and uh yeah sometimes you know you come out of this stressful job and you feel like a zombie and after a couple drinks you're like talking to everybody you feel live again right here take the edge off yeah take the edge the only problem is if you're made out of edge which i believe that i might be so people have like you know people have deep experiences with psychedelics they're healing experiences and um but it's not all serious i mean people have like mushrooms for example are famous for making you laugh and laugh and laugh at things and i've had that experience many times have you heard have you ever heard anybody talk about that pop like you just you see things from a different angle and it cracks you up and uh i think that's therapeutic too because a lot of that is just taking things less seriously that's the best the best feeling ever i just you know it's like oh yeah okay all the kind of a joke here not to say you have to abdicate your responsibility for for living because what you were talking about is you know i think really good is you when you change your perception then that's just the beginning then what are the actually the actions that i can take to change that you know it's really about radical responsibility to me what are the things i can do and what are the things i can really honestly look at that i'm maybe repeating behaviors that don't serve me or i'm around people that don't elevate me or serve me and or maybe i'm doing a job that's just you know terrible for me can i i mean maybe i can't afford to quit but how can i change the way i look at it absolutely that's that's uh that's really where you're right that's where things happen and in in the psychedelic movement there's a term called integration and it's about like taking those insights and then integrating them into your life and that is really where the magic happens or where the healing happens you know it's not about just taking psychedelics over and over and over again until they change you it's really like you just said it's really you still have to make that commitment and make that effort to change your own life you know what is your life change it's when you change it right like that's when you're gonna have a life changing experiences when you change your life right Bob that's kind of what it comes down to you know i just remembered something when i was in college long time ago in the 70s early 70s it was Halloween night and i took LSD and i went out and everybody was dressed up and i had this this realization super clear it was not a good one um that everyone was acting and dressed up like somebody they wanted to be and weren't and never would be and it made me really sad and i i had to i had to go be away from people because the the overwhelming sadness of humanity grabbed me that night now that could be what was going on with me too i don't really know but it was so clear to me that people were living a way that wasn't honest wasn't authentic and i sort of globalized it it's you know everyone people you know you know i didn't bother to you know look at individuals in terms of each person's life i just saw this sort of it was like an it was like an ugly cartoon to me um and i had to go be alone like i couldn't i could not be around it it was just it it grabbed me now was that a positive outcome from that um in one way it was uh in that i got to see beyond the facade in a certain way um it didn't wreck me you know once i came down i was i was pretty okay and eventually completely okay but i wonder about i don't know that was just a story but i wonder about the you know there's the the intense effect when you're under the influence of these things and then there's the residual effect what is that how long is it last do you have to keep repeating in order to remember that those are the things that i find sort of can be areas that might be difficult yeah that is that is difficult um and i love that example you just gave it reminded me i don't know if you ever ever listened to George Carlin um and he had a bit about LSD and he said he only took it one time and that was enough because he he said he took it one time and he had an experience like you described where he really saw the society in a different light and he changed his hope he knew what he had to do and he did it and then according to him uh he didn't never have to take it again because he made that change and i think it for healing it can be like that too i think there's a trap in taking it a lot um i've met people i met somebody who bragged about drinking ayahuasca over a thousand times and um if you just hung out with her for an hour you could see that you know there was still a lot of stuff to work on and if you like taking ayahuasca a thousand times hadn't uh necessarily i don't know i don't know how she was before that maybe i'm sure it helped to some degree but you get my point really where it's at um in terms of residuals people do report flashbacks i've never really had anything that intense uh yeah me either yeah that seems like a rare thing and i i worry about certain people that have um mental health issues before they take something like that um i'm not talking about you know depression i'm talking about some other kinds of things and although you know because the thing about uh altering your mind chemically sometimes it can accentuate the very thing that you don't want at least to talk about pot paranoia back in the day and i've i had those experiences where i got really paranoid smoking weed um and that actually became more often than not so i'd stop that um and um so i i i wonder about certain people because it could be kind of risky if you're if you're really in a troubled state like what's the preparation you would tell somebody to to to have i'm glad you brought that up because for for kind of more serious psychedelics like ayahuasca i do recommend i mean if people ask me about this stuff i do recommend preparing i even sometimes recommend doing one of these um because that i think i told you before we got online i'm a i'm a Buddhist i'm i'm open to everything but i i'm a practicing Buddhist and i recommend there are these 10-day silent retreats called vipassana and they're all over the world um there's like five centers here in california i recommend people do something like that first because you do want to be as clear and kind of as stable as possible you know um you want to be prepared because you you can have a harrowing experience well let's talk about the different options for psychedelics okay there's LSD there's ayahuasca there's pylocybin there's peyote um i would even say from some of the people i've had on her mdma has been helpful to some people with um mental health stuff so we're there's like five right there i'm sure there's other things um how does somebody sort of look at what thing to do and what what what are the risk factors or the benefit factors of all those different things i forgot masculine masculine right which is uh in peyote in it in in several other cactuses i want to use them for i think what's emerging right now and this is it's a very complex landscape right um there's also ketamine people are using ketamine as kind of a psychedelic and uh there's a lot of controversy about a lot of these things i think didn't um the actor that died recently it turned out to be a ketamine overdose yes um so there's a lot of different factors at play it it it is a hard landscape to navigate um micro dosing that you which you mentioned earlier is always a good it's kind of a safer way to start taking very small amounts and pylocybin is is really um a kind of missiles have in mushrooms it's pretty easy to do that with i don't know what it's like in la but in san francisco there's all these psychedelic churches mushroom churches that have popped up but they're really just like pot dispensaries they're kind of like churches so that they can get the freedom of religion kind of thing to operate you know i'm sure you have them in la too but there's some really good products in there and you go in and there's these bars and the nice thing about the chocolate bars is they're all kind of broken into these squares and the one i get it's called the buda bar i think it's got the buda on it like i told you i'm kind of a buddhist too so i kind of like that one but um it tells you right on the back with the dosages and i think one or even two squares is a micro dose so people can start with a very small dose that's not going to take you into some kind of place where you're dealing with you know your deepest inner demons or anything like that you just kind of kind of get the slightest kind of frosting on reality and see how it makes you feel you know so i think that's a very safe way to start and then there's all kinds of professionals now entering the field there's indigenous people coming up and holding ceremonies there's all kinds of ways um to get into psychedelics but i do think like maybe just micro dosing um is it is a good way to get started i guess there's a whole world i don't really know much about it i didn't know about the churches at all i just that was um did not know see that was going to ask you about this the what the legal aspects that some of these things are considered controlled substances i don't think anybody really has any big consequences for delving into that world but i suppose the potential would be you know incarceration for some people in if a government agency wanted to go after you absolutely and uh depending on where you are um here in california most of the big cities have officially now decriminalized which means um it's not necessarily legal but it does mean that the law enforcement has been told to just really not trouble themselves or other people over there's a there's a movement um called decriminalized nature which um at the first place i did it was oakland the first place that it's basically they passed these legislations at the local level oakland did it san francisco did it maybe sanicruz was the first call and then the whole state of Oregon i believe Oregon is the only full state that's decriminalized and that's opened the doorway for these churches to open up and operate as uh under freedom of religion selling these things but you're right it's still quasi-legal and if you're in i think even parts of california where it's not decriminalized you can still get in trouble potentially um and definitely other parts of the country um it's just like it's just like you know the marijuana landscape is still patchwork as well the psychedelic landscape is following kind of that same you know i'd say the more progressive places are kind of opening up first and so you do have to really watch where you are i'm sure people are booking airline flights right now well you know it's funny like here in humbault i'm in humbault county bub uh it's been decriminalized but people are much more cautious about it and i came up from san francisco a week or two ago and like it's open sales in san francisco really just open open sales and nobody's worried about it because i guess they figure in san francisco san francisco i guess it's gotten to that level where it everybody knows it's just not going to be a problem but in humbault there's still kind of this feeling like we don't know maybe the sheriff like even though the city of arcada decriminalized maybe the humbault county sheriff is going to come in and bust us right um so things are still kind of underground here which is weird you know humbault county is the place where homeless people don't even ask for money they ask for weed right it's like it's it's been famous for it's like black market economy forever but um it's all these things are still sensitive in a lot of ways yeah well i'm wondering what's going to happen you know it's uh an interesting thing because it's you know it's not just the united states we it's it's a global thing obviously it's things that grow in the ground and have been around since you know there was mankind people have wanted to alter their perceptions and and open things up since the beginning i mean it's not it's not anything new it's not new it's just there's a there is a desire i think it's a really deep desire to have an experience that's that's um impactful so i you know it's never going to go away if that's for sure and it may uh you know it may increase it seems like the um that that's what will happen only because the media uh social media in particular saturates the world now yeah a lot of the growth is through social media mexico now has a bill to legalize psilocybin mushrooms um and mexico of course is where the traditional use of these mushrooms uh comes from down in in the south of mexico you had um you have these psilocybin using indigenous cultures um back in the 50s there was a guy who went down there and did an article about it for time magazine and kind of blew that up and it's become a mecca for psychedelic tourism in this area of wahaka the wahaka and highlands um but the the senator that introduced this bill in mexico is not indigenous what she says is during the pandemic she was experiencing such high levels of panic and anxiety that she experimented with a bunch of different things and what she found the greatest relief from was mushrooms and then she she quotes some statistics and i think these are global as well um about the rates of depression and anxiety disorders since the pandemic and i think that's one of the big factors globally um one of the big factors behind this kind of explosion in interest in psychedelics because it's kind of following on the heels of this explosion of it's kind of like an existential crisis people feel um instability maybe in a way that's more intense than we're used to even though we have everything we need there's this kind of global instability at the same time it's a little bit of a post-traumatic yeah reaction from being um well afraid right and isolated right those are two things that are not healthy and we had we were sort of forced to be both of those things right for years uh you know i i know people that you know became and are still are very isolating they're the fear is still there in their mind and they don't you know they don't want to go out they don't want to be around other people and they get strange you know i get strange if i'm spent too much time alone i love being alone but i don't like it too much because your mind will just take you over in in ways that are usually not very healthy um you know we're pack animals human beings we need each other i totally agree let's talk a little bit about the book because i know you wrote it with someone more from the academic side i think people listening to this are going to want to know that that is part of what's in your book so what would say the title of the book the title of the book is infinite perception the role of psychedelics in global transformation and i am a co-editor along with Natalie Dyer who uh PhD who's a Harvard trained neuroscientist and a lot of the people i pulled into it where people i met while covering psychedelics uh for different outlets like reset me or high times magazine and also i have indigenous voices that uh that are that are indigenous shamans that i know from the amazon and so then she pulled from like the research she was doing at Harvard and at different schools where she studies neuroscience and psychedelics among other things and so i think we have a nice balance of different voices from all over the place but we have some actually some of the most we have some big names i should say we have big names in here like Dennis McKenna and uh Rick Dobblin and these kind of and um Zoe Helene who's got this outfit called cosmic sister uh which is really at the forefront of kind of psychedelic feminism um so i mean there's about 20 22 different voices in this book sounds amazing if you want to find out more about that world folks that sounds like the book you want to take check it out um let's talk about i know you visited indigenous cultures what have you seen that's blown your mind and maybe in some ways or just where you went oh my gosh that's incredible either from uh a shaman or somebody that was you know being guided by that have you seen some things that are just wonderful and remarkable yeah um that's a really good question um i think that world is remarkably beautiful and um and i think it's why like when we we we we're just talking about how does how does psychedelics translate into modern society and why that's such a complex topic is because um we're trying to figure out maybe how to do that in a different context you know but these these shamanic rituals that have evolved uh over millennium involved music and dancing and um and they're passed down they're like they're wisdom traditions and they go hand in hand the traditions go hand in hand with these medicines that kind of open you up to them and um it really just the whole thing is really beautiful um and uh i have a lot of respect for it um and i don't know myself how how well all of that can be translated into the modern world um i think i think the essence of it the with like i don't know it's a deep question Bob but i've seen some very yeah i've seen just i've met people that are so full of wisdom and i think that's the most beautiful thing and like and like and i've said this several times i've involved in the Buddhist world the wisdom on level with like these Buddhist writings from 3,000 years ago or the taught Buddhist teachers like that's i think what's remarkable and it's outside i think you can have that outside of these psychedelic medicines but the fact that the kind of the guardians of these psychedelic medicines also carry that kind of wisdom is just amazing you know when you talk about uh music and dance being integrated into that there's an aspect of wisdom that is can't be put into words right that's oh kind of how i see it there's things there's an um you know obviously i'm not the first person to ever say this because it's in Buddhist writings but the um you know talking about um if you want to use the word god let's say that word um that but that for which there is no name it's like as soon as you put a name on it you got a problem you know in a sense uh it misses by just by labeling something but the the um the idea of dance and music being these um non um intellectual thought things that they just sort of are they exist they happen and that being integrated it makes me feel like there's something really solid there even though it's the mind can't quite grasp it it's it's more solid than what the mind can grasp if that makes any sense totally yeah i make total sense and that you know going back to when we talked about um you know seeing the things inside of you that are like um stopping you from enjoying life fully so i remember a lot of my a lot of my iOS experiences were like these guys over here singing and dancing and i'm over here like in the darkness like feeling miserable and then what is it that stopping what's keeping me from this joy right and that kind of inner investigation i found leads to like a lot of the healing because yeah you know you do ultimately want to live you want to be happy and you want to be joyous and um and i think it's one of the hallmarks of a good shaman is that they they drink this medicine and then they they share their joyous state with you and it's kind of a non-verbal teaching it's like um this is kind of the goal in a way to be this joyous you know to be this musical and dancing and singing um even under the influence of something that's this strong it's kind of maybe the proof that you've gotten somewhere yeah i'm thinking about my cat just now when you were talking um when i watch my cat outside walk around and there is a musical aspect to the way she walks around and the way she moves it's it's it's dance and music the way i kind of look at her when she's just sort of being a cat and doesn't know i'm watching and then i watch like i watch her pick a place to sit and i wonder why is she picking that place to sit what is going something i mean why that and not the not two feet away or 10 feet away now it's is it just oh i want to be out of the sun or i want to be in the sun it might be that but there's still even within that framework and i'm thinking there there's a the cat isn't like thinking about anything it just knows where to sit it's an intuition i mean i'm i'm gonna be getting too little woo-woo here but it is something that i when i watch my cat i'm like wow this is like um this is this is something you know and i i guess people do it too it's like i don't want to sit in that you know do you ever have that where you go into a room and you just know where you want to sit yeah yeah and what what makes that the place you want or you go in you go into a place and you go i don't want i can't be here or there's something off you know that i i'm sort of fascinated by that non-verbal thing that goes on with with humans that um you know is to me you know you're being told by i guess intuition and maybe when you expand what that is then you make even better choices that's it that's really it when you see a cat you see an animal that doesn't really worry i mean that's kind of the the thing that's going on with a cat right they just doing what they're gonna do and i think that there was an author i forgot who well it might have been like Ray Bradbury or somebody who said something like i've met i've met several Buddhist masters and masters and all of them were cats or something like that because that yeah they really do cats more than any other animal in a way really do embody that spirit like you said it's nothing like a cat relaxing in the sun and there's nothing like that full attention that a cat gives something also when it's after it too you know whether it's playing or actually hunting that that full awareness that cats are beautiful creatures i really love them anything you'd like to add to the whole psychedelic experience or if i missed anything that's in your book that you want to elaborate on i would just like to say psychedelics is a strange topic because it kind of is open to everything right although right now like you know to circle back to kind of what i said in the beginning there is this huge interest in psychedelics that i really feel and personally for me i have a friend who's a who's a indigenous shaman he's actually from the Arctic Circle and he said there's never been so much interest in psychedelics as it is right now and there never will be again and i think what he was trying to say is that they have and this would and this i want to bring that up because the subtitle to this book right is the role of psychedelics and global transformation and so the kind of the theme that runs through this book even though it's 20 something different voices is that there is a role of psychedelics in this kind of current globalized world figuring its way forward right um and that's why they're so important in the mental health epidemic and in this book we we get deeper than that we get into environmental consciousness and we get into like helping us figure out some of our social issues um and that might not have anything to do with the psychedelics themselves other than their ability to allow us to do like what you said in the beginning kind of see things from a different perspective and so that's all i want to say is that that that is kind of important right now and i think that's really what's driving all this and so that and that could be used for everything from personal relationships to solving world problems there's not like one specific area where like seeing things differently can be helpful right now um i could talk a little bit about my personal experience if you want um which is i do i would love that okay yeah it's and it's been progressive and it's um you know i kind of totally agree with what we were saying earlier it's not necessary to keep it's not necessary to take psychedelics at all and it's definitely not necessary to keep taking them even if you benefited from them a lot of the reason why i've kept up with them is because as now as an environmental journalist that spends a lot of time in the amazon i'm in that context and um you know i last couple times i drank ayahuasca was in this in the context of the culture the cultural context of it um but for myself i've i've experienced a lot of growth using psychedelics alongside um other growth oriented means like meditation like making actual changes in my life like actively working on improving my relationships with my family actively working on taking better care of myself and actively educating myself and changing my perceptions and you know it's like that's what i want to say about psychedelics and that's personal as well as global that's how they've helped me um but it's because i i i wanted to change i was miserable and i wanted to change and so i had to i did all these different things you know i didn't just i didn't just pop appeal i did all these different things and i keep doing different things last couple years i've really been learning qigong tai chi type stuff and i found that there's a real joy in this kind of ancient movement um and i like to dance to you know i spent a lot of time in columbia uh as well Peru Brazil Mexico but in columbia there's this really strong salsa culture and i just think that that the dance culture of people going out and dancing and being social and that's non-verbal they don't have to sit down and have these big conversations like we tend to do at a bar you know we go to a bar in the United States we sit down and like you said we we drink we'd have to have a couple drinks just to break the ice you know and then i don't know when i when i drink a lot there's uh you probably had this experience but there's a point where the conversation is interesting and then there's a point where you had too many drinks and it just and sometimes that that point where it's interesting gets smaller and smaller the more you yeah then it's just loud and sloppy it is just loud and sloppy so one of the beautiful things about somebody's Latin American dance cultures is uh there's less talking and just more dancing and i find that there's less drinking because you don't there's no room for sloppy on the dance floor right it's like yeah and you feel just as good if not better absolutely the next day you know you don't feel as bad if you're just dancing absolutely i was just when you were talking about solvino world problems and i i just had this uh this uh image of it's kind of an awful of dosing um the entire house of representatives in the senate the entire government all in the same day you know and and what would happen if all these sort of bloated pink men had an awakening i think it would be awesome um if they were open to it if they didn't know what's going on they might all just freak out and they might all push the red buttons i don't know well you gotta tell you'd have to tell them but after you'd say get well something just happened you don't know this but don't worry you're gonna be fine right there's no turning back now so you might as well enjoy dosing them might be the best way to do it especially if they're suffering depression like if you're already suffering from depression where do you have to lose you know like well all that money obviously didn't get you the happiness right obviously no sometimes it makes it worse because it's a glaring mirror to this didn't fix it you know it's that that's uh that's uh that's a top that can be a tough one nor is that great line uh it's two things wrong with money not enough and too much right i uh something in between there and and i i like to add and and also when the people with too much think it's not enough i think it's maybe it's habitual but like you get so used to always wanting more of that when you have enough you're you're in this mental habit that you can't you can't just stop and enjoy it right you're like it's like it's kind of like an addiction right well it is an addiction just like any other addiction it's it's absolutely an addiction yeah it's you know you're trying to fill a hole that you can't so you keep doing you keep wanting more more more more but hopefully that you know people are open to trying some some things and this is this certainly is an option to add to your toolbox of uh how to live a a fulfilled life i i really appreciate talking to you today i i didn't know how it was going to go it went great yeah i love the topic um and um i think it folks if you want to pick up the book it you there may be some benefit to you well there will be even if you don't like it that's a benefit you'll go i don't want to do that but you might go oh this might be something i i could try and again there's uh experiential stories in there and uh research people in the field who've been researching it say the name of the book again and and if there's a website people can contact you or want to find out more because i know you've written a ton of articles too so lay it out there man let everybody know all right what's going on with ocean okay ocean melons are here uh with the book infinite perception the role of psychedelics and global transformation it's available on amazon it's also available through our publisher collective ink uh you can follow me on twitter or instagram ocean melandra at ocean melandra i've yeah i've written for over 30 different media outlets i've been doing this for over 15 years everyone from vise to usa today the high times to uh environmental websites like mongo bay and earth island journal um and uh yeah i hope we enjoy the book it is broken down into three sections we've got uh cultural transformation uh we've got kind of societal transformation which is kind of the more serious stuff where i've got different some of the bigger institutions involved with psychedelics and they're like maps and i series and they were kind enough to write chapters and in the last section that was just called personal transformation it's all first-person stories about how psychedelics helped individual people uh change their lives and in some ways that's maybe the best section because that's the that's the final word is your own kind of uh your own experience you know and and so those people in a way have the most authority to me um because it's their own story you know it's not the results of some test that in reading data they they're telling you their own experience yeah well i always love stories you know that that i can relate to that it's it's kind of like the difference between studying music theory and listening to a song it's like you know well i appreciate your time and uh i hope you have a wonderful day yeah bob it was a pleasure thanks for having me on your show um i had a great time and we i'm i'm really happy with the conversation was when in all kinds of interesting directions i love it yeah me too thank you so much all right have a good day what's appreciation for you folks listening to the exploding human the website is the explodinghuman.com there's a youtube channel where you can listen that is the exploding human with bob nickman once again i want to thank ocean melandra for being on the show and check out the new book infinite perceptions the role of psychedelics in global transformation have a fantastic day thank you
