Take Back Your Mind
The most explicitly spiritual of Matt's appearances. He sits with Michael Beckwith, founder of the Agape International Spiritual Center, on the session that reopened a sense of God he had set down, and on what the Johns Hopkins research says about mystical experience and healing.
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Episode summary
On Take Back Your Mind, Matt sits with Michael Beckwith, the founder of the Agape International Spiritual Center, for the most explicitly spiritual of his appearances. He recounts the guided psilocybin session that reconnected him with his late mother and reopened a sense of God he had set down after her death, which sent him back to school for a master's. Drawing on Johns Hopkins research, he points out that studies use a validated mystical experience questionnaire, and that the depth of the mystical experience tends to track with how much a person's depression, anxiety, or compulsive behavior eases afterward. He frames a psychedelic as a catalyst rather than a cure, something that opens an experience the person then has to actualize in ordinary life.
Much of the conversation concerns how spirit and science might work together. Matt lays out the three ways people reach these medicines, medical, decriminalization, and religious, and argues that the old split between healer as physician and healer as priest is one our culture invented and could now mend. He describes what he sees as a kind of reformation, people leaving traditional religion yet hungry for a direct spiritual experience, and reminds listeners that cultures across the world have used these substances in sacred contexts for thousands of years. He and Michael connect this to a move away from a scarcity mindset toward a felt sense of abundance and interconnectedness.
Asked what happens in the brain, Matt describes the quieting of the inner narrator and a window in which neurons fire in new patterns, using the worn-ski-tracks image. He explains that these medicines can soften shame, blame, and guilt, which is part of why they help with trauma, and he shares, as he has in his book and elsewhere, his own experience of revisiting inappropriate sexual contact he survived as a young teen with an older family member, and of reaching understanding and healing without condoning what happened. He ties this to the strong results MDMA has shown for treatment-resistant PTSD, and to his forthcoming Veteran's Guide to Psychedelics, with proceeds going to the Heroic Hearts Project.
Toward the end they turn to the dying. Matt describes how psilocybin has been shown to reduce the depression and anxiety that often accompany a terminal diagnosis, easing the quality of a person's remaining life without changing the prognosis, and how the spiritual side extends this by including the friends and family who bear witness, which can change the conversations a family shares in someone's final months. Throughout, both men return to the same point, that the medicine is occasional and the practice is daily, and that whatever a person remembers in a session has to be carried forward through practices like meditation and the support of a community. Michael closes on a line he often uses, that the aim is to get free rather than to get high.