I think my mind was , I , I was just , I was so um cerebral in my , just my engagement with anything . I was so skeptical of any of the , the spiritual , the religious and spiritual traditions that , that have given us most of our meditation talk , you know , um that I think I just would have , um I , and I know many of these people like I , you know , I have , I have tried to teach , you know , Richard Dawkins to meditate and Daniel Dennett to meditate . I've ambushed them with meditation and very , you know , both , both in a group setting and , and one on one .
I mean , so what I , I hadn't done psychedelics for 25 years because I mean , again , they were super useful for me in the beginning . Then I discovered meditation on the basis of , of those experiences got really into meditation and realized , OK , this is a much more , this really is the , you know , conceptually , this makes much more sense to me , this is delivering the goods , you know , in terms of my experience , um there's no need to keep having these , you know , seeking these peak experiences with , with , with drugs . But it had been , you know , 25 years since I had done that .
Um I know I wasn't having these kinds of experiences spontaneously that get , that showed me that there was an inner landscape that was worth exploring . Um I was a very hard headed skeptic who was very interested in lots of things , but there was no alternative to me just thinking more about those things , right ? I mean , the idea that there's some other way of grasping cognitively at the interesting parts of the world beyond thinking about the world , right ?
I mean , there's no doubt but this uh the truth is , I mean , just looking at this cup is just as formless and as mysterious as that , right when it's seen in the right way . And that's , and that's , that's what , you know , meditation encourages , you know , want to recognize .
Um Again , leaving aside any of the superstition and , and other worldliness and miracles that you , you know , uh we don't have to talk about at the moment and you certainly don't need to endorse in order to be interested in this stuff . Um And so that's the , the , the bifurcation between the all of the utility of psychedelics and what I'm talking about under the rubric of meditation is at this point of OK , once you realize there's a there , there , what do you do ? And what's the logic by which you're led to do it ?
