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[singing] Que pasa mufasa. Welcome to the Mycopreneur podcast.
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This is a podcast about people solving problems with mushrooms. I'm your host, Dennis Walker. Let's get down to business. [singing] Que pasa mufasa. What's up, everybody?
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I'm elated to welcome Eric Osborne, who's the founder of Psanctuary, P-S-A-N-C-T-U-A-R-Y, the Psanctuary in Louisville, Kentucky. Welcome to the Mycopreneur podcast, Eric. How's it going today?
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Man, Dennis, I'm happy to be here, brother. How are you doing? Dude, we're a long time overdue for this. You know, I was fortunate to have you host an incubator, and we got to connect you to the Mycopreneur community.
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And I really wanna continue this conversation about your very important contributions over a number of years to the psilocybin mushroom space internationally, which maybe often get overlooked in this current age of, uh, m- cause célèbre and, uh, mushroom celebrities and things like that.
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But let's take it back to the beginning, before Psanctuary, before MycoMeditation. What got you into psilocybin mushrooms, and how did that intersect with your faith? Oh, man. Wow. I guess LSD got me into psilocybin.
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[chuckles] 'Cause my friend said, at 19, they're like, "Hey, if you like LSD, buddy, you're gonna love mushrooms." And I sure enough did.
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So I had, had a good dose of LSD, and then a couple months later got some mushrooms, and I just felt like I was home. I was just like, "This is where I belong."
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And, uh, that, that really opened up the door to the world of mycology, and I got interested in wild harvesting, uh, gourmet mushrooms.
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I started a company, Magnificent Mushrooms, and, uh, helped Indiana form the wor- the state's s- wild mushroom certification program to sell wild mushrooms to restaurants and stuff.
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And, you know, then I was clandestinely growing mushrooms in closets and basements.
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And, uh, when I had a mushroom farm, I just, well, I, I couldn't not grow tons of psilocybin because I was growing tons of shiitake and whatnot. And so it just kind of made sense. I had always been, uh, you know,
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giving away mushrooms to people. I really never liked selling mushrooms.
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That was kind of a, uh, a spiritual component to me, is I didn't, I didn't like connecting money to mush- to psychedelic mushrooms anyway, for, for whatever reason.
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Um, just thought they're so w- they're more powerful than we can ever put a dollar on, you know?
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Um, and so I gave them away forever and ever and ever, and then my mushroom farm was really struggling, so I was like, "Well, I guess we're gonna have to sling some shrooms."
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And I did that for a while, reluctantly, um, until during a dose one night, the mu- mushrooms, whatever it is that's talking through the mushrooms, said, "Jamaica is going to be the lighthouse of psychedelic s- psychedelic wellness for the world, and you are going to light the torch."
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And I was like, "No way. That is not happening." And they're like, "Yes, it is." And I was like, "No."
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And every time I ate mushrooms for a full year, that would come and it would-- And it was like, I was eating mushrooms probably once, twice a month, and every single time, they would just sit me down and say, "This is what you're doing."
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And I finally submitted. And, you know, the motivation there really, if I had a conscious motivation at that time, which was 2011 is when the message started coming through.
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Uh, 2013 was the first retreat that we, we did a, uh, beta on.
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And, you know, the motivation there was I was seeing all this ayahuasca talk, you know, all the ayahuasca retreats and taking high doses of mushrooms and listening to, like, Terence and Dennis McKenna.
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I was just like, "Come on, y'all. Mushrooms are just as powerful as ayahuasca." And I was studying Maria Sabina and her teachings and all that.
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And, uh, and so, like, within my mind, my personal motivation outside of this download that I was getting from the mushrooms was to bring, like, like, publicly present a spiritual
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relationship with the mushroom to the world. Uh, and even then, I was, honestly, I was afraid to do that because most people were s- were coming to mushrooms for a therapeutic...
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If anybody, I mean, 2013, when I did the, the first retreat, and Michael Pollan's book hadn't even come out, his New Yorker article hadn't even come out. It was not even really in the conversation publicly.
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Um, and so I was really reluctant to speak to them spiritually back then because I just-- Like, I was bootstrapping this thing.
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I was still selling mushrooms on the underground, so I couldn't really publicize that I was doing psychedelic retreats, you know? And, um, [lips smack]
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but then, like, what would happen is people would come down and have these massive spiritual experiences trying to heal from their depression or anxiety, whatever.
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I mean, we worked with people with all kinds of, uh, conditions. And they would have these profound spiritual experiences, and then I would get to...
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I, I still, like, it's like, so one of the most beautiful opportunities to help walk people through a spiritual awakening. And so for years and years, we did those retreats. I ran Myco for seven years, and, uh,
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COVID came down, and things just shut down, and I was like, "Let's go back to the States. Let's go do this the way that we always wanted to." I was har- I was-- My heart was breaking down in Jamaica.
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As much as I love Jamaica, I miss Kentucky. I'm, I'm a country boy at heart.
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And, uh, so yeah, my wife and I packed up, came back to Kentucky, and in the process, we were-- I had a nonprofit that I'd started that was for scholarships to send people to Jamaica.
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And, uh, when we came back up and we were selling the company, our attorney was like, "Eric- I don't know if you've ever heard, heard of Evan Park. He was a psychedelic attorney for a long time.
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Uh, he was like, "Eric, man, if anybody can, can start a mushroom church that can stand before the Supreme Court, it's you, and I wanna help you do this." And I was just like, "Nope, I'm not doing it. Not doing it."
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'Cause like I'm, I'm Catholic or I grew up Catholic. I got tons of church trauma. I've seen the damage that organized religion has done, and so I was very reluctant to do so.
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But the more I would sit with it, the more I just like in my heart I knew like this is, this is the way forward, especially because equitable access has been so important to me.
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You know, when I started Myco, um, I was doing-- I, I, I never even did a back of the napkin. I just was like, "Eh, 1,000 bucks for 10 days. Sure, that's good." And like I was just giving this thing away.
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Um, so fortunately the partners that came in brought in the financial, um, uh, wisdom and helped keep that company alive [chuckles] for seven years, 'cause otherwise it would've been in the ground very quickly.
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Uh, it was, it was, it was tanking financially as it was. Uh, and so yeah, man, it's, it's been a, it has been a heck of a ride. You know, I was for, what?
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Four years I smuggled mushrooms to Jamaica to r- to start those retreats.
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And so like when I see what's going on in Jamaica there now, it's like it's estimated to be like a, I think it's like $26 million a year is what's going into Jamaica.
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Um, that really touches my heart because I didn't go to Jamaica to start a mushroom retreat, right? I was visiting Jamaica for 10 years prior to that because that was actually my spiritual mecca.
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I, yeah, I, I didn't wear this shirt for you, but I realized as I was hopping on, I was like, "Oh, shit, Dennis was in Jamaica. I got the colors on for him."
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But Rasta, when I left the Catholic Church, uh, and like I w- I got introduced to cannabis and mushrooms, Rasta is what appealed to me the most because that was like an earth-based spirituality, one love, you know.
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Um, and so I started going to Jamaica or Jamaica every year for 10 years before the retreats themselves even started. Yeah.
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It's so interesting now to see the evolution of everything, 'cause as someone myself who was always more underground, like this was not really a socially acceptable and, and honestly still isn't in a lot of ways industry where you could just come out and publicly share what you're doing.
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More and more people are, and you've got your church there, but for many years it was just kind of in these little echo chambers, these little pockets, and we all knew it was important, but didn't really see how it fit into the broader culture.
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But now we have characters like Brian Hubbard, and I saw that you were excited about the executive order that was signed. Oh, yeah. Right?
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And he's very much speaking and that kind of whole group of people to Christian nationalists or within this, uh, container of Christianity or of Catholicism, and for so long these have been very strange and alienated bedfellows, right?
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It's like the psychedelic experience. Many people are having profound spiritual experiences, but it's at odds with the dogma and the doctrine of the church.
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And I think really in the last few years and this year, we've seen an attempt to bridge that gap, and I've been seeing like the owners of, uh, MBHO Ibogaine down in Tijuana, right, which is a prominent ibogaine clinic, making videos about ibogaine and Christianity, and we've been seeing more churches emerge.
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Of course, there's Zydor out in Oakland, has 120,000 members. I've seen an estimate of maybe 500 churches that exist in the United States that are psychedelic churches.
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Really hard to quantify 'cause not all of them are as public, right? But w- we are seeing more and more in this domain, so I find it really interesting. Also, your journey kind of represents a full circle in some ways.
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Like it's almost like, would you call it like the, the exiled child or, uh, the, the wh- what is the name from the, the biblical scripture, right? Of like- The prodigal son...
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the prodigal son leaving, going to Jamaica, leaving the church, and then coming back home. There's really a hero's arc to that journey from what I'm seeing.
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[laughs] The last thing I ever thought I would do is start a church in my entire life, believe me.
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[laughs] Well, I also understand based on some comments you had made publicly that you were arrested for growing psilocybin mushrooms, which also puts you in a unique category because I think now in 2026 there's this sense of cultural acceptance and there's people who are pretty open about it, but that really wasn't always the case.
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Uh, and 10 years ago, 15 years ago, this was a, a very clandestine operation for a lot of people. Can you talk a little bit about that chapter? Oh, man. Whew. That was, uh,
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one of the most painful periods of my life, there's no doubt about it. Um, and I see that it was-- I perceive it as being divinely orchestrated because I didn't want to be selling mushrooms on the underground.
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I never did. I was constantly paranoid, living in fear, producing like, you know, 30 fresh pounds of psilocybin a week. I mean, I had a, a big, big operation going on outdoors and in a big walk-in closet.
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It was, it was beautiful, it was amazing, um, but it was terrifying at the same time, you know?
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And so what ultimately happened, and I feel like this is really important to share because we i- in a lot of the hype and the excitement around psychedelics, we can forget, uh, that, you know, there are risks, and the risks are often not what we anticipate.
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So what happened for us is we were doing a ceremony with friends, these are people that we had known for everybody well over a year, two years most. Um, one of them was an employee at my farm.
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Uh, and the friend of my wife, a female there, she started getting anxious and she wanted to go lay down in her tent. I was like, "Sure, go lay down in your tent. That's fine."
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We had all dosed, which was a problem, and, um, maybe an hour later, uh, just out of nowhere, her car is just blasting down the driveway. We had her keys.
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Like I ended up throwing her keys in the ocean of, in the sea in Jamaica
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just kind of like as a, as a point of closure, but she army crawled on the ground, had a key magnetized under the bumper of her car and was like paranoid and afraid and wanted to go see her boyfriend.
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So she got into a little wreck. She didn't get hurt or anything, but I mean, I was freaking the fuck out. I just figured it was over for me. You know, I have pr- two uncles that went to prison for the Cornbread Mafia.
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Um, our family's been deeply traumatized by the drug war, and I just figured I was going to jail for manslaughter when she left, when she drove off.
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Uh, but fortunately she just ran off in a little ditch and got out and was like making a bunch of noise, and people came out and got her. We were way out in the middle of nowhere in Indiana.
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And, uh, the next day, like as soon as I could drive, which is about three o'clock in the morning Got in the car, me and my, my now wife, then girlfriend, um, and went looking for her.
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We drove an hour and a half to her boyfriend's house, couldn't find her, just freaking out, and called, you know, all the police stations, uh, everywhere, hospitals, everything.
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And we're texting her, calling her, and nothing. And finally at, like, 5:00 PM she text messages and said, "Hey, I'm okay, I just need some space." And we're like, "Okay, thank God."
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And then I was like, "No more selling shrooms. This is done. This is done. That is energetically what caused this to happen. I'm done. I don't care what I gotta do."
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And so, uh, we came home that night, and as I was pulling in my driveway, I was living on an 87-acre farm, had one neighbor who was bush hogging, and he, uh, p- flagged me down.
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He's like, "Yeah, man, the sh- the sheriff was just here, said he heard a mush- mushroom party got out of hand." And I was like, "Oh, shit." So I took my tractor, blocked off, blocked off the driveway, big long driveway.
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I'd blocked it off at the very end, so if the cops came back I could see them. And I had a massive bonfire, burned everything. Just the week before I had sold, like, 10 dry pounds.
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I had just gotten rid of everything I had except for a pound. So I burned everything I had, which is a ton, and then I hid m- my last pound.
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And I remember telling Courtney then, like, "This is my sacrament and I'm not going to, I am not gonna throw away my sacrament because I'm afraid." And so I took it out in the woods and put it in a tree.
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And, um, maybe three day... That was, like, a Saturday, and then on Tuesday we were there working in the farm and I was on lunch break, and, uh, here comes cops, seven cars.
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State cops, county cops, city cops came in, checked-- They went through everything. They were touring the mushroom farm. They're like, "Well, this is pretty cool, actually."
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Like, and I gave them, I gave them the grandest of grand tours, you know. And, uh, at the very end they didn't find anything and went to the house. We had cleaned everything up. We went through it, didn't find a speck.
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And at the very end, this one smart-ass cop was like, "Well, I know you're growing some weed out in your woods. I'm gonna go find it." And I was like, "Well, I don't grow no weed."
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I never would grow weed 'cause I was scared it would give away my mushrooms, you know.
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And so he went out in the woods, and I don't know if the, what led him to that hollow tree, but he found that bag of mushrooms, and he came back like he was a kid on Christmas, he was so happy to put those handcuffs on us.
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So it was, it was traumatic, man. My wife and I were, uh, considered co-defendants, co-conspirators rather, so we couldn't talk to each other. We weren't married, so we couldn't talk to each other.
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We were separated for eight weeks while the whole trial went through.
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Fortunately, her parents are both attorneys, and they had a hookup on a top-tier attorney for her, and the judge deemed that we were both going to get the same sentence. So her attorney helped her get a minimal sentence.
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We, we were charged with three Class B felonies that were reduced down to a D felony of maintaining a common nuisance, which is the most ridiculous charge I ever heard of.
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And after two and a half years of probation, that was expunged, and we were-- it was taken down to a misdemeanor. So it was, uh, I'll never forget that. I was doing a ceremony in Jamaica.
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The d- the, the d- like, an hour before the ceremony started, we got an email from our attorney saying that our, uh, case had been expunged, our convi- conviction, convictions had been expunged, and that was one of the most celebratory ceremonies that I've ever participated in.
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So yeah, it was a, it... And, like, it's ridiculous, Dennis, man. I was on probation for psilocybin and was smuggling psilocybin to Jamaica to run these retreats. It's just like, I don't even, I don't even know.
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I'm like, I'm in the process of writing this book. I'm putting, putting out a book in September, um, of, of basically why I believe that a church is the most effective model.
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And in it I talk a lot about these stories and, and within that there's this whole, like, episode of, uh, ovoids. I don't know if you know of the Ovidios cestodiata. Like, I had never found wild psilocybin for years.
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I'd been hunting it, hunting, hunting. Never found it. Was always growing my mushrooms in my closet in my basement for a solid, a solid decade. I never went without mushrooms growing in my closet.
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And, uh, the s- nine months after we were arrested, when I had not had any psilocybin growing, and, and, like, I had a strain that I had grown. I called it Mystery. It was, like, my, my buddy.
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And, uh, nine months after that we found the first batch of ovoids, and I started finding them by the thousands. And, like, I would be sitting in my living room.
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There were times when I did not know how the retreats were gonna happen.
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I was like, "I don't know where we're gonna get mushrooms for these retreats," 'cause I couldn't get the Jamaicans up to skill growing them and whatnot, and the, just so many, so many challenges there.
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And I would be sitting in my living room and I would hear this voice telling me where to go, and I would go and there would be just ungodly amounts of psilocybin.
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And so I just spent so many hours encapsulating, drying and encapsulating psilocybin here, and then smuggling it down to Jamaica while having three felonies. [laughs] I'm just like, "Eric, what are you doing, man?"
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But it's like that to me is a testimony to the mission of this work. Like, this is not, this is not for me to make money. I'm happy to make money, but this is about, like, cognitive liberty.
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This is about giving people access, their own direct access to however they interpret divinity or spirit or whatever the mystery is that's behind the veil. Yeah.
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Personally, I've never experienced the ovoids that you're mentioning, so I think, uh, I'm gonna have to pay you a visit down there in Kentucky to tap in sometime.
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And I, I would love to expand further upon why a church is the optimal model for intersecting with psilocybin mushrooms as a culture and society, because there's a lot of debate around this obviously right now.
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You have vested interests who really wanna restrict it to the clinical pathway, and there's some very prominent and outspoken powerful figures who say, "Medical first and only.
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That's the only way that this is gonna get rolled out."
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Then you have a lot of people who are actively campaigning for decrim, and I have a lot of faith in the professed ideology behind decrim, which is nobody should go to jail for this. Mm-hmm.
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And then you have kind of point-blank retail sales, and you've got smoke shops and brick and mortars, and you've got online vendors just indiscriminately selling.
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I can also appreciate from a cognitive libertarian standpoint that, but it's missing something for me, right? There's the, there's no community there.
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There's really no accountability or, or transparency in a lot of cases. And ideally, or when done well, a church can provide all those things.
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So let's hear from your perspective, and now that you're into the book you're, you're writing right now, why is the church model the ideal model for making psilocybin mushrooms available to people? Yeah.
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I mean, I do wanna say that I, I am in favor of all models, though the free-for-all model is the one that I'm least in favor of because it is missing tons of really important components.
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And at the same time, I believe that everyone has the God-given freedom to consume whatever plants that are safe on this planet. But we know that psilocybin is medicinal.
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We know the scheduling BS is just that, complete BS. They, they-- There's no reason that they're still a Schedule I substance, period.
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And so with that being said, um, I have found over the years that there are very important safeguards in place for these, and this is one of the things that the medical model does not really get.
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If I could tell you the dozens and dozens of physicians, psychiatrists, therapists that I have dosed with psilocybin, who in the midst of their experience said, "This is fucking wrong. This is wrong.
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This is not what mushrooms are supposed to do. This is not what I read in Michael Pollan's book." And I'm like, "Well, I understand that's not what you read, but this is how it works."
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And so approaching this from just purely a clinical standpoint, I truly believe introduces a significant amount of risk. The, the primary risk being that the clinicians themselves are typically not practitioners.
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Our model of medicine is that the doctor gives the sick patient the medicine that they themselves take, and then they get better because of some neurochemical or biochemical reaction that's happening in the body.
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For all of the talk about respecting the indigenous models, we do a really poor job of that because the indigenous models that have been studying these medicines for thousands and thousands of years-- Let's not forget that the oldest cave paintings illustrate psilocybin mushrooms, that these m- medicines of ancientcy have been used not just as a applied therapeutic, but they've been used as a tool of, um, um...
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What do I, I wanna say? Of, um, um... Oh, gosh. Diagnosis. That the actual, the quote unquote "physician" or the shaman was often the one that took the medicine instead of the sick patient.
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So that is a complete paradigm shift that we do not have a concept for in our medical model.
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And I'm not saying that's the only way that it should be used, but that is actually a very legitimate use of psychedelics, psilocybin in particular. There's plenty of evidence.
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There's plenty of documented research from the '40s and '50s that show that psilocybin actually does in, like, uh, uh, um, increase our potential towards extrasensory perception.
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You probably know that, uh, dimethyl-- Not, uh... Is it-- What was, what was it? Was it DMT? Is it DMT that was almost called or for a while-- No, harmaline.
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Harmaline for a while was called telepathine because these compounds actually do expand consciousness enough where you can perceive information that the mind is not normally capable of perceiving.
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So that, that alone just shakes the whole foundation of how we understand applied medicine. When you take it then and start considering giving the patient psilocybin and how that functions within the being.
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And so, like, what I'm gonna say right now is something that I have started to say publicly that it, it will not make sense to a lot of people.
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And it's just too important that I share the information that I've collected over the years because when I have consumed psilocybin, which is over 500 times at least, and when I have administered psilocybin, which is over 4,000 doses at least, I have been studying this process.
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I, I am in rapt attention trying to understand the fundamentals of what are-- what's going on here.
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Because you know as well as I do, Dennis, that when you consume these mushrooms, that the-- there are almost an infinite number of ways that the experience can manifest itself.
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And yet, there are these repeated patterns that can be observed over time.
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And it takes a very long time to be able to observe those patterns, especially if you're experimenting on yourself or really even you've experimented on others.
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Now, in Jamaica, I had incredible fortune, and still do, of doing group, group dosing where I'm administering to, you know, anywhere from 5 to 15 people. And my specialty has been high-dose administration in groups.
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So I was doing, you know, groups of, you know, people doing 5 to 15 grams of 5 to 15 people. And the amount of data that you can collect in watching that experience unfold, uh, it, it's, it's just--
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What you see in a clinic on a two-to-one scenario is infinitely smaller than what you're gonna get in, in this kind of situation. And so what I have seen, and again, this is gonna sound so backwards.
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The only way, the only place I've ever found this spoken to is in the teachings of Rudolf Steiner, who I've been studying for the last couple years, um, is that we believe that psilocybin functions primarily on, you know, we've got the, the, uh, serotonin system with 5-HT2A, you know, and all this.
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So what I have witnessed, and I can go-- I can give examples of how this displays, um, is that first and foremost, what is being impacted is the etheric body, is the auric s- the aura, the energetic self.
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These are energetic medicines. These are not just some biochemical response. And so the things that come out of people There, there is no predictability for it.
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There has, uh, the, the number of clinicians and, and, like, very well-intended and, and, you know, smart people, uh, therapists and whatnot, who want to pathologize the outcomes of a psychedelic experience because they can't explain it in the context of their, you know, deconstructionalist medicine, uh, illustrates the shortcomings of that field when it comes to really understanding what this process is.
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So I'd, I'd love to, I'd love to share this. This is an example. I don't know h- I, I'm not sure, you know, I'm curious how much you've experienced with this or what your knowledge of is it in a historical sense.
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But, you know, uh, Maria Sabina, for instance, had a quote where she said, um, if the person that she's working for doesn't vomit out their sickness, that she will have to vomit it out for them.
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Have you ever seen that quote by any chance? Not that quote, but that's my understanding of how some of these bioenergetic medicines work. All right. All right. So how is that happening
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if it is not the energetic body of the individual who is there as a support pulling stagnant energy off of the person that they're working on? And look, I, I have been an absolute skeptic.
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I got into mushrooms because of science. Uh, I, I thought I was gonna be a herpetologist as a kid, you know? I still, like, study snakes. Like, I'm surrounded by boa constrictors in this room right here.
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I love science, and I recognize through my explorations of spirit that material science does not have all the answers.
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And so anyway, I could go off on a huge rant there or c- I could cont- [laughs] continue my rant, uh, but maybe I'll give it a break there, uh, see, see how that lands. Yeah. Well, thanks for sharing that.
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You know, interestingly enough, I've been to Maria Sabina's family compound twice in Huautla de Jiménez, dating back to 2010 was my first visit there, and have spent a lot of time in Mexico as someone who grew up on the border.
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I'm from Chula Vista, which we affectionately call Chula Wanna. So I became more and more comfortable crossing over to Mexico as I matured and started learning about all these different traditions, right?
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The mushrooms are one, but there's [coughs] quite a few other indigenous ethnomedicine traditions spanning the country.
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Of course, peyote, that's where it's found natively and has been used for millennia or certainly many generations.
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But of course, Oaxaca and Huautla de Jiménez became very interesting because of the whole Maria Sabina story, and by that time, I had found out about Huautla and went and visited and took the little colectivo they call them, the little minibus, six hours up this harrowing road with switchbacks up the mountain and just sheer drops right down hundreds or thousands of feet.
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You get to this village. By that time, the hoopla had died down. It was pre-psychedelic renaissance, quote-unquote, pre-Michael Pollan, pre-Fantastic Fungi. So there was Reality Sandwich, I think was the main- Yeah...
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kind of de facto psychedelic media hub, and they're still around. I've been fortunate to write for them. But at that time, I think they were the only psychedelic media that was regularly publishing.
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So I was in Oaxaca, uh, for no relation to Huautla, waiting for two friends to arrive for a road trip through South Mexico and Central America, junior year of college, and I read this Reality Sandwich article serendipitously about Maria Sabina and Huautla, and I start putting two t- two and two together.
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I go, "I'm very close. I'm gonna take this combi. I've got two days before my friends get here. I'm gonna go up there and check it out."
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And I had what can only be described as a absolutely phenomenal, paranormal, above and beyond psilocybin mushroom ceremony, a velada, that was administered by one of her direct descendants, uh, while I was up there with...
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And they heavily infuse elements of the church, as you may know, right?
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There's, it's like a syncretic practice where they had the indigenous traditions, and then the conquistadors came, and they kind of met in the middle to some degree, at least in regards to the ceremonial aspect.
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So they do invoke prayers to different saints, and there's a crucifix.
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Right next to the family compound, that is present-day family compound, there's a Catholic church with psilocybin mushrooms painted all over it- Yeah... all over the outside. So really incredible.
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But I had already a very strong baseline of high-dose experiences by that point, ranging in the 7 to 14 gram and perhaps higher range and lots of smaller doses. And this, from just a handful, right?
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They don't measure it out on a scale there. You get just a, a, a dose wrapped in a leaf, and I think in this case it was honey because the rainy season hadn't started yet. I remember thinking, "Hey, this is really cool.
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I get to do this, but I'm not expecting too much-" Yeah "... 'cause I've eaten mushrooms a bunch before." Right? That's not very many. And it blew my socks off. Yeah.
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And it was a full-on seance and, right, there's th- so I, I do have some personal experience in that kind of really ceremonial aspect tied to the direct lineage of practice, and they do defy a lot of our current models for understanding, right, how this is gonna work.
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Mm-hmm. So that's just one story I wanted to share. And another one briefly, when you're mentioning vomiting out sickness, I'm a colleague and friend of a gentleman named Edward Crow.
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I don't know if you've come across- Yeah... his work, but based in Nashville.
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He's a high-dose practitioner and does a lot of solo trips out there in his back 40, right, in the rural Tennessee, and that's his goal is to take a minimum of 9 grams.
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He's very ceremonial with the way he approaches it, so he takes a minimum of 9 grams of whatever type of fungi he has on hand, and he's ascertained that that's the dose that allows him to vomit, that if he takes 4 or 5 grams, he, he cannot guarantee that he'll be able to vomit out this sickness or whatever is, is bothering him or, or inside.
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So there, there's someone who's actively practicing in a more like- I, I got to the point in Jamaica-- So, I mean, you know, I'm just starting to talk about this.
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There are things that I, I have seen over the years that, you know, paranormal is the right word.
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But, but in Jamaica, I got to the point where when I would pick up a group at the airport, I could, I could tell who were our purgors.
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Like, I could just feel, I could-- Like, they come in, and there, there is a You know, this is how I understand it is tied to lineage. There's something within
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the, the-- I don't want to say just the blood, but in the being of the individual that makes them more prone to being this energetic transmutator. And I mean, like,
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uh, there are so many stories I could tell of, like, these weird psychic surgeries or vomiting out for other people. It's, it's something that I d- I found was, um, it was harder on my system.
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Maybe it's because I was doing it so much. But what I ended up starting finding out, and the teachings of Mantak Chia and Qigong practices have informed my work in this capacity more than just about anything.
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Um, but what I ended up finding is that you can take that same energy and rather than, rather than being the one that's pulling
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off of other people, you can push into other pe- in-into an individual and, like, give them an excess of energy and watch them purge.
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Like, there-- I remember this once, this one time, there was this young woman, she was trying to purge, trying to purge, and, like, this is why I f- I almost always have dosed with the people that I work with because I'm not, I'm not just an administrator of psilocybin.
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I'm working with people.
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It's, it's no use if I've gained all this knowledge and skill spending tens of thousands of hours in this space if I just sit back and watch somebody have their trip and act like I don't know how to drive the bus, you know?
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But this lady, she was like, um, she was trying to purge, and she couldn't really get it, and she had her back to me. She didn't even know I was there.
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And, uh, there was another guy watching who, this guy ended up, um, he, he died through COVID, but he ended up being a, uh, a visual clairvoyant. He would see energy working. And so I saw her doing her thing.
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She was trying to, trying to get it out.
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And so I just kind of, like, stood, like, you know, 15 or so feet behind her and just was, like, like, building up this energy through this Qigong practice and praying and giving it, just being right there with it.
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And then, like, there are these little windows where you can just like, "All right, now is the time." And, and I, I pushed this energy towards her, and she just immediately just, like, blah, going, you know, purging.
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And she looked back, and she goes, "Oh, God. Thank you, Eric." Like, she felt what was happening without being consciously aware.
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And then this guy who was a, a facilitator I was training, he later told me, he's like, "Dude, I just saw all that.
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I just saw you, like, building up this light around you, and then you, like, shoved it at her, and then she vomited." I was like, "Yeah, that's, yeah, that's, that's kind of it."
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And so, like, that, that is the deep end of why the spiritual perspective or the spiritual approach is going to be more valuable than the dry clinical approach.
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There's also the, just the kind of like the normal, normal stuff here that more people might be able to, uh, to digest, and that's what you already said was community, right? Like,
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the biggest mistake that I made in my work in Jamaica, and it was kind of inevitable in the way that we built this, was that people come down, and they have an experience or three experiences during the week, and then they go home.
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And yeah, you do some integration calls. You have a WhatsApp group. But most of those people go back to just, like, mundane lives.
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They're like, you know, working, you know, at some cubicle in Chicago, or somebody's a pharmacist in Kansas or whatever it is. And they go home, and they don't have that community to help them maintain.
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They just, they just had a out-of-this-world, paranormal, weird experience that nobody in their social network can even grasp but much less have a conversation around.
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And so to have a community where you can continue those conversations and explorations, where you can continue to confront yourself with your shadow and do the ongoing work that is required for ongoing growth, I don't see how that can happen outside of, of a legitimate community, of a community that continues to come together and show up for years, not just a couple of weeks, like years.
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Because this process that we're in of c- getting back to wholeness, it, it's not gonna happen after one session. You know, all the headlines about psilocybin.
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I mean, it's awesome that a lady took some psilocybin, and she got her speech back, you know, from Alzheimer's. I've seen pe- I had a fighter jet pilot I worked with who had aphasia.
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He was beginning to lose-- He st- he was l- dropping off the last word of every sentence, and he couldn't stop it. It was a brain, brain lesion. And, uh, psilocybin reversed it.
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Like, he had six doses of mushrooms, and it completely reversed it. So there are amazing things that we have yet to see.
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I've seen stage four cancer patients, numerous stage four cancer patients go into complete remission after a few doses of mushrooms, where they worked through their energetic, spiritual, psychological baggage that was forming a blockage in their body.
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So I, I hope that, like, my, my sincere hope is that the, all these worlds can come together, that the medical, clinical world, the spiritual, shamanic world can come together and learn from and share with each other rather than being at odds and thinking that somebody's got to gatekeep.
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Yeah. It seems that that's the only logical coalescence that we're headed towards. But as mentioned earlier, there's also a l- steady profit potential that is incentivizing gatekeeping, right?
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And I think that's where, like, the clinical model comes in because it costs so much money to route through the FDA that they want to patent protect and then kind of, uh, exclusify the access or make it exclusive.
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And that's my understanding of the model, but I do think that there's a strategic partnership to be had, right?
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There's, like, people who have very analytical, data-heavy focuses, and then you mentioned some of them, these clinicians came and had experiences with you and said, "This is not what's supposed to happen.
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This is not what I read about." That's another interesting angle is there's sort of a debate, I think, among clinicians about whether or not it's necessary to personally have the experience- [chuckles]...
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in order to administer the medicine. And I bet you could tell which side of the fence I'm on, on that one.
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But that, that really is something that, uh, in some cases I see people very invested in the more industry side of psychedelics who- Have no experience with psychedelics, and they wanna be neutral.
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They think there's something about, like, being neutral, being objective.
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Uh, this also is something we see with journalists, where the goal of journalism, at least in theory, is to remove yourself from the story and be objective.
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But I think actually with psychedelics, it probably works better the other way when you have a lens of subjectivity and personal experience.
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But what's your take on this idea of clinicians prescribing a psilocybin-based medicine potentially with zero experience themselves?
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Or trip sitters or, or p- therapists, right, who are sitting for people having this experience, and they've never personally underwent the experience or undergone it. What's your take on that?
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It's the single greatest risk factor. There, there is no greater risk to harm than administration of psychedelics by someone who has not consumed them themselves.
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And I, I think that needs to be pretty extensive consumption. You know, one or two experiences or a dozen experiences can actually be maybe even more dangerous because you think you know.
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It is-- There's a reason why these traditional cultures had, you know, a decade of apprenticeship before you were able to go out there and practice on your own. So I feel pretty strongly about that.
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I also wanna touch on the, the profit motive here because what we're-- I think we're gonna find out, you know. I was just writing about this yesterday, how, um, you know, a,
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a higher-end therapy session, or just say th- therapy runs $150 to $300 an hour for a sit down and talk to your therapist.
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The amount of work and time that goes into truly supporting someone through a psychedelic experience will not fit in that container under those pricing structures.
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I, I spend, if I'm working with an individual or a group, I mean, if I'm working with a group, it just depends on what comes out.
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But, like, for one ceremony, we did a ceremony last weekend, and for that ceremony alone, outside of the weekend itself, I've probably put in, like, 15 hours just with the individuals.
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We got another call tonight, you know. And that's not even to mention the ceremony that was, you know, eight hours the day before, eight hours the day after, and the 12-hour session in between.
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So to think that we're gonna be able to fit this, price this into, you know, a standard model of therapy is just not gonna work, which is, I think, the, the greatest motivator for the communal, even dare I say church approach.
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Because
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it's gonna be more cost-effective to have 10 people taking mushrooms together than it is gonna be to have one, one per- The, the clinical model is one person taking the psychedelic and two people sitting there with them.
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Like, that is not sustainable. It is not sustainable financially. So, you know, I, I, I think that we're gonna see a bubble pop in this, uh, in this whole, uh, arena of, um, whatever.
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Psy- The, the psychedelic money, money bubble is gonna pop. I mean, it's just, it just can't, it can't sustain.
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And even the retreats, I, I know for a fact that retreats, international retreats, and even the retreat, the clinics in, uh, Oregon, like, I think a third of the clinics that opened in Oregon have now closed because people, people can't afford it.
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They can't afford to run the clinics with the prices that they're charging, and people can't afford to pay the prices that are being charged.
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So, you know, it's a real issue that is going to, if we really truly care about people getting help and people getting better, and psychedelics and psilocybin in particular, as sustainable and accessible as it is, is one of the most efficient ways to help people heal from trauma, addiction, et cetera, et cetera.
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But it's not a linear process, and it's not gonna fit neatly into a typical therapeutic container.
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Well, especially as people come to have this experience or become interested in it and then learn that there are alternative models available.
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And I think that's one thing probably that happened in Oregon is people who have no baseline or experience or frame of reference for what the experience actually is probably learn about it, maybe are interested in it, they're referred to it.
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Maybe they have one experience, and then of course, they start doing research and you find out, "Oh, I, I brought this up in conversation at church, and it turns out that my ch- fellow churchgoer over here grows their own mushrooms."
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Right. "Or my neighbor has 'em." And then that's another fascinating thing about this current era with mushrooms in particular is that the demographic totally transcends any isolated group or- Mm-hmm...
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special interest group. Like, we see a lot about veterans, right? And I think that's politically convenient, and of course there's a lot of potential healing and value available for veterans.
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But they seem to be kind of the, the face of this public-facing messaging, right? Of like, uh, y- when you see a story about ibogaine or psychedelics, it's usually tied to the potential for the veteran community.
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But then you also see, like, suburban moms. There's microdosing moms and circles of that.
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And then you have athletes, and there's all these kind of affinity groups I've heard them called, where, you know, on this podcast I've interviewed, like, multiple former NFL players and I say, "Well, uh, how'd you find out about all this?"
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They say, "Well, I heard another NFL player talking about it." Like, or, "I heard a Navy SEAL talking about it, and I'm a Navy SEAL."
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Like, but that's an amazing thing about mushrooms, amazing thing about 'em, among many things, is that it doesn't just fit neatly into this, like, hippie box.
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It was, you know, the, the-- for years, for decades, the establishment tried to paint psilocybin, LSD as something that hippies use, long hair, anti-war.
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And now you find out, wait, the Silicon Valley founders are using this stuff. Wait, uh, pastors are using this stuff. Wait, the Vietnamese immigrant community likes mushrooms.
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Like, it is c- it completely spans, uh, all demographics to a point of common humanity, and I think that's something that is also worth paying attention to, that there's, uh, a lot of value there.
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And, like, when I think about a church in Kentucky, and I've seen some of the videos you shared, like, that's a type of person that would probably feel comfortable knowing there's other people that are like me.
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They live like me. They, they're part of the same community. They look like me. That's maybe easier to, um, it's more palatable to get inducted than, like, a, a white lab coat.
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I've never met this person before, and I don't know them, right? I, I also think there's maybe some unintended risk in the clinical model that they're not being honest with themselves about.
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And all, a lot of these studies you see, my understanding, it's usually, like, a one-month follow-up they do when they say, like, "This population got better."
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They're not really accounting for the next year or two years. But a church or a social grou- group can do that. Yes. Yes, absolutely.
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I mean- You know, among the deme- deme- demographics that benefit from psychedelics or psilocybin, healthy normals are one that are, we're not talking about.
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And actually, people who don't have outstanding conditions seek to be some, some of those who benefit most from these experiences. Some of my favorite people to work with over the years have been top performers.
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I mean, you give, you give 10 grams of mushrooms to someone who is a high-level CEO or, um, you know, very experienced, uh, journalist. I worked with this one journalist for a while. She was in- just incredible.
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And man, this woman would take 20 grams of mushrooms and would turn into a Ferrari, and it was just like, "Let's go." And then, like, what comes out, it's not just a good time.
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Like, yes, there's a good time to be had there, but when you are, when you are expanding your awareness, you're expanding your ca- capacity.
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You know, this is, this is one of the understandings that I have developed through the integration of Qigong into this work. So, you know, the Taoist Qigong practice teaches that you can increase your level of qi.
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You can ex- you can absorb more vital energy from the environment around you. And I, I, I s- believe that in large part, that's what's happening with these experiences.
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And when you see someone who is already an incredible channel for energy and intelligence and wisdom, when you see them open up and become an even more, a higher capacity channel, well, you just upped the consciousness game for the entire planet by upping the consciousness for that individual.
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So there's a ton of benefit to be had in, yes, dosing people who are struggling with PTSD and addiction.
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Also, like high-ranking military who are extremely high-performing individuals, feeding them mushrooms and watching them, like, level up in consciousness is an absolutely amazing thing to experience.
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I, I, I've worked with so many people. I worked with this lady, man, she was a retired CIA agent, and she was, she was one of the most powerful ind- individuals.
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I just like-- Uh, the first time I stood around her, I just like, just constant chills because her energy was just so powerful.
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And when we fed her mushrooms, it was just like 100-watt light bulb gained the capacity of 1,000 watts and just sat there and glowed so bright and, and helped her being.
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Like this is another thing that's really valuable to consider, and I know practitioners who have been in this for a while understand this, is that
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if, if someone is a high-capacity practitioner and they're in space with others, if that person takes a he- a healthy amount of mushrooms, and they just sit in that space and channel energy and light and conscious- consciousness into that space, you will see, you will see improved outcomes for everybody that shares that space with them.
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So, um, who was it? Um, Joe Tafur. I'm sure you know Joe. Um, Church of Condor. He was saying...
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I haven't seen this yet, but he's-- I heard a talk he gave here in Louisville once, and he said that there was some research that was gonna come out in the next couple of years, this was about a year and a half ago, that showed clearly that the most important factor for long-term outcomes was not the medicine, but was the facilitator, was the space holder.
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And I believe confidently that that is because the level of consciousness that the individual brings into that space with them impacts the level of consciousness of those who share it.
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And all of this healing, all the, the outcomes that we get are a result of expanded consciousness. We can say it's a mystical experience.
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We can talk about all the neurol- but ultimately, we are expanding our consciousness, and that gives us a larger capacity to process information that may be stuck in our systems or to interpret our lives and to make different choices, et cetera, et cetera.
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So I, I have this feeling, strong feeling, even though it's a very, uh, early in the field.
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Um, but what I have from the experiences that I've had, from the studies I've done from, from Qigong, uh, and also s- the Steiner work,
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quantum biology is actually going to be the scientific field that informs our understanding of the psychedelic experience more than any other discipline. Because what we are working with here is light.
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That's what, that's what we are. That's what all this is, in some weird way, is light. And when we consume these mushrooms, there is some component of this light of consciousness that facilitates the healing.
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So there, there's gonna be something, some interesting work study there hopefully in, in years to come. Yeah, hold all bets because this ship is just getting sailing right now, and we've already seen some,
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uh, remar- remarkable, unexpected developments, uh, on a planetary scale over the last decade or so. And now that everybody's tripping, it feels like, like it's safe to say this [both laughing]
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there's gonna be a lot more, um, interesting things going on, that's for sure.
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But we're all here for it, and I think that community is really gonna be where people need to invest because, um, the, the old myths are breaking down is something that we're kind of encountering.
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It feels like the, the myths of h- who the United States were, at least in the '90s when I grew up, is very different than, uh, what we're seeing today. And I think that's true around the world.
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There's a lot of people questioning institutions, a lot of old world institutions kind of losing some of their grip, and we don't really have new myths yet.
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I know this has been the subject of a number of books, so stay tuned everybody. But, uh, I, I always say, "May you live in interesting times." And we definitely lived- We're there... in interesting times, man.
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We're there. We're in the thick of it right now.
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And I think this is probably a good place to put a pin in this conversation, but I wanna leave you the last few minutes here to share anything you'd like to that we didn't touch on or any other ways people can get in touch with the sanctuary and other work that you're doing in this domain, Eric.
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Yeah. I appreciate the space there, Dennis. Um, well, you know, I mean- All I would do is just dig in deeper into the stuff that we've already talked about. There's, there's so much more that we could explore.
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Um, but yeah, it's, it's a good place to, to leave people wanting some more per- perhaps. Um, if you wanna check me out, I am... I got a YouTube channel, Erik S. Osborne. My TikTok is growing, Erik S. Osborne.
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Sanctuarp is sanctuary with a P, not P sanctuary, but sanctuary with a P, and that's.org. Um, we are, we are building a movement.
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This is, this is a community, but it is a movement to, uh, you know, level the playing field, create expanded access, have ongoing real s- real support, um, mushrooms for the people.
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Uh, so yeah, check out those platforms, and I just appreciate the time here to share, and appreciate the work that you're doing. Also, the, like, especially the comedy.
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Like, I did, I did some retreats with Shane Moss in Jamaica. That was a big motivator for me, was to bring comedy into the space. Um, we get so much more healing from humor than we get from seriousness, I s- I believe.
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Well, thank you so much for that, and thanks for joining me today. Erik Osborne, always a pleasure.
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Look forward to dropping in on you down there in Kentucky one of these days, and I hope you have a splendid rest of your day today. Thanks, Dennis. And that is a wrap. Thank you for sticking around to the bitter end.
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It's very sweet of you to commit so thoroughly. Don't be a stranger. Let me know what you thought of this episode, and please consider checking out the substantial backlog while you're at it.
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You can reach out to me via email, micropreneur@gmail.com, or hit me on any of the numerous social platforms that I'm currently active on, @micropreneurpodcast is the handle on Instagram and Twitter.
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Thank you all very much for sticking around. Have a wonderful day. I'll see you back here next week on the Micropreneur Podcast. [outro music]
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[singing] Que pasa mufasa. Welcome to the Mycopreneur podcast.
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This is a podcast about people solving problems with mushrooms. I'm your host, Dennis Walker. Let's get down to business. [singing] Que pasa mufasa. What's up, everybody?
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I'm elated to welcome Eric Osborne, who's the founder of Psanctuary, P-S-A-N-C-T-U-A-R-Y, the Psanctuary in Louisville, Kentucky. Welcome to the Mycopreneur podcast, Eric. How's it going today?
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Man, Dennis, I'm happy to be here, brother. How are you doing? Dude, we're a long time overdue for this. You know, I was fortunate to have you host an incubator, and we got to connect you to the Mycopreneur community.
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And I really wanna continue this conversation about your very important contributions over a number of years to the psilocybin mushroom space internationally, which maybe often get overlooked in this current age of, uh, m- cause célèbre and, uh, mushroom celebrities and things like that.
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But let's take it back to the beginning, before Psanctuary, before MycoMeditation. What got you into psilocybin mushrooms, and how did that intersect with your faith? Oh, man. Wow. I guess LSD got me into psilocybin.
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[chuckles] 'Cause my friend said, at 19, they're like, "Hey, if you like LSD, buddy, you're gonna love mushrooms." And I sure enough did.
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So I had, had a good dose of LSD, and then a couple months later got some mushrooms, and I just felt like I was home. I was just like, "This is where I belong."
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And, uh, that, that really opened up the door to the world of mycology, and I got interested in wild harvesting, uh, gourmet mushrooms.
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I started a company, Magnificent Mushrooms, and, uh, helped Indiana form the wor- the state's s- wild mushroom certification program to sell wild mushrooms to restaurants and stuff.
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And, you know, then I was clandestinely growing mushrooms in closets and basements.
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And, uh, when I had a mushroom farm, I just, well, I, I couldn't not grow tons of psilocybin because I was growing tons of shiitake and whatnot. And so it just kind of made sense. I had always been, uh, you know,
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giving away mushrooms to people. I really never liked selling mushrooms.
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That was kind of a, uh, a spiritual component to me, is I didn't, I didn't like connecting money to mush- to psychedelic mushrooms anyway, for, for whatever reason.
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Um, just thought they're so w- they're more powerful than we can ever put a dollar on, you know?
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Um, and so I gave them away forever and ever and ever, and then my mushroom farm was really struggling, so I was like, "Well, I guess we're gonna have to sling some shrooms."
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And I did that for a while, reluctantly, um, until during a dose one night, the mu- mushrooms, whatever it is that's talking through the mushrooms, said, "Jamaica is going to be the lighthouse of psychedelic s- psychedelic wellness for the world, and you are going to light the torch."
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And I was like, "No way. That is not happening." And they're like, "Yes, it is." And I was like, "No."
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And every time I ate mushrooms for a full year, that would come and it would-- And it was like, I was eating mushrooms probably once, twice a month, and every single time, they would just sit me down and say, "This is what you're doing."
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And I finally submitted. And, you know, the motivation there really, if I had a conscious motivation at that time, which was 2011 is when the message started coming through.
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Uh, 2013 was the first retreat that we, we did a, uh, beta on.
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And, you know, the motivation there was I was seeing all this ayahuasca talk, you know, all the ayahuasca retreats and taking high doses of mushrooms and listening to, like, Terence and Dennis McKenna.
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I was just like, "Come on, y'all. Mushrooms are just as powerful as ayahuasca." And I was studying Maria Sabina and her teachings and all that.
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And, uh, and so, like, within my mind, my personal motivation outside of this download that I was getting from the mushrooms was to bring, like, like, publicly present a spiritual
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relationship with the mushroom to the world. Uh, and even then, I was, honestly, I was afraid to do that because most people were s- were coming to mushrooms for a therapeutic...
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If anybody, I mean, 2013, when I did the, the first retreat, and Michael Pollan's book hadn't even come out, his New Yorker article hadn't even come out. It was not even really in the conversation publicly.
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Um, and so I was really reluctant to speak to them spiritually back then because I just-- Like, I was bootstrapping this thing.
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I was still selling mushrooms on the underground, so I couldn't really publicize that I was doing psychedelic retreats, you know? And, um, [lips smack]
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but then, like, what would happen is people would come down and have these massive spiritual experiences trying to heal from their depression or anxiety, whatever.
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I mean, we worked with people with all kinds of, uh, conditions. And they would have these profound spiritual experiences, and then I would get to...
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I, I still, like, it's like, so one of the most beautiful opportunities to help walk people through a spiritual awakening. And so for years and years, we did those retreats. I ran Myco for seven years, and, uh,
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COVID came down, and things just shut down, and I was like, "Let's go back to the States. Let's go do this the way that we always wanted to." I was har- I was-- My heart was breaking down in Jamaica.
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As much as I love Jamaica, I miss Kentucky. I'm, I'm a country boy at heart.
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And, uh, so yeah, my wife and I packed up, came back to Kentucky, and in the process, we were-- I had a nonprofit that I'd started that was for scholarships to send people to Jamaica.
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And, uh, when we came back up and we were selling the company, our attorney was like, "Eric- I don't know if you've ever heard, heard of Evan Park. He was a psychedelic attorney for a long time.
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Uh, he was like, "Eric, man, if anybody can, can start a mushroom church that can stand before the Supreme Court, it's you, and I wanna help you do this." And I was just like, "Nope, I'm not doing it. Not doing it."
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'Cause like I'm, I'm Catholic or I grew up Catholic. I got tons of church trauma. I've seen the damage that organized religion has done, and so I was very reluctant to do so.
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But the more I would sit with it, the more I just like in my heart I knew like this is, this is the way forward, especially because equitable access has been so important to me.
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You know, when I started Myco, um, I was doing-- I, I, I never even did a back of the napkin. I just was like, "Eh, 1,000 bucks for 10 days. Sure, that's good." And like I was just giving this thing away.
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Um, so fortunately the partners that came in brought in the financial, um, uh, wisdom and helped keep that company alive [chuckles] for seven years, 'cause otherwise it would've been in the ground very quickly.
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Uh, it was, it was, it was tanking financially as it was. Uh, and so yeah, man, it's, it's been a, it has been a heck of a ride. You know, I was for, what?
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Four years I smuggled mushrooms to Jamaica to r- to start those retreats.
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And so like when I see what's going on in Jamaica there now, it's like it's estimated to be like a, I think it's like $26 million a year is what's going into Jamaica.
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Um, that really touches my heart because I didn't go to Jamaica to start a mushroom retreat, right? I was visiting Jamaica for 10 years prior to that because that was actually my spiritual mecca.
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I, yeah, I, I didn't wear this shirt for you, but I realized as I was hopping on, I was like, "Oh, shit, Dennis was in Jamaica. I got the colors on for him."
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But Rasta, when I left the Catholic Church, uh, and like I w- I got introduced to cannabis and mushrooms, Rasta is what appealed to me the most because that was like an earth-based spirituality, one love, you know.
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Um, and so I started going to Jamaica or Jamaica every year for 10 years before the retreats themselves even started. Yeah.
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It's so interesting now to see the evolution of everything, 'cause as someone myself who was always more underground, like this was not really a socially acceptable and, and honestly still isn't in a lot of ways industry where you could just come out and publicly share what you're doing.
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More and more people are, and you've got your church there, but for many years it was just kind of in these little echo chambers, these little pockets, and we all knew it was important, but didn't really see how it fit into the broader culture.
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But now we have characters like Brian Hubbard, and I saw that you were excited about the executive order that was signed. Oh, yeah. Right?
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And he's very much speaking and that kind of whole group of people to Christian nationalists or within this, uh, container of Christianity or of Catholicism, and for so long these have been very strange and alienated bedfellows, right?
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It's like the psychedelic experience. Many people are having profound spiritual experiences, but it's at odds with the dogma and the doctrine of the church.
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And I think really in the last few years and this year, we've seen an attempt to bridge that gap, and I've been seeing like the owners of, uh, MBHO Ibogaine down in Tijuana, right, which is a prominent ibogaine clinic, making videos about ibogaine and Christianity, and we've been seeing more churches emerge.
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Of course, there's Zydor out in Oakland, has 120,000 members. I've seen an estimate of maybe 500 churches that exist in the United States that are psychedelic churches.
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Really hard to quantify 'cause not all of them are as public, right? But w- we are seeing more and more in this domain, so I find it really interesting. Also, your journey kind of represents a full circle in some ways.
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Like it's almost like, would you call it like the, the exiled child or, uh, the, the wh- what is the name from the, the biblical scripture, right? Of like- The prodigal son...
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the prodigal son leaving, going to Jamaica, leaving the church, and then coming back home. There's really a hero's arc to that journey from what I'm seeing.
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[laughs] The last thing I ever thought I would do is start a church in my entire life, believe me.
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[laughs] Well, I also understand based on some comments you had made publicly that you were arrested for growing psilocybin mushrooms, which also puts you in a unique category because I think now in 2026 there's this sense of cultural acceptance and there's people who are pretty open about it, but that really wasn't always the case.
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Uh, and 10 years ago, 15 years ago, this was a, a very clandestine operation for a lot of people. Can you talk a little bit about that chapter? Oh, man. Whew. That was, uh,
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one of the most painful periods of my life, there's no doubt about it. Um, and I see that it was-- I perceive it as being divinely orchestrated because I didn't want to be selling mushrooms on the underground.
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I never did. I was constantly paranoid, living in fear, producing like, you know, 30 fresh pounds of psilocybin a week. I mean, I had a, a big, big operation going on outdoors and in a big walk-in closet.
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It was, it was beautiful, it was amazing, um, but it was terrifying at the same time, you know?
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And so what ultimately happened, and I feel like this is really important to share because we i- in a lot of the hype and the excitement around psychedelics, we can forget, uh, that, you know, there are risks, and the risks are often not what we anticipate.
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So what happened for us is we were doing a ceremony with friends, these are people that we had known for everybody well over a year, two years most. Um, one of them was an employee at my farm.
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Uh, and the friend of my wife, a female there, she started getting anxious and she wanted to go lay down in her tent. I was like, "Sure, go lay down in your tent. That's fine."
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We had all dosed, which was a problem, and, um, maybe an hour later, uh, just out of nowhere, her car is just blasting down the driveway. We had her keys.
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Like I ended up throwing her keys in the ocean of, in the sea in Jamaica
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just kind of like as a, as a point of closure, but she army crawled on the ground, had a key magnetized under the bumper of her car and was like paranoid and afraid and wanted to go see her boyfriend.
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So she got into a little wreck. She didn't get hurt or anything, but I mean, I was freaking the fuck out. I just figured it was over for me. You know, I have pr- two uncles that went to prison for the Cornbread Mafia.
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Um, our family's been deeply traumatized by the drug war, and I just figured I was going to jail for manslaughter when she left, when she drove off.
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Uh, but fortunately she just ran off in a little ditch and got out and was like making a bunch of noise, and people came out and got her. We were way out in the middle of nowhere in Indiana.
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And, uh, the next day, like as soon as I could drive, which is about three o'clock in the morning Got in the car, me and my, my now wife, then girlfriend, um, and went looking for her.
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We drove an hour and a half to her boyfriend's house, couldn't find her, just freaking out, and called, you know, all the police stations, uh, everywhere, hospitals, everything.
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And we're texting her, calling her, and nothing. And finally at, like, 5:00 PM she text messages and said, "Hey, I'm okay, I just need some space." And we're like, "Okay, thank God."
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And then I was like, "No more selling shrooms. This is done. This is done. That is energetically what caused this to happen. I'm done. I don't care what I gotta do."
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And so, uh, we came home that night, and as I was pulling in my driveway, I was living on an 87-acre farm, had one neighbor who was bush hogging, and he, uh, p- flagged me down.
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He's like, "Yeah, man, the sh- the sheriff was just here, said he heard a mush- mushroom party got out of hand." And I was like, "Oh, shit." So I took my tractor, blocked off, blocked off the driveway, big long driveway.
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I'd blocked it off at the very end, so if the cops came back I could see them. And I had a massive bonfire, burned everything. Just the week before I had sold, like, 10 dry pounds.
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I had just gotten rid of everything I had except for a pound. So I burned everything I had, which is a ton, and then I hid m- my last pound.
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And I remember telling Courtney then, like, "This is my sacrament and I'm not going to, I am not gonna throw away my sacrament because I'm afraid." And so I took it out in the woods and put it in a tree.
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And, um, maybe three day... That was, like, a Saturday, and then on Tuesday we were there working in the farm and I was on lunch break, and, uh, here comes cops, seven cars.
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State cops, county cops, city cops came in, checked-- They went through everything. They were touring the mushroom farm. They're like, "Well, this is pretty cool, actually."
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Like, and I gave them, I gave them the grandest of grand tours, you know. And, uh, at the very end they didn't find anything and went to the house. We had cleaned everything up. We went through it, didn't find a speck.
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And at the very end, this one smart-ass cop was like, "Well, I know you're growing some weed out in your woods. I'm gonna go find it." And I was like, "Well, I don't grow no weed."
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I never would grow weed 'cause I was scared it would give away my mushrooms, you know.
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And so he went out in the woods, and I don't know if the, what led him to that hollow tree, but he found that bag of mushrooms, and he came back like he was a kid on Christmas, he was so happy to put those handcuffs on us.
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So it was, it was traumatic, man. My wife and I were, uh, considered co-defendants, co-conspirators rather, so we couldn't talk to each other. We weren't married, so we couldn't talk to each other.
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We were separated for eight weeks while the whole trial went through.
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Fortunately, her parents are both attorneys, and they had a hookup on a top-tier attorney for her, and the judge deemed that we were both going to get the same sentence. So her attorney helped her get a minimal sentence.
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We, we were charged with three Class B felonies that were reduced down to a D felony of maintaining a common nuisance, which is the most ridiculous charge I ever heard of.
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And after two and a half years of probation, that was expunged, and we were-- it was taken down to a misdemeanor. So it was, uh, I'll never forget that. I was doing a ceremony in Jamaica.
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The d- the, the d- like, an hour before the ceremony started, we got an email from our attorney saying that our, uh, case had been expunged, our convi- conviction, convictions had been expunged, and that was one of the most celebratory ceremonies that I've ever participated in.
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So yeah, it was a, it... And, like, it's ridiculous, Dennis, man. I was on probation for psilocybin and was smuggling psilocybin to Jamaica to run these retreats. It's just like, I don't even, I don't even know.
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I'm like, I'm in the process of writing this book. I'm putting, putting out a book in September, um, of, of basically why I believe that a church is the most effective model.
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And in it I talk a lot about these stories and, and within that there's this whole, like, episode of, uh, ovoids. I don't know if you know of the Ovidios cestodiata. Like, I had never found wild psilocybin for years.
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I'd been hunting it, hunting, hunting. Never found it. Was always growing my mushrooms in my closet in my basement for a solid, a solid decade. I never went without mushrooms growing in my closet.
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And, uh, the s- nine months after we were arrested, when I had not had any psilocybin growing, and, and, like, I had a strain that I had grown. I called it Mystery. It was, like, my, my buddy.
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And, uh, nine months after that we found the first batch of ovoids, and I started finding them by the thousands. And, like, I would be sitting in my living room.
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There were times when I did not know how the retreats were gonna happen.
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I was like, "I don't know where we're gonna get mushrooms for these retreats," 'cause I couldn't get the Jamaicans up to skill growing them and whatnot, and the, just so many, so many challenges there.
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And I would be sitting in my living room and I would hear this voice telling me where to go, and I would go and there would be just ungodly amounts of psilocybin.
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And so I just spent so many hours encapsulating, drying and encapsulating psilocybin here, and then smuggling it down to Jamaica while having three felonies. [laughs] I'm just like, "Eric, what are you doing, man?"
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But it's like that to me is a testimony to the mission of this work. Like, this is not, this is not for me to make money. I'm happy to make money, but this is about, like, cognitive liberty.
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This is about giving people access, their own direct access to however they interpret divinity or spirit or whatever the mystery is that's behind the veil. Yeah.
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Personally, I've never experienced the ovoids that you're mentioning, so I think, uh, I'm gonna have to pay you a visit down there in Kentucky to tap in sometime.
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And I, I would love to expand further upon why a church is the optimal model for intersecting with psilocybin mushrooms as a culture and society, because there's a lot of debate around this obviously right now.
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You have vested interests who really wanna restrict it to the clinical pathway, and there's some very prominent and outspoken powerful figures who say, "Medical first and only.
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That's the only way that this is gonna get rolled out."
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Then you have a lot of people who are actively campaigning for decrim, and I have a lot of faith in the professed ideology behind decrim, which is nobody should go to jail for this. Mm-hmm.
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And then you have kind of point-blank retail sales, and you've got smoke shops and brick and mortars, and you've got online vendors just indiscriminately selling.
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I can also appreciate from a cognitive libertarian standpoint that, but it's missing something for me, right? There's the, there's no community there.
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There's really no accountability or, or transparency in a lot of cases. And ideally, or when done well, a church can provide all those things.
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So let's hear from your perspective, and now that you're into the book you're, you're writing right now, why is the church model the ideal model for making psilocybin mushrooms available to people? Yeah.
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I mean, I do wanna say that I, I am in favor of all models, though the free-for-all model is the one that I'm least in favor of because it is missing tons of really important components.
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And at the same time, I believe that everyone has the God-given freedom to consume whatever plants that are safe on this planet. But we know that psilocybin is medicinal.
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We know the scheduling BS is just that, complete BS. They, they-- There's no reason that they're still a Schedule I substance, period.
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And so with that being said, um, I have found over the years that there are very important safeguards in place for these, and this is one of the things that the medical model does not really get.
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If I could tell you the dozens and dozens of physicians, psychiatrists, therapists that I have dosed with psilocybin, who in the midst of their experience said, "This is fucking wrong. This is wrong.
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This is not what mushrooms are supposed to do. This is not what I read in Michael Pollan's book." And I'm like, "Well, I understand that's not what you read, but this is how it works."
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And so approaching this from just purely a clinical standpoint, I truly believe introduces a significant amount of risk. The, the primary risk being that the clinicians themselves are typically not practitioners.
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Our model of medicine is that the doctor gives the sick patient the medicine that they themselves take, and then they get better because of some neurochemical or biochemical reaction that's happening in the body.
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For all of the talk about respecting the indigenous models, we do a really poor job of that because the indigenous models that have been studying these medicines for thousands and thousands of years-- Let's not forget that the oldest cave paintings illustrate psilocybin mushrooms, that these m- medicines of ancientcy have been used not just as a applied therapeutic, but they've been used as a tool of, um, um...
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What do I, I wanna say? Of, um, um... Oh, gosh. Diagnosis. That the actual, the quote unquote "physician" or the shaman was often the one that took the medicine instead of the sick patient.
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So that is a complete paradigm shift that we do not have a concept for in our medical model.
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And I'm not saying that's the only way that it should be used, but that is actually a very legitimate use of psychedelics, psilocybin in particular. There's plenty of evidence.
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There's plenty of documented research from the '40s and '50s that show that psilocybin actually does in, like, uh, uh, um, increase our potential towards extrasensory perception.
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You probably know that, uh, dimethyl-- Not, uh... Is it-- What was, what was it? Was it DMT? Is it DMT that was almost called or for a while-- No, harmaline.
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Harmaline for a while was called telepathine because these compounds actually do expand consciousness enough where you can perceive information that the mind is not normally capable of perceiving.
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So that, that alone just shakes the whole foundation of how we understand applied medicine. When you take it then and start considering giving the patient psilocybin and how that functions within the being.
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And so, like, what I'm gonna say right now is something that I have started to say publicly that it, it will not make sense to a lot of people.
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And it's just too important that I share the information that I've collected over the years because when I have consumed psilocybin, which is over 500 times at least, and when I have administered psilocybin, which is over 4,000 doses at least, I have been studying this process.
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I, I am in rapt attention trying to understand the fundamentals of what are-- what's going on here.
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Because you know as well as I do, Dennis, that when you consume these mushrooms, that the-- there are almost an infinite number of ways that the experience can manifest itself.
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And yet, there are these repeated patterns that can be observed over time.
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And it takes a very long time to be able to observe those patterns, especially if you're experimenting on yourself or really even you've experimented on others.
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Now, in Jamaica, I had incredible fortune, and still do, of doing group, group dosing where I'm administering to, you know, anywhere from 5 to 15 people. And my specialty has been high-dose administration in groups.
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So I was doing, you know, groups of, you know, people doing 5 to 15 grams of 5 to 15 people. And the amount of data that you can collect in watching that experience unfold, uh, it, it's, it's just--
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What you see in a clinic on a two-to-one scenario is infinitely smaller than what you're gonna get in, in this kind of situation. And so what I have seen, and again, this is gonna sound so backwards.
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The only way, the only place I've ever found this spoken to is in the teachings of Rudolf Steiner, who I've been studying for the last couple years, um, is that we believe that psilocybin functions primarily on, you know, we've got the, the, uh, serotonin system with 5-HT2A, you know, and all this.
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So what I have witnessed, and I can go-- I can give examples of how this displays, um, is that first and foremost, what is being impacted is the etheric body, is the auric s- the aura, the energetic self.
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These are energetic medicines. These are not just some biochemical response. And so the things that come out of people There, there is no predictability for it.
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There has, uh, the, the number of clinicians and, and, like, very well-intended and, and, you know, smart people, uh, therapists and whatnot, who want to pathologize the outcomes of a psychedelic experience because they can't explain it in the context of their, you know, deconstructionalist medicine, uh, illustrates the shortcomings of that field when it comes to really understanding what this process is.
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So I'd, I'd love to, I'd love to share this. This is an example. I don't know h- I, I'm not sure, you know, I'm curious how much you've experienced with this or what your knowledge of is it in a historical sense.
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But, you know, uh, Maria Sabina, for instance, had a quote where she said, um, if the person that she's working for doesn't vomit out their sickness, that she will have to vomit it out for them.
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Have you ever seen that quote by any chance? Not that quote, but that's my understanding of how some of these bioenergetic medicines work. All right. All right. So how is that happening
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if it is not the energetic body of the individual who is there as a support pulling stagnant energy off of the person that they're working on? And look, I, I have been an absolute skeptic.
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I got into mushrooms because of science. Uh, I, I thought I was gonna be a herpetologist as a kid, you know? I still, like, study snakes. Like, I'm surrounded by boa constrictors in this room right here.
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I love science, and I recognize through my explorations of spirit that material science does not have all the answers.
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And so anyway, I could go off on a huge rant there or c- I could cont- [laughs] continue my rant, uh, but maybe I'll give it a break there, uh, see, see how that lands. Yeah. Well, thanks for sharing that.
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You know, interestingly enough, I've been to Maria Sabina's family compound twice in Huautla de Jiménez, dating back to 2010 was my first visit there, and have spent a lot of time in Mexico as someone who grew up on the border.
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I'm from Chula Vista, which we affectionately call Chula Wanna. So I became more and more comfortable crossing over to Mexico as I matured and started learning about all these different traditions, right?
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The mushrooms are one, but there's [coughs] quite a few other indigenous ethnomedicine traditions spanning the country.
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Of course, peyote, that's where it's found natively and has been used for millennia or certainly many generations.
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But of course, Oaxaca and Huautla de Jiménez became very interesting because of the whole Maria Sabina story, and by that time, I had found out about Huautla and went and visited and took the little colectivo they call them, the little minibus, six hours up this harrowing road with switchbacks up the mountain and just sheer drops right down hundreds or thousands of feet.
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You get to this village. By that time, the hoopla had died down. It was pre-psychedelic renaissance, quote-unquote, pre-Michael Pollan, pre-Fantastic Fungi. So there was Reality Sandwich, I think was the main- Yeah...
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kind of de facto psychedelic media hub, and they're still around. I've been fortunate to write for them. But at that time, I think they were the only psychedelic media that was regularly publishing.
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So I was in Oaxaca, uh, for no relation to Huautla, waiting for two friends to arrive for a road trip through South Mexico and Central America, junior year of college, and I read this Reality Sandwich article serendipitously about Maria Sabina and Huautla, and I start putting two t- two and two together.
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I go, "I'm very close. I'm gonna take this combi. I've got two days before my friends get here. I'm gonna go up there and check it out."
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And I had what can only be described as a absolutely phenomenal, paranormal, above and beyond psilocybin mushroom ceremony, a velada, that was administered by one of her direct descendants, uh, while I was up there with...
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And they heavily infuse elements of the church, as you may know, right?
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There's, it's like a syncretic practice where they had the indigenous traditions, and then the conquistadors came, and they kind of met in the middle to some degree, at least in regards to the ceremonial aspect.
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So they do invoke prayers to different saints, and there's a crucifix.
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Right next to the family compound, that is present-day family compound, there's a Catholic church with psilocybin mushrooms painted all over it- Yeah... all over the outside. So really incredible.
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But I had already a very strong baseline of high-dose experiences by that point, ranging in the 7 to 14 gram and perhaps higher range and lots of smaller doses. And this, from just a handful, right?
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They don't measure it out on a scale there. You get just a, a, a dose wrapped in a leaf, and I think in this case it was honey because the rainy season hadn't started yet. I remember thinking, "Hey, this is really cool.
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I get to do this, but I'm not expecting too much-" Yeah "... 'cause I've eaten mushrooms a bunch before." Right? That's not very many. And it blew my socks off. Yeah.
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And it was a full-on seance and, right, there's th- so I, I do have some personal experience in that kind of really ceremonial aspect tied to the direct lineage of practice, and they do defy a lot of our current models for understanding, right, how this is gonna work.
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Mm-hmm. So that's just one story I wanted to share. And another one briefly, when you're mentioning vomiting out sickness, I'm a colleague and friend of a gentleman named Edward Crow.
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I don't know if you've come across- Yeah... his work, but based in Nashville.
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He's a high-dose practitioner and does a lot of solo trips out there in his back 40, right, in the rural Tennessee, and that's his goal is to take a minimum of 9 grams.
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He's very ceremonial with the way he approaches it, so he takes a minimum of 9 grams of whatever type of fungi he has on hand, and he's ascertained that that's the dose that allows him to vomit, that if he takes 4 or 5 grams, he, he cannot guarantee that he'll be able to vomit out this sickness or whatever is, is bothering him or, or inside.
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So there, there's someone who's actively practicing in a more like- I, I got to the point in Jamaica-- So, I mean, you know, I'm just starting to talk about this.
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There are things that I, I have seen over the years that, you know, paranormal is the right word.
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But, but in Jamaica, I got to the point where when I would pick up a group at the airport, I could, I could tell who were our purgors.
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Like, I could just feel, I could-- Like, they come in, and there, there is a You know, this is how I understand it is tied to lineage. There's something within
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the, the-- I don't want to say just the blood, but in the being of the individual that makes them more prone to being this energetic transmutator. And I mean, like,
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uh, there are so many stories I could tell of, like, these weird psychic surgeries or vomiting out for other people. It's, it's something that I d- I found was, um, it was harder on my system.
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Maybe it's because I was doing it so much. But what I ended up starting finding out, and the teachings of Mantak Chia and Qigong practices have informed my work in this capacity more than just about anything.
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Um, but what I ended up finding is that you can take that same energy and rather than, rather than being the one that's pulling
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off of other people, you can push into other pe- in-into an individual and, like, give them an excess of energy and watch them purge.
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Like, there-- I remember this once, this one time, there was this young woman, she was trying to purge, trying to purge, and, like, this is why I f- I almost always have dosed with the people that I work with because I'm not, I'm not just an administrator of psilocybin.
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I'm working with people.
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It's, it's no use if I've gained all this knowledge and skill spending tens of thousands of hours in this space if I just sit back and watch somebody have their trip and act like I don't know how to drive the bus, you know?
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But this lady, she was like, um, she was trying to purge, and she couldn't really get it, and she had her back to me. She didn't even know I was there.
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And, uh, there was another guy watching who, this guy ended up, um, he, he died through COVID, but he ended up being a, uh, a visual clairvoyant. He would see energy working. And so I saw her doing her thing.
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She was trying to, trying to get it out.
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And so I just kind of, like, stood, like, you know, 15 or so feet behind her and just was, like, like, building up this energy through this Qigong practice and praying and giving it, just being right there with it.
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And then, like, there are these little windows where you can just like, "All right, now is the time." And, and I, I pushed this energy towards her, and she just immediately just, like, blah, going, you know, purging.
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And she looked back, and she goes, "Oh, God. Thank you, Eric." Like, she felt what was happening without being consciously aware.
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And then this guy who was a, a facilitator I was training, he later told me, he's like, "Dude, I just saw all that.
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I just saw you, like, building up this light around you, and then you, like, shoved it at her, and then she vomited." I was like, "Yeah, that's, yeah, that's, that's kind of it."
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And so, like, that, that is the deep end of why the spiritual perspective or the spiritual approach is going to be more valuable than the dry clinical approach.
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There's also the, just the kind of like the normal, normal stuff here that more people might be able to, uh, to digest, and that's what you already said was community, right? Like,
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the biggest mistake that I made in my work in Jamaica, and it was kind of inevitable in the way that we built this, was that people come down, and they have an experience or three experiences during the week, and then they go home.
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And yeah, you do some integration calls. You have a WhatsApp group. But most of those people go back to just, like, mundane lives.
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They're like, you know, working, you know, at some cubicle in Chicago, or somebody's a pharmacist in Kansas or whatever it is. And they go home, and they don't have that community to help them maintain.
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They just, they just had a out-of-this-world, paranormal, weird experience that nobody in their social network can even grasp but much less have a conversation around.
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And so to have a community where you can continue those conversations and explorations, where you can continue to confront yourself with your shadow and do the ongoing work that is required for ongoing growth, I don't see how that can happen outside of, of a legitimate community, of a community that continues to come together and show up for years, not just a couple of weeks, like years.
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Because this process that we're in of c- getting back to wholeness, it, it's not gonna happen after one session. You know, all the headlines about psilocybin.
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I mean, it's awesome that a lady took some psilocybin, and she got her speech back, you know, from Alzheimer's. I've seen pe- I had a fighter jet pilot I worked with who had aphasia.
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He was beginning to lose-- He st- he was l- dropping off the last word of every sentence, and he couldn't stop it. It was a brain, brain lesion. And, uh, psilocybin reversed it.
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Like, he had six doses of mushrooms, and it completely reversed it. So there are amazing things that we have yet to see.
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I've seen stage four cancer patients, numerous stage four cancer patients go into complete remission after a few doses of mushrooms, where they worked through their energetic, spiritual, psychological baggage that was forming a blockage in their body.
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So I, I hope that, like, my, my sincere hope is that the, all these worlds can come together, that the medical, clinical world, the spiritual, shamanic world can come together and learn from and share with each other rather than being at odds and thinking that somebody's got to gatekeep.
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Yeah. It seems that that's the only logical coalescence that we're headed towards. But as mentioned earlier, there's also a l- steady profit potential that is incentivizing gatekeeping, right?
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And I think that's where, like, the clinical model comes in because it costs so much money to route through the FDA that they want to patent protect and then kind of, uh, exclusify the access or make it exclusive.
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And that's my understanding of the model, but I do think that there's a strategic partnership to be had, right?
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There's, like, people who have very analytical, data-heavy focuses, and then you mentioned some of them, these clinicians came and had experiences with you and said, "This is not what's supposed to happen.
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This is not what I read about." That's another interesting angle is there's sort of a debate, I think, among clinicians about whether or not it's necessary to personally have the experience- [chuckles]...
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in order to administer the medicine. And I bet you could tell which side of the fence I'm on, on that one.
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But that, that really is something that, uh, in some cases I see people very invested in the more industry side of psychedelics who- Have no experience with psychedelics, and they wanna be neutral.
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They think there's something about, like, being neutral, being objective.
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Uh, this also is something we see with journalists, where the goal of journalism, at least in theory, is to remove yourself from the story and be objective.
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But I think actually with psychedelics, it probably works better the other way when you have a lens of subjectivity and personal experience.
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But what's your take on this idea of clinicians prescribing a psilocybin-based medicine potentially with zero experience themselves?
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Or trip sitters or, or p- therapists, right, who are sitting for people having this experience, and they've never personally underwent the experience or undergone it. What's your take on that?
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It's the single greatest risk factor. There, there is no greater risk to harm than administration of psychedelics by someone who has not consumed them themselves.
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And I, I think that needs to be pretty extensive consumption. You know, one or two experiences or a dozen experiences can actually be maybe even more dangerous because you think you know.
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It is-- There's a reason why these traditional cultures had, you know, a decade of apprenticeship before you were able to go out there and practice on your own. So I feel pretty strongly about that.
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I also wanna touch on the, the profit motive here because what we're-- I think we're gonna find out, you know. I was just writing about this yesterday, how, um, you know, a,
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a higher-end therapy session, or just say th- therapy runs $150 to $300 an hour for a sit down and talk to your therapist.
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The amount of work and time that goes into truly supporting someone through a psychedelic experience will not fit in that container under those pricing structures.
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I, I spend, if I'm working with an individual or a group, I mean, if I'm working with a group, it just depends on what comes out.
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But, like, for one ceremony, we did a ceremony last weekend, and for that ceremony alone, outside of the weekend itself, I've probably put in, like, 15 hours just with the individuals.
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We got another call tonight, you know. And that's not even to mention the ceremony that was, you know, eight hours the day before, eight hours the day after, and the 12-hour session in between.
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So to think that we're gonna be able to fit this, price this into, you know, a standard model of therapy is just not gonna work, which is, I think, the, the greatest motivator for the communal, even dare I say church approach.
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Because
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it's gonna be more cost-effective to have 10 people taking mushrooms together than it is gonna be to have one, one per- The, the clinical model is one person taking the psychedelic and two people sitting there with them.
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Like, that is not sustainable. It is not sustainable financially. So, you know, I, I, I think that we're gonna see a bubble pop in this, uh, in this whole, uh, arena of, um, whatever.
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Psy- The, the psychedelic money, money bubble is gonna pop. I mean, it's just, it just can't, it can't sustain.
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And even the retreats, I, I know for a fact that retreats, international retreats, and even the retreat, the clinics in, uh, Oregon, like, I think a third of the clinics that opened in Oregon have now closed because people, people can't afford it.
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They can't afford to run the clinics with the prices that they're charging, and people can't afford to pay the prices that are being charged.
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So, you know, it's a real issue that is going to, if we really truly care about people getting help and people getting better, and psychedelics and psilocybin in particular, as sustainable and accessible as it is, is one of the most efficient ways to help people heal from trauma, addiction, et cetera, et cetera.
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But it's not a linear process, and it's not gonna fit neatly into a typical therapeutic container.
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Well, especially as people come to have this experience or become interested in it and then learn that there are alternative models available.
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And I think that's one thing probably that happened in Oregon is people who have no baseline or experience or frame of reference for what the experience actually is probably learn about it, maybe are interested in it, they're referred to it.
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Maybe they have one experience, and then of course, they start doing research and you find out, "Oh, I, I brought this up in conversation at church, and it turns out that my ch- fellow churchgoer over here grows their own mushrooms."
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Right. "Or my neighbor has 'em." And then that's another fascinating thing about this current era with mushrooms in particular is that the demographic totally transcends any isolated group or- Mm-hmm...
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special interest group. Like, we see a lot about veterans, right? And I think that's politically convenient, and of course there's a lot of potential healing and value available for veterans.
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But they seem to be kind of the, the face of this public-facing messaging, right? Of like, uh, y- when you see a story about ibogaine or psychedelics, it's usually tied to the potential for the veteran community.
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But then you also see, like, suburban moms. There's microdosing moms and circles of that.
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And then you have athletes, and there's all these kind of affinity groups I've heard them called, where, you know, on this podcast I've interviewed, like, multiple former NFL players and I say, "Well, uh, how'd you find out about all this?"
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They say, "Well, I heard another NFL player talking about it." Like, or, "I heard a Navy SEAL talking about it, and I'm a Navy SEAL."
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Like, but that's an amazing thing about mushrooms, amazing thing about 'em, among many things, is that it doesn't just fit neatly into this, like, hippie box.
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It was, you know, the, the-- for years, for decades, the establishment tried to paint psilocybin, LSD as something that hippies use, long hair, anti-war.
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And now you find out, wait, the Silicon Valley founders are using this stuff. Wait, uh, pastors are using this stuff. Wait, the Vietnamese immigrant community likes mushrooms.
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Like, it is c- it completely spans, uh, all demographics to a point of common humanity, and I think that's something that is also worth paying attention to, that there's, uh, a lot of value there.
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And, like, when I think about a church in Kentucky, and I've seen some of the videos you shared, like, that's a type of person that would probably feel comfortable knowing there's other people that are like me.
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They live like me. They, they're part of the same community. They look like me. That's maybe easier to, um, it's more palatable to get inducted than, like, a, a white lab coat.
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I've never met this person before, and I don't know them, right? I, I also think there's maybe some unintended risk in the clinical model that they're not being honest with themselves about.
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And all, a lot of these studies you see, my understanding, it's usually, like, a one-month follow-up they do when they say, like, "This population got better."
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They're not really accounting for the next year or two years. But a church or a social grou- group can do that. Yes. Yes, absolutely.
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I mean- You know, among the deme- deme- demographics that benefit from psychedelics or psilocybin, healthy normals are one that are, we're not talking about.
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And actually, people who don't have outstanding conditions seek to be some, some of those who benefit most from these experiences. Some of my favorite people to work with over the years have been top performers.
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I mean, you give, you give 10 grams of mushrooms to someone who is a high-level CEO or, um, you know, very experienced, uh, journalist. I worked with this one journalist for a while. She was in- just incredible.
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And man, this woman would take 20 grams of mushrooms and would turn into a Ferrari, and it was just like, "Let's go." And then, like, what comes out, it's not just a good time.
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Like, yes, there's a good time to be had there, but when you are, when you are expanding your awareness, you're expanding your ca- capacity.
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You know, this is, this is one of the understandings that I have developed through the integration of Qigong into this work. So, you know, the Taoist Qigong practice teaches that you can increase your level of qi.
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You can ex- you can absorb more vital energy from the environment around you. And I, I, I s- believe that in large part, that's what's happening with these experiences.
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And when you see someone who is already an incredible channel for energy and intelligence and wisdom, when you see them open up and become an even more, a higher capacity channel, well, you just upped the consciousness game for the entire planet by upping the consciousness for that individual.
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So there's a ton of benefit to be had in, yes, dosing people who are struggling with PTSD and addiction.
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Also, like high-ranking military who are extremely high-performing individuals, feeding them mushrooms and watching them, like, level up in consciousness is an absolutely amazing thing to experience.
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I, I, I've worked with so many people. I worked with this lady, man, she was a retired CIA agent, and she was, she was one of the most powerful ind- individuals.
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I just like-- Uh, the first time I stood around her, I just like, just constant chills because her energy was just so powerful.
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And when we fed her mushrooms, it was just like 100-watt light bulb gained the capacity of 1,000 watts and just sat there and glowed so bright and, and helped her being.
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Like this is another thing that's really valuable to consider, and I know practitioners who have been in this for a while understand this, is that
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if, if someone is a high-capacity practitioner and they're in space with others, if that person takes a he- a healthy amount of mushrooms, and they just sit in that space and channel energy and light and conscious- consciousness into that space, you will see, you will see improved outcomes for everybody that shares that space with them.
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So, um, who was it? Um, Joe Tafur. I'm sure you know Joe. Um, Church of Condor. He was saying...
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I haven't seen this yet, but he's-- I heard a talk he gave here in Louisville once, and he said that there was some research that was gonna come out in the next couple of years, this was about a year and a half ago, that showed clearly that the most important factor for long-term outcomes was not the medicine, but was the facilitator, was the space holder.
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And I believe confidently that that is because the level of consciousness that the individual brings into that space with them impacts the level of consciousness of those who share it.
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And all of this healing, all the, the outcomes that we get are a result of expanded consciousness. We can say it's a mystical experience.
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We can talk about all the neurol- but ultimately, we are expanding our consciousness, and that gives us a larger capacity to process information that may be stuck in our systems or to interpret our lives and to make different choices, et cetera, et cetera.
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So I, I have this feeling, strong feeling, even though it's a very, uh, early in the field.
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Um, but what I have from the experiences that I've had, from the studies I've done from, from Qigong, uh, and also s- the Steiner work,
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quantum biology is actually going to be the scientific field that informs our understanding of the psychedelic experience more than any other discipline. Because what we are working with here is light.
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That's what, that's what we are. That's what all this is, in some weird way, is light. And when we consume these mushrooms, there is some component of this light of consciousness that facilitates the healing.
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So there, there's gonna be something, some interesting work study there hopefully in, in years to come. Yeah, hold all bets because this ship is just getting sailing right now, and we've already seen some,
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uh, remar- remarkable, unexpected developments, uh, on a planetary scale over the last decade or so. And now that everybody's tripping, it feels like, like it's safe to say this [both laughing]
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there's gonna be a lot more, um, interesting things going on, that's for sure.
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But we're all here for it, and I think that community is really gonna be where people need to invest because, um, the, the old myths are breaking down is something that we're kind of encountering.
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It feels like the, the myths of h- who the United States were, at least in the '90s when I grew up, is very different than, uh, what we're seeing today. And I think that's true around the world.
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There's a lot of people questioning institutions, a lot of old world institutions kind of losing some of their grip, and we don't really have new myths yet.
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I know this has been the subject of a number of books, so stay tuned everybody. But, uh, I, I always say, "May you live in interesting times." And we definitely lived- We're there... in interesting times, man.
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We're there. We're in the thick of it right now.
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And I think this is probably a good place to put a pin in this conversation, but I wanna leave you the last few minutes here to share anything you'd like to that we didn't touch on or any other ways people can get in touch with the sanctuary and other work that you're doing in this domain, Eric.
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Yeah. I appreciate the space there, Dennis. Um, well, you know, I mean- All I would do is just dig in deeper into the stuff that we've already talked about. There's, there's so much more that we could explore.
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Um, but yeah, it's, it's a good place to, to leave people wanting some more per- perhaps. Um, if you wanna check me out, I am... I got a YouTube channel, Erik S. Osborne. My TikTok is growing, Erik S. Osborne.
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Sanctuarp is sanctuary with a P, not P sanctuary, but sanctuary with a P, and that's.org. Um, we are, we are building a movement.
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This is, this is a community, but it is a movement to, uh, you know, level the playing field, create expanded access, have ongoing real s- real support, um, mushrooms for the people.
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Uh, so yeah, check out those platforms, and I just appreciate the time here to share, and appreciate the work that you're doing. Also, the, like, especially the comedy.
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Like, I did, I did some retreats with Shane Moss in Jamaica. That was a big motivator for me, was to bring comedy into the space. Um, we get so much more healing from humor than we get from seriousness, I s- I believe.
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Well, thank you so much for that, and thanks for joining me today. Erik Osborne, always a pleasure.
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Look forward to dropping in on you down there in Kentucky one of these days, and I hope you have a splendid rest of your day today. Thanks, Dennis. And that is a wrap. Thank you for sticking around to the bitter end.
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It's very sweet of you to commit so thoroughly. Don't be a stranger. Let me know what you thought of this episode, and please consider checking out the substantial backlog while you're at it.
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You can reach out to me via email, micropreneur@gmail.com, or hit me on any of the numerous social platforms that I'm currently active on, @micropreneurpodcast is the handle on Instagram and Twitter.
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Thank you all very much for sticking around. Have a wonderful day. I'll see you back here next week on the Micropreneur Podcast. [outro music]
