The Christian Psychedelic: Should Christians Use Plant Medicines, Is Microdosing (Or Tripping) A Sin, Accessing Spiritual Realms, DMT & Much More With Paul Risse & Ben Greenfield.

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, it's very easy to manipulate information to have the end result be what your will wishes to find.

You better have preyed on the armor of God. You better be in deep spiritual union with God. You need to be saved and washed with the blood of Jesus. You need to be protected going into any of these type of environments.

Love and light being prayed over from a non Christian perspective, I believe can come from the enemy. And what might be perceived of as a blessing that they're praying over could actually be a curse.

Health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. Well folks, plant medicine, psychedelics, Christianity, spirituality. If you're scratching your head about how all this kind of jives the, then you're going to want to listen to today's show because we take a deep dive into Christianity, psychedelics, plant medicine and a whole lot more. With my guest Paul Reese on today's show, this one is a doozy. Well, folks, we are about to dive into a topic I actually get asked a lot about. I get asked a surprising number of times nearly every week, sometimes every day, about how I navigate the wide world of, of plant medicine and even microdosing and things like psilocybin or LSD or marijuana. As a person who is also a professing Christian. And we also run into this a lot in just the health sector in general, this concept of psychedelics and what they might do to the brain, whether they're healthy, whether we might get some kind of neurotransmitter issues or other deficits built up. And you know, there's all sorts of little rabbit holes in this whole discussion that we could dive into. But I recently had a guy reach out to me who has a pretty fascinating history. He's taken psychedelics like thousands of times over the course of the past decade. He has a history of, you know, DMT and Sellvia and LSD and 2 CB and 2 CI. I mean, you name it, he's probably messed around with it a little bit. But interestingly, he is also a Christian. He's writing a book right now called the Psychedelic Christian. And he also has a history in personal training and fitness and health. He was a personal trainer on ABC's Extreme Makeover TV show in LA. He has been a chef, he's been a life coach. He even ate 100% raw vegan for a couple years. He's lived off grid with no electricity for a year. And as a result of part of that even wrote a whole book called Kind of Tiny Home, which is a whole different book, whole different topic. That's kind of an approach to building and owning your own teeny tiny home. And he's kind of a Renaissance man. He's got his fingers in a lot of pots, so to speak. I think that's how that metaphor goes. He's also a husband, he's a father, he's up to a lot of stuff. And his name is Paul Reese. Paul Reese. So as Paul and I talk today, I'm sure you guys are going to have a lot of your own thoughts and comments and questions to add. So if you do, just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com ChristianPsychedelic BenGreenfieldFitness.com christianpsychedelic and that's where you can discover the show notes and also links and resources to everything that Paul and I talk about. So, Paul, welcome to the show, ma'. Am.

Thank you for having me on, Ben. I really appreciate it.

Yeah. And I mean, I guess my introduction kind of begs the question, are you actually hovered in a tiny, tiny home somewhere right now?

No, I am hovered in a tiny room in a slightly larger home. But yeah, my other house is in Hico that I built and then we're building a new house down the road and that will be what would be considered a normal sized home. So. Okay, right now I'm in a tiny room.

All right, well, maybe your next book can be called kinda Tiny room. Where do you live, by the way? Which city?

Bridgeport, Texas. Right outside of DFW area.

Okay. All right, so that's, that's, that's closer to Dallas then to Austin, right?

That's correct.

Okay, Am I, am I correct? Did, did you wind up going to, did we meet each other at, I think was it was a paleo effects or something like that. Did you ever go to that event?

I was in town that weekend meeting friends and I happened to find out that that was going on, but I don't think that that weekend. I think that several of my friends have met you before and I've definitely watched a lot of your stuff, but I don't believe that we've met in person.

Okay. All right, we'll have to make that happen sometime. But by the way, also just to get this out of the way, because I know people might ask, what is the deal with tiny houses? Why do people seem kind of super interested in this whole concept of tiny home?

I think that a lot of the younger generation have observed their Parents take on the big mortgage and build the big house and perhaps pursuing happiness in that and then perhaps seeing that their parents weren't happy when they got the big house and the big mortgage payment. And so they said, you know, what, if taking a huge amount of debt on and building a huge house doesn't make them happy, then perhaps I can be content with something smaller. I think that also society is kind of just, you know, the carbon footprint and that whole thing that's happened kind of last 15 or 20 years, people have become more conscious of, you know, how much they consume, how much they need. And I think it also just became a way to have less responsibility and more freedom to travel the world and things like that.

Interesting. Yeah, I guess my concept of it is my family and I driving each other nuts after about a month. Living in one room is the way I envisioned the tiny house movement working for us. But yeah, I suppose we could make it work. I remember when we used to visit Thailand a lot and I remember like every single home that we kind of duck into when we visit all these villages, it literally was just like one room. And that one room had, you know, a guitar and pots and pans and some fish cooking and some beds and a small tv and it was all just like in one tiny house. So maybe my concept of a tiny home is, you know, a small fishing village in Thailand and perhaps there are, there are cooler, sexier tiny homes out there.

There are some cool, sexy tiny homes out there.

Cool. Well, I'll link to your book in the show notes, but obviously that's not the topic at hand today. So something perhaps more meaningful, not that tiny homes aren't meaningful, but something perhaps a little bit more close to home for people who have been asking me a lot of questions about psychedelics. And I've talked before in the past about my own history with the use of psychedelics. You know, for example, it's no secret that I will often microdose. You know, I'll microdose with, with variants similar to something like LSD or, you know, psilocybin with niacin and lion's mane or even occasionally something closer to like an MDMA for sociability or compassion or, you know, or connection or just a date night with my wife. And so, you know, I certainly use smaller doses of certain substances on a pretty frequent basis, the same way as I'd use a nootropic or a smart drug. And I have also delved into these so called journeys where, you know, you get a little bit of ego dissolution. You get a merging of the left and right hemispheres of the brain, sometimes open yourself up to new ideas, new concepts, business brainstorming. You know, if I were to do this with my wife, you know, relationship building and things that. That seem to. To be relatively enhanced via the use of certain compounds that. That God available to us or given human beings the wisdom to be able to create that, tweak a few dials in the brain, so to speak. And of course, I have caught some flack for that as a Christian in many cases, simply because it seems to be something that can take you into a bit of a spiritual realm almost in many cases. And so there's a lot of little avenues to unpack and rabbit holes we can dive into. But I'm curious, first of all, what your history is with the use of plant medicines or psychedelics, Paul, because from what I understand, you actually have a pretty extensive history of use with these compounds. Especially as a Christian.

I'll start kind of at the beginning. I grew up in an amazing house with Christian parents, and I actually never partied. I never drank, I never smoked. I never did anything while living at home because my dad was the leader of the house and we got disciplined if we disobeyed. But I also, at the age of 12, started hardening my heart towards Christ and started to look for other answers or create questions for the Bible that were hard to answer.

And by the way, I may. I may interrupt you a few times, you know, and sometimes I get called out for this by my audience. They tell me I'm rude to interrupt, but I always like to clear things up as we go. Where was the kind of the legality in your home growing up around drugs based on your parents kind of having a sordid past? You know, kind of in the same way that, you know, someone whose parent was an alcoholic might have a completely different attitude towards wine or beer than someone whose parent has a. A healthy history of proper, responsible use of alcohol. In your case, were your parents kind of scarred by previous use of plant medicine or psychedelics or something like that?

I don't believe so. I believe that my dad in high school, he said that he would party, and I think that just involved drinking. He grew up in Minnesota, and when he was in college, he partied. And then when he gave his life to Christ, he stopped that. And the partying, to my knowledge, just involved drinking. My mother grew up in Brooklyn, and I think that there was probably drug abuse and physical abuse at her house growing up and her dad was in Vietnam and came back and was kind of hurt from the war and abused her. And I think that my mother and I. She passed away a little bit over a decade ago, and at that time I was not having the types of conversations where I would have inquired about that, but I think that she probably partied. I imagine she might have smoked weed or she might have drank. She definitely would have drank. But they both got married fairly young and were both Christians fairly young. So I think that my mother perhaps a small amount from her parents, but my father. And yeah, his upbringing was very. His dad was an iron worker, his mom was a school teacher. Very kind of structured upbringing. So I don't think there was any plant medicine that they engaged in growing up.

Yeah, I was just curious. You know, my mom had a pretty extensive use or extensive history with the use of. Of psilocybin. And in fact, you know, for her growing up, she. She actually dealt quite a bit. She. She was involved in some drug dealing. And then my father had some. Some pretty extensive issues in terms of not only growing up in a wealthy family in Miami and being engaged in drug use, but his brother was actually killed in and. And murdered. And it was actually related to some. Some cocaine dealings with some local Cuban gangs. So. So both of them, you know, were relatively legalistic with me growing up, you know, with everything from. From alcohol to any form of drugs, anything whatsoever. But for them, it was. It was kind of a deal where they had been through so much related drugs in the past that, you know, it was not as though they, you know, in some set and setting, under the guidance of a facilitator, did a dose of psilocybin with peaceful johns hop playlist playing in the background. Like, for them, it was. It was the way that I think a lot of people in perhaps the, you know, the 60s or the 70s experienced drugs.

Yeah, that's interesting. That's an interesting question. I'd never really asked my dad that, but I will.

Yeah, I was curious. So. So you. You kind of branched out from growing up as a. As a young Christian kid. You started to experiment with a lot of this stuff.

Yeah, once I got to college, I kind of. I was like, man, I'm going to do pretty much whatever I want and rebel against everything that I was ever taught. And I thought it was cooler than the world and started mostly just drinking. And I found out pretty quickly, I was like, what happens when you get drunk? Like, you just get, like, you throw up and you make stupid mistakes and you spend a Lot of money. I was like, this can't be that much fun. So then I tried smoking weed and I really enjoyed it a lot. And that was much better than drinking. And then the first time I ate mushrooms, it actually was like, wow, this is different than anything I've ever done. And it's actually changing the way I view the world and I view myself and my history and my story and. And you know, I didn't have any spiritual maturity at all at the time. I just had, you know, whatever a 19 year old's brain is that, you know, is in college. That's the perspective I had on, on that experience. But it made me want to do it more just because I felt like I've always wanted to grow in every part of my life since I was little. I felt like I was pursuing something and that I was, you know, I was more enlightened than, you know, people who would just go out and get drunk, you know, because I could go into the woods by myself and eat mushrooms and stay out there and cry under a tree and like, watch the tree grow from a seed to where it was and it tells me a story. And watching a butterfly land on me and like watching it go in reverse into a caterpillar, like. And just like, I was like, you know, it was much more interesting to me and as an experience in going out and getting drunk. So. Right.

You were experiencing some of the like the structural and functional neuroplasticity that we see with the use of like a psilocin or a psilocybin. And you know, I think that many people, including myself, will get little pieces of that just by microdosing, for example, throughout the year, throughout the month. But it sounds like you were 19 years old and kind of trip dosing on hefty doses of psilocybin.

Yeah, absolutely. And I did that for probably a couple years. And then I had a girlfriend at the time and she became pregnant and then she became. I have a daughter named Kaylee from that. And I got married as a result of that. And I was married for three years. And kind of those three years I kind of stopped engaging that reality in the same way I would still do it occasionally. I just loved, loved, loved to either smoke a little bit of marijuana or eat some mushrooms and just go bike riding all day. That was like my escape whenever I was married. But I really wanted to be a good father, but I didn't know Christ at the time. And so I would say for the first two years I experimented pretty heavily. And then When I got married, I stopped experimenting in the same way. But then, you know, not knowing Christ and I made some poor decisions. My ex wife made some poor decisions. We hurt each other really badly.

Can we stop for a second? I don't understand. I thought you grew up in a Christian home. But then you say you didn't know Christ. What do you mean?

Oh yeah. To me, well, knowledge of Christ is perhaps I can say I didn't have salvation, I hadn't given my life to Christ. So to me there's a difference between knowledge of Christ, which if you go to Sunday school and they say this is who Jesus was, that's knowledge of Christ. And so I was not saved at the time. Like I hadn't chosen Jesus Christ as my savior.

Yeah, you had not. I guess the way that I would phrase it would be that my belief is that there is a deity, there is a creator, that there is an all knowing, omniscient, omnipresent being who designed this universe. And I also, of course, catch a lot of flack for that, operating largely in a sector that is overrun by scientism. So for me to believe in, you know, an old man in the sky in robes, you know, gets me called out for, for fairy magic. Yet I believe that. And I also believe that, that, that a deity came down, became a man and suffered some of the, some most horrific, horrific torture and shame and you know, ultimately crucifixion and death in a very horrible manner in a way that allowed us to be able to take all our shame, all our suffering, all our sin, everything we've ever experienced and turn it over to that God to be forgiven. And, and that, that is, you know, what I, what I believe the deity, the death, the burial and the resurrection of Jesus Christ allows for us to completely be free of sin and shame. Should we do something as simple, you know, something a little child and simply believe upon that and cast everything that we have at the foot of the cross. And what you're saying is that you kind of knew the story, but you really didn't actually cast everything at the foot of the cross or kind of, kind of believe that you could, you could rid yourself of that shame?

That's correct. And you know, even growing up I, I had memorized chapters of the Bible and I probably said the prayer, I don't know, hundreds of times growing up and be like, Jesus, please save me. And you know, I knew I'm a sinner, please forgive me my sins. I knew everything to say and that would just like kind of open my eyes and, like, I don't feel anything different. And looking back now, I think that I was doing that based purely out of fear because I like some of the environments we're in, taught so heavily on hell that I was just like, instead of realizing who I was as a sinner, that I just was like, I don't want to go to hell and Jesus, please save me. And it was just a mechanism from my parents that I learned to try not to go to hell. And I think later in life, when I finally did give my life to Christ, it was because I was in desperate, desperate need of God. And I tried everything of my own power, and I needed Jesus. And I cried out to God and said, I'm a sinner. I need you. Because I can't do this on my own, and I'm going crazy. And I've tried everything that there is to try. So I think there is a difference. And I do believe sometimes children, when they say that prayer, that. That they become a Christian. And who knows, one day when I stand before God, maybe God will say, you know, back then, like, I understood your heart and even your place. But I think that I would. I would say that I became a Christian a little bit after 30.

Okay, gotcha. And so. So up until that time between like, 12 and 30, you. You pretty much took every psychedelic known to man.

Well, I would say, like, like 19 and 30. Yeah. And so, yeah, after I went through the divorce is kind of. It was two years of some of the most intense pain and anger and bitter bitterness and resentment and jealousy and manipulation. And like, you know, even not being in my daughter's life every day was just. I mean, it just literally at that age just. Just broke me down. And because I had developed these systems of thought that said, well, I know that religion isn't the answer because I've already found hypocrisy in the Bible and questions that can't be answered and churches that obviously are judgmental and don't have a relationship with God, or else it'd be apparent. And so I'd already developed reasons in my mind why religion wasn't the answer to the pain that I was experiencing. And if you don't know the difference between a relationship with Jesus and religion, it's easy to just lump the two of those together into the same category. And that's what I did. And so I just started eating mushrooms probably five days a week for two years during that period.

And you ate mushrooms five days a week for two years? How many Mushrooms, are we talking about?

Oh, man. You know, they say there's certain things in life, like when I was a fireman, they say, you'll remember your first fire call and last fire call, and everything in between is kind of a blur, you know? So there were definitely a lot of heroic doses. There were definitely experimentations with tea like I used to when I lived in Austin. This is when I was doing it, and I had four different jobs. I was a waiter at PF Chang's, and I would wait tables while I was tripping. And I would Pedicab, which is pulling people around on a bike in downtown Austin to make money. I would trip. Then I was driving a lot at the time as well, and I was making jewelry. And then I was also in massage therapy school at Lauterstein Conway. And, yeah, I would say that sometimes it was heroic doses on the weekend, going to Barton Springs or going to Greenbelt or riding my bike around all day. And then some days it was like, I'm just gonna pop a couple of caps before I go into work today to see how interesting of a conversation I can have with a couple of caps.

Okay, so you're doing, like, 2 to 6 grams?

Yeah, sometimes. And I found that you could build up a tolerance pretty easily to them. So it almost became extremely lucid how I took them. It was almost like it was like the whole two years was a trip, in a way. And sometimes there'd be amplified versions of it, or, you know, I'd go to a concert and there'd be, like, something really huge that would happen as far as, like, an insider breakthrough. But, yeah, it became fairly lucid how I used them and started making chocolate with them and teas. And I actually tried smoking them pretty much any way that you can ingest the mushroom. I tried at the time. And I had tried other things also during that time, but they felt a lot harsher, and it didn't feel quite as natural. And the insights were almost like. Like. Like mechanical or electronic instead of, like trees and sunsets and, you know, air and breath and birds and noises, like, it was. It just felt like the other things I engaged. I didn't know this at the time because I wasn't a Christian, but I do believe that if you have a substance like, let's say, 2C, B, 2Ci, LSD, a man makes that substance. And when a man gets involved.

You mean they're considered to be synthetically created substances?

Yes, that's correct. That's correct. And so I think that whenever you have a substance that can affect your spirit and your emotions and your thought process. And someone is creating that substance, that an intention can be put into that substance. And I believe that sorcery is something that's very real and that is something that can be infused with the knowledge that perhaps your portals would be opened if you're creating lsd. And you said, you know, I'm going to know, use sorcery and put a spell on this or whatever you want to do. And so I felt like most shunt comes from the ground and I feel safe doing this. And I didn't, I didn't know Christ at the time, but just like my natural reaction to it felt that way.

Well, you know, I certainly know that the hallucinogenic or psychedelic effects of a synthetic substance are often, you know, by many psychonauts, so to speak, described as slightly more synthetic, sometimes a little bit more, you know, nearly geometric, or slightly less natural. You know, something like even, you know, an LSD or as you were mentioning, the 2 CB that, you know, the dimethoxy, ethylamine, whatever it is, you know, it was, it was synthesized back in the 70s, you know, to kind of do. Do some of the similar things that something like Ecstasy or MDMA might do. And, you know, many of these compounds that are synthetic are, I know, not, not favored as heavily as the natural compounds due to the feeling that it is a little bit more. More synthetic. Yet at the same time, I mean, couldn't. Couldn't you say the same thing about, like, vitamin C? You could take it synthetic ascorbic acid or vitamin C from an orange and technically it's. It's the same molecule, isn't it?

Yeah. And, you know, I agree with that. I think that if the only reason that I kind of drew that line and understand it that way is because I don't know that someone would be, you know, putting a spell or have the desire to put a spell on vitamin C because vitamin C does something very specific in the body and it usually doesn't affect your emotional or spiritual state to such a degree. Yeah, I just think that those particular subs and the people that have the desire to explore that reality if they don't know Christ, that it's just a. It's just something to be extremely aware. Aware of.

And where would you draw the line? I mean, would you draw the line with, with creatine or theanine or caffeine or, you know, 2C, B or MDMA? Like, where do you say, okay, so this was made by somebody who's you know, who. How to describe it? Not, not a shaman, but someone, someone who's like doing some kind of sorcery magic over something in a lab. You actually think that's happening?

I think that the possibility of it happening is extremely real. And I have known people in the worlds that I was in back then that, you know, travel with the Grateful Dead or were scientists and chemists and I knew the spiritual practices in their life at the time. And now that I have a spiritual maturity, I can look back and say, wow, there was, you know, what they said. I'm going to pray over this as a blessing. Like what that means, if you don't know. Christ is something much different than you would think of it from a New age concept. Love and light being prayed over from a non Christian perspective, I believe can come from the enemy. And so it's an invitation to, you know, what might be perceived of as a blessing that they're praying over. It could actually be a curse. And so, yeah, that's just something I would just be really aware of.

Interesting. And, you know, I'd be remiss not to mention that some of these compounds, you know, in terms of their comparison to a traditional entheogen, they are often been, you know, favored. I know, for example, there are some South African tribes that would rather use, you know, two CB than their traditional entheogens just due to the, the seeming efficacy or purists or, you know, purity or I guess better effects of something like, like a pharmacologically derived or synthetically created molecule or extract versus what they might get from, from a plant just due. Due to superior purity. But it sounds like what you're saying is that, that the source matters because the attitude or the emotions of the person who has created what you might be consuming to enter into a spiritual realm or for a heavier psychedelic trip may actually affect the nature of that trip.

Yeah, absolutely. I think in the same way that we. In the Bible, it says when you pray, break your food. And anytime that Jesus broke the food and did a miracle and turned the fish in loaves and fed a lot of people, he prayed a blessing over it. And I think that the intention of a human being, like if someone makes you a meal and they're mad, like, you don't really want to eat the meal because the energy goes into the food. You can almost feel it in the meal.

What if you were to pray over the 2 CB before you took it?

Then I say that would be a wise thing to do. And I think that you can have protection over many of those things. And simultaneously I do not want to say that you should do two CB and pray over it. I want to be really clear on something and that is, I think that one verse God is in just kind of praying about this. God's put this verse on my heart and it's Romans 14:17. It says, for the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. And so I think that if we elevate this conversation about psychedelics or 2C, B, 2Ci, LSD, any of the plant medicines or anything that, that is synthetic, if we elevate that to a level of God, then it's an error. Now if we say God is God, Jesus is Jesus, he is my Savior, he's the Lord, God is the creator of all things. And now there's a subcategory under that, that's going to be a really interesting conversation for us to have. And then when I think it starts getting into the subcategories, it becomes less of a salvation issue and more of a personal conviction issue. And so I cannot from my heart encourage people to do two CBI or do microdosing lsd. But if they believe that they know Jesus Christ and they don't have conviction in their heart on doing those things, then in the same way that I have to stand before God one day, I believe that they will too and they'll have to answer for their heart's convictions and whether or not they responded to them.

So how would you, you know, let's say I wake up, I have an intensive writing day and I'm looking at a cup of coffee, I'm looking at a 10 microgram microdose of, of LSA or LSD and I'm looking at a piece of nicotine gum. You're saying that if I were to choose the lsd, the microdose of a psychedelic compound, that in your opinion that would be unwise as a Christian to choose that?

I'm saying that for you personally, if you don't have conviction from God and you claim to have a relationship with the Holy Spirit and with Jesus Christ, then you're going to stand before God. And that's between you and God. And that's all I know how to say about it.

But wouldn't I also have to stand before God for the, for the coffee or the, or the gum?

Well, I was about to go into that and so it says not to be a stumbling block to your brother. So that means like I feel really comfortable if I have a glass of wine, although drinking is my least favorite thing to do. If I have a glass of wine with my wife, I have zero conviction on that. But I know that it's also possible that someone who grew up and their parents were alcoholics and they grew up and they started drinking at the age of 12, and they can't even be around alcohol or else they're going to end up just diving into the bottle. And so that's what I'm saying is like, this is a subcategory where it's like a personal conviction and a knowledge of yourself before God that makes it right or wrong. It's not the actual substance that makes it wrong.

Yeah. Okay, so that makes better sense to me then. So what you're saying is if I were to, let's say, choose to microdose with a psychedelic, but then I were to to tell the entire world that it's totally acceptable, and I also would encourage them to, in a similar manner as me, microdose with, say, psilocybin or LSD or something like that, and they were someone who was predisposed to addiction or grew up in a household where those type of things were associated with abuse or the detriment of one's biology or connection to God or anything like that, or an escape or an addiction that I could, based on the words of Romans 14, be causing someone to stumble or to make an error in a way that they might not do with, say, a cup of coffee. But there's kind of like a slippery slope type of possibility with something like that. Like a psychedelic.

Yeah, that is. Yeah, that's 100% what I would say.

Okay. Although you can kill yourself on caffeine capsules that you buy off Amazon.

Yeah. You know, that's the weird thing.

Yeah. The toxicity of the caffeine you can buy on Amazon. Literally right now, I could go buy a bottle of pills for about 30 bucks and give somebody 10 of them, and they would die. I would kill them. And I could do the same with lsd, and they'd be perfectly fine the next day.

Yeah. You know, that is the interesting thing about this moment in history and understanding cognitive dissonance and thought and programming and why laws are laws and all of that. It's a fascinating, exciting time to be alive and to contemplate those things. And I think I gave you the illustration where it's like, if I were to go to church or to go to my Christian brothers and be like, man, I just, like, took like four hits of LSD last night and I sat underneath the stars and I became one with the stars and I went to the universe and I learned all these things and I just saw how much I love the people on this earth and saw a temporary, it was. And like shared with them my experience. Like, like I would say 99% of them would be like, wow, that's sinful and you shouldn't have done that. And it's because, you know, there's a certain degree of programming of how we understand what's right and wrong that has nothing to do with actual like sin before God's eyes. It's just like how, how we've grown up to understand reality. But at the same time, if I, you know, two year old kid who comes over to my house and his parents have like fed him like really healthy all their whole life, he's never had any sugar, like processed sugar. And he comes over and I give the kid a Coke and a Snickers and he freaking goes like crazy for two hours. And if you were to study his brain chemistry like from taking those substances in, he'd straight up be on drugs. But there isn't all that. 99% of people that would say the LSD was bad, they would be like, oh, that's funny, the kid got a little sugar high. So there's this disconnect between how we understand, I think the law and sin and programming and all of that. And then even drugs in America, you know, with food obviously being one of the biggest drugs. Or I actually asked my friends, I was like, hey, if you, if you just right now in America, right before church On Sunday morning, 100% of people that go to church that drink coffee, they're not going to have coffee. How many people go to church that day? And I said, I guarantee you it'd be about 50% would be like, I'm staying home because I'm going to have a headache and my wife is going to be cranky and the kids are going to cry and I've. And so to realize how attached we are to other drugs that we've justified or even looking back in time at the 1920s, when you know, a sin because it was against the law to consume alcohol, but you know, Jesus turned water into wine. And you know, people observing Jesus actually called him a wine bibber because he was sitting with the alcoholics and drinking. Those were Jesus own words in Matthew. And you know, so it's like, because something became a law in America, then it made it a sin. To do it, but it's not a sin. In the Bible, real estate meant that Jesus sinned. So I don't know. It's just an interesting one to think about for sure.

Yeah. When you get into the practice of taking anything before church, that opens up a whole new can of worms. There's actually a new book. It's somewhat controversial. It's called the Immortality Key, the Secret History of the Religion with no Name. And it literally is an entire archaeological exploration of the Eucharist, the sacred wine, and also just the entire history of the use of psychedelics in the Christian church. And I actually interviewed Steven Kotler a few years ago about his book Stealing Fire, in which he claims that this whole idea of koinonia and gathering of early church Christians was actually supported by not only the breaking of bread and wine, but actual wine spiced with different psychedelic substances. And that the bread may have been the amanita muscaria mushroom. And it's a very controversial topic. This idea of magic mushrooms, for example, as a way of opening one up to, I guess, be a little bit more spiritually dynamic in a church or a group worship situation, could have actually been something that contributed to early church practices. I don't know if I'm convinced one way or the other, and I'm not finished with this book that I'm reading about it yet either. But it is kind of interesting how some of this stuff seems to be woven into Christian history, or at least there's some claims that it is, and perhaps a little bit of a rabbit hole. But have you looked into any of this stuff at all, like the use of psychedelics in the early church?

You know, I actually, yeah, it was probably like six years ago. I. There's a place called Garden of the Gods and had this bookstore, and I went in there and I guess the owner said that he wrote a book and basically showing how mana from above was mushrooms and how that fed people and how they sustained themselves. And then just. I read that book, and I've read. I've known some Gnostics as well, and they've shared texts with me that believe those things. But then what I did was I just got the Bible and I said, you know what? I'm just going to look up every time in the Bible where there is in any way the possibility that something is ingested that creates an outcome that is psychedelic in nature. And everything that I looked up in the Bible, the only thing just in the purely Bible alone that I found was that whenever they did sacrifices, they would Use frankincense, which is psychoactive in nature when there's a lot of smoke involved. And if they're putting it on the altar, then that would have been psychoactive. But out of everything I studied in the Bible, that was the only thing that I found. Now, when you get into exploring the roots of words or hidden, hidden history or things like that, I believe that it's very easy to manipulate information to have the end result be what your will wishes to find. So I do not have any comfort in saying that, you know, psychedelics were a part of the early Christian church. But I also, if they were, and I don't know that, then that'll just be something interesting to discover. Whenever I die or maybe later in life, something will be revealed. Revealed to me through a person or through a text or through God's word, through prayer that I didn't see before.

Yeah, it's something I'm still exploring. You said that about frankincense. I think the same could be said of myrrh, which I believe was also used by the magi, possibly also by the Levites. You know, that targets some of the same mu and delta opioid receptors like opium does. And then frankincense kind of works on GABA receptors almost similar to something like Valium. Both are somewhat psychedelic. And many of the spices that were used in. In even Old Testament times or in many early Christian rituals, the wine actually wasn't just wine. It was spiked with everything from cinnamon to agarwood, which is a sedative and an analgesic, to spikenard, which was the ointment that was rubbed into Jesus's feet. And a lot of these do act on serotonin and dopamine and GABA pathways, but yet God created those pathways. He created us to have a dopaminergic response to everything from from sex to wine to ribeye steaks. And I don't necessarily discount the fact that perhaps the use of certain plants to elicit certain mental or spiritual effects could have been part of the early church or could have been part of the high priest traditions of the Levites or the Israelites. However, again, I, like you, tend to turn to the Bible as the ultimate absolute source of truth. And I don't think that we could take those historical anecdotes and then make a justification, for example, for the hefty use of psychedelics for escapism or trauma release or many of the reasons that people sometimes seem to turn to these substances as a replacement for God or replacement for salvation. Or a replacement for even just living a moral, ethical, upright, right life. And so I think that to use this term again, it puts one on the potential for a slippery slope in which the excessive or damaging or escapism use of some of these psychedelics can take the place of God and then be justified. Just because we might say something like, well, the Levites used frankincense and myrrh and it tweaks some neurotransmitters. Therefore there's absolutely no reason we can't just, just go ape nuts with this stuff.

Yeah, that's good. And you know, it really to me, at this point in my life, I've wrestled with the subjects for so long that it has just become this beautiful mystery that I just get to swim in with God. Because, you know, I can create two separate scenarios in my brain. Let's say there's a guy who's 40 years old, he's been married for 13 years, he has a dead marriage, he thinks he has a relationship with Christ, he has three kids, he's overwhelmed by debt, he's out of shape. He goes into the woods with a friend and they eat mushrooms and he just breaks down and cries and he sees that he hasn't loved his wife, he sees God's love for him, he sees his connection to nature and that he's creating disease within his own body. And he has this intense reflection. He goes back and he's a changed man. Through one experience. I could justify the use of mushrooms for people if that was 100% of people, if they had that experience. But, but you can take the exact same type of person, put them in the woods, and all of a sudden they have a area in their life where they've learned how to manipulate power and it teaches them a specific demonic entity can teach them something much deeper. And they become a powerful agent for Satan and disguised as a Christian because they took that mushroom trip that showed him these really deep things in the spirit realm that they would have never tapped into on their own. And so those are the two kind of same exact kind of people, but high, high variability on the outcomes of those. And I could create a thousand scenarios and I've lived with people and observed people where the most profound, beautiful, amazing things have happened. And it just showed them so much about life. And I've been around other people who ended up in mental institutions full on possession. And you know, and so I've seen the outcome go both ways. And that to me is why it's such a, an intense thing to wrestle with having had as many experiences as I've had. And I'll. You know, sometimes I'll be talking to someone, and in my mind, this may not be the correct thought. And God convicted me of Islam. It's like, man, if this dude just went and ate mushrooms and rode his bike around, like, he would not be in this, like, cycle that he can't seem to get out of, you know? And then simultaneously, my other thought is like, well, why am I not praying for this guy and just being brutally honest with him and just be a reflection for what I know that he would discover? And why isn't the Holy Spirit, you know, breaking this off of this man? And why is the Bible and him reading the Bible not, you know, waking this part of this man? So, yeah, it's. It's something I really wrestle with, man. I think it's a mystery. And just the fact the mushroom grows out of the ground, and when we eat it, you know, we have the receptor 5H TP2A, and its only job is to break the psilocybin down into psilocin. And our bodies have a deeply intense experience, which means before I was born, before the Earth was here, God had an intention put into the mushroom. Intention put him into my body. And the intention was for those two things to have a relationship. And the outcome of it is a crazy, strong spiritual experience. And I don't know how to answer that, because I can't separate. I've asked many, many people, and some people say, well, it's part of the fall. I'm like, well, everything's part of the fall. You're not going to eat an orange or you're not going to eat an apple because it's part of the fall. And then other people say, well, it came down from extraterrestrials, and it's one of the few things that can make it through the Earth's atmosphere, coming in on asteroids. And so, you know, it actually created consciousness in the evolutionary process. You know, I've studied tons of terrorists, McKenna, back in the day, and all those. All those dudes that were kind of wizards with that thought process. And I believe that I had the experiences so that if people are out there searching and they say, you know, I've tried all these things. I went and did ayahuasca in the Amazon jungle, or I went and ate, you know, this heroic dose of mushrooms and met these entities and broke free from all these fears, like. And my job, I believe, is to say, you know, I've done those things. Too. And at the end of it, I was really just becoming my own God. And my breakthroughs were just personal and I was just relying on my own power. And you're going to need Jesus, you're going to need salvation, you're going to need God, or else you're going to end up empty, alone and crazy like I was.

Yeah.

And it might take you 50 years, it might take you 80 years, it might take you one trip, you know, but that will be the end result.

Yeah. You know, I have a few thoughts about this based on what you've just said. First of all, you know, this idea that God created all things and that all things in creation, all are in and of themselves created for good or named by God as good, you know, that pops up all the time in Genesis. I think there's like four or five different times in just, just the, the first book of the Bible in Genesis alone where it says, God saw, it was good, God made it, it was good, God, God created the entire planet and all things were created for good. That doesn't mean they can't be bastardized. That doesn't mean that, that we, we cannot take anything that was created from a, from a nice bordeaux that we might get drunk and drink three bottles of and abuse our partner to, you know, to overdosing on, on something like, you know, psilocybin, to, you know, whatever drowning in a, in a beautiful lake. You know, there's all sorts of ways that creation can be twisted. And, you know, that's just our nature as fallen, sinful humans to be able to do so. Yet I think that everything on this planet was created, created for a specific intention, for a specific good. You know, I think that in many cases, many of these, many, many of these plants that can tweak one's neurochemistry or the synthetic variants thereof that, you know, smart humans have figured out how to isolate and create, can be used for everything. From, like I mentioned earlier, merging of the left and right hemispheres of the brain, you know, increased creativity, increased sensory perception for something like hunting or hiking or sex, the ability to be able to write, to tap into areas of creativity, to be able to dissolve the ego and brainstorm in different ways. There was a good use for many of these things, but I think that they can all be bastardized. And I think that the fact that many of these things that we're talking about, LSD, MDMA, psilocybin, 2, CI2, C, B, you name it, because they act so heavily on neurotransmitters the addictive potential and the escape potential is much, much higher than say, an orange or a tomato. And so you need to be even more careful, even more cautious, even more precise in dosing and also arguably even more connected to God and firm in your faith before you would begin to use something like that. So that's one take that I have. But then you also mentioned, mentioned, you know, this whole idea of the spiritual realm and the capability of these to bring you into what seems to be a little bit of a spiritual realm, or in many cases a lot of a spiritual realm. We're talking about like, you know, demon, demon possession, possession and angels and interaction with these spiritual forces. And there's kind of like two different camps of thought. And I'd be curious to get your take on this. There's kind of like the, the very, I guess, reductionist materialistic assumption that the brain is the generator of consciousness. And so when people say take DMT and that interacts with the 5H2O, what was it? The 5Ht2A receptors, like these serotonin receptors that when we're seeing elves and aliens and little, little, you know, magical clockwork grasshoppers or praying mantises or everything else that seems to be almost universal in human consciousness when we take these kind of things all the way down to sacred geometries and pyramids, that all that we are experiencing are kind of anthropomorphic data that would pop into kind of otherwise kind of random data that's in our heads that these plant medicines are inducing just due to previous experiences or just general human anthropomorphic data that's floating out in our brains. That's one reductionistic assumption. And then the other argument is we are literally dropping into, especially with trip based doses of many of these things, a complete other spiritual realm in which we are actually interacting with powerful beings like aliens and angels and demons and goddesses and demigods and spiritual elders and religious figures like Buddha or Krishna or Muhammad. And so, you know, I'm curious what your take on that is. And if you feel that we actually are entering into a spiritual realm or this is all just a projection of data floating around in our brain.

I think that my answer for that is it goes back to kind of it's a mystery. I have read so much on the subject, but specifically read one where a scientist who was an atheist went and you know, to an ayahuasca ceremony. And three days later he came back absolutely believing in God and the spirit realm. And I'm not saying he Gave his life to Christ. But this atheistic scientist. And that's just one small instance. I think that for me personally, I have known when it was a figment of my imagination. I could sense when it was real out of the thousand times. And a thousand is just a random, like, approximate number. But out of those times, I had two bad trips in both. Both were with the same person, and both times the person actually turned into a vampire. And I saw very, very clearly a vampiric spirit. And I wanted to be as far away from that person as possible. Like, as fast as possible. And, like, looking back now, at the beginning of our relationship, I was like, oh, that was absolutely there the entire time. And I saw it manifest after I was no longer in the relationship. And I was like. And I saw it so, so clearly. And I can see, to me, I can differentiate between. If I look at this wall in front of me, and it's a solid kind of like grayish white wall, but if it were to start turning into leaves and swirling patterns and fragmented reality, I'd be like, okay, that's my imagination. Now, if I start interacting with one of my friends and I see, like, a deep level of sadness in that them, that is the spirit of sadness that is perhaps hidden on underneath layers of, you know, pretend. And I believe that that is a potential to see something that is real is, you know, a spirit of sadness in a person that was perhaps. Perhaps had masks over it. And if you even take it away from. You can view it from an endogenous perspective or exogenous. But you look at a dream, like, what is a dream? What is a vision? What's a hallucination? What's your imagination? All those things. And I just kind of realized the other day when I was writing, I was like, you know, we're trying to find, like, logic and reason, like, to apply to something that is supernatural in nature and that we interact with with half of our lives, Whether that's through partaking a substance and it creates an outcome, or whether we fall asleep or whether we are sitting there exercising. Like, I rode my bike when I was in college. I was like, I'm riding my bike 110 miles. I was like, old mountain bike, bike. And the furthest I'd ever ridden was like 70 miles. And I got to, like, I wrote reasonable. Yeah. And I rode it at night. And I went from San Angelo, Texas, to Brownwood, Texas, in the last. In between Blanket, Texas, in between Brownwood and Blanket, which is the last 10 miles of that 110 miles. The sun was coming up, and it was a hot summer day. And the last 10 miles was like hills, and I was, like, exhausted. And like, that last 10 miles, I can't even describe the things that I saw. Like, it was more intense than any trip I've ever had. And I didn't take any drug. I was eating, like, peanut butter jelly sandwiches and, like, yerba mate and water, I think. And so, I mean, what does it mean whenever our bodies can create that without, you know, what does it mean when we fall asleep? What does it mean? When I was lucid dreaming, I taught myself to lucid dream and very specifically could interact with entities in my dream and either command them to leave or just avoid them. And then that's actually how I went crazy, was there's two entities in my dream when I was lucid dreaming, and they continually had power over me. And they would taunt me, and they'd say, hey, you think you're pretty strong and powerful in this dream world? How much you come and play with us? And I just. I couldn't sleep for two days. And I was just haunted by these things. And that is when my friend came over and he just prayed over me in the name of Jesus Christ. And these specific demons that I had in me, like, named themselves without me, like, consciously saying, I'm gonna name this thing. Like, these demons, like, left me. And I felt what those spirits inside of me were manifesting in my thoughts, actions, and words in my life up to that point. And it was so revealing of the spirit realm. And so I know that the reason I was haunted in. In that lucid state, which some would say hallucinating from the pineal gland. And, you know, it was a spiritual entity, and I had freedom that it. It not only affected my dream, but it affected my real life, where I didn't have these spirits in me anymore. The next day is when I got on my face and just called out to Jesus. And at that time, like, experience was the only way that I was determining truth at that point in my life. I just said, Jesus. Like, I. I was trying meditation. I was trying mushrooms. I was trying. You know, this is when I was living off grid, and I was just really in tune with everything. And I just completely gave my life to Jesus and felt the Holy Spirit come over me. And I think that sometimes it's absolutely a figment of your imagination. I think that sometimes it is the most real interface with the spirit realm. And I think that sometimes it is a completely manipulated trip. And that's the thing is there's so many variables.

Yeah, yeah, there are a lot of variables. I mean, I mean, you know, and I would say I, I don't think you can make a one sided argument about whether, let's say an entity exists outside of human consciousness or whether it's a product of human consciousness. I think that it can be both. I think that I could, for example, and, and you know, that this is, this is something that, you know, I've had similar things happen to me before where you might go to the zoo. Let's use this as an example people. And you might be looking at a whole bunch of, I'm just going to throw a random animal out there, camels. And then the next weekend you might actually be doing some kind of a trip dose of LSD or psilocybin or MDMA or probably not mdma, dmt, something like that. And you might experience this whole new spiritual realm where there are camel like aliens walking around in your dream. And I would suspect that a large part of that is anthropomorphic and based on your experience at the zoo the week prior and your brain's neurotransmitters actually processing this trip to the zoo and you actually seeing strange camel beings in your head because that's kind of what your head was full of before you started to tweak some of these neurotransmitters that amplified that experience. However, I also think at the same time you can, in this deep spiritual state that one can enter into with a hefty use of a plant medicine or psychedelic relic, actually be in a spiritual realm in which you, in a very similar way as you might experience during a very long fast or lucid dreaming or holotropic breathwork or prayer or anything else that kind of opens the doors to the spiritual realm, actually truly be interacting with spirits, angels, demons, etc, in sometimes a helpful but often a dangerous or potentially dangerous manner. And I think that that needs to be approached very seriously. I do not deny the presence of a spiritual realm. You know, I cannot as a Christian, as a spiritual man, deny the presence of angels and demons and principalities and powers and all these things happening in the fourth dimension in and around us that, that we cannot even see or witness when we are in our lucid, egotistical conscious state state. Yet I think there's a lot going on around us that we are able to delve into and see and perceive once we actually slip into a subconscious or a less perceptibly conscious state, as we might do with plant Medicine. And so I think it can be both, it can be a product of anthropomorphic data and it can also literally be a complete different interaction with entities that exist, exist outside of human consciousness. And if you look at, for example, a lot of these shaman battles in the Amazon where these guys will go to battle over people's souls and people's spirits, and there are cases of shamans possessing people even in the US Good shamans, bad shamans fighting over people's souls, kind of collecting souls, collecting spirits. And actually in a way very similar to demon possession shamans or, or, you know, or plant medicine practitioners will literally possess people or take charge over them. And I've seen certain people who, who are, you know, who are people who I know actually be affected very deleteriously from, from a physiological and a biological standpoint by working with, with say, a shaman who literally just had it out for them and, and wanted to curse them or ruin their life or possess them with a demon or just, just completely mess with them, so to speak, in kind of a power play way. And I know this kind of stuff happens all the time, you know, I, I, I am friends with, with shamans and, and I've talked to many people who have had similar experiences in many cases in the Amazon or in places where a lot of this stuff runs a little bit more rampant, you know, and I, I will not deny that that exists. And again, I think that because of that, for me, my own personal stance is if you're going to f around with this stuff, if you're going to take, take trip doses of any of these psychedelics or plant medicines, you sure as hell better know what you're getting into if you're a Christian. And, and, and I think that if, if you're not, you're playing with fire to an even greater extent, you better have prayed on the armor of God. You better be in deep spiritual union with God. You need to be saved and washed with the blood of Jesus and you need to be protected going into any of these type of environments because you might decide, hey, I need a new business breakthrough, therefore I'm not going to microdose with 10 micrograms of LSD. I'm going to take a pretty hefty hit of DMT. I'm going to take 100 or 200 micrograms of LSD. You may enter into a completely different dimension that you did not expect and open yourself up to some pretty intense spiritual experiences that could change you for the rest of your life. And that's Playing with fire. These are things to be taken very seriously. In the same way that you wouldn't hop on a motorcycle and drive 200 miles an hour across, across the desert without a helmet on or body armor or anything else. I mean this, this is kind of the same idea like, like you need to approach this stuff with a great deal of caution and preparation. And frankly I think that some people have no business at all around heftier doses of these psychedelics and plant medicines because they're not spiritually prepared or physically prepared, whereas other people are called to it, can handle it and it may actually benefit their lives based on what they come out the other side with. And again, I know that that's a tough pill for people to swallow to hear. Well some people can, some people can't. It's right for some people, it's not right for other people. God has called some, God has not called others to that type of experience. You know, especially when we're talking about higher doses dosages. And I just, I just think it's a very fragile topic and it needs to be approached with a great deal of respect and caution. And that's what drives me nuts are you know the people on their 48th ayahuasca trip trip who are still searching, experimenting with a wide number of plant medicine based and psychedelic based compounds and there is no trust in God, there is no foundational spiritual health and they're simply using these type of things as an escape or as a replacement for what God can do in one's life.

Yeah, I've heard so much about that before and just looked in the Bible and because you know, I did nutrition and coaching and all that stuff for a little over a decade and I still help people with things like that. And so let's say that you have somebody and they come to you and they're a celiac and they say well my body can't handle wheat or I just get really, really sick. Someone else will come to you and say, well you know, lactose makes me break out and I get really bloated. Another person will come and say, you know, if I have red meat, I'm extremely constipated and, and it's hard for me to have any energy for the next day or two when body's trying to break it down. And it's very reasonable to assume through nutrigenomics and just studying the body that each one of us are built differently and what our nutritional needs are and what our body responds to will be different. And so imagine if you will that if God created the mushroom, that perhaps the mushroom is such a specific thing that there are only specific people that should partake in it. In the same way that some people can eat wheat, and some people, it just messes up their stomach. And if you study the Indian culture, which I used to, a lot the shamans in the Indian culture would say that you should. They would consider somebody foolish if they did not have the calling on their life to eat peyote or mushrooms, to go on these journeys where they learned about specific hunts or who they were as men. And they said if you don't have the calling on your life and you partake in those things, that you're extremely foolish and you would actually affect your life in a very negative way within those tribes. And that. That answer is not biblical. And it's not. It's just my just observation of reality in general as a possibility.

Yeah. And, you know, again, a lot of this stuff is stuck. Stuff that I think we as Christians especially are having to navigate through in a way that, due to increasing popularity and acceptability in. In our current cultural climate or climate, is something that perhaps Christians have not, at least in recent history, had to deal with quite as much before, because again, we're talking about things that are now considered culturally to be noble and laudable and acceptable. Acceptable and good replacements for pharmaceuticals, for example, for trauma release, and also as things that many people would equate to, as I mentioned earlier, simply the equivalent in smaller doses as caffeine or nicotine or nootropic or, you know, insert the name of your favorite smart drug here. And, and so, yeah, there's. There's a lot of. Of. Of avenues that, you know, that we've explored thus far on this podcast that I think, think, you know, Christians are now having to think about. And, you know, I. I think that one thing that I should say for sure is if you don't know the answer or you suspect this isn't for you, or you're not called, or you seem to be opening yourself up to strange spiritual dimensions you haven't experienced before, probably not your cup of tea, probably you're probably not in a place or state where you should be partaking in these type of things, because again, I think they. They can be. Be dangerous. And there's one other question I get asked a lot in the Christian sector, Paul, and that's this whole idea, like back in the Garden of Eden, right? The tree of. There's a tree of life and there's the tree of the Knowledge of good and evil. And many people say, well, the tree of the knowledge of Good and evil, the ability to be able to like delve into the mind of God and, and you know, and know God and really truly understand, you know, our fallibility as human beings or be able to really know what's good or what's evil. That was a mushroom or that was a plant medicine. And you know, and therefore when we first took that, and we weren't supposed to back in the Garden of Eden and God protected it with flaming swords and angels, that dictated that we have no business going near this stuff because it is actually the tree of Good and evil or the tree of the knowledge of Good and evil. You have any thoughts on that?

Yeah, I think that, I don't think that that is shown anywhere in the Bible. But I also believe that there is a mystery behind what the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil is because it could be symbolic. Because I've traveled a fairly good amount and I've never run into a tree of knowledge of Good and evil. In all my travels. I've run into lots of other kinds of trees.

AKA many people may be familiar with this as the forbidden fruit in the Bible.

Right. And so some people will say it's an apple, but you're not going to find the word apple anywhere. That's just like kind of a fig, pomegranate, grape. Yeah, you're not going to find those. And so I personally believe that whatever they ate, it had less to do with the fruit and it had more to do with their choice and discovering their own self sovereignty and their own free will and choosing to become their own gods instead of allowing God's will and God's sovereignty to reign over their lives, which would have been essentially heaven on earth for eternity. And so I think it's less about the type of fruit that they ate and I think it's more of the choice that they made in the end result of that was that they became their own gods. And I think that that is the trapping of kind of this whole psychedelic push that's been happening in the world right now is that it is elevated to a place where you can become your own God. You're like, wow, I see through, through religion, I see through societal structure, I see through the necessity for materialism. I see, you know, how bad hate is and I'm vibrating no longer in a level of shame, but I'm, you know, elevated to a level of love. And so it's this experience is now elevated to the level of God. And not only that, but becoming your own God. And I think that is the trapping and I think it's just like a repeat of history. The same choice that Adam and Eve made made is being made right now. And that's just the choice to become our own God. And I can't speak to knowledge of what that fruit was. And I can understand, you know, having eight mushrooms and not being a Christian before I was a Christian and very clearly seeing like things that I was blaming on other people. I saw it inside myself. I was like, no, I'm angry, I am full of hate, I'm full of manipulation and I'm full of sadness, I'm full of bitterness. And instead of projecting it onto someone else's, their issue issue, like I, like this is my issue. And you know, so that to me could be a reflection of what the tree of knowledge of good and evil is, that personal reflection that's so intense. And I understand when people like view the mushroom experience and say that had to have been, you know, the tree of knowledge, that's what it was. And you know, I could be wrong maybe, you know, one day when I die and I say God, you know, what was the tree of knowledge? He's like, it was a mushroom. Like, wow, that's crazy. I just thought it was something else. But I could be wrong. But to me, I look to the Bible for the answer. And to me it's not conclusive that it is a mushroom or any specific type of fruit. And it seems to be less about the type of fruit or else it would have been specifically named and more about the action that that choice produced as a result for humanity.

Yeah, I would tend to agree because we could say maybe it was nutmeg, which we know contains myriad, which is a natural compound with some pretty significant hallucinogenic and mind altering effects, which is why it's for example, a preferred prison source of psychedelics when you can't get your hands on anything else. But if we say that we could therefore point a long crooked finger at every Christian drinking eggnog with nutmeg in it on Christmas and say forbidden fruit, you're opening yourself up to the spiritual dimension. And again, again, I think that, that you are correct in that the whole story of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is simply a very stark message that we should obey God, right? We should obey the two greatest commandments of the Bible. Love God and love your neighbor. Right? And so many of this stuff, you know, once, once we get through all the crap of, you know, of was it this, Was it that, you know, what historical fruit was the tree, the knowledge of good and evil. It doesn't matter if it was a banana or nutmeg or mushrooms. The. The message is simple. People obey God, right? And so sometimes I think we get caught up in the weeds. And in many cases, you know, that's why I wanted to record this podcast. We kind of short ourselves on being able to partake in what God has called good, which is all of creation, because we're holding ourselves back due to preconceived notions and beliefs. Part of loving God and loving others, as you so astutely noted, Paul is also not causing others to stumble, humble. And if you are married to or you are friends with, or you have, you know, relationships with people who would be brought into some very painful or traumatic or troubling places if they were to use the same type of compounds as you are using, then that would be another perfect example of, hey, you know what? Don't microdose with lsd, because your wife used to be addicted to LSD in college, had some pretty significant and disruptive and troubling trips, and it just shouldn't be in the house. Right. The same as it might be if. If, you know, your partner was. Was a previous alcoholic. I don't care how much you like Bordeaux, it's just the sacrifice you might need to make for. For a while is just not have wine around. So, yeah, you know, I think a lot of this stuff we have to approach from a very practical manner in which we're looking at what scripture has to say using the Bible, which, again, I believe is the source of absolute truth. Absolute right. And we have to have absolute truth in our lives. We must have some kind of natural law on our hearts. And I think the Bible is our manual for that. And whereas I don't think we can find evidence in the Bible where it says don't take psilocybin or, you know, don't stir theanine into your coffee, what we can find is a clear and distinct message that we are called to be sober of mind, mind responsible. We see situations in which wine is acceptable, and we see situations in which wine, when used irresponsibly or for drunkenness, is not acceptable. We see situations in which, you know, the land is overflowing with milk and honey, and honey is just the most amazing super nutrient that God gave to humankind. And then there are other places in the Proverbs where it says, don't eat too much honey. Because it's going to make you vomit, and that's irresponsible. Right. And. And so when you look at the Bible, it's got the practical recommendations in there. And I think most people know if you're flat on your ass all the time and having horrific hallucinations and lucid dreams that are bringing you to a deeply dark, spiritual place, and your entire life is becoming disrupted and you're going crazy because you started to delve into psychedelics, stop. And if your life is better and your relationships are better and you're writing better books and you're more productive and everything's humming along quite nice, nicely, because you discovered that whatever, a microdose of nutmeg or LSD or psilocybin or whatever has been able to unlock that for you. Great, you're using God's creation in a good way. Proceed. But I think that we simply cannot, with a big, broad brush, paint a picture that says psychedelics are cool for all Christians and all humans to partake in. Here are your plant medicines. You know, just. Just go to town and do whatever you want.

Yeah. And I think I've listened to a few of your other podcasts, and you have instructed people that there are studies being done into. You know, there are experts who are testing these things out with John Hopkins or with ptsd, and I think it'd be very wise to let these tests unfold with the newfound publicity that the psilocybin mushroom is getting. And, you know, I have a friend in. I won't say his name, but his wife had some brain issues where she had a brain surgery earlier in her life, and it led to some pretty intense depression, which is very uncharacteristic of her normal attitude towards life. And it just hit her like crazy. And so the doctor was suggesting ketamine, but then they heard the first podcast I did, and they were like, man, would you suggest, you know, microdosing with psilocybin to help her with this? And, like, every part of myself just wanted to say yes, like, before you go get on a bunch of crazy drugs, go and, you know, try some mushrooms. Yes, God created the mushroom. It's going to be very inexpensive. There's low risk. You can pray with her. But I didn't have the freedom to say that because I feel like all the variables we've talked about, like, what happens if all of a sudden it's the opposite effect for her in that she becomes manic depressive and bipolar from that. I'm just like, oh, then all of A sudden I've given him a suggestion and the outcome of that, I have to stand before God and my friend and say, I suggested this and I didn't fully understand the potential outcome of what I was suggesting. And I'm responsible for that. And that's the balance that we're in right now is that there's so much publicity going around it and the outcomes are so, so crazy on their potential that you have to have a tremendous amount of not only wisdom and discernment, but also of kind of like let's slowly, slowly understand this and not from the world's perspective, but from a prayer and biblical perspective.

Yep. And I think that's reasonable and that is wise. And you know, I'll come right out and say it right now. All these people I've interviewed about psychedelics, ketamine, psilocybin, Johns Hopkins research on trauma release, you know, all of that should be couched in, in the following terms. I think that anybody going through any of those experiences, first and foremost needs God. They need salvation, they need a Bible by their bedside, and they need true connection with their creator and a full union with God and salvation from Jesus Christ. Once those foundational principles are in place. Yeah. What God has created on this planet, such as plant medicines, might be the icing on the cake to help you break through and fully dissolve and release perhaps some of the tangled up trauma that still might be harbored, whether epigenetically in your MRNA or DNA or some neurotransmitter imbalances that could potentially be be corrected through the properly administered use of some of these medicines. You know, I'm not close to that, but ultimately the foundation, the foundation, you know, and, and here, here, here comes Ben. The Jesus freak foundation must be God, Jesus in the Bible, right? Once you have that in place, then yeah, go and with wisdom and discernment and responsibility and turning to God in prayer, use some of these other elements that God has put on the planet to help some of those things along. But you cannot ignore the foundation. You cannot place your trust in anything, anything but God, because everything else is a shaky foundation that will eventually fall away and fail. Whereas knowing Jesus, laying all your shame and sin and trauma at the foot of the cross, believing in God, reading your Bible, the only source of absolute truth that exists on the face of this planet, every day you do those things. And then if plant medicine is something that God has called you to, whether microdosing or, you know, journey based doses, then yeah, proceed, but with prayer and with discernment. And with counsel and, you know, I'm. I'm hoping that this podcast today gives some people, people some direction when it comes to how to approach this the right way. But I would be remiss not to say that, you know, every single researcher at Johns Hopkins, I wish before they were heading to work each day, they were reading God's word, had a Bible tucked into their backpack on their way into the lab, and were praying with their patients and bringing everything to God, laying everything at the foot of the cross, and then using all these other blessings that God has put around the planet to, to basically make the process even better in the way that God has equipped us to do. But, yeah, the foundational principles cannot be denied.

Yeah, that's good. Yeah. We just got through reading Ecclesiastes. We do Bible study every Monday morning at our business of the Hay Harris brothers. And this morning went through the last chapter of Ecclesiastes. And the last verse says, let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter. So Solomon basically, you know, was wise, wisest man in the world, richest man in the world, had all the insights into like, everything is just like what we're striving for from an earthly perspective is just temporary and fleeting and vanity and vexation of spirit. And he says, let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter. For fear God and keep his commandments, for this is man's all. For God will bring every work into judgment, including every secret thing, whether good or evil. And so, yeah, man, that was good. And I think this is a very, not only timely but just important conversation to have. I never struggle with conversations ever. This is one that I struggle with because it's a balance between knowing Christ fully and knowing Jesus is my Savior. And then having had these really intense experiences in my life where I have no other option but to be honest with what I experienced and the potentialities behind them. And, and for someone who hasn't engaged those realities, it isn't as easy to understand the necessity for honesty. But whenever you're out there searching and you're willing to go to the Amazon jungle by yourself and with a shaman, like have a 24 hour trip where you have no touch with reality at all. Like, if you're willing to do that, then you want somebody that's honest and truthful about the things that they've experienced because you're like, I'm doing this, the least you can do is be honest. And if Jesus is the answer, then. And let's be honest about everything else. And so, yeah, it's this is a timely and good conversation. I'm going to pray that the people that hear this will come to know Jesus Christ as their Savior. And that is the answer. And from there it's all just subcategory stuff.

Yep. And if, if you want to know more about that, I'll link to it in the show Notes for this podcast@BenGreenfieldFitness.com ChristianPsychedelic a whole article I wrote about the Hero's Journey Journey. You'll read that article. It'll tell you everything you need to know about where to find true salvation that lasts a lifetime and far beyond where to find the true bliss that goes way beyond the five minutes you're going to get from a DMT vape pen. And it's called the Hero's Journey. And I would go and read that. I will link to it in the show notes again at BenGreenfieldFitness.com ChristianPsychedelic look for Paul's new book book called the Psychedelic Christian to come out soon. And I will also link to Paul's website where you can go find out more about that book that's going to be written for people who are who are searching the spiritual realm for truth. And again, that's all gonna be@BenGreenfulFitness.com ChristianPsychedelic where you can leave your own thoughts, comments, experiences with plant medicines and psychedelics, whether as a Christian or otherwise. You know, I, I read all those comments, so feel free to just jump into the conversation. And in the meantime, Paul, thanks for despite you not being in a tiny home, coming on the podcast from your from your tiny, tiny, tiny room.

Enjoyed it thoroughly, Ben. Thanks for the opportunity.

All right, folks. Well, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Paul Reese signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week. Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes, use the promo codes that I generate because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week. It.