13

Gabor meets Ralph Metzner (psychologist, writer & researcher) at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Science (MAPS) conference in California. They are introduced by a colleague, Cary Wright.

CARY: So it’s good to have you here Ralph, and I wanted to just begin a little bit by just picking up on the last pieces of your book on ayahuasca (Sacred Vine of Spirits), where you talk about ayahuasca in a broader sense: in its usefulness potentially for addiction treatment – this is what this conversation will revolve around. So, speaking specifically of addiction to substances and addiction to behaviours, this is where Gabor’s expertise has come in over the last year – in the work that we’ve been doing, and so I’m really happy to have you here to be a part of this conversation.

METZNER: Well, I’ve been making the point for some time in this, my other recent book is on altered states of consciousness across the whole spectrum, and I make that distinction between expanded states of consciousness and contracted states. Expanded states can occur with psychedelics you know: it’s consciousness expanding. And contracted states happen when you’re concentrating or focusing but also when you have involuntary contractions of consciousness; you’re obsessions, compulsions, addictions, you know, because you’re repetitively, fixedly…and so it makes sense to use consciousness expansion as treatment for consciousness contraction.

And that is in fact what has happened. LSD has been used in treatment of alcoholism, and psilocybin has been used in obsessive-compulsive disorders, and ayahuasca and ibogaine have all been used in treating addictions. Because it’s the expansion of consciousness, becoming aware of your own internal thought patterns, as well as your own interpersonal relations and being. An expansion of consciousness always leads you to have more choices, to make better choices.

The simplest example being when you wake up in the morning, you expand consciousness, you realize that you’re not just in that dream sequence that you were in, but you’re lying here in bed and you have your room, and your house and your job and your relations – and then you make different choices than you were able to make in the dream. So that’s the general principle.

GABOR: I was interested in your definitions of the various words around psychedelics. I was wondering if you would say something more? When you talk about these substances, psycholytic, that’s an interesting way of putting it. What do you mean by that?

METZNER: Yes, right. Well, that was the original term that the Swiss people came up with – meaning ‘dissolving’.

GABOR: So, what is being dissolved then, and what does that make possible?

METZNER: Well, the idea was that it was dissolving, what was the term? Psychic structures? Defensive structures? It’s an alchemical image:. dissolving, soluteo, soluteo is a chemical process of dissolving, right? So, dissolving what? A chemical image of dissolving is an image of a man or sometimes a man and a woman sitting in a hot tub and that’s dissolving of defensive patterns or ‘armoring’, what Reich would call ‘armoring’. And if it’s a man and a woman it’s, it’s not sexual but it’s a male and female side of your own nature, dissolving the barriers between them. So, that’s the way I would interpret that.

GABOR: I like that phrase because that’s exactly what I find in the ayahuasca experience, there’s a dissolving of the egoic defensive structure which allows for the actual fears [that the defences were there to protect against] to emerge: so that you can actually look at them more clearly.

METZNER: That’s right, to look at them. You have to have a protected environment so that the person doesn’t then suddenly feel exposed.

CARY: So, that kind of ties in directly to your notion of expanded states of consciousness: once the egoic structures are dissolved and ayahuasca kind of goes under the radar of the defences or through them as they dissolve. So, I’m curious just in terms of integration – within the ayahuasca experience and integration of that experience?

METZNER: Well, the integration is a conscious process that you address just like preparation. Every psychedelic session you have to preparation which involves becoming conscious of your intention, what are you trying to do? What are you trying to accomplish? That’s what I call divination; what knowledge are you seeking? What understanding? What healing? What change?

And then integration afterwards, which is: how do you apply this? Which then refers you back to the original intention- what relevance does this have?

That’s where I remember reading Howard Lotsof’s original research of people getting treatment of cocaine addiction. He had a group of 20 or so people that he gave them ibogaine, they had these experiences where they could see their own patterns. With ibogaine, apparently, this is specifically counteracting the receptor sites with cocaine in the bran, so blocking the withdrawal system. But [his subjects] would see their patterns, and then they would see that ‘I can make different choices’ and some of them chose not to continue using cocaine and some of them did.

GABOR: It’s interesting to me that it’s that integration that was unfortunately completely missing in the so-called psychedelic revolution in the 60’s.

METZNER: It wasn’t completely missing.

GABOR: For a lot of people it was: they just took these substances without any kind of context, any kind of meaning.

METZNER: But that’s true now too. For example, I participated in a ceremony with the Santo Daime in Brazil with ayahuasca, but they don’t do any integration whatsoever, you know? None. They just do their thing, they sing their songs and then they go back to work. In UDV they don’t sing songs, they listen, its like going to church. It’s a different model, you see, it’s not a therapeutic model.

CARY: It’s a really interesting point, because in the work that we’re doing with ayahuasca in addiction treatment and holding it in the container of a Western psychotherapeutic model, it may seem paradoxical to be using ayahuasca as a substance to treat addictions. Nonetheless, there’s the huge benefit of the egoic structures dissolving, as you say, and there’s also the support of the Western psychotherapeutic integration model.

METZNER: Absolutely. No, I don’t think it’s paradoxical, I think of all the psychedelics ayahuasca is the best one for addiction because it has the purging element. In addition to the dissolving, you could use LSD – when LSD was used in treatment for alcoholism- and ibogaine you know, it’s not so accessible, but ayahuasca has the addition of purging.

GABOR: How do you understand the purging?

METZNER: Well, it’s not just physical, it’s psychic purging, you know? I remember a group session that I was involved in that person was, at a certain point, starting to think about El Salvador and the civil war that was going on in El Salvador and he had no personal involvement of that but he started thinking about it and when he did he went “WHAAAAA!!” You know, because it’s a collective, you know: mass-mind phenomena of violence and toxicity, toxic imagery of murder and mayhem and bloodshed and murder. So, that’s what he was purging.

GABOR: I would wonder if there was an element of internal civil war inside him about something

METZNER: Well, could be, but, you know, that was not in the consciousness.

GABOR: I was interested in how you talk about the Western attitudes towards these substances. You talk about the black box of behaviourism? Then you talk about in the West, at least the United States particularly, all kinds of drugs that are being manufactured and mass-produced and prescribed that are of far greater toxicities and far less understood? Could you comment on the reasons for that? And then you talk about a phrase that Charles Grob uses later on in the book when he talks about Jeremy Narby’s ‘Radical Empiricism’ where he actually has an experience, and is willing to take that as knowledge…

METZNER: It was not Jeremy Narby, William James was the inventor of Radical Empiricism…

GABOR: OK, but Narby does ayahuasca or a substance and he takes his own experience as being valid. He doesn’t wait for it to be proved in double-blind studies.

METZNER: Well, that’s right, that’s the whole Jamesian idea. That was our initial thing – including Leary’s – at the very beginning: William James, radical empiricism. William James just said ‘all your knowledge is based on empirical data and observations and no observations are excluded’. And that’s the radical part, because conventional science excludes data from – for example – from parapsychology, because they said well, ‘it can’t happen’. And it excludes data from drug experiences because it “well, that was just a drug, it distorted your brain, so it’s can’t be valid”, you see?

It can’t be a valid observation and include mysticism. The mystical aspect in science observations, well, it doesn’t fit the paradigm, it’s religion, you know?

The Dalai Lama in some discussions with Western science has made the same point; he calls it ‘first-person empiricism’. You see, don’t just say ‘well, this person did that, and this behaviour and you know, the external point of view’ but also add ‘well, I see this’. You can make observations of your own internal states and include those observations along with everyone else’s.

METZNER: In our study at Harvard we got attacked for that, because behaviourism was still dominant, and the chair of the department said ‘no, you shouldn’t be doing that, you shouldn’t be taking it yourself because then you’re no longer objective’.

GABOR: To the behaviourist there’s no internal event…

METZNER: There is no internal event either. It’s ridiculous: you can’t use a behaviourist approach to these things, you know? You give somebody LSD and they just lie on the ground, sit in a chair and every now and again get up and…there is no behaviour to observe! You see? If you want to find out you have to actually ask them! Or see for yourself, you see?

GABOR: What is the price that we’re paying for that exclusionary approach? Not only as a culture but also in terms of healing and as a society?

METZNER: It’s absurd. It’s a complete distortion and it’s gradually dawning on people, you know, that this conference [MAPS] is a tacit acknowledgment of that. I would bet you that every single one of the presenters at this conference has based their interest in this area on their own personal experience with these substances, but they don’t say that and they don’t write that up in their papers, but it informs everything else- otherwise they wouldn’t be doing it, you see?

GABOR: Living in the academic world – and you’ve been at this for decades – do you notice there was more resistance to your concepts in the earlier days than you find now? Or what’s been the trajectory of that in the academic, scientific world?

METZNER: Well, it’s hard for me to say, you know, because I’ve been an academic but then I have my own history, but academia is like the medical system, it’s no different. Psychedelics have been basically taboo. It’s like the mainstream media, in the mainstream media the 60’s is considered a lost decade. The hippies ‘dropped out’ and all this stuff about [Timothy] Leary, you know? In fact I went to Harvard. In the Harvard Yard I asked some students…”what, oh yeah, Leary, didn’t he you know, give drugs to students and get fired and go to jail?” All of that is not true: he didn’t give drugs to students, he didn’t get fired, he didn’t go to jail for that. And the drugs weren’t illegal!

GABOR: Now, I was also interested in your definition of hallucinogen. Can you talk about that?

METZNER: Well, that’s part of the thing about these drugs: they change the way you perceive perception. People ask you, “well, what does this drug do?” I’m sorry, I can’t tell you, you know?

It’s not like a muscle stimulant. I make the distinction between psychoactive drugs which just simply move your awareness up and down the energy continuum: more elevated or more calm. But, they don’t change or expand your consciousness, particularly, they just give you more or less energy. So, these other drugs people call them psychotomimetic, or psycholytic: dissolving psychic defence structures. Or psychedelic manifesting and hallucinogenic, you know, ‘alucinari’ is a Latin word meaning to wander in your mind, so that’s not bad.

GABOR: So, you talk about mind journeys?

METZNER: It’s like an etymology, you know, hallucinations generally means seeing illusory perceptions. But that wouldn’t be true, because it’s not like you see illusory perceptions: you don’t see things that aren’t there- you don’t see pink elephants or whatever.

You see things that are there, you see much more, you see the flowers – and you also see radiating energy fields around the flowers. So, that’s not a ‘hallucination’ in the classical sense.

GABOR: Well, some people ‘see’. I haven’t, personally. I had visions, but I didn’t see things that weren’t there. I just knew I was having a vision. But some people do see snakes or jaguars. Have you had those experiences, or no? What do you make of them?

METZNER: Well, they’re internal visions, you know all the time they’re internal.

GABOR: You’re aware.

METZNER: Yes. No, it can be that you get caught in fear, and then momentarily confuse the internal and external – that’s the definition of psychosis: when you can’t tell the difference between internal and external reality.

CARY: So, in that way, then, you’re make a distinction between an internal vision and a hallucination, something that’s projected in the external world?

METZNER: Well, sometimes a vision can be just a feeling for example. So, vision, ‘vision’ is something that draws you, that attracts you, you know the Native Americans would go off in the mountains and fast and pray for ‘vision’, for their life. That’s what I call you know, in my work, when you’re doing healing work or in therapy. In healing, you’re always going into the past because you want to see what’s the origin of the wound or the infection or the trauma, you know? And then discharge the tension around it and then bring it into the present so that you can live without it, without looking back into the rearview mirror. And then there’s looking ahead into the future; anticipating the future, not predicting- but seeing the probability lines in the future, and that’s like a vision. So, a young child may have a vision: I want to be a doctor, and sees himself practicing. Or an artist, or an inventor or an explorer or whatever and then they take the steps to make that happen. Otherwise it’s just a fantasy, you see? So, you have to realize the vision: the memory has to be integrated into the present and so does the future vision have to integrated in the present, otherwise, you know, it inspires you like that. So, in that sense, I think the work of psychologists needs to be expanded in that direction, and it is now.

CARY: There’s an unpredictable element to ayahuasca in working with addictions and that makes it tricky for any kind of scientific research. But it’s this piece that sometimes, in one trial or in two events of working with ayahuasca – and I’ve watched this over the 7 years of curanderos in Peru and working here – where somebody will drink ayahuasca once or twice and with the proper support and care afterwards, they’ve stopped their addictive pattern whether it be to a substance or a destructive behavioural pattern, gambling or sexual addiction. So, I’m curious, you talk a little about ‘what is healing? what is being healed?’ So, I’m posing you that question.

In that sense, what is being healed? What is healing?

METZNER: Well, healing means wholeness. So, literally, healing means integrating split off parts of your psyche into more integrated balance: a harmonious working together. That’s also more of a traditional sense: in the middle ages the people used to think the four humours had to be in balance. There was that famous debate between Louis Pasteur and Claude Bernard where Louis Pasteur supposedly, on his deathbed, said ‘you’ve got to look for the infecting agent’, the virus or the bacteria, the germs. And Bernard said no, it’s all the milieu-interior, the internal-milieu, balancing the internal-milieu. They were colleagues, sort of rivals and also friends but Claude Bernard was right- the milieu is everything, not the external agent.

GABOR: Yes, he said the microbe “c’est rien” is nothing, the “milieu, c’est tout”

METZNER: You’ve heard that story, yeah?

GABOR: I quoted it in one of my books. But that’s just what we forget in the West. We’re always looking for the ‘external agent’. It’s like in foreign politics: they’re always looking at the foreign aggressor; they never look at the internal conditions. It’s the same with medicine.

METZNER: That’s what I think: there’s a tendency for people in the psychedelic movement in this community to do that.

GABOR: Say that again.

METZNER: To excessively focus on the external agent, you know? Even though they recognize the importance of set and setting, still to say, ‘it’s the drugs that we want to study’. I know Stan Grof doesn’t do that any more, and in my work I tend to downplay it. Like, I’ve written this book on alchemical divination methods and going into the past or the future. I call it accessing your spiritual intelligence for healing and guidance. And then I say you can do these methods, and I teach these methods, without using drugs at all. And when you’re doing therapy with somebody, you’re doing that kind of thing: divination. Healing is a form of divination because you first do the diagnoses and then you do the integration. But the drugs can amplify the perception, that’s really their main function, you can do all the work without it, and we’ve known that from all the healing traditions. Drugs are not necessary, they are a valuable aid, you know, to amplify the perception: to make it a little more distinct. But if you just focus on that, you’re gonna miss it. You can amplify perception till the cows come home, but if your intention and your diagnoses are not correct, then you’re not gonna get it.

GABOR: Mind you, I do find that the substances do accelerate and deepen the process immeasurably sometimes.

METZNER: Yes, that’s right. But there is a process that you structure.. and maybe I’m being too harsh. I mean [the attendees] do understand. It’s interesting, now, in the double-blind-placebo control studies they use what they call an ‘active placebo’ – because they found in these studies you can’t just give them nothing or people get pissed off. They’re not gonna sit around for 4 hours and watch some other people get psilocybin. It’s ridiculous! That was originally true in the study we did at Harvard so, with an active placebo they get a lesser dose of the same substance.

GABOR: Now, finally, I would ask you to put on your prophetic hat. How do you see this going while the resistance is still so tremendous? With all the intellectual and the legal and the cultural resistance – it’s completely schizophrenic – in that – all kinds of substances that are harmful are being happily dished out and things that are potentially healing are being restricted. Do you have any sense of how it’s going?

METZNER: Well, how what is going? I don’t know.

GABOR: The process of possibly getting people to see reality here.

METZNER: I think there are applications, & I think you’re in the right field! I think the application for the treatment of addictions are, far and away, the most likely. Actually the two main areas of the applications of these consciousness-expanding substances that have the best potential is the treatment of addiction and end of life. With one additional third thing – which is the treatment of PTSD with MDMA. I think this is a phenomenally important thing. I was talking to Rick Doblin about it and he was telling me the number of people: veterans from the wars suffering with PTSD? In the United States…250,000 people. 250,00 fucking veterans! You know! And there is no way to treat them ordinarily: they’re on disability for the rest of their lives. It’s extremely costly.

GABOR: Yes, it’s having an impact of millions of other people as well.

METZNER: Yes, it’s devastating to families, to the communities. Taking these people out of society completely – they can’t function – they’re dangerous. They’re like time bombs.

CARY: The compounding issue is with prescribing psychopharmacological compounds to soldiers.

METZNER: That’s right, that’s right. You have them on maintenance drugs for the rest of their life, it’s extremely expensive. And that work can be so tremendously facilitated. Regular therapy for them could go on for years and years and years – and not make a difference. And it’s been demonstrated over and over that changes can happen, you know? In one of my books on MDMA I published called “Through the Gateway of the Heart” I worked with a veteran with MDMA, in one session. It was enough to take him from a place of feeling completely in denial about the whole thing: not wanting to talk about it, not wanting to see – talking about it openly. And he founded a group called Vietnam Veterans for Peace: it’s an activist group where he and several of his buddies go into high schools after the recruiters have been there and say “Okay, guys, you know, your choice, but this is what it’s really like, let me give you the other side of the story!”.

GABOR: You know, I can also see it working in a whole range of medical condition because behind every cancer, behind every rheumatoid arthritis case, behind every case of ALS, multiple sclerosis, there’s a whole life of emotional repression and in some ways lack of integration of the self and I think it could be healing in all these conditions significantly.

METZNER: Right. An addiction and alcoholism. I sometimes kind of have these fantasy visions that there would be centers – probably outside of the United States – maybe in Mexico, Costa Rica, because the United States is such a repressive system. Centers where people would be able to go, spend 2-3 weeks, have detox from alcohol or other drugs and then have the counseling, and have 2-3 ayahuasca sessions interspersed with treatment by people who were experienced and that would at the same serve a teaching function for the people wanting to work in that field using those substances.

GABOR: That’s just what we’re envisioning actually at some point – God knows when.

METZNER: But you go around to different places? Which is okay.

GABOR: But I’d like to have a center at some point.

METZNER: And there’s a place in Peru, right? That’s Takiwasi?

GABOR: I was down there a few weeks ago.

METZNER: You’ve been here? You know Jacques Mabit?

GABOR: Yes, I was there about a month ago. And that’s what I’d like to see up here in North America.

CARY: We’re looking at that, and going to Brazil to do a project just like that as a possibility. And we’re also looking for a clinical trial to be able to do this at a retreat center in Canada: legally, with the sanction of the authorities.

METZNER: Are you using ibogaine, or?

GABOR: Well, people have been asking me about that, and I haven’t worked with it. I understand that its opiate-withdrawal protective qualities would be tremendously useful.

METZNER: It’s what?

GABOR: It protects against the withdrawal from opiates, which ayahuasca cannot do. So, it would be wonderful to work with ibogaine and maybe ayahuasca together sometime.

METZNER: Right, right.

GABOR: But, again, it’s a question of logistics and legality.

METZNER: Yes, it’s harder to obtain I think.

GABOR: Have you had experience with ibogaine?

METZNER: Yes.

GABOR: What would you say about that? The differences between ibogaine and ayahuasca?

METZNER: I don’t know. I’ve tended to be skeptical about this effect on you know, dropping the withdrawal symptoms. In general, my theory has been that any consciousness expanding drug can be used to treat consciousness contractions; addictions, obsessions and compulsions. And people said no, but because ibogaine blocks the cocaine receptors, you don’t get the withdrawal symptoms. So, you have a period of several weeks where you are not experiencing withdrawal symptoms.

GABOR: Well, they also say that it activates the endorphin release in the brain so it takes away people’s need for the opiates cause they get their own endogenous endorphins working with them, which is an interesting proposition.

METZNER: I’m a little bit skeptical about that approach and I’m not sure it’s even helpful. I think what’s helpful is being able to confront your internal processes and that’s not automatic with ayahuasca either. It depends, as they’re being guided with the ayahuasca in a supportive setting where people, other addicts are. The key is always to find other people who have already gone through that hell and who can show you the way out.

CARY: I think that’s a very good point. It’s not just about pouring a cup of ayahuasca and drinking with different traditions, particularly there’s a very precise medical process involved, and it’s not unlike Chinese medicine, particularly 5 element Chinese medicine, where there’s a complete protocol and a surgical precision to the work.

METZNER: Yes. There’s this book by this guy Robert Tindal, speaking of the curanderos down in Peru and Ecuador, they give you detailed herbal preparations specifically for your body and you know – what you’re needing to strengthen – and the ayahuasca is a kind of a general purge – to cleanse along with that.

CARY: So it’s a comprehensive integrated medical approach to the actual ayahuasca process.

GABOR: Medical and psychological and spiritual. I think that it’s multi-dimensional; it used to be, to bring in the spirits as well, as best you can. And of course that’s a big stumbling block for Westerners you know, they want it to be the magical thing..

Let me ask you personally, I mean, this guy sees spirits [pointing to Cary], I don’t. When I do ayahuasca, I don’t see spirits. Do you?

METZNER: Well, seeing, depends on what you mean by seeing. How about talking with them?

GABOR: Well, do you?

METZNER: Well, do you?

GABOR: No, I don’t. That’s not my experience. I don’t know what that is about me but I, it’s not in my repertoire to experience them. I have visions, but I’m very aware of them as visions. And I don’t experience entities as being there interacting with me – which some people do. And Cary and the other helpers who actually are the curanderos, they actually see spirits around people and they interact with them.

METZNER: And sometimes they channel the spirits so the spirits are speaking through them?

GABOR: Are you a bit reluctant to speak on that?

METZNER: Well, yes, I am reluctant to speak on that.

GABOR: Ok, I understand, yeah, fair enough. I’m just wondering..

METZNER: You can be easily misunderstood. I think when you say ‘I don’t see spirits’; you’re like closing a door that way. Like you’re saying ‘in my house there are no windows’ or ‘my house.. Doesn’t have windows’.

GABOR: No, but you see, I actually would love to.

METZNER: And like William Blake said: “if the doors of perception are cleansed” – which is a kind of a strange phrase “the doors of perception” in which the ‘doors’ are cleansed? It’s like mixing up doors and windows, you see? And so, maybe try not thinking that you don’t see visions?

GABOR: Yes, well, that’s a thought. I’m asking only because I’d like to broaden my own experience.

METZNER: I once had a communication with a spirit being of somebody who had died and I said “I don’t see you, why don’t I see you?” and he said, “What do you want to know? I’m right here”. He was right inside – I couldn’t see him – but he wasn’t in front of me.

GABOR: Yes. And that’s not uncommon for people to communicate with somebody like that.

METZNER: Perceive here [pointing at his chest], you can perceive here. The eye of the heart. Each of the chakras is an eye and they look every direction, how many directions? Front, back, left & right. People see with the back of their neck. Or you can sense it, not ‘see it’ but sense it – there’s a fixation with ‘seeing’ which prevents ‘sensing’.

CARY: And we can sense with our hearts and our bellies.

METZNER: Yes, exactly. Gut-level, you know, I have a gut-level sense that this guy is full of shit or you know a crook or whatever or there’s danger here – I think I’ll leave. We have lots of senses, that’s what some people say, not just 5. Some people say we have 49 senses. I don’t know. For example, you have a sense of temperature, sense of pressure & a sense of vibration. Sensing vibrations? Not one of the 5 senses. The whole sensorium, I like the idea of the sensorium: it’s a continuum of sense perception of which you know sight and hearing are specialized distance senses. Actually you can sense all the time: you can sense somebody is standing behind you. Or you’ll see them: and you can sense something about that – maybe they’re tense, uptight. And psychedelic drugs – they amplify all those senses.

That’s why sometimes when people take LSD they say “I can see 360 degrees all around me, how is that possible?”

Actually, it’s possible all the time and if suddenly there was somebody with a murderous intent, walking behind you, you’d feel it, like ‘what’s going on’? So the psychedelics can amplify the potentials of perceptions and in that sense I think neither psycholytic, nor psychedelic, nor consciousness-expansion even covers it. Something like ‘amplification’, and that’s the tricky thing about it, because depending on what it is that you’re doing it can amplify that too.

METZNER: Like, Charles Manson used LSD to brainwash his followers you know, into murder and perversion. That’s horrible, that’s a horrible diabolical use of these tools which people cherish and value for their duty. Those kinds of phenomena really cause one to really examine the very basis of how we approach life.

GABOR: Well, I appreciate your comments because I’m a bit wordless right now cause I’m realizing that perhaps, or more than perhaps, I’ve been limiting my own experience you know?

METZNER: We all do, we all do that. Through concepts, you know, through our concepts we all do. And that’s one of the gifts of doing this kind of work: it allows you to expand beyond the framework of your previous assumptions. And you always want to expand the box, as they say – ‘think outside the box’. Well, how do you get outside the box? You only have the problem inside the box. And a person who is an addict finds themselves boxed in.