This YouTube interview ("Kava Is Meditation In A Drink") features Cameron George and Josh Trent discussing kava as a mental, psychological, and spiritual medicine used historically by South Pacific peoples. Cameron argues kava promotes introspection, empathy, neuroplasticity, systems thinking and personal development—characterizing it as "meditation in a drink"—and contrasts it with alcohol, which he locates within unhealthy societal conditioning around drinking for stress relief. The conversation touches on cultural models, psychedelic-like integrative effects of kava (but while remaining functional), and the role of altered states in deconstructing socially imposed models of reality.
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The thing that's beautiful about kava, and I'll get into alcohol too, here in a second, so we can kind of unpack that and the difference between the two and the relationship and sort of that on road trajectory from alcohol to kava, which I believe that culturally we're going in that direction for sure. It's just inevitable long term. The indigenous people of the South Pacific actually see kava as a mental and psychological and spiritual medicine. That's how they view it, mainly because they don't have a lot of the same physical ailments that we do, right? The kind of anxiety, the kind of depression and things like that, maybe because they use kava, but it's not just that. It's because they haven't historically had the level of processed food, or I would just call all expressions of nature divorcement syndrome, which is really what generates pretty much all disease, right? Anytime you take steps away from the base intelligence of what you are, you're actually separating yourself from yourself and you're overlapping and working against yourself. And that is generating every expression of disharmony and dis ease, which leads to every kind of ailment and the manipulation of your mind, body, spirit system. But the indigenous people see kava as a psychological and mental medicine that actually builds mental health and mental fortitude and emotional maturity over time. It builds wisdom in a person or creates the opportunity for wisdom to be built. The medicine doesn't do it itself, but it opens up the pathway and the doorway for you to increase your senses, to be able to develop as a human. They see it as a developer of the mind and a developer of the emotions. And they see it as something that helps to bring out that authenticity, existential core in a person and to manifest itself collectively. And when you do that in individuals, remember, healthy cultures are made up of healthy individuals, right? So it all starts with the sovereignty of the individual. That's another Jordan Peterson thing, right? It's like, I truly believe in that, right? Because in order to have a good, healthy culture collectively, it starts from your internal paradigm, your perspective, your belief systems, your thoughts, which that's the place that you are internally. So, of course, there are these physiologic effects with kava. And the reason that kava is so good for so many people, as an entry point to all aspects and a catalyst for personal development, is because it gives anybody, even a person who's really not seeking personal development, or at least not consciously seeking, gives everybody. There's something in it for everybody, whereas there's that sort of that. That sort of catalyst hook there where you get a physiologic response that is pleasurable and comfortable. Kava, in a lot of ways, brings on a state of comfort which is accessible and relevant to anybody. No matter where you're at in your life. And whether you're seeking to get those deeper psychological effects of mind integration and the induction of empathy, you don't even know that it's happening if you're someone that's not seeking it. But whenever you drink kava regularly, what we see in populations is people tend to become more introspective, reflective, they more empathetic, and I would just say across the board, in many cases, more intelligent because of the neuroplasticity that we believe is happening from activating and allowing these different parts of these different hemispheres of the brain, left and right, the different parts of the brain, to communicate into a more what I call systems thinking, where high doses of kava. Something similar happens that happens with all psychedelics, except for you maintain total sobriety and it's happening in the background, which leaves you functional and you can use it more often and regularly. But you're in this state that's more systemally integrated and orchestrated to where you can kind of look at the circumstances of your life and put them on the table and kind of be the observer, kind of zoom out. And this is a characteristic of all psychedelic plant medicines. It's because they connect these parts of the brain. Normally you're in fight or flight or you're in everyday waking sort of productivity consciousness, right? That's fueled more by like stimulants and caffeine that bring you into this mono focused, get things done productivity, very, very much executive thinking kind of state of consciousness, which is very useful, but. But it is also incomplete if you don't have this sort of more introspective, reflective side, at least at some point, integrated into your daily life, which comes through meditation, many other things. Kava in many cases is kind of like meditation in a drink to some degree, but because it helps to bring on this sort of state of integrated systems thinking where you can see the big picture and you can see the circumstances of your life like they're on the table and you can start to connect dots, you start to see pictures instead of pixels, right? And whenever you can do that, you start to look at your life in. In the same framework that an engineer would look at a schematic, right, where you can see the entire machine instead of being focused in these individual compartmentalized parts of your life. And now you can start to see how everything fits together so you can start to work on it. And you're like, oh, making me think.
Of Tom Cruise in Minority Report where he had that gloves and the windows. Yeah. Was that thing pre. Pre Contemplation.
Yeah.
They would arrest somebody.
Precog. The precaution.
Precogs.
Yeah.
I love that movie because I thought, wow, that's how all of our brains work. We all have these photos that are kind of flashing before our eyes at all times, but are we actually looking at them? And really, like, do we even have the courage to look at them? Which is really why I think alcohol exists. I don't know when it started. I think it was in the 1300s or 1400s or whatever it is. But if you had to articulate maybe in a few sentences or more, why do you believe that so much of the populace and so much of our societal conditioning is. Is around. Get drunk after work, get drunk on the weekends, so you can, quote, slog it through the week, literally. It's a societal continuum that is so unhealthy. And I fell into it for many years. Most people that go to college, it's all about drinking, keg stands, parties, stuff like that. It's literally woven into the fucking fabric of our culture. And it's very sad because I wonder how many more people would be empowered and free if they weren't literally in a jail cell shackled by. By partying and all these things that might give them a temporary high, but they're really just looking for reprieve from stressors they're not even aware of. So what do you make of this? Like, what do you make of our societal conditioning in this. In this almost tapestry that everybody gets introduced to it? Like 18. Well, this is what life is. You go drink, you go party, you do these things. What the hell? Where did that even come from? What is the answer to that? Kava being one of them. What do you think about.
Yeah, it's a model of reality, right? And we all. There are collective models that. That. That precipitate like a virus in a host, right. You know, that it just becomes a collective idealistic sort of mentality or non Idealistic mentality. That is a model that we kind of inhabit, you know, and partly what psychedelics do is they deconstruct that model and bring you back to the base of, you know, the base fabric of your intelligence and your consciousness to where you can look at things objectively and kind of see them outside of the model that's been presented to you that your mind has been molded into, and you start to see everything, all of your belief systems, everything from the structures of how we're even taught to think about certain things. Everything, even from mathematics to science to history to everything, they're all models that we've been given and we've been integrated into these models. And some of the models are really good, some are incomplete, and some are just totally nuts and probably are best to be broken or discarded, but they're all models. I think this is a really, really important thing to hit on. I'm so glad that you hit on it of like, you know, the discussion around, you know, first of all, why we're drawn to alcohol and why we're drawn to altered states of consciousness to begin with.
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