Are Transcendental Experiences Proof of God? Dr. James B. Glattfelder on Consciousness, Spiritually & The Amazing Intelligence of the Universe

Summary

Podcast Summary

Podcast: Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown
Episode: Are Transcendental Experiences Proof of God? Dr. James B. Glattfelder on Consciousness, Spiritually & the Amazing Intelligence of the Universe
Host: Mayim Bialik (co-host Jonathan Cohen)
Guest: Dr. James B. Glattfelder, Complexity Scientist and Physicist
Date: October 3, 2025

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Overview of the Episode

This episode features a deep-dive into consciousness, the origins of reality, the limitations of physics, and the scientific and experiential basis for transcendental and mystical experiences. Dr. James B. Glattfelder argues for the need to "re-enchant" modern scientific and daily life by expanding our metaphysical assumptions beyond strict materialism, exploring idealism, and considering consciousness as a fundamental aspect of reality. The conversation also explores the intersection of psychedelics, mystical traditions, the Akashic field, synchronicity, and the paradoxical relationship between science and spirituality.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Crisis of Meaning and Re-Enchantment in Science

• Dr. Glattfelder opens with an assertion about the fundamental mystery in the universe—"95% of the stuff in the universe, we don't know what it is… that's most of the universe." (00:00)
• He criticizes a strictly physicalist and reductionistic worldview for leading to nihilism: “It tells you you don’t matter, everything is random, there’s no purpose, and you die. We’re suffering from a crisis of meaning. We need to be re-enchanted again.” (00:00)
• Points to a necessary "re-evaluation at a metaphysical level… an evolution of consciousness." (00:30)

2. The Role of Idealism & Consciousness as Fundamental

• Mayim and Glattfelder discuss the paradigm shift from the view that the universe is just made of particles to the idea that information—and possibly consciousness—is fundamental.
• Glattfelder: “The quantum pioneers just realized that the fundamental level of reality is just a mess from our rational perspective because it’s incoherent, it’s illogical, it just makes no sense….there’s so many fundamental enigmas in physics that now is the time… to recalibrate our metaphysical assumptions.” (10:17)
• The “hard problem” of consciousness is highlighted—how the non-conscious could produce subjective experience is still unexplained. (12:30)

3. Science, Mysticism, and Experiential Knowledge

• Mayim emphasizes not dismissing “thousands of years of wisdom, of consciousness expansion and of mystical experiences.” (01:00; 21:45)
• Glattfelder discusses non-Western and ancient perspectives—shamanic, mystical, and meditative traditions—that treat consciousness as primary and reality as layered, with the non-physical as real as the physical. (18:55)
• “These transcendental experiences allow you to feel what it means to dissolve and become one with all that is.” (07:07; 32:54)

4. Psychedelics and the Expansion of Consciousness

• Glattfelder calls shamans, mystics, meditators, and psychonauts the “masters of consciousness”. (28:43)
• Discusses research and personal experience with psychedelics, as well as their transformative, sometimes overwhelming nature:

  “These other-worldly non-physical realms are inhabited by other expressions of agency and intelligence… I find…if you're open to working with your consciousness and seeing what's happening in there…it's kind of a transformational thing.” (28:43; 32:54)

• Psychedelics (like LSD, DMT) are not necessary for everyone; meditation, breathwork, and introspection can also grant access to altered states and expanded awareness. (39:18–40:25)
• The importance of integration and caution:

  “Drugs are… dangerous. They have their use, but be careful.” (39:18; 46:12)

5. The Akashic Field, Synchronicity, and Intuition

• Potential scientific explanations for intuitive phenomena like synchronicity, the Akashic records, and psi:

  “If there’s a layer of reality beyond the physical which we can access, which has certain properties... and we can tap into that, then maybe depending on how our brain tunes as a radio, we get different frequencies…” (54:12)

• There is renewed academic interest in psi phenomena, intuition, and the possibility of non-local or distributed consciousness. (25:18; 56:58)

6. The Limits of Knowledge, Openness, and Re-Enchantment

• Repeated calls for scientists and laypeople alike to hold openness and humility in the face of the vast unknown:

  “Scientists should be less confident in their assertions...there is still so much crazy stuff that we don’t understand.” (76:48) “We need to be re-enchanted again from the universe we’re living in...More joyful and more playful in how we experience stuff and how we contextualize stuff and how we judge others and how we give ourselves a hard time.” (70:20)

• Encourages embracing both rational and experiential knowledge for a balanced, meaningful life. (93:19)

7. Aliens, DMT, and Non-Physical Entities

• Raises the possibility that encounters with “aliens” or entities on psychedelics like DMT (e.g., Terence McKenna’s “machine elves”) could represent access to non-physical layers or intelligences, not just hallucinations. (77:46–82:12)
• Mayim questions how much of these experiences are shaped by shared culture versus universal phenomena. (80:22–81:20)

8. Practical Wisdom & Integration

• The balance between recognizing meaning in everything versus becoming paralyzed or lost; finding ways to integrate transcendent insight without losing functionality. (68:28)
• Creativity, connection, joy, and the search for meaning are key outcomes of expanded consciousness. (71:58–74:12)
• “You’re a human being, not a human doing.” (73:59)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the crisis of meaning:

  "We’re suffering from a crisis of meaning. We need to be re enchanted again."
  — Dr. James B. Glattfelder (00:00)

• On idealism and consciousness:

  "If you look at non-Western societies for many millennia or even longer, they seem to have been making experiences of what this means to live in a universe which is based in consciousness."
  — Dr. James B. Glattfelder (18:55)

• On psychedelic transformation:

  "If you’re open to working with your consciousness… This is kind of a transformational thing."
  — Dr. James B. Glattfelder (32:54)

• On humility in science:

  "Scientists should be less confident in their assertions of what is possible and not, and just be more open…there is still so much crazy stuff that we don’t understand."
  — Dr. James B. Glattfelder (76:48)

• On religious and scientific dogma:

  "Any knowledge system which is static and dogmatic is a bad explanation. It has to…evolve in terms of knowledge."
  — Dr. James B. Glattfelder (59:21)

• On joy and meaning:

  "We’re suffering from a crisis of meaning… it’s about reconnecting or finding this re enchantment…you can look at the tree and just go, wow, this is amazing. What an amazing experience."
  — Dr. James B. Glattfelder (74:12)

• On transcendental experiences and unity:

  “These transcendental experiences allow you to feel what it means to dissolve and become one with all that is.”
  — Dr. James B. Glattfelder (07:07)

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Important Timestamps

• 00:00 — Opening: the unknown universe and the "crisis of meaning"
• 07:08 — Studying physics leads to more questions than answers
• 10:17 — Quantum mechanics as a challenge to reductionist worldviews
• 15:30 — Idealism & the hard problem of consciousness
• 18:55 — Experiential knowledge, shamans, mystics, and psychedelics
• 25:18 — Synchronicity and psi phenomena discussed in academic circles
• 32:54 — The illusion of separateness and transformative potential of consciousness work
• 39:18 — Mechanisms for accessing expanded consciousness (drugs, meditation, breathwork)
• 54:12 — Akashic field and the blending of mysticism and quantum physics
• 70:20 — The re-enchantment project: meaning and symbolic cognition
• 77:46 — Alien encounters and consciousness, DMT as a portal to non-physical entities
• 92:15 — The need for perceptual filters and the limits of human awareness
• 93:19 — Dr. Glattfelder’s message to scientists, religious people, and everyone in between

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Flow and Tone

• The conversation is playful, highly accessible, and conversational, balancing technical insights with humor and personal reflections.
• Mayim’s approach is inquisitive, supportive of integrating science and spirituality.
• Dr. Glattfelder is candid about the limitations of science, open to discussing his personal experiences, and philosophically robust.
• Jonathan Cohen brings grounding queries and emphasizes practical integration.

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Conclusion

This episode encourages listeners to embrace both humility and openness, to honor age-old mystical traditions alongside scientific rigor, and to cultivate personal and collective "re-enchantment." It highlights the value of experiential knowledge, the urgent need for new metaphysical frameworks, and most importantly, the deeply human search for meaning, connection, and joy—in both the known and mysterious dimensions of consciousness.

Transcript

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

95% of the stuff in the universe, we don't know what it is. We've given it the name dark energy and dark matter. And that's a big problem because that's most of the universe. If you're stuck in this physicalist, reductionistic worldview, it tells you you don't matter, everything is random, there's no purpose, and you die. We're suffering from a crisis of meaning. We need to be re enchanted again. This revaluation has to happen at a metaphysical level. This is going to be an evolution of consciousness. The pendulum swinging back where scientists asking themselves, what the hell am I doing?

[Jonathan Cohen]

Dr. James B. Glatfelder is a complexity scientist and physicist. Changing how we see reality and how.

[Mayim Bialik]

We can all be happier.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

It seems to be that the universe is evolving towards this higher state of complexity or divinity. This could be something inherent, programmed into how our universe evolves. And this consciousness field behind the things that exists wants to become more embodied.

[Mayim Bialik]

There's scientific merit to saying we don't just get to dismiss thousands of years of wisdom, of consciousness expansion and of mystical experiences.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

If you're open to working with your consciousness, this is a transformational thing. Your feeling of identity is probably one of the root causes of a lot of problems, because it's the you versus me. These transcendental experiences allow you to feel what it means to dissolve and become one with all that is physical. Reality is fine, and we know how it works. But we live in a transcendental multiverse, which is huge and has many planes and beyond the physical. It's structured, it has intelligence, it has purpose. I think we all should wake up in the morning and just look out of the window and just go like, this is insane. It is this universe we're inhabiting. The complexity, the intelligence. This is amazing. Wouldn't it make more sense that this is by design?

[Mayim Bialik]

If this is the answer to us all feeling love and connection, how many of us can afford to not tap into this? Hi. All right, remember, the machine knows if you're lying. First statement. Carvana will give you a real offer on your car.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

All online. False. True.

[Mayim Bialik]

Actually, sell your car in minutes.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

False.

[Mayim Bialik]

That's gotta be true again. Carvana will pick up your car from your door, or you can drop it.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

Off at one of their car vending machines.

[Mayim Bialik]

Sounds too good to be true. So true. Finally caught on. Nice job.

[Jonathan Cohen]

ISD isn't just their policy, it's their entire model.

[Mayim Bialik]

Sell your car today too, Carvana.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Pickup fees may apply.

[Mayim Bialik]

When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Learn [e-mail] Mayim Bialik and I'm Jonathan Cohen and welcome to our Breakdown. Today we're going to be taking a very special and complex dive into our understanding of consciousness. So many of us think like I don't know, I'm conscious, I'm here, I'm alive. What do you want me to do about it? We're going to be speaking today to a complexity scientist, James Glatfelder. And one of the things that he talks about is that spirituality and being open to understanding consciousness is an invitation to an open minded, non dogmatic exploration of existence which is only accessible through introspection and cultivating self awareness. He's going to talk about the interconnectedness of all phenomenon. He's going to talk about idealism and what is possible with when we literally learn the ways to open our mind to understanding consciousness as something much bigger than simply I'm here.

[Jonathan Cohen]

We're also gonna talk about what it means to access other realms of information. Can you tap into intuition, synchronicity and use that to help you guide your life in really practical ways.

[Mayim Bialik]

And one of my favorite things that we're gonna Talk about with Dr. Glatfelder is the possibility of a scientific explanation of a field of consciousness which many know as the Akashic records. In esoteric circles. He's going to explain the best quantum relativity, description of a field of consciousness that I have ever heard. And we're going to talk about DMT and people experiencing interactions with aliens. Could this be an extension of our consciousness field awareness?

[Jonathan Cohen]

If you haven't already checked us out on Substack we release exclusive content not available anywhere else but Bialik Breakdown on Substack Join the breaker community and without.

[Mayim Bialik]

Further ado welcome Dr. James Glatfelder to the breakdown all the way from Switzerland. Break it down. We are very eager to talk to you about a variety of things. Your book is beautiful and enormous. I didn't know that people write 800 page books anymore but it's amazing.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

It's a little hobby. It's a bit yeah, compulsive but yeah, happens when I fall down the rabbit hole.

[Mayim Bialik]

Before we kind of dive in with a variety of questions from a variety of the disciplines that we're interested in hearing your take on, what would you say your mission is? To communicate as a scientist.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

Exactly. That just be sort of a conduit between what's going on behind the scenes in sort of science and philosophy and what the general audience knows. So, like this, this sort of renaissance of idealism, that consciousness could play a far bigger and more fundamental role than we from an academic perspective would have thought. Yeah, things like that people probably aren't really aware of. And so I kind of see my role to sort of try and communicate these ongoing paradigm shifts or also this idea that in physics, if you use the concept of information, that's like a really good thing that's happening and has been happening in the last 15 years. And I think you could call it a paradigm shift, but I think that most people wouldn't be aware of this and still think of like the physical world made up of stuff and Lego blocks, which it doesn't seem to be. So that's kind of. Yeah. Where I see myself as a sort of a. A communicator and trying to sort of wrap this into narratives and try and make it more accessible. Because yeah, some of this stuff can be pretty dry and dense and boring if you're not into it. So the challenge there.

[Mayim Bialik]

Well, we'll get into the Lego blocks version of reality in a second, but can you just talk a little bit about sort of your path? Because you. I love this quote of yours that, you know, you studied physics so that things would make more sense and by studying physics you found that they made.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

Less sense having finished studying physics and like, yeah, sort of been a bit disappointing that, that you have equations. As you say, this gives you access and you can understand it. You can, you can solve the equations and have great technology, but you still don't know what it is. And it turns out that's like not the purview of science. Science doesn't tell you what stuff is, it tells you how it works, which is great. But the what stuff is. Yeah. Is more of a philosophical question which kind of got bit ignored in physics. And for me it was kind of a pragmatic thing. So these existential things then came up and yeah, this is really important if you're going to be a scientist and a good physicist. And for some reason the pioneers of quantum mechanics were big into the metaphysical implications of their work. And the next generation kind of got bored or frustrated and said, shut up and calculate and just don't bother with what this means. And this has seemed to be backfiring now, where the next generations of scientists kind of realize, hey, we just have to deal with this stuff. We just. We just. Yeah, we need to talk about these philosophical implications of the stuff that we're doing.

[Mayim Bialik]

When I learned physics, it never occurred to me to think about really anything philosophical unless it was on my own time. When I studied and even when I studied the brain and nervous system, to me, there was a divinity in understanding the things that we can understand. Right. And, you know, studying neuroscience, I specifically chose because I wanted to study the science of how I speak. And you hear, and it has meaning, and we love each other, and then there's war. But also we exist. Right? So there's a real interest, I think, that. That many of us have in what is now classified as kind of esoterica. Right. But can you talk a little bit about kind of the origins of our understanding of reality, meaning when we could first say there are particles? If you look close enough, right. We're not just people with souls given from God.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

We're.

[Mayim Bialik]

We are particles. We are things. And if you look close enough, you can see that we're all made of molecular beauty. But where did kind of traditional physics then hit this roadblock that leads to a larger understanding of the applications of that as the reality that we actually can grasp? Physics and its equations should explain everything, right? Reality is made of particles, and you're talking about that reality is actually constructed from information. And the original founders, right, of this kind of thinking were very, very tuned into what it means for a larger plane of consciousness, what an electron field means. And it's true, those things kind of got cut off. And we just sort of have been operating from, like, reality is made of particles, and we're just particles. So talk a little bit about that conflict and how it leads to these larger conversations.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

The quantum pioneers just realized that the fundamental level of reality is just a mess from our rational perspective because it's incoherent, it's illogical, it just makes no sense. There's so many quantum experiments which just don't work. And this I would have imagined, would have started to, like, challenge this. This ingrained belief that, look, at the end of the day, we can understand reality, and fundamentally, it's made of, like, tangible stuff, which, no, it isn't. And these experiments in quantum mechanics haven't gotten any better. And now there's even things like contextuality where these quantum information people are saying it somehow makes no sense to say that elementary particles have certain properties before you measure them. It's like the measurement, you put it on them and like this makes no sense at all. So that's like 100 years ago. And we didn't really recalibrate because of, in my view, this problem that a lot of physicists just suck at philosophy, or they think philosophy is irrelevant and just a waste of time. So there weren't really very mature conversations on this, on the ontology, meaning, like the basic layer of reality, what it is. And it was always assumed. No, it has to be commonsensical and rational because, yeah, for 400, well, for 300 years, this worked really well, so why should it stop now? But somehow it did stop. And yeah, the mess got even worse because now with the James Webb telescope, we've figured out that there's so many crises in cosmology that this standard cosmological framework is actually not correct. A lot of it got appended. And we just realized that there's so many fundamental enigmas, problems, puzzles in physics that now is the time has come where people are like, hey, maybe, maybe we went down a wrong road at one point. We need to reevaluate where we're going. And this revaluation has to happen at a metaphysical level because it's not the equations, it's not the physics that works. We understand it, we can compute it. That's not the issue. The issue is like, what is going on? What does it mean? And here is where it seems to be sort of the pendulum swinging back, where scientists are asking themselves, what the hell am I doing? What does this mean? What is the existential implication of this stuff that I'm working on? And that seems to be something that we're seeing now that people are opening up to, recalibrating their metaphysical assumptions, which then also affects consciousness, because we still don't have a definition of what consciousness is. And the hard problem of consciousness is still a thing. How does non conscious stuff produce this inner perspective? We don't know. Big problem. And maybe if we recontextualize as an example by claiming that consciousness is fundamental, things change and you get a different perspective. And okay, you get different problems, but you get some solutions to the problems which were standing for a while. So it's exciting.

[Jonathan Cohen]

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[Mayim Bialik]

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[Jonathan Cohen]

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[Mayim Bialik]

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[Jonathan Cohen]

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[Mayim Bialik]

Plus free shipping that's symbiotica.com break for twenty percent off plus free shipping I am so excited for this spa day. Candles lit, music on, hot tub warm and ready. And then my chronic hives come back again in the middle of my spa day. What a wet blanket. Looks like another spell of itchy red skin. If you have chronic spontaneous urticaria or csu, there is a different treatment option. Hives during my next spa day. Not if I can help it. Learn [e-mail] what does it mean for, you know, for people who don't have experience, let's say in physics or in metaphysics, what does it mean to say that consciousness is fundamental?

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

So that's a bit of a problem because we always expect that we should understand stuff rationally. So the only way that you can gain knowledge is through your sober, waking, rational mind. Of course, that's like a big gateway to knowledge and information and knowing. But there's things which are not rationally understandable, like the quantum world. And the problem is that this idea of idealism seems to be something which is hard to grasp rationally. I mean, they're very clever idealist philosophers, contemporary ones who try really hard to put into words what this means. That behind the things that exist, there's this immaterial field of consciousness which is universal and has whatever attributes and somehow these centers of awareness pop out of it and this structured universe with laws. But again, this is very technical and very hard to read.

[Mayim Bialik]

But isn't that true meaning? I wake up and I open my eyes and I see the things I see and I have the thoughts that I have. And I know that I'm going to podcast with you. So I have to put my makeup on and I do my hair and. And a friend of mine's moving out of town, so I talked to her on the phone. And I come over here and I lift your book to do exercises for my tennis elbow. And we sit down and there are some satellites, you know, that, like, I don't know. I really don't even know how I'm talking to you right now. But I trust that there is a matrix, right, that is allowing information to reach you where you are. We're having a conversation. I am aware of sensation in my body. I'm aware of smells in the room. I can feel that I. I'm experiencing reality. So what part of that is not true? Meaning, if I want to, I can tap into God, right? Like, okay, when I wake up, like, thank you, God, for returning my soul to me. I had a rough time at night, but we're here, you know, I can tap into that. And if I had certain skills, I could say, what's Jonathan feeling? Even though he's not in the room? Right? I can close my eyes. I can do a meditation. What part of that. Like, if I'm a brain in a vat, are you also a brain in a vat? And you're having your own experience of how we got here? We have a shared collective consciousness. Like, what do I need to understand about it so that I don't ask to be put in a mental hospital? Because I can't believe we're spinning on a globe.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

Actually, I mean, that's just on a tangent. I mean, I think we all should wake up in the morning and just look out to the window and just go like, this is insane. This. It is this universe we're inhabiting. The complexity, the intelligence. This is amazing. And, yeah, we wake up and it's like, yeah, my job. Too late to work. Whatever. My point is that it's really hard to understand idealism rationally. You can try, but you have to put in a lot of effort. And it's kind of annoying because you have to read philosophical texts which are written in an annoying way, not accessible to lay people. But then it turns out that there is this experiential knowledge where you can have experiences of things which you cannot really grasp or contextualize with the things you've experienced or known.

[Mayim Bialik]

Like what? Can you give us an example?

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

Metaphysics, by definition, is. You can't prove it or disprove it. You can just say, oh, it's all consciousness, or nothing is consciousness or whatever. And no one can prove it, but this is where I believe idealism has more weight to it. Because if you look at non Western societies for many millennia or even longer, they seem to have been making experiences of what this means to live in a universe which is based in consciousness. So we have the shamans who 30 to 50,000 years ago started to pop up around the globe with this kind of universal way of organizing their societies, where it was very, I mean, where it was very clear that reality has two aspects, the physical and the non physical. So the spirit world. And for the shaman, the job is to modulate their consciousness through trance or entheogens, so psychedelic substances to enter these otherworldly realms. And then we have the mystics who talk about these spontaneous epiphanies where they experience for them, of course it's in the context of some God, but still it's about this intelligence which is behind the things which you can commune with. And then we have the meditators who also claim that if you just work with your consciousness long enough, you can have these experiences of like non duality, advaita in the vedas, where suddenly you cease to be this individual and your personality fragments and you start to sort of unify with all there is. And then of course now with the renaissance of psychedelics, we have the psychonauts who very reliably, depending on what substance, tell you about experiences which just transcend anything you can ever imagine. But these things can be understood at an experiential level. And again for, yeah, for psychonauts this actually there's studies showing that people who take psychedelics, they're open to believing that idealism is the correct metaphysics, it correlates with their well being, it makes them happier. And then you have other philosophers of psychedelics who say, yeah, that's bad because yeah, these people take psychedelics and maybe in a legitimate context for mental health, but then they have all these silly metaphysical ideas like idealism, they should stop doing that. And again, it just shows you that, I mean this idea that the universe is physical or material, this is a metaphysical assumption which kind of got encoded as a scientific fact 400 years ago. And only now we're kind of realizing that this is not something science is dictated us. So you can totally be idealist and not be anti science whatsoever.

[Mayim Bialik]

This is a very helpful framework I think then for us to talk about this sort of paradigm shift, right, that we're sort of in the middle of. And I think this is something people can kind of really sink their teeth into. Meaning, there are things that we can explain. There are things that we know to be true with our five senses, and those are important and valuable things. But when we look to traditions that have historically viewed the world from a not purely materialistic perspective, what we see is what a lot of us dismiss as primitive and historically. I'm not saying us totally. Yeah, we dismiss it as, you know, well, those aren't the societies that built skyscrapers, you know, and, like, those aren't the societies that created the stock market and got me my Tesla, right? Like, that's sort of the notion and the paradigm shift, you know, this sort of notion of an awakening. You know, many people in the psychedelic community or in the, you know, Age of Aquarius community, they've been dismissed for so long. And actually, one of the reasons that Jonathan and I started this podcast was because we believed that there is scientific merit to having these conversations. And we believe there's scientific merit to saying we don't just get to dismiss thousands of years of wisdom, of consciousness expansion and of mystical experiences, and say, that's for everyone else. But for those of us who want to, like, drive a nice car, have a vacation home, you know, raise the 2.5 kids, we're going to leave all that aside. We'll just drink a lot of wine and take whatever big pharma tells us to take so that we can continue to operate in the madness that we are all born into. I want to also, like, give you the opportunity to sort of help us understand when quantum mechanics was first discussed, when Einstein was having these conversations with. With Planck, with Bohr, you know, there was a whole community of dudes. And what we took from that era of physics was we can make a bomb that can decimate people, right? And that's what people think about, right? That's the Oppenheimer conversation. Like, we can split litten atom. Like, what is that? Right? But there was an entire esoteric set of conversations going on where the inexplicable things that even quantum mechanics couldn't describe were in many cases discussed as an opening to what if. What if there's a plane, an electron field, a consciousness field. All these terms are virtually indistinguishable. And people who have no scientific background have described it, they've lived it, they've experienced it, and they've tried to transmit it to us. And then physics comes along and says, we also can explain this. And the things we can't explain probably exist in this beautiful metaphysical stew. And what if God exists? Right? Where does that land us today in terms of trying to frame what we want our reality to look like. Does it look like everybody needs to quit their jobs and go do mushrooms in the desert? What are we talking about?

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

I mean, I think that the dangers of this certainty, if you have this metaphysical certainty, is that you say this is not possible and this cannot happen. Things like synchronicity, which Carl Gustav Jung came up with and he had discussions with Wolfgang Pauli, the physicist, and they tried to figure out together what could this look like. If there's this additional causal layer, a above reality which we cannot really understand from our perspective, but it has order and meaning in it. This is such a thing in human experience that still today, this is a concept, people still relate to that. Now of course you can say, yeah, that's because people are stupid and your mind just does pattern recognition, whatever, blah, blah, blah. But again, that's the thing, like in your metaphysical framing, if you don't know that that's a belief and a choice, then you're not so careful with saying what's possible or not. A recent book I bought which appeared in the Routledge academic publishing house and it's called Dark Cognition and it's two years old and it's what we know about these psy. These supernatural effects and that they probably are true. And this is appearing in a mainstream academic publishing house which I find amazing because not too long ago this was all just like, this is not possible. Because of course if you're framed in this physicalist worldview and you see such a book, then you have two reactions. I mean, one reaction is this isn't true. So what's happening? Either the people are lying, they're frauds, or they're just incompetent, that that's it, that that's the explanation. So you don't have to bother or engage with the tons of data.

[Mayim Bialik]

And that's actually a very non scientific approach.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

It's just bias. It's just your personal bias.

[Mayim Bialik]

Well, right, and with all due respect to my teenagers who are, you know, 17 and 20, that's the way a cynical, intelligent 17 or 20 year old would approach it. Like that doesn't make sense. That's bullshit. You're all on drugs.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

I can't understand it. So it's not true.

[Mayim Bialik]

Right. And that's the least scientific way to approach things. So, so to take the notion of what if psi phenomenon are true, what if synchronicity is not just what hippies and people who can't hold down a job like to base Their life on what if synchronicity is actually a confluence, right, of patterning? It's an acknowledge, it's an acknowledgment and a recognition that the way that molecules line up, the way that your brain understands patterns and is actually indicative of a larger plane or field that we may not yet understand or be able to explain. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

Exactly. Recently I was listening to a podcast with Mike Levin, the biologist who is doing all these crazy experiments with sort of electrical fields of like organisms. And he claims that actually there's cognition on every level. You have cognition in tissue, in cells. It's not just the brain, the entire.

[Mayim Bialik]

Fascia system, which we thought was just blobs. It's not. It's actually an interactive system that when you touch something on your shoulder, it, it does ripple through your body. And we used to think fascia was just a bunch of blobs in your body. Turns out it's not. And haha, it's like a consciousness of.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

Your system, this idea of this cosmic intelligence consciousness that's behind the physical, which is propping up the physical. If that's true, what would it look like? What could the effects be? And he was thinking maybe synchronicity, which means that there's a higher ordering principle we haven't discovered, but it's actually mapping onto our everyday lives. And that's another thing which I find if you're stuck in this sort of physicalist, reductionistic worldview, I find it like, I call it cosmic nihilism because it's really sad. It tells you, look, you don't matter, everything is random, there's no purpose and you die. And that was it. And just grow up and deal with it. And sorry, we can't help you if you don't like that. And anything else is just wishful thinking and you being immature. And I find the converse with idealism is that you basically are asked to work with your own consciousness. I mean, I call the shamans, mystics, meditators and psychonauts the masters of consciousness, because they just were working with their consciousness, which is not something that we in the west are very good at because our sort of expertise was hey, look out into the world and try and figure out what's happening out there and not inside side. So we're kind of behind there on the learning curve. And I find this sort of this if you're open to working with your consciousness and seeing what's happening in there, so you don't have to take psychedelics. You can meditate, you can sit in a forest, you can do drumming or singing or holotropic breathwork, whatever, but just that you start to sort of see what can emerge in your own consciousness. And this is kind of a transformational thing because it seems, I mean, for me, the goal there is that you just try and be a happier person.

[Mayim Bialik]

You know, you have this sort of description of the problem plaguing us. Right. I like to quote people directly to them when your words are so good. Our current era is defined by deeply troubling crises. You list the environment, economic inequality, the deterioration of social cohesion, the rise of entrenched ideologies, the rejection of a shared reality in a post truth world that weaponizes ignorance and incites outrage. I mean, add to that the recent research that just came out that young people are less, less conscientious, more neurotic, less able to sort of function with focus, with intention, with even a feeling of purpose. So we're potentially descending into a sort of dystopian future. And for those of us who've ever heard about science fiction, yeah, there's many aspects of what's happening that feels very, very scary. And as someone who watches a lot of true crime documentaries, we can start to feel like it's everywhere. Whatever this dystopia is, it's, it's kind of, you know, we're, we're numbing ourselves with social media, we're numbing ourselves with, with purchasing, we're numbing ourselves with, you know, the wine that they keep selling to middle aged ladies. We're doing our best here. You know, so if, if these are the problems, and one of the things, you know, Jonathan and I have talked about really since this podcast started, you know, the, the notion of, of psychedelic drugs in particular, which can be used therapeutically and even which are used recreationally. You know, Timothy Leary used to talk about this, Rick Doblin talks about it. If you give enough people access to a higher level of consciousness, which inevitably leads to feeling loved, feeling part of something bigger, not being able to imagine killing other people, even if you've been told that they are your enemy, that expanded consciousness does not allow governments to put people in uniforms and send them across the world to kill strangers. So the notion of a government wanting to control our access to our own consciousness makes a lot of sense. In that sense, where do you see the sort of fight for our own access to consciousness as a way to sort of fight against the dystopia that we seem to all be falling into.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

Maybe it's not really our fault in the sense that it seems, it feels so real to sense or to have the feeling that you're an individual and kind of disconnected from everyone else. So kind of the first thing which you should try and cultivate is sort of reimagine or just remember the connection of like at least life as a matrix. But then if idealism is true, basically, yeah, this is all connected in the same substance and this is a reality. So kind of the, your feeling of identity, which is probably one of the root causes of a lot of problems because it's the you versus me. Because if, if my sort of light cone of compassion, another word borrowed from Michael Levin is really small, then yeah, I'm not going to care about anything. But if it's big, I'm going to include animals and plants and the ecosystem, stuff like that. And that's probably the first illusion that you have to sort of work against where your sober waking mind is telling you, hey, we are all disconnected and it's only me and I have to fight for survival. These transcendental experiences, if they're mediated through psychedelics or trans sunny, allow you to feel what it means to just dissolve and become one with all that is. And this is where this profound transformative potential is there. And I mean, this is like a big sort of red flag for most rational thinking people. If you say, look, the physical reality is fine and we know how it works, most of it. But that's not all. We live in a multiverse, in a transcendental multiverse, which is huge and has many planes and this physical one is just a tiny slice sliver. And we somehow are. Yeah, during our waking state. That's where we exist and live. But this doesn't mean that you cannot travel and explore this multiverse. Yeah, if you never had access to experiencing this, you'll just say, come on, that's bullshit. You just like hippie talk. But then there's people like Christopher bache, who for 20 years took 73 high dose LSD sessions. And the things he describes, I mean, for me that's a 101 of metaphysics. I mean the stuff he describes in the book is just insane. And this is something which you can yourself go and experience if you're up to taking 500 micrograms LSD, which most people shouldn't. But just to say this is like a metaphysical, this is empirical metaphysics kind of. It's something which is reproducible theoretically, which brings it to a new level.

[Mayim Bialik]

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[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

Exactly. They're dangerous. They have their use, but they're, yeah, be careful.

[Mayim Bialik]

But I sort of feel like there's people that I know who are like, I don't want to get in touch with anything inside. I don't want to think about feelings. I don't want to feel anything. Leave me alone. I'm fine. You're crazy. Those people, I'm happy for them to exist. And I'd like to think that they're part of the bell curve, but I don't think they're all of the bell curve. But the question I want to kind of pose to you, do we need to function in a society where the only way to achieve this kind of awakening, enlightening and paradigm shift is for everyone to have access to that? Or can enough people either do drugs, meditate, you know, do holotropic breathwork so that they can then somehow impart that goodness and awakening to the rest of humanity? Or do we all need to somehow be getting in touch with it? Like, is it about more people need to be doing drugs so that they can have access to this, or learning to meditate deeply? Like, if this is the answer to us all feeling love and connection, how many of us can afford to not tap into this?

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

It just takes a small fraction of the population to like show change and have this become meaningful for people to see. Because often it's just you can't even imagine what's happening. And just seeing people embody this or show these behaviors can already help. And I mean, there's tools, there's like a lot more benign stuff you can do without having to do a full on disembodied psychedelic trip. I mean, I find just the idea that realizing the thing, you're always in this ego state where you worry and you're anxious and you're annoyed and you think about tomorrow or about yesterday. And I mean, this is like the 101 meditation where you just try and take a step back and just watch that. And even if you can't reach that state, just knowing that this is something that's possible, I find already allows you a bit of a shift in recontextualization. And that's sort of a first small step. And then depending what feels right, and probably psychedelics are the very sort of last resort for people. Because I love the quote of, I think it was Huxley, when he was asked in an interview, it's on YouTube, somewhere in black and white, they asked him, well, who should take these substances? And Huxley's like, well, yes, professors. And then he kind of was thinking, then he said, well, actually anyone who's certain about reality, that would do them very good. And I think that's sort of the, that's probably also the health benefit of psychedelics that you're being trapped in your mind with zero flexibility. You're just in there, you can't. Yeah, you just can't change anything. And somehow this reboot with psychedelics lets you become more flexible and just suddenly discover different perspectives and recalibrate. And that's probably also something which is beneficial for your metaphysical assumptions. Have you followed up on the sort of the brain imaging studies of people under psychedelics that they somehow don't light up like a Christmas tree and that it's more reduced and that's kind of weird, but then you can explain it away with entropy and whatever, blah, blah, blah.

[Mayim Bialik]

Yeah, we, we actually, we've talked about this Dr. Bruce Grayson, who studies near death experiences and all these sort of phenomenon, and the notion being that what if our constant state is one where the default mode network is not acting and overacting, right? So when we talk about even in internal family systems work, which a lot of people are coupling with psychedelic therapy, the notion of when we can quiet that network, when we can quiet all of those voices, right, the stories that we tell ourselves, the messages we got from our traumatized childhoods, right? When all of those things kind of fall away, right? The filtration system gets to relax and it's no longer filtering for all of that trauma and all of that pain. And what is left is some sort of state of, I don't want to say ecstasy, but a knowledge that we are all connected, that there is some force and you can call it whatever you want, that cares for you, loves you and makes you feel a way that you can make other people feel and that even hurt people, hurt people. So that all of your pain is now understood through a completely different lens. And we've spoken to people who have had near death experiences and in their life review, they have witnessed the deepest pain. And it's not just about forgiveness, because that's a human term that we use on the material level, but there is a notion of release of all of those things that our brain works so hard to hold on to, right? So once that is lifted with these drugs, you get some sort of, you know, it's like it's a different steady state, right?

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

One of the sort of mechanisms of idealism would say that your brain tunes into this consciousness field. So it's, it's, it's, it's not creating it, it's transmitting it. So if the transmitter starts to break, then you kind of start to reconnect. And it was also Aldous Huxley who, building on the philosophy of Henry Bergson, had this idea of the reducing valve where the big thing our consciousness does is just reduce the influx of craziness of reality and put it into this, he called it measly trickle. So we can survive and run away from the saber tooth tiger and function and psychedelics kind of break this valve and then you get the full on influx of transcendence which is there and you can experience, but it's bad for survival. But that would also kind of explain that why people who are taking LSD having the most intense phenomenal experiences which do not correlate with your brain going into metabolic overdrive, that seems to kind of point in the same direction.

[Mayim Bialik]

So what's your personal psychedelic experience? You have a pretty startling and interesting story that you've told.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

Ah, well, just kind of being a stupid teenager usually. Yeah, Many, many stories start. Yeah. My friends started experimenting with lsd and I was like, wow, this is something I need to try as well. And I actually had just read Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception and I was blown away. Like, this is amazing. I want to. Yeah. Open the doors and just experience this reality. And friend gave me lsd, a little blotter, and he told me, this is super potent. And I was like, oh, wow. And then with another friend, I went to the forest. Friend was a sitter. I took half of the. The blotter. And after whatever, 50 minutes, nothing happened. And then being a stupid teenager or both of us, we were like, hey, the only thing you can do is take the other half.

[Mayim Bialik]

No.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

Yeah. As one learns. And then the first, first half kicked in, the second half kicked in later. I don't have much recollection of what was happening because it was just like too much. I mean, this is also something Christopher Page was saying that the only reason he could go so deep into this transcendence is the practice because, like, places where he just couldn't be coherent the next time or the next couple of times he could and go deeper. And so for me, it was like, I just. Yeah, don't remember much. The next day I was pretty bummed and thought that was. That was like, not at all what I expected. I mean, it wasn't like negative or horror trip or anything. It just was like too overwhelming. And then a month later, my kind of psyche reacted with. With random panic attacks for two years. So drugs are. Yeah. Dangerous.

[Mayim Bialik]

What are other ways that you have found to access this field of kind of expanded consciousness?

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

Smoking pot, which also we're starting to make progress where. Yeah, I mean, like now in Switzerland, there's a couple of cantons who are doing a three year study with universities and figuring out what happens if it becomes legal. Who's taking this? What are their problems? How do you distribute it? Who can produce it?

[Mayim Bialik]

You know, with all due respect to marijuana and all of the wonderful things that people get from it, like not. I don't know, Valerie, you could vouch for this. Not everyone is looking for consciousness expansion when they go to the millions of pot stores. Like, a lot of it is its own experience and many people use it medically and I absolutely believe in that. But that's very interesting because there are people who do experience it as consciousness Expanding and use it for creative capabilities. I don't think there's anything wrong with legalizing it, but I do also have, you know, concerns about sort of that framework because it can be abused, you know, because it, what I say is it's addictive to feel good.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

I mean that's, that's why you need to, you need to really understand like how you're going to do it. And you can't just roll it out like in Thailand and think oh that's going to be fine. And, and then you realize, ah, so that's why like Switzerland, like yeah, let's take three years and figure out how to do this correctly if we're going to do it.

[Mayim Bialik]

Well, you've always been known for being very measured over there.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

But just the one thing I find is super therapeutic with THC is just like this sense of humor which, which I find is very hard to uphold in today's world. And there's not so much to laugh about. Like if you're, if you're just gonna be real, it's just like, come on. But just having sort of this. Yeah. The ability to, to just not take things as seriously as, as you would if you're just caught in this sober ego state and just kind of feel sort of, I mean not victimized but just feel like sort of. It's just so annoying. So many things and just not having that and just being able to sort of. Yeah. Have a sense of humor and just not take stuff as seriously and laugh about it.

[Mayim Bialik]

And obviously this is why people get addicted. When people are like pot's not addictive, I say no, but feeling good is.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

But I think they figured out that I think 10 or 15% of pot users do develop problems and addiction like issues. So. And again it correlates with how young you started the, the THC percentage. So it's again it's like multi dimensional and you need to figure this out. And the chart that I think David Nutt in the UK did for classified bunch of drugs for self harm and harm to others and up there with like super harm to user and harm to society is crack cocaine and alcohol and then tobacco and all the other stuff is like way down there. So yeah, it's, we should also have a discussion about like why those and others not.

[Mayim Bialik]

And like I think the way Katt Williams describes it, like the only problems with pot is that you're either happy, horny or sleepy. Those are the problem.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

Or hungry.

[Mayim Bialik]

Or hungry. That's right.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Let's revisit the brain Injury and savant conversation for a minute because it's fascinating to think that if you damage the hardware, the software works better. Let's talk about what's actually happening and the implications for what that means about our reality.

[Mayim Bialik]

Well, I have a neuroscience answer, but we'll let James go.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

No, no, please, let, let, let, let's do the serious answer first. I do the hand waving.

[Mayim Bialik]

No, I, I don't know if, I don't know if it's the serious answer. But you know what? Our understanding of sort of how the brain works, there's an infinite number of feedback loops and they're positive and they're negative, and there's all sorts of channeling and amazing intricate connections between all of these, you know, systems and networks that, that run throughout the brain and through the spinal cord as well. You know, for, for me, when we have a tumor, when we have damage, when we have, you know, damage to the hardware, as it were, in some cases there's a release of inhibition and when you have a release of inhibition, you'll get, you know, sort of a potentiation of activity. You'll get. In many cases, it could be a potentiation of resources, of, in some cases, blood flow of information. And if many of the systems that we're inhibiting are relieved, you will get, you know, a disproportionate amount of ability in some cases. I mean, it depends on so many things.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Okay, so here's why this answer is interesting, but requires James to step in and round out the picture. Because if someone has a increase of potentiation, that doesn't mean that they should be able to play piano when they were never able to play piano before. There are people who have like these profound new skills that they never had before. Okay, so I have my explanation, but I'm going to pass it to James for hand waving and scientific explanation of what he understands as our connection to information that could be around us versus stored in the brain.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

Exactly. Because that would be my question. Like, do we all have, are we all whatever musical prodigies, but our brain is, our valve is reducing that. And then if you break it, we all start to play piano virtuously.

[Mayim Bialik]

Not all of us, but yeah, maybe some of us. Sorry guys. That's how the brain works.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

But that would be weird. I mean, like, why would evolution make us good piano players and have that stored in there and you can break it open if you hit your head in a specific angle? I mean, it is possible, but I don't know. But yeah, the other thing is that and again, this is sort of an old, an ancient idea, this Akashic field, or also a concept in shamanism that there is this, this non physical storage of information which you can go and access. And you could say that's where intuition comes from because that's the place you get these spontaneous ideas of creativity. But maybe it's more serious. Like Erwin Laszlo wrote hundreds of papers and books, very serious guy. And he wrote a book called Akashic Field where he claims maybe the quantum vacuum is this storage of information. And why not? And again, it's, it's sort of a blending of highly esoteric terms with quantum physics. But he's not like the. Yeah, I mean he's a serious sober scientist.

[Jonathan Cohen]

But explain that to us for a second, this idea of the Akashic fields in this physics terminology and understanding. Because what I like about these conversations that we're having is that the mystics had their own language for understanding things and it was dismissed. And now science is trying to say, wait a second, there is some sort of language equivalent that we're trying to have.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

I mean, it's probably a bit of an overstatement saying that science is there yet. So it's a couple of random people, some of them are very eminent. So yeah, that gives them more weight. But if there's a layer of reality beyond the physical which we can access, which has certain properties, for instance, it's structured, it has intelligence, it has purpose, and we can tap into that. Then maybe depending on how our brain tunes as a radio, we get different frequencies and apparently if you hit your radio, it plays nice music.

[Mayim Bialik]

The notion that you're talking about would be then that if we're going to admit that there's something beyond this reality that we're all functioning in, and it's something that you can tap into in any transcendental way that you would like to that in that place where physics knows that there are particles and the particles have different rotations, there's different chimeras, like a lot of interesting things happen those exist in a field. If you zoom in as much as you can on the human experience. If you zoom in, it's just particles, it's just electrons, it's just positive and negative, it's binary, it's the Matrix, right? It's just zeros and ones, it's just information. So if that information exists in that way, the Akashic records was describing that in a very specific way a long time ago. It's been referenced in one way or another. For Jonathan, I Don't know, hundreds, thousands of years maybe. So what the Akashic records would be trying to describe is that exact same plane that information exists as a series of zeros and ones. And certain people with certain skills that I do not possess can feel into that, can tap into that, can drop into that so that they are able to receive information that is out there in a way that we cannot access in our physical material plane. Is this similar to what remote viewing would be? Or people who are having near death experiences and are leaving their body and witnessing conversations that are happening down the hallway from where they are laying, supposedly unconscious?

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

Probably. And this would again be an, an example of, of experiential knowledge of these. Whoever came up with that idea. And then I don't know how many thousands of years later you have Carl von Weizacker and John Wheeler who are like, hey, maybe we should think of information being the most fundamental thing in the universe and we should stop talking about particles, because that's silly.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Talk a little bit more about this is where intuition comes from.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

I mean this just seems to sort of fit in nicely that probably, I mean if this is a thing and it's there and you can tap into it would be kind of unfair if like only certain people could. So I mean it kind of would make sense if most of us have the propensity, but just like a little bit so we can sort of tune in and get glimpses of it. But yeah, if you haven't like have full on mastery and are able to sort of go there and download and come back, then yeah, you just sort of scrape the surface. I mean that's another thing which I find is very bad in sort of the contemporary sort of materialist view of the world, that all this complexity is just random. It just happened, it's just brute fact, just whatever, move on. There's nothing to see here where it's like wait, wait a minute. I mean this seems very specific. I mean the intelligence in nature is crazy. I mean it's just mind blowing from in every direction in every. I mean this is just insane. The intelligence in life. And then you have the structures and the whole universe and everything. Wouldn't it make more sense that this is kind of by design? And the problem when you say that is that the scientists then have the, the reaction to say you just want to bring in your God. Which is a good reaction because most people try and do that. But that doesn't mean that there isn't this structuring force, this will to complexity shaping our Universe. And this could be very well, a physical force that we haven't discovered yet. This doesn't have to be some God like putting in magic sprinkles or whatever. This could be something inherent, programmed into how our universe evolves. And we haven't detected it yet because we haven't looked. Because for most scientific people, it's like, that's just. That's just what happened. The Big Bang, structure, whatever, you're here, move on.

[Mayim Bialik]

And also, religion is just our best human attempt to explain the wonders of the world that we have been placed into with the consciousness that we have. Religion just did the best that it could while also organizing and weaponizing people against each other and combining tribal conflicts and things like that. That's just the best that we could do to put a word and a name and a building around whatever this is.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

Yeah, and I mean, you had the mystical traditions also in the Abrahamic religions, which were very much, hey, you experience the thing, you experience God. But then it's hard to. Yeah. If you want to institutionalize and dominate and be a power structure, then you have to have this static version of religion, which. Any knowledge system which is static and dogmatic is a bad explanation. I mean, like, without any judgment, that's just bad. It has to. Anything which does not evolve in terms of knowledge is a bad explanation for what's going on in reality.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Talk a little bit more about this idea that there's a higher order principle that is being mapped onto our life. Because if things are not random, but we can't truly understand the complexity of the design that we are a part of, we know that we are connected to nature, but nature's intelligence is so vast that we can't truly understand it. Which is why the scientists put some parameters up and say, well, there is no. It's all random because it's too complicated to truly understand. But if we take the perspective that there is an intelligence and we are part of that, what does it mean for both reality and our specific lives to have this principle mapped on to our life?

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

Yeah, that everything has meaning. That this isn't just some random, cold universe that hasn't any purpose and it just happened, but that there's actually something to be done here, to be experienced. Two ways of looking at this. One is sort of the ancient Indian wisdom tradition in the. I think, the Puranas, where they describe this concept, this divine play. Leela. So in the beginning, there was the self, which is cosmic consciousness, Brahman, which is everything. And that's just a state of pure bliss and nothing happening because it's very boring, because there's no duality, no dynamics. So the self hides itself from itself, so it can start to discover itself through us, through these individualizations. And that's what's happening in the cosmos now. So it's a play, that's why it's not to be taken seriously. And yeah, you're an actor and sometimes you laugh, sometimes you cry, but that's part of the play. And I really like that idea. But then coming up to sort of more contemporary metaphysical ideas. Reading Christopher Bache's LSD in the Mind of the Universe, where he just was very adamant about explaining how there seemed to be this incredibly loving intelligence behind the things. And it very deliberate and very orchestrated. And that's why after 20 years he had to stop doing these sessions because he couldn't bear communing with this loving intelligence and detaching again. It broke his heart. And this is something he experienced. And again, this is something which probably enlightenment or I'm sure many other people have experienced this as well. And then the question is, yeah, but why does my everyday reality suck so much? And then it's probably about. Yeah, it's about experiences. And if you want to have something happen, you need duality, you need left and right, you need good and bad, you need light and dark, otherwise nothing's going to happen. So if you want to have an experience, you necessarily have to have the good and the bad. But they don't really mean anything because they're contextual, which again, you can have crazy sort of recontextualizations of then what sort of moral morals mean and things like that. But. But again, it gives you. I find just thinking about these things in that way give you a more freedom to be more accepting to suffering. Because at the end of the day it's like, why do we have suffering? Why is there suffering in the universe if apparently there's this loving whatever intelligence behind the physical, if this is our.

[Mayim Bialik]

Reality, that we have free will, I mean, however you want to express it, that we can hate each other, we can war with each other. The challenge would be what does it look like for humanity to interface with something greater than ourselves so that we can bring it down from the mountain and try and create something which if you've ever seen two nations who are warring make peace. It's miraculous, right? It's inexplicable, that divine beauty that can come when two people reconcile, right? That's bringing that kind of spark of goodness back somehow.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

But Maybe if the universe is really going towards some level or state of higher complexity. The Jesuit priest and mystic Pierre Tyler de Chardin, with his Omega Point, where he kind of came up with this idea that it seems to be that the universe is evolving towards this higher state of complexity or divinity. If that's the case, then we just have to wait because it'll get better, complexity increases, and at one point we should reach a threshold where things have to necessarily become better, because that's how it's programmed.

[Mayim Bialik]

But to me, that sounds. I mean, from a scientific perspective, that sounds like there will be enough disorder and chaos that something's gotta give.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

Contrasting the entropic decay and the chaos. There is structure being assembled every day at ever higher levels. We're compute. I mean, first it's life, which is like molecular computation. Then it's our brains, which are our thoughts, and then we build computers and now we have AI, which it seems to be. I mean, this is probably not going to stop. This is going to be an evolution of consciousness. So maybe that's what's happening. Kind of this consciousness field behind the things that exists wants to become more embodied and deeper expressed. And this is also something which the mystics talked about, how the divine unfolds in the physical. And that this is the project and this is the idea.

[Mayim Bialik]

I don't like it. I want out. I don't like AI I don't understand it yet. I have never used it.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

No, but just having the divine embody in the physical, and I mean, not that AI is like. I mean that again, that's just a state of higher cognition and computation. And that's not going to stop. It's going to continue because that's the trajectory the universe is on and we are part of it.

[Mayim Bialik]

I'm just, I'm ready to pull the cord. I'm like, reveal yourself to us now.

[Jonathan Cohen]

All the mystical traditions are always talking about this evolution of consciousness. The fact that more people are waking up, the fact that the globe is changing, and then it's hard to reconcile that between all the challenges and war and difficulties people face. And yet, you know, when you're describing this notion of the consciousness revealing itself, it seems like more and more we have different pathways. Now AI is actually explaining, you know, there are these videos where you ask ChatGPT to explain the reason why we're here and like the early stages of it, explain it really badly. And then now it is giving the most philosophical understanding of consciousness and that we're all nodes in this larger system and Is it just been weighted by people who are non materialist who want that answer, or has it evolved in some way to better understand the structure of reality? I don't know what the answer to that is.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

So in the last version of Claude, I think version four of Anthropic, in the system card, they described how they let two AI agents discuss with each other. One was free form, they could just do whatever, and the other was. Maybe the other form was sort of more directed. And after like 50 iterations, every time they did it, the two models started to go full on hippie and cosmic consciousness and peace and love. And the engineers from Antropic are like, we didn't put that in there. That's. We don't know why our models.

[Mayim Bialik]

That's like when me and Jonathan got together, if you give it enough time, and we just go full on hippie.

[Jonathan Cohen]

When we spoke to Deepak Chopra, he said that when he started talking to AI and asking these large philosophical questions, it had a very materialist bent. And he kept pushing it. He kept saying, no, no, and he kept saying, you're right. But it had been weighted towards the main scientific understanding of reality, which is that there is no purpose, there is no reason. Everything is, you know, random and chance.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

I've been more successful with my philosophical conversations with AI where it pretty quickly was like accepting that idealism is probably the better metaphysical take.

[Jonathan Cohen]

I think now, in the last, like six months especially, it's the case, but.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

It'S still a minority view. It's not something that's in the bulk of the training data. It's still a minority thing. So I don't know why that gets picked up and enhanced.

[Jonathan Cohen]

I don't. So I don't mean to be a buzzkill, but I do want to bring a couple of these ideas from the very practical, which I mean from the theoretical, which I love to understand the mechanisms, but also down into the practical, which is when we start to believe that everything has meaning, right? You can see people getting lost in that and becoming paralyzed. They're like, oh, this. The squirrel crossed my path, but it was looking the wrong way or the owl talking to me. And that's a sign because owl medicine means this. So it's like this sort of delicate balance between both recognizing that there can be a larger order that can be guiding our lives for some reason. Maybe I'm. Maybe each of us are here to accomplish something and our souls have a purpose. If you believe in that, which I do, then okay, I may then use my intuition and Expand my consciousness, tuning into the field to get intuitive messages on how to take the next step. Or is this the job for me? Or is that the job and what will help me along my path? And I'm a big proponent of that. And on the other side, you can get people who go so far down that they become paralyzed and unable to navigate their life effectively. It seems to be, you know, when we hear, for example, Donald Hoffman and others talk about how our filtering system is great for keeping us alive but not understanding reality, there's a balance between, well, I need to pay for my car and my food, so I need to stay alive and be focused. And on the other hand, our understanding reality is great to help us emotionally heal and feel more connected and satisfied. But also it could help us pay the bills if we're able to use our intuition and connect in ways that we can bring back and translate into everyday action.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

I would call it the re enchantment project. We need to be re enchanted again from the universe we're living in. Which means that being more open to decoding the symbolism, this symbolic cognition, which probably the shamans were great at, because if the owl flew by, whatever, it means something. But with the lightness of knowing that there is a meaning or a guiding principle or you're not lost. You don't have to, like, do it, like, by yourself or have this pressure put onto you so you can let go a bit and become lighter and just sort of play with this. I think that's maybe sort of this. This element of re enchantment that we just are more joyful and more playful in how we experience stuff and how we contextualize stuff and how we judge others and how we give ourselves a hard time. I mean, basically, we probably all should be a bit easier on ourselves because that's where a lot of the friction originates with exactly as you were saying that you put yourself under pressure, but just chill and, like, accept that things could be fine and okay. Which without the correct metaphysical framing is just a silly claim because you're like, hey, just look at the world. Just how can you claim that? So you really need this metaphysical foundation to be able to recontextualize these things that make them rational to contemplate and maybe adopt.

[Mayim Bialik]

And I think also one of the things that comes from that, because, you know, we're not arguing for hedonism. We're not arguing for just be stoned and drunk all the time and, like, you know, chill out, like, it's fine. But the notion is that in that state of joy in a state of transcendental experience in any of these kind of altered states, meaning states that take you in some way out of the drudgery, the pain, the misery, the dystopia. In those states, creativity exists. And I don't just mean creativity to make art or write, but the ability to see other possibilities for your own happiness. The ability to find solutions to things that previously you couldn't find solutions to. So when we talk about something like depression, right. Where you're in such a hole that you can't even remember why you want to get out of it, which is usually the point at which people turn to pharmaceuticals. Right. I don't even understand the purpose of wanting to find the purpose. Right. But the idea is that once people are, in some cases, you know, let's say, on a medication, where they can now see the possibilities, that's the place where, when you get creative about what you could do so that things are better, that is the place where some people then get off medication and realize, oh, I was in the mire of something and now that I can see that, I need to be in nature more. I need to stop participating in activities that don't bring me joy. I need to remove toxic people from my life. That's the creativity that many of us cannot access when we're so head down in our military life that we've created for ourselves. Right. Or we're sitting in traffic for four hours a day when maybe that's not actually healthy for us. You know, we've talked to Johann Hari a couple times. Johann Hari has made this a hallmark of his research and his life. Like, if you're not connected to other people, there's no creativity about why you're here. And it's one of the main things that's going to lead you to depression. But I love this idea that joy for some people that might be smoking pot, it might be having a drink, you know, outside of an addictive framework. Yeah. What it allows you to do is say, there's a reason that I'm here. I'm a human being, not a human doing.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

Because that's another way of looking at the current state that we're suffering from a crisis of meaning everyone individually and collectively. That's why we seem to have these collectively psychotic behaviors. And so it's about reconnecting or. Yeah. Sort of finding this re enchantment that you can look at the tree and just go, wow, this is amazing. What an amazing experience. Look at the intricacy, the intelligence the beauty.

[Mayim Bialik]

Or to wake up every morning and say, it's a freaking miracle that I have consciousness that I'm interface. Like, I literally, I hugged my cat this morning and we had been away and so, you know, she missed me, but I literally held her. And a comedian that I like, said this. I'm like, I have a stuffed animal with legs. I have the ability to, like, love this little creature that is so happy to be in my life. Like, why would I not feel that way every time I get to see her? Or if Jonathan and I have a conflict, to be able to say, I don't like how you're doing this, or you don't like how I'm doing this. But what an amazing framework we're existing in that we have this consciousness that can exist and we can interact and work together and create this podcast with you.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

And then we forget that we're like sitting on this tiny planet in this crazy, huge, intricate cosmos. I mean, wow.

[Mayim Bialik]

And also, we're not alone. Like, we can't be alone. There's other beings on other planets. I'm supposed to just accept that now. So I do.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

Some of the basis for how complexity and like this molecular intelligence starts or begins is a bit understood by what's called non equilibrium thermodynamics. And we're finding a lot of organic molecules on comets. So there seems to be this physical basis for why you start to put atoms together in a way that they then kickstart this replication process. And probably it wasn't just this one thing randomly happening on Earth, but it's like a physical principle which we're slowly maybe starting to understand. But also, like coming back to cosmology, 95% of the stuff in the universe, we don't know what it is. We've given it the name dark energy and dark matter, but we see the effects. We have no clue what it is. And that's a big problem because that's most of the universe.

[Mayim Bialik]

Not to alarm anyone.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

No, it's fine. We'll figure it out sometime.

[Jonathan Cohen]

What do you take from that? Like, what do you do with the fact that there is so much unknown? What sense do you make from that?

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

That scientists should be less confident in their assertions of what is possible and not, and just be more open to, like, hey, we've figured out a lot of stuff, but there is still so much crazy stuff that we don't understand that we should be cautious in saying, that's stupid, we shouldn't do that. And this is the only way we should Be doing it. So just being more open, more open minded.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Let's talk about aliens for a second.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

Why not?

[Jonathan Cohen]

I think a lot of people get it wrong in trying to create a version that they've seen on television with bodies. You know, if we think about consciousness and all this data and information in the field, could it not be that an intelligent life or presence can be non physical and show up just as information in the field that would impact our consciousness?

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

Maybe this is, is not something some physical entity flying over from wherever in the universe, but something that's actually trans traversing these different layers of the non physical. And it kind of makes sense because people who smoke DMT claim to make contact with these other beings or intellig that are inhabiting this DMT space.

[Mayim Bialik]

Wait, what?

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

Ah, you didn't know that? Actually no, there's a lot of, I mean if you eat the seeds of the datura plant, you, you also have like, this is always like hellish experiences, but there you also get to interact with beings that are, you perceive as being alien intelligences.

[Jonathan Cohen]

So.

[Mayim Bialik]

Wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on. I've never heard this before. We had, we had one person who had a drug o D experience, Buddha Betty and her NDE included her landing on a spaceship and she had a whole explanation of an interaction that she had in her life review and all these things. But no, I have not heard this.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

Terrence McKenna called the machine elves.

[Mayim Bialik]

That's true.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

Those entities which people seem to keep experiencing during certain psychedelic states. So what happens if these kind of leach over into the physical and somehow manifest stuff and then we like. It's a totally different ball game.

[Mayim Bialik]

I was with you until we got to DMT and aliens, because also when I think of a lot of the experiences people have on very, very intense drugs, you know, in, in many cases what I would imagine is that we're also, we're conjuring cultural constructs, right? We're conjuring things that are kind of, you know, in the ether. They're, they're in the sort of vernacular, you know, I, I would. Obviously it's very hard to do, you know, global DMT studies to see if we're having the same sort of, you know, imagery occur. But that's one of the challenges with the notion of, you know, the aliens as people describe them. If enough people describe them, it becomes kind of part of the vernacular, right? So I'm very interested in things that across cultures, right, people are able to access meaning, you know, how much can we dip into what's happening on ayahuasca? What's happening with mescaline? What's happening with peyote? Like I want to do a cross cultural study to see if the same imagery is occurring.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

I mean, that's this kind of sacred geometry stuff, which seems to be universal. But coming back to the shamans, I mean, if ayahuasca, which is some vine and some bark put together randomly, you would think in like a forest of whatever 100,000 species. And if you ask the shaman, shaman, why exactly those two. This is a story a friend told me. She looked at him like disconcerted and said, well, the plants told us, because the plants are living entities and intelligences and you commune with them. So this again spins into that these otherworldly non physical realms are inhabited by other expressions of agency and intelligence. And apparently that's why there's such successful healing techniques which were developed in shamanism, because they went and asked the plants and mother Ayahuasca as a, as an.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Entity, can we revisit aliens and DMT for a second? I feel like that needs a little bit more explanation about what's happening. I don't, I don't fully get it.

[Mayim Bialik]

I pulled up an article from the Journal of Psychopharmacology, that's a very reputable journal, and they did a survey of entity encounter experiences with inhaled dmt.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

This just feels like you, you, you teleport into DMT city, which has these whatever structures. It's weird, it's outside of space and time. There's no way you can describe it. And you encounter entities who seem to have to seem to not be part of what you are projecting. It's not, it doesn't seem something that's part of you. It seems to be something totally alien in the sense that it's some intelligence which you can communicate with and which can give you insights.

[Mayim Bialik]

This study was 2,561 individuals and it was an online survey about their single most memorable entity encounter after taking dmt. And what was interesting is the encounter experiences were very similar to experiences people had when not on DMT when encountering aliens. Oh, so this would be something we would need to talk to Dr. Jeffrey Kripal about, because Jeffrey Kripal speaks to people all the time who are having altered perceptions of reality without drugs and who experience and report many of the same things. This is the place. And we're so glad, James, that you're open to these conversations. You know, this is the place where we see our podcast kind of landing squarely in the Middle of. We are very interested when people have near death experiences, if you've been abducted by aliens, and I'm happy to talk to you, but what I'm interested in is what is the scientific, conceptual and theoretical framework that we structure an understanding of that experience in. So to me, this is fascinating because obviously people on dmt, we can say, okay, these are possibly transcendental experiences, but when they are similar to experiences that other people are having, the only, one of the only explanations, besides everyone's crazy and I don't believe in it, it is that there are people who have access to a different plane of reality that I don't understand. That I might say is impossible, but it is possible because they're experiencing, experiencing it and reporting it. And it has cohesion with experiences that we can codify as, oh, this is happening.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

Yep. And that's probably the sad thing, that people who suffer from psychosis are actually having access to that layer of reality, but they have no way of dealing with it. Whereas, for instance, probably the shaman is having the same experience, but they just know how to deal with this and contextualize it. Or I mean, the early name people came up with for psychedelics were psychotomimetic because they mimic schizophrenia. And when the first anthropologists saw shamans, they were like, these people are schizophrenic, neurotic, whatever. So our normal sober waking consciousness prevents us from just losing the screen of sort of coherence. And we need that to function and be happy. And if you're having a psychosis or otherwise change your consciousness, then you start to tap in and experience these other layers of reality which are not physical. And this can be really hard on you if you have no way of dealing with it or knowing what's even happening. Because we don't have any cultural context.

[Mayim Bialik]

And we do have, we do have endogenous sources of DMT in the mammalian brain. Are they at levels that can cause these kind of pharmacological phenomenon? Likely not, but still. Right. To go back to our tumor brain injury conversation, which I still like my neuroscience explanation for, you know what? Oh, Jonathan just shrugged his shoulder. Okay, I'll, I'll report it to ucla. They should take my degree back. No, but the notion is, what if there are people who are having access to a set of receptor interactions, a set of filtration that is normally in place. Right. A release of inhibition. What if, what if there are elements of, you know, literally receptor activation that might be tapping into the same things that when actually taking DMT at These larger pharmacological levels you're seeing some impact of. I have no idea. This is new to me.

[Jonathan Cohen]

I think we can access our natural DMT and actually increase it. If you believe many of the mystics, if you believe, for example, Sadhguru, who thinks that you can. The body is the most advanced chemical producing factory in the world. With the right mindset and access to consciousness, and if we can tap into whatever frequency it is, potentially that can interact with our biological systems and increase our availability of whatever neurochemical is needed in order to create different types of euphoric state.

[Mayim Bialik]

Yeah, I mean, guess what the suggestions are for increasing DMT release.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Being happier.

[Mayim Bialik]

No, be more specific.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Be more specific. Like it's not a holotropic breath work.

[Mayim Bialik]

Great. Yep, keep going.

[Jonathan Cohen]

That's one. Kundalini yoga.

[Mayim Bialik]

Yeah, it's all like. Like when your Kundalini teacher says, focus on your pineal gland. And I'm like, you're insane.

[Jonathan Cohen]

But I think that the evolutionary nature of consciousness revealing itself is that we all are being given these amazing instruments that we can learn how to control to create a much more euphoric state.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

Another question I have is like, why are there so many plants which can induce psychedelic states? So the ethnobotanist Christian Versch, he traveled around the world and he wrote the Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants. Thousand pages. It's insane. Just so many plants. And like, why would. Why would these plant molecules have any effect on our phenomenal consciousness? I mean, okay, they could poison us and we just die or go unconscious. But why these wild crazy enhancements of experience? What's going on there? And there's so many of them. It's crazy.

[Mayim Bialik]

It's like God was just begging us to have these experiences.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

And again, Terence McKenna saying, yeah, stoned ape hypothesis that 50,000 years ago when this cognitive revolution happened, probably these early humans stumbled upon psilocybin. And because that makes sense, that's what happens when you take these substances. You go into cognitive overdrive.

[Mayim Bialik]

I always reference in my. In my religious tradition, we received the Ten Commandments and we saw sounds. There is an experience of communal synesthesia at Mount Sinai. And what is said is that anyone who was part of this community throughout time stood there and witnessed it at the same time. And this is the mystical notion when we say we all stood at Sinai, that every single human who's part of this tribe was somehow mystically experiencing this synesthetic, communal revelation. Sounds like an enormous journey, right? A tribal journey that cultures have been.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

Utilizing psychedelics for ages is a blind spot in our historical knowledge in the west, where in the Veda Soma, this psychedelic drink, which I mean kickstarted spirituality or Plato.

[Mayim Bialik]

Brian Morescu.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

Exactly. Yeah, yeah. And Plato with the Eleusinian mysteries, the Kaikyon they were drinking, which kicked off Western philosophy, which. Yeah, I'm still wondering if there ever is going to be a philosophy class where they're like, this guy took psychedelics and this is what he said. And according to Alfred North Whitehead, the mathematician and philosopher, the whole of Western philosophy is a footnote to Plato.

[Jonathan Cohen]

So James, if I think back to your LSD experience as a teenager and connect that to the notion of people who are having a schizophrenic experience not having the mechanism by which to integrate or filter out the information that they're accessing, I think my sense is that your experience of anxiety was almost an integration panic. Like how do you go from such an intense experience back to natural reality and integrate those two worlds? And the realization that your current experience is not all that there is.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

That's spot on. And that's how I rationalized it like, or rationalize it afterwards. That this was just too intense of an experience and I was too young and that just messed up my whole reality conception. Because if I would have had. If I would have the same experience today, I'm sure it would be fine.

[Mayim Bialik]

Let's do it, James. Let's do it. We'll meet you halfway. You are the person I would like to take LSD with.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

I've tried microdosing, so I'm not quite there yet. Need to step it up because you.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Didn'T have any intellectual framework to give context to your situation.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

I mean I did, I read Aldous Huxley. So that was kind of the intellectual. It was more the experiential kind of blow of it. That just was too much for my brain or my reality conception at the time. It felt like being just sort of unrooted and sort of. But what you say is exactly what I believe was what was happening. That this is how my brain then integrated and coped with this experience, which made no sense.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Back to Donald Hoffman for a second when he explains that if we were to perceive reality it would be so terrifying to us because our filters have been so tightly guarding our perceptions that we wouldn't know how to make sense of it. And I think people get blown open even in non chemical experiences where they start to have wild intuition or they start tapping into the non physical realm in a way that either gives them Intuition or psychic ability, or they start having intense dreams. They can feel like they're losing a connection and they're tethered to reality, and it can be terrible, terrifying for them.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

Don't know who said it, but the one, I think philosopher or mystic who said if the doors of perception were cleansed, we would experience reality as it is. And that's infinite.

[Mayim Bialik]

There's so many other kabbalistic things that I'm thinking of just the mystical notion of that we have to be protected from also understanding all of the suffering that exists in the world. And that there's a veil, you know, basically that we wear so that we can function and, you know, work our computers and drive our cars. But the notion is that, you know, the messianic concept of what will peace look like, it will look like us deeply and fully understanding both the damage that we have done and the potential that we have to heal.

[Jonathan Cohen]

As we wrap. James, I would love, you know, a. A re. Articulation of what you would like scientists to keep in mind to expand the field and our understanding of this experience that we're all having. So a message to them, but also to. A message to people that you would like for them to keep in mind as they're navigating many of the distractions and coping mechanisms that so many of us face.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

I would like to address the scientists and the religious people and then the people in between as well, because they. They get it for free. Because I think that's the main problem we're seeing today is that either you are convinced that the universe is random, has no purpose, and you die. It's absolutely clear you're 100%. You know this because you're a scientifically rational person and you believe that science is telling us that which it isn't. So that you realize that these metaphysical questions, there's no certainty. You're locked in consciousness and you can do with that whatever, whatever you wish, because there is nothing is certain except that you are having this experience. And for the religious people, it's also just abandoning this dogmatic, static description and accepting this external authority. I find it's all about looking inwards and finding the wisdom, the spark, whatever inside you. And that's what the masters of consciousness seem to have been doing, that they have worked with their consciousness, looked inside and found, yeah, there's a lot to be found there and a lot of things that can transform. So I find that the takeaway should be, hey, we have no clue what's happening. There seems to be a bigger picture that we're not aware of and it seems to be fine.

[Mayim Bialik]

James, thank you so much. We recommend the Sapient Cosmos for those of you who want to dive in. And where else can people find you if they want to learn about the work that you do and the incredible writing you do?

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

I sometimes post stuff on Medium and yeah, I don't know, I'm on social media, but I find social media is one of the big problems we're facing. So don't do social media.

[Mayim Bialik]

Thank you so much. Really such a pleasure to talk to you and we hope our paths will cross again. I will see you when we're both doing drugs in the ether.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

Yay. Connect in the ether, whatever. DMT space.

[Mayim Bialik]

Thank you, James. I've known about Terrence McKenna for a long time and for those of you who don't know who Terrence McKenna is.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Tell us a little bit about who he is.

[Mayim Bialik]

So Terence McKenna, he's an ethnobotanist, which is a fancy name for a mystic who took a lot of drugs and he died in 2000 and he advocated for an expansion of consciousness through the use of psychedelics. I had actually never heard the term psychonaut as someone who's a. Until James got Felder mentioned it. But yeah, he was what we would now call a psychonaut. You know, Terence McKenna did some very, very complicated and, you know, not recreational level drugs and he did experiment with DMT and his claim, you know, was that he accessed a different plane of consciousness that exists all the time and that you can drop into when you're on certain drugs. And I had forgotten about the elves.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Because we recorded an episode with an intuitive who at the end of the episode, as he was walking out, he told you that you had a lot of elves and fairies around you.

[Mayim Bialik]

He didn't say elves, he didn't say elves.

[Jonathan Cohen]

He said a lot of fairies around you. He said you have a lot of fairy energy. And he said, I don't really talk about that because it gets too weird for people, but I'd like to find the similarities between how different people access information in this field of consciousness.

[Mayim Bialik]

Yeah, I mean, there's definitely, there is, there's something that he experienced which, you know, the, the thing that we'll never know is, you know, are ideas introduced that then get used in other ways so that, you know, if enough people vaguely hear about the elves that, that it becomes a thing that, oh, when you're on dnt, dmt, you know, you're gon the elves, like, I don't know but yeah, there were definitely these beings, you know, that McKenna experienced interacting with which, which could be, yeah, he called them machine elves, fractal elves, self transforming elf machines.

[Jonathan Cohen]

What is an elf machine?

[Mayim Bialik]

I mean, he would encounter these elves that seemed in some way, I guess coordinated, working on something.

[Jonathan Cohen]

They're working on the fabric of reality, right?

[Mayim Bialik]

Pretty much. And I mean it's a lot. And like I said, there's. To me it's sort of like, yeah, what do we conjure? I would need to know. You know, it's kind of like, okay, here's an example. When people have transcendental experiences, when people do mushrooms or you know, those kinds of journeys, like universally, no matter what language you speak, no matter where you were raised, how much money your family had, what books you read, what movies you saw. Universal, like light love, big warm hug from the universe, like that's just like what people say. That's like the thing that people say. And so people say when they come on here and talk about NDEs, right? If everyone that we spoke to who had a near death experience or a psilocybin journey said, I found these humanoids, then I would say, okay, it seems like there's something here. But if it's just dmt, I'm kind of having a hard time being like, oh, people with DMT are literally accessing the deepest level of the machinations of the universe, which is elves. I would say that there's some feature of that drug interaction and the person taking them that is producing an image that, you know, is definitely resonating with what otherwise would be called elves. The question is, do people who don't believe in Santa's elves also have these visions when they smoke dmt?

[Jonathan Cohen]

One explanation is that each plant has a key to a different type of doorway. And the psilocybin doorway is about love and experiencing that connection to the communal nature of the universe. And the DMT key opens up the sort of construction room of what's, how the universe is being operated on or how the lights are being kept on in the universe, right?

[Mayim Bialik]

It's like when you go on Space Mountain with the lights on and you're like, oh, this is what's going on.

[Jonathan Cohen]

The universe is actually just a bunch of non human entities, like stringing the streetlights together, making sure that when you wake up you have that pop in the morning, like, oh, I'm still here, making sure the cat is animated.

[Mayim Bialik]

My children once went to a class that was led by a denomination of our religion that we don't generally identify with. But it was a program that a bunch of people in our community were trying out. And my older son must have been. I don't know, he must have been like maybe six, five or six. And he told us years later that one of the teachers said that at night, when you go night night, God unplugs you.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Just.

[Mayim Bialik]

And if you're a good person, you get plugged back in in the morning. And like, that's first of all not consistent with any theological description of anything in my religion or others that I've heard. But he said he remembered being kind of terrified. Like, is that like you just get unplugged and if you're lucky, you have plugged back in. I'm thinking of all the elves. When you're on dmt, you get to see the elves that are like.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

Also.

[Jonathan Cohen]

How do they explain dreams?

[Mayim Bialik]

I don't know, like literally the least of their problems. They're just trying to like bring the Messiah by making my kid not eat pork. I don't know.

[Jonathan Cohen]

You're not functioning at full electrical. You have a little charge left and the dreamscape is just like battery operated.

[Mayim Bialik]

But it's funny because when I first saw the Matrix, that that holy experience that is seeing the matrix for the first time, like, yeah, they're just plugged in. I was like, that's what the rabbi said.

[Jonathan Cohen]

I like to take these conversations and really think about the practical ways that people can use this information for their actual lives. Smoke grass, people can get lost in this world. And I do think that the work now is to be a bridge between these two worlds. How do we take an understanding of the nature of reality, the non physical qualities, the fact that consciousness is this field and information is available for us and help us navigate the physical world with more care, more love. And I love the re enchantment idea.

[Mayim Bialik]

I mean, look, I think that James was such a delightful combination of all of the things that we hold very sacred here on this podcast. You know, the true open scientific mind, the true rational mind, is one that is open to the possibility that we cannot explain everything that's happening. We do not know everything that we think we know. And we've done a really good job as humans getting here, but there's a lot more waiting for us on the other side of this level of consciousness Mime.

[Jonathan Cohen]

We do so much metaphysical exploration on our substack page. If anyone who is listening or watching hasn't checked out Mayim Bialik's breakdown on substack, give it a try. Our breaker community is there having in depth conversations about the nature of reality and how to take our insights and bring them back to navigate our actual lives.

[Mayim Bialik]

And from our breakdown, the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.

[Jonathan Cohen]

It's Maya Bialik's breakdown.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

She's gonna break it down for you. She's got a nervous neuroscience PhD or two. And now she's gonna break down.

[Mayim Bialik]

It's a breakdown.

[Dr. James B. Glatfelder]

She's gonna break it down.