Ep10 Dr. Nicholas Byron Powers - A New Vision for Social Change Through Psychedelics

Dr. Nicholas Byron Powers  0:00  
Loving others is the real trip. Psychedelics is a door that opens up between where you're at now and who you really want to be, between the freedom I felt and the fear that all my other New Yorkers were feeling. I could see that's the power of psychedelics, that distance between us, the healing that took place. That's the power of it. Welcome

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  0:21  
to psychedelic source where wisdom meets practice in the evolving landscape of psychedelic medicine. I'm your host, Dr Sandra Dreisbach, and I'm here to help you navigate the complex intersection of ethics, business and personal growth in a psychedelic space, whether you're a practitioner, therapist, entrepreneur, or simply curious about this transformative field, you've found your source for authentic dialog, practical resources and community connection. In each episode, we'll dive deep into the stories, strategies and ethical considerations that matter most to our growing ecosystem. Let's tap in to our inner source of wisdom and explore what it means to build a sustainable and ethical, psychedelic future together.

VO  1:14  
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Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  1:45  
In this episode, I talked with Dr Nicholas powers. He is a poet, a literature professor, novelist and journalist. He's the author of five books. His literary journalism was collected in the ground below 09, 11 to Burning Man, New Orleans to Darfur Haiti to Occupy Wall Street and the political vampire novel thirst. And in 2025, this year, North Atlantic books published black psychedelic revolution, which we definitely discuss. And I'm most the way through it, and I can tell you that it's it's definitely an enjoyable read and an experience in and of itself. So I highly recommend it. Our first book, recommend on a show, but definitely worth checking out, just released. And so you'll hear us talk about his latest book, talk about his own background in history and and and we even get a little bit of poetry at the end. So enjoy the show. Well, well, welcome so much. Nicholas to psychedelic source. I am so grateful that you could make some time here, and it looks like we may even do this in two parts, which I kind of even love the idea of like that, especially given your book and everything. But I'll let you say a little bit about yourself before, before I go too far into assuming people know conversations that they aren't a

Dr. Nicholas Byron Powers  3:08  
part of. Sure, sure, I am a I guess I'm like the right wing's worst nightmare. Oh, wow. English professor of color, I've gone to the BLM marches. I support my trans friends. I love poetry. Do activism. I do boxing, jogging, running. Of a father. I live in Brooklyn, which is for totally free, Palestine, free in the genocide in Gaza. You see that spray painted everywhere. So I'm probably one of the more progressive. I'm a cliche of progressive identity in a cliche zip code in a cliche city. So, like, it's just so many layers of blue that I look like a smurf. I am Papa Smurf of the Hello,

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  3:58  
hello, Papa Smurf. I don't think I'm a Smurfette. I don't know. I have a lot of questions about that whole anyway, we will go there. But I love that you're already kind of telling a story, and you are a professor of literature, right? But you also are a journalist, and the book you just wrote and released is black psychedelic revolution, which I've actually been enjoying, and actually I have the audio book version. So like, which is I highly recommend, not that you shouldn't read, like, the physical fiction slash history book, but maybe you could tell a little bit about about that. Like, how did you come to write that story?

Dr. Nicholas Byron Powers  4:37  
Yeah, it was a fork on the road moment I was approached by acquisition editors for North Atlantic books, and this was, I think, a little bit before the George Floyd swell wave of protest. And you know, that had a cultural effect, that wave of protest spilled over not only into the halls of power, but also really into the halls of media. Nine is at the halls of our everyday lives. And so I was kind of picked up by that wave, and the acquisition editor asked me, like, hey, to write a book about race and psychedelics. And I, you know, stood at the crossroads, and I could write a kind of paint by numbers Oprah friendly book. And I decided to actually follow my curiosity, but also my love for my son, and asking, well, what's the book that could possibly make a world where he and the other kids in the playground have a real chance to live that a world where psychedelics was at the tool, not only of healing, which it should be, but also of a revolutionary consciousness that is maybe different in how it works than the traditional forms of Western Marxism, of intersectionality, of identity politics, but like it has just like a different engine. And so I began to write that book. And as I was writing it, I pulled threads from my bookshelves, pulled the different books. There was like a stack of books, like next to the

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  6:17  
laptop you mentioned four in the book, right, including the Michael Pollan book, The Michael Pollan So, WB Dubois, if I recall correctly, yep, no good memory.

Dr. Nicholas Byron Powers  6:27  
And, and I, but I began to realize that as I was, as I was, you know, going to the store and, you know, getting food for the family, and just walking and talking. And in New York, you know, if you walk half a block, anywhere in any direction, you can have like, 10 conversations. And I began to think, well, what's the book that I could write that my neighbors could read? I wanted them to be able to read it. And then when I'm taking my son to school, if we're on the bus, or if I'm bringing him back from the museum, and I thinking about the bus driver or the train operators or the MTA workers cleaning out the the stations with, you know, foamy suds and thistles. And I think like, well, what's, how can I imagine this book in their backpack, you know? And so I began to write for my son, but I began to write to the city, to the people who I live with, to the my neighborhood. And I found that that at least for me, for for me as a writer, it's easy to have in some ways, like the New York Times editorial team in your head, or like the Nobel Prize team in your head, or the MacArthur Genius, like it's easy to have the faces of liberal awards and accomplishment going, you know, all the way up to the Nobel Prize in the Kennedy Center. As the people who I'm supposed to write to, because they're the ones who give a kind of a guarantee of approval, like you've approval,

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  7:53  
you're culturally approved to be distributed at a New York Times bestseller. Yeah.

Dr. Nicholas Byron Powers  7:59  
And, and the thing is, when I, you know, as of someone who, not, you know, I teach literature, but I've been a practicing poet. I've been a poet now for about 20 some years, a writer for longer. And what I've always known is that when I write to the people who I actually have a real relationship to, that that voice is the one that winds up becoming the most poetic and in it, because, like as I'm trying to reach to this person who I care about so much that in the service of that human connection, I will bring in metaphors and similes and allegories. I will bring in, um, themes and motifs, you know, I will bring in primary and secondary characters, and that in different genres, all of them become the in service of this connection. And that, to me, is what I call, I guess, like method writing, or kind of authentic writing, because it's a writing in which is that's the service of a connection with another person. And so I began to bring in fiction to the black psychedelic revolution, history into the black psychedelic revolution. Humor into it. Analysis, cultural analysis, introspection, poetry. And, you know, on the surface, it may seem kind of like a like a wild tiro misuse cake of different, you know, layers. But the thing that everyone says is that it's such a kind of like an easy read. And I think the reason that it's it is such an easy read is because that there's an emotional commitment to an authentic connection to the reader, you know. And I think that's why it was important for me to write for my son, but it was definitely important for me to write to the city, to my neighbors and to my students. And I think that's, that's how the book actually took shape. It was about me being honest about who am I actually talking to? Oh, that's what I'm talking to. Well, that's what's important.

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  9:58  
No, it's beautiful. It really. Does feel like a love letter, you know, and and I and here, at least on psychedelic stories, we I try and ask people questions about their history and their background and how they came into relationship with psychedelics, or even where were their cultures or their intersectionalities, all the things. And I love how in your book, it's very clear about your own family history and relationship and how that was part of the storytelling as well. It's not just about forward looking or identity shaping, or even backwards looking and reconnecting in a fiction plus history. Maybe, maybe it'd speak a little bit more about about that piece, like, Why? Why? Why? Psychedelics?

Dr. Nicholas Byron Powers  10:42  
Yeah, um, I inherited the psychedelic vision from my mother, who was born in 1948 so in 1968 she was 20, and, you know, she was just this hot, you know, Mama from New York, Brooklyn and and she knew it too, you know, she, shook that math, and she got into Woodstock and got behind the um, you know, backstage and watching the musician goes up, up and down the stage, carrying their amps and, you know, smoking with the band and all that. And she loved it. She was She loved the psychedelic community at Woodstock, that everyone treated each other like family, that people fed her, gave her a place to sleep and stay. And so when she came back from Woodstock, which is in upstate New York, back to Brooklyn, she was, I think, astounded by the world, how many different worlds are on this one planet like Darren Woodstock was this like utopian, like city on a hill, this new Eden, this garden of Eden. And then when she came back to New York, it was the clanging of the subways and hustle and everyone's trying to make that money. And she began to realize that psychedelics was one necessary ingredient to the 1968 social rebellion and anti war movement and the social movements. So she would tell me those stories as I was young, because, like, we just had, you know, there was no cell phones back then, so you just had to tell stories to keep, keep the time passing. So as we're doing these long walks, you know, she would just tell me the stories. And, um, I inherited an idea of psychedelics as a as a kind of liberation, of consciousness as a way of helping one get beyond, you know, the establishment, the consensus, which was, well, you know, at that point, was pretty clear, you know, war mongering, very patriarchal, white supremacist, very capitalist, very, you know, against the working class, yeah. And so when you see all these, you know, for me, psychedelics, then I took them up into my own life. And at first it was just going to raves and kind of enjoying the the hot soup of sweat and dance and sex and silliness and laughter and all that at the raves, and then coming again, like her coming back to at that point, I was in Boston for college, coming back to the city, and seeing people in their suits and striving for that dollar. And psychedelics at first for me were were like what they were for my mom, a tool for liberation. But it was only after I went to Burning Man in 2002 and this had been a year after 911 so when it came back to Burning Man, when it went to Burning Man for the first time, and I took LSD and ecstasy that I really, really felt the healing power of psychedelics and how much that they could help trauma pass through the nervous system, have trauma pass through the different layers of consciousness and finally emerge. And for me, I coughed out 911 in the desert, I screamed, I cried, did everything. And so when I come back to the city, my body is like confetti. I'm just glittering and feeling so much more open, but everyone else around me is still holding tight and scared the the next bomb is going to go off, or they're going to be in the building and it's going to be struck. So between the freedom I felt and the fear that all my other New Yorkers were feeling, I could see that's the power of psychedelics, that distance between us, the healing that took place, that's the power of it. And since then, psychedelics have been in my life both as healing and as inspiring to higher visions of interconnectedness with other human beings. And

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  14:22  
I love, and I love this interplay of of both where your own personal story begins with psychedelics, where your own journey is, and how that interrelates with collective experiences of trauma, right? And I know you wrote another book on on 911 and that sort of like this sort of, I've seen this pattern, at least in the in the in the writings that you have about, like a traumatic experience, and then, and then, how that shifts and pivots right, and and, and black, psychedelic, uh, revolution, at least in terms of, you know, like my experience with the book so far, I'm only about halfway through, is it really captures that same. You mentioned 911 but you also mentioned about, you know, like even historical and black comedians talking about their experiences with psychedelics and and then bringing that to the present time and then, and I kind of you get this feeling, not just of, you know, whatever kind of gift you're giving to your son and to the city of Brooklyn and your community, but also gift in terms of your own healing and transformation, and what, what the meaning making is about this, yeah,

Dr. Nicholas Byron Powers  15:28  
I mean, when I, when I looked at Black and Latino and these are all kind of within the American like 1968 Japanese context that you know, I think what struck me was, was that psychedelics could inspire utopian visions. Psychedelics could be healing, but psychedelics could also lead to a dead end. And I think what really took took me aside was when the comedian Richard Pryor, who passed a couple of years ago, but obviously he's like one of the giants of the art form, went to, I think it was Kenya, and he went there and he had, I would say, an incredibly soul, moving experience that, you know, he's a black American guy, so he's only experienced life as a racial minority. And you know, to be black in America is, you know, constantly, in a sense, to live under the pressure of history, knowing what your ancestors went through, which usually, obviously, was worse, and to and to have that experience of your ancestors inform you and educate you about why what was happening to you now was happening right? Like why the policemen were stopping you, why you were having a hard time at work, why you weren't really prepared the way you should have been prepared, why people were being suspicious of you, like all of that, the weight, the constant heaviness. And so when he went to Kenya, and, you know, all of that briefly beautifully disappeared, it's like the weight was lifted off his shoulders, he felt and he realized he would see people in Kenya that reminded him of people in Illinois, where he was raised, and other places. And, yeah, in Peoria, and he would say, oh my god, like the drunk in my town looks exactly like this diplomat. He should have been that diplomat, right? So he had a much more transforming experience in Kenya, seeing black people in positions of power, seeing black people in control of the nation, control of their own land, not having all the symptoms of internalized racism, like but really, having liberated themselves, he got a much more powerful trip through that than he did actually through LSD. And so for me, what was powerful is that it's not LSD alone. It's LSD plus the set and setting and container of a revolutionary model, like, what experience can you have on psychedelics that actually helps you free yourself from the different internalized power dynamics that have gone into your body, as much as air and water and Kool Aid and hamburgers and hot dogs and the god Lord's prayer and the pledge of allegiance, like all of that that's been Going through your body since you were a kid, you know, and that that, to me, is one of the promises of psychedelics, not just as personal therapy, but as I would say, revolutionary ignition, to help people Ignite, you know, the revolutionary within them, and to open their minds to and this is where I say, this probably the last thing, because of time, because of time. But what I found was that most, most forms of Western Marxism and Marxism, Soviet Marxism, have at its core that there has to be a militant, violent class struggle, and that the and that the workers have to come to a sense of self consciousness and become the proletariat, yeah, and revolt, and that at some point they must kill or liquidate the bourgeoisie as a class, which is a kind of euphemism for mass murder. And that's a Revolutionary War. It's a class war like they've been killed for many years by the bourgeoisie. Now it's time to fight back. And so it's seen as justified revolutionary violence. But with psychedelics, what psychedelics often, at least in my experience, do is that they show how both, how flimsy this ego is, how much of a illusion, the sense of myself. It you know, I am, and what the truth is, how deeply connected I am with other people. And so one of the things that I think a psychedelic revolution differs in dramatic concept and quality from the Western Marxism is that at least it holds open the possibility that if people entered into the psychedelic sphere, entered into the psychedelic state, that in that place, they could see how interconnected they are, and maybe just maybe, that the revolution could happen through love, empathy and awareness, rather than through you know, rampaging through. Through the suburbs or the wealthy zip codes and killing,

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  20:04  
and that already is a revolutionary thought, right? You know that, like, what if it's not a the reason why the revolution is in televised is because it's internal, and in terms of the set, setting and container, and I know you talk a lot about about being embodied and being returned to the body, right, as a as part of what I mean, it happens for a lot of people in healing trauma, but something unique about, I mean, and maybe, maybe this, like, what's unique about the set black, psychedelic revolution in terms of set, setting and container, um, how, how do we co create that? Because that's definitely been a question about, How do we support bipoc communities, given that we do not have sufficient numbers of facilitators who who identify as such and and there's also the cultural and the mask. You talk a lot about the masks in in the book, and the mask that we put on, and I love the the Black Panther conversation. And I'm sorry for for listeners who aren't getting the full context with the about the book. So I'll just teach you guys. Just have to read it. Okay, just get the I'll be a pusher.

Unknown Speaker  21:20  
Please push it.

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  21:24  
No, really. I'm like, I'm like, That's it, you know, yeah, I will, I will confess, like, I'm like, okay, maybe I need a, maybe I need a book club. He said that we could have because, like, even in terms of the idea of your your book being a trip, because you do talk about that, right? This is a trip or, like, and it even has this sort of idealization, um, envisioning of what, what could be the revolution in terms of a set setting, like, you know, the, what was it Tanisha, who comes into the, yeah, the center. And of course, she's not ready, right? And she's still very much in a, sort of a drug user, sort of, you know, mindset, and then you like, Come back when you're ready, and then when she comes back, you know, she's welcomed with warm, inviting arms, with no judgment, with with real compassion, and and gets the shot of ketamine. And you know, we experienced part of that, what that healing trip would be, yeah, yeah,

Dr. Nicholas Byron Powers  22:21  
probably for part two, but I know we have

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  22:25  
but, but what could you say? Like, if someone can only hear one thing, one takeaway from, from this, the five minute what's, what's the or the two minute blip that we get to share with people? What would that be?

Dr. Nicholas Byron Powers  22:40  
Loving others is the real trip. Psychedelics is a door that opens up between where you're at now and who you really want to be and who you really want to be. When you look through the door, and it's kind of like a bit of a tunnel, and there's a light at the tunnel, and that light is you in communion with others. That's really what psychedelics offer. There's different doors to get there. Psychedelics is just one door. It's a very powerful door, and it's so powerful that we've seen it over centuries across cultures, across continents. It's always reappeared, but that now, as you know, the walls are getting rebuilt between people and you know, us versus them, and we're getting trapped in our tribes, trapped in our labels, trapped in our bodies. That psychedelics is a door, and when you look through it, you're going to see that there's more to you. And the great, the greatest effort, is to take responsibility for how much more of you there is

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  23:55  
something I ask a lot of people when they come onto the show. You know people who are coming new to this space and experience what kind of sourcing, what kind of resourcing Do you feel people need? And that can be, you know, whether that's like, what would you recommend for someone, whether it's you know what, what's good for within themselves? I know you mentioned in your book about set, setting in container and and a little bit more emphasis, I would actually even argue on container. But what? What would you tell someone in terms of what, what helps to source themselves? What kind of recommendations would you give someone who is considering their own experience.

Dr. Nicholas Byron Powers  24:44  
If psychedelics a bit of it's a bit like being shot out of a cannon. And you have to ask, where do you want to aim your psychedelic experience at? Because there's definitely value in a very bodily. Psychedelic experience where you take, you know, maybe MDMA, and go to a deep house club and sweat it out all night long. There's value in taking a micro dose of LSD and getting in front of a blank canvas and painting oil on it. When seeing what visions emerge through your unconscious out of your fingertips. There is definitely a value in having say you're going through a separation, a divorce, or your children are leaving the house because you know, they're going off into the world where they're college or career on their own explorations. Well, if you're in that kind of therapeutic space. One thing I found is surrounding yourself by pictures, or sometimes I actually, after my mom passed, I had a really, really beautiful ketamine therapy treatment, and I brought her photos, and I brought my son's like, socks and family photos that went back from from my grandmother to true, you know, to my son. And what I found is that having those anchors, whether it's photos or even just the smell of of, you know, a child on a sock, that they intensify the therapeutic part of the trip. And so I would just tell people that, you know, you can design your own psychedelic experience, but there are some basic principles that are the architecture of a psychedelic trip, and you have to kind of know how different types of architecture will either enhance or diminish different types of trips, you know. So if you're going to do the club, great, but have someone who's a designated driver and someone who's a spotter to make sure that you don't get taken advantage of. If you're going to do an artistic trip, you know, maybe find inspiration in the art that you've that's that that you learned over the years, or that was your mentor or challenge yourself. Or if you're going to do a therapeutic trip, have anchors, you know. And one thing I found is when I was going through my own separation, and then also healing from my mom's passing, that having a therapy session right before the ketamine trip was incredibly helpful, because it puts you really right in the zone, and then you're off and running, and then in terms of

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  27:20  
Your mindset, to help create the mindset before the experience, yeah, to create

Dr. Nicholas Byron Powers  27:23  
the setting. And I say that afterwards the container is the integration, right? How do you integrate that into your because the thing is that the psychedelics, at least my experience, is that they increase my consciousness, and so beyond the bandwidth of my kind of ego consciousness, they increased both to my subconsciousness, but also to what I know about others that I refuse to take responsibility for, the way that their facial expressions, their pheromones, their tones of voice, their body language, and how much more of other people that I actually really do know but I refused to be conscious of, because that would be too much emotional responsibility. And so as my bandwidth increased, I knew how much more deep my my knowledge was of the people in my life, but also how much subconscious and unconscious. And it just got larger and larger. And then finally it started to get into the radiant consciousness, where I began to see how small a part of what I was with larger life, with the flow of life itself. And then as obviously, the chemicals wear off, and my consciousness starts to go back to its original bandwidth, but it's never going to be the same size again. And how do I integrate that enlargement now as part of my life and able to make actual decisions, courses of action, different types of language, maybe changing my political or artistic ideologies to take into account what I've experienced on that journey. And I think that's really the that container is really, really important to be able to integrate.

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  29:03  
No, I love that. I love everything from the anchor points you mentioned for therapeutic to talking about integration and how we've actually expanded, and we need to adjust to that, that shift, you know, that that altered state, that isn't just the the experience itself. It goes beyond that, right? And, and when, when you think about, how do you want people to take and and integrate the trip of the black psychedelic revolution book to

Dr. Nicholas Byron Powers  29:36  
it's gonna different class levels and different different series of symptoms and pathologies are going to require maybe slightly different containers. What we're doing there's like a small little team that's interested in kind of taking this beyond, beyond the book, and making events and starting to organize and promoting and. Then the first thing we'll do is use narrative therapy to help people recognize what are the conflicts in their life and what are the conflicts they have with each other, and then begin to actually use William E Cross's Negro to black conversion experience as a kind of a container, and begin to ask how has internalized racism or the history of systemic trauma shaped their lives, and once they're aware of that, then ask, okay, in a psychedelic trip, be able to expand one's consciousness to understand the deeper levels of one's own memories. One owns trauma and the defensive behaviors. So it's almost like trauma is a pearl, and all the defensive behaviors kind of create a kind of this shell around it to protect us from having to deal with it. And so we will do workshops, you know, at different you know, places to host us in during the spring and summer, will host outside events, and then the goal is for it to become like a meme, or like a cultural practice that travels beyond our core group, which is just really almost like a presentation group, and that as it travels through the communities, as it travels through the buildings and the homes and the families and the relatives and the network of friends, from Section Eight all the way to Queens, the Hamptons and the far rockaways that as it spreads, people start doing it, not because they're paying for it, but they do it the same way that some people go to church, like it just becomes something that's part of a culture like this helps me. This actually gets my life moving again. So some of the containers would be using meditation exercises and breath work. Exercise like a heartbeat meditation, listening to a heartbeat and asking, what you know, writing, narrative therapy, writing, what does your body, if your body could write you a letter, what would it say to you? You know, if your ancestors were alive, what would they say to you? So, like just trying to put use the expanded consciousness of psychedelics to put you back into the place of your body, back into the place of your ancestors, into the place of your your descendants, into the place of people around you, and by decentering yourself, then you come back, you get this larger kind of map of why you are, who you are, and how you really relate to those around you. So I think that would be it. And I think eventually, the container of the Negro to black conversion experience, which came out in 1971 that's William Cross' kind of stage theory of black identity formation. That what you see is that when people become more aware than they inevitably share stories. And it's in the sharing of their stories that they realized that the plight I suffered is not an individual like happenstance, that this is something that all of us are sharing because it's part of a system. And the minute that you go from being an individual to being part of a collective that has organized around a shared story, and that shared story allows you and drives you to try to repair the damage and then also dismantle the system that's causing the damage. Now you're going from the personal to the political. I

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  33:10  
love that, yeah, oh, sorry. I was just gonna say like, you know, for me, that really illustrates, right, that the personal narrative that you're telling yourself and the relationship you have with these stories and and and literally, sort of like a breaking down to break through, type of idea where you're you're examining it critically, right for healing, for transformation for yourself, and Then turning that into collective healing and collective change and storytelling that people all the time in psychedelic space talk about, like the journey right, or that the journey never ends, or things right and and if you in terms of our our personal narrative of our lives, of How of our identities, of our traumas, of our collective experiences, or of trying to dream the dream that we want to live right, that that the ultimate creation, or co creation, would be to dream the world we want to live in. Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Nicholas Byron Powers  34:17  
And I think that's, and maybe that's for me, the most powerful part of psychedelics is that once you visited that place, and you talk to other people about that place, even if you're not on psychedelics, at that moment in the in the instant of the conversation, in the present tense, that you know what it was like and that and it's an it's an experience that it's not just ethereal. It's not just like a mental experience. It's your whole body. You felt it. You it, and I think that allows for the foundation of good faith. We've all been there. We've all experienced that sense of interconnectedness with everything, and how that felt so much closer to reality than this kind of small little like bandwidth that our ego. Allows. And I think that's what makes it, makes the psychedelic revolution, for me, seem a very unique possibility in history, because, you know, it's a it's a revolution that's based on interconnectedness, the reality of it, that we have empathy for each other, there in a psychedelic experience, because the emotions are so intense and so oceanic waves. They wash you up and down. You know, it's like throwing a one of those Greek theater sad, happy theater mask and throwing it out into an ocean storm. You know that you really get to the primal core of what it means to be a human animal that's conscious for a brief crack of Conscious Light in the brain before after birth and then death. And so you have this brief, you know, human experience, and it gets it's like a lightning the psychedelic is like this lightning strike that connects the most primal part of being a human animal with our most transcendent consciousness. And when you do that, so much gets illuminated. And if everyone, when the people talk, they can say that, yes, I know, I've been to that place. And I think it allows for the political imagination to be rejuvenated, you know, and I think that's why, for me, um, there's a possibility of a psychedelic revolution that's based on the shared euphoria that we've had, and could be non violent, like it could actually be more about art and creation and beauty. Um, and that's, that's, that's what I'm feeling. And it's also I feel like the the world is so hungry for it, like we just seem so trapped right now, um, in these shadows and smoke and mirrors and traps and pits, and I just feel that the world is so hungry to feel human again, you know?

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  36:51  
Yeah, I think that's really beautiful and poetic in a way, even the trap. I'm not, I'm not going to glorify the the trap, per se, but but even to envision that, the recognition that there's a that there's a hunger, right, that's that's beyond the individual, that's collective, and that we're all living to varying degrees into varying depths of our own humanity. And that psychedelic experience helps to not just have elements of a shared experience, even if we're not together in it, that we can all integrate to create a different kind of revolution. Yeah, that's really freeing.

Unknown Speaker  37:40  
Oh, that feels good.

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  37:45  
Well, what would be, you know what? So as we wrap up, what would be sort of like, you know, I know you're a poet. I won't make you say a poem, but, but you know what? What's, what's something that we can look to as a takeaway thought or message, you know, to take with us. You know, to if we're gonna see the dream you and I, yeah, in this moment, and gift this little podcast episode to the world. What kind of seed there's

Dr. Nicholas Byron Powers  38:15  
this incredible poet. His name is Paul salon, and he has, I think the poem is titled, speak you also, and the very last stanza, and I'm paraphrasing, but the the poem is about the the idea that two individual people are so irredeemably Different that they can't actually ever communicate to each other and say everything to each other. And as a poet, Paul salon felt that that idea that people are just always separated from each other because they can never put into words their full human existence, their full being, as missing out, that so much of what we communicated to each other is actually we communicated to each other outside of words and on the side of words, and sometimes inside, inside words, but then sometimes Yeah. And so for him, he said, I think his idea was that emptiness communicates too, like you can talk through emptiness. And he had this one beautiful stanza where he goes, I was there. I was not there. You were there. You went there. And when only the void stood between us, we got all the way to each other. Wow. Yeah. And that's powerful, right? Yeah. So just when you think that there's a wall between you or you in the world, or there's this emptiness that you can't cross, just remember that you also are the emptiness, and you can play the. Emptiness like a piano or a flute, and you can communicate, and sometimes you can say more through the emptiness than you could ever say through words.

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  40:07  
Well, on that note, I will thank you for the non emptiness and void of this conversation crossing a different chasm, even though we've never met in person, I definitely feel a shared heart space with you. Like, yeah, and it's just been a beautiful experience. So so thank you for your book, thank you for your time, and I will see you connected in the void. All

Dr. Nicholas Byron Powers  40:38  
right, sister, talk to you soon.

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  40:42  
I have to admit, I have so many takeaways from this conversation with with Nick. It was such a joy and delight and and honestly, I always appreciate when I'm feeling inspired at the end of a conversation with someone. And this is definitely one of the examples where I would say that that I myself am feeling even more inspired the idea of, you know, not just a black psychedelic revolution, but but a revolution for all of us in terms of the possibility of, of CO creating that, that possible future, that beyond, beyond an experience, beyond even healing. It's it's the revolution and transformation of our world that we can co create together. So action step for us all. I hope you find a little piece of inspiration and action for your own contribution to our heart revolution. Much love. Thank you for joining me on psychedelic source. If you found value in today's episode, please subscribe wherever you get your podcast and share with others in our community. And if you're a psychedelic practitioner, therapist or coach looking to identify blind spots in your practice or determine next steps for moving it forward. Take the first step by visiting psychedelic Source podcast.com Until next time, remember, start low, go slow and stay connected to your source. You.