also all students at the california institute of interval studies we have means the freedom to explore my own being yes and the word cognitive has an association with the mind or the brain but i would say consciousness in general and the freedom to explore all the interesting the ties in with the subject of integration that we were doing earlier culture grows by contact with other cultures and imbibing or  importing concepts ideas and perspectives from other cultures which in bridges your own culture so that's an integration of a larger world a scope of of ideas and ways of thinking and  world and so what we're talking about here is the same process brought to the level of the individual human being if we were raised in a box we'd have exactly one way of looking at things but because we live in a society we have the chance to talk to other people and learn from them and some people may propose perspectives ideas concepts that are alien to us perhaps even repugnant at first but if we are open minded which would certainly be of a necessary feature of cognitive freedom cognitive liberty then we can begin to review these ideas and say well wait a minute now you know there something to that and even if i don't hold heartedly adot this other perspective or idea it certainly modify my own perspective to make my way of being in the world work better for me to make my life smoother and richer in that way so cognitive freedom cognitive liberty means the freedom to change my mind in whatever way i want d taking in other perspectives new ideas and in the case of an image and sometimes perspectives and ideas that you could not normally obtain in consentual real the beauty of it is that it comes from experience i mean antigens have you have an experience which is very different than relating or opening your mind sometimes is so hard to be able to open your mind to new ideas or it's hard to keep yourself in a box if you have an experience of something different then you can start contemplating the idea of you know of that of that difference and embracing a new paradigm if you don't have that experience for a lot of us and i'm going to speak for myself but i think all of us that you and surgeons are have had experience with n t agents it's a liberating because it's an experience that melody and jumps out the window and all these problems are happening right now as a child i don't really understand this whole sort of propaganda against drugs or whatever and and at that point time i never really understood the importance of cognitive liberty  still young i still believe that the people that were in charge had their our best interests in mind and there is a reason for them telling us these things but as i sort of developed and got over those fears of this war on drugs and i started have my own experiences i came to realize like what right does any government have to put restrictions on what i do in a spiritual way or mental way or a psychological way or even in some ways a recreational way you know this is me this is my body  this is my right to be able to do it with it so it was a really interesting transition for me to go from this youthful state of like ok well maybe these people have you know maybe it's ok for the government to put on these types of things and then as i developed and had these experiences which were mind shattering my glowing medicinal healing and not necessarily the propaganda scary fear tactics that i was told the middle school it sort of changed everything and it was sort of a byproduct of that in a way it sort of had me start to question all the other things that i was being told in the world that these things were bad for me and turns out that they were bad for me and that they're very healing for me so what other things my being told by media mainstream press or whatever else you were talking earlier about the waking up you know how does this work and so like basically you it was a really interesting development for me and i remember my first my first mushroom journey ever right and this experience of like sort of reconnecting to my childhood essence and maybe going back to that point back in the day where i was sort of not really pro medicines and i remember thinking myself back in the day why would anyone at one ever take l s d who wants to taste purple because these are the types of things that we're fed right here who wants it you know be jumping all windows you know all these types of things that that happen so so how do we develop from this fear based sort of reactionary template that's been given to us to a more  some of the substance that has gotten quite demonized in the culture and misperceptions have been propagated but the original synthesizer our hop man accidentally had his first experience with it and his description was that he felt like he he had a memory of a mystical experience he had as a small child around between six and eight years old i believe where he was in the forest and he had this child like sense of wonder and knowingness and connection with nature is how he could describe it as an adult reflecting and that experience that he had as a kid he didn't have the context maybe to describe at the time but he knew that something mystical was going on for him in his experience with l s d thirty forty years later reawakened that experience that he had had as a child and he's  gifts at the agenda and some things that get called psychedelic and we can delineate that a bit more but there's an opportunity to tap into the enchanted perspective and to those helps us helps us remember what's interesting too is not for l s d in particular it's not even just just bringing that magic that wonder that but actually bringing magic wonder back to brain science because l helped people discover the neural chemical basis of certain and all these other brain chemistry that was happening it would have happened without the discovery ability because the similarities so it's really interesting to see that not only brings magic god to us on a personal level but brought magic in all into the science community which of course now it's changed a little bit but you know this whole new area of study opened up which was brain chemistry which nobody had any idea about before and that would have structure of d n a and many of the pioneers in the world of computer technology attribute some of their breakthroughs and their creativity in their problem solving to utilizing particularly  working with engineers and what is now known as silicon valley so there's levels of potential that are untapped at this point for creativity for problem solving and for healing and why don't we have the liberty to that this is our first amendment rights to have this individual cognitive freedom the first amendment of course talks about freedom of religion but the word religion it's flat roof speeds to connect back to and many people have the same religion you think about the big organized state religions in the world but that's not the only form of religion there are all forms of many forms of religion and the point is that the point of religion is to connect back to our roots in the world both of you mentioned that in the particular experience you discussed you well you mentioned hofmann and you mention your own remembering some important childhood experience that was important to you then that you completely forgotten but now was brought forth again in a whole new context of meaning as an adult with wisdom exactly so it is our first is the position of the council and spiritual practices it's hard to ignore that the first amendment gives us by extension you know the freedom of religion actually extends to the freedom of our individual cognitive liberty so that we can explore our connection to the larger cosmos to our you've to the the ground of being to the fundamental aspects and to the wonder of the world but people tell me today like i everything is so humdrum i can't even imagine what they're talking about because we're surrounded by the great mystery you know to thank for a moment that we've got it all down it's all been done end of story let me go back to work that's that's such a bogus and also the concept of plant teacher says that when we take these in theologians we can be taught something new experience really as you were saying not just like reading a book or going to class for somebody tells you something that you have to accept because they're an authority now you become the authority yourself because plan teacher directs you to have the experience through which you directly learn this is the concept of apprenticeship instead of learning something in the course through a book you actually do yourself and you have the bodily sensations the activities and and a mentor right there to guide you in this case plan teacher  how many of us have had answers in three genic experiences that would have never even come close to incorporating or changing part of our lives or part of the way we think and feel and the way we relate to the world if we didn't have those experiences it's not about following something it's not about belonging we're really doesn't feel like i want to belong there and it's almost like we need to find our own meaning own spirituality aside from an organized religion great if we can relate to that but some of us can't some of us through our experience can relate to spirit can feel that it's not something outside of yourself but it's inside of you and i think i think one of the reasons that the research that's coming out of u c l a at n y u maybe johns hopkins as well treating anxiety for terminal cancer patients is really interesting because again they're they're treating a spiritual thing right they're treating the fear of death they're treating the fear of what's going to happen once we lose these bodies and so that's like this really interesting space because it's not really so it's by medical i mean they're they're treating somebody but they're treating them for a different thing right like what we were talking earlier it's one thing is treating the symptoms which would be and but nobody talks about death i mean how many u