Markdown lines 28–95 · Part 1 of 2
[00:00:00] what I wanted to do tonight was just to tell you a little bit as I said about a pilot study perhaps some of you can remember two years ago I presented the
[00:00:30] results of research that I conducted in my search for finding out the the effects of Sam being able to demonstrate that Sam had effects and I was looking for relaxation effects because my hope was we could use it in clinical settings like patient waiting rooms where people are under a lot of stress give them something that they could just use and I
[00:01:00] have to admit I learned a lot from the three studies that I conducted which we're not really successful in the demonstration of powerful effects of Sam but my questions remain same question remains for me and since that time I've just continued this kind of work and thinking on my own so I want to pose this question for everyone in the PD how can we demonstrate the beneficial effects of the programs and
[00:01:30] products provided by them in Roe Institute because I think as we've heard some people already say if we can demonstrate and provide evidence that these things are effective then that will be both of tremendous value ins in getting it out there and spreading the word but also very helpful to the presentation of Monro programs so I do
[00:02:00] hope everybody will think about it maybe we can talk about this in general so my search led to other things some one of you I forget who gave me some good advice and said well you're looking in the wrong place to see the effects of what happens in meth Monroe what the programs do what the exercises do so I began to look at other places try to find something that made sense that it would be something that we
[00:02:30] could expect to see from Monroe programs on something that would be interesting and they came upon a questionnaire called the mystical experiences questionnaire and I just want to give you a little of a background of this the mystical experiences questionnaire was developed to evaluate the experience of psychedelic drugs back in the 60s some of us may recall there was a study that
[00:03:00] was called the Good Friday study which is one of the hallmarks of psychedelic research in the 60s and what they did it was a placebo controlled trial giving psilocybin to seminary students on Good Friday in the chapel during the hours from say 12:00 to 3:00 you know on Good Friday obviously a very spiritually
[00:03:30] important time for the seminary students and so with the addition of psilocybin they wanted to know what would be the impact what kinds of experiences would they have and the mystical experiences questionnaire was one of several they gave it was based on the idea that there's some consistency in all reported mystical experiences through history that there's certain underlying dimensions you know that are always reported so they selected items to
[00:04:00] represent these theoretical aspects of mystical experiences and then a colleague of mine at Johns Hopkins who was now continuing this research on psilocybin shared with me a newer version a revised scale that had 30 items and for subscales that you could give and since it was only 30 items I thought this would be the kind of thing that would be suitable for using in a TMI
[00:04:30] program the four subscales were mystical positive mood transcendence of time and space and ineffability that I hope you'll agree with me things like this is what happens to us when we go through the exercises especially Bob's exercises with Sam the questionnaire gave a summary score that she was a dichotomous outcome a
[00:05:00] person had a complete mystical experience which I also just love you know as the idea oh yes I had a complete mystical experience well mine wasn't complete but it was darn nice so I was looking into this further I you know I mean especially from the back some of this might be tough to read but I just want to go through it quickly this is what the questionnaire looked like I
[00:05:30] have a copy with me if you want to see it for yourself but it did have 30 items and it says looking back on the entirety of your session please rate the degree to which at any time during that session you experience the following phenomenon you know feet you answer according to you feelings thoughts experiences and the scale runs from zero none or not at all up to five extreme more than any
[00:06:00] other time in my life and stronger than four which was strong so it's stronger than strong looking at this I figured you know we might have a problem here using this questionnaire because if you asked somebody to evaluate any one exercise and they'd been through many exercises it would be tough to say this one was the strongest I have ever had the strongest experience and it turned
[00:06:30] out that was true we got very few fives on the items but a lot of fours you can see the first four items here and I don't want to dwell on it but I did make slides the mystical scale had 15 items if you can read them here quickly to yourself you know you can see they focus on I felt I saw ultimate reality you know a sense of being in a spiritual height so forth there was a positive
[00:07:00] mood scale which they felt was critical a critical component of a mystical experience and it experiences of I mean look at these things and think about your own experiences here in programs and such programs and exercises and think about to what degree you would say yeah one that describes it I love the transcendence of time and space but I've
[00:07:30] had this a lot of times I'm sure you have too and the fourth scale it was my favorite ineffability you know and I'm sure if Brian were here to be in effing something ability but you know the idea that you cannot put the experience into words so an opportunity arose to try happy and meek you pilot tested here at
[00:08:00] TMI and it was the journeys to happiness that we did which was the first program to have the mind mirror EEG measurements back in June and there were 14 participants eight women six men ages 51 to 78 years so forth and you know this was an ordinary what five day six night program and the meq was given at the end in the final debriefing as part of other
[00:08:30] questionnaires and assessments and evaluations so now we remembered what I want to say is before I do the big reveal the meq was used to assess the effects of psilocybin to produce mystic experiences now we know the Monroe programs don't produce drug experiences and don't have drug related symptoms but they do produce very special experiences
[00:09:00] that I would say are for the most part of a mystical nature the scores that I'll show you are the percent of the maximum score so here is all for all 14 people the columns are the 14 individual subjects the rows are the subscales and then down here at the bottom is the total scale but again each is represented as the percent of maximum
[00:09:30] that you of the that you could have achieved on that scale and this is the way it was used for the other trials how you did it the same way so I could compare and what I did was highlight in yellow when the score exceeded 60% which was the criterion to be part of a complete mystical experience so you could see I hope that out of the 14 people seven people had a complete
[00:10:00] mystical experience that their responses produce scores above that criterion on all four sub scales and there were several other people who came pretty darn close to having a complete mystical experience perhaps missing one or two sub scales at the same time there were two people that just didn't get at that
[00:10:30] time the program did not create that to them decided you know it's just this that was the way it came out the numbers and other I didn't slide anybody this time so but the point is half of the people who took it had what qualified by prior standards as a complete mystical experience I think that's pretty cool so how did this program do against Silla
[00:11:00] Simon what I have here are the the group scores for the RT mi program 50% complete mystical experiences and two other trials of psilocybin pretty high doses of psilocybin conducted by my colleague roland griffiths and you can see 30 milligrams of psilocybin pure you
[00:11:30] know would get you 64 sick or 2/3 of the group having complete mystical experiences we had v ba had 50% so um and it's pretty well spread there was no subscale that got left behind I think so then I think it's interesting to say
[00:12:00] that this is really the first time I've seen a program here evaluated in this way what we're actually seeing that the experiences people have are mystical experiences and that we can compare them to other things that everybody would say wow you know this is almost as good as a psilocybin trip without any side effects and without any of the pejoratives it's
[00:12:30] free freely available to everyone and it's legal so where could we go from here and I don't want to make too much of this pilot study but I said where do we go from here and I would say we need to reconsider where we are right now in order to know where we should go so can anybody tell me where we are right now yeah yep right up here on the top of this
[00:13:00] peak and then down here is our mr in the bottom corner well again the point is this was a small study there were no experimental controls so I don't make too much of it and the other part of it the folks in the program work for the most part I think except for the two 13 and 14 they were very familiar and experienced with
[00:13:30] TMI programs and no doubt they had had similar experiences before and might be better able to recognize them and more willing to report them than you know the man on the street or the woman on the street but still this is the first evidence we've ever had of this kind and I'm very optimistic about it I think one thing we could do for example is look at gateway participants who are less
[00:14:00] familiar with the experiences that are provided here if we did measurements with a mystical experience questionnaire before the program started and at the end of the program we might be able to gather evidence that would show what the effects of the program likely were on the people who participated and then we would have evidence to say the Gateway as we've always said produces mystical
[00:14:30] experiences in people and helps them in the exploration of consciousness which is our mission i'm sure i'm confident that we could design a study that would be acceptable to the scientific community and publishable in one of the journals that are interested in topics of this kind so I think that this could really be a good path to take to move forward with
[00:15:00] research to answer the question I raised at the beginning what can we do to demonstrate the f efficiency the effectiveness of TM eyes programs okay so that was that that was it but if I have a minute does anybody have any questions Thank You penny
[00:15:30] it was their first time of being there I think the if I remember because I was in the study I was at that and I do think that I remember two people had never been to a TMI program and if I remember correctly I think it was those two so it's quite possible that it's only among those of us who are familiar with these experiences that will show this kind of
[00:16:00] effect and that's why I think the next step is to look at people who aren't familiar and take them through a gateway and just see what does happen there less experiences or experiencers mean unbelievable yeah bad experience you know very literally but the lesser experience is they don't have we may be wrong that's true it may be that you need to see these things more than once