Psychedelic experience

And this plays a very important part of the conversion story.

I want to just mention that because, yeah, my conversion actually happened during an acid trip.

Um, and it wasn't, it wasn't one of those where there's like, I'm seeing llamas on the wall, you know, like Trump is saying something over here, you know, whatever is going on.

I wasn't seeing any of that.

And for me, so much of my life was like living in my head, built around understanding and trying to understand things.

Whereas like this, the reverse was true here.

Everything with the Lord started with, especially like, yeah, in that moment in the acid trip, Start with faith.

I'm giving you belief, like I'm helping you to believe.

He's like, "None of this has anything to do with me.

In fact, I don't even know why I'm here." And uh, uh, uh, his lack of paranoia in that moment, uh, said to me, "Oh, I think this guy is going to have a life-changing acid trip."

Well, he was watching, what? The World Series?

Yeah.

It was a meme of three images.

In the first image, it was titled Before the Psychedelic Trip, and there was a small figure dragging an enormous black tangled bundle behind it, covered in eyes and padlocks.

And in the second image, titled During the Psychedelic Trip, the bundle bursts open and strange colorful creatures pour out and eyes and stars and tentacles.

And the figure that had been dragging it behind looks astonished, perhaps a bit enchanted and probably a little bit overwhelmed.

And then in the third and final image titled after the psychedelic trip, the figure is walking forward, holding hands with all of the creatures that were once locked inside.

Nothing has been destroyed.

Nothing's been left behind.

think you're onto something with that one.

Dude, I think that, and I mean, obviously I can't speak for anybody else, but that meditation was the, at least my experience, was the closest I've ever gotten to any psychedelic experience.

That was the closest.

Yeah, I mean, I literally, I was trying to really just fully let go and just experience, no thoughts, just fully dive into it.

Where was it? Can't remember.

Where someone was having a NASA trip for like years.

They lived like 45 years.

And as they were getting into bed on the trip, they looked at a lamp and they goes, wait, I don't have a lamp in my room.

And so Octavio began using the toad to treat or offered it as a treatment to people in the community and super, super quickly emerge from that encounter with a narrative of not only kind of healing the tribe of addiction to meth, but of resurrecting a lost psychedelic tradition that had been used in ancient times but been eradicated during the violent contact with Spanish and later Mexican outsiders, and that he had brought it back to life.

And that narrative of finding the indigenous source of this potent psychedelic experience, I think really changed how people engaged with the idea of toad smoking.

It wasn't just a weird creature with a mind bending trip.

but something that had been used for spiritual and shamanic reasons and purposes.

Many of your listeners will know of the writer Gary Nabhan, who has done work on Seri ethnobiology.

Richard Felger, the botanist, did incredible work with the seri.

And so just on that front, the idea that such a singularly powerful psychedelic experience would have been lost and forgotten while these thousands of other names and uses for plants and animals would have been preserved seems unlikely.

The other weird part of delving into this part of the story for me was...