Down the Rabbit Hole: The Mystical Side of Psychedelics – Keith Kurlander & Dr. Will Van Derveer – HPP145

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:00:06]:
Thank you for joining us for the Higher Practice Podcast. I’m Dr. Will Vanderveer with Keith Curlander, and this is the podcast where we explore what it takes to achieve optimal mental health.

Keith Kurlander [00:00:21]:
All right, all right, all right. Some people may have got that. Yeah, that’s all we’re doing.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:00:35]:
Yeah.

Keith Kurlander [00:00:37]:
It is psychedelic week after all. Dazed and confused for some of you that haven’t seen the movie.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:00:44]:
Yeah. One of Matthew McConaughey’s all time great roles.

Keith Kurlander [00:00:49]:
Right. And one of his first roles.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:01:02]:
Right.

Keith Kurlander [00:01:02]:
Well, psychedelic week and we’ve got a good one. We’re going to get into the mystical and pretend like everyone else on the planet, that we know something about it.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:01:09]:
Well, we’ve had some experiences we can talk about and describe.

Keith Kurlander [00:01:12]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:01:15]:
That’s something that we do know. We do know. We’ve had experiences.

Keith Kurlander [00:01:20]:
Oh, yeah. We’ve had experiences in all the stuff that we’re going to talk about.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:01:24]:
Well, let’s talk about what the term mystical experience means for the purpose of this podcast. What are we talking about here?

Keith Kurlander [00:01:36]:
It’s far. It’s far out.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:01:44]:
It’s far out. I mean, for me

Keith Kurlander [00:01:44]:
I guess. Yeah, go ahead.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:01:44]:
I could just start and say that the phrase mystical experience was something I’d never heard of before until I was in college and I took an advanced religious studies course at Penn that was a survey of the mystics who had been burned at the stake or crucified and so on in the Middle Ages. And so what I. I got a lot of really interesting knowledge from that course, but I walked away with this notion that a mystical experience is a direct experience of divinity or something much bigger than ourselves. With no priest, no rabbi, no, you know, guide filtering, explaining, you know, inner. There’s no middleman in a mystical experience. So that’s, my current understanding, is having a direct experience of something much bigger than us.

Keith Kurlander [00:02:38]:
Yeah, I think mystical, I mean, we could get very technical from like a definition, but I would say it’s definitely usually transcendent. Something outside the ordinary perceptions of ego into the non ordinary perception of reality. Typically, it’s beyond ego, although it doesn’t have to be ego can be online. It can include the essence of reality, like divinity, or could be about getting in touch with essence of reality or the fabric of reality. But not all mystical experiences are about that either. Right. So it’s, I think it is something that’s, you know, tends to be a radical departure from our ordinary experience and tends to involve something that transcends ego. And there’s many different areas we’re going to talk about today in the mystical and different elements and things. So

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:03:40]:
Doesn’t need to be a psychedelic.

Keith Kurlander [00:03:46]:
Exactly.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:03:46]:
Most of them aren’t.

Keith Kurlander [00:03:48]:
Yeah, no, yeah.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:03:49]:
Many are spontaneous occurrences, near death experiences. There’s plenty of writings you can go and access of people having these experiences throughout history.

Keith Kurlander [00:04:03]:
Mysticism exists in all, in almost every religion. There’s mystical branches in all religion and it is something about having a direct experience of. Usually in religion it’s of God, but of divinity. But I think it’s just having a direct experience of, you know, more that meets the eye, so to speak.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:04:26]:
Right.

Keith Kurlander [00:04:27]:
What’s beneath the surface of ordinary reality. And once you get below that surface, you’re kind of in the mystical.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:04:34]:
Right, right. So below the surface, outside the walls of ordinary perception, something beyond the ordinary.

Keith Kurlander [00:04:44]:
Right.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:04:44]:
Hard to talk about. But many people, if you go around and you ask people if they’ve ever had an experience like that, be surprised how many people will say, oh sure, I had that experience when my dog died or when my mom died or when whatever happened. So these are not uncommon experiences, but they feel a lot different from ordinary consciousness.

Keith Kurlander [00:05:05]:
They’re not uncommon by any means, but I would say that for most people they are not regular either experiences.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:05:24]:
Right.

Keith Kurlander [00:05:24]:
Right. They’re more. They tend to not, I mean, you know, profoundly mystical experiences don’t tend to happen on the regular.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:05:24]:
Unless the person is a so called mystic, someone who has these experiences often, which is not common.

Keith Kurlander [00:05:32]:
Right, yeah.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:05:34]:
Okay, we got that out of the way.

Keith Kurlander [00:05:36]:
We got that out of the way.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:05:39]:
So having spontaneous mystical experiences is one thing and then deliberately going and taking a psychedelic compound in a particular context is a different thing. Right. I think that’s one of the opportunities of psychedelics is that we’re actually intentionally choosing to create a situation where you may not have one, but you may have a mystical experience.

Keith Kurlander [00:06:06]:
That’s right. Let me start with a story. Okay, how’s that sound? I’m gonna, we’re gonna jump around here. We’re gonna jump around here a little bit then. But I think starting with a story is cool. My first LSD experience. I haven’t done LSD that many times in my life. My first LSD experience, I was, I think I was 18, sometime around them. And so that was my first psychedelic experience was actually LSD and I was with a friend in college, we both did LSD and we’re hanging out. And it was very, it was, there was a lot of hallucinations going on, like, you know, heavy trails and it was a wild ride there. And we’re both sitting there and we’re just kind of went quiet. And there was a roll of aluminum foil on the floor. Because I was a messy college student, of course.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:07:05]:
Was this in the dorm room or where. Where was

Keith Kurlander [00:07:08]:
Dorm room, dorm room. And I didn’t clean up my aluminum foil roll. So it’s just sitting right in the open there, and we’re just staring at it, and then all of a sudden it turns into an accordion, like a worm. And it. It leaves the room, and we’re looking at each other and we know we were both seeing the same thing. And at the same time, we go, that thing just turned into a worm and left the room. We both said at the same time.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:07:36]:
You both said that, okay.

Keith Kurlander [00:07:39]:
At the same time. And then I picked it up and we were both like, oh, shit. Why’d you pick it up? That was cool because it ended the whole thing. Now, I want to talk about this as a mystical experience. For a moment, we both had the exact same hallucination, a very specific, vivid hallucination at the exact same moment. For me, that turned into a very mystical opening in my life.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:08:03]:
How so? What were you?

Keith Kurlander [00:08:06]:
Well, I was like, okay, clearly the chances of that randomly, that we both had the exact same hallucination in the same moment just sort of randomly happening is very unlikely. So since that’s very unlikely, I went into a very big opening of, okay, our minds actually interface in ways we can’t see. In in planes that we can’t see, in places we can’t see. Somehow there’s an interaction going on. And that became a very mystical opening for me, of like, there must be a whole way in which we exist that we don’t know about, you know, so that was a big moment for me of like, ah, you know, I. I thought I. What I saw was reality. Now, I don’t think that, you know, tinfoil rolls are turning into worms. I didn’t go there. Like, I wasn’t in some, like, fantasy of, like, oh, that’s really how the world works. Or that’s not where I went with it. It was more like, oh, our minds actually are entangled in ways that we can’t see. That’s where I went. And that was a mystical experience for me of being like, we just got entangled somehow.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:09:19]:
So it sounds like you went beyond the ordinary perception, which we could call it materialism, maybe, of if you see it, you can measure it, then it’s real. If you can’t see it, you can’t measure it, It’s not real. You had an experience that, for you felt like a set of experiences. That couldn’t be explained through ordinary frameworks of understanding.

Keith Kurlander [00:09:44]:
Yeah. Rational scientific frameworks. Science is not going to explain that to me now. I think it’s possible that it’s possible that quantum physics might explain that on some level. In terms of some type of entanglements that happen there. But science doesn’t really explain that. So, yeah, I went to a place of like, I can’t explain this. And so there’s more that meets the eye here going on.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:10:07]:
Right.

Keith Kurlander [00:10:08]:
And that became a mystical opening for me.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:10:10]:
I think that what you’re talking about is a similar quality of awe. And kind of like having your structures of interpretation and understanding. Completely blown out of the water. That we see in psychedelic therapy. And I could talk more about that later. But it has a similar vibe of like, whoa, there’s more to meet the eye here. More than meets the eye.

Keith Kurlander [00:10:35]:
Totally. Yeah. So it might be fun, just for a moment, to be like, well, what happened there? What do we think happened there? Let’s just assume that I. Remembering it accurately. And we didn’t say anything out loud until the moment we did at the same time. And let’s just assume we actually both had the hallucination at the same time. If we would just play with that possibility that that’s actually what happened. What do we think happened there? How did that happen? What do you think happened? If that, if that actually happened? It wasn’t suggestion. It wasn’t, you know, what do you think happened if that happened?

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:11:15]:
You know, this. You could. You could call this skepticism or not. I don’t know if it’s. If it’s a skeptic in me or not. But where I go with that is every nervous system apparatus. Every human individual. Perceives things in a very unique way. And so even the notion that there could be. There could ever be a perception in one person. That’s exactly the same as another person. Even if you and your friend both said it’s exactly the same. I don’t believe that it could ever be exactly the same in two different individuals. Because of all the different, you know, variables, nuances. The description of the tinfoil worked like a worm and left the room could be the same description. But the experience itself of any human internal experience is ineffable. It’s unique. Right. It’s like the words point toward an experience. But they’re not the experience itself. So that’s where I go with that.

Keith Kurlander [00:12:16]:
Right now now. That’s fine. But how do you explain seeing a box turn into a worm at the same moment? Why that box? Why? Why are we hallucinating on the same object in the same moment with roughly a similar description? What. What’s the explanation for you?

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:12:33]:
Well, you are both having a lot of perceptual experiences in that moment, the two of you. And when I’ve had experiences on psychedelics where I point to a thing like, do you notice that the walls are moving? Or the walls are breathing? It’s not uncommon for another person to go look at that and say, yeah, I see that too. But I don’t assume that they’re seeing the same thing I’m seeing.

Keith Kurlander [00:13:01]:
Yeah.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:13:01]:
And that’s different from what you’re talking about. But I think that when people are having a lot of perceptual disturbances and one person says something, hey, look at that. Or do you see that? I don’t think it’s super uncommon in a. One of the states on a psychedelic that’s a feature of it is the suggestibility on the psychedelic. For instance, it’s sort of like what I’m trying to describe is like an Escher painting where there’s a staircase and it’s sort of inside of itself and it’s really hard to tell what’s going on there, or some other test of a trick of the mind that you show. Do you see a face in that picture, Keith? No, I don’t see it. No. Really? Look, Keith. Do you see it? Oh, now I see it. Now I see it. Or doesn’t that cloud look like a spaceship? No. Well, really, look. Yeah. Okay, now I can see it. So I think that there’s an openness and a flexibility and, like, a receptivity to seeing patterns that we don’t ordinarily see that is happening simultaneously for you and your friends. So I don’t know. I’m not trying to debunk your mystical experience and say it’s not mystical, but I think there’s a lot going on in a shared psychedelic experience.

Keith Kurlander [00:14:24]:
Yeah, I have a different sense of what happened there, which is that I think it was a synchronicity of sorts. It’s sort of like when you. Someone says something to you and you were thinking it right before they said it, and, like, it was, like, so random and out of the blue that you were thinking this one thing and your partner says this thing, and it’s like, about some thing that happened 10 years ago, whatever. Like, I was just thinking that. To me, it felt. It feels like it’s more in that category that there’s some way in which we don’t fully understand yet that our social emotional nervous systems actually exchange information on subtle levels that we don’t understand.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:15:12]:
Yeah, that makes sense to me, too.

Keith Kurlander [00:15:14]:
I go there with this experience, and I think that if that does exist, which it does, obviously our social emotional nervous systems exchange in ways we don’t understand. I mean, that seems obvious, but I think that when we begin to touch into those ways, it’s a very mystical thing when we can really touch into the ways we’re exchanging in the ways that we can’t see here, smell or taste or touch, and we start exchanging outside of those five senses.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:15:42]:
If a mystical experience we have on, let’s say, January 1st, we come to find out on February 1st that there’s a science to, let’s say, mirror neurons. Right. So maybe we find out that there’s a way that the social emotional nervous system does track and respond and, you know, we can see EEG waves happening in the prefrontal cortex. Does that make it not be a mystical experience at that point?

Keith Kurlander [00:16:08]:
No, I don’t think so. I think then we’re starting to merge science with the mystical. I mean, again, what is the mystical? I think it’s when we’re able to touch into subtler realities that break apart the confines of what we’ve created in our minds about how the world works and what we see and when we. When we can go into a wider reality than what we know, a much wider reality, one that maybe is limitless in some way. I think science is going to show and lead us there over time, actually. And already is.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:16:45]:
I agree.

Keith Kurlander [00:16:45]:
Yeah.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:16:46]:
It’s really interesting. Quantum entanglements and so many things that break down.

Keith Kurlander [00:16:51]:
Yeah, totally. Let’s go to another story that you were part of.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:16:59]:
Yeah.

Keith Kurlander [00:16:59]:
We were in an ayahuasca ceremony together.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:17:00]:
Yeah.

Keith Kurlander [00:17:00]:
We’ve met long time ago.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:17:02]:
More than 10 years ago.

Keith Kurlander [00:17:03]:
Yeah. When we actually did that sort of thing.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:17:07]:
That’s right.

Keith Kurlander [00:17:09]:
And I was bouncing around the room. Right. I was bouncing up and down.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:17:16]:
You were levitating.

Keith Kurlander [00:17:18]:
Levitating. I was levitating, yes. Levitation exists. I was levitating. Shaking. Right. For a long time. Just like. And the interpretation of the facilitator later was you had a kundalini rising. That’s what that was. I was. I mean, you saw it. I was, you know, whatever.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:17:42]:
You were shaking. Yeah.

Keith Kurlander [00:17:43]:
Shaking like crazy. Bouncing around. And of course, it was an inner experience that was, whatever, hard to describe. And the facilitator was like, I’ve seen this three times, and it’s definitely a kundalini rising experience. That’s what happened to you. Let’s play with that for a little bit.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:17:57]:
Maybe you could talk to us about. Since you’re a ex Yogi, or maybe if. Is there such a thing as an ex Yogi? Are you always.

Keith Kurlander [00:18:05]:
I’m an ex. No, I’m an ex Yogi. Once a Yogi, always a Yogi.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:18:12]:
Yeah.

Keith Kurlander [00:18:13]:
No

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:18:17]:
No?

Keith Kurlander [00:18:17]:
Unfortunately, it’s kind of like. It’s kind of like.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:18:17]:
When did they take your card away? Does it have like a couple years you get at a time or.

Keith Kurlander [00:18:22]:
Yeah, I lost my certification. I gotta go. I gotta go take some CE. I lost my certification. I don’t know.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:18:30]:
What does the word Kundalini mean for the folks in the audience who never heard that word before?

Keith Kurlander [00:18:34]:
Well, Kundalini is used, I think, in a number of ways in yoga and sort of new age. But Kundalini is an energy that sits dormant from. From Indian mysticism. It’s an energy that sits dormant at the bottom of the spine and it can rise in you. And it’s your creative life force, really, through the channels. And so they talk about a kundalini rising. Kundalini arousal. And it moves through the chakra system. And as it moves through the chakra system, it can cleanse the areas through the chakra system. And then there’s this whole thing of like, well, you could have a kundalini emergency and it just rises spontaneously, which is like, what one of the hallmarks of spiritual emergencies. That term. It doesn’t have to. You can do practices that slowly cultivate kundalini energy over time. And. And I was in a kundalini yoga tradition. Well, I wasn’t in the type of kundalini yoga most people know, but I was in a. One of the few lineages that actually is a kundalini, like shaktipa tradition where they do transmissions and the kundalini rises. And I was in one of those traditions. Not. Not when we were hanging out together with the ceremony, but yes. So Kundalini. And you know, when it rises, you can have all kinds of experiences. Mystical experiences, oneness, visions, psychic experiences, all kinds of stuff.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:20:06]:
Would it be like having some kind of, like, electrical surge coming into your system? Is that.

Keith Kurlander [00:20:11]:
That’s what it feels like If. If it exists? If it exists? Let me just say that, then that’s what it feels like. I mean, that’s what it felt like for me if that’s what was happening. It’s like sticking your finger in a AC outlet.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:20:24]:
Wow. Did I tell you about the time I did that as a kid?

Keith Kurlander [00:20:28]:
Well, did I tell you about the time I did that as a kid?

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:20:31]:
Maybe we did it at exactly the same time.

Keith Kurlander [00:20:34]:
As a kid there. I went through a little phase with my friend where we would, we would take an extension cord and a plug and put it together just enough so you could touch the metal inside and we would shock ourselves.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:20:43]:
I was sticking forks in the wall in the

Keith Kurlander [00:20:45]:
Oh, wow. Okay. You might have burned down your house like that.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:20:49]:
Right.

Keith Kurlander [00:20:53]:
Anyway, that’s another story.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:20:53]:
Lets get back to the topic at hand here.

Keith Kurlander [00:20:53]:
Yeah. Talking about our crazy childhood. So kundalini energy though, what’s. Why, why this is important is you will hear in psychedelic circles about Kundalini a lot. People will talk about, oh, I had a kundalini rising. Or you know, you might hear our facilitator. Again, not typically like a traditional like shaman or something. Don’t, don’t usually have that language. But you might hear a facilitator that’s, you know, broached. Different worlds use this terminology for some people. Imagine the impact you could have with your clients when you’re able to practice the most cutting edge modality available today. Psychedelic therapy is the future of mental health care and the Integrative Psychiatry Institute will empower you with the tools and knowledge you need to master this exciting modality. IPI’s comprehensive training and in person experiential practicums will elevate you personally and professionally. This in depth curriculum is the gold standard certification in the field. When you join, you will step into a global community of thousands of innovative colleagues who are integrating psychedelic therapy into their practices. Visit psychiatryindustice.com/apply where you will find all the information you need about IPI’s training and when you visit psychiatryinstitute.com/apply you’ll also receive IPI’s free ebook getting started with psychedelic therapy so you can get the most up to date information immediately. Again, that’s psychiatryinstitute.com/apply to learn more about the training and to get your free ebook.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:22:26]:
Well, let’s take a moment to explore this spiritual emergency thing for just a minute because I think I want to see if we have the same understanding of that. My understanding is that when a person has trauma, they have some of their life force is tied up in some kind of internal entanglement, some kind of internal process that I think of as just like potential energy. I think of it as like really condensed, dense energy that is not available for the person to deploy toward what they want to. How they want to live their life. And so I think about an spiritual emergency as a condition where somehow the density of that place of energy in the body is cracked open. And now it’s a relatively violent kind of sudden experience of going from a status quo to having a really different experience of energy in the body that is hard to integrate and can take a lot of effort, a lot of support to sort of weave back into the being of the person. Is that how you think about spiritual emergency?

Keith Kurlander [00:23:36]:
Well, you know, that’s interesting. I mean, I think that would be. Could be a description of a type of. If someone came to me and that was their description of what was happening to them, I might be like, that sounds like you’re having a spiritual emergency. But I don’t think it’s the only type. For instance, our friend Joan Borysenko talks about her spiritual emergency as a young child when she started hearing voices and, you know, she was starting to go to, you know, they’re taking her to whatever or psychiatrist or whatever, and they thought she was going psychotic and. And then she did this thing where she started praying and they completely went away or something. And so, like, I would say that’s also a spiritual emergency right now. Maybe it’s the same thing, maybe as some kind of locked up energy, who knows, that’s kind of cracking. So I think there’s different types of spiritual emergencies, for sure. I think there’s also, like, people could have a spiritual crisis, like where their foundation of how they understood divinity just crumbled in front of them. Like, let’s say they had a journey and their whole identity, spiritual identity of the world and how it works, just like crumbled and they can actually go into like a major crisis.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:24:47]:
Well, that can also happen when we lose a loved one.

Keith Kurlander [00:24:59]:
Sure.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:24:59]:
In an accident or an act of violence or something like that. That.

Keith Kurlander [00:24:59]:
Right.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:25:00]:
You know, the theme of like, you know, whatever you call God. How could, how could God do this to me? How could this happen to me?

Keith Kurlander [00:25:11]:
Yeah.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:25:11]:
Yeah. Existential crisis.

Keith Kurlander [00:25:11]:
Right. Now, coming back to Kundalini again. This is how I was taught early on. We could decide whether or not I believe in this or not. I don’t know. But, you know, I was taught that you can have a Kundalini rising either spontaneously, which is rare, or you do practices that cause it and you’re not ready for it. And you can be in a spiritual emergency from that. You can do some practices where you haven’t done, you haven’t gotten your body, your nervous system, your spiritual system, ready. And you’re doing these things that cause Kundalini to rise, and you’re not ready. And now you’re in a spiritual emergency because you’re dealing with too much energy, too much life force. And now that’s a whole point of view, which I think there’s something there. Just from my own personal experience, there’s something here.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:26:06]:
I think the quality of emergency in my mind has to include the dynamic of not having enough capacity or resilience or structure inside of yourself to hold your experience.

Keith Kurlander [00:26:18]:
Yeah, yeah. And whatever the cause of that is and how we frame that and. And this can happen on psychedelics. Right. I mean, this is whether you call Kundalini or anything, like you can have an experience that you’re not. That overwhelm your system. Let’s say the. The. The protection around the wire wasn’t thick enough and, like, it’s starting to leak energy out. Right.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:26:42]:
I just had one of those synchronicities where I was thinking about the insulation on the wire, and there you go.

Keith Kurlander [00:26:48]:
Oh, well, there you go. Well, you. You don’t believe in that. You tried to debunk that. So. So you’re. So it’s not true. Whatever you’re thinking here. It’s not a synchronicity doesn’t exist. Yeah, you had one. So, yeah, that happens. And mystical experiences can do that to us. Whether it’s a rush of energy. That’s kundalini or whatever it is. Or let’s actually take this into another place. Like entities. You know, you go into ceremony in a lot of. In other places in the world also. Like. And you might. They may be talking about entities.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:27:26]:
In Amazon or. Yeah

Keith Kurlander [00:27:27]:
Yeah.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:27:27]:
Kind of traditional.

Keith Kurlander [00:27:27]:
When I was down there, they were talking about entities. You know, they’re doing clearings to keep the space clear of things getting in and, you know, negative energies, entities intruding the space.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:27:39]:
Right.

Keith Kurlander [00:27:40]:
Did you ever have an experience of an entity?

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:27:42]:
Oh, yeah, definitely. I mean, it’s. I think what we’re talking about is a framework of shamanic healing where entities and, you know, just energies that are not benevolent or that don’t have our best interests in mind are considered to be a part of what you’re dealing with all day.

Keith Kurlander [00:27:59]:
So what do you think about that? What do you think of it?

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:28:02]:
I. I remember one time I was in the jungle and I was sitting with my teacher and there was a. So it was an ayahuasca ceremony. I was deep in the journey, and so the visual imagery was becoming strong, and I perceived I started to notice the feeling of dread in my body. And I was sitting in meditation in circle with my eyes closed, and I was seeing this thing coming toward me that was kind of. I couldn’t tell if it was an insect or like a helicopter or that kind of like weird mechanical insect shape coming toward me. And it had this feeling. The feeling that came up in my consciousness was, it’s going to do something to me. And the facilitators had explained that, you know, you’re responsible for your own experience, but if you need help, raise your hand or say the word help. If it’s pitch black, dark, so raising your hand sometimes doesn’t do anything. So I said the word help, and one of the helpers came over and she leaned in close to my ear and said, what do you need? And I said, there’s a thing coming toward me. And she said, is it friendly or not? And I said, it’s not friendly. And she said, don’t let it. And then she left and went back to the front of the circle.

Keith Kurlander [00:29:26]:
Yeah, good luck.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:29:31]:
And it was really powerful that she didn’t rescue me because.

Keith Kurlander [00:29:34]:
Right.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:29:35]:
I started to notice this kind of warrior energy arising in me to take care of something, you know, myself, my space that felt worthy of protection, you know, and this quality, this archetype, if you will, this facet of my personality came forward and I slashed and destroyed this thing that was coming at me. And it kind of vaporized and disappeared. And I had this really strong feeling of like, wow, I just. I did it, you know, I took care of it.

Keith Kurlander [00:30:09]:
And did you ever place meaning on that, that there is a dimension where energies exist that are actually outside of our body? Or did you place meaning on that like that? Well, that’s just the part of myself inside my own.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:30:25]:
That’s a great question. I mean, this is sort of where shamanic healing and western psychology seem to have a different point of view, Right?

Keith Kurlander [00:30:34]:
They definitely do.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:30:35]:
I mean, the tendency in western psychology is like, that is a part of you.

Keith Kurlander [00:30:42]:
Yeah.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:30:42]:
Right. Especially transpersonal psychology.

Keith Kurlander [00:30:42]:
That’s true.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:30:44]:
So

Keith Kurlander [00:30:45]:
You you were also steeped in Buddhism. Would Buddhism say that was a part of your own projection?

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:30:52]:
That’s a great question. Well, I came from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition I was in for many, many, many years had emerged. It was informed by an older tradition in Tibet called the Bon tradition. B O N and the Bon tradition was a shamanic tradition that was older than Buddhism in Tibet. And there were entities in the Bon tradition. And so in the tradition I was studying in Buddhism. There were kind of, you could say, dark and light deities that were a part of what we learned about and studied. So it wasn’t so clear in the Buddhist tradition I was in. And I think in a different tradition, like a Zen tradition, probably there would not be a lot of room for saying, oh, there’s an, there’s an entity over there. But.

Keith Kurlander [00:31:35]:
Right. So what’s your, what’s your, what’s your sense from your own experience of it?

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:31:41]:
When I think about reality, ordinary and non ordinary, I think it’s a both. And for me, I don’t think it’s an either or. In other words, if you look at microbes, for example, on, on the micro level, you’ve got bacteria and amoebas and, you know, different things that can coexist and have a symbiotic relationship with each other. Right? And you can see this on the macro level in nature where you’ve got, like, aspen trees and you’ve got certain groups of microbes in the soil that cooperate and so on. There’s, there’s. But there’s also a lot of competition, right? And there’s genocides that occur in nature, not just humans, but also with plants and animals and so on. So I think that if we live in a world on the perceptual kind of physical, materialist level, we can measure it, we can see it whatever. Where we have, you could say good and evil going on, there’s a fight between this and that. Why wouldn’t that be the case on every level of every dimension? Why wouldn’t we have, you know, if humans ever become interplanetary, why wouldn’t there just be bigger wars between bigger groups of people with more power and more destruction? So I think that, to me, it makes more sense that, you know, if, so to speak, good and bad, you know, evil and good happen on this level, they happen in other dimensions. But I also believe simultaneously that all of those labels are labels generated out of ego. You know, what’s good, what’s bad? I mean, that’s, you know, violence occurs by one entity or group on another one, is it good or bad? I don’t know for sure. It’s a, It’s a value judgment. So I think they’re both there. That’s. That’s my synopsis.

Keith Kurlander [00:33:44]:
Yeah.

Keith Kurlander [00:33:45]:
Yeah.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:33:45]:
You think it’s all. Is it all mind for you?

Keith Kurlander [00:33:49]:
No.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:33:49]:
No?

Keith Kurlander [00:33:50]:
I would say the first thing is it’s all. I don’t know. But the second thing I’ll say. And anyone that claims they absolutely know probably don’t know themselves that well because, you know, claiming absolutes and things that we have internal experiences of is. Well, it’s a claim from an individual person. But what I will say that I think I know for sure is that we. One thing I see is that we don’t. We obviously, we can’t see everything yet in terms of using scientific instruments. We know that.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:34:30]:
Right.

Keith Kurlander [00:34:30]:
We know there’s so much we can’t see. And so our understanding of the nature of reality is still pretty young. I mean, we’re not that old as a species when we actually started even collecting information and thinking about this stuff. We’re super young as a species, so we’re babies as a species, so we don’t know a lot. So what I would say is I don’t know. But my guess is there are definitely sort of dimensions of reality that we definitely do not see whether some type of energies, whether it’s matter or not, collect there. I think that’s probably happening. So I’d say it’s probably both, and like you, you know, on some absolute level, I think we’re. When we enter unity consciousness, all this goes away anyways. So we’re, we’re perceiving things, you know, through our mind in relative reality, and we’re more making sense of them and we’re creating ideas and stories and all that. So. And we’re projecting onto them and creating meaning onto these things. And, you know, so I think it’s both and.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:35:41]:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s good that we’re on the same page.

Keith Kurlander [00:35:45]:
We’re on the same page. I mean, I’ve had enough. I’ve had enough experience. Here’s another story. Go ahead.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:35:50]:
Okay, before you go to the next story, I just want to add one caveat here, is that I just want to say as a therapist, you know, as a healer, I, generally speaking, want people to start with the assumption that it is a part of them rather than thinking that it’s something outside of them. And here’s why is that we have such a huge tendency in human nature to blame our environment or our parents or whatever, our lot in life, the Republicans, you know, whatever the. Whoever the enemy is or the situation we’re in, rather than taking responsibility and saying, okay, this is up to me. So I think it’s a much more empowering stance oftentimes to take to just start from the assumption that this is you and this isn’t something outside of you. But I don’t think that’s always the case.

Keith Kurlander [00:36:36]:
Well, one thing we could say is your reaction is definitely you.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:36:58]:
Yeah, yeah.

Keith Kurlander [00:36:58]:
We know that. So, you know, whatever’s happening out there, which we don’t know when we get into this whole entities or other dimensions, you know, we. One thing we know is the way we’re reacting is you. And so you. You can work with that.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:36:58]:
Absolutely.

Keith Kurlander [00:36:59]:
And the meaning you create on it is you.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:37:02]:
Right.

Keith Kurlander [00:37:03]:
You’re the one creating the meaning. Now, somebody might have told you that meaning, and you’re just said, okay, I believe that, but you’re creating the meaning. So that’s you.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:37:10]:
And you’re responsible for that meaning.

Keith Kurlander [00:37:13]:
So you better create meaning that helps you and doesn’t hurt you.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:37:16]:
As our friend Greg Olsen often say.

Keith Kurlander [00:37:19]:
Yes, going to create a story. Create a good one.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:37:22]:
Exactly.

Keith Kurlander [00:37:23]:
That’s right. So the story for me is that. So when I was in my 20s, I had horrible nightmares all night for all of my twenties, every night without fail, of entities attacking me. And I couldn’t breathe. They were, like, sitting on my chest. Dark energy. So in my 20s, I brought this to my guru at the time. This is the kundalini lineage thing. I was like, what is this? Is this a real thing? You know, what do I do? Now he was smooth on this piece. And he said. He was smooth, and he just said, just trust what’s happening and let it pass.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:38:11]:
Mm.

Keith Kurlander [00:38:12]:
Trust it and let it pass. That’s all I said. So. So that was interesting. But here’s the story with what I ended up happening with this. It actually was until ayahuasca that this stopped, which is also interesting.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:38:26]:
Wow. Weird.

Keith Kurlander [00:38:28]:
Yeah. So this. This experience went on into my 30s. No. And I haven’t done ayahuasca since my 30s, late 30s. So in my ayahuasca journeys, I would sometimes face these same energies that I was waking up from. And what has started happening in my ayahuasca journey spontaneously was I started, like, moving like a cat and howling and hissing and growling at this energy, particularly on the ones when I was outside of nature. They didn’t like that inside the temples. And so I would just start spontaneously doing that. And then during that time period, I would wake up in these nightmares, in the nightmare, attacking the energy from this animal place. And I would scare the out of my wife because I would be, like, in my sleep doing this and, like, with claws, with my hands. Now, this went on for, like, a few months, and. And then they stopped forever. I haven’t had. I don’t even think I’ve had one since that time.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:39:41]:
Wow.

Keith Kurlander [00:39:42]:
What is that? I don’t know. But maybe it was entities. So that’s cool story, but let’s actually move this into another part of the conversation, which is synchronicity, which I think is really interesting. And also the whole concept of animal spirits and plant spirits so related to that. One of these nights I particularly got in touch with the jaguar spirit on the medicine. And I was, you know, I was in a church setting in Colorado and I. With a church that came here, a Colombian, you know, church. And I was one out of deep communion with the jaguar spirit. So I go home that night and at 7am I get a knock on my door and it’s a guy who’s holding in his, his hand a big picture of a jaguar face. And he says to me, this jaguar, we just rescued this jaguar from somewhere in South America. There’s something going on and we need money to help this jaguar. It’s at the sanctuary right now. Would you give money to support this jaguar? And I was like, well, I’m giving money to support this jaguar. So, you know, this is where I’m like, okay, you could just say it was random synchronicity. But also like this whole concept of, you know, that the, the animal energy, the plant spirit energy is jaguar like that sometimes is talked about with ayahuasca. And. That there’s something there. And I’m like, well, there’s something there. I don’t know what the hell it is, but something happened there, right? Like, I have enough of these experiences to. To check off my life where I’m just like. I don’t like to make big conclusions because, you know, I have a propensity to do that. So. And I get into messes and like, you know, I could get mentally ill. You don’t want to do that when you have like, susceptibility with mental illness. So like, you gotta be careful with making conclusions. But there’s enough of these check marks in my life to go. There are things going on and dimensions going on that this stuff might be going on in some. In some weird way. What’s going on here.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:42:13]:
Right I mean, I think it’s an important. There’s actually been studies on the health benefits of the experience of awe, you know, and I think

Keith Kurlander [00:42:24]:
Yeah, there’s been a lot of studies on that.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:42:26]:
And I think it’s important to. To link that up here because, you know, when we have experiences that kind of blow our mind and cause us to wonder if the way reality works is really how it works or is it just a very limited imagination that we have we can go straight into awe. And I think that’s. I think it’s a hallmark of the mystical experience. Right. Is. Is some sort of sense that. Oh, there’s a much bigger picture here. It’s very beautiful. Very beautiful.

Keith Kurlander [00:42:56]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:42:58]:
Let’s talk about the dark side of these experiences that are not euphoric, not pleasurable, not fun, because, you know, the melting away of the boundary between our sense of self and our sense of other or our sense of nature or sense of the universe, and be incredibly fulfilling and peaceful. Beautiful.

Keith Kurlander [00:43:22]:
Inspiring. Awe. Inspiring.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:43:25]:
Awe inspiring. Life changing.

Keith Kurlander [00:43:28]:
Life changing. That’s one way it goes.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:43:31]:
Can go that way. There can also be an incredible amount of terror and annihilatory panic.

Keith Kurlander [00:43:39]:
Terror, panic, confusion, agitation.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:43:43]:
Yeah. Disorientation.

Keith Kurlander [00:43:46]:
Disorientation.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:43:47]:
Loss of reference points, really. Loss, even loss of, like, circadian rhythms, loss of ups and downs.

Keith Kurlander [00:43:58]:
Mania. You can get.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:44:03]:
Yeah.

Keith Kurlander [00:44:03]:
Get like, sort of, you know, inflated and. Yeah.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:44:03]:
Yeah. I had an experience. Maybe it’s time for me to share a story here where I was getting trained in ketamine therapy. And this was seven or eight years ago, and I went to a ketamine training where the facilitator suggested a range of ketamine intramuscular ketamine. And I tend to have a propensity to go big in my life, try to do things that sometimes are a little over my head. And this particular facilitator didn’t dictate the dose. He said, you know, it’s up to you, but here’s the range. So I did a big dose of ketamine on day one, and then a second big dose of ketamine on day two. And we left the retreat. I think it was later that afternoon on day two, so there wasn’t really any time for integration. And on the way out of the retreat, I was deeply fragmented. I was. I was having all kinds of uncomfortable physical experiences. Nausea, disorientation, dizziness, tinnitus. And I had to get on a flight to go to a conference, to function professionally. Got on. I was about to get on the plane. Luckily, I was with a couple of people who were really. Who were with me in the ketamine training and getting on the flight with me. So I had friends, which helped a lot. But I told my friends in the airport, man, everything is too intense. The lights above me are really scary. I don’t think I can get on this flight. And they said, well, if we’re with you, can you get on the flight? And I get on the flight with them. We got out of the airport and we were in an Uber. And I remember I was sitting in the backseat between my two friends and I started having intrusive thoughts. To jump out of the Uber on the highway. It’s going about 60 miles an hour, multi lane highway. I never had these experiences before. It was not part of my repertoire. The long story short is it took me a few weeks to feel like I was in my ordinary self again. I don’t know if I’d ever say that I was back to who I was before because this experience changed me permanently. I think ultimately for the better in the sense that it opened me up to a lot of things. The fragility of my mind, the density of my belief systems and so forth. But it took a while to integrate that experience. And I think these fragmenting experiences are scary and difficult to go through. Take a lot of support to move through effectively.

Keith Kurlander [00:46:29]:
And yes, been through many of them. And they are mystical. Even though they are incredibly painful. They, they do have a mystical quality as when your ego sort of falls apart, your, your reference is completely gone. And so there’s a mystical quality of you are getting beyond yourself in some way. But it’s, it’s a shattering. It’s not, it’s not the funnest way because there’s my experience with ego fragmentation, if that’s what we’re calling this and from people I’ve worked with, is that there’s still, there’s, there’s sort of. You’re sort of in between worlds of you’re, you’re, you’re sort of feeling beyond the ego, but your ego is sort of trying to keep itself together and fighting for its solidarity. It’s authority. No, falling for its solidness.

Keith Kurlander [00:47:30]:
Right. It’s

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:48:18]:
Integrity.

Keith Kurlander [00:48:18]:
Integrity and form.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:48:18]:
Right.

Keith Kurlander [00:48:18]:
And that’s terrifying. Right. And everything’s chaotic and it’s not. The brain’s firing in all kinds of weird directions and so you get all these intrusive thoughts and um, your inhibited brain is like not functioning properly. It’s like you’re getting all this stuff from probably your brain stem shooting up and yeah, it’s, it’s pretty, pretty intense. And I agree with you for myself, it, it. These things have led to a much broader way of being in the world, a wider way, a more humble, a more open way. But I, I don’t think I’m ever the same after those experiences. And I, I don’t wish those upon myself or anyone, honestly.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:48:18]:
Yeah.

Keith Kurlander [00:48:18]:
They’re, they’re, they’re very intense and it’s one thing that can happen.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:48:22]:
You know, it’s. One of. One of our spiritual teachers had, had a line that goes. And I’m paraphrasing here, but that. “That enlightenment is one humiliation after another,” is what he would say. And I think he was speaking about, of course, the ego’s point of view. Um, but it is incredibly humbling to go through those experiences. And certainly we can wish for gentle humblings, but they’re not all gentle.

Keith Kurlander [00:48:49]:
No. And you gotta wonder how trauma plays into these experiences. Fragmentation. Right. Like, obviously with trauma, it’s. It’s easy for significant trauma to lead to some experience of fragmentation. So we can fragment away from the reality that we’re seeing.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:49:07]:
Right.

Keith Kurlander [00:49:09]:
Right. So they don’t have to take it in as a whole. We could take it in parts.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:49:13]:
Right.

Keith Kurlander [00:49:13]:
Receive parts of our reality, but not all of our reality. And that is uncomfortable when that’s forced on us.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:49:21]:
Right. When we’re forced to see that for the exact. The exact. Being able to perceive that in sort of accelerated time. Right. Where we’re actually aware that there’s fragmentation, but there’s nothing we can do about it in the moment. Really scary. Yeah. Uncomfortable.

Keith Kurlander [00:49:41]:
Yeah. And it’s probably. I think there is a piece of. I mean, again, like, if you took a western psychology lens here, you might argue that that’s the ego defense mechanism from an overwhelming experience. Right. You might argue it

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:50:12]:
Go into fragmentation.

Keith Kurlander [00:50:12]:
Yeah. Like more of, like a dissociation spectrum almost. You might argue that it’s the ego’s mechanism so that it doesn’t, you know, get obliterated or go psychotic at fragments.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:50:13]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Keith Kurlander [00:50:15]:
That would be one argument. But I think there’s also something here. Mystically. It opens. Like, you’re saying, like, I think it’s common for people who put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Hopefully.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:50:36]:
Mostly.

Keith Kurlander [00:50:36]:
Mostly. You might be missing a little shell walking around with, like, a black hole.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:50:36]:
Right.

Keith Kurlander [00:50:36]:
Actually, you probably are.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:50:44]:
Yeah.

Keith Kurlander [00:50:44]:
So Humpty Dumpty’s not all the way back together again, but

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:50:44]:
Maybe Humpty has a softer shell after he gets put.

Keith Kurlander [00:50:46]:
Humpty has a shell. Softer shell. Yellow holes here and there. Yeah.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:50:52]:
So brittle in your perception of how reality works.

Keith Kurlander [00:50:55]:
Yeah. Or so hard.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:50:58]:
That too.

Keith Kurlander [00:50:59]:
Right. Yeah. So it’s. It’s all valid and useful and interesting to sort of think about what is this stuff and what’s real and what’s not real. And I think some us think we’re real, so maybe we’re real.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:51:19]:
Well, it’s part of the story. We’re real and we’re not real.

Keith Kurlander [00:51:22]:
We’re real and we’re not real.

Keith Kurlander [00:51:26]:
Maybe we should start wrapping up here that we’re real, we’re not real. And

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:51:29]:
Yeah, I guess I also want to just speak to the listener who might be in the middle of one of these experiences we were just talking about. And

Keith Kurlander [00:51:42]:
That’s true.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:51:42]:
And say, look, there’s help available.

Keith Kurlander [00:51:42]:
Yeah. There’s support.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:51:44]:
Yeah, yeah.

Keith Kurlander [00:51:46]:
And it all leads to growth as soon as you can get on that path.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:51:53]:
Yeah.

Keith Kurlander [00:51:53]:
Yeah.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:51:53]:
Post traumatic growth is real. And, you know, one of the benefits I had in that moment of pain was heading. I was on my way to a MAPS conference, and so when I started to talk to a handful of people, I was a little scared to share my experience. But when I opened up and spoke to people, there were lots of people there who had had very fragmenting, difficult experiences and come back from it. And sharing those stories with me helped me feel more confident that, you know, I hadn’t broken myself permanently and I would find my way, which, of course, I did. So, yeah, know that. Know that people come back from these fragmenting experiences.

Keith Kurlander [00:52:34]:
Yeah. All right.

Dr. Will Van Derveer [00:52:39]:
We look forward to connecting with you again on the next episode of the Higher Practice podcast, where we explore what it takes to achieve optimal mental health.