Dennis Mckenna: Michael J. Winkelman, PhD, Masters of Public Health at the University of  Arizona, is retired from the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State  University, where he served as the head of sociocultural anthropology and the director of the  ethnographic field school in Ensenada, BC, Mexico, and Director of the M.P.H of in community  health. Winkelman served as president of the anthropology of consciousness section of the  American Anthropological Association and was the founding president of its anthropology of  religion section. Winkelman has engaged in cross-cultural and interdisciplinary research on  shamanism, psychedelics, and the alteration of consciousness for 40 years. His books on  shamanism include Shamans, Priests, and Witches (1992) and Shamanism: A Biopsychosocial  Paradigm of Consciousness and Healing in 2010. It uses cross-cultural and evolutionary methods  to examine these ancient spiritual and ritual healing capacities. He is the co-editor of  Psychedelic Medicine in two volumes published in 2007, Advances in Psychedelic Medicine published in 2019, and Frontiers in Psychology special issue on psychedelic sociality, and editor  of a special issue of the Journal of Psychedelic Studies on psychedelics in history and world  religions. He recently edited the Handbook of Entheogenic Healing just published in 2025. He  has served as an expert witness for Santo Daime in their defense against the US Department of  Justice in 2009. Dr. Winkelman, welcome to the Brain Forest Cafe. 

Michael Winkelman: Oh, hey Dennis. 

Dennis Mckenna: Such a pleasure. That is a depressive biography. I tell you, you you’ve been a  busy guy over the last 40 years. 

Michael Winkelman: Yeah. Well, it’s been, you know, particularly, you know, productive since I  retired. It’s the best, you know, career move I ever made in terms of being able to do research  and publish. 

Dennis Mckenna: Indeed. Indeed. Retiring has its perks. I I feel the same way. But people like  you and me, we never really retire. We’re we’re we’re incapable of that. We just keep working in  other capacities and uh and you’re still doing that obviously and being very productive. So uh  what are you what are you working on now that you have all this time on your hands? 

Michael Winkelman: Well I’ I’ve been for quite a while working on a book called The Psychedelic  Brain. Along the way it’s split into two books: one which is just you know the neurophysiology of  how psychedelics affect our brain, and which got my—it was my distraction from writing about  the evolution of the psychedelic brain, but trying to put together just how the brain changes  systemically under the effects of psychedelics, and you know, also just trying to continually bring  back in the the psychophysiological dynamics, how our intentions and engagement with this  through ritual changes and modifies and focuses the effects of the psychedelic.

So right now I’ve been working for a year on the psychedelic self. What is the transformation of  the self and self-processes that’s happening under psychedelics and coming up with a new  model about how it is that we change, and it has to do I think with what I would call the  affective core self. Right? So that’s basically what I’m focusing on. So instead of you know the  default mode network and the frontal executive you know networks is this ancient mammalian  process of socio-emotional and psychological regulation that’s really where all the little points  of change are are being coordinated. 

Dennis Mckenna: Mhm. Well, one thing that your work has always focused on which I which I  respect and few others do is the evolutionary aspects of this, you know, and the roles that  psychedelics probably played almost certainly played in co-evolution in the emergence of  consciousness. It’s all uh in line with the idea that these medicines are teachers. That that’s how  indigenous cultures regard them. And in fact, we do learn from them. We haven’t learned  enough from them obviously. And in many respects, we’re ignoring their lessons. But, you know,  we’re we’re what I call the the problematic primates. You know, we do not listen well. But when  we do get the message, then we advance just another notch on this on this trajectory from apes  to angels. 

And we’re not at this angel stage yet. We may never get there, but you know, it’s it doesn’t hurt  to aspire to that. So, uh, uh, you’ve always, uh, been aware of that that evolutionary  connection, and that’s often dismissed, but I think I think, uh, to the detriment of of the folks  that do not entertain those ideas because it just seems obvious that these plants and fungi, of  course, had had to have had a role in the emergence of what we call hominid consciousness or  or consciousness in general. Uh how can it not be? But we’re not necessarily here to go down  the the uh the path the the rabbit hole about the stoned ape theory. You’re familiar with it. But  much of the work that you uh that you’ve done is uh you know supports that idea. 

Michael Winkelman: Yeah. Well, I mean ever since I started talking about these things, people  were saying, “Well, you should read Terence’s book.” And I was like, “Terence, oh, Terence  McKenna.” Okay. So I did eventually get around to reading it and uh you know of course Terence  was you know operating a lot from, you one might say, intuition and then like obvious facts  without you know scientific basis in the sense of the science of today. I mean you know we you  know hardly nothing about what psychedelics do to the brain then compared to what we know  now. I mean now there’s so much is like it’s hard to put it all together, but yeah I mean and I  think we’re sort of getting along a better understanding of you know what Terence you know  saw as being you know not only intuitive but obvious was that psychedelics enhance the way  the brain works in certain ways, and some of the ways in which psychedelics enhance how the  brain works has to do with the stimulation of the most important neuromodulatory system  serotonin, right? You know it does so in a number of different direct and indirect ways, but you 

know serotonin is basically this you know master you know neurotransmitter neuromodulator  coordinating a lot of other neuromodulatory systems and neurotransmitter systems so yeah  we’re enhancing how one of the most significant control features of the brain can operate,  right? 

So I mean it’s like it doesn’t at that level it doesn’t take a whole lot of you know intelligence out  of the ape. You know the brain has gotten these new you know chemical sources that enhance  its innate capacities and even take it beyond what perhaps the normal capacities of the brain to  

produce these neurotransmitters are. So, you know, talk it’s like, you know, we’re hacking nature  to get chemicals that enhance our capacity of the brain to function with information processing.  And you’re right about how absurdly it’s being ignored because there’s people out there, Hagen  and Sullivan and others that publish extensively on, you know, how humans underwent  

adaptations to use exogenous sources of neurotransmitters. But, you know, try to talk to them  about psychedelics. I mean, they just reject your papers and won’t even respond to your emails.  I mean, they’re all into, you know, how, you know, stimulants helped us adapt and survive and  how painkillers helped us adapt and survive, you know, and this and that, but psychedelics—no,  no, we can’t talk about that one. You know, don’t don’t even respond to emails and just like, you  know, you you you know who are rejecting your papers because they cite their own work. You  should look at—well, what what the [ __ ] You don’t look at this issue, you know. Oh, sorry  about the f word. I have to remember we’re on a podcast here. 

Well, yeah. I mean, it’s it’s it’s an obvious, you know, hypothesis. And I mean, I’ve tried  sometimes, you know, it’s not a hypothesis. It’s it’s an established fact. The problem is that  people aren’t pulling all the facts out and putting them together in a paradigm. They’re they’re  rejecting the paradigm. So, the facts are irrelevant. 

Dennis Mckenna: Right? Since Terence wrote the book, which was, I think, published in 1992,  obviously, there’s been a lot learned about the the long-term effects of psychedelics on the  brain. The this uh this what you could place under the broad umbrella of neuroplasticity. This  has all been well studied. And then epigenetics is the other factor that can make this a plausible  hypothesis. I don’t regard it as established fact but I regard it as very strong circumstantial  evidence. And as you say the scientific community is not uh programmed to be open to this  stuff. You know I mean it science pretends to be open to all ideas but in fact it’s a very closed  system. It has to fit with the with the current paradigm and and the uh the stoned ape  hypothesis which probably should be called the awakened ape hypothesis. 

Michael Winkelman: I say the illuminated ape. 

Dennis Mckenna: What’s that? 

Michael Winkelman: I call it the illuminated ape or the illuminated ape.

Dennis Mckenna: Right. Right. Turned on a certain way. And uh it’s a very appealing and there  are few there are few mechanisms one can think of that explains this rapid expansion in the size  and complexity of the of the hominid brain over a mere two million years. Um, but we’re not  here really to talk about the stoned ape theory. We’re here to talk about your ideas. And you  have a PowerPoint that I looked over that far from being able to summarize all of them, but it’s  a good it’s a it’s a good overview. Uh, and you mentioned that you might like to show that and  use that to structure the conversation. Would would you like to to do that? 

Michael Winkelman: Sure. That it works. And at the same time, you know, feel free anytime to  jump in, ask a question or, you know, take it another direction. But I can do this. Let’s see if we  can uh 

Dennis Mckenna: Okay. Oh, I will jump in. Don’t worry about that. Uh, okay. 

Michael Winkelman: So this basically was what I presented at Psychedelic Science last year and  uh it’s sort of an effort to synthesize a book that I put together about a bunch of case studies of  contemporary indigenous and mestizo and postmodern medical uses of entheogens. How do  they do it? How does it work? And I kind of put this Handbook of Entheogenic Healing in a deep  historical context for me because it really was a path that started right back in 1988 when Stan  Krippner asked me to or invited me to go to Mexico to meet Maria Sabina and Salvador Roquet  and uh I was down in Mexico at the time and I went back to the US for a month to finish a  semester and headed back down there and had this interesting kind of career defining  experience. 

Um, I didn’t think enough about, you know, getting a picture with Maria Sabina. Uh, and but I  did take a picture of Stan and Salvador with her and some interesting stories behind her effect  there, which one might wonder about. Uh but anyway, I I did a ceremony one of those nights  with uh one of her uh apprentices and um I was in my meditation phase and I really got into the  experience of you know meditation within the context of the mushroom work and I just had this  you know sort of you know light and happiness and engagement experience during that night.  Uh a few uh unusual things happened. One is that at one point I started trying to dance and  chant, you know, and Stan and the healer just came over and shut me down. It’s like put their  hands up and it’s like I fell back down in my chair. But uh Stan doesn’t remember that. But I I  think I was about to incorporate some Indian healers that probably wasn’t supposed to leave  there. 

Dennis Mckenna: Oh, sweet. 

Michael Winkelman: But, you know, one of my early publications with Stan was sort of an  account of that experience, you know, and sort of beginning to try to put what she was doing in  the context of psychedelic science. I mean, this is not just, you know, a bunch of, you know, 

weirdo Indians taking drugs out in the middle of nowhere, but they’re actually using substances  that modern science tells us have effectiveness in the treatment of a variety of conditions. And  so sort of been on the path off and on since then to try to understand really how do entheogens  heal and uh one of the things that I’m going to really come to today is that it really has to be  understood in the context of the interaction between pharmacology and setting which we’ll call  primarily cosmology and ritual in the indigenous setting. So it’s both sides of the equation. 

Dennis Mckenna: Yeah. And and your your work on this makes makes that clear. Um, exactly. I  mean, the these traditions uh one thing that impressed me uh uh strongly about about this  PowerPoint was how you bring together the commonalities of these diverse traditions. In all of  those traditions, you find the similar approaches, you know, uh uh the whole dynamics of set  and setting. So, here here you go. Okay. 

Michael Winkelman: Yeah. So I mean this is basically the big picture of what I’m going to try to  talk about here and that one hand we have all these case studies from the Handbook of  Entheogenic Healing and got all the authors to use the same structure for writing their chapters.  So it sort of led me into this know ethnological comparative assessment of you know what do  they do in common in terms of how they engage with ritual and the entheogen and how does  this lead to healing and then the end part of it is like how does these commonalities fit in with  our evolved psychology of been a number of years trying to understand the evolution of ritual  and healing within the context of shamanism. So I have this other whole set of you know  parameters to look at in terms of what is the underlying evolved psychology and psychobiology  of these common practices. 

Ultimately how did we evolve to have a certain kind of mindset for optimizing ritual healing and  psychedelics. And to me this is the big message out of this Handbook of Entheogenic Healing.  We’ve tended to treat the antigenic traditions as like sources of chemicals but don’t let the  rituals you know confuse you and I think ultimately the rituals are the psychobiological envelope  for managing the psychopharmacological effects and pharmacological effects of the entheogen  that we need to have the ritual structures as well as the chemicals. 

Dennis Mckenna: Yes, you can’t separate these things. 

Michael Winkelman: That’s that’s right. Well, I mean in some sense you can separate them but  think is how what’s the dynamic of interaction and what’s a good ritual versus a bad ritual and  what’s a you know a good outcome versus a bad outcome and how you manage ritual ends up  becoming a very important tool and I’m still working on all the details of it but in some senses  

it’s even like how does ritual manage stress responses how does ritual manage you know  emotional transformations and things like this where you know there’s things that the 

chemicals themselves alone may not be able to adequately manage you have to have the ritual  envelope, right? 

And I I think the current approach to psychedelics in the clinical setting, it uh it impoverishes  itself in a certain way by not paying attention to the ritual context. You know, they try to rip it  out of ritual, stuff it into a clinical setting, they miss half the point. It’s not just the medicine, it’s  the context in which it’s used. That’s where they went the the therapeutic uh effect happens.  The one point I would make about it is like the typical clinical trial start at 7 or 8 in the morning  and finish at 5 or 6 in the evening. Right. 

Dennis Mckenna: Right. 

Michael Winkelman: The typical entheogenic ceremony starts at 8 or 9 at night and finishes at,  you know, six or seven in the morning. They’re they’re doing it just the opposite of what our  natural psychological rhythms of consciousness are. The clinical practice is not in incorporating  dream time for instance and that whole overnight process of you know consolidation and  information integration and even the psychophysiological shifts in the body. So yeah, we need  to to figure out how it is to optimize psychedelic science, clinical research and treatment using  the lessons from the traditional and entheogenic practices. And that’s what this book is ending  up, I think, being able to do. 

So I’m just going to talk about, you know, about 13 of the case studies briefly. You know, one  year basically looking at the mushroom traditions of central Mexico by Gonzalez Mariscal,  Guizsola, Martinez, uh, Osiris and, uh, Maria de Carmen Macuil. And so these are basically  common traditions that we know a lot about. Maria Sabina, not as much about the Nahua  traditions, but you know, basically they have these practices. You have purification beforehand,  steam baths, abstaining from sex sometime for up to weeks and fasting and what you eat is very  restricted in terms of foods and then it’s a nighttime ceremony and preferences in nature and  the context is familial and community. You know, it’s not the patient going to see the doctor, the  family and friends are going with this person. Uh all of these practices emphasize the songs, the  sacred language, the music, the chanting, the whistling as part of this melodic envelope that at  times is seen as really being even more important than the entheogen itself. And then the  dancing, the percussion, the whole kind of musical accompaniment to the visionary experience. 

And then the idea that these are diagnostic visions. They tell you what disrupted your balance in  life, and more importantly how to restore it. What it is that you’re going to do to get back to a  state of well-being. This may be seen by the patient or the healer or likely in a combination  between the two of them. The patient divulges, the healer, you know, comes forth with a a  vision of how to resolve it. And the conditions that they address is just, you know, the whole  spectrum from physical illnesses, emotional illnesses, psychological problems, social conflicts, a 

whole range of things we might call magical, you know, witchcraft, sorcery, but just you you  bring it. We we can deal with it. This is a way to reorganize your life around what’s afflicting you.  And um the integration, if we want to use that concept, is is important. Seclusion, you stay away  from strangers. You stay at home. You stay with your family. No sex, no alcohol. You work on  understanding what it is you need to do to change your personal behaviors, how it is that you  are interacting with the world. 

Um, couple papers here. Uh, one about cannabis Santa Rosa, a presumably African import is  clearly not understood exactly how cannabis ended up being incorporated about, you know, 250  years ago into the Otomi. And then the the morning glories the virgin seed widely used across  Mesoamerica sometimes as an alternative to psilocybin when it’s not available. Um sacred you  know Santa Rosa special diet sexual abstinence and work the healer is working on the  emotional state and here they eating the cannabis not smoking it. 

Dennis Mckenna: Okay. And right ritual. 

Michael Winkelman: Well, there’s a lot of different kinds of rituals, but the ones mostly focus  on individualized kind of healing rather than collective healing. Nighttime ceremonies with  family and community. And you got the sacred psalms, the the Santa Rosa is thought to put the  healer in contact the contact with the songs that are then bringing the power to activate the  medicine and heal the person. And it’s thought to have a significant direct effect on the heart  energies of the healer. It’s your emotions, the emotional state of the healer that’s most  important for the healing process. And I think we see a kind of a a transference and an  induction, a transformation by this, you know, mimetic interaction and singing and the dancing  and all the other things that go with this healing. 

And then the vision say, you know, what’s the problem and how to deal with it? You focus on  figuring that out from their visions and their concerns and once again very diverse you know  kinds of things that might be considered magical envy fear illnesses depression curses  alcoholism just general well-being and you know even into the community concerns and then  the integration period focusing on the dreams the dreams are important during the ceremony  after the ceremony and sort of like expanding the visionary experiences of the plants into this  more integrative phase the diet It’s important sexual abstinence and once again the notion is  you heal by changing your behavior and what it is that you’re doing in your life right one aspect  of one thing about this 

Dennis Mckenna: I was not really aware of this this tradition of using cannabis uh and most of  the plants and fungi that are used in the shamanic context they’re they come from the  geography they come from the ecology that the that that the that the community lives in. How  is it that this particular group adopted cannabis which is of course from the other side of the 

world? Could you say a little bit about how that became integrated into their practices and why  can’t I mean since they have so many other fantastic and entheogens right in their environment.  How did how did this happen? How did they adopt cannabis? 

Michael Winkelman: Not not really known exactly. You know, the ancestors brought it kind of  thing. This is how you contact the ancestors. And there’s no ethnography of that period, but I  think there’s, you know, converging evidence that it happened in the early 1800s, you know, and  probably via transport of slaves from Africa. 

Dennis Mckenna: Interesting. 

Michael Winkelman: But, uh, you know, the ancestors brought it for him, right? Well, we can  always blame the ancestors or credit the ancestors. I mean, it is that’s the other thing about  their healing practice. It’s all about the ancestors and the ancestor’s power and keeping the  ancestors happy and, you know, offering sacrifices to the ancestors because you’ve done things  wrong that have made you, you know, become ill. And so, you know, bringing in this whole long  deep, you know, tradition of the ancient spirits that guide us. 

Virgin seeds. This is a a well recognized uh set of practices in history. Uh well documented in the  colonial records. It was a major source of concern to the uh the monks, the priests, the  conquistadors, the extensive, you know, efforts to eradicate this evil snake, you know, because it  was a vine. But uh they didn’t win, you know, but just exactly how all this is done is uh not really  available to any extensive modern ethnography. I think uh the people kind of decided, you  know, we we don’t need to let anybody else know about this. From history and you know  interviews with patients and this and that you know it’s the same kind of thing you know sexual  abstinence special dieting you know you do this at night time in the darkness with your family  and friends uh and in this case often you have bring a group of fasters or other people remotely  are fasting for you during the ceremony and then you engage in the visions to understand how  it is that you’re going to heal what what caused whatever is afflicting you and listening to what  the seeds tell you about what caused your problem. Listening to the voice the they often say it’s  like the seeds are speaking through me. You know it’s like I hear the voice of the seeds telling  me the circumstances of my illness and you know the path and you know whatever led me  down to here. 

So once again the whole wide range of conditions from physical illnesses to supernatural  concerns with you know emotional interpersonal you know community dynamics all in there  and uh how you resolve it. You know you pay attention to your dreams. You continue to follow  the diet sexual abstinence afterwards avoiding strangers. They do sauna stuff and they have  various notions about contamination but like you know go home and stay there get your [ __ ]  together you know.

Dennis Mckenna: So the morning glories the ololiuqui is founded often in the same cultures  that use the mushrooms. Is there a difference in perception? Is one held in higher esteem than  the other, or are they both considered on their own terms as not better or different, but just  different, but one is not regarded more highly than the other. Is that accurate to say? 

Michael Winkelman: Well, I would say that there’s a lot of people that consider mushrooms to  be better. And there’s other people that would say, you know, the virgin seeds, they’re just  they’re supposed they’re my plant, they’re my tool, and they’re for certain conditions in certain  people in situations. So, I I think it’s that just one better than the other, but you know, one’s  better for some people, and the other is better for other people, but there may be a a general  preference for the mushrooms. And the morning glory seeds are kind of backup if you don’t  have the mushrooms. It’s like I think it would be a broad sentiment, right? 

Dennis Mckenna: Right. Yeah. Sometimes when the mushrooms aren’t available, they’re a good  alternative, but but they have their own also their own status within the culture, right? 

Michael Winkelman: Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, once again, something that was very important in  the colonial period. Very important. But anyway, we got a bunch of different, you know,  mescaline containing cacti that are probably some of the most important that we’ve come to,  you know, understand in terms of their early impact upon, you know, anthropology and western  understandings of this entheogenic spirituality. You know, the the Huichol peyote practices of  the Native American church, which was a a reinvention of ancient traditions, but clearly, you  know, borrowed from widespread traditions of the southwest of Mexico. 

And then, you know, the iconic San Pedro of of South America, particularly Peru, uh, and, you  know, how they’ve come to be seen as a major therapeutic agent, you know, throughout these,  uh, early colonial times. Uh but other necessary thing is how they’re used in somewhat different  ways and for different focis that reflect this important context set and setting cultural  adaptation. Um, interestingly I think the the healers as they might be called the Wixárika the  Mara’akate are literally the singers. That’s you know what you call your healer the singer uh  famous in in anthropology’s history uh 19th century discovery of this you know pilgrimage that  was made to the sacred peyote fields uh could last for weeks of walking through the desert you  know during the day in the hot sun fasting sexual abstinence an arduous difficult challenging  and sometimes dangerous journey to eventually get to the peyote fields you collect it and then  you have this nighttime collective ritual in which everybody who came along on the journey is  doing the peyote together with the Mara’akate singing the songs singing the peyote songs and  also using tobacco and sometimes other substances but the singing the drumming the dancing  being these core techniques of the healing process the ritual envelope and then the visions give  you the self diagnosis what was it that happened to you that made you you know ill or what is it  that you need to do in order to achieve your goal.

And uh here we see once again this very broad range of concerns that would be addressed  through the use of the same ritual and the same medicine uh you know infertility, pregnancy  problems uh on one end to sort of emphasize these very physiological things and then you  know remove curses, remove spells, remove some kind of supernatural malignant influence on  your life. Restore equilibrium, address your life’s problems. What’s your career going to be?  How are you going to become empowered? And so all these different things are thrown out  there as possible ways of these plants working with us. And then the integration from what I  read has not been really clearly laid out as a kind of a specific process. But once again, you’ve  gone with your friends and family two week three week walking out there and you walk back  with them and you’re talking about what went on and you pay attention to your dreams and  you do purification at the end and then ritually untie the souls of the group at the end. So you  now have sort of like let this bond go. So I think this really intense two-week walking together is  probably the epitome of long-term integration with your family and community. Um don’t see  that in very many of these traditions though. 

Dennis Mckenna: Okay. Yes. Common themes in all of these uh sexual abstinence seems to be  required in all of these traditions. 

Michael Winkelman: What a pity. But then I guess there’s a reason for it. Yeah, I’ll try to touch  on that. I was actually looking at some of that right as I had had my alarm set for 529 so I would  get away from that and come to here. But Native American church uh the famous road men,  you know, whose traditions have really developed in the last 120 years or so uh and really have  been sort of one of the main stays of American and entheogenic rights and even though they’ve  been challenged at times. Uh but once again an all night ritual in the tipi normally with the  community group um NAC church sort of like those you’re not just here one time you’re joining  an organization that’s significant set of influences on your social life the ritual singing the peyote  songs drumming and engaging with the songs and their messages one might say that that’s the  Bible uh that’s what you’re you know singing. 

Um people will point out there’s also a lot of you know pharmacological effects going on that  bring this up into a positive emotional kind of dynamic with enhanced cognition enhanced  thinking. Um Calabrese talks about these as self-reflective states. You know, your brain is  presenting you with integrated information about what has been going on, you know, behind  the scenes in your complex brain. And the peyote allows these, you know, unconscious  dynamics to come out to speak to you. They say peyote is like a voice that’s talking to me and  telling me what’s going on and what I have to do and how am I going to deal with the problems  that I face in life. 

Uh in the context of the NAC uh you know a lot of authorities would say it really just comes  down to dealing with alcoholism identification problems and coping with social injustice. These 

are the big problems that Native Americans face and the NAC becomes this excellent tool and  some would say really the only effective tool for alcoholism among Native Americans because it  gives you sort of a you know alcoholics anonymous analogy to you know a support group of  non-drinking Indians when you know drinking is an important part of the problem and an  important part of many people’s identity and so the church gives you a new identity you know  you’re you’re able to engage engage with the dynamic of the church as a group and its ideals  and father and mother peyote to bring about a new set of social relations that allow you to  identify with a different kind of way of being in the world. So you got this reflection, emotional  enhancement, enhanced cognitive processing, social support, positive role models that are  wrapped up in the spiritual blanket that then engage this reorientation of self and identity into  the Native American church mindset worldview social network. Calabrese talks about this as a  therapeutic emplotment. You redefine yourself within your life within the context of this church  social symbolic system. 

Dennis Mckenna: So it seems that peyote is very much uh a bridge to all the cultural values that  Native American communities have and the ones that are disrespected by the non by the  outside community. So th this is about politic. This is the the principles seem political as much  as they do spiritual or therapeutic. In a case of peyote, it’s like peyote is our medicine. The  native Americans say and we stand by that and that’s that’s interesting. 

Michael Winkelman: Yeah. I mean you call it political. I find it kind of a you know an unusual  term but yeah I mean certainly there is this you know sort of self autonomy. He says, you know,  and and as you mentioned, you know, connected into Native American tradition, you know,  their spirituality was destroyed, outlawed, and everything else including burned and, you know,  killed their healers. And so this is what emerged as a new tool for engaging with one might say,  the cosmovision of Native America. 

San Pedro um well known in in Chile and Peru and other parts of Latin America. This iconic  cactus that uh is well represented in the prehistory and major temples. Uh it was used as a most  powerful tool and uh called San Pedro because of the power of St. Peter as you know being the  most important Catholic saint. Once again these uh context nighttime and collective but more  client oriented reflecting a much more complex culture. You may bring family members. You  could end up in groups where you don’t know most of the people there. So here we were  talking about mestizo adaptations. 

Uh but once again we see the songs, the whistling, the incantations, the use of rattles. Uh and  uh as was often also the case among uh the Mazatec, you know, a very Christian orientation to a  lot of this. A lot of these practices had to, you know, take on Christian messages to survive. And  of course being Christianized they sort of implicitly started to recognize the similar powers in 

the Christian saints and things like this. But uh also a very important set of symbolic resources  for protection. 

Uh purging induced by the San Pedro induced by tobacco uh things like this to sort of evoke this  very basic parasympathetic cleansing response and can in and of itself contribute to the  visionary experiences. Is once again emphasizing seeing the source of the problems. Um and  and in this case I’ve really gotten to some of the side literature talking about how mescaline can  provide this pharmacological mechanism for stress resolution through pharmacological effects  upon the general adaptation syndrome or overall stress response and its modulation through  the autonomic nervous system. So to me this is probably a common pattern that we see  throughout in entheogenic healing both from the pharmacological point of view and perhaps  even from the ritual dynamic is that we’re forcing the body to undergo this set of  psychodynamic pharmacological processes in which stress responses may be stimulated but  then ultimately there’s a resolution of the stress response by a shift to the parasympathetic  system to a tone in which we have enhanced vagal stability in the body which allows us to  modulate the fear and uh you know other kinds of traumatic responses. 

Um here in the context of the San Pedro once again a wide range of conditions treated people  will go for you know various forms of physical illness that’s not being resolved by doctors but  there’s a lot of emphasis more on this psychosocial dimension you know what do I need to do  to be successful in life how do I find my path you know what is it that I’m going to do to you  know get beyond the limitations of my current life and you know find love and you know  connection with others and become the person that I ideally want to be so kind of a a self formation process and uh there’s a lot of you know the positive emotional parts of the ritual  and the songs the use of perfumes uh scenting uh they call it the florecimiento the very end  you’re bathing with all these traditional spiritous perfumed waters and then you can’t bathe for  24 hours so you know part of the integration is this olfactory dynamic that sticks with you you  know beyond the period of time in which you’re uh you know just directly under the influence  to the uh San Pedro. 

Dennis Mckenna: So, San Pedro seems to be more about not so much a medicine for things  wrong with your body, but more or less uh a medicine for uh your adaptation to the community,  I guess you could say, interpersonal issues and that sort of thing. Sort of a more  psychotherapeutic function. And peyote has that, but it also has it’s regarded as a medicine and  can be used for specific physical problems or illnesses. I suppose San Pedro might be too, but it  it’s not mentioned here. Is there is there a difference? 

Michael Winkelman: Well, you know, I I only know about what I’ve read about a couple of  traditions, and I expect there’s a lot of variation. And I would also point out I mean we often  make the difference the distinction between you know all physical illnesses and and 

psychological psychosocial but you know the psychosomatic is right in the middle there and that  is you know you know feeling tense and nervous and your stomach hurting you and having  migraines and a whole lot of other kinds of physical problems can be the result of  psychosomatic psychosocial stress. But yeah, in the San Pedro tradition, there’s a big uh  emphasis on sorcery, witchcraft. I must have dropped the line off because it didn’t fit on the  PowerPoint. But yeah, there’s a certain, you know, uh supernatural magical dimension that is  very psychosocial. It’s it’s your friends and neighbors and co-workers that are the ones that are  doing, you know, malevolent magic against you. 

Okay. And then uh couple of, you know, ayahuasca traditions here in the book. There’s more  than just these. I just stuck to the the mestizo ones uh the Kamëntšá um in uh Colombia, the  Shipibo in Peru and then the uh Peruvian vegetalista traditions which are a spectrum of sort of  urban to rural uh practices that really had the rural roots that migrated more to urban areas and  the 20th century. But uh all of these in a sense reflecting something of of a mestizo adaptation  particularly the vegetalistas but you’ll read in the book the Kamëntšá ones and the Shipibo ones  offering a very different indigenous worldview than the ones that came out of the Christian uh  amalgamation. 

Kamëntšá. Once again, this is going to sound repetitive. You know, dietary restrictions, no  alcohol, no sex. Get your emotions in order, physical, emotional, and spiritual balance as  preparation. Nighttime context with a group. Um, purging is thought to be important. And once  again, we have the songs, the songs really being activated by the Yagé, the the songs making the  Yagé work better. The incantations in prayer sort of being these modulatory tools by which  emotions are being you know transformed through the combined ritual and pharmacological  processes and then the visions tell you where did this come from? What’s the source of your  malady and what you need to do to get better and often a healer patient interaction that are  brings together an understanding of what happened who did it and why you know it happened  and what you need to do to change it and then once again the spectrum physical and emotional  illnesses mental concerns you know people who be considered you know perhaps insane or you  know highly depressed schizophrenic whatever spiritual problems interpersonal family  problems and sometimes you know even community and inter-community conflicts. So  anything is open as the source of a problem to be addressed through the understanding  provided by the singers of the medicine and those from the other world that provide the songs  and the source of the healing. 

Get to the integration period, you know, no sex, no alcohol, stay away from conflicted people,  no staying out at night partying, you know, seclude yourself a bit. Figure out how you need to  change your behavior, your life, your relationship in order to make yourself better.

Shipibo, this is a very interesting one here, Dennis. And uh I’m surprised that uh more people  haven’t talked about it because at least what I understand from the more article we have here is  that among the Shipibo, it’s just the healer that takes the medicine. Most of the time, the  patient is not taking the ayahuasca. Uh at least in these sources it rarely happens. Now I don’t  know about the full range of Shipibo traditions and I know many of them have adapted to the  modern client demand of westerners but here Favaron and his wife Chinso talk about how you  know there’s a lot of Shipibo healers out there that don’t know what they’re doing. And they  went to a few Ayahuasca ceremonies. They learned some songs. And now they’re charging  foreigners big money to do some ceremonies. And they don’t have the slightest idea what  they’re doing. 

But people that speak here with sexual abstinence necessary, patient and healer, restricted diet,  and cleanse negative emotions. You got to get your negative emotions out of the way. Figure  out how to start letting these things go as you move into the ceremony. Nighttime overnight  ceremony. The songs are thought to be the healing tools. The ayahuasca activates the songs.  The songs are vibrations. The vibrations provide healing energies. So once again, a model that I  think is often implicit rather than you know right in front. But uh very clear here from this  tradition, they see the songs as what are being the healing tools. And so the visions are to get  the songs he either gets them provide an understanding of it through the songs and how they  respond to the um person or the person responds and a lot of times I think it’s like you know  you don’t just okay I’m going to sing this song it’s like well okay now it’s oh this is the song that  needs to be sung maybe at the end if we have time I’ll tell about how I had something have me  sing a song once but interpret things through dreams and whole wide range of stuff from you  know physical problems of on extreme drugs to, you know, supernatural, sorcery, evil, you  know, contamination and a wide range of emotional conditions. 

And the spirits are there to help you realign your life. What it is you need to do to change how  you have become that have made you ill, calm your body down, and then recover through this  transactional relation with the healer. In this case, they really emphasize that the patient’s faith  

in the healer, their willingness to be, you know, accepting of whatever it needs to do, trusting  this whole dynamic of emotional expectation put into the healer. So to me, this really  emphasizes this notion that a significant part of the entheogenic healing processes has to do  with how it is that the healers are able to engage with the patients for a process of emotional  transformation through modeling a particular way of being. And ultimately it also includes this  repetitive refrain of patient needs to change their behavior. They need to understand it was  their ignorance that caused an illness. They got to change how it is they’re going to be in the  world.

Dennis Mckenna: But the uh it seems that the traditional use of uh ayahuasca among the  Shipibo is uh uh the healer the curandero is the only one that takes the medicine. That that’s  not going to work in the context of ayahuasca tourism. And I I guess the Shipibo have risen to  the moment. Uh they now I don’t know if their traditions say only the healer takes it. But I  suppose in the in the modern context they uh they offer it to the people that attend at least you  know the on the Gringos basically and they’re not going to come to a ceremony and not drink. I  don’t think that’s that’s going to work for them. 

Michael Winkelman: And in this case you know it it may be that this particular lineage this is  really different than others. Now this is not an extensively comparative one and my authors  even say we don’t know how other people heal. We don’t go to other people’s ceremonies, you  know, but they also said that, you know, in in the traditional context, when a patient comes to  be healed, they’re pretty sick, you know, and they can’t handle. 

Vegetalismo probably, you know, the most widely known traditions apart from the Santo Daime  and União do Vegetal, relatively similar traditions across Peruvian you know, semi-rural settings  that reflects these you know hundreds of years of cultural amalgamation but also you know  some variation uh within them um certainly some regions are known for you know uh sorcery  and witchcraft being a central part of the ayahuasca use and it’s in many cases between healers  you know competing for clients uh then some people say well in an urban setting it’s become  you know more spiritual oriented but you know there’s still always envy and concern and things  like that that may drive, you know, this other dimension. Of course, that’s often a a concern that  the people themselves have when they come to get this healing is that, you know, they’re being,  you know, affected by the envy or bewitchment or sorcery of neighbors or enemies or, you  know, some kind of friends. But, uh, they still have this ancient shamanic root of, you know, you  fast beforehand, no sex. 

Uh and they’re really well known for these you know dietas these specialized diets uh herbal  substances normally often very restrictive food consumption sometimes lasting up to almost a  month as the preparation for healing ceremonies and this may be more the case of the the  healer in many cases but patients also are expected to do a dieta and it’s supposed to help  activate the other plants context overnight but once again more of a group it’s more you know  kind of a you know urban you kind of setting where a lot of different clients show up. Uh and  the techniques once again emphasize the songs. A lot of little ritual uh kinds of implements that  have interesting implications for the body like fans more than rattles traditionally. Although  some fans can sound a little bit like rattles, you know, purifications, you know, the tobacco  brought in the ancient Native American practices, the crystals uh being used sucking on the  body.

And then uh once again the visions being seen as the basically the way in which you figure out  what went wrong, the causes of illness, you know, enhance your intuition about what’s  happened to you and how you’re going to address it. And then once again, pretty wide range of  kinds of concerns that one might say are sort of psychosocial, spiritual, emotional. Uh but  people can come with any problem. But that seems to be the kinds of things that are being  addressed with these practices and the integration of the visions into the post session dreaming  as part of learning what to get out of these kinds of practices, out of these kinds of experiences.  And sexual abstinence continues after the ceremony and focus on changing your emotions,  changing who you have become, how you behave, how you perceive yourself in the world, your  relationships with others. 

Dennis Mckenna: And vegetalismo is really a syncretic practice, right? I mean, it it borrows from  many traditions. It’s it’s not really an integrated practice in itself. Is that accurate to say that? It’s  kind of a I mean it’s very syncretic combining all these different traditions or is it is that not  really an accurate thing to— 

Michael Winkelman: Well, I think that a broad level yes. Although I would say that it the really  the syncretism is between this what this amalgamated colonial ayahuasca tradition, right? It  sort of survived the suppression and it was sort of like diverse cultural roots but pretty similar  practices. And then the Catholicism, the Catholic overlay, you know, that also, you know,  brought in a once again a common set of elements from this, you know, Spanish influence,  right? And you see the the ultimate expression of that in the in the syncretic churches like the  Santo Daime and the UDV. They are very much uh infused with uh tradition with with Christian  iconography and uh and they borrow very heavily from that 

Dennis Mckenna: and they’re not so much therapeutic. I mean, they’re psychotherapeutic,  those traditions, but they’re uh, as I understand it, they’re not really addressing physical  problems, although they they do claim to have uh special preparations that can be used for those for those. 

Michael Winkelman: Yeah. So it’s an kind of an interesting place uh situation with those  churches because they are definitely a combination of Christian and indigenous iconography  and of course they at least in the UDV they deny the indigenous origins of ayahuasca. You know as you know they claim that it came from King Solomon. Uh and I mean obviously this is a myth  but uh I was going to say you know that’s why I would say you know UDV is more of a one might  say a new age Christian church loosely you know and and Santo Daime I think is is a very  Christian church I mean there’s very little you know focus on the indigenous traditions sure yeah  there you we know where it came from but you know it’s very Christian in disorientation.

So we have you know one article in the book by Mark Blaney about you know Santo Daime and  what kind of healing that it focuses on and particularly if you look at what happens to Santo  Daime in the context of Europe I mean it emerges into much more of a kind of psychosocial  healing process you know self-management kind of process um but yeah not not so much  indigenous in either of those at all uh Dennis I don’t know how we need to deal with time here  for I mean I can keep on going. I can wrap up with this slide. It’s your call here. 

Dennis Mckenna: Yes. So this is the overview of all of it and uh yeah all of these things are  elements in in these practices and uh that is remarkable in some ways. I mean uh um how does  that arrive? I I guess it’s uh partly a function of the of the pharmacology of these things. This  just naturally comes up. 

Michael Winkelman: Well, I mean that’s one way of looking at it. And uh you know the other  way of looking at it is that uh the entheogens were incorporated into an existing sort of evolved  psychology of ritual healing and that that evolved psychology of ritual healing uh sort of became  social adaptations that optimized the way in which the pharmacological agents worked. So I  don’t think for instance that for instance I don’t think the pharmacology makes us do it at night  although if we do it in the evening the pharmacology is going to keep us up at night but you  know the reason that we do it is night is not because the pharmacology forces us to you know  we can take it early in the morning it’s that the nighttime you know dream period is the  optimized period for incorporating the pharmacological effects. Okay. So my notion is that we  sort of ritual capacities co-evolve with these substances in order to optimize their effects. 

And I could go you know through this you know in detail. I could I may have a summary one at  the end. It’s the sort of looks at know well I mean you know basically looking at how all of these  different aspects of the evolution of the you know capacity for healing sort of interacted with  these substances and became sort of the context within which you know endogenous healing  processes were evoked. Uh and this particularly I think involves things such as how mimesis  evokes a lot of different kinds of influences. 

Um but to sort of like this is my two slides I can wrap up with here. You know how does the  traditional and entheogenic healing practices the indigenous setting interface with our evolved  psychology. And this takes us deeply into the work I’ve done on shamanism and the evolution of  shamanism as a ritual healing capacity. But I see, you know, both of these as having sort of been  integrated into what exists in hominids and chimpanzees, nighttime reunification displays with  vocalization, group drumming, chorusing, and basically everybody getting together and getting  happy and integrated as a group up in the trees, safe a little safer from the predators. It’s  basically sort of a psychophysiology of ritual that allows us to integrate members of our group  together. And the fact that hominids have this uh even chimpanzees have these behaviors argue  is again for not necessarily the ancient ancientness of the use of the entheogens but definitely 

the social dynamics of communities can be found in these in these primate populations. And  we’re nothing more than complex primates. I sometimes say we’re the problematic primates  and we are problematic in in many ways but it’s interesting a curandero once told me I don’t  know if he how serious it was but he says you know he said it is a liquid, it will fill whatever  

vessel you create for it. And that was that my takeaway from that was that it needs a vessel it  has to have a vessel and that’s the ritual context that you provide for it and it can be supportive,  fulfilling or in the wrong hands. It could be actually quite harmful in uh uh you know in uh uh  what what what’s the term uh not vegetalismo but uh but the sorcery has a vessel too. Uh  brujeria I think is the term witchcraft. Yeah. Yeah. 

You know, as you mentioned early on, you know, the neuroplasticity. I mean, that’s that’s going  to be, you know, neo-Nazis love LSD, too. You know, it makes them feel high and better than  everybody else. And, you know, they get their own spiritual high off of it, but uh doesn’t make  them a better person necessarily, right? Another example of this. These entheogens are basic  technologies and they can be used beneficially or harmfully or somewhere in between. I mean  again it comes down to like with any technology the choices we make in terms of how to deploy  those or how to employ those things. And uh but they do seem to be these plants do seem to  foster states of empathy, community bonding, self-reflection. All of these are are good things,  you know, tools that we can use to become better humans. And but you know, there may be  this thing about, you know, how the the psychedelics may be driving this in-group empathy  rather than an outgroup empathy. But the thing is about the you bring out group members in  and then the psychedelics make it easy to incorporate them into the ingroup. 

I’ll go on here talk about this preparation the dietary and sexual restrictions. What’s this all  about? I mean this is a worldwide thing about spiritual traditions. You know you fast you know  you don’t have sex. I mean why I’m sort of trying to get more into this understandings now. I  mean, one of the major things I think we should recognize is this notion that it’s overriding  natural drives and that these kinds of conditions, including sleeplessness, uh, engage what  Carhart-Harris and Brouwer call pivotal mental states that are exacerbated by acute stress on  top of chronic stress that elicit the 5HT2A response, which is the neurotransmitter systems that  are preferentially targeted by major classes of psychedelics. So the 5HT2A is already there and  natural things such as fasting and extreme exercise and sexual abstinence and stress and  sleeplessness all evoke this 5HT2A response. And so we’re basically priming the 5HT2A system  by getting these things done before the psychedelics come in. 

And I’ll just briefly make a couple of comments here. Uh the sexual restrictions, the dietary stuff  I think also have important psychopharmacological or perhaps ultimately pharmacological  effects. Uh but the diet is in a sense primary the dopaminergic system and I think we need to  figure out you know what does ketosis do to psychedelics? I mean these guys are typically in 

highly ketotic states when they go into these ceremonies as shamans. I mean how does this  change the overall pharmacological dynamics? And then the sexual restrictions have a lot of  different kinds of effects. One of the things I was looking at is just how we have this excitation  inhibition balance in the body. One can kind of see it as being a higher level manifestation of the  balance between uh the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system.  And it’s like just where is that balance going to be shifts during the day but it also shifts in  moods. You know, you get highly stimulated and you can be, you know, both happy or very  nervous. You know, you get very relaxed. You can be both calm and connected or sort of, you  know, fear for your life and you’re dying kind of thing. But these different points and you know,  this balance between these two systems are modulated by lots of different things. Not just the  psychedelics which can produce these dramatic shifts across the whole hierarchy of the  excitation-inhibition balance uh but also within the more specific dynamic of the person and I  think that you know you can see like mood shifts coming out of sex for instance that in a sense  kind of reflect some of the dynamics of psychedelics. In some ways you get this excitation phase  then you go into a collapse phase but the collapse phases are different because of the  pharmacology and the behavior so it may be that the sex would take you out of a modality that  was established by the psychedelic sort of as this excitation inhibition balance in the nervous  system. And so by not having sex, you sort of stay more moderated. You don’t go to these  extremes. You don’t get this highly stimulated phase with the collapse phase falling. You have a  more uh robust modulation of this interaction between the different levels of excitation and  relaxation in the nervous system. I see all of this has been mediated ultimately through the  5HT2A receptor system which is these basically deliberately exposing yourself or practicing  these uh effectively it’s controlled stress practice. You’re you’re driving yourself to unpleasant  experiences like fasting, abstinence, sexual abstinence, sleeplessness. All of these are stresses  intended to trigger these pivotal mental states and then that is mediated by 5HT2A. 

Dennis Mckenna: How specifically where is 5HT2A in this dynamic? You’re are you increasing  the density of receptors or the amount of serotonin that’s being released or what does that look  like physiologically? 

Michael Winkelman: You’re activating more receptors and you’re activating them you know  more intensely than they ordinarily get activated. Normally you got to you know get fasting and  stressed out and and all these different things and here we got a little chemical that helps us get  right into that highly activated 5HT2A system and this system is like has high levels of plasticity.  Uh it’s more emotionally modulated, more emotionally positive as you pointed out. It has all  these different qualities, makes us more adaptable, makes us less, you know, responsive to  stress, etc. So um I think that we have to continue with the focus on the 5HT2A but I also think  most people are missing an important part of the picture that I thought was known 40 years ago  and that is that ultimately the serotonin effects lead to dopaminergic dominance and that there 

there’s early on there’s a lot of emphasis on the different phases you know the up to peak and  slightly post-peak versus the long sequelae afterwards and I think that one of the things that is  true but not sufficiently uh recognized is that psychedelics are very highly bound to the 5HT2A  sites right they’re they’re very resistant to uptake and so eventually what’s happening to all  

these 5HT2A receptors is that they’re getting habituated. 

I think that’s part of why you get these repeating patterns because this receptors are continuing  to fire in the same ways and these repeating patterns eventually habituate the 5HT2A receptor  system and it quits functioning and then I think we enter into this second phase in which the  regulatory effects of 5HT2A over the dopaminergic system are lost and that what is this you  know cortical straight cortical dynamic that’s emphasized by Vollenweider is then the  dopaminergic systems being released and so it’s all about 5HT2A in the beginning but ultimately  it gets taken out of the picture and I think the really largely unexamined dynamic of the  psychedelic effect is what happens with the dopaminergic system as well as the opiates and— 

Dennis Mckenna: Sure, but basically this is under the uh regulatory control if you want to put it  that way of the 5HT2A system. It is calling the shots and the dopamine and opioids are are  brought into the picture through that process. 

Michael Winkelman: I would slightly qualify that, Dennis, and say 5HT isn’t calling the shots all  the way. At a certain point, the psychedelic effect shifts from 5HT2A stimulation to the  habituation and it basically goes offline. And so the 5HT2A is not so much calling the shots is  that when it quits calling the shots is when the dopaminergic system comes in and maybe other  ones too. 

Dennis Mckenna: So are you talking about tolerance with respect to 5HT2A? I mean prolonged  exposure uh to these 5HT2A agonists which most of these infusions are leads to leads to  tolerance in— 

Michael Winkelman: I mean that may be another another way of thinking. I mean I thought  about it as habituation and the system doesn’t function anymore. It’s not that it’s become you  know insensitive but that has become sort of locked out. But yeah you know you know you do  LSD two nights in a row and the second night doesn’t come off as hot you know right and that’s  probably why you know entheogenic ceremonies are typically spaced out a couple of weeks you  know you sort of get back to your different baseline. But I think you know just to emphasize  here I think you know it’s not just a 5HT2A effect, in fact has published some stuff about how  there’s important dopaminergic effects that you can find when you use drugs that lock out the  5HT2A sites. 

Okay, but I should keep on moving here. Um, the mimetic suite that’s a major focal point in  human evolution. One one and a half million years ago is when we started seeing all these tools 

start to show up, different level of culture. We acquired a capacity to use what’s called mimesis  which is this ability to express meaning through motion, emotion, sounds, behavior, singing,  chanting, expressive performance and probably an evolutionary achievement or an adaptation  to deal with the loss of grooming. It’s an opioid stimulating system. Music is and I think it’s an  important reason why it’s central to the healing ceremonies because it’s ancient adaptation but  it probably does a lot to enhance the effects of the uh serotonin stimulation as well. It probably  also contributes to these visionary functions the induction of altered states of consciousness.  Uh I could do a whole talk just about what is the alter state of shamanism how it works in the  brain but basically, it’s giving us access to these unconscious dynamics innate symbolic  processes that are exemplified in dreams. 

The overnight nature of the entheogenic ceremony is to enhance the incorporation of dreams  and I think that this sort of puts us in a modality that enhances the ability of our endogenous  healing mechanisms to take over different kinds of psychological psychosomatic um we could  

call them placebo or hypnotic effects but basically moving into a state that I think ultimately  we’re going to characterized by a certain frame of the vagal system that then is like you know  being in this protected social community with you know your mother and you know father and  all the hierarchy of spirits and powers that help make sure that you’re being taken care of and  so to me that’s a important part of the cosmological social ritual envelope is that you know you  go back to this notion the set and setting. You know we can give you LSD and terrorize you you  know or we can give you LSD and make you have spiritual experiences. The Johns Hopkins  community is good for getting you know 70% of their people to have full-blown mystical  experiences, you know, but if if you’d had them be chased around in Central Park by a pack of  wild dogs uh I don’t think they would have had you know mystical experiences they probably  would have had death and rebirth experiences. 

But but anyway, so ultimately, you know, it’s how the whole community shapes the experience  and that’s part of the integration. Restricted social contact, you know, the diet, the sexual  restrictions is it puts you into a more closed social space where you’re going to be able to uh  engage with these healing potentials. 

Dennis Mckenna: Uh can you go back to the slide before this one? Let’s see. Yeah. Okay. I just  wanted to look at this. This is a very useful summary slide and uh I just wanted to get a more  deep more structured look at that. 

Michael Winkelman: Yeah, I think it’s going back to this thing about you know what’s the best  practices from the shamanic point of view for psychedelic medicine. Um but yeah this is sort of  like you know what comes from that earlier consideration about you know what does  shamanism say about it apart from you know the way in which we might manipulate you know  through the entheogenic effects but basically is this preparatory set and I will go back to the you 

know natural elicitation of the 5HT2A stress response: austerities, fasting, sexual abstinence,  isolation, you know basically you know getting outside of civilization and the comforts of  civilization. One way of looking at it. 

And then, you know, I sort of think about this from the point of view of ancient human  adaptation. You know, you’re stressed out trying to get back to your camp, freaked out about  the predators after you haven’t eaten for days, you know, and you’re just stressing out trying to  find your people and you get back and then you’re in your group. You have the overnight, you  know, communal reunification. I mean, the model here comes with chimpanzees. Every night  the group reunites for protection. So now you’re together in this overnight context with the  mimetic capacities enhancing the social bonding, enhancing the sense of you know social  connectedness, and then entering into these overnight states of integration with the dream  processes. We’re enhancing our ability to u manipulate what are one of the most important  kinds of adaptations for learning and ultimately that’s what I think you know dreaming is all  about. It’s a certain kind of psychosocial emotional learning adaptation to help us put the pieces  together, and psychedelics become prime tools to exact these innate capacities and take them  to another whole level through the exogenous neurotransmitters and through the ability of  ritual to extend this experience in a variety of different ways. Particularly through the songs, the  cosmology, the storytelling, the enactment, all of these things are sort of, you know, the  language of the dream world that then is being enhanced by the psychedelic overnight  experience. 

So in the context of shamanism, you know, there are certain kinds of experiences that people  have and you know, the death and rebirth experience, the soul flight, the animal powers. I think  we can all kind of understand these as part of an innate capacity. I kind of just went right by the  innate intelligences slide, but these are parts of the ways in which our brain functions. 

Dennis Mckenna: It seems that the one tradition that doesn’t have all overnight, or maybe I  missed this, but it seems that the huachuma San Pedro is very often taken during the day. Is that  true? 

Michael Winkelman: Well, from the stuff I’ve read, no. But I wouldn’t be surprised that they  make those adaptations particularly in urban centers and stuff like this. But uh I remember uh  The Wizard of the Four Winds by Douglas Sharon, like that’s an overnight ceremony, very classic,  you know. 

Dennis Mckenna: Okay. Mid evening to that is the usual practice. 

Michael Winkelman: Yeah. And I mean and I guess I would say that they don’t necessarily only  do it at night but all these traditional practices always did have night ceremonies. They might  have other ones in addition. So, one of the things I I found really interesting about this u innate 

intelligence perspective is um thinking of it in terms of an innate symbolic capacity and been  discussed as presentational symbolism and people are just starting to get into this you know  visual languages and visual image but that’s basically what we used before we became you  know language speaking beasts. It’s a way of knowing the world through the visual system and  it’s the way that other animals also know the world and this is part of our roots to our ancient  forms of you know pre-hominid consciousness. And one of the prominent things in shamanism  are animal powers. It turns out animal intelligence is one of these innate intelligences and I I  won’t go off into it other than to say that you know we have intrinsic understandings of the  meanings of different kinds of animals and even young children can identify some of the  important qualities of animals they never seen before been told about just by looking at  pictures. 

So it’s his visual knowledge system is kind of innate. But because it’s innate, then it becomes  this capacity for modulating self in the sense that we’re able to look at these animals,  understand something about them. And given our proclivity for social imitation, social  incorporation, you know, social idealization of others, we’re able to put animals into these  innate categories for social relations. And so one of the sort of evolutionary adaptations that  came out of altered states of consciousness was the ability to enhance the integration of what  are called innate intelligences. At one time they were called modular intelligences sort of  emphasizing they function on their own and separate from one another. And the truth is one  they’re not completely autonomous. They share some structures each other. But what is  particularly important about them is that altered states of consciousness and psychedelics  integrate these and that this is the foundation for creating symbols. You put representations  from two different systems into the same working space. So in this sense we can understand  how these alter states were kind of a part of an evolution of the capacity to expand the innate  uh representational systems into more complex systems that could be used to manage personal,  interpersonal and social relations and emotional dynamics. And so then out of this grows the  comes the idea of your spirit animal which is very common in in shamanism. 

Dennis Mckenna: This idea as you pointed out even a young even a child could look at a picture  of an animal without ever having actually seen the animal and they can sort of divine what its  properties are and they can integrate its properties its its characteristics. So that’s these uh this  animal spirit is uh effectively a way to get in touch with your own animal your own internal uh  spirit animal. Would would you agree with that? Is that accurate? 

Michael Winkelman: Yeah. I mean I would look at it generally yes. That I would say but it’s not  necessarily that you just get in touch with something that’s within you but rather that you use  your understanding of the symbol and it’s externalized manifestations to incorporate something  new into you.

Dennis Mckenna: I see. 

Michael Winkelman: So you’re going out and you’re finding this power and bringing it into you.  So it’s not something that you you know experiences being your own before. Now, we can say  you had an innate capacity to acquire this, but the idea is that you brought in something that  wasn’t previously available to you as a a power, as a source of inspiration, as a tool, as a  protector, as an ally, etc. 

Dennis Mckenna: Okay. 

Michael Winkelman: Well, should I just wrap it up with this one here? 

Dennis Mckenna: Yes. 

Michael Winkelman: So I mean one of the things that I I think was you know hoped for but not  necessarily you know completely preceded in putting this book together was that there was  going to be commonalities and in the healing practices and that those commonalities which I already knew something about were really part of our evolved psychology that this is an ritual  adaptation to enhance the capacities of an existing set of structural you know functional  systems by using the interaction between pharmacology in ritual to maximize their operation or  optimize their operation. That basically these cross-cultural similarities tell us that they’re not  basically cultural but they’re biological and that consequently they have universal applicability. 

So we often say oh there’s just a bunch of rituals of you know the Indians we don’t need those.  Well, it’s not that they’re just rituals. They’re rituals that have adapted or evolved psychology.  And by seeing the patterns in the rituals, the commonalities, then we understand how to  optimize adaptations to the effects of these substances and then basically become guidelines  for creating contemporary and entheogenic healing practices or psychedelic healing practices.  And I think one of the real powerful things about this what I would call an ethnological  approach, this cross-cultural approach, is that what it ends up telling us is a tool to deal with the  questions of cultural appropriation and the development of psychedelic medicine and  entheogenic medicine. 

Now, if I go take a psalm from the peyote church, that’s appropriation. If I go take a rattle from a  particular group in Peru, you know, that could be cultural appropriation. Of course, they got it  from China, then it’s okay if you use it. But the idea is that you know we we can’t go and justify  taking specific cultures practices but what we can do is justify building our own systems based  upon what we understand to be the sort of the I think the the biograms is the term these innate  biological systems of information processing that the commonalities identified. So go create our  own songs, go create our own traditions, go create our own practices about fasting, go create  our own, you know, system of, you know, cosmologies, whatever, and find that as a way to integrate our need for a ritual structure with the substances that we use.

And at the end of the day, these these commonalities, these cultural practices that we’re  concerned not to necessarily appropriate or co-opt, but this is rooted in uh the basis of it all  goes back to something we all share, which is human physiology and neurophysiology and the  experience, the biological basis of what it is to be human that and then it that experience finds  its expression in all these different cultural cultural contexts and these medicines bring that out  but the raw material you know I’m often I’m I’m fond of saying we’re all indigenous to earth you  know and by that in effect I mean we’re all humans we share a similar physiology our brains are  structured similarly we’re more like each other then we’re different than each other and uh and  these uh these cultural practices give a way to express that in a unique way that’s appropriate  for the for the context of the particular culture but it all comes down ultimately to human  biology and the human experience right and um I mean that’s why I kind of want to place this in  the context of our evolved psychology you know we need to understand how it is that our our  brain function functions in terms of the effects of these plants and then how it was that our you  know ancestors discovered ways of adapting to these effects to optimize their beneficial you  know consequences. 

Dennis Mckenna: Right. Right. Well, this is uh yeah this is a wonderful presentation Dr. Thank  you for this. This is great. Wow. I’m just gob smacked. There’s so much material you’ve you’ve  shared here. It’s going to take a little bit of digestion to uh to integrate all this as as you will, but  this presentation will be posted on the episode page for the podcast as well as links to your  books and uh and your many publications and so on. So, people will get have a chance to  understand Michael Winkelman and everything you’ve produced over the last 40 years. Well,  they probably won’t understand everything, but at least the treasure is there and people can  follow these links and understand your thinking. But this has been a really very interesting  conversation sort of conversation presentation. It’s been good. I thank you for your time. Have  we have we failed to say anything that we should before we sign off here? 

Michael Winkelman: You know, I guess I just have to read it. Okay. Most of my stuff’s available  on or through my site, Michael.com. 

Dennis Mckenna: Right. michael.com. 

Michael Winkelman: This book in entheogenic healing has just been published less than a year  ago. It’s available and it’s basically a handbook for people that want to understand these  practices and and put them into practice. 

Dennis Mckenna: So that’s a very valuable reference and uh thank you for sharing your time  and your knowledge with us. It’s been a great I really appreciate it. Thank you for for that and  for all that you do in the world. Uh we need more.

Michael Winkelman: Thank you Dennis. You know we we need the McKenna Foundation too or  McKenna Academy. 

Dennis Mckenna: Oh, well, we really appreciate your steady support as an advisor and a  supporter and uh you’re part of our family and our family is growing. So, uh very much  appreciate you’re sharing your your wisdom with us and uh and that presentation. There’s a lot  to unpack there. So, thank you so much.