58 - Shane Mauss (Psychonautic Adventures at the Edge of Genius & Madness)

 This week’s guest is comedian Shane Mauss, whose psychedelic standup A Good Trip blew minds at over 100 tour stops last year, and whose documentary film Psychonautics takes us on Shane’s adventures in psychedelic therapies. He also hosts the Here We Are Podcast, where he interviews scientists of all stripes and mines their research for standup inspiration…Shane’s always been a rigorous thinker, a legitimate and respectable skeptic, which made his inquiries into the weird realms of psychedelia so interesting to me. He started tripping to self-medicate for his lifelong depression a few years ago but hisHe and I disagreed for years about the nature and validity of the phenomenon known as “synchronicity” – that everything is linked behind the scenes, no coincidences – but this summer he texted me to tell me he’d had a revelatory experience and that I was right all along.The next thing I heard from him, he was on Duncan Trussell Family Hour Podcast talking about how he had just gotten out of a mental institution. So WHAT EXACTLY was I right about, again?? We go deep in this episode about the nature of reality and madness in this warm and funny conversation (in which he shared what he actually saw that put him in the psych ward)…http://shanemauss.com http://herewearepodcast.com TOPICS- How the universe is wearing stripes and plaid (just like in some of Alex Grey’s art).- What’s behind that crazy look in someone’s eyes.- Simulation theory vs. the brain’s innate virtual reality.- What people are really seeing when people say they see God.- A bunch of awesome trip reports from Shane.- Shane getting courted as a clinical subject for new extended-state DMT trials.- Time as a multidimensional landscape of rhyming moments- Marshall McLuhan’s “invisible environment” as it relates to memory as a mutable substance, altered every time it’s accessed.- Evolving through the layers of the multiverse from animal to human and beyond.- The Evolution of God and how we’re all participating in the new empathy of a deity that does not have it figured out.- A new kind of psychedelic science.- Princeton Engineering Anomalies Lab and the possibility that the so-called future is actually present and accessible via longer wavelengths.- and a bunch more… QUOTES“I found out years ago that I can just gobble up some mushrooms two or three times a week for a few weeks, and that’ll get rid of my depression for a few months or so…I started thinking, ‘What if instead of just getting rid of my depression, I could actually feel GOOD?’”“The DMT world feels very ‘top down,’ very ‘creator’ type of thing…”“Sobriety is not really a thing that works, even though I've got to do it for now…”“Why try to envision Jesus doing something – why try to have a dream where you’re seeing Jesus and talking to Jesus, when it’s just in your head? Just BE Jesus!”“A lot of this stuff gets pretty far away from the scientific method, you know?” Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe