Oprah Talks Psychedelics with Dr. Roland Griffiths | Oprah Daily

Hello everybody, I'm here with a delightful audience of Oprah Daily Insiders again and I want to invite you all into a conversation about a topic that so many people want to avoid but it's one that every one of us is going to have to face in our lifetime and that is our mortality and the older you get the more you think about it. So I have to say I certainly think about it a lot more than I did when I was y'all's age okay. So how we choose to look at it either with fear or with gratitude can make all the difference in our lives and also the lives of everybody else around you. So I recently read this really interesting column maybe you all read this too by journalist David Marchese in the New York Times Magazine about his interview with Dr. Roland Griffiths. Now Dr. Griffiths is a world renowned scientist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He's been studying the human mind, listen to this, he's been studying the human mind for 50 years, over 50 years. Also the founding director of the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research and last year he was diagnosed with stage 4 terminal cancer and I was so moved by the message in his interview that I read in the Times that I reached out to Dr. Griffiths to ask if he could share his insights with all of us, all of you on Oprah Daily because it's really rare that you can find someone who knows they're dying who has a prognosis that is you know not even to the end of this year and is willing to talk about it openly. I know when my own father I knew he was not going to live he still thought he was so he wasn't willing to talk about it in the way that I felt could be meaningful. So joining us from the Johns Hopkins campus in Baltimore, please welcome Dr. Roland Griffiths. Hello Dr. Griffiths, good to see you. Good to be with you. So Dr. Griffiths you know you said you want us to accompany you on this journey but I don't think most of us are ready for the journey. We admire the fact that you're able to handle it, handle this moment and that prognosis but we're not ready. And nor was I when I went in for a screening colonoscopy over a year ago leaving myself to be completely healthy coming out with a positive finding which was confirmed within just a few days that it was a metastatic cancer and so it was stage four and in a very few weeks it had progressed to a point where cure was extraordinarily unlikely. But for me then Oprah at that time I had a long history of meditation. I had contemplated my own death but I had no real sense of how I might respond to a diagnosis of this sort. And I can't quite explain it. I can tell a story about it but for me what occurred was this incredible opening, awakening if you will, to the preciousness of life. And it immediately became something to celebrate. Now that's not to say that I didn't go through a series of psychological conditions. I kind of probed into depression and anxiety and denial and resentment but I came to realize very quickly that inhabiting any of those states would simply be torture. And so what I turned to is a gratitude practice and it's something that we all should know and we know it at some level but for me the gain or the volume was turned up and that is the preciousness of what it is to be alive, the preciousness of what it is to be sentient. And we all know this, we get caught up in our stories though and so that's what I've really leaned into. And as a consequence of that I have never been happier or had more equipoise than ever before in my life. And so it's just about gratitude for the mystery in which we find ourselves. Wow, so that's what you mean when you say come along on this journey. Come along on this journey with me of opening up to the preciousness of life. Mary Oliver speaks about that. I was reading you know one of her poems to you when we had our first conversation the other day about we're not just flesh, we're not just bones but you have this life. And I think it's not until something tragic happens or somebody in your family encounters a diagnosis or prognosis that is not favorable and we start to think about it differently. So as I was introducing you as being in charge of psychedelics, psychosilobin and using that mechanism for allowing people to experience traumas differently and handling depression. Did you think I want to go drop some LSD or not LSD as some psychosilobin? Do you think I want to try some drugs? Did you think about that? Because I would think if you know you're going to die soon, that's the time to take the trip. Yeah. Let's see, so I am founder of the Psychedelic Center at Hopkins. What got me interested initially, and this was 20 years ago, was my meditation practice and it opened up a window into the mystery and the wonder of life that I found very compelling. And I actually had at that point been doing research for years in psychopharmacology, that is with behaviorally and mood-altering drugs, but I didn't have any interest in psychedelics. But it became of interest to me to know whether psychedelics would have anything informative to tell me about the nature of this mystery, for lack of a better word, the spirituality, the humbling sense that we truly don't know what's going on here. So that's where I started engaging as a researcher with psychedelics. And what we found from the very first study is that at high probability, people would take a psychedelic under our set and setting conditions and being very carefully screened and prepared, and they would have experiences that really shifted their entire sense and worldview. And it's this sense that these kinds of experience occurs normally and naturally and have been reported for eons by mystics in different traditions, their opening experiences. But the core features of that experience is that we're all interconnected, we're all in this together. There's something extraordinarily precious about that knowledge. Some people would use the word sacred, although you don't have to. And there's something emphatically true, that it's more real and more true than everyday waking consciousness. And when you bring those qualities together, we're all in this together, it's precious or sacred, and it's absolutely true, you have the foundations for changing people enduringly after that. And so that's what we're seeing, that's part of the opening into the therapeutics of these drugs. So you've done this for patients for years, you've done this for patients for years, and now you're saying that after all these years, it's ironic that you are now in the exact position of your patient. How did you adjust to the role reversal, the doctor who becomes the patient? Yeah, and it goes even deeper than that, because the very first therapeutic trial we ran was in cancer patients who had a life-threatening illness and who had a lot of anxiety and depression. So I had spent many hours talking to people about, what do you think happens when we die? And people had all kinds of different descriptions. And in many of those conversations, I never had the thought that we would be changing seats. That you'd be asking yourself that question, yes. Yeah, yeah. But, and I think it was partly because of my meditation experiences, and partly because by the time I got this diagnosis, I now have some limited experience with psychedelics. But those allowed me to lean into this sense of gratitude and opening. So initially, with the diagnosis, I had no interest in going back and taking another psychedelic. It really felt to me that I was in this remarkable psychedelic state. I mean, just the diagnosis itself and leaning into gratitude. Now, I have on one occasion since then taken a psychedelic just to kind of stress test where I find myself. Am I kidding myself about being joyful and in equipoise? You know, is there underlying fear here? And there wasn't. There wasn't. It was a confirmation that, in some mysterious way, that everything is perfect. And what I'm doing is what I should be doing. And that's talking to people about awakening, recognizing that I was underestimating the extent to which I could become aware that I'm aware and feel the incredible gratitude for that. And so I think, in principle, we shouldn't need a terminal diagnosis. And that's partly the direction of my future research that I'm sponsoring through the development of an endowment. But what I would want for people is literally join me in this celebration of what we know to be true. And that is we're in the middle of a mystery. How has this come about? How are us as these highly evolved sentient creatures able to be aware that we're aware? Science does not have the answer to that. There are ideas of how that might come about. But we need to be really humble. Can you tell us, Dr. Griffith, what happens when you take a psychedelic trip, supervised and, you know, monitored and all the people are in the room and helping and guiding you? What happens to your mind and your consciousness that allows you to know that we're all connected, that we, in our supposed right mind, not on a psychedelic, not using psychosilicon or any other enhancing drug, mind enhancing drug, we can't see? What do you see? What do your patients see and feel that we don't recognize? Well, let's see. So I want to be very careful in stating emphatically you don't need a psychedelic to lean into the mystery and the gratitude. It's just one of many ways. Because as you stated, it started with you with meditation. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And there are all kinds of ways to opening up to presence. I mean, practice of mindfulness and there are other practices like, you know, breathwork practices and deep prayer practices that tend to open people to that underlying sense. What's traumatic about psilocybin and naturally occurring mystical type experiences is the intensity of them and the opportunity for that to reorganize worldview and personality just, you know, just in a brief afternoon. That's why it's been so effective for depression in so many people. Yeah. So that's the curiosity here is that the therapeutic applications of psychedelic appear to have efficacy across a range of therapeutic conditions. So depression or end of life anxiety, you know, or the addictions, there are a number of studies in addiction. And so isn't that baffling that a single kind of experience could influence so many different domains of suffering, if you will. And I think it comes down to this core sense of change of sense of self. And in so doing, there's more optimism. There's more self-efficacy. People are willing to take charge of their lives. If you go into, so if you take an addicted cigarette smoker, and we've done quite a bit of work in cigarette smoking here at Hopkins, if you take an addicted cigarette smoker and they present as, well, I'm an addicted cigarette smoker, well, that's what they are. And as long as they hold on to that belief, that self-limiting belief, they have no way of moving past that. After an experience of this sort, and they may or may not have these transcendent experiences, but this kind of reorganizational experience, they appreciate how limited their self-narrative is. They appreciate how vast the opportunities are to change. And curiously, they're interested to or they're willing to endure discomfort, that is withdrawal or the unpleasantness of quitting. They're willing to endure that in a way they formerly weren't. And so you have the opportunity to shift. So it allows them to see themselves from a different perspective, bottom line, you were saying. It allows them to see the fullness of themselves or come to a greater awareness about what their whole life means and how that's connected to everybody else. And so they're not just this small, I am addicted to cigarettes or I'm addicted to drugs or I'm a depressed person. I know that you've started an endowed professorship at Johns Hopkins to study what you call the benevolent, I love how you describe it, the benevolent mystery of what it is to exist. I just love that. The benevolent mystery of what it is to exist. And so what mysteries are you hoping to answer by starting a foundation to study the benevolent mysteries? So my inspiration for creating the endowment came directly out of my diagnosis, rewriting my will, looking at charitable contributions and thinking deeply about what it is that I would like to give. And it has everything to do with this line of research that I started after meditation and then through psychedelics. And that is to use psychedelics or manipulations like psychedelics to really understand these core awakening experiences. Because with that sense of interconnectedness, preciousness, and truth also comes a deep, deep ethical sense that we're all in this together, right? That we need to take care of one another. And there's something that strikes me as profoundly important to understanding the very nature of that. And it boils down to the golden rule, doesn't it? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And so then the contemplation becomes, yeah, how can we maximize and understand what's happening with such experiences? And then how can that eventually change culture at large and, frankly, humankind? So that's what we're after. My strong belief, I'm a scientist, so I think science is the best handle we have on understanding and getting to the truth of things. And so there's a clear path forward with this research. What's remarkable about the psychedelics in this regard is that they allow us to create such experiences, these opening experiences at high probability. And up until this point, I mean, we've known that these kinds of opening experiences happen, but they've happened capriciously. And they're not given to prospective scientific study. But if we can occasion them at high, with high probability, then we can run, conduct randomized trials. And that's what science needs in order to get purchase on what's happening. Our audience has a question for you. Where is Hitha? Hi there. I'm Hitha Palapu. I am a mother and now an elder caregiver. One of my parents was recently diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. And it has very much changed what we thought the future would be with our family. And while they are the most positive, optimistic, and also accepting of the diagnosis, I'm struggling. And I wanted to ask how your family, your spouse, or any of the members of your family have moved through with your diagnosis in that acceptance and into savoring the time you do have left together and celebrating it. Thank you. Well, thank you for that question. So my wife, Marla, and I came together with a deep sense of the mystery. We're spiritual in the sense that we're both in wonder. And so it's been, I can't underestimate the role that Marla has played for me in helping me maintain the sense of gratitude. And so she jumped in to celebrating with me this wonderful sense of gratitude. But you weren't married before, right? Didn't you get married after the diagnosis? Didn't you get married after the diagnosis? Because you asked her, because you were living together, and you both were fine with that. And then tell us what happened. Well, that's, again, going over my will after the diagnosis. Looking at my life, Marla and I had lived together for 11 years. We had thought about getting married, thought it was unnecessary. And then very touchingly at one point, I said, Marla, would it be meaningful for you to be married? And she said, yeah, I would like that. And her saying that kind of instantaneously shifted my sense of the importance of that. And we had this just beautiful ceremony in our living room with my three grown children and just a few friends to just celebrate that. And so Marla and I are much closer together than we've ever been. And I would have said before the diagnosis, we are much closer than many couples find themselves. But to have partnership in this is really, is really helpful. Are you not afraid at all? Because I think, you know, one of the reasons why it's so difficult to have this conversation, and particularly for, I was sharing with the audience before I introduced you that my father passed last year, and he had metastatic cancer and was diagnosed in May and was gone by July 8th. I believed that it was going to go quickly. Nobody else in the family believed that it was going to happen quickly, but I was preparing myself all along for it. They were still, you know, hopeful. And so it was impossible to even have the conversation with the family that I thought we needed to have because everybody was still in denial about it. And my own father was in denial about it because his whole thing was making the number 90. He would have been 90 in January. So from the moment he was diagnosed, he was like, well, am I going to make it to 90? Am I going to make it to 90? And then when I had an appreciation gathering for him around July 4th, like four days before he passed, you remember this Gail, and I was putting, helping him get into bed and he said, did you ever think that I wouldn't make it to 90? And I said, Dad, I don't, I don't think that the creator is like measuring you by a number. It's not like, you know, because there are people who didn't make it to 46 and didn't make it to 17 and didn't make it to five. So I don't think it's about the number. I think it's about how you've lived and what your purpose was and did you serve that purpose? With respect to just the contemplation of dying and whether I experience fear, I don't. What I experience is wonder. And again, being a scientist, I'm very skeptical to take on belief systems that are unverifiable. What I do know is that we live in the middle of this inexplicable mystery for which we need to be deeply grateful. So I don't know what will happen when I die. And I cannot just endorse the variety of stories that people tell about consciousness surviving death. I simply don't know. But I don't know that that's not true. And so I find myself in a deep state of curiosity and intense interest. I mean, it's actually a little bit, it's exciting, isn't it? I'm going to find out before most of you in the audience finds out. So there's, even if the probability is low, there's something to be really interested and excited about. And so that's where I find myself. I will be sad to have to say goodbye and leave loved ones behind. But there's something also beautiful about that. And it's certainly not fear. Would you say that getting this prognosis, because now they're telling you how long, what did they say? You have until Halloween? Well, 50% chance that I make it to Halloween. But who knows? I mean, I know I'm not going to make it to 90. How old are you? 76. In the larger scheme of things, it just doesn't feel important to me anymore. What I'm so grateful for is this sense of joy and awakening and gratitude that I've experienced since the diagnosis. And in fact, I've said on several occasions, what a tragedy should I have left to go to that screening appointment and been run over by a bus. The level of joy, appreciation, and gratitude that both Marla and I are experiencing now is greater than anything that we would have formally imagined. So let me ask you this. It has been a blessing. Dr. Griffith, if you were in this audience now, listening to yourself, what would you want to say or what would you want to have said that would wake you up, that would get you to the point where you are now without this kind of prognosis? What needs to be said to all of us so that we can experience this journey of joy and gratitude and smile, be grinning like you are from ear to ear here, without that kind of diagnosis? Okay. What do we need to know to feel as good as you do right now? I don't know the answer to that, but that's precisely the question that the Endowment Research Project is aimed at. How do we awaken and stay awake to the wonder of what our existence is? So there's no pat answer to that. Okay. So what are you doing differently now? Can I ask you, what are you doing differently now that you were not doing before this diagnosis to stay awake? What I'm aware of is the extent to which I'm mindful about whatever thought, feeling, emotion comes to consciousness. And so that was very early on when I said I kind of probed into what depression or resentment would be, or anxiety. And what I was able to catch myself, and I think it's largely in part to a long history of meditation, but I hadn't accomplished it before the diagnosis. But largely that I was able to attend, I was able to see fear arise and recognize that is not a condition I want to allow myself to fall under. And then I'll turn to gratitude. And so it's been a gratitude practice. And I think, I mean, at some deep sense, I mean, my sense is that all of us sentient beings can have a sense of exactly what that is. It's a mystery. I mean, here we are inexplicably conscious, alive, and a miracle is not too difficult a word to substitute for that. And if we allow ourselves to get out of the dialogue in our head about where we're putting our priorities, and just rest in gratitude for that, that's all that's needed. Now, what I cannot explain is why, for me, that sense of presence and awakening took that stair-step function, left forward. But that's precisely the kind of thing that we need to systematically study. But what I'd say to people who want to open up more to being able to identify difficult thoughts or feelings as they arise and work with those, then things like meditation and breathwork of some type, and psychedelics for that matter, could be useful tools for doing that. But I don't have, I can't tell you a single thing you can do. I wish I could. I really wish I could. I'd love for you to. I'm glad to hear you say gratitude because gratitude is my religion. And I have been preaching, teaching it. I have volumes of, I started doing gratitude journals back in like 1992. And I now have volumes and volumes and volumes and volumes of gratitude journals where I still write down every day five things that I'm grateful for. One of the things will be being able to have this conversation with you. Being able to have this conversation with you will go in my grateful journal tonight because I see the joy in your face and eyes. I see no fear. And when my father was dying and my mother was dying, one of the things a minister friend of mine, Wendley Phipps, sang to both of them and said, no fear, just peace. No fear, just peace. I think that's what everybody wants in those final moments when you're passing, but you also want it when you're living your fullest. And so I think, first of all, I know for myself that being grateful changes my entire vibration. It literally changes my frequency. And if you're in a crisis or you're going through a challenge, the thing that I go to immediately is, all right, what can I be grateful for in this moment? And it immediately just gives you that much of a lift. And if you do it as a regular practice, then you live in this space of continual gratitude. So I'm glad to hear that even as someone who is preparing for the end, that you recognize that that's one of the big values. Yeah, well, that's beautifully said. I love gratitude is your religion. My religion. And it's a simple message though, isn't it? I mean, that's what's astonishing is, how is it that we get caught up and entangled in these self-narratives? And we can sense how destructive they are when you want a choice, when we can be in this. I mean, the mystery, the joy, the gratitude for being. Well, I'm hoping that the rest of your days are as peaceful and joyful as you've expressed to us here today. We really appreciate you taking the time. I hope that people will donate to your fund. I'm going to donate myself. And Dr. Roland Griffiths, we thank you for your wisdom and for spending time with us because we realize how precious it is for us, but how even more precious it is for you. So thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. You can find more information on Dr. Griffiths' work here on Oprah Daily. Thanks everybody. Bye-bye. Thank you so much. Thanks, Dr. Griffiths. Thank you so much. Good job, sir. Good job. Good job. Really good.