Magic Mushrooms, Madness, and the Search for Meaning with John O’Connor

Can magic mushrooms unlock the meaning of life—or lure seekers to the edge of madness?

Award-winning journalist and bestselling author John O'Connor returns with a gripping investigation into the untold story of modern psychedelics, spirituality, and the mysteries of belief. From NPR and Chicago Tribune’s “Best Books of 2024” author, this conversation dives deep into O'Connor’s new release, A Short Strange Trip: An Untold Story of Magic Mushrooms, Madness, and a Search for the Meaning of Life in the Amazon.

In this revealing episode, John O’Connor explores:

• How his fascination with unconventional beliefs and subcultures—from Bigfoot to psychedelic explorers—shaped his approach to storytelling
• What he uncovered about the complicated relationship between belief, disbelief, and the human longing for the extraordinary
• The forgotten legacy of Terence McKenna and his brother Dennis, who first unlocked home cultivation of magic mushrooms—and transformed the psychedelic underground
• The role of sacred, indigenous traditions versus the romanticized wellness narratives dominating Western psychedelic culture
• His father’s struggle with addiction and why psychedelic therapies are no quick fix for suffering
• Why stories of divine intelligence, “little people,” and multidimensional encounters on psychedelics demand both open-mindedness and investigative rigor
• How the booming billion-dollar psychedelic industry raises urgent questions about access, authenticity, and the future of mental health
• What seekers must remember about shortcuts to healing, enlightenment, and meaning

John O’Connor’s nuanced, compassionate journalism asks: What if the border between spiritual revelation and psychological destabilization is thinner than we think? Whether you’re curious about altered states, seeking hope for mental health, or navigating the intersection of science and spirituality, you’ll find insight, caution, and inspiration in this episode’s search for meaning at the edge of belief.

If this sparked new questions for you, subscribe for more, share the episode with a friend who’s curious about psychedelics and spirituality, and leave a review so more listeners can find the show.

Transcript

Welcome And John O’Connor’s Work

SPEAKER_02 0:50

Today I am joined by acclaimed journalist and author John O'Connor. John's work has appeared in the New York Times, GQ, Men's Journal, Financial Times magazine, Oxford American, and the Boston Globe. His previous book, The Secret History of Bigfoot, was named one of the best books of 2024 by NPR and the Chicago Tribune. In his newest book, A Short Strange Trip, A Untold Story of Magic Mushroom's Madness, and a Search for the Meaning of Life in the Amazon, John takes a deeply investigative look at the origins of modern psychedelic belief, the influence of Terrence McKenna, and the complicated intersection of spirituality, altered states, mental health, science, and growing psychedelic industry. John holds an MFA from Columbia University and teaches journalism at Boston College. John, welcome to Spiritual Spotlight Series. John, before we dive into psychedelic renaissance, what first drew you to the stories about people searching for something mysterious, transcendent? I can't even say that word. It's such a good word. Or beyond ordinary reality?

SPEAKER_00 2:01

That's a great question. I and I don't have a probably a very succinct answer to that, but I just I'm interested in belief and un and un paradoxically unbelief. Like I'm just curious about how people come to their convictions about things. And I'm interested in like kind of oddball, quirky subcultures. And you know, for a long time I was a before I started writing books, I was a travel writer and I worked at this kind of intersection between kind of landscape and literature where I wrote a lot about American writers and sort of and where they where they drew their inspiration. So like Erna Semingway in Northern Michigan and Edda Abbey in the desert southwest. And then that sort of started to feed into kind of a broader swath of subculture and like you know profiles of musicians and you know sports, obscure, basically obscure personalities in his sports and let's say arts and entertainment. And then I got interested in Bigfoot. I found out that a a writer who I really admire, who's been dead a few years now, Peter Matheson was a Bigfooter, worked on a Bigfoot novel for many years, didn't complete it. It was on his desk when he when he died, literally. And I and I thought I would write a I thought that was cool. I'd write a story about it. It morphed into a a book proposal. My agent was encouraging me to work on one, and I did, and then somewhat to my surprise, she sold it. And and the book is really a travel book that is a a dive, as I was trying to say, into this kind of very colorful and quirky microculture of American belief.

SPEAKER_02 3:40

So you kind of touched on this for a brief second. So your previous book explored the world of Bigfoot believers. What did what did that investigation teach you about belief, longing, and our desire to experience something extraordinary?

Bigfoot, Ghosts, And Messy Belief

SPEAKER_00 3:54

Yeah, what I, you know, when I started the book, I I think I thought about belief. I mean, it really, insofar as I gave it any thought at all, I think I thought of it as this just hermetic category, you know, and then on the other side of was unbelief or disbelief. And they were just they the two never touched. And what I came to see, I think, is that they actually at times are really entwined and entangled in kind of curious ways, and to the point where sometimes it can be difficult to say with any conviction what we really believe and don't believe in. A good example of that is is ghosts. On there's a couple of good surveys about paranormal and supernatural belief that come out every two years, one at the Pew Institute and the other of uh Chapman University. And at the top of that, those lists tends the ghosts tend to rank pretty high, but but the you know, yes or no binary answer doesn't really capture the complexity of people's belief. Like, do you believe in ghosts? Well, no, except but when my grandmother died, I had this strange premonition, and I woke up and there she was standing at the end of the bed, you know. And so yeah, and I I just in my my conversations with people with uh uh over the course of the research of a year or so with Bigfoot and and ghosts and and Bigfoot overlap pretty closely, like I was just struck by how often that I and you know, and I don't have to look outside myself either. In my my own family, you you you know, if you look, if you're really paying attention, you really do see this phenomena time and again where where our our professed beliefs really don't always line up with how with how how we how we behave, essentially. Um if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_02 5:35

It's a really valid point. No, it does. It's a really valid point because I'm somebody who comes from a pretty Christian family that maybe doesn't put stock in ghosts and those kind of things, and and I'm over here, like, but I believe, and it's interesting how we all kind of like interact and have our stories and you know our beliefs and how it kind of falls together. It's it's very fascinating to me. So do you believe in ghosts?

SPEAKER_00 6:01

Ghosts, no, you know, it's no, but I I have a funny store family story to say in respect to that. And I I'm not quite sure where I fall, but I there's uh well I so I'm in the Boston area and we vacation every summer in the kind of north shore of Boston, like Cambridge uh uh Gloucester and Rockport, if people are familiar with those like kind of picturesque rocky New England coast. And we always go to the same place, but one year it wasn't available the night we wanted to arrive, so we were looking for a place to stay one night and then move. And and we found a hotel, it was perfect, it was nearby, but in the fine print, we discovered, oh, it's supposedly haunted. And my my kids were like, Well, we have to go there, you know. And but my wife caught wind of that, and my wife's a very smart, sane, sober person. She's a doctor, you know, she's medically trained, she's you know, has people's lives in her hands quite literally and she was like, Well, we can't stay there, and so I was like just to be clear, so we we believe in ghosts now. Is that where oh no no no, don't be ridiculous, but we're not staying in a haunted hotel, you know. So so it's just yeah, I think I think people betray themselves, and I don't mean to throw my wife under the bus.

SPEAKER_02 7:04

Yeah, I don't know, not at all. Well, didn't take it that way.

SPEAKER_00 7:07

In many respects, like the you know, would put myself in the same category. But then the point is just how we how we behave sometimes and what we really think don't always line up with with again with with that binary answer, yes or no. You know, it's it's it's hard to say sometimes.

SPEAKER_02 7:27

And I wonder if she thought because it's it's it's marketed as a haunted place, if maybe they would scare your kids. Right. Like maybe not the reality of actually truly being haunted, but maybe they would spook your kids, you know, or you, you know. I remember I stayed in a hotel at Salem and I they were like, it's haunted. And I think someone came into our room and like grabbed us and was like, Oh, right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 7:49

For the full experience. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 7:52

So what was it about Terrence McKenna's story and the events at, and I'm probably gonna mispronounce it, Lo Cochera, that made you feel that this was something that you needed to investigate.

SPEAKER_00 8:03

Yeah. La Chorera, it's called the Yeah, and it just means choro means um chute in Spanish. And there is literally a chute of rapids that goes right through the center of this village, La Chorera, which is a small indigenous village in the southern, in the Putumayo region of the Colombian Amazon. So, really right near the border of Peru. The Putumayo River is the border that separates northern Peru and Southern Colombia. I mean, it's this little village in the middle of nowhere that Terence McKenna, the subject of my book, and his and his brother Dennis and some friends ventured to in 1971 in search of this obscure indigenous hallucinogen called Ukuhe, which is DMT containing it's a virola, so like a flowery shrub, basically. A lot of varolas are DMT active, some some are not, but some are. And and they read about it in this obscure Harvard botanical leaflet by uh written by the great, late great ethnobotanist Richard Evan Schultees. And so they went in search of it. And what drew me to Terrence was just the fact that I hadn't heard of him before. I mean, I sort of pride prided myself, still do, on like knowing about kind of esoteric weirdball, you know, like uh self-taught polymaths. And and I the fact that I hadn't heard of him, the supposed guru of the psychedelic 60s and 70s, as I read, and I was shocked. And I was further shocked to to learn that like virtually nothing had really been written about him. And so he's kind of not entirely lost to history, but really kind of forgotten and somewhat brushed aside. Uh partly in fact that Terrence had the great misfortune to die very young. He was not quite 54 years old when he died in the year 2000 of brain cancer. And so, and also I had heard of La Chorera. So that that component, Terence, La Choreira, which I had heard of because I knew who the Roger Casement was, the great Irish patriot who had gone to La Chorrera at the behest of the British government to investigate allegations of rubber atrocities there in the early 20th century. I mean, that's a weird whole other story. Um, there's, you know, an Irish guy in La Chorera right now trying to get a statue of Roger Casement built. And but anyway, and so these things, there's one more component, kind of it's more than you wanted to know. I I know my father at the same time was uh under who had struggled with alcohol addiction for much of his adult life, was undergoing um two had did undergo and was in the process of undergoing kind of psychedelic therapies. He did two ketamine and psilocybin. And so these three kind of tangents all sort of wove together and eventually morphed into a book proposal,

Why Terrence McKenna Still Matters

SPEAKER_00 10:43

which again I was somewhat surprised my agent sold, but she did.

SPEAKER_02 10:46

So you have a good agent, number one.

SPEAKER_00 10:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 10:49

So I'm sorry, but I'm gonna go on a a tangent uh here. Did your was your father did he like conquer his addiction by having the ketamine and the the psycho? I can never say that word. That other thank you. Did he was he successful in that treatment?

SPEAKER_00 11:07

He was not, you know, he the ketamine basically amounted to like a $500 nap each time. I mean, he was unconscious the whole time. That that is that can happen with ketamine. It's ketamine basically uh anesthetic, it was developed as a battlefield anesthetic for and used during Vietnam. But and then the psilocybin it just didn't it didn't take. And it's like I spent a whole chapter on this uh on the book, but uh it you know, it may have been it's have been partly the fact that he was too that was too kind of too late or too far gone. You know, the one of this is one of my complaints about this kind of the way these drugs uh and plants are talked about in the these days is as a kind of magic bullet and sure all for folks, and they they definitely are not. And I and I think both my father and I were maybe a little bit naive going into this. I I was the one who you know kind of not pressured him, but really uh helped kind of facilitate this whole this whole approach. He had been in and out of various treatments, you know, treatment centers, done the 12 steps on and off kinds of medications, and nothing really ever took. And it was a kind of last ditch effort, and it just might have been too little too late and or too much too late. I don't know. It was an awful lot, actually. And but he and also, you know, that one of the things that's left out of the conversation a lot is that the this the therapy is supposed to be accompanied by uh traditional psychiatric therapy.

SPEAKER_02 12:35

It needs to be partnered, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:37

Partnered, you know, before and after treatments. It's it's a crucial component that's right when you read about like there's especially after Trump signed that executive order in April, fast tracking. That there was in virtually every article, like the the last or penultimate paragraph in every piece was uh they'd have some mental health professional but say, by the way, this is supposed to be paired with traditional therapy. And that's that's part of the conversation that is kind of being brushed aside.

SPEAKER_02 13:06

I can definitely see that in the spiritual community. It's like people who go for psychedelic retreats, they go for ayahuasca, you know, or ketamine or things that maybe it's not administered by a licensed professional. It's like you really have to do your research and making sure that you're going to a place that does partner, does a screening, make sure that it's partnered with the you know, actual psychiatry, and is this gonna be beneficial? And for some of my viewpoints, is I can see some spiritual bypassing. It's like, well, I'm gonna do an ayahuasca journey and then I'm gonna be cured. Like, no, that's one step.

SPEAKER_00 13:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:43

Um, sorry, I went off on a tangent there.

SPEAKER_00 13:45

No, okay, and you know, there are people who do report uh it's you know, like especially with PTSD who report the Ibogaine, go to an Ibogaine treat or ayahuasca and report basically say that save their lives, you know.

SPEAKER_02 14:00

100%.

SPEAKER_00 14:01

Yeah, and uh but I but I do think you know people metabolize these drugs differently, and uh so it's not and it's a sort of miracle cure part of things that I think is being real really fast-tracked in the public imagination.

SPEAKER_02 14:15

So we hear the phrase psychedelic renaissance everywhere right now. What do you feel like is driving this renewed interest?

SPEAKER_00 14:24

Well, partly I think it's just what we were talking about is there are a lot of people like my father who are really really hurting and really just suffering. Yeah. And I think if you've had any people folks who have had any experience in the mental health care system in this country, they uh know that it pretty intimately that it's just it's broken. Yeah, it's broken and it's just uh you know, and that's not to dismiss all the very, very real and valiant efforts on behalf of the healthcare professional, mental health care professionals, doctors and nurses. And there are real treatments out there that have nothing to do with psychedelics, but but it doesn't they again, they there are a lot of folks like my father who have sort of washed up on the shores of helplessness, uh, um, to put it kind of melodramatically, and just need help. And now they can finally get it after a half a century of kind of the dark ages of the Nixonian drug war, and and now fortunately, we are have arrived at a I think a better place than than we were then even five or ten years ago. So now now people have options. You know, we owe a lot to folks like some of the early researchers like Roland Griffiths and Bob Jesse. Bob Jesse wasn't really a researcher, but fundamental kind of progenitor here. And also Michael Pollan, you know, who in the movement, you know, in the movement, people call him the pollinator. And he really deserves all the accolades he's getting for helping to legitimize in the public mind the very real research that had been going on for for years, but you know, done by Ronald Griffiths and Robert Hicard Harris and folks like that. So I think it's just we are in a kind of cultural awakening.

SPEAKER_02 16:02

And it also feels like a tipping point. And I will speak from my personal experience being a nurse and I manage a doctor's office. And in that experience from COVID to now, we can real see a real desperate need for mental health services for especially our teenage population. There's a lot of anxiety, panic, and it's it's it, it's it there are truly amazing providers, but it is hard

Psychedelic Therapy Hype And Integration

SPEAKER_02 16:28

to get appropriate care right now. It is hard. We don't have a lot, you don't have a lot of providers. Access to care, I think is the hardest part right now for where we're at. And hopefully, you know, for the adult population and maybe leaning into some of these alternative therapies will help ease that hopelessness, you know, like you're speaking of with your father. So, do you believe that the current movement is being driven primarily by scientific discovery, spiritual hunger, dissatisfaction with traditional mental health care, financial opportunity, or maybe a combination of all four?

SPEAKER_00 17:03

Yeah, I would say all the above. Yeah, because yeah, for sure. I mean, you know, and unfortunately, I think uh the the financial gain part of it is kind of distasteful to many people. But but the reality is that's what's that's how this is gonna happen. Unfortunately, it's gonna if if people uh lots of people are really really gonna benefit from this, then it has to come out of the underground and in into the overground, and a matter of speaking, you know, and the way that it's gonna do that, it has there has to be a harm harm reduction regulation that's gonna be FDA approved. Not necessarily that that the drugs I'm sort of gonna walk back from that a little bit because I do think that there's danger in some of these drugs becoming proprietary in a to companies in a way that they should not be. They should be accessible to people, you know. Like I don't know, I could give any number of examples, but like psilocybin, like it just kind of if Terrence were alive today, he would be appalled at these the pharmaceutical companies in particular having having a stake in in any of these treatment programs, you know. But uh but unfortunately, I think that's just the the reality of the situation is it's gonna have to happen in a in a above board kind of harm reduction uh way. So so yeah, I think it's all the above.

SPEAKER_02 18:23

Why do you believe Terrence McKenna played such an important role in shaping today's psychedelic movement?

SPEAKER_00 18:29

So Terrence gave us, I claim in the book, I mean he he gave us a lot of things, but the three things in particular he gave us. And and and here I have a big caveat because I really actually think it will I can't establish this for a fact, but I really think it was his brother Dennis who Terence always took credit for this, and he was the better known, he was the guy who had a sort of public profile, and Dennis was just a lonely PhD in ethnobotany. And but it they they let's say the two of them, I think Dennis, but uh to be fair, the two of them were really, if not the first, and the very first people to figure out how to cultivate magic mushrooms at home. But kind of weird to think that now in their present ubiquity, but even in like the sort of psychedelic 60s and 70s, psilocybin mushrooms were a relative not novelty item. Like you just even well-connected heads had to go, you had to go to Cornovaca or something to get, you know, like uh Timothy Leary had his famous first psilocybin in Cornovaca, and or you had to go Haka or something, or or to La Torera, you know, you could get in the United States, you could get DMT, uh synthetic DMT, you could get LSD, you could get MDMA. If if you were really in the know, you could maybe get peyote but or mescaline, but but you couldn't get mushrooms until Terrence and Dennis came along. And so, and they by early to mid-70s, they were growing and and selling a disseminate, giving away a lot, a lot of magic mushrooms to people. And they sparked this seismic movement in the psychedelic underground. Now, a few years, it's complicated because a few years later, these amateur mycologists like Paul Stametz would come along and point out well, if you know how to look, you could find psychedelic mushrooms sometimes in your very backyard. You know, he he tells this story Paul does of finding the largest flush of psilocyide mushrooms that he'd ever discovered in a public park across the street from a police station in Oregon in the 1970s, and they were a new species, or they were unidentified species because no one knew how to identify them. So, but so Terrence uh beat beat them to the punch a little bit, but then these kind of mycologists come along and it creates this uh efflorescence of the of psilocybin mushrooms in the in the underground. So Terrence gave us that. He also gave us, I claim, it wasn't again a slight caveat, the only one, but he really proselytized hard on this end for many, many years. But he gave us this idea of psychedelics not just as fun or being used to get high and expand the mind, but he he gave us this idea of their sacred and sacramental use, that they were somehow tied to the transcendental and tied to religion. Again, he he sort of stole that from Indigenous Americans, especially the Mazatak Indians in Mexico, who have been using psilocybin mushrooms for at least a couple of generations, if not a couple of years, and um in their religious ceremonies. But Terrence really spent a good part of three decades proselytizing that idea that they that these things were sacred and were to be used to those ends. And then the last thing he gave us, I claim somewhat unfairly, but I think also accurately, is that he gave us this desire or I don't want to say, like, readiness to discard science and logic for subjectivity, subjective experience, which makes sense because it's psychedelics and subjectivity is part and parcel of the whole psychedelic experience. But the problem is that he claimed it to be much more than that. He used it to um in the Timothy Leary way to develop a whole political, whole politics and a worldview based on the psychedelic experience. And it's just and I argue in the book that this that's just not that's not sustainable. And it's I understand it having done these drugs myself, the desire is to do so. But I think with these drugs, they're so powerful and so you know transcendent, and it can be such an ecstatic experience for people that we have to remind ourselves to be our smartest, sanest, most, if you'll excuse the pun, kind of sober selves when we're when we're no longer high. And it's great if you find them useful, and especially in a mental health aspect and ameliorative. Or salutary in any way. That's terrific. But in my view, they are not a basis for politics. And that's why I think Terrace went wrong.

SPEAKER_02 22:57

Gotcha. So the word madness appears in your book's title. Where does madness enter the story? And how difficult is it to distinguish spiritual revelation from psychological destabilization?

SPEAKER_00 23:09

Well, that second question, I don't know if I can answer that. That's probably above my pay grade. But um is very very, I mean, really did kind of go crazy for a couple of weeks. So they went to the jungle, they went to the Amazon looking for this psychedelical Ukahe. They didn't find it. They were told, I think, somewhat erroneously, they were maybe given a bum steer by someone who didn't like them very much, that it

The Psychedelic Renaissance And Profit

SPEAKER_00 23:33

was taboo to ask, even ask about it. I, you know, I visited La Chorera 50 years later and I intervening years, maybe things changed, but I I was told as well what there's that's not true at all. So, but for whatever reason, Terence they got off the Ucahe path and got onto the psilocybin mushrooms, which they found growing everywhere in La Chorrera thanks to the they're not native to the region. They you probably know this, but psilocybin uh mushrooms do especially well in the dung of a hood hood game and and cattle. And there were cattle that had been imported by Jesuit missionaries there. And when they arrived, they one of the first things they discovered was this huge flush of psilocybin mushrooms. It was also spring, so it was wet, and it was anyway. So they were taking a lot of mushrooms, is my point. Mushrooms and in combination with DMT. And these combinations was well, this uh this combination was developed into what Terrence and Dennis referred to as the experimental La Torera, which was an attempt to basically in kind of shorthand crack the space-time continuum and and and establish a kind of collective consciousness in humanity. It's I I don't even know if I can explain any more than that, but there's a lot more to be said there. But that's essentially what we're up to. Dennis went crazy. I mean, he he he for essentially disappeared for two weeks. Terence kind of slowly nerd nursed them back. They were able to get us plane to fault to fly in and kind of essentially evacuate them to Bogota. But so that that's the m madness part. And but to your other question, I I you know it's a it's a real really good one. And I think that there are a lot of certainly religious mystics over the years, and you might count Terrence and maybe even Dennis as one of one of those, as one of them, but who would say who would who skirted that line between madness and religious ecstasy. So but that's interesting. And anyway, so yeah, but that's where the literal madness and then the figurative madness, I I think is maybe a kind of slightly different topic, although somewhat adjacent. But uh anyway.

SPEAKER_02 25:36

So psychedelic experiences are often described as encounters with entities, divine intelligence, universal consciousness, and other dimensions. As an investigative journalist, how do you approach claims that feel profoundly real but cannot be independently verified?

SPEAKER_00 25:54

Well, you try to take people at at their word, you know. Like, I mean, the same with Bigfoot. It's like I who am I to say that it's not real? Like, you know, I I I um and I'm to actually, as far as it's possible to do so, I try to set aside my own convictions. Like I in my Bigfoot book, I wasn't at all interested in you know, parachuting in from Cambridge to kind of wag my finger at Bigfoot or say, no, no, no, there's no way that you could say what you said you saw.

SPEAKER_01 26:21

Right.

SPEAKER_00 26:22

You know, and I I'm just again, it just going back to your first question, just interested in belief and and how people come to the beliefs and uh and how it differs from diff d disbelief and how it overlaps. You know, and in psychedelics, I would say the same thing. Like it uh if it works for you, great. If the subject of experience is ameliorative or just salutary or helpful to you, that's true. That's that's terrific. You know, it you know, it's funny, you said entities, and one of the commonalities of the DMT experience, like ayahuasca and and so on, is it's uh these uh the little people, which is people report those elementals? Yeah, like uh gnome-like elfin-like creatures. Terrence wrote and talked a lot about this over the years, and and lo and behold, in in in La Chorera, I met indigenous people who report seeing the little people when they're on DMT, when they eat when they take the ukahe, drink okay, okay. And this is a phenomenal, a cross-cultural, transhistorical phenomenon. I'm just reading Oliver Sachs, the late neuroscientist, his grade on the man who mistook his wife for a hat. And these they have, you know, case studies going back a century and a half, you know, in France, notably, of in like psychiatric institutions of people who are bipolar or institutionalized for one mental health problem or another reporting. Some people who have migraines that report similar encounters, you know. So um anecdotally, there's there's a ton of really tantalizing stuff there in evidence. I, you know, and it's not my job to really try to discount it or anything. I think sometimes the psychedelics it can be such a powerful experience that the only thing left standing is that that subjective takeaway, you know, and and the I think the the kind of impetuses sometimes to just go proselytize on on its behavior, go pro go go preach the gospel afterwards. And I so anyway, that's all I'll say on the matter.

SPEAKER_02 28:27

I mean, I do respect the fact that you know you're you're there to hear about an experience and not maybe take away from their experience and say, no, no, no, no, you know, because you can speak to someone like myself, and I'm like, well, yeah, I work with elementals, and you're like, how? And I'm like, I don't know, I just do. Like it's just, you know, I appreciate and respect the fact that you're open and willing to see a different side and different perspective.

SPEAKER_00 28:51

So that's something you see in your own work?

SPEAKER_02 28:54

I do. Yeah, yeah. Working with what?

SPEAKER_00 28:58

Oh no, I'm sorry. I just I was gonna ask me to say more about it.

SPEAKER_02 29:02

So I work within the Akashic Records and I do a lot of so my work is primarily in different, like I would say, energetic threads. Like that's where I pull from. And I'm not somebody who has actually gone down the psychedelic route, even though I've I'm well aware of it and whatnot. But within my own spiritual practice and working with clients, like when

Madness, Mysticism, And DMT Entities

SPEAKER_02 29:23

you open up like the Akashic Records, a different dementia, different dimension energy you pull in, elementals pop in, you know, angels pop in, if your guides, your masters, your teachers, your loved ones, they come in because they wanna they want to bring you a message and they want to do healing. So I find it fascinating that they also are working with the elementals. It's so cool. The elementals are I mean, they're they're I mean, we're of the earth and they're of the earth, and it's fascinating to me, even though gnomes will mess with you, fairies will also mess with you. Sorry, we're really off topic. I I got very excited about elementals because never mind, because they also work within your chakra system, so like your Earth Star chakra, your the gnomes work up there with helping bring in more abundance. So sorry, that was off topic. So how do Western seekers sometimes romanticize indigenous traditions while overlooking maybe cultural context, responsibility, boundaries, and relationship to the land?

SPEAKER_00 30:28

Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah. I mean, I mean, we've definitely romanticized ayahuasca in recent years. You know, it's just that was one of the surprises of the book for me. You'd think the way it's talked about in the West. Well, I mean, I guess South America is also technically the West, we could say like the global north, but the way that we talk about it is like it's like a ballot Tylenol or something, you know, and in ayahuasca is actually, at least among the Putumayo, the Witoto and Bora people that I spent time with in the shamans there is uh not used that often. It's certainly not used for healing purposes or for what we would call wellness, you know, it's it's until pretty recently it was used almost exclusively to communicate with ancestors, to have luck in the hunt, to find lost objects, to communicate with people over long distances. The whole wellness thing is something that's been kind of grafted onto the ayahuasca experience by the by people in the north, you know, and it's not necessarily a crime or anything, but I do think that there is a misunderstanding of just broadly speaking, of uh indigenous cosmology and and and indigenous medicine. Like in so like in the Putuma, in the I'll stick to La Chorera. So the Wutoto and Bora people love La Chorera, the like the two big psychoactive drugs, the by far and away, the most important drugs in their universe that they use every day are coca and tobacco. The women don't use coca, but the they use tobacco, and the men use both always simultaneously. Uh, the tobacco first, which you lick is like a paste, and then coca, which is a powder. It's not like cocaine at all. It it's it's you know, you you you get an uptick in kind of mood and euphoria, but not with the existential crash of cocaine. But it's um those are the two main psychoactive drugs in the indigenous medicine cabinet. And you know, and up there, I think even before ayahuasca would become things like dancing, to you know, dancing till you become totally ecstatic and delirious and dancing and drumming in particular together. And so, you know, and and then there's a medley of different psychoactive drugs, different there's different kinds of ukahe, there's different kinds of ayahuasca. People in the putuma in the Amazon basin talk about set up between 17 and 20 types of ayahuasca. That can be there are about a hundred admixtures, and those admixtures can be tweaked to evoke different different experiences. So, so yeah, all that was really kind of novel and and unique for me to discover. One of the shamans I hung out with who'd been apprenticing as a shaman for 14 years, had never taken ayahuasca before. So it's not this thing. I think it's fair to say that it's not quite as we imagine it in the West. Again, that's not this, it's not a crime, it's not to say that people can't find something useful in it, especially if you feel that your life is on the line. By all means. I mean, I'm not gonna advocate go, you know, you go to a keto's or pull copper or something and hire a shaman, but like, but but you know, do some research and talk to people and find out what's the best path for you using just ornament. Exactly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:34

So psychedelics become a billion-dollar industry. What does that signal about where this movement may be heading and where can listeners learn more about your work and your book?

SPEAKER_00 33:47

Well, unfortunately, probably you know, it's funny. I I sometimes I change my mind about this like every other day. Like sometimes it seems like the psychedelic the pharmaceutical companies have such a toehold, they're just gonna they're just gonna mow everybody down on their path. They're just gonna establish the kinds of outreaches and the and the kinds of access that they want to. But on the other hand, it's like hard for me to imagine, especially with magic mushrooms, how how they're gonna make any proprietary claims. Uh, you know, you can grow a bag of magic mushrooms now, now it's so it took Dennis and and Terrence years of tinkering to figure this out. But now you can order a bag online for 50 bucks and grow it in your closet, and you'll have enough mushrooms to last you and all your friends and family and all their friends and family for like a whole year. So it's hard, it's hard for me to have on that side how the what the profit model is, you know. Um, and even micro dosing, that was the big talk when I was writing my book was microdosing. And I microdosed for research purposes for four months or so for and I I I got so sick, I don't want to swear, but so sick and tired of it. So fucking sick and tired of that feeling, you know, after a while. And and I just don't, I don't think, I don't think it's it's not something that you're gonna do every day for the rest of your life or for even for a year. Like you're just gonna people are gonna tap out. But it just doesn't seem to me like there's a market really there, or an underground market, maybe mom and pop shops. But now the the other stuff, the you know, ibogain and and you know, mescaline and mdma and dmt, that's a kind of different ball game. But and there are even companies now who are doing like taking the tryptomines, which are tryptomines are the active compounds and psyl7 mushrooms that make you trip, and they're tweaking them in the laboratory, making their own proprietary brand of tryptomines. I've tried a few of them and they're not great, but we might maybe we're just in the infant infant stages here. You know, that's another kind of can of worms. But anyway, so but but they can find me at my website, which is John M O'Connor all one word.com, and and my books are you know in the available there. The the links to them are there, they're in the usual bookshop, usual places, and yeah, so as we Yes, perfectly.

SPEAKER_02 36:08

So as we wrap up, after everything you investigated and experienced, what do you hope people remember the next time they hear psychedelics described as a shortcut to healing, enlightenment, or the meaning of life?

SPEAKER_00 36:24

That it's not gonna be that easy, you know, that that it's the but that there's virtue in the struggle and and and virtue and and taking the kind of long long way in, you know, and um spending spending time learning as much as you can and and and deciding what's the right path

Indigenous Context, Industry Future, Next Book

SPEAKER_00 36:43

for you, I guess. I would also hopefully take away from Terrence McKenna, who is this forgotten, I I hope for not much longer, forgotten guru of the psychedelic 60s. Terence was a brilliant guy, very troubled guy. He had a lot of very good ideas. He also had a lot of completely batshit ideas. Unfortunately, it's the batshit ideas that tend to have lasted people, what people think they know about him, is more complicated than that. And I hope that they'll get a fuller picture from my book. And I also hope that they'll consider reading Terrence's great, is really only great. He wrote a lot of books, but his truly great opus called True Hallucinations about his trip to La Choreira with Dennis, which is a would be a terrific companion to my own book. I sort of wish Barnes and Noble or somebody would sell them as a package, but but it's it's a really wonderful book to to read and and and you know shows Terrence and and all his sort of glory in mayhem.

SPEAKER_02 37:38

So and uh so I lied. I have one more question. Are you currently working on another book now? And if so, can you share anything about it?

SPEAKER_00 37:47

Yeah, for sure. That yeah, I am working on that's how this in journalism you'd kind of tend to bang these things out a little too quickly, actually, for my taste. But I'm working, my next book is about UFOs and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. So similar, similar, very similar to Bigfoot, except there's more serious folks uh invested in this now. Just here at Harvard, there's a famous astrophysicist, Abby Loeb, has really thrown his weight behind the extraterrestrial hypothesis. And I mean a lot of very serious, not that there's not serious people involved in Bigfoot, but let's say, like for whatever it's worth, like credentialed, like professional, serious people who who have their kind of livelihoods on the line by taking a claim one way or the other.

SPEAKER_02 38:29

It's open disclosure time. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 38:32

Yeah, yeah. And it's so yeah, it's interesting time for this uh subject. And uh and uh so similar to Bigfoot, it's a travel story and a portrait of kind of microculture of American belief.

SPEAKER_02 38:43

That's amazing. John, thank you so much for coming to this virtual spotlight series. It's truly been amazing to connect with you when your UFO book comes live. Please come back on. I would love to talk to you about that. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 38:55

Yeah, for sure. Thank you. Thanks for having me on.