Sherry Walling - 0:00:09
You know those conversations that you just don't want to end. You're watching the minutes click by, but there are so many things that you want to ask and so much left to say. I had the opportunity to talk with Sam Berrin Shonkoff at the end of a long work day. And I'll be honest, when I began the conversation, I was pretty tired. My brain was moving a little bit slowly, kind of exhausted. But as we sat together and began to talk about philosophy and psychedelics and spirituality and religious tradition, I came back alive and my brain was moving so fast to try to squeeze all the wisdom and insight that I could from Sam's incredible mind and experience. A segment of this conversation was featured on the podcast a couple of weeks ago, and we did a deep dive into psychedelics and religion and we looked at how different religious traditions are interacting with the psychedelic renaissance.

Sherry Walling - 0:01:03
Dr. Sam Shonkoff is an assistant professor of Jewish studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. His scholarship focuses on themes of embodiment and representations of human divine encounter in German- Jewish thought. He is an expert on a philosopher that I like very much, Martin Buber; and more recently, he's taken a position at the Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics studies and he will be supporting their efforts to create a training program in psychedelics, religious culture, and spiritual care. Dr. Sam is warm and brilliant and I am delighted to share the entirety of our conversation with you today. This is a conversation between two curious minds and is not designed to be medical or legal advice.

Sherry Walling - 0:01:48
Thanks for listening and let's dive in. Well, I'd love to hear a little bit about your background and how you come to this conversation around psychedelics and spirituality, psychedelics and religious conversation.

Sam S.B. Shonkoff - 0:02:12
So, I come to this conversation, first and foremost, as a scholar of religion. Some of the work that I do is on experiences that we tend to call mystical, different kinds of altered states of consciousness and awareness in religious life and spiritual practice; and so from that perspective, I've been thinking very hard for 30 years at this point about how we even begin to think about altered states of consciousness and the various chemical and ritual and textual techniques that human beings use to catalyze those different states and what that looks like and so, when thinking about psychedelics, you know, this has a lot of brain scientists and policymakers speaking about mystical states, religious experience, and that's the bread and butter of the field that I'm in. So, I think we have a lot to bring to the table, and I'm interested in those conversations. Also, more specifically, I'm a scholar in Jewish studies and one of the main kind of field that I look at is a movement called Neo-Hasidism. Hasidism itself is a modern Eastern European-born mystical movement in Jewish spirituality and Neo- Hasidism is basically people who are not Hasidic Jews who, nonetheless, draw upon Hasidic sources, Hasidic practices or values for purposes of spiritual cultural renewal and as it turns out in the American Neo-Hasidic concept especially starting in the 1960s and beyond, actually psychedelics played a very significant role in the development of that movement. So, with my sort of historian hat on, I'm tracing that relationship and that's another thing that's brought me into contact with this field. And I'll just say also that as a professor at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, we're just a block away from UC Berkeley and we have been exploring and developing this really exciting partnership between the GTU and the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, which just launched in this past year.

Sam S.B. Shonkoff - 0:04:30
So, I've been really involved in helping to facilitate those conversations across disciplinary lines, which have been really fruitful thus far.

Sherry Walling - 0:04:44
How do you define or describe what you mean with the word mystical? Yeah, what's a mystical experience?

Sam S.B. Shonkoff - 0:04:52
That is a fantastic question. I think the best place to begin an explanation of the mystical is to say I don't know because a lot of people have very particular concepts of this thing called mysticism, and I think almost invariably the definitions that people give tend to be limited and very culturally specific and I'll say what I mean by that. In the world of psychedelic studies, for example, and the sort of conventional discourses in that field, mystical experience tends to be defined according to particular categories that were shaped by people like William James, if it's the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries and Walter Stace, a scholar in the 1960s. These sort of older paradigms that emphasize the experience of ego dissolution, like where our sense of being a separate self is dissolved into an experience of oneness, sometimes called a unitive experience. These tend to be characterized as experiences that are really filled with pleasure, filled with joy, bliss, love. They're characterized as ineffable.

Sam S.B. Shonkoff - 0:06:09
So, like difficult to translate into language, to defying description in some ways and so conventional understandings of the mystical experience tend to really be along those lines. As a scholar of religion and as a historian, I'm interested in ways that that definition is super limited and very culturally specific especially coming from a sort of Protestant framework that identifies an essence of religion as being separate from all the rituals, all the architectures of sacred spaces and really emphasizing you, the individual, right? The modern subject who is having this experience. It's internal. It's, perhaps, intellectual or emotional but it's ultimately a sort of inner experience that's separate from all of the kind of unessential trappings of ritual in religious communities and institutions and so on.

Sam S.B. Shonkoff - 0:07:01
And so we get into tricky territory around psychedelics where it becomes in the kind of academic field in psychedelic studies that is just burgeoning right now. There is this really strong tendency to essentialize psychedelic experience as "mystical" and bearing these sort of essential characteristics in ways that would honestly be unrecognizable to many of the, say, indigenous communities who've been working with the medicines, these substances for centuries, operating with really different paradigms about what these experiences look like if thinking about them as personal experiences is even really the operative category to begin with, right? And actually we enter this much more complicated and much more interesting and diverse landscape thinking about what we tend to call mysticism.

Sherry Walling - 0:08:18
And even our framing of a spiritual experience is something that one entity has, perhaps with a divine, but it is in most of our Western framework, highly individualized, and so this idea that that framing of it is not really congruent or doesn't align necessarily with other cultural interpretations or historical interpretations of what a spiritual or mystical experience is.

Sam S.B. Shonkoff - 0:08:46
Absolutely, and there's a kind of funny irony there that actually even when we're talking about ego dissolution and the disappearance of self...

Sherry Walling - 0:08:54
We're still in the middle of it.

Sam S.B. Shonkoff - 0:08:57
We are completely fixated on what happens to the self, what happens to the ego, and it makes me think of this Maria Sabina who is a really major revered medicine woman, a curandera, in the indigenous Mexican tradition. She observed that when these white people from the United States started visiting her famously with Gordon Wasson and others who came in his wake, she said, "You know before they started coming, no one turned to mushroom just to seek God," like they were turning to these medicines for healing, for like particular ailments, for these sorts of practical purposes and it was really these white gringos who started coming down and it was all about like their spiritual journey. It was all about their experience with God and it's just something that often gets taken for granted in a lot of the conventional conversations happening that actually like spirituality and mysticism are far vaster then we tend to appreciate them.

Sherry Walling - 0:10:09
And I wonder sometimes if it's our kind of hypermodernity, the separation or the segmentation of our intellectual lives from any kind of spiritual practice or religious community that for many people in kind of modern Western cultures, we're almost like spiritually starved. So, whereas, perhaps, psychedelics were utilized maybe even more like an antibiotic, right? You have a problem, something doesn't feel right with you, you engage these substances to help correct that issue but you bring in these modern traveler adventurer types and their longing for something that's transcendent, whereas other cultures live more integrated with the transcendent, perhaps all the time. I'm curious though about this tradition that you speak of, the Neo-Hasidic tradition. I don't know anything about that and so very curious about how that particular group of people and sort of their relationship with psychedelics that helps to develop this new adaptation of traditional practices.

Sam S.B. Shonkoff - 0:11:12
Yeah, so that story, like any good story, it's hard precisely to locate the beginning of it, but I'd say our best bet for really the origin story of this relationship between psychedelics and Neo- Hasidism starts with a guy named Solomon Schechter, who later changed his name to Solomon Schechter Shalomi, drawing from shalom and solidarity with peace movements between Israelis and Palestinians; but at this moment in the early 1960s, his name was Solomon Schechter; and at that time, he was still officially a Habad Hasid. He was a part of the Habad movement, a traditional Hasidic movement in Brooklyn, New York, based in Brooklyn, New York, but he was already starting to kind of smite spiritually beyond those boundaries and was interested in exploring other traditions, learning from other people. And he, one summer, actually, while he was working at a conservative Jewish summer camp called Camp Ramah, he took a day and to make a long story short, he went to go have his first LSD experience with a guy named Timothy Leary who is really at the forefront.

Sherry Walling - 0:12:30
I've heard that name before.

Sam S.B. Shonkoff - 0:12:32
Yeah, it comes up here and there at a sort of ashram in Massachusetts, and Timothy Leary agreed to bring this Hasid named Solomon on a journey with LSD and I've spent time in the Solomon Schechter archives at the University of Colorado Boulder and actually have the typed-up transcription of just the verbal trip report that Solomon gave about this experience and you can just see not only his life, but like the tradition of Hasidism and Neo-Hasidism just transforming in real time under the influence of LSD. And so what we see here is that he came into this experience seeking a kind of religious illumination and one that was in harmony with the tradition that he came from. So, actually, he brought clothing and ritual objects associated with the Sabbath with Shabbat. He brought audio records to play traditional Hasidic nigunim, traditional Hasidic music and melodies. He had his prayer book and his prayer paraphernalia for when dawn would come and it would be time for morning prayers, and this was all he really thought to kind of integrate this into his experience and as he is tripping on LSD for the first time, we see him interpreting the experience itself in real-time through the prism of these stories.

Sam S.B. Shonkoff - 0:14:06
So, one example of this is sometimes especially as one is starting to peak on these substances, it can be terrifying, it can be really overwhelming, and he was having a moment like that, and he was seeing this kind of fiery demonic beings surrounding him and he was feeling afraid, and he conjured up this old Hasidic tale about (inaudible) an old sage from this tradition who is standing on the brink of hell and had this moment where he realized this can be the last mitzvah I performed. This can be the last like act of divine service that I can perform. And so according to this story, (inaudible) like tightens his belt and jumps into the fiery depths and Solomon sort of channeled this story and he says right as I sort of took on that image sort of tightening my robe and jumping into whatever would come, then all of those fiery demons kind of dissipate and he opens up into this expansive luminous place of peacefulness. So, we see here ways in which he is drawing upon his tradition but also transforming that tradition in the process through this new experience and later when the sun rises and it's time for morning prayers, he talks about how he brings Timothy Leary along with him and takes out his tallit, his prayer shawl, and actually drapes it over the two of them together. He takes out his tefillin.

Sam S.B. Shonkoff - 0:15:51
It's like traditional leather straps and boxes that one wears during Jewish prayer and he actually wraps it around both Timothy and him. So, they're actually bound to one another in this moment of prayer, and he just described what it is like for him to plunge into the traditional liturgy while still sort of in the afterglow to the coming down from this psychedelic experience and how he is just completely reinterpreting this language. So, I'm going into like the texture details of this particular episode as what for me is just a really powerful example not only of the beginning of this relationship between what becomes Neo- Hasidism that Solomon is one of the really formative figures of that in psychedelics that is progressing through this day but also a kind of case study for thinking about the interplay between psychedelics and tradition, right? Like, the tradition is refracted through psychedelic experience and psychedelic experience is refracted through the tradition and that's something that as a scholar of religion in this field of psychedelic studies that I and other colleagues of mine are really trying to draw attention to, right? Like there's no transcultural, transhistorical, universal experience that these substances will catalyze, but actually, people, ideally, they bring their own set and setting to the table, right?

Sam S.B. Shonkoff - 0:17:28
They bring their own personal dispositions, their own life story, and their own spiritual traditions or lack thereof like to that encounter. And so, I'm tracing that historically in Neo-Hasidism but also interested in just thinking about that more generally and cross culturally.

Sherry Walling - 0:17:50
And what's the conversation like within the tradition? Because on one hand, you have the opportunity to utilize substances that can both deepen and illuminate and allow for this reinterpretation of the tradition and then on the other hand, you have substances that allow for the reinterpretation of tradition, which most traditions are not really up for a lot of reinterpretation. So what's the larger conversation in terms of how these substances are viewed?

Sam S.B. Shonkoff - 0:18:22
Yeah, so it's really, it's interesting for reasons that are hard to explain, the resistance to this in Judaism has been much less, I think than in other tradition. Kind of like funny evidence of this is that Johns Hopkins University did this trial in their Psychedelic Research Center with religious leaders and they had a really like excessively easy time finding rabbis to volunteer for this, which was telling in itself, there was this disproportionately huge number of rabbis who were like, "Ooh pick me, pick me," but their selection criteria made it really difficult because it proved very hard for them to find rabbis who hadn't already had their own psychedelic experiences, like that ended up being one of the great challenges in terms of Jewish leaders and I think that that actually is quite telling. I mean, one thing is that mind-altering substances are generally not prohibited in Jewish law in a way that they are, for example, in Islamic law, and in terms of what you are pointing to before about the kind of the threats and dangers of new interpretations of sources, I think that in Jewish tradition, that is the bread and butter of what we do kind of even in the most like ultra conservative corners of the Jewish world. It's a fixture in theological discourse that the more you can kind of defamiliarize some deeply familiar canonical source, the more extraordinary like that moment of interpretation is. This idea that when we have new perspectives on traditional sources, we are letting the revelation of Mount Sinai continue to reverberate through the present moment.

Sam S.B. Shonkoff - 0:20:12
So, it's not to say that there is not resistance and there are some debates happening in the Jewish world today about how appropriate it would be to incorporate these substances and experiences into Jewish practices and to Jewish communities but I would say those debates are a little less heated in Jewish context than they are in many other religious contexts.

Sherry Walling - 0:20:47
Which I appreciate your pointing out in many ways is a hallmark of the tradition that the questioning and sort of reinterpretation is part of the tradition itself versus, you know, my early life background coming from a more evangelical perspective in which you know the canon is closed. There's a sense in which the divine has been given and now we're trying to muddle through but there's not a sort of sense of openness maybe in the same way as there is in other traditions.

Sam S.B. Shonkoff - 0:21:20
Yeah, they're one of the most common phrases in midrash, which are the collections of traditional Jewish interpretations of the Torah. One of the most common phrases is, devar aher, which literally means another thing. Another (inaudible), and you'll just sometimes have these just put side by side, you know, like here's another way of looking at this same source. And we have a very sort of commonplace idea at this point in Jewish spirituality, in Jewish tradition that even if we're looking at a particular verse of Torah, right, of the closed canon, that there are many different layers of that verse. There's the shot. There's this sort of simple plain sense, maybe the literal interpretation but there's also remez.

Sam S.B. Shonkoff - 0:22:04
There's a symbolic level. There's (inaudible) a secret mystical, perhaps even unspeakable, dimension of that that will emerge in different ways at different times. And so, there's a sort of elasticity in interpretation and so if the sources are having new unprecedented lights shine on them, great! Bring it, bring it on.

Sherry Walling - 0:22:31
You know, at least from my context, as a psychologist, a lot of the conversations that I'm part of related to psychedelics are around mental health. So, sometimes that's the traditional treating mental illness, you had symptoms of depression, you have this experience, and then you no longer have symptoms of depression. But I think for some of us, it has really opened up a larger conversation about what is wellness? What is wholeness? I guess, I'm curious from your perspective as a religious scholar, how do you think about these, the mystical element? I know mystical and spiritual and religious all (inaudible) for different connotations but is that part of what we're after when we're after human wholeness or human well being?

Sam S.B. Shonkoff - 0:23:20
So beautiful question. My mind goes in a couple different directions thinking about that. One is just ways in which these psychedelic medicines challenge us to think in pretty radically different ways about mental health and treatments of mental health, right? When we think of our sort of conventional approaches to psychopharmacological treatments, right? We think of SSRIs, you know, treating depression and anxiety where we are, the mechanism is to temporarily repeatedly manipulate the amount of serotonin that's in the synapses, right? Like to somehow change the chemistry and do that on a daily basis, twice a day, whatever it is and what these studies with the psychedelics are indicating over and over again is that actually the mechanism in these situations, which actually maybe even appear to be more sustainable and more transformative is not at the level of just manipulating the chemistry of the body but at the level of experience that there is something about the kinds of experiences that these substances generate that are themselves healing and transformative in some way.

Sam S.B. Shonkoff - 0:24:39
And, you know, in the field of psychology and medication, that is huge and from my perspective as a scholar of religion, that's just tremendously illuminating and affirming because that's something that traditions throughout the world, throughout human history have been saying is that there are kinds of experiences that are genuinely powerful and transformative and healing. And I think, you know, in addition to that sort of general observation, what healing looks like and feels like also looks different through this lens. Oftentimes, I think in contemporary kind of capitalist culture, American culture, where we assume that what healing looks like is the disappearance of sufferance.

Sherry Walling - 00:25:35
Sure, the elimination of the symptom.

Sam S.B. Shonkoff - 0:25:39
Exactly. We picture healing and effective treatment as eliminating pain, reducing suffering and replacing that with happiness and what we see with psychedelic treatments increasingly is something far more textured and complicated than actually the experiences themselves that are apparently so healing in many cases can be really hard, can be overwhelming and even terrifying at times, but they open us up in some powerful way. They might rattle us awake in some powerful ways and perhaps the way to think of it is not that they get rid of pain or suffering, but they give it a vaster pasture to run in, in some sense. Like it helps us pan out a little bit and so I think that plugging that back into religious life and spiritual practices-- what I was just saying we've done, so thinking about psychology and mental health, I think we've also done to religion. We've thought of religion and spirituality as something that's supposed to eliminate suffering and make us feel happy and tranquil and we throw our hands up in, you know, exasperation when spiritual practices don't immediately start working or if they actually make us feel sad or get in touch with some anger, we think, "Oh well, I guess that's not working." But I think that this psychedelic renaissance is really an opportunity to rethink, "Well, how do spiritual practices work in general?

Sam S.B. Shonkoff - 0:27:19
And how can actually the challenging parts of those experiences also be grease for the wheel for a sort of greater transformation that we didn't even really recognize as possible before?"

Sherry Walling - 0:27:35
I feel like there is this expansion, a deepening, that creates more capacity for a human psyche to experience suffering or challenging realities rather than a glossing over of that suffering or challenging realities and so this deepening is so, you know, again, curious to me as a psychologist, but I think also has big implications for meaning for existential reality and of course, for religious practice, and that we have become so averse to pain, and I think in some ways these experiences create more capacity for pain.

Sam S.B. Shonkoff - 0:28:15
I think that's right and sometimes like enduring the moment of fear, just having a deep cry, right? Like these can be the active ingredients at times.

Sherry Walling - 0:28:30
Well, what else Sam, what should I ask you about that's important? What key ideas do you think a lot about that I haven't thought to ask you?

Sam S.B. Shonkoff - 0:28:38
Chaplaincy is one thing, like psychedelic chaplaincy is this real new frontier right now thinking about questions of guides, right? Because we're potentially on the verge of a kind of bottleneck crisis or at least a challenge where the research is just gaining steam before our eyes. From what I can see, psychedelic study is the fastest-growing field in academia right now. It seems like every couple of months, there's a new center. There are constantly new fascinating papers coming out with all these findings.

Sam S.B. Shonkoff - 0:29:14
The legal landscape is changing, the policies are being challenged, and it's very imaginable that within, well already in the state of Oregon, right, we're seeing clinical use on the horizon and that's only gonna spread quickly. But something that I think is really, I think is really promising and exciting about this new moment with psychedelics is this increasing sense that guides are important. Like it's not to say we need to start judging people, you know, using these more so-called recreationally and had parties or concerts or in like doing it by themselves or just with a group of friends, it's not to judge that, but it's to say that they're actually, for some people, it's really essential to have someone in there kind of as a container, someone to hold the space for them, someone to be ground control while they're going wherever they're going, and if these practices, if these treatments and techniques with psychedelics start to really flourish and spread in the way that they surely will, we need really good guides. It's one of the things that in these collaborations between the Graduate Theological Union and the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, if that's one of the big conversations that we're having and thinking about what kind of skill sets and backgrounds and toolkits this guide should have, I think really gets to the heart of some of the questions we've been talking about here around this intersection of psychology and medicine and mysticism and spirituality. And so, we're exploring this intersection between psychedelic guidance and tried and tested techniques of chaplaincy and spiritual care recognizing that this isn't talk therapy, at least in the actual experiences, and it's also not a strictly medical context in the kind of white coat, doctor, MD sense.

Sam S.B. Shonkoff - 0:31:25
These guides actually should ideally be people who are familiar with the spiritual landscape, who maybe can be attuned and humble in relation to the different kinds of religious backgrounds and spiritual orientations that people are already bringing to these experiences, and so I think that the training of guides and envisioning what that looks like is really exciting and important frontier right now.

Sherry Walling - 0:32:04
Yeah, I mean it reminds me of the story you shared earlier about Solomon's experience with Timothy Leary as a guide and how powerful that was because he could be so clearly Jewish, right? He had sacred objects. He had sacred practices that were deeply integrated into the work that he was doing because that was what he desired, that was what fit for him, and so to be able to have a landscape that creates space for that and honors the power of those traditions whether it is in a psychotherapy context or a medicalized context or whether these practices begin to show up in our faith communities or religious communities in different ways.

Sam S.B. Shonkoff - 0:32:46
Absolutely, and something that's very interesting at the end of that trip report that Solomon gave when he was kind of evaluating his experience, he did complain a little bit and said, "You know I didn't feel Jewish enough to me," and he actually let himself daydream therein then about what it could look like in Jewish communities. You know, how a Jewish community could actually get together in a particular kind of space with particular kinds of practices integrated into the journey experience with, in his mind, LSD but this could, of course, be generalized to include other substances. And I think that is just a really fascinating like growth edge right now and it's already, of course, being explored on the ground or the underground in many cases. But yeah, looking at like what does it look like when say before going on a journey, in the preparation process, a community is getting together and maybe doing some text study, you know, studying some mystical sources from a tradition that will sort of prime them in some way for where they're heading, perhaps engaged in some practices of prayer or communal singing and maybe actually literally being inside of a synagogue or a beit midrash, a house of study and learning. In what ways do those conditions and those preparations open us up to not only potentially deeper layers of healing and experience but ones that resonate on a particular wavelength for particular individuals and communities and then of course the integration process afterwards. Different people are going to need to make sense of these experiences and make meaning out of these experiences in different language and different cultural matrices that are in relation to the rest of their lives.

Sam S.B. Shonkoff - 0:34:52
We need religious leaders who are ready to do that. We need lay communities who are exploring different techniques of doing that. And I'll also just add this because I'm personally passionate about this, we also need to be doing that in ways that are both experimental and also attuned to issues of appropriation in ways that there is like a deep violent history of colonialism and exploitation that has just done heartbreaking damage to communities in recent centuries who have practiced with these substances and to merely sort of absorbed them into nonindigenous communities without some kind of conversation about that, some kind of humility around those considerations, I think, is really doing a disservice obviously to the communities who have been working with these substances for many, many generations but also to these contemporary nonindigenous communities themselves. I think this is a real opportunity to potentially heal some of the traumas and the deep violence that we've seen in the age of colonialism.

Sherry Walling - 0:36:15
It's a beautiful thought, I think, to begin wrapping up our conversation with but you know the way that you describe what's possible here with psychedelic chaplaincy or with just deeply informed religious practitioners who are able to help guide people really from their context, is it-- it comes back to where we began with the irony of how individualized these experiences have begun and when we have some more or different mystical communal language when we are kind of reintegrating the tradition with the mystical practice and with the journey, it seems like those practices no longer happen purely between the I and the everybody else but can be more of a shared experience that is hopefully more communally healing.

Sam S.B. Shonkoff - 0:37:03
Amen. Yeah, I mean modern humanism has done many good things and to affirm that every human being is a human being is obviously an incredibly important insight in human history and yet that modern humanism has also in many cases sought to efface the differences among different human beings and to have a sort of excessive universalism on steroids that becomes colorblind that becomes blind to cultural diversity and difference and I think, this, what we're looking at here is how do we integrate this sense of justice and equality and affirming that the human being and the human experience, while also recognizing that we're not just faceless individuals who are coming with some sort of unmediated, right, unconditioned perspective that actually how do we actually take seriously the different backgrounds and value systems and ritual practices that different human beings bring to the table and how will that really deepen our sense of like what mysticism is, what spirituality is, and how will we develop more practices with psychedelics and beyond psychedelics that really see the communal interpersonal dimensions you're seeing.

Sherry Walling - 0:38:40
Well, beautiful. I think that's probably a good place to leave it but more generally if people are interested in your work or in the kinds of conversations that you're hosting, what's the best way for folks to follow you? Get in touch with you? Read what you're writing, hear what you're thinking?

Sam S.B. Shonkoff - 0:39:01
Yeah, well, definitely check out the GTU website and the Center for Jewish Studies at the GTU at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. You can find me on Twitter at Sam Shonkoff and I'm very easy to find in cyberspace, so I'll certainly be interested to be in conversation with folks out there.

Sherry Walling - 0:39:27
If you haven't yet had the opportunity to listen to Episode Nine of Season One of MIND CURIOUS,

Sam S.B. Shonkoff - 0:39:34
highly recommend that you'll hear Sam in parallel to a few other religious thinkers.

Sherry Walling - 0:39:39
This program is sponsored by Mind Cure Health. For more on all that they are doing to help move forward the role that psychedelics can play in well-being and healing, check out mindcure.com. We also have a presence on all the major social media platforms and we would love to hear from you what you think about this podcast. Feel free to jump over to iTunes. Give us a rating, leave us some feedback, or feel free to engage with us with your questions and comments on social media. Thank you for your time and stay curious.