Dr. David DeSteno

There's a good chance you may have a bad outcome.

And so for me, you know, long answered your question about prayer.

I think we have these containers of the rituals and the ideals of the religions that work together synergistically.

And when you extract those, the question is, will they work as well?

Or if not, is there actually even in some cases a danger?

No, that's true.

And I think you may know this better than me being a neuroscientist.

I think some of the most recent work on psychedelics suggests

to use a poor metaphor, what it's basically doing is loosening the mind, right?

It reopens up periods of critical learning.

And so things that have become kind of rigid and reified in your brain, suddenly there's flexibility again.

And so

the messages that you're getting at that time can have much more influence and situational influences than they would at any other time.

And if you don't have that safe container for the religion, yeah, it can take you in really problematic ways.

But what I find interesting about it, you know, is people often talk about that moment of when it's good, of ego death as kind of being this transcendent experience where you feel this sense of connection to everything and great love.

And if you look at mystical traditions where they're all designed to kind of get you to this point, there are what are traditionally called right-handed roots and left-handed roots.

Right-handed roots are the ones that are kind of deeply embedded in religions that we normally don't see as much because they're for people who are kind of

living a contemplative lifestyle.

So Christian traditions have the goodest tradition we're more familiar with, etc.

And so you can, by virtue of engaging in long practices of meditation, building your skill over many years, get your mind to that point where you can have this sense of ego death.