Official announcement at Speaking of Jung podcast
Official announcement at Speaking of Jung podcast also available on other streaming platforms.
Grateful thanks to Laura London for the care, depth, and steady intelligence she brought to navigating this complex and demanding subject.
This is a transcript of the podcast episode. Minor edits have been made for clarity and readability, including the removal of filler words (such as “uh” and “um”) and repeated words.
Laura London:
I'm Laura London and this is the January 2026 edition of Speaking of Jung. Returning to us today for episode 153 is Jungian psychoanalyst Fiann Paul. The world's most record-breaking explorer. He has led pioneering expeditions in the world's most challenging environments, earning 42 Guinness World Records. Though known for his ocean expeditions, his favorite frontier has always been consciousness. Initially trained as an architect and formerly a professional artist, Fiann is the creator of several national level art projects. Today, a Jungian psychoanalyst, leadership consultant, and lecturer at the C. G. Jung Institute, Zürich, he merges exploration, leadership, psychology, and art into a unified inquiry into human transformation, and lived initiation into the unknown. His background includes what he regards as three forms of experiential education, completing the ocean explorer's grand slam, which is rowing all five oceans, living on five continents, and 12 years of personal and clinical experience with plant medicines, psychedelic assisted therapy and integration, supporting individuals through transformational processes. He is the founder of the International Jungian Psychedelic Association, serves as president of the Ocean Rowing Society International and holds the distinction of Freedom of the City of London in addition to the title of Chartered Geographer of the Royal Geographical Society among many other distinctions. He describes himself as a psychologically self-made person devoted to the quest for meaning, authenticity, and self-expression. Next month, Fiann will be presenting a series of public lectures and seminars at the C. G. Jung Institute in Küsnacht, Switzerland. The lectures will be available to attend online. On Monday, February 9th, he will deliver “BDSM archetypes, useful typology not exclusively sexual” and “The healing power of music, AI tools for engaging music in therapeutic process”. And on Tuesday, February 10th, he will be presenting “Healing plants and psychedelics, categorization, profiling, effect, and therapeutic potential” and “Gifts of wounds and personality disorder traits, exploring their multilevelled causes, and potential rather than focusing solely on symptoms.” You can register to attend the lectures online by clicking on the link in the show notes for this episode.
Hi Fiann, thank you so much for joining us again.
Fiann Paul:
Hi Laura, and thank you for inviting me. It's been fun and I'm really happy to be able to interact again and embark on this journey of our exploration of the theme.
Laura London:
Mhm. So many people know you as the world's most record-breaking explorer, but I think very few people know about your inner expeditions. So, how did the transition from, as you like to say, oceans to consciousness as your preferred field of exploration, how did that unfold?
Fiann Paul:
Most of all, of all that I am and I was, I identify myself with being my journey through life, most of all, and both are an amplification of a journey. So ocean art and consciousness, all connect to depth. I sometimes repeat this phrase because it defines my life quite well. And they've always been the same current flowing through different landscapes. And when you spend weeks or months at sea deprived of everything familiar, no society, no mirrors, no entertainment, something different happens there. We even see things sometimes, things that don't exist in reality and sometimes slightly psychedelic things. Phenomenologically they would be more likely to be classified as delirium but there is a psychedelic component in there, basically the world becomes minimal and the inner world becomes everything. And I've always seen exploration in expeditioning sense as a metaphor for consciousness in this way. The oceans were simply the first frontier that mirrored the inner one. So shaman analysts or psychonaut (psychonaut is a phrase used for an explorer of the psychedelic doors of perception), they all need to be an explorer of consciousness. So whichever we are, we need to dive deep and bring the findings and the gifts from the abyss for ourselves obviously but also for others and share it with others. Doors of perception by the way is a term introduced by the revered by Jungians William Blake and this phrase was later picked by psychedelic communities widely starting from the music band the Doors. Back on track though speaking of this realm in a way being all metaphor for consciousness. I would say Jung calls it the self, sailors call it the sea and psychonauts call it source. I most of all call it life. They are all the same mystery just seen through different eyes. It moves, it creates, it devours, it gives birth and for sure it demands participation. Yes, this participation is also often an aspect I really contemplate and focus on.
Laura London:
Mhm.
Fiann Paul:
Means it counteracts voyeurism, participation matters. And psychology names it from inside. Seafaring names it from exposure and psychedelics name it from dissolution for example while life most of all names it from participation. So there are just different names for the same mystery and each is shaped by how we dare to meet it. So to understand life is to live life.
Laura London:
Mhm. How did you gain this deep hands-on understanding of psychedelics and integration? Was that through your personal experience, your clinical practice, both? I mean, there are a lot of people studying psychedelics academically, but there aren't many who've actually lived the work. What kind of experience do you personally bring to the field?
Fiann Paul:
Well, psychedelics were what eventually led me into Jungian analysis and Jungian studies, not the way around. Why? Because Jung's framework gave language to what I was already feeling. This encounter with something beyond, with the unknown, with the vastness of the mystery of life. There is literally very little competent credible language or framework to use to translate, systemize, orient yourself in it or navigate it. I have 12 years of personal and clinical experience with plant medicines and psychedelic assisted therapy and integration.
Laura London:
Do you think it requires that long of a dedicated practice?
Fiann Paul:
Not that long because it is different to attend a study for example and different to build the experience from scratch. It's like the difference between an Olympic athlete and an explorer. Both may be rowing, but one attends ready training, and another one builds the expedition like mini Olympics from scratch in a new location. And if we look at the analysis regime of becoming an analyst is very intense. Hundreds of hours of being in analysis, practicing with clients hundreds of hours, hundreds of hours being supervised. Also these three pillars I think should also define the competences of psychedelic practitioners. There are trends today. New enthusiasts, they have experienced it twice and now they use these trendy words talking about downloads, and we have to have a really good orientation in the machinery of what's moving there because experiencing it really helps understanding it beyond any theory. So again to understand life is to live life. A guide is someone who walks in front of you and who knows the terrain and who knows the ways of handling the encounters with the unknown most of all because the terrain can't be ultimately known but the approach can be mastered. So wherever this arbitrary line of competences is placed it shouldn't be existing.
Laura London:
When you talk about transformation it sounds experiential rather than theoretical. How much of that comes from your own direct involvement?
Fiann Paul:
Yes. So I consider myself holding some educational degrees, educational in quotes that are not formal on top of the formal ones, and I think because these degrees are derived from actual intense participation in life. They may have value at least comparable to these conventionally understood degrees. One is what I call experiential education of living on five continents for at least a year on each up to 3 years in some cases. Second is the ocean explorers grand slam rowing five oceans. This one took me 10 years to complete and it gave me an intense experience of life and manhood. Finally being self-educated empirically in psychedelic work is one of these degrees. I extensively and empirically worked with all of the constructive as in worth exploring psychedelics on both sides: personal side and with clients. I wouldn't exclusively call it a clinical side. I would say that this experiential psychedelic background is rare because I made many attempts to connect with like-minded or like-experienced individuals with little to no success. Usually it is either participation only and often on a little bit pedestrian level,if it's only participation, or only meta engagement. It's rare that somebody in a serious or ambitious way aiming competence is participating on both levels and to make it more intriguing I would like to emphasize what may not be obvious that I have never drunk alcohol or smoked cigarettes or cannabis I never took amphetamine cocaine or opioids and I never will. It's not the altering of consciousness that was repelling me from these substances. It was my own authority to evaluate what is worth exploring and what to steer away from. So in all this attitude of extreme abstinence as many would call, and many called it so, I explored psychedelics thoroughly. I just now especially chose to exhibitionistically present this juxtaposition, just to embody at least decisionally, an affirmation of psychedelics' valuable potential.
Laura London:
Well, when exactly did you start exploring psychedelics?
Fiann Paul:
I didn't start exploring early because I was Puritan initially and I needed to open my mind or more surprisingly my body, which I had to learn that it is a greater mind than the brain. And why is it a matter of opening your mind? Well, because only strong discernment and courage will allow you to transgress the layers of conditioning of prohibition. And this is a really big part of the theme of psychedelics actually. I would like to mention an interesting fact. There is a phrase used to define the highest transcendentalists in eastern cultures in Hindu tradition called Paramahamsa. (highest transcendentalist) That's how it's translated into western languages. But we know that there is an insane amount of beautification in all these translations. If you study Sanskrit actually you will learn that these words usually mean something very basic. But at the same time the meaning and the translation becomes more beautiful because paramahamsa basically means great swan, swan as this amphibious bird often praised in Celtic poetry. The big white bird that floats on the water. And why is this swan assigned to Paramahamsa? Because according to folklore beliefs, a swan can drink milk only from the water once the milk is poured into the water. Of course, if you observe this phenomenon, it appears like that. The truth is that swans drink both, but it was not understood previously properly. But it is seen as a quality or capacity to differentiate and choose the essence. So one of the core qualities of paramahamsas is discernment which in Sanskrit is Viveka. If you read a lot about their (paramahamsas) main qualities even though the term was later contaminated, all the qualities could be nearly exclusively defined by being the masters of navigating authority. And especially when navigating authority is accompanied by courage and endurance. We reach this big Jungian combo, right? Discernment, courage, and endurance. So to me, the fact that the law approved alcohol and not psychedelics meant completely nothing. From a biological, psychological or aesthetic perspective, I never saw anything convincing in alcohol or cigarettes and other substances I mentioned that I avoided. Interestingly, most people have no resentment to those while intense resentment to psychedelics. For example, I really like one definition that Schopenhauer delivered. He defined intelligence as sensitivity to noise. And this definition convinced me a lot because alcohol was always increasing the noise level literally and metaphorically. And if you go to alcohol-free events, they are unbelievably acoustically pleasant. All this auditory ambience is built on completely different principles there.
Initially it was clearly a prohibition in the Jungian environment and in the tone of education as well and now it becomes nearly a sprint. It's worth asking why such a rapid shift… well because there is not enough personal authority engaged on an individual level. I would say in society in general in any group it's an important dynamic to understand. So you can often observe magnets snapping iron filings more or less if I were to bring an image that illustrates it well. And I think it's really important that as analysts, we find internal locus of control, self agency or personal authority as these phrases are sometimes used interchangeably, and I think I mentioned something about it in our previous podcast because it's an important theme that I often focus on. Because 80% of people are known to have external locus of control and we need to help people find it and the only way towards it is to initially find our internal locus of control as it is with many other realms of transformation.
Laura London:
Would you explain that a little bit more?
Fiann Paul:
Yes, we could say as history had proven that solutions of today are constrictions of tomorrow and constrictions of today are solutions of tomorrow, or sins of today are virtues of tomorrow and virtues of today are sins of tomorrow. But I like this definition of sin that the only sin is when you act against yourself. For example, speaking of personal authority, wise women knew that they should have rights to vote hundreds of years ago, but until 1970 on a federal level and until 1990 in some parts of Switzerland, it would be against law.
So, we continuously wait for what I define as a 4P to grant this permission, the most pronounced version of external formal authority. And to break down these 4P are: Parent, Priest, Politician, and Professor. In this particular theme, actually Pharma could make a great 5th P. But because I use it usually generally referring to life, not only to psychedelics, pharma could be seen as a cascade effect of these 4 P. And the counterbalancing this 4P is just 1P which is personal authority. Many newborn psychonauts entered the field because permission came from 4P. Yes, 4P allowed. But people I respect the most are those who have always had their own relationship with life. So many norms today for example widely practiced are in fact offensive: alcohol is one of them or social media could be another one, and many psychological disorders don't offend humanity at all. It's important to stay away from finding refuge in the false security of consensus because it prevents one from becoming an analyst for others. Personal authority I think is the key. It is the first and foremost task of the analyst to reinstall it of course for ourselves initially to be able to help others undergo such transformation. So one of the few places where I've seen people have a chance but rarely display a sober approach to life is pranks. I gave a couple of examples last time but one that comes to my mind is not mine unfortunately. Pranks nearly always navigate personal authority. I had friends who were in the Norwegian army and they were taken on a very strenuous hike through the mountains. I may not exactly recall details but I think it was something like 48 hours with minimal or no food and water. I can't remember. So delirium is for granted. We explorers know it. Certain levels of deprivation cause you to see things that don't exist. You basically hallucinate and delirium is a very mean nature of hallucination because it requires participation that you cannot resist. So as they were marching through the forest, the leaders of the march previously staged vending machines and bananas on the pine trees in Norway. But as soldiers were pushing and passing these vending machines and bananas a meter away from them. Nobody dared to look at them because they understood that the delirium may be in action. Nobody wanted to look stupid. But of course if anybody dares they would have had the food that they were starving for. So I would like to conclude and expand that becoming a person doesn't mean becoming more adjusted. Personhood is a continuous struggle. So many people feel something is wrong with the culture, with the world around them, or with the status quo but because they outnumbered they accept that something must be wrong with them.
Laura London:
Right.
Fiann Paul:
And there is this beautiful phrase by T.S. Eliot that “in the world of fugitives people who are going direction might appear to be running away.” I have another anecdote that comes to my mind. When I was 18, I was participating in a mountaineering expedition and one of the team members was a priest. At 18 years old, I was musing on my ideas of the mysteries of the universe, sharing my beliefs in different things. And he responded to me with this authoritative tone: “but pantheism was abolished.” Asked myself, how?…. who abolished it? Did the pope come one day and announced ex cathedra: “pantheism, I abolish you?” Or did they examine every living and inanimate object looking for traces of divinity in it? Or maybe one object didn't display the presence of the traces of divinity such as the goat in the shed in a garden that a witch was maintaining? I realized that it was entertaining and comedic to puzzle an 18 year old like that. But nevertheless, recently it, as it turned out, applies to adults very well. It surprised me. It brought this anecdote back to my memory because there was a very enlightened and promising presidential candidate in Poland called Trzaskowski. He was denigrated by a government campaign via government owned media. So the campaign headline was saying that “Trzaskowski believes in the god of Spinoza” and this Spinoza was meant to be so scary and repel the voters and it effectively did. So as it turns out, pantheism is still being abolished even for adults because that was one of the main contributions of this philosopher (Spinoza) that is actually often picked by very enlightened people. And the second thing that the presidential candidate was accused of is that he speaks English better than Polish. So this perhaps opens a catastrophic scenario in front of the country, probably running into a Lee Kwan Yew kind of governance or something. So in ancient Greece there was a system called Arete and arete was basically an adulthood initiation into becoming an adult citizen of polis. Just to make sure we talk about the same term I will spell p o l i s. Yes, this kind of police and to avoid confusions and the part of Arete was displaying mastery in the art of rhetoric which included navigating logical fallacies. Today actually surprisingly logical fallacies is CBT, as basics it was known forever and I am laughing that Greece should sue CBT for cultural appropriation, cognitive behavioral therapy. It basically is operating logical fallacies. And one of the main fallacies thought there (in ancient Greece) was appeal to authority. So the point may be right and it may be against authorities' opinion and is still valid and authorities opinion conversely doesn't validate the point. So if we look at the world today most of the authorities on the global level are bonkers. And sometimes someone asked me when I was stating one of my opinions: “and who are you to say that?”... it's already an invitation to validate the authority, right? And I would answer “nobody”, with a grotesqually confident commanding and authoritative tone which was meant to mean that this alleged lack of authority that I am accused of or pointed with doesn't invalidate the resonance of what I say. So then because we were really close-minded as in we as humanity I say retrospectively, we took a cultural dip after ancient Greece and from these days in Greece we spiraled down to reemerge in the same place just a couple of millennia later so to renaissance. And religions were one of the major contributors to this dip. It's a high price we paid. We had a micro-repetition of this history with the psychedelic renaissance now: 60 years, not two millennials. Nevertheless, it's a high price to pay and especially in this nowadays exponential momentum of technology. 60 years is an insane amount of time. If you compare the size of a computer from 60 years ago and now, this is an unimaginable difference. To navigate constrictions and solutions or sins and virtues, big questions need to be continuously asked or at least periodically asked and you need to be open-minded enough to answer these questions and readjust course if necessary based on the answer that that you find genuinely, and that's the main scary part as you are changing and world is changing your soul will require adjustment. So if you work with consciousness, and as a therapist you definitely do, you can't be close-minded because if you are, you are no longer working with consciousness. A conservative system is closed and therefore it's self-referential and as a result it becomes self-preferential. The worst leaders will tell you it's done like that because it's been always done like that. A self-referential system without openness becomes an echo chamber of its own signals. And the more perfectly it closes the loop, the faster it self-destructs. Enso, one of the most beautiful symbols of life, Zen symbol of life is an open circle. A closed circle is only true when it contains the entire universe, which for example conservative systems, philosophies or religions claim. Psychoanalysis as a result is an adjustment of attitude towards openness. So in this sense understanding that the solutions of today become constrictions of tomorrow and no single change is ultimately valid. It's the open-minded attitude itself that's valid. So life is a question and we are meant to become an answer and the answer doesn't remain the same through life. Psychoanalysis is the only language left to answer the madness of today. I would say psychiatry completely fails theoretically or methodically. I mean madness on a global level. If we look at closed psyche following this concept of becoming an echo chamber of its own signals, loops of self-confirmation leads to neurosis or dogma. If we look at closed culture for example it leads to internal mythologizing and that results in decay of creativity to begin with, medieval times being the best illustration of it. And if we look at closed ideology for example then self-reference may be mistaken for truth and lead to tyranny which we also observe a lot surprisingly even in nowadays times of quite developed at least access to consciousness. And same may apply to closed technology, it can cause feedback without correction that can lead to meltdown. So now you may think that I am building it all up really big, this prelude to speech on psychedelics to spell it out that psychedelics will open it for you, the consciousness or the mind, but no, I want to present it completely the way around! Because I was open-minded and because I didn't allow my mind to constrict I managed to find the objective contributions of psychedelics. I was really puritan initially and I needed to overcome this limitation and it's often very intense limitation, puritan attitude as religions tend to prove for example. I think to everyone this attitude of open mind is enough.
Laura London:
Well what has been an authentic authority for you?
Fiann Paul:
There is a website called erowid.org. It is one of the longest running independent online libraries and it documents human experiences with psychoactive substances. It's been there since mid '90s and collected firsthand reports, thousands of them and more than just reports, but most of all, most importantly, reports and they are very well systemized and you can browse them and request very particular types of experiences with particular substances. Why does this matter as reports not an academic database for example? Because erowid preserves phenomenology of these subjective symbolic and somatic dimensions of doors of perception and this as a result creates a really large archive of how people actually experience these substances outside of formal research settings. So if you start looking for people's reports which I think you should if you want to get to know the field and you don't look for authority in the first place, but you really look for people's experiences, you will find it inevitably and rather quickly, and if you haven't found it yet it means that you haven't looked for reports, that means that you try to validate it in other way. Some reports consistently prove valuable outcomes and that's how I selected substances that I chose to explore that appear to be consistently contributing something worth experiencing. A few years ago though, I bring this anecdote here, I experienced disappointment with some of my colleagues because they needed to hear this boring lifeless professor to tell them that there is some potential in psychedelics and some of them said after hearing this lecture: “I am considering that there actually may be something in there” and I was really disappointed, and they were surprised to see my disappointment. It’s very difficult for me to watch how most people's lives are defined by external locus of control because I showed erowid to many of them and many times, but the professor who embodied no life who lacked juice of life but holds his badge of formal authority had higher weight to their opinion making yes we can ask analogically why AI is supportive of psychedelics well maybe because it's from San Francisco?.... but maybe because it analyzed humanity log and applied intelligence to investigating it. And I think it could be important to look in a broader context and point where the initial most deeply embossed negative bias came from. It started with American President Nixon and his agenda on psychedelics. So I would like to just take a moment even though it may sound like a detour but it's really important part of the whole picture to understand to review what he's not widely enough infamous for. One really big thing was disconnecting the American dollar from gold backing. It may sound trivial but a really critical turn in the history of the world actually because the worst president won't outperform this move. I know it sounds like a very provocative statement, but in the big picture, yes. Why? Because it didn't collapse the country's economy overnight, but it rewired the entire economic architecture and opened the door for all this finance madness that today is often mentioned as the number one evil of the United States and in some way righteously so. So the future or current president will really struggle to match this scale of downgrade. Next thing that I would like to mention, okay, that's maybe not exactly during his presidency, but it was orchestrated by the CIA right before he became president… it's one of my favorite phenomenons from an entertaining point of view:Operation Midnight Climax. This operation lasted for over a decade. It basically consisted of CIA staging fake brothels and hiring prostitutes to spike their customers with psychedelics most of all, and it was a research if we can call it so, whether psychedelics can be used to interrogate and extract information from people. But I believe what was often very triggering and what the agents were accused of that voyeurism of this project was probably more appealing than the results of the research because they were watching these scenes from behind the mirrors or on the recordings as they were recording it on hidden cameras. Now next things while Nixon launched the war on drugs at home US military soldiers were getting addicted in Vietnam but he was blaming dealers. There is a very important quote and he'll maybe let me read it. Okay, I'll pull it out because this one has to be cited verbatim: John Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic policy adviser later admitted, “We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.” I mean this is a really intense statement! And it shows that it's completely not about what it is about. And speaking of authority, another intense display, and I really think it should be understood, thinking of the big picture of psychedelics, and law, how it later rolled down the hill like a snowball from this moment on. This is the same president who, for example, during one of his speeches, after the Watergate scandal, breaking into democratic headquarters, when he was asked by journalists: “when a president does something illegal, is it not illegal?” And he said: “yes, when a president does it, then it's not illegal”. This is also a really intense statement. So let's say he knew something about the authority but he just got it from the wrong end. And lastly to even more contradict it, there was one of very rare scenes in history when he was giving speech to a crowd a very important speech huge crowd and someone behind him speaks giving him instructions while it was not expected to be caught in microphone, and someone speaks with a very commanding and let's call it impolite tone such as: “wrap it up!... wrap it up!”... and he wraps it up. I mean it's a really odd thing. So in the end it also seems that authority was something he struggled with. It might be worth adding that he for example was also a great supporter of Spanish dictator Franco and he was probably the main cause why Franco broke the record of the longest lasting dictatorship in Europe because he was positioned to his advantage to Nixon's advantage. So now if you put it all together, and you ever hear anyone like dead chamber echoing: “oh but psychedelics are bad because they are illegal". Basically at this moment one echoes all that was said here, and basically indirectly saying: “Viva Papa Nixon!”. But no, just don't be like iron filings cause magnets can be agenda driven too. And even if he ends up governing your reality as in his ghost, just like in primary school, apply this policy: you know how you often teach very intelligent young students in primary school? You need to finish and get good grades, but don't let them mess you up. So nobody can prohibit you from traveling where for example psychedelics are legal where echoes of Nixon’s legislative have not reached. I can give you an example: in coincidentally juxtaposed Japan you could buy psilocybin mushrooms from street vending machines until the 90s. Well, it's important to understand that the foremost purpose of every institution is to preserve itself. No institution in the name of truth will open itself to self-annihilation. So that's the first point to keep in mind granting authority to institutions whether it's CIA and midnight climax or president.
Yes, one of my favorite exposees of the uselessness of authority was Lobsang Rampa. I don't know if anybody remembers his books, but it was a fantastic example. It was a firsthand experience of a Tibetan Lama that elaborated on details of the regime and the advancement of spiritual and transcendental practice in Tibet and of daily life and of cultural flavors. Books became bestsellers and they were cited in universities to later find out that Lobsang Rampa was not a Tibetan Lama but was a plumber from Ireland who did not even complete university and has never been to Tibet. But it's a fantastic story. I love this story, and there were some other examples like that. There was Alex Malarkey for example who as a few years old boy experienced near death and when he returned, he said that he met Jesus and it built cult around him and this cult carried on until he was about 20 he confessed that he made it all up because he knew he would be more popular and people would be excited about it, but his followers rejected it. It's a striking example of collective denial in the face of discontinued spiritual authority. When the prophet himself confesses the lie, the believers still prefer the illusion. One more documentary actually I could recommend it's called Kumare. It's very good training in authority navigation. It's a man who chooses to become a spiritual leader, a guru, but he documents it step by step and he never believes in it. He says clearly from the beginning that it is going to be just a performance but he follows all the steps which are very conventional and he successfully builds a certain following. The same phenomenon happens, collective denial in the face of disconfirmed spiritual authority. He towards the end confesses the whole scheme and some followers reject this confession and keep following the practice he established. And I actually believe that most spiritual leaders are like Lobsang Rampa, just slightly less explicitly and literally. So I remember the moment when I realized that I had to choose between loyalty to Jungian prohibition of earlier Jungian days and loyalty to my own experience. And I knew that if I followed my own authority, I might lose belonging to a tribe that I loved. But if I ignored it, I would betray the very psyche that the analyzes asked me to serve. I think not only me, perhaps everyone. I mean the psyche is asking everyone to be followed. So slightly moving back to the big picture, psychedelics fascinated me not just as trips but as instruments that reveal the psyche's own intelligence. The etymology of the word psychedelic means soul revealing and I see psychedelics as amplifiers not shortcuts of the individuation process. So when they are used responsibly, they catalyze profound psychological insight and result in emotional process and reorganization. And because they reveal the soul, they are disliked by authority even more because the soul is an equalizer. And while ego builds a life that works, the soul asks for a life that matters. And psychedelics defeat ego and let the soul speak. As a result, psychedelics are becoming a great equalizer. They borrow this quality from the soul. And the soul is the opposite to persona or to formal authority. And surprisingly, it's often not welcome at all even in the soul praising circles. When hierarchies are invalidated, personas appear. And the first phenomenon to occur is authority panic, especially on an institutional level. Also partly because authority rests on control of difficulty. Priests for example are meant to be the elite who can exclusively mediate between humans and the divine. Right? So it might be also worth noting as a side note that today it's a newly mismatched association of the word psychedelic with colors and geometric shapes to define for example psychedelic art. Soul revealing has nothing to do with it at its core and these shapes are just one of the side effects of it. It's just a decoration. I have very little interest in this decoration. But I have full interest in this soul revealing. And to just close up the authority theme, I would like to mention that however uncomfortable it may sound, all of us who wait for the validation by the external authority are those that could very easily be hypnotized by any totalitarian system. So of course when we hear it, we would say no, no, absolutely no. But there is a lot of probing already existing whether we fall for propaganda or not. Well, social media is one of them. There is more. And how many people believe effortlessly without any inquiry that things are normal just because the status quo promotes it?....
Laura London:
So you see psychedelics as complimentary rather than opposed. And today it's very commonly emphasized the integration aspect to this.
Fiann Paul:
Yes I have a metaphor from the realm of biology to explain the integration aspect or its importance, or maybe more precisely ornithology. So there is a species of bird called common swift, and that bird is quite phenomenal because it's known to be able to live and it typically does live its nearly entire life in the air but if it ever lands on flat ground as a result, it's stuck, it can’t take off without height. So that's a metaphor and I will break it down a bit now. Psychedelic states are the air in this metaphor. They lift people effortlessly and in the altered state people feel spacious, lucid, visionary and connected. It is like flying. Gravity is suspended. Then in everyday life there is the ground solid and flat. And when the session ends people land and suddenly they are back in their normal psychological gravity. Let's say defenses, habits, narratives, relationship dynamics, and like the swift they realize that you cannot take off from flat ground just because he once flew. And actually a joke comes to my mind: even more difficult from flat earth to some. Now height is integration work and a swift needs altitude to launch again and in this sense humans need architecture but I want to refer to the etymologically undisturbed understanding of architecture because it is a beautiful word actually especially should be of interest to Jungians because it literally means nothing else than giving shape to an archetype. So psychological attitude is the structure, practice, reflection, analysis, discipline, meaning making, that is all architecture, and without that elevation the person is stuck on the ground and there are memories of flight but often no momentum. So Leonardo da Vinci once spoke of this beautiful thing and I don’t remember exactly how this quote goes: once you tasted the flight you will always keep looking skywards. And flight is easy. Ascending again from the ground requires architecture. So psychedelics can drop you into the sky but they cannot give you the launch pad to launch your life afterwards or maybe just partial depending on your disposition. Some can to some degree, to some people it's entirely impossible and only integration fully builds that launch pad. So experiences are not transformation. Structure is a transformation. Structurizing by the way is a major aspect of our work with clients whether as analysts in analysis or psychedelic therapies. It's quite important to understand that new age mused this idea that catharsis alone is, and the reason why is because katharsis is like an explosion after which the system quite sufficiently self-regulates but the structurizing requires knowledge of machinery or let's say anatomy of the soul. So back to the metaphor, if you find this bird common swift on the ground and you want to help it, you can take it on your palm and let it fly. It typically will if it was not suffering for too long deprived of food and water. But in this metaphor, I'm not trying to point out that the hand is a guide and swift is a person. Not at all. It's a metaphor for an approach. It is what you can act towards yourself. So integration is when the real work happens without a doubt and as long as the therapeutic aspect goes of course which we focus on today.
Laura London:
What other aspects could we talk about?
Fiann Paul:
Well the experience itself can be a goal that doesn't require any rational validation. It is just something to be aware of. If it's your intention. I think I mentioned in the last podcast that there are three potential directions to take as long as my understanding of life goes. Experience, self-expression and contribution. And art of healing bridges self-expression and contribution. But we may find out that life is about experience alone. In the end and ultimately if there ever is revealed the only and ultimate meaning of life and if there isn't then we need to create it ourselves.
Laura London:
Mhm. Well, but let's continue with the therapeutic aspect and with integration.
Fiann Paul:
Mhm. So without context, a psychedelic experience could be like an unfinished dream or a randomly picked pages of the book. Could be potent but directionless. Interestingly, that's how Herman Hesse described the experience of our lives when we can’t find a broader existential context to it. And that's where depth psychology becomes uniquely handy. And also that's when he decided to work with an analyst himself, it was a big part of his life and transformation because depth psychology translates this raw experience into meaning and provides context. You need a vessel or a container for the fire of these psychedelic experiences. So depth psychology is an excellent, I would say phenomenal, like a steampunk wonder. For those who may not be familiar, steampunk is a general in fiction initially in literature but it attracted a lot of visual representations, where technology detoured in the end of Victorian era fully corresponding with the Jungian appearance in chronology where Jungian psychology appeared that's why it's a it's interesting match. In this (steampunk) realm only pneumatic, hydraulic and magnetic energy sources and technology developed. So electronics as it is in our world dominating technology did not appear. So you can imagine that visually this world looks very interesting. Well if anybody is bored I encourage looking up the recent AI videos because these things are very difficult to produce. In the past they were only still images. Today there are beautiful steampunk AI videos. And what is special about it, what I'm trying to deliver here is that this marvel looks antiquarial and futuristic simultaneously. And just like psychology, it took a different turn at this time (end of Victorian era), Jungian psychology kept developing in a slightly different direction. That's why I bring this comparison. And perhaps that's how Jungian psychology appears in front of many other psychologies. Nevertheless, it translates experience into meaning. And again, I repeat that I think only psychoanalysis can explain the madness of the world today. I've seen many people come out of psychedelic experiences inspired but fragmented. They opened the gate but the bridge was not built. So without grounding the unconscious can flood the ego and without navigation and orientation there are a lot of distractions in the experience and I would maybe like to list them to give an idea:
-for example inflation is a common one, people experience flying with angels in the sky. That's inflation, or psychedelic experience that's not necessarily a process, that's a form of defense.
-entertainment is one of them such as giggling. It can be fun and I don't want to say it's a wrong thing, but it's not fully utilized or it's less utilized psychedelic potential.
-Intoxication, I mean, as a way of being lost in the labyrinth just to get high. Some manage to use some psychedelics this way. It's more likely to be a way of depressants. Speaking of categorization of substances, but some managed to use psychedelics this way
-and distraction of all sorts. Sometimes it's even erotic distraction, but sometimes it may be the best you can get out of a psychedelic trip. A very exceptional unique erotic experience, but overall it could be a turn slightly away from the core of the experience.
-And there is also a phenomenon I call psychedelic defense mechanism. And maybe we can describe it a bit later if we have time because it's a bit longer theme.
Laura London:
Okay.
Fiann Paul:
-Another thing to be careful about is of course shadow bypassing a common new age domain ascending to love and light without descending simultaneously. That's where new age ends and Jungian psychology starts in the natural progression of consciousness or of development for many young people. That's when they find: ah there is something incomplete in it. I want to look for some more convincing way of handling healing or internal processes. Right.
-And becoming schizotypal is one of the risks as well. Which to me most of all in psychedelic contexts means making psychedelic experience the only feeling of home while losing sight of the path to any home on earth. And this is actually a more complex phenomenon that I speak about during the lectures on personality disorders. So I invite listeners to expand if they want. Maybe I will not elaborate on it too much here.
Laura London:
How is the consensus today emphasizing neurochemistry versus symbolism?
Fiann Paul:
Yes, the emphasis is on neurochemistry, clinical trials and the measurable outcomes. Yes, that's all valuable but it misses the symbolic dimension of course. So the meaning of the experience and its architecture is left unspoken. So psychospiritual literacy as we could name it is the ability to navigate what's revealed.
Laura London:
Well most research seems to focus on receptors and neurotransmitters as the mechanism behind the effects. Do you think that's the whole story or do you think there's something deeper going on? I mean, you've spoken about meaning being lost when we reduce all of this to chemistry, but on a biological level, what do you see as being the real keys to their power, their therapeutic power?
Fiann Paul:
When you reduce that to serotonin receptors, for example, you amputate its meaning for sure. Not only because there are about 50 known receptors that participate in these processes and probably another 50 still unknown, actually even though recent findings indicate that it's not even just serotonin receptors as they were initially believed to be the key, this 5-HT2A receptor that is known to create visions but as long as therapeutic potential is concerned it is today believed to be GDNF and BDNF which to simplify is a growth protein or growth factor. The aspects of the experience if I could simplify have restorative and regenerative impact on our nervous system literally physically plus psychotherapy. So GDNF and BDNF plus psychotherapy, that's today believed to be the most potent approach not as before believed to be 5-HT2A receptors and visions. But that is aligned overall with my personal findings because before this consensus existed and before I knew well enough the science behind it as this equation was not known some time ago, I found that iboga was the most potent psychedelic therapeutically and it is the most growth factor generating psychedelic. So we could look at it as more than just psychedelic and because the actually conventionally understood psychedelic effect of it may not be visually impressive. So even though I believe there is still a limitation to this conclusion, what is the key to the therapeutic potential, what works best and how we don't have the ultimate knowledge yet. It's nowhere near. It's just an example of recent findings. I won't be rigid holding on to it. I would like to give a metaphor that could illustrate it well. Psychology is a child in the community of sciences. Mathematics is a grandpa. Psychedelics are an embryo. So, science is just being born here. In psychology, people complain that numbers are right until new numbers come. Mathematics is very old, crystallized, smoothened up narrative because not much can surprise you anymore. In psychedelics, even the questions are still forming. That's how early we are and that's what I think about researchers. The questions are still forming.
Laura London:
What would you say is actually happening in a psychedelic state?
Fiann Paul:
What happens in a psychedelic state isn't just chemistry as we just named it. There is cosmology as well. The psyche is expressing itself in mythic and archetypal form and reduction of this experience to neurochemical facts feels similar to how boring and limited science only based psychology has become. I continuously see this hype about such articles and such discoveries and such research and it reminds me a bit of how indigenous people didn't need to define scientifically photosynthesis for example to understand that the forest is the heart of life and it was always perceived as holding the status of non-human personhood as indigenous people perceived it, perhaps even superhuman personhood, and now surprisingly governments are granting legally non-human personhood to ecosystems and species such as rainforest or dolphins. And westerners go there to talk with the spirit of the forest during the indigenous rituals because it seems to be able to answer what they can't anymore. I think the mystery of psychedelics, answering your question, goes as far as the mystery of human being or the mystery of life. I would say that psychedelics are a picklock to the chambers of the mysteries of life or at least one of them and somewhere in this intriguing existence of human biosphere, and I use this word biosphere consciously because it links to the beautiful concept of biophilia. Biophilia names this instinctive bond with living systems. It's a phrase introduced by psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, for indigenous cultures that bond was not a theory or a value or a movement or commandment. It was basically the default condition of the psyche embedded in the landscape. So it did not need a word for something that before it stopped existing. It's like stealing did not exist in some indigenous languages. Then Erich Fromm articulated this term to give language to what disappeared and to define modern condition more properly through naming the gaps in the picture. And once it disappears, loss of instinctual wholeness appears which we know today is basically a definition of neurosis in Jungian language. And psychotherapy follows wherever this center-forging western civilization appears. I say center forging instead of center finding. It's a big difference. It makes psychotherapy immediately become necessary. I observed it many times. Even in my short life, I saw this wave progressing to different parts of the world. I saw this phenomenon growing in Africa. Biophilia is not just something indigenous people had. It's something that modern people lost and suddenly it wasn't there and it was named. So going back to where I detoured somewhere in the intriguing existence of the human biosphere, mythologically, I believe in these inconspicuous jungles someone left a picklock to unlock the access to the source of life perhaps and life beyond the sheer biology of it. Of course, accessing this source allows us to confront our humanhood, seen usually as a map covering lands and times from present through our childhood and all the way down to our atavistic heritage. I imagine that this entity, presence or creator said: “might you dare….” to humans, and the jungles echoed: “they might dare…” because jungles and humans were best friends! So obviously they supported each other, and let me speculate that the user manual to life is written on the walls of our psyche’s chambers in carbon braille and lit in infrared. Let me break it down a bit. I call it carbon braille because we are carbon based life forms and braille is this alphabet that blind people read by touching it. And it's made of dots similar to atoms. It doesn't emanate visual light spectrum. That's why it's lit in infrared as our eyes perceive it. Means you can't see it, but you can touch it or feel its warmth like mammals do and psychedelics I believe can take you there and let you touch it. They, indigenous people read it on a daily basis, this carbon braille. It was their holy scripture, their life user manual. And we western men, well we read the Bible. So modern human beings believe they create the center often even without the context while indigenous people believed to be finding it. And now we go back to indigenous people asking if they could take us to these chambers to these roots that we had lost, and to the center that we are looking for, giving up on many of our own failed center creation attempts. And in many ways science proves that to continuously retrospectively admit that certain major things about indigenous people were right in this or that area of life. The climate conferences are a perfect place to observe this dialogue. When I lived in Greenland, I attended some of those and it was always, always the same dynamic. And from a Jungian point of view this biophilia is a return of an archetype that was once repressed in indigenous cultures. It is Self calling through biology when myth and ritual are gone. Today we experience very intense reemergence or appearance of this hybrid epics, hybrid as in futuristic and indigenous simultaneously, such as Dune or Black Panther or Avatar, and maybe even Mad Max to a degree could make it there. And or one of my favorite but less known so it's not an epic but the best of all those is an animation Scavengers Reign. It emphasizes these realms meeting. And there is some unconscious urge for illustrating and watching it I believe for a reason. And maybe also I would mention here to close this thought on what's really there, at the end of one of my favorite films titled Artificial Intelligence (2001) when in the last scene a very advanced forms of life, perhaps artificial intelligence futuristic not sure maybe extraterrestrial forms of life appear on earth and witness one of the last encounters with human DNA and one of them makes a beautiful comment and says: “human must have been the key to the mystery of creation”. And I would like to add to this comment that perhaps psychedelics are one of the doors to this mystery.
Laura London:
Well, do you think that technology is the future or is indigenous wisdom the future?
Fiann Paul:
Well, I believe that there are four frontiers of technology and I would even say of business to list them. It's obviously AI first and foremost and the next three will also be interlaced with AI but they are blockchain, anti-aging and psychedelics. Psychedelics is one of them and is the only one that's most directly touching psychology or most directly located in psychology. So as a result I believe that one of the most significant frontiers in psychology are psychedelics and AI. Maybe technology will find a way to access the roots of consciousness on that level that surpasses the psychedelic practice of indigenous people by for example upgrading cybernetically our nervous systems. Well, we already are cyborgs to a degree because we all function only with the electronic prosthesis such as smartphones, not anymore without it. Yes, that's the definition of being a cyborg. But maybe it will be a very advanced interaction with a nervous system that will help us experience this permanent oneness. Oneness that was mystically described in Vedas for example, that was only a utopian dream for even the very well-oriented modern men, they could only aspire to it but they never achieved it. I am confident for example that in the future we will have nano robots in our nervous systems activating different receptors in any way we wish, that we could operate with an app but the app will not anymore be in a palm size mobile device. It will be something somewhere in the quantum carrier of information and who knows where it leads. If such technology actually happens, we will be able to request any process, psychological, emotional process we imagine, any experience, any mood, any state of mind. This would be a whole new reality and whole new life. There is this concept of connectome that assumes that just like the internet connects us digitally, connectome would connect us neurologically. That's a concept of oneness for sure, a very intriguing concept.
For now though hats off to indigenous people because they read the user manual before they started using this planet. That's how I see it and it's a significant part of education we overlooked. You know, funny fact, it is actually one of the classic ADHD questionnaire points, searching for behavioral traits such as starting to use something, a complicated new device for example without looking at the user manual first, assuming that okay I will figure that out. And now we colonizers are struggling to decolonize ourselves and we deforestators are trying to reforest our minds. I would add as a joke referring to our conversation a few minutes ago and hopefully to de-Nixon our legislation.
Laura London:
You've spoken about Jungians being in a uniquely privileged position when it comes to psychedelic work. Why do you think Jungian psychology, depth psychology, is particularly suited to this?
Fiann Paul:
Well the psychedelic field is full of people who can open gates and it unfortunately often is a space to hide for incompetent people as well because it gives certain power even without competence of any sort. That power is limited to certain auto-intelligent aspect of psychedelic substances which treatment providers often try to claim as their contribution (to the process) or their efforts. Jungians though are among very few who are actually trained to walk with someone through what comes after the gate is open. They for example have the capacity to differentiate revelation from inflation. And these are just random traits I could mention here. There are many of them. They are trained in holding symbolic material without literalizing it. They are trained in long-term relational containers, not just events. They find comfort, if it's the right way to phrase it, with encounters with shadow, death, sacrifice, and difficult archetypal material. So I believe it is time for Jungian psychology to take an active role in the psychedelic renaissance. This is why I founded the International Jungian Psychedelic Association, IJPA. It is a nonprofit association registered in Portugal. Its purpose is to bridge depth psychology and psychedelic practice to ensure that the revival of these substances is matched by equal revival of psychological understanding. So this organization will most importantly offer a professional network, a network of analysts and therapists trained in psychedelic integration and a training and certification program for practitioners. Two types of training programs to be precise, one for Jungians to learn the protocol and practice psychedelic assisted therapies and one for practitioners to learn the Jungian craft. Jungians need to be made aware that we are standing in a very privileged place and I want this privilege to be made conscious and available to claim by Jungians. I don't think we should miss this train. And what I will say now is probably one of the most important points we are touching on today: what I keep hearing from people who complete psychedelic facilitation training programs is that the real skill that they are missing isn't the logistics of managing this session or practical technical aspects but is the capacity to work with the content itself which is essentially what Jungians have been trained to do all along. Depth psychology is uniquely suited to this territory because it gives this framework for receiving, interpreting, integrating experiences and instead of staying at the level of symptoms or surface techniques it works with archetypes, complexes, dreams, symbols, the shadow, exactly the same kind of forces that tend to emerge in psychedelic states. And a facilitator trained in depth psychology isn't just holding space, they can actually recognize when someone is encountering these deep layers of their psyche and help them navigate it. Most importantly, depth psychology orients this whole process toward individuation, not just symptom relief or theme of healing but the question of who a person is meant to become or unbecome in a big picture sense, that first has to be understood and its a study that doesn't happen in a course over span of a year or so. Jungians know how long, going back to these hours we were counting initially, how long it takes to train these skills, right. And also it holds the clinical side and the symbolic meaning together, yes, so honoring the risk and sacredness of the work and because of that I think also it offers the most complete and responsible frame that we currently have for psychedelic assisted therapy. Our goal is to ensure that the psychedelic renaissance is grounded in meaning, in individuation and psychological depth, more than in clinical mechanics. And on the other hand there is also training for Jungians that bridges what Jungians already know with what they most need to learn, positioning them to lead rather than remain on the sidelines. For example official guidelines for psychedelic assisted therapy today say that if you work with someone who experienced sexual abuse trauma you defer him to someone with therapeutic background. It's a very wise, very wise guideline. Why not deferring to a Jungian when someone encounters major archetypal presences such as for example inner persecutor? Is it less of a caliber of challenge or less dangerous construct in the psyche than sexual abuse trauma? It's very difficult to quantify it but something we could argue about right now. New Age that influences most of the psychedelic assisted therapy trainings is hopeless in front of it. Yeah. What would be the typical intervention of the untrained? A bit of intuition, a bit of mindfulness, a bit of something new age, a bit of what someone else I know did in a similar case and a phrase maybe from this self-development course and something from a self-help book and no actual competent intervention, right? So when you read books you hear that they don't even have language to name these things, that the language is very spontaneous and a little bit clumsy I have to say sometimes.
Laura London:
Mhm. So what should a Jungian do then if they feel called to this work and they don't know how to begin?
Fiann Paul:
First of all, if you are someone who should be included in the core faculty or core analysts and the faculty is not limited to Jungians exclusively, I want to say please reach out to us and we will review it. This list is being finalized and there are still some ongoing conversations. Otherwise, if you are a Jungian analyst or a therapist listening and you feel perhaps both drawn and uneasy, I think that's healthy. And I think I would not suggest to start serving medicine tomorrow. I would suggest to start with three things. One, deepen your own symbolic literacy. Learn the science enough to sort out myth from data like dust from the seeds in Jungian fairy tales and if you will feel called, begin a serious relationship with your own doors of perception, ideally I guess under proper guidance. And IJPA is being built as a place where you don't have to do it alone.
Laura London:
This field, the psychedelic field, seems to be split between religious ceremonial use and rather tightly controlled clinical frameworks. How do you see that shaping the future of this work, that polarization?
Fiann Paul:
We are also creating a meeting place between the ancient and the modern and between ritual and analysis and perhaps beyond this entheogenic tourism or academic rigidity. Many people complain that it's either or. That's true. It's difficult to find something in between and this polarization is enforced most of all by law. It leaves two ways to bypass the prohibitive regulations, religious or clinical. Clinical usually means medical clinical. Jungians would call it deprived of eros. Explaining for non-Jungians, it doesn't mean that it's non-eroticized. It just means that it's giving you this feeling that you feel when you enter a court building or a bank. It's sterile. It's impersonal. It's non-relatable. And the development of psychedelic regulation seems to be all leading towards psychiatrists for example being the most privileged practitioners. I would never guess it would be such a great profession to have been trained in. And then religious use has limitations too. It can't address therapy legally, limits types of interventions and promotional and naming issues arise and so on. Just like modern psychology becomes very mechanistic and only to a minor degree teaches us about the depth of the psyche. I would say that the psyche was nearly eliminated from psychology like Steve Jobs from Apple. And this is why James Hollis says that he rather reads classical literature and how character versus fate saga unfolds instead of this mechanistic new modern research-based psychology. And I think something slightly similar happens with psychedelics. I sometimes say that Claudio Naranjo's book The Healing Journey, I think it was late 60s or early 70s, was one of the first and the last great books on psychedelics. It was very unfiltered. It was undisturbed and innocently direct and later writing drifted into wrestling with academic nuances, all these things that feel unrelated to the inner process itself, making the work as a result as well less relatable and unintentionally paving way for big pharma to annex the field. Sometimes it also went into this very goody, I like to use this word to illustrate the dynamic: g o o d y, means careful stating the obvious, a lot of white and no red color in it. And Claudio Naranjo, by the way, was one of the closest friends of José María Fábregas, who is one of our IJPA board members. And I believe that to introduce the board briefly here maybe as we are speaking about it: José María Fábregas may actually become the core figure in the European psychedelic renaissance. I say it just because I know what he’s working on and who he’s working with, and there is a high chance he may provide a space where we can legally practice. On board there is also Mark Winborn, one of the leading Jungians, and established presence that doesn’t need introduction to any Jungians, track record of solidity and accountability and building leadership, and Saliha Afridi, who, directly speaking, is one of the key figures in the realm of psychology in the United Arab Emirates, and Eduardo Drivon, a former professor of politics from the United States, today Jungian in training. And maybe I would just say a word why the board was designed this way. I took reference from The Explorers Club, one of the institutions that defined one of my past lives. I am a fellow and a mentor there. When leadership boards were chosen there, not the best explorers were chosen, but the people who are in the field and have the strongest records of leadership and building businesses or institutional. But all of our board members are leaders, are open-minded, psychedelics-friendly. So Jungians, open-minded and psychedelics-friendly, are quite a niche in a niche in a niche, who are leaders and have a track record of very solid building. That’s a very narrow group of Jungians.
Laura London:
What does certification look like for people who want to enter this field? Is there a standard path?
Fiann Paul:
Well, we are in the pioneer phase. So the institutions will come later and they will pretend to have invented these standards. Jungians can now either quietly wait to be accredited by someone else, desperately look who it could be, or they can accept that right now we are the ones who actually must help shape those standards. And this is what I am encouraging them to do. This situation is usually temporary. It’s an anomaly, like tornado. You know how a tornado is created meteorologically? It’s when cold air, which typically always falls down and stays at the bottom, happens to be above, and warm air, that usually goes up, happens to be below. And these masses happen to overlap without colliding yet, and suddenly when they touch each other, it’s a very rapid correction of this anomaly. And I think we are in a little bit of a similar dynamic now. These institutions later will retrospectively legitimize all the current pioneers. But for now, it’s basically a field without this credentialing infrastructure, or as I called it more simply, a pioneer phase of a discipline which is psychedelic-assisted therapies or psychedelics in general. In science studies and the sociology of knowledge this is sometimes also called a legitimacy gap or institutional vacuum. So the expertise exists in practice, but not yet in all the formal education or certification systems. The early experts are basically self-taught pioneers or founders of a discipline, and they themselves end up shaping all the standards, but institutions later certify others. A beautiful footprint of such a phenomenon is actually Carl Jung. If you open his Wikipedia page, you see him mentioned as a psychiatrist, not as a psychoanalyst, right? It’s quite a weird thing. But he was the one who certified the first psychoanalysts. Nevertheless, he didn’t initially become labeled as one historically. So psychoanalysis was exactly the same phenomenon in the beginning of the 20th century. Aviation around the same time, the Wright brothers are not mentioned as pilots, maybe here a bit more righteously, because they were aviators in a broad sense: designers, builders, scientists, philosophers of aviation of all sorts. Then computer science, it’s hard to say where we assumed the computer scientist was a computer scientist, but somewhere around the mid-20th century the first computer scientists were mathematicians and cryptographers. And then artificial intelligence, also hard to agree where the actual beginning of it is, but as we associate it today, it’s quite a new phenomenon. Theoretically in science it’s (AI) not that new, but the pioneers were not trained or certified in artificial intelligence. Cybersecurity was a similar phenomenon. Cryptocurrency and blockchain from 2009 onwards, that was sometimes a very intriguing psychological phenomenon, where again cryptographers and mathematicians were the only ones who could explain enigmatic concepts and apply them to finance, such as proof of stake, while hardly any senior banker could explain what derivatives are, for example. And today it is psychedelic therapy. Why not Jungians being one of the pioneers alongside neurologists, psychiatrists, and so on? The pattern has always been the same. I’ve observed it quite a lot and learned from it. And historically speaking, holding back psychedelics from therapeutic clients is like holding back antibiotics from the crowd would have been if early doctors had done so.
Laura London:
Well, I’d like to know what exactly psychedelics are best at healing in your experience. What are they best at healing?
Fiann Paul:
If I were to phrase it in one sentence, I would say they are the best at healing the parts of you that are frozen. A lot of it would boil down to the preverbal, in Jung-friendly language. If I put it very simply, they are the most powerful tools we have today for restarting psychic processes that got frozen very early. And Jungian psychology is the best language we have for making sense of all that emerges there, what is hidden in the preverbal, for us to understand practically, such as suicide tendencies, lack of hope for life, lack of will to pass on life to anyone, seeing life as a burden, which is the cause of the former. We could basically round it up to a “right to exist” hidden in the preverbal, which, if we contemplate deeply, can be defining nearly everything in our lives as a domino effect.
Interestingly, just as a digression, when you work with interpretation of art therapy, preverbal is often where abstract shapes appear, simple geometrical figures and so on. And I sometimes wonder if psychedelic vision is how infants see the world.
Back to neurology a bit: the amygdala plays a big role in the preverbal, major role, the amygdala and our body, as in the body outside the brain, because the brain is a body too, but the limbic body, let’s call it. And surprisingly or not, the amygdala is always mentioned in psychedelic research as the part of the brain that plays a critical role in the healing process that psychedelics initiate.
If we were to define preverbal more classically, we could say it engages emotional responses, body memories, attachment expectations, affect regulation patterns, somatic reactions, relational templates. So preverbal is difficult to access in therapy because language had not existed back then, and language doesn’t have access to these records. This is a territory where language fails, and what has access is relational rather than verbal. These terrains can be accessed relationally. Therapists know it. They know that it’s often actually also the embodiment of their own transformation that can help. It resonates relationally. It cannot be technically compensated. Psychedelics bypass this barrier. They nearly go there right away. And this is a huge potential.
Laura London:
You lecture on personality disorders. Which ones do you think can be helped or healed by psychedelics?
Fiann Paul:
I would very confidently point to cluster A personality disorders. Because they are usually linked to preverbal wounds. And my conclusion is that psychedelics don’t heal cluster B personalities. I will be blunt about it, full stop. Preverbal wounds and the right to exist we mentioned before, is validated in the case of cluster B personalities, but the right to be yourself isn’t.
Not to make it too much of a psychology discourse and sidetrack, but it might be helpful to those who are interested in the theme. As a result, cluster B personalities can claim others’ energy and space, attempting to validate their right to be yourself, while the former ones, the cluster A personalities, don’t find permission to claim anything, even for themselves. So the big paradox here is that being less disturbed in a chronological or holistic sense, if you were to quantify it, doesn’t mean less problematic or easier to heal. It’s a big paradox psychologically.
And then cluster C, I would say, is rather responsive to healing, not as profoundly as cluster A, but it is not immune like cluster B.
Psychedelics are basically best at healing the parts of you that are frozen.
And you maybe know the early definitions, one that I consider a genius contribution of Wilhelm Reich was the anatomical level of analysis of the schizoid personality, which he called the frigid child. And as we know, schizoid personality often encounters frozen landscapes in dream imagery, for example. It’s a big part of their inner landscape. So these frozen parts here are relevant. And so we could poetically round it up to existential deadness as well.
Another thing, all psychedelics have different profiles, of course, but nearly all of them show you who you are without defenses. So it could be to a degree understood as viewing you more raw, more untamed, more unconditioned, unadapted, this more original core of who you are, and understanding better where it got misaligned. That is the whole value of this neuro-reset phenomenon that psychedelics have a lot to do with, some more, some less, depending on which ones.
Again, we could go back to this understanding that ego builds a life that works and the soul asks for a life that matters. And psychedelics defeat the ego and let the soul speak. So hearing this voice is often very valuable.
And lastly, a big theme: reset to the instinctual self. So this instinct that was there before all the adaptations, that was our initial personal authority and our initial inner compass. The instinct that we knew before construct had overwritten it. Instinctual self was initially rendered as something rather negative or primitive until, I think, through the work of analysts, it turned out to be empirically discovered to be so strongly connected to our vocational compass that when we numb it or kill it, we don’t know anymore what we want from life and what is our call and what we are here for. And as a result, we don’t know anymore who we are.
So that’s a lot of the case of people who intuitively choose to work with Jungians. They see this light in the tunnel there, like a moth that’s driven to this light that can help reorient yourself in it (instinctual compass, vocation). So this would be the third major pillar of the prowess of psychedelics.
Laura London:
Well, what do we have to be careful with when working with psychedelics?
Fiann Paul:
So before I mentioned these potential obstacles and distractions, so maybe I won’t repeat that part, such as inflation and so on, but there are various levels of caution and danger. For example, I think I can just touch the surface, but I’ll try to say something psychologically interesting instead of all the encyclopedia of neurological risks.
For example, some substances are categorized as psychedelics but are definitely to be avoided, such as NBOMe or bromodragonfly compounds. Chemically psychedelics, doors of perception, no. So that’s an example of what to be careful with.
Well, typically listed in all the psychedelic-assisted therapy trainings, there are many things: careful assessment of structure and history, especially any psychosis or mental or neurological contraindications, understanding medical risks for each substance and the profile of it. And importantly, that for sure has to be mentioned, as we already named it, integration as a commitment, not a condition, not an option, not something to negotiate with.
And what else to be careful with? For example, the psychedelic defense mechanism that I mentioned before. I could develop it a little bit further. It’s a psycho-neuro intriguing phenomenon. There are some researchers that I believe are not glamorized enough. One is the Calhoun experiment, a “rat utopia”. But today maybe I would like to mention one by José Delgado. By the way, we are making a good loop now because José Delgado was held in prison by Franco, Franco who was kept in power by Nixon. Franco was a Spanish dictator.
So in José Delgado’s book Physical Control of the Mind, overall the experiments were about electrical stimulation of specific brain regions that caused participants to instantly form conclusions. And one very extreme case, I’m not remembering 100% if it was in this book or somewhere else, but in his work, one very intriguing case was that a participant of the research expressed the desire to marry the therapist conducting the study. There was no process of reasoning, no emotional buildup, no narrative formation, just immediate induced conclusion. And I made an effort to look up whether José Delgado was particularly handsome, but I’m not sure about it.
And the same principle can apply to the perception of depth or intensity or struggle during psychedelic experience. Psychoactive substances can press those neurological buttons instead of delivering genuine psychological content. So I call it a psychedelic defense mechanism, and it relates to what I mentioned earlier about the potential distractions. Basically, some people mistake this artificially triggered intensity for the actual result of the process they are undergoing. And I always encourage them to keep this distinction in mind.
It’s important to narrow this perceived content and transformation down to what was truly achieved therapeutically, rather than emphasizing just how intense and how extraordinary the experience felt. I say this again assuming that therapy is the goal. If the goal is simply the experience itself, then it doesn’t need to translate into therapy. In that case, no one can define what the ultimate purpose is. But we have to be conscious about it and name it as it is. And most importantly, of course, I know what the goal of IJPA is. Going back to this thought, most psychology, I believe, can be mastered once you understand that impulse comes first and the narrative appears afterward. And Delgado showed that this stimulation could cause a subject to invent a narrative just to justify a feeling or impulse that was artificially induced.
And when the narrative is doing nothing else than affirming who we already are, what we already are, then it blocks the soul’s impulse towards wanting to become more. The brain backfills the story to make the sudden impulse feel subjectively meaningful or self-generated. But it doesn’t necessarily happen to be so in every case. And the feeling of profundity may not be the proof of profundity.
So it’s important to be cautious and not trust your mind unconditionally. And not only in psychedelics, I would say in life in general. One of the pillars of understanding Jungian psychology is understanding that there is nothing more seductive than the ideologies or beliefs that justify our self-interests or ratify our complexes.
Another big one is the altruism defense mechanism. We know that it’s one of the most mature defenses. If all the world revolved around altruism as the main defense, it would be a beautiful place. But sometimes a beautiful illusion is more difficult to question than the ugly one because it doesn’t stick out too much, doesn’t have too many spikes, doesn’t cause losses significant enough. And it prevents us from understanding that yes, people sometimes feel profound empathy for the planet, for the forest, for nature, for endangered species in the psychedelic experience. But it is an altruism defense mechanism which is preventing them from touching their own process. It’s a very noble way out of it. And sometimes without psychedelics they do it too. Sometimes they even make it their life mission. But if we help ourselves first, then the problem actually may be less likely to exist in the outer world to begin with. But for sure, to help the outer world, we have to help ourselves first.
Another thing to be careful with, in a very intriguing way, is a big picture problem. What does it mean? Psychedelics often zoom you off to understanding the big picture of life in a very constructive way, often because we are stuck in provincial insecurity, smallness, and we hold on to this small role we play on this piece of sand that rotates around the sun in this infinite vast cosmos. And when you get a flavor of this feeling, you immediately give up a lot of things that you understand are futile. But too much of it can literally lower self-preservation to a degree that you will nearly withdraw from efforts in this world because in the big picture they indeed are futile. I mean, what change in this infinite and timeless universe your small life makes. But we of course have to make meaning for ourselves in this life. If not finding it, then creating it. And too much zooming off to the big picture may be disturbing, especially if you’re an intelligent person. This is a very convincing argument. There’s a great film I would recommend to all Jungians that metaphorically illustrates this dynamic of provincial insecurity. You just have to translate this metaphor in the right way. The film is called Distinguished Citizen. Of course, it’s a metaphor. It’s not a film about psychedelics, but it’s a beautiful exposé of provincial insecurity.
Laura London:
What would you say people are typically afraid of?
Fiann Paul:
They’re afraid of this very precious sense of control that they have mistaken for the nucleus of their identity very often. So at the very core, of course, they fear the mammalian. That which is tamed by control and shamed by civilization, that we feel deep inside but we learn to pretend that it’s not there because it is in the cage. And deep inside we know all the times it died and what it died for and how much energy is there below the lid and how scary it can be. It’s a little bit like with an animal in the zoo. Watch it, but from a distance. Don’t come too close and definitely don’t touch it! And to a certain level, they are right. I asked one person who struggled with insane anxiety and at the same time was drawn to psychedelic therapy, and I asked: imagine if your anxiety or fear communicates something factually correct, and there is really a reason to be scared and anxious about something that the psychedelics would reveal or unleash or that would manifest as a change in your life. What would it be? What’s your first impulse? And he mentioned three things: I would quit my job, divorce, and move out of the country. Well, this is really genius. You could not imagine more, what else can you change in your life? I understand it makes people profoundly scared or anxious or insecure.
I compare it sometimes a little bit, maybe each of us encountered once in life this odd owner of a dog, sometimes sitting somewhere with his dog, and you come to the dog, maybe you want to touch it or pet it, but you’re not sure. It looks a little bit off scene, and when you just spread your arm, he says, “Don’t spread your arm to this dog. It’s a good dog, but don’t spread your arm.” And you just keep standing, thinking and looking at this dog, and he says, “Don’t look it in the eyes. It’s a good dog. Don’t look it in the eyes.” And it’s a little bit like this.
Laura London:
What’s the worst thing that can happen?
Fiann Paul:
Well, what’s the worst thing that can happen? I work with surgeons as my clients. They are very interesting personalities, truly fascinating. And if you ask a surgeon what is the worst thing that can happen, they sometimes say it because clients ask them, they say the worst thing that can happen is that we both die. They just leave it like that. So it exposes a little bit of the absurdity of the question and names the magnitude of the fear, obviously. And nevertheless, surgeries happen every second.
And one of the most heroic figures in the psychedelic renaissance, if we could call it so, David Nutt, he brought a term Equasy. He basically presented research, a set of statistics, how low statistical risk psychedelics pose in general. He compared it to the risk that equestrian sports cause and the amount of injuries and overall risk. And the risk, I can’t remember, it was ten times less or something like that. And nevertheless, nobody is so obsessed about regulating it and continuously scrutinizing it and so on. And this is quite a weird coincidence. Well, surprisingly, again, as he questioned authority, exposed effectively the authority’s inconsistency, he was fired from the advisory council on the misuse of drugs in the UK, or maybe it’s an international institution. I can’t remember well. I think it’s the UK. I lecture on categorizations of psychedelics, and risk type is one of the categorizations.
So there are substances like iboga that hardly ever, I don’t want to say never, but nearly never cause psychosis or mental capacity loss that people usually fear, but they pose a risk of cardiovascular issues. While other psychedelics, some more, some less, cause risk of mental destabilization or even psychosis. But usually there has to be a nucleus for psychosis there.
People usually fear that when they take something (psychedelic) they will be running around doing crazy things because they don’t understand the concept of body load. Body load usually eliminates it naturally, because the more you take, the more immobilized you are. In the end it becomes a completely inner trip. So only on low doses you will be able to run around. Otherwise your body is basically in complete rest mode.
And this is a little bit of an imaginary problem with a lack of understanding, as long as we speak about psychedelics, of course. Because deliriants, which are a whole different group of hallucinogenic substances, yes, they can make you run around and do crazy things. So if you read deliriants trip reports, this is for example what witches in medieval times were using. These trips often end up in mental asylums, but these are not substances opening doors of perception. And I always advocate against them if I’m ever asked, but I don’t link them to psychedelics. So this is often a bit of a lack of understanding, or maybe also thinking it’s like amphetamine or cocaine, that people have a lot of physical energy and maybe become aggressive or something. That’s a very different type of processing. And the body load is inevitable. We would all like to be just experiencing consciousness alteration, but we also have to deal with the body load, unfortunately.
Laura London:
Well, what have you learned from psychedelics? What have they taught you?
Fiann Paul:
First of all, me personally, they helped me to restore hope in life. And I remember waking up once and saying: “life has never felt so optimistic”. And since that time I never went below the line, while I used to be living below the line until my early thirties. That’s the big thing.
Now I could mention many trivial things, but very intriguing or interesting. For example, what this neuro reset exposes. One most interesting thing I learned about sugar. That’s the drug that kills most people that we know. But like any drug, we build tolerance to it. So sweetness level perception is distorted because we desensitize our nervous system to this sweetness perception. And if you recover this healthy neutral, let’s say mammalian instinct for sweetness that we would literally crave, so when we reset this sugar tolerance, the optimal level of sweetness that feels comfortable is the taste of ripe banana, something sweeter than that feels literally disturbing. It’s very intriguing to watch how somebody goes back to their habits, grabs something sweet they used to snack every day, and suddenly feels repelled from it, nearly throws it away, not understanding that it has always tasted like that. But we have desensitized our nervous system to it. And we desensitize ourselves to many unnatural things that we have a chance to unwind, and see how things were originally. That’s a very interesting part of neuro reset. And if we cultivate this tolerance reset, it means we don’t keep pushing our taste buds to get desensitized again, this taste of ripe banana remains the maximal comfortable taste for us. We don’t feel comfort eating something sweeter than that. It’s a very interesting example.
To profound things: psychedelic breakthrough should be one of these, I would say, primeval experiences of life that are very difficult to explain, but you only know once you experience it, such as falling in love, for example. It’s very hard to educate someone theoretically about it. A first encounter with death or awareness of mortality, is a similar phenomenon of that caliber. Childbirth or witnessing it. And in this sense, psychedelics, particularly the breakthrough, which, yes, it’s a little bit vague phrase maybe, but once you experience it, exactly in the same way like falling in love. How to explain it? Once you experience it, you know it. It’s the true awe in front of sublime mystical union, you may think you have felt it, but it is a whole other world when you touch it with this breakthrough psychedelic intensity. And this made me understand that there is a door that’s always there, but in our entire life we may never choose to open it. And I can say there’s like a whole big world there behind this door, just as big as the one we know. And it’s a shame to miss it completely, to not even look behind this door once.
And they also taught me how intensely people fear their inner lives and how their main effort is one big master plan to avoid it. How very few people feel comfortable with meeting themselves properly. How many just dread it. How many people basically live to write a narrative to who they already are, and how few people want to write a narrative to who they may become or unbecome. Yes, that’s definitely a big part of this learning.
Psychedelics taught me also that past all the layers of disguise, oneness is the eternal quest of human beings. So I learned through psychedelics that whenever people chase money, sexual gratification, possessions, it’s this feeling in disguise that they are chasing, oneness. But when you feel it, you know it. It’s self-explanatory. And we may say, “Ah yes, I felt it.” No, see it in full grace. It’s not so easy to really feel it in full grace. But if he or she who chases it in disguise doesn’t know it exists as direct experience, has no maps, no hints, no guides, and can’t put the dots together, then we can educate people in helping them experience it. And it’s a profound transformation to realize it. It can definitely restructure life.
Another psychologically interesting thing I have learned is that crying full voice or laughing full voice sound vocally identical. As I work with people, I’ve heard both. If I were not looking at them, I wouldn’t know which is which, as if life expresses itself vocally with full intensity and these polarities meet. Sort of, I am so pessimistic that I’m actually optimistic, as in one of my favorite films the main character speaks before pretending a suicide. So this eternal question, laughing or weeping, suddenly makes more sense, because it is indeed challenging at some point which is which, humorously speaking, of course. I could see it if I look at the face, then it becomes more clear which is which, but the voice alone isn’t. It was intriguing. Something very unusual. I’m trying to bring unusual things that are not commonly repeated.
One special thing about relationship with music and nature, that’s another lecture in February, as you mentioned, but to make it simple and strictly diagnostic, I would introduce it that if it is none in someone’s life, if there is no relationship with nature and with music, start timer, depression is on its way. And the way around it: recover relationship with life…. music and nature immediately start creating gravity centers in your life. That’s one of the things I’ve learned.
Then this psychedelic defense is a big theme, that impulse comes first and narrative comes later, that it applies to our entire life. That ideologies are only justifications. And how to be honest with yourself and see this impulse only. Admitting self-gratification instead of idealistically holding on to all the high values is a very important part of this maturing process. As obvious as it may sound, actually it is rarely achieved. If you name the impulse, you are nearly disliked, like a stage magician who appears on the stage and reveals all the tricks instead of tricking the audience. And the audience wants to be entertained and asks, “Where are the tricks?” So to give you an example in life, as an explorer I would say to a journalist that I find joy in completing the expedition, instead of, like the other explorers who after careers in banking and petroleum industry now claim to do it exclusively for environmental reasons. I would be disliked for what I said. But to me it was simple. I see the impulse, not their narrative. So I see the impulse is I do what makes me profit. Previously banking, today environmental claims. I nearly discard the narrative completely. I am often deeply curious how to live life, always seeing this impulse raw, directly, and not narrative around it. It definitely helps to understand your clients a lot when you start applying this scrutiny.
One of the important aspects of this navigation is maturing to admit self-gratification. That is very rare. It’s not often taught unfortunately. You maybe know, James Hollis mentioned in the podcast he was interviewed, don’t tell the admission committee when you are applying for Jungian studies that you do it because you want to help people, because it just displays lack of self-awareness and maturity.
So that’s another thing. Self-preservation is also a big part of the impulse. For example, ultra-religious Christians often stubbornly believes that if he or she was born in Afghanistan, for example, he or she would also become ultra-religious Christian. For me, ultra would be ultra. The impulse is encapsulation. The narrative is secondary, if not unnecessary. So that’s perhaps a big part of the learning.
And I also believe psychedelics will extend the irreplaceability of therapists or analysts in the times of AI. AI will not replace the analyst completely, because the task of the analyst is to suffer together with the client, and not just to label patterns, but provided that the analyst actually is the master of the mammalian. Because if it is only in the intellectual verbal area, then AI may be close to replacing it, because then that (mammalian) process is not happening, but psychedelics more organically require living presence.
And they also helped me to understand, for example, functions of receptors, how cognition and all the emotional processes change. That helped me understand certain psychological conditions better. Now I know that certain receptors are linked to certain experiences. For example, when a client says, “Lights seem more dim, spaces seem more hostile, sounds more distant,” I know that it is an NMDA receptor. I have seen it. That’s dissociation traits. And it also feels like this and like this and like this. I understand it. That’s also learning.
Laura London:
What are some examples of interesting occurrences?
Fiann Paul:
So one very interesting occurrence that I saw several times was how, when people wake up after, a profound healing experience, they remove the piercing if they had some eccentric piercing. I’m not talking about more conventional culturally cultivated piercing like the ear, but let’s say in the lip or nose. They often take it out and they say, “I don’t need it anymore.” As if it was meant to mark part of their history that they now outgrew. That really intrigued me, as it communicates something.
One synchronicity theory that I would like to mention, one of many, because there were really many, and to those who are non-Jungians now listening to it, I would like to explain briefly that synchronicity is not necessarily, as basically understood in New Age, inconspicuous intriguing events. But therapeutic potential of synchronicity consists in the idea that certain archetypal dynamics manifest themselves on every layer of our existence simultaneously. And as the core of this dynamic is protected by defenses because it often is attached to a wound, we may observe the peripheries of this manifestation and learn from them, interpret them, or touch them more safely and see it as a metaphor.
One of these examples of synchronicity was an experience where, as I lived in different parts of the world, sometimes I facilitated an experience for someone. And usually I would book a place in nature, because I believe nature is a very important part of the experience. And this place would usually have to be quiet and private and comfortable. And in one of these instances, it happened that as the person came to work on the theme of her father issues and something that happened in her life, she was now grown up and able to look back and process some of the things. At the time she was in the peak experience, the rally (car racing) started. It was an absurd scene. I could not predict it. Maybe locals had a way to know it. It was a place totally in the middle of nowhere, and this property became the corner of the rally track. So these cars, with these roaring engines, were there. And it became a bit muddy after many of them drove. And it was not easy. Most of all, I felt embarrassed, really embarrassed, that I provided that kind of circumstances, and I apologized after she woke up. And she said with conviction, “It’s okay. My father was a professional driver.” And when I heard it, the music was playing in the background. It was music from my collection, Kristin Hersh, Your Ghost, where the chorus goes, I think last night you were driving circles around me. And the second voice sings at the same time, You were in my dream, you were driving circles around me. It was a really intense experience and one of many that open crack in reality and give you a glimpse of some other world at that moment.
And interesting also on a body level, for example, how people who slouch, when they wake up, they can’t slouch anymore for a significant amount of time, talking weeks or months. Because I see this slouching as their conditioned self, which they cannot hold anymore. They have to give space to the soul demanding from them a more confident presence. Because if I ask them why they slouch, they will say, I’m afraid that if I straighten up, somebody will knock me down. And they often live this program in life. The body is a metaphor for something bigger, right? It doesn’t matter on a physical level that much, yes, it does result in certain health issues and so on, but most importantly, psychologically, it’s a communication of not living your potential. And sometimes they tell me they could not slouch anymore. They felt almost violent opposition from their body, almost forceful disagreement, to continue it.
Laura London:
So, how would you like to wrap this up?
Fiann Paul:
First of all, I would like to mention to anyone who is interested in joining our WhatsApp group, I would like to share a link, if you don’t mind and anyone is welcome to send us a request.
https://www.jungianpsychedelic.org/join-ijpa-community
I would like to mention a couple of bloopers, if you don’t mind, because there were funny things I had in my mind when you asked me something, but I thought the moment was inappropriate to disturb it with too much humor.
When you asked me about this connection between expeditions and consciousness, one story was hilarious. One of my expedition team members genuinely suspected that my expeditions are psychological research, something like the Stanford experiment. The participants find themselves in a very difficult circumstances that push them to the very limits of their capacities and that I am observing this and making notes. This inspired me to create a movie idea where indeed an expedition member would believe that it is a research being conducted and would suspect that the leader of the expedition has this research as a foremost goal of the expedition in mind.
Laura London:
Wow.
Fiann Paul:
So he would allow himself to process all his greatest life traumas and address all the biggest themes and psychological struggles of his life and emotionally digest it all during this exhibition expedition and only towards the end to find out that the leader wanted nothing else and completion of this expedition.
Yeah. So sort of like this Joseph Conrad kind of style about psychological becoming.
Laura London:
Mhm.
Fiann Paul:
That was one and another one when you asked me whether it really has to be so much work, take so many years, and so on, I wanted to say that if I were to be religious, I would cite here the first religion that excites me within the reach of my hand, and I would bring a phrase that it takes two decades to train a Jedi Knight. So why not?
And yes, I think we could end here.
I would like to maybe mention a phrase I typically say to people who are just about to take off: May the mirror be kind.
And I would also like to add a phrase widely cultivated in psychedelic communities, authored by Terence McKenna: When transmission is over, hang up the phone. This phrase was initially meant to make us not extend the psychedelic channel without a reason. That was his instruction, a wise one. But today, humorously, I apply it here, because I think we provided a really solid transmission. Thank you for opening this channel. I invite everyone to hear more during lectures. But once you hang up the phone, my wish is that when the line goes quiet, you feel more at home in that silence that appears.
Also, I would like to present a song, Transform. It’s a song originally composed by Lynne Piper, and for many years it’s been one of my life’s favorite songs. Recently, I collaborated with Lynne, this time to give this song the grand production it deserved. This song, I believe, is the essence of psychedelic ritual. It’s about remembering who has always been there all along beneath all the adaptations. It’s about shedding old identities. The theme is central to both psychedelic initiation and depth psychological work. It is about finding that part of us which is ultimately timeless and contextless and same time is defining us most authentically. It has accompanied me through a lot of deep journeys and I have witnessed its potency in others I’ve guided. It basically opens this space for becoming a psychologically self-made person. Because we don’t always heal by becoming someone. Sometimes we heal by unbecoming, and this track holds space for it.
https://song.link/s/0FbCmqMaKGlsA1mZDdUr9H
Laura London:
Thank you Fiann.
Fiann Paul:
Thank you.