Original subtitles

♪♪

♪♪

[Griffiths] There's a deeper mystery here,

and it's really the mystery of consciousness.

And it's the mystery of what we don't understand

about the nature of this conscious experience

that we're living in.

♪♪

There's this existential wonder

about what's really going on here.

What's the meaning of life?

What happens when we die?

Why are we awake?

How is it that we are aware that we are aware?

♪♪

[Gagliano] We've been asking for millennia, "What is life?"

Isn't that what we all want to know?

What is life?

What is consciousness?

We answer one, we find the other.

Consciousness is the essence of life, to me.

♪♪

♪♪

To think that at one point,

there was this one first cell...

and basically everything that needed to be known was in there?

Because from there, everything else just emerged.

How did the one little cell know how to become this?

You cannot not be in awe of life in all its forms.

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

[Koch] My own personal goal, before I die, is to understand

how consciousness fits into the universe,

how is compatible with the laws of physics and biology

that have been so successful

at describing everything else around it.

♪♪

I had this magic-mushroom experience.

I was sitting here, just on the beach.

I was listening to minimalist music.

And the rays of the sun were reflecting off the water.

And you had these fantastic hallucinations superimposed.

Everything slowed down

until I thought I arrived at the center,

at the beating heart of the universe.

And I finally understood.

I understood how it all works!

But it's ineffable.

Afterwards, you have great difficulty explaining it.

And so if you apply the cold, sodden, wet blanket of reason,

you have to sort of question yourself.

What did you experience, and what does it reflect?

Does it really reflect a different experience,

a fundamental, different aspect of the universe,

or just another intensely pleasurable experience

produced by my brain?

The magic is that you experience anything at all.

The magic is that your brain,

which is a piece of physical furniture like this boat --

that a physical object can feel.

That is the heart of the mind/body problem.

I'm dedicated to cortex.

That's what I have on my body.

Few scientists have that.

♪♪

Consciousness is any experience, any feeling.

It feels like something to be angry.

It feels like something to remember something.

It feels like something to see red.

Common to them all is subjectivity.

♪♪

I'm here to direct this large institute

of 300 people focusing on

trying to understand the cortex,

accelerating neuroscience by building

these large observatories to peer at the brain.

♪♪

-Hi, DiJon. Howdy, howdy. -Hey, Christof.

-How's it going? -Very well.

Mouse, human?

[DiJon] This is mouse.

[Koch] We have this project at the Allen Institute.

It's a wiring layout of the brain

that involves taking a tiny grain of brain matter,

literally one cubic millimeter.

So it's like quinoa, a grain of quinoa,

one-by-one-by-one millimeter,

cutting it into 30-nanometer-thin slices,

25,000 of them,

at the level of electromicroscopy

and then using modern machine-learning techniques

where it can automatically reconstruct the precise wiring,

because in this piece of quinoa grain

there are roughly 50,000 cells

and there are a few kilometers of wiring.

And once I understand which neuron is wired to which,

I really understand a whole lot more

about what makes this matter so special.

So those are all mitochondria?

Yes, it's mitochondria. This is a --

And that's a micrometer, or what?

A half a micrometer?

This will be a micrometer or something like that.

And can you go all the way to layer one here?

-Yes. -How does layer one look?

Gosh, it looks beautiful everywhere!

At this point it is not clear, whether at this level

you can distinguish whether it's a human brain or mouse brain.

And the point I always make is that the basic hardware

of all of us is the same.

Whether we are a mouse or a dog or a monkey

or a human or a whale,

at this level, it's all very similar.

The brain is the most highly organized

and complex piece of matter in the known universe.

I always say I get a shiver down my back.

Yeah, because you see just vast untold complexity

upon complexity upon complexity.

And each brain is unique and different, right?

And you can go back to a famous example

when it comes to consciousness that Leibniz made,

in his mill example 350 years ago,

because he said you can never find consciousness.

And even if you go into a mill, as it were --

that was his analogy at the time --

and you zoom in inside the mill,

you see nothing but levers moving.

And the same thing here with respect to consciousness,

you go inside, you say, "Where is consciousness?

I don't see consciousness."

I see synapses and I see mechanisms, right?

That was the point of Leibniz. All I see is mechanisms.

And somehow out of this emerges consciousness.

♪♪

♪♪

What is it about this piece of goo, of gray goo,

that gives rise to the feeling of love?

Because if I look at in --

in physics, if I look at the foundational theories

of physics, quantum mechanics, relativity,

there's no "love" there.

There is no experience. There is no pain and pleasure.

If I look at the periodic table of the elements, again,

there's no "consciousness" in there.

There's no feelings and love and hate and dreams and desires.

If I look at the endless ATGC chatter in my genes,

there isn't anything there.

But here, every day, I open my eyes in the morning

and I have feelings -- of love, of pain, of sadness.

And so the big question,

the heart of this ancient mind/body problem is really,

how do you make --

how do you turn the waters of the brain

into the wine of our conscious experience?

♪♪

♪♪

[Ricard] Consciousness is, before everything,

an experience.

♪♪

I think most neuroscientists who work on consciousness,

they know very well --

You could track to the last neuron

of the hundred billion neurons,

made a complete map of everything that takes place

when you see red or feel anger or love.

Fine.

But unless you know what experience is

by the first person,

it tells you nothing about what it is to be and to experience.

Nothing. Zero.

Sometimes people ask me, "You were a scientist."

I did a PhD in cell genetics.

"Why suddenly you left all that?" --

Seems supposedly a promising career.

I don't know, might have been a complete flop, but anyway,

was going okay until I finished my PhD --

to become a Buddhist practitioner first,

and then when I was 30 I became a monk, yes.

Well, first of all, I didn't slam the door on science.

I didn't left science because, for me,

science is the rigorous pursuit of knowledge.

I was trying to know more about the mind

and what it is to achieve inner freedom from mental poisons.

Different science.

After so many years, I'm certainly not enlightened,

but I have a real clear picture of how the mind works.

So I just changed the field of application.

[people chanting in native language]

[music playing]

We speak of a horizon that cannot be reached.

It is the idea of studying consciousness from the outside.

Now, from the inside, there's no such problem.

Because we are not trying to step out of consciousness,

you go so deep within consciousness

that actually you can experience

pure consciousness -- the bare faculty to know.

There is something at the depth of consciousness

that is pure awareness.

You can't get deeper than that.

♪♪

Meditation aims at getting an aspect of the mind

that is perfectly lucid, perfectly clear,

where there's no gap between perception and reality,

where you see phenomena as appearing yet empty of reality,

as impermanent, as interdependent.

Where you see beneath the movement of thought

is pure self-illuminating, nondual awareness

so that you require the maximum clarity,

limpidity of the mind,

like a blue, perfectly immaculate sky.

It's getting to the very core

of the basic nature of consciousness.

♪♪

[Koch] The key difference between the Western way

of looking at consciousness and the Buddhist way,

is that they have primarily focused on the inside view.

We, by in large in the West,

since particularly Galileo, scientific revolution,

we said, "Let's remove subjective from the world."

That was the step of Galileo.

And that gives rise to science, because let's just focus

on the objective things we can all agree on.

I now realize as a mature man much better

why I first became interested

as a scientist to study consciousness.

And ultimately I think my reason was to rebel against

this feeling of cosmic indifference.

I felt that consciousness

ultimately could not be explained by science.

I have two conflicting impulses,

"Zwei Seelen, ach, leben in meiner Brust."

Right? Very much so.

So, on the one hand, I was very much a scientist.

I love science.

I love looking and finding confirmation

of order in the natural universe.

That's why I'm a scientist, ultimately,

because I do believe that by rational process

we can understand what this universe is made out of

and what we are we made out of and why we are here?

On the other hand, I grew up as a devout believer

and I wanted to reconcile --

those are obviously conflicting things

and I wanted to reconcile them.

So, on the one hand, I thought, well, consciousness --

you know, science is going to

not be able to explain that, finally,

and then finally I have a justification

for why I believe in a soul.

But then as I did it more and more

and thought about it more and more, I said,

no, this is -- I don't need a soul.

I don't need the classical sort of,

you know, traditional and religious Cartesian soul.

I think you can explain the strange aspect

of consciousness, you know, the subjectivity,

using physical, natural laws.

You have to extend what we know about the universe a little bit,

but you can explain consciousness

without removing this wonderful aspect of consciousness,

that it is a feeling.

It cannot just be reduced to my neurons in my brain.

♪♪

♪♪

[Gagliano] There are many -- possibly infinite -- ways,

of approaching consciousness,

just like in the story with the blind men

and the elephant, where everyone had a different perspective

of what this elephant might be.

♪♪

We have learned over the last few decades,

that under the ground, a forest like this,

these trees will be connected and will be talking right now.

Probably whispering about what I'm talking about.

♪♪

The field of bioacoustics is just at its infancy,

and we still know very little.

But we know that trees and plants

are not only able to detect sounds from their environment

but would also produce their own sounds.

The incredible amount of data that is emerging

in the field of plant behavior and communication

is obviously pointing at more uncomfortable questions

of whether plants are actually sentient,

intelligent, conscious?

To be sentient means that you are perceiving, sensing,

responding subjectively.

And that is the key word.

We have plenty of data to show that plants perceive,

sense, respond.

So they definitely do that.

And the real question that I often ask myself is like,

can you do this in any other way that is not subjective?

Because to do it nonsubjectively

means that you're doing it "objectively,"

which really means that you're an object

but objects don't feel, don't perceive, don't respond.

The new lab that I'm setting up here

at the University of Sydney, it's called the B.I. Lab,

and it stands for "biological intelligence."

And really, it is my little smirk

to the A.I. people, so, "artificial intelligence."

We are kind of comfortable in considering technology

as becoming intelligent and even conscious...

We talk about robots as if they are alive,

and yet we are not prepared to talk about plants

as if they are alive.

It's definitely not considering the question

of intelligence or consciousness for these others

worthy of discussion.

My pea is out!

Ohh, I can see the root.

Excellent.

The plant is directing the root into the channel here,

which is exactly the one that is taking it to the water.

So the previous experiment

with the peas looking for water using sound

was quite straightforward.

The pea was growing inside a maze,

which was the shape of a letter "Y" upside down.

And when I just placed real water

at one end of the maze,

the pea grew its root straight to it,

which is not surprising

because they use the humidity grading

to detect the source of water.

Now, I then did what we do with animal studies

and designed a playback experiment.

So, I actually recorded the sound of water in the pipe

and I played it back by attaching a little speaker,

a vibration speaker, and an iPod

which would play back the sound of water.

And what I found is that the peas would also be able

to find the source of "water" through the sound

even when water really is nowhere to be found.

[music playing softly]

[music plays]

-[chuckles] -[woman] Yeah.

-That's touch. -Okay.

So, we're going to set up the EPG,

which is the equivalent of the EEG, for the little pea.

Oh, yeah. There it is.

-What are you doing? [laughs] -[laughs]

I'm not touching it. That's amazing.

Yeah.

I was a few centimeters away.

So it's seeing you.

Again.

So one other experiment I did

is testing Pavlovian learning in plants,

specifically, peas.

And it's following pretty much the same

testing protocol that we use in animals,

and specifically the Pavlovian protocol with the dog.

So in the case of Pavlov, he used a bell

which was always preceding the arrival of dinner.

And in response to that, the dog would salivate

because it's very excited about the arrival of dinner.

By repeating this long enough, or times enough,

the bell on its own,

even when there is no dinner coming,

will make the dog salivate.

Now, plants don't salivate and I didn't use a bell.

But instead of a bell, I used a little fan.

And instead of dinner...

...I used light.

Now, this is actually blue light

because the peas really like that.

And what they do, a blue light, they grow towards it.

So they bend.

If you repeat this enough times --

in this case for three days --

you will find that the fan alone,

without the light even arriving,

will make the pea bend in the right direction.

The fan didn't mean anything,

but the plant somehow has learned the association

between these two.

And just like the dog,

the pea is passing the test with flying colors.

♪♪

My first experiment was received with great resistance

because it was really the first one to show that, yeah,

plants can learn

and they can tick all the same boxes

that we would expect from an animal.

A lot of the comments that I received

were never about the data, which is, you know,

that's the foundation of science.

Nobody ever actually said to me, "You did this experiment wrong.

The data are no good."

It was always about, "This cannot be."

That is, the concept, even the idea

that a plant could learn, it was almost disturbing.

So, what is it about brain and neurons that is so special

that without them you can be conscious?

What brain and neurons are really doing

is passing through signals of an electrical nature.

Well, plants are really good at electrical signaling.

So does that mean the plants are more conscious?

I think that they have more genes that are coding

for that kind of exchange of information internally.

So does it mean that they are even better than we are

at this consciousness business?

They're doing all of the things that we think you can only do

if you do have a brain and neurons, but they're doing them.

♪♪

[speaking softly]

♪♪

[speaking softly]

[Gagliano] Modern science seems to be

coming around in a circle.

The voices of plants that the shamans

have listened to for millennia,

we can record them now in a lab with a laser.

A lot of my research has been inspired

by knowledge that was shared by Indigenous people with me.

And it was directly opened up by the experience with the plants.

Often it comes through dreams.

And in a traditional indigenous knowledge perspective,

this is nothing unusual.

A lot of shamans

get their information through the dream world.

But for a scientist to get the information

from the dream world looks weird.

It requires an opening up to a space

where intuition lives.

♪♪

[Griffiths] When we launched our first psilocybin study,

no such study had been done for decades.

Psilocybin is the active principle

in the so-called magic mushroom.

And it is a classic psychedelic or a hallucinogen drug

used for thousands of years by Indigenous cultures

for religious or divinatory or healing purposes.

These drugs provide a very unique window

into the nature of consciousness.

♪♪

[Fritz] The lights are super bright.

I'm seeing kind of like a metronome keeping time,

keeping track.

And as that metronome swings up and down,

I'm bouncing backwards into time.

♪♪

There's a woman, a native woman,

that I know I've encountered.

She has long dark hair.

And I can see her face,

and to me it looks very familiar.

She knows me, and I know her.

♪♪

I feel very peaceful and not scared,

like I'm being connected to like a collective knowledge base

and that I'm learning about myself

and about what is.

[Griffiths] These experiences looked like experiences

that have been reported over the ages by mystics

and religious figures.

There's a sense of unity of all people and things,

the sense that everything is interconnected.

And that's accompanied by a sense of deep reverence

for that experience.

Some people describe it as homecoming --

There's something that they knew to be true all along,

and it's a remembering.

And that's one of the powerful pieces of the truth value

of this experience,

when we say it's more "real" and more "true"

than everyday waking consciousness.

♪♪

[woman] You ready for a few ratings?

[Fritz] Yes.

[woman] Zero, not at all.

Ten being the strongest imaginable.

Distance from normal reality.

[Fritz] Six.

[woman] Pure being and pure awareness.

Five.

Fusion of your personal self into a larger whole?

Four.

Everything okay? Warm enough?

-Yeah, I'm warm enough. -Okay.

You're doing beautifully, Justine.

-See you in a little bit. -Yep.

Okay.

-She's doing great. -[man] Great.

[woman] Yeah, I mean, look at...

Pure being and pure awareness -- five.

Fusion of your personal self into a larger whole -- four.

Sense of reverence or sacredness -- five.

Eight for timelessness.

So, yeah, so we may have some

touch of a mystical experience here.

[Griffiths] We brought people back

a month later or two months later

and interviewed them.

We have anywhere from

70% to 80% of people saying that this is

in the top five most meaningful experiences of their life.

With respect to spiritual significance,

in our first study, we had 30% of people

saying it was the single most

spiritually significant experiences

of their entire life.

And when you'd ask, "Well, what does that mean?

You know, you're saying this is in the top five.

What does that really mean to you?"

people would kind of look off and say,

"You know, when my first child was born,

that changed my entire life.

You know, my life would never be the same.

And my father recently passed away,

and that's hugely moving."

They'd say, "You know, it's kind of like that."

And so that's the metric that they're using,

these huge experiences that everyone has,

but this is occurring in a single six-hour session

in a session room at Johns Hopkins.

[laughs]

I have worked at Johns Hopkins for over 40 years.

I work long hours.

And I work more than five days a week.

And I can't say I've had one of the most, you know,

top-five experiences in my life there at Hopkins.

[Fritz] In one of my most meaningful sessions

that I had in the study,

I felt the energy of people that have been close to me

that have passed away

in a way that is maybe hard to describe

but it was very convincing to me

that it was these certain people.

So that's one way that it really strengthened my belief

in the afterlife, whatever that means.

Whether that means

that your energy cannot be ever destroyed.

And that's a part of that connective thread

that is binding all of us in the world,

all people and things.

I felt as though the experience

was preparing me for things

that I know will happen in my life, that will be tough.

♪♪

I'm being pushed on a gurney down a hallway.

What I can see is ceiling tiles

going by very, very quickly, and industrial lights,

and I know that I'm in a hospital.

And something is not right.

I can smell the anesthetic hospital smell,

and things are very chaotic around me.

Just commotion, concern.

But all I can feel is safety

and a loving feeling

that's cradling me in that moment.

♪♪

And I know I'm learning now

for an experience in the future

and that I'm being prepared that,

when that happens, when that moment happens,

I'll remember this, remember that I'm safe,

and it will be okay.

♪♪

[Griffiths] Since we began this work,

we have conducted research in over 600 psilocybin sessions.

Just recently, our group at Johns Hopkins

and a group at New York University

copublished studies in which we administered

a moderately high dose of psilocybin

to cancer patients who met clinical criteria

for very significant anxiety or depression.

And most importantly,

the measures of depression go markedly down.

And for the most part,

people felt much more comfortable

with the prospect of facing death.

And these effects appear to endure.

People do not come out of that experience saying,

"Oh, now I believe in heaven," you know,

"Now I believe in life after death."

But it's not uncommon for people to come out

entertaining, in a way that they perhaps

didn't previously, that there's --

there could possibly be continuity of something.

♪♪

[people speaking native language, music playing]

[Ricard] Sometimes when Western visitors come here,

they expect that all our young monks

in the school would meditate.

But, basically, meditation

is not considered something for beginners.

You don't go to a mindfulness course here.

"Meditation" means "cultivating" in Sanskrit --

cultivating altruistic love, loving kindness, compassion.

So it's not just sitting there and looking in the sky

and emptying your mind.

Meditation actually comes pretty late

because it's dealing with the basic nature of your mind.

And if you're not prepared, what are you going to do?

[music playing]

[Ricard] When you see the sacred dance,

the rituals are not just magic rituals.

They are actually guided meditation.

First, there is a dance to purify the ground

from all graspings and mental clinging.

When you see a dancer with a sword that cuts an effigy,

it's just cutting the clinging to ego.

Grasping to the self could be a source of hatred,

obsessive craving, arrogance, jealousy,

distortion of reality.

What would be the result of that?

Suffering.

So unless you deconstruct the notion of ego,

those things will continue to appear.

♪♪

[Griffiths] Meditation is the tried-and-true course

for understanding the nature of mind,

and psilocybin is the crash course.

We often speak in terms of "ego" and "self"

being dissolved acutely by psilocybin

and some of these meditation practices.

That's actually the objective of most Buddhist practices,

to recognize that you are not the self

and that so often in our cultures

that we've come to identify ourself

with that voice in our head that says, "I'm going to get up.

I see the morning."

As one meditates more deeply, it becomes very apparent

that that sense of self can drop away.

And that experience alone can be totally transformative.

So we'll have this top over your head.

It's like an antenna.

Okay.

[Griffiths] Hey, Jane -- Roland.

Just wanted to know how you're doing in there.

[Jane] I'm doing great, thanks. It's actually pretty comfy.

[laughs] Okay. That's what we want to hear.

[Man] It's like a spa. [chuckles]

[Griffiths] One perspective on what happens with psychedelics,

from a neuroscience point of view,

is the influence of psychedelics

on something called the default mode network,

a function of brain that underlies ego

or sense of self.

People with clinical depression have increased sense of ego,

and one of the things that psychedelics do --

psilocybin and LSD --

is to decrease function in the default mode network,

in other words, decrease egoic function.

There can be a sense of the melting away

of a sense of self or personality, if you will,

and a merging with something greater than that.

So, acutely you'll get decreases in the sense of self,

but concurrently a much greater interconnectivity in the brain,

and the opportunity for rewiring and new connections forming

is really quite substantial.

One of the common features of this

decreased sense of self

is just a greater openness and a greater freedom of choice.

And so that emerges from psychedelics.

It emerges in meditation because one of the characteristics

is an open-mindedness

and a freedom from habitual response.

And it looks very much like patterns that we see

in childhood before those narratives get locked in,

and that sense of self gets locked in.

So this openness has huge implications for healing.

[Boothby] I wouldn't hesitate a second to say

that the Hopkins experiment

was a completely life-changing experience.

Why would something synthesized by mushrooms

do something so dramatic to the human brain?

And, in fact, "What does it do?" was the question, in part.

I participated about 10 years ago in a study

which gave a small number of subjects like me

various concentrations of psilocybin

in a very controlled environment in which we were coached

to be open to whatever happened in our brain.

Ten years later, I still regard it as --

in fact, even more so regard it

as the most significant experience I've ever had.

At the time I did this,

I was in the more or less immediate aftermath

of a really tragic death.

My son died by suicide.

He went through different forms of drugs,

from alcohol to Ecstasy to LSD to cocaine to heroin.

And one night I just got a call

that he had shot himself to death.

My son's death had left me so raw

and so in need of working through certain things.

So I regarded the whole psilocybin experiment

as at least potentially a way

to come to some further terms with that.

I went into it with a good deal of skepticism.

I wasn't in any --

certainly not in any institutional way religious,

nor really a believer in much of any sense.

As a philosopher, as a professor of philosophy,

I knew a lot about the history of theology

but didn't feel a great deal of personal participation in.

So I went into the whole thing quite prepared

for a big zero on the spiritual side.

Okay. So...

All right. Get a sheet.

[Boothby] Roland and Mary coached me a lot,

regarding the whole experience

as a kind of space traveler, a kind of astronaut,

where you're going to get blasted out

into some possibly scary place by yourself.

Okay, so, Rick, just begin by taking a couple deep breaths.

♪♪

And out.

♪♪

And in and out.

♪♪

[Boothby] It really felt like a journey

through some kind of cosmic roller coaster.

A deep-sea diver descending into the ocean depths.

I even had the illusion of pressure and darkness.

♪♪

And I was so gratified to feel the touch of Mary's hand,

although it felt as though she's in some little boat

hundreds of feet, if not miles, above me.

But even that didn't suffice to orient me.

I seriously wondered, "Am I alive or am I dead?"

I couldn't make out.

And at one point I thought, "Oh, my God,

I have become a heroin addict myself.

In some kind of mania of sympathy and grief

for Oliver's death, I have experimented with drugs

and here I am in some kind of overdose."

♪♪

But I maintained a weird clarity of mind at the same time,

as though I was able to observe

from some position that was undisturbed

while the rest of my entire reality fell apart.

I felt at times as though

I was hearing music for the first time.

It felt like the heartbeat of reality itself.

And it became clear that something like that

is the very essence of life --

that is to say,

life is about trying to open oneself

in a kind of loving acceptance and an engagement

or pure openness to experience.

That's the point.

Rather than fear and defense.

♪♪

[Griffiths] What remains if ego or self dissolves completely?

What remains is this sense of awareness,

this sense of witness, the sense of awakenedness.

And so ego can dissolve entirely,

sense of self can dissolve entirely,

and yet you can be fully aware that you're aware.

And there's something sacred about that.

Some people might describe it as a void.

Some people might describe it as a white light.

But there's this state of pure awareness...

...and we're leaning deeply -- as deeply as we can --

into this existential mystery

of what it is that we're doing here.

♪♪

[Gagliano] I changed my research direction and my career, really,

because of something that happened in the field

with my fish.

I was trained as a marine scientist,

and I did most of my early research with coral reef fishes.

And then one day, as part of my experiment,

I was in the water, and after spending months

with these particular individuals,

which I knew personally, I would say,

as one-on-one relationship built over time,

that day, fish that just until the day before

would come inside my hands

and I could close my hands around them, and they were like,

"We know. This is just Monica.

She comes every day, and it's all good."

That day nobody came out.

And the only thing that was different that day

was that I went in the water

with the thought of finishing my experiments

and collecting them all, which, obviously,

it wasn't a good ending for them.

In that moment when nobody came out to greet me,

as they did for days and days, for months,

I just realized that these fish knew about me

much more than I knew about me.

They showed me what it really means

to have empathic relationships.

In that moment, I realized that there are no boundaries,

that we think we have our private lives inside our minds,

but in reality we are immersed in this ocean

where all boundaries are quite fictitious.

That experience for me changed my entire career

because I realized that there was no questions

that I could ask that would be important enough

or special enough to justify me taking someone else's life.

That's when the plants came and rescued the scientist in me.

♪♪

We see the world as separate from us,

and we see things, not beings.

And so the moment we appreciate what consciousness really is,

this one big ocean that expresses itself

through different forms and shapes,

then, as the plants have taught me many times,

what you see is just you.

You wouldn't hurt yourself. You wouldn't kill yourself.

You wouldn't destroy anything.

You wouldn't behave as we do in our environment

because that is you too.

♪♪

[Koch] I'm now a "panpsychist."

So, panpsychist comes from the word "pan" -- "everywhere" --

and "psyche" -- "soul."

And it's an ancient faith.

So, many philosophers in the Western tradition have had it,

including Plato and Spinoza and Schopenhauer.

But, of course, it's very prevalent

if you look, for example, in Buddhist faith,

that many more creatures may be en-souled than we think.

Most people are willing to say, "Okay. A monkey is conscious,"

and maybe a cat and a dog.

But it peters out very quickly after that.

Bird? Mnh-mnh.

A squid? Probably not.

Bees? Heaven's sake. They're just bugs, right?

But we really don't know.

A bee has a brain that's roughly a million neurons.

Far smaller than us.

However its complexity, it's much denser --

10 times denser than the neurons in the human brain.

Many biologists, particularly who think about consciousness,

believe it's an "emergent" property.

The classical one is wetness of water.

I can take a liquid like water, and it's wet.

I can pour it over my clothes, and I know what "wet" is.

Now, if I ask, is one molecule of H2O --

It isn't wet. It doesn't have those properties.

Or two molecules of H2O.

But at some point, if you put enough molecules together,

they have this property, "wetness."

They cling to surfaces and they have tension, et cetera.

So people think, "Well, you have one or two neurons,

you don't get consciousness, 42, you don't.

But if you have a billion, you get some.

And if you if you have two billion, you get more."

So it is just an emergent property.

I used to think that.

But then consciousness is just too radically different

from anything else I know.

Conscious experience, subjectivity,

feelings are too radically different

from anything else in the universe

for me to accept that it just emerges.

Max Planck, the father of quantum physics,

said in the late '20s,

"I regard consciousness as fundamental."

I concur.

It's not something first you have physics,

and then if you have enough physics,

then somehow you get consciousness.

Consciousness is a fundamental feature of the universe.

♪♪

[Griffiths] Does the fish know that they're in water?

Do we really recognize that we're swimming

in this sea of consciousness all the time?

In our culture, often that's not the case.

We're so caught up in achievement

and our own stories

and acquisition of material objects that define us

that we lose track of the fact

that we're afloat in this sea of consciousness.

Psilocybin is one very powerful doorway into that recognition.

Some people are already awake to the vastness and the wonder.

But other people, it's their first awakening

to a different way

of experiencing and being in the world.

♪♪

[Boothby] It's not the drug.

The drug helps you to open the door.

But the drug isn't what's outside the door.

The question is how much of reality you can take.

Ordinarily, the function of our mental apparatus

is to close down the opening,

like closing down the aperture of a camera

to the tightest, most restrictive aperture,

so that you're not flooded, so you're not overwhelmed.

And psilocybin is an aperture opener.

It massively exposes.

I felt like I was being...

...miraculously exposed to my own life.

♪♪

I had enormously powerful experiences visually

of what seemed to be an immensity of space.

Then the experience would reopen,

as if you're already at the infinite.

And suddenly that would open again

to an infinite beyond the infinite.

And that was the moment

when the astronaut metaphor came back.

And I thought, "Yeah."

Something like exploration,

something like the pure adventure

of going out with as open eyes as possible,

to drink in what is new and strange.

That's the whole purpose and aim of our existence.

Consciousness is nothing but this openness.

Traditionally, we think of God as the end point of the journey.

God is the destination.

And it suddenly rolls over me again --

No, God is not the destination.

God is the journey.

It's the openness itself that is divine.

Which then led me to this massive realization

that God is seeing through our eyes,

that God's on the adventure,

that God, in a certain sense, is the ultimate astronaut Himself,

that without us seeing these strange visions,

He doesn't get to see anything.

And without us feeling things, He doesn't feel anything.

Without us going through the experiences of life,

He doesn't go through life.

In other words, that we are the proxies for God's own life.

And this was, to me, so new...

...a perspective that I was kind of shocked by it.

And I realized if God truly grants freedom...

He doesn't know the outcome of those free acts.

He is on the adventure more than anyone.

The gift of freedom necessitates

that God is truly open to whatever's gonna come out.

And it also made me realize, of course,

this is the only possible meaning of love.

Love is such an adventure of freedom

where you take the risk of openness to the other,

including the possibility of being disappointed,

of being wounded.

♪♪

In another rushing over me of a revelation,

I thought of my son.

He came to me.

And not just his presence,

but a kind of electric, vivid, intense presence.

I could not but imagine it alive

and imagine it as his core being.

♪♪

In his absence, in this ultimate absence, I found him again.

It came to me to realize

that maybe in this sense, nothing ever dies.

His...essence,

his kind of distilled essence, could survive death --

at least in my heart.

That triggered another whole wave where I thought to myself,

"Maybe this is why this life is so filled with failures

and tragedies and losses,"

that love requires these failures,

its own failures, its own losses.

Love perhaps, in this very mysterious way,

requires death in order to...

...sort of purify itself,

which, you know, in any other time,

I would have regarded as a completely crazy thought.

Or I would have regarded it in another time and place as...

a kind of not just silly religious thought,

but maybe almost a despicable thought.

A making light of what is terrible and tragic,

a sugarcoating it

and making appear acceptable what isn't acceptable.

[Gagliano] For me, the work with psychedelic plants

is a moment of communion with the infinite,

just the same as maybe

the poets would have written about it forever.

Anybody who has had those experiences

knows exactly what they are.

And they touch our soul so deeply

that the mind has no chance to try to explain.

The heart is listening.

And the heart already knows.

When we're having these mystical experiences,

whether it's, like, through meditation

or psychoactive plants or yoga,

the place that we are touching is always the same,

because there is only one place here.

That's what I would call consciousness.

It's not a thing.

It's a space.

And that's where we go when we allow it.

I think this ability to directly connect

with this universal... consciousness,

whatever we want to call it -- God...

...it's actually not a special thing,

but it's our heritage.

It's not something that only some people can achieve.

It's our heritage as human beings.

And it is, again, just a matter of choices.

But we are all the same.

We are made of the same.

We come from the same. We are the same.

And so we all have exactly the same opportunity

for the same choices if we want them to.

Which, of course,

compared to what a religious system would offer,

it would be exactly the opposite.

Someone has the control of your experience of yourself as God.

I had dreams in my home in Australia

pointing to specific places and people.

Then I went and looked for them.

And that's how I ended up working with an elder

who taught me a lot about the plants that he uses

to heal his people.

I traveled to this very remote area of Mexico

to learn from the Huicholes,

because they are such an ancient culture

and their entire culture is founded and closely related

to one psychedelic plant -- the peyote.

The relationship with this plant seems fundamental

for them to survive in these remote regions,

not just physically but also spiritually,

and find the direct connection to their divine essence.

[men singing in native language]

♪♪

[Gagliano] And now I have to deal with my conflict.

I see a stressed animal

that knows exactly what is going to happen.

And...

And I actually really hope he is going to fight.

And it's actually interesting,

because, just like in our society,

I don't feel I have a choice

that I can stand just on my own and stop this.

It's going to happen regardless.

And I have to let it happen,

and this is where my conflict is.

Under all of these layers, I'm actually wearing a T-shirt

that says, "Tread lightly, eat kindly."

It's like it's --

This is seriously a really funny joke from life.

[men singing in native language, music playing]

♪♪

[men singing in native language, music playing]

♪♪

[cow lowing]

♪♪

[Ricard] There's a Buddhist saying,

which I think physicists will agree,

that a million calls cannot bring to existence

something that does not exist in any way out of nothing.

There's always a transformation.

So, according to a Buddhist way of seeing things,

the stream, the continuum of consciousness,

can only be beginningless and endless.

Now, what will happen when we die?

The atoms of my body will disintegrate,

but they are not going to disappear.

Similarly, the stream of consciousness,

made of moment of consciousness, being a continuum,

unbroken continuum, but without entity traveling.

Me, I'm traveling there,

the young Matthieu now becoming the old Matthieu.

I'm going to die,

maybe reincarnate in a little cow.

[chuckles]

But something is still Matthieu in that cow and all that.

Okay. Buddhism doesn't accept that.

There's no "self," autonomous and permanent

that travels along the consciousness.

There is just the successions of moments

that is never interrupted.

It's like a stream.

The Mississippi River, the Rhine River --

There's not something at core

that is really the essence of the Rhine River.

It's just the endless succession

of flow of the river that you call Rhine.

And rightly so, because it's not the same as the Ganges.

[Gagliano] If we see consciousness

just as this ocean,

then my essence as me right now

is just part of that ocean.

And in that sense, I will continue.

I don't die because I'm already everything as it is,

concentrated into this little drop.

If I do see myself as separate from the ocean, then I will die.

♪♪

[Griffiths] This question about the nature of awareness,

the nature of this sense of the interconnectedness

and the sacredness of that --

This is not going to be answered in my lifetime,

and it's not going to be answered

in my grandchild's lifetime.

This is a much deeper question.

It may never be answerable.

♪♪

But, boy, do I love contemplating that,

do I love studying that.

And I think that deeper understanding of that

has very profound implications

for how we're going to end up treating one another

and how we're going to survive as a species.

♪♪

[Gagliano] This mechanistic view is dying,

and we really need to move into a more unifying view.

And inevitably, I think the message is always the same.

It's like, just remember that you are part of this.

And your delusion that you are separate from this,

it's just that -- an illusion.

And actually, I think what is really beautiful about it

is that longing,

that feeling of aloneness that most of us carry

in those moments, just really disappears,

because you are not alone.

You never were, and you cannot be alone.

♪♪

♪♪