Program Notes
Guest speaker: Jon Hanna
A talk by Jon Hanna at Burning Man 2003.
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space. I’m Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:07 ►
Our program today is a talk that John Hanna gave at the Burning Man Festival in 2003.
00:00:14 ►
In fact, it was the first of the Palenque Norte lectures that we promoted that year.
00:00:19 ►
You know, we didn’t really have a good idea of what we were in for yet.
00:00:23 ►
Right in the middle of his talk, in fact, a dust storm blew in,
00:00:26 ►
and everybody in the audience had gas masks and dust masks on,
00:00:30 ►
but good old John just kept talking away.
00:00:33 ►
So he didn’t let it disturb him.
00:00:36 ►
He was a real trooper.
00:00:37 ►
I’ll have to say that for him.
00:00:38 ►
In fact, John is such a trooper that the night before the first talk,
00:00:41 ►
he came over and actually had to help us put the roof on the pod that we had the talk in.
00:00:47 ►
So I don’t know many speakers that build their lecture halls and then come give a talk the next day.
00:00:52 ►
But John’s one of the good guys that can do stuff like that.
00:00:59 ►
As most of you already know, John has been a pillar of the tribe for quite a long time.
00:01:06 ►
My first introduction to John’s work actually came from Terrence McKenna.
00:01:11 ►
He was at a conference I was at in, I guess it was the summer of 98.
00:01:15 ►
I remember Terrence saying that if you didn’t have a copy of John’s book, you really hadn’t started your library yet.
00:01:20 ►
So, of course, I went out and got a copy right away, and I was quite blown
00:01:25 ►
away. A book he had out at the time, in fact, he’s got it available now in a later edition.
00:01:31 ►
It’s called The Psychedelic Resource List. And I just, rather than give you the details,
00:01:37 ►
I’d suggest you just go out and get it. It’s exactly what the title implies. It’s The Psychedelic
00:01:42 ►
Resource List, and I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
00:01:46 ►
You know, the first time I actually met John was at the All Chemical Arts Conference in Hawaii.
00:01:52 ►
I guess it was in the fall of 99.
00:01:55 ►
And to make a very long story short, John and I became friends,
00:01:59 ►
and he eventually edited my book, The Spirit of the Internet.
00:02:03 ►
If you’re a member of the MAPS community, by the way,
00:02:06 ►
I’m sure you’ve seen some of John’s work on the special art issues he’s done for their bulletin.
00:02:11 ►
His most significant contributions to the tribe, in my opinion, are twofold.
00:02:16 ►
One is the Mind States Conference.
00:02:20 ►
We just had a very successful Mind States 6 up in San Francisco not long ago.
00:02:26 ►
You can read more about that online at www.mindstates.org.
00:02:32 ►
M-I-N-D-S-T-A-T-E-S dot org.
00:02:35 ►
And the other major project John’s involved with is he’s one of the contributors and supporters of the Entheogen Review.
00:02:46 ►
And that’s E-N-T-H-E-O-G-E-N-R-E-V-I-E-W.org.
00:02:51 ►
The Entheogen Review.
00:02:52 ►
And if you’ve never had a copy of that in your hands, you don’t know what you’re missing.
00:02:57 ►
So check it out.
00:02:59 ►
When I first asked John to give a speech at Burning Man, he jumped right into the fray and says yes.
00:03:02 ►
asked John to give a speech at Burning Man he jumped right into the fray and says
00:03:04 ►
yes, so
00:03:05 ►
putting together our program
00:03:08 ►
I just thought it was fitting that he give the
00:03:10 ►
first lecture since John’s usually the guy behind
00:03:12 ►
the scenes, you know, the wizard pulling
00:03:14 ►
the levers behind the conference scene
00:03:16 ►
and personally
00:03:18 ►
I think John really set a
00:03:20 ►
good tone for these talks and set
00:03:22 ►
the rest of the speakers up in pretty good shape with the audience
00:03:24 ►
but you can decide this for yourself because here’s set a good tone for these talks and set the rest of the speakers up in pretty good shape for the audience.
00:03:26 ►
But you can decide this for yourself because here’s John Hanna
00:03:29 ►
discussing his ideas about
00:03:30 ►
drug-inspired metaphysical concepts.
00:03:39 ►
I think that Lorenzo’s comment
00:03:42 ►
of me putting something together
00:03:43 ►
is an overstatement.
00:03:45 ►
So this is going to be a very loose talk,
00:03:49 ►
and I also want to encourage everyone to participate in this process
00:03:54 ►
and share stories related to the topic that they might have experienced.
00:03:58 ►
But before I start, I want to thank Lorenzo and Mercy and Carla and Don and everyone who’s put this
00:04:06 ►
incredible camp together and spent so much time folding cardboard which is cool.
00:04:15 ►
So let me think how do I want to start this. I think I want to start this with
00:04:22 ►
just reading a quote from Allen Ginsberg that is kind of describing I think I want to start this with just reading a quote from Allen Ginsberg that is kind of describing, I think, a very accurate description of the psychedelic experience, because I feel that this description sort of relates to the idea of drug-inspired metaphysical concepts.
00:04:47 ►
concepts and probably everyone here is familiar with our Gordon Lawson and he was a banker who first sort of rediscovered or was involved one of the
00:04:54 ►
first people involved in rediscovering the velocity mushrooms and he has
00:05:01 ►
postulated that the origins of religious ideas
00:05:05 ►
come from
00:05:06 ►
the use of
00:05:07 ►
psychoactive drugs
00:05:09 ►
and
00:05:09 ►
I don’t know
00:05:10 ►
whether that’s
00:05:10 ►
true necessarily
00:05:12 ►
but certainly
00:05:12 ►
it’s one
00:05:13 ►
avenue
00:05:15 ►
to
00:05:15 ►
religious
00:05:17 ►
or spiritual
00:05:18 ►
type of
00:05:19 ►
thoughts
00:05:20 ►
and so
00:05:21 ►
anyway I’m going to
00:05:22 ►
read this book
00:05:22 ►
from Allen Ginsberg
00:05:23 ►
which I think
00:05:23 ►
sort of encapsulates that idea.
00:05:28 ►
So this was in Playboy magazine.
00:05:32 ►
What does a trip feel like? A creeping sensation
00:05:35 ►
comes over your body, a change in the planetary nature of your
00:05:39 ►
mammal eyeballs and hearing orifices. Then comes realization
00:05:44 ►
that you’re a spirit
00:05:45 ►
inhabiting a vast animal body
00:05:47 ►
containing giant apparatuses,
00:05:49 ►
holes, circulatory systems,
00:05:51 ►
interior canals,
00:05:53 ►
and mysterious back alleys of the mind.
00:05:55 ►
Any one of these back alleys
00:05:56 ►
can be explored for a long, long way,
00:05:59 ►
like going back into recollections of childhood
00:06:01 ►
or going forward into the future,
00:06:03 ►
imagining all sorts of changes in the body, in the mind, or in the world outside, inventing imaginary universes
00:06:09 ►
or recalling ones that existed, like Egypt.
00:06:14 ►
You then realize that all these exist in your mind simultaneously.
00:06:18 ►
Slowly, you approach the mysterious feeling that if all these histories and universes
00:06:21 ►
exist in your mind at the same time, then what about this one you are, quote, really, unquote, in, or think you are?
00:06:30 ►
Does that also exist only in your mind?
00:06:33 ►
Then comes the realization that it does exist only in your mind.
00:06:36 ►
The mind created it.
00:06:38 ►
Then you begin to wonder, who is this mind?
00:06:41 ►
At the height of the ask experience, you realize that your mind is the same mind
00:06:45 ►
that’s always existed in all people at all times, in all places. This is the great mind,
00:06:51 ►
the very mind men call God. Then comes a fascinating suspicion. Is this the mind they call God,
00:06:58 ►
or what they used to call the devil? Here’s where a dumb trick may begin.
00:07:15 ►
If you decide it’s a demonic creator, you get hung up wondering whether he should exist or not. To get off that train of thought, you might open your eyes and see you’re sitting on a sofa
00:07:19 ►
and over the living room with green plants flowering on the mantelpiece,
00:07:22 ►
blah blah blah blah blah.
00:07:24 ►
So I’m not going to continue with this but
00:07:25 ►
I thought that that was a pretty good description of the sort of spiritual aspects and so
00:07:32 ►
part of what I wanted to just put forward and I don’t have any answer for this
00:07:37 ►
is what what is the idea of spirituality where did this come from? What is it that we think of as spiritual or metaphysical?
00:07:48 ►
And I think that it’s the sense that we get that this material world is not all that there is,
00:07:59 ►
and that there’s something beyond that, and that when we’re in these enhanced states of mind,
00:08:05 ►
beyond that and that when we’re in these enhanced states of mind we experience that sort of timeless moment it seems very very real when we experience it and
00:08:11 ►
all manner of ideas might come to us while we’re in that state of mind that
00:08:16 ►
seemed very real and valid and then we come back to this state of mind and a
00:08:20 ►
lot of them might you know in reflection in reflection here, seem sort of crazy. And so that fits
00:08:27 ►
in with the beyond belief theme of Burning Man this year. And I wanted to talk about
00:08:31 ►
a few of the more well-known people who had sort of nutty ideas, let’s say, that were
00:08:42 ►
drug-inspired. So the first one that I’ll just mention briefly, who you’re probably all familiar with, is Terence McKenna. And Terence went to
00:08:50 ►
the Amazon in 1971. He was 25 years old and he was on a quest to find TNT-containing
00:08:58 ►
plants, and he had decided that that was, you know, a very important thing to do because the PMT experience was very strange and otherly.
00:09:08 ►
And so he went down there,
00:09:10 ►
and instead of finding the PMT-containing plant he was looking for,
00:09:13 ►
he hooked up with some mushrooms that were growing all over the place there
00:09:18 ►
and had a number of experiences with the mushrooms
00:09:20 ►
that led him towards these ideas about reality.
00:09:27 ►
And he sort of connected this to the I Ching
00:09:31 ►
and kind of ended up being connected to the Mayan calendar
00:09:35 ►
and he created this time wave theory.
00:09:39 ►
And so that’s something that I would consider very much his time wave theory,
00:09:43 ►
which you’re probably familiar with. It’s very much a drug-inspired metaphysical belief. There’s not, you know,
00:09:50 ►
if you were to look at it with a rational mind, it doesn’t seem to hold very much water.
00:09:58 ►
But on the other hand, he was fairly convinced that it was true. Towards the end of his life he became, you know,
00:10:06 ►
a little more convinced, well now it’s easy for me to believe that it’s the truth.
00:10:15 ►
So, you know, he knew he was checking out and he felt confident that it didn’t matter. But he always had a retain a sense of humor. He always, you know,
00:10:25 ►
said, you know, maybe it’s just all a bunch of bullshit. Or actually he probably would have said horseshit.
00:10:32 ►
So that was one person who’s pretty well known. Another person who’s pretty well known is John Lilly.
00:10:41 ►
He was a doctor who did work with dolphins. He was convinced that
00:10:46 ►
dolphins were very intelligent and tried to understand how they communicate with each
00:10:52 ►
other. He also did work with isolation tanks and ketamine and became fairly involved with
00:10:59 ►
ketamine to the point that some people may feel that it wasn’t so good that he was getting as much ketamine as he was doing.
00:11:07 ►
I remember hearing, I wasn’t at this conference, but I remember hearing about a conference where
00:11:11 ►
later in his life he was on a panel and people, it was a question and answer session,
00:11:17 ►
and people would ask him a question. And every time he was asked a question, he would answer with the same answer, which was 100 milligrams intramuscular ketamine.
00:11:28 ►
That’s your answer.
00:11:31 ►
So he was fairly convinced that it was a good thing.
00:11:36 ►
So he had an experience.
00:11:38 ►
I think it was maybe his second LSD experience, where his first LSD experience was fairly good,
00:11:44 ►
and his second one, he was thrown into first LSD experience was fairly good, and his second
00:11:45 ►
one, he was thrown into a kind of a really negative state. And he had to piece the whole
00:11:51 ►
thing together later from memory, but what he had ended up doing was feeling, I guess,
00:11:58 ►
sort of unconsciously suicidal. He injected himself with an antibiotic. He was a doctor, he was familiar with injections, it wasn’t a weird thing for him to do.
00:12:09 ►
He might have thought in his conscious mind that maybe this will help the bum trip I’m
00:12:16 ►
having.
00:12:17 ►
But what ended up happening is he cleaned out the needle with some detergent and there
00:12:22 ►
was detergent left in the needle which was injected into the system and the bubbles from the detergent went through his lungs
00:12:28 ►
and then lodged in his brain and caused him to go into a coma.
00:12:33 ►
And he was found sort of on the floor in this state and rushed to the hospital
00:12:36 ►
but they knew who he was and were taking care of him.
00:12:40 ►
And he actually ended up going blind for a period of time after that
00:12:44 ►
because of the neurological damage which turned out to be temporary.
00:12:47 ►
But during this time when he was sort of in this coma,
00:12:51 ►
he had an experience where he met these two beings of light,
00:12:55 ►
and they were sort of his guardians, I guess.
00:12:58 ►
And they said to him, we’re not really two beings of light.
00:13:01 ►
We’re actually just one being, and you’re part of that.
00:13:04 ►
But because of your kind of limited perspective, you’re seeing us as really two beings of light, we’re actually just one being, and you’re part of that, but because of your kind of limited perspective,
00:13:06 ►
you’re seeing us as these two beings,
00:13:08 ►
and we’re going to take care of you,
00:13:10 ►
and we’re looking out for you,
00:13:12 ►
and you can,
00:13:13 ►
he described the place that he would be in,
00:13:15 ►
and it’s just utter joy,
00:13:16 ►
a wonderful space to be in,
00:13:19 ►
and they said to him,
00:13:20 ►
well, you can stay here,
00:13:22 ►
or you can go back to your body,
00:13:24 ►
and your work in your body isn’t finished,, you can stay here, or you can go back to your body.
00:13:30 ►
And your work in your body isn’t finished, but if you stay here, this is what it’s going to be like.
00:13:35 ►
So, you know, how seriously should we take these kinds of ideas?
00:13:38 ►
And why do they… One of the things that to me is always interesting is a religion like Christianity,
00:13:42 ►
or any organized religion, which over time
00:13:45 ►
has filled up certain rituals and certain practices,
00:13:48 ►
and everybody just takes them for granted.
00:13:51 ►
It doesn’t seem that strange, like, oh, there’s angels.
00:13:54 ►
There’s beings, there are angels that live in heavens,
00:13:57 ►
and that’s part of it.
00:13:58 ►
Or, oh, this person came back from the dead.
00:14:02 ►
It’s part of it.
00:14:03 ►
It doesn’t seem that strange.
00:14:04 ►
But when somebody is telling you,
00:14:06 ►
I am Christ,
00:14:07 ►
and I realize this because I get to know us,
00:14:09 ►
then people tend to dismiss that
00:14:12 ►
as maybe brain damage
00:14:15 ►
or because of the crowds.
00:14:17 ►
So, in one way, it’s really strange
00:14:21 ►
because here people who are taking the LSD,
00:14:24 ►
they’re having this direct primary religious experience
00:14:29 ►
and they’re speaking from personal experience whereas the people who are just following the Bible maybe actually they just read something and they believe it
00:14:40 ►
so which is a weirder way to approach it. So I think I want to move into discussing now the…
00:14:49 ►
Well, actually I’ll talk about one of my own experiences. I took a brief
00:14:55 ►
sphere fist of mushrooms one time when I was camping and it was probably, I think it was about four grams of mushrooms
00:15:02 ►
and I was just in my tent and with my eyes shut.
00:15:05 ►
I had this experience where I went into what seemed to be like a waiting room of a hospital.
00:15:13 ►
The walls were all sort of a drab green color, and there was no one there.
00:15:16 ►
It was just me sort of waiting in this waiting room.
00:15:18 ►
And these things would float by that were maybe about this big, sort of like football sized, and looked like giant maggots,
00:15:26 ►
but moving sort of through the air. So I thought that was sort of strange, these maggot-like things.
00:15:32 ►
And then I saw this creature that was about the size of a small dog that was very furry,
00:15:38 ►
but a very insect-like creature with a really nasty long proboscis that looked like it was sort of a mosquito type thing.
00:15:47 ►
And as soon as it turned around and saw me, an alarm went off.
00:15:51 ►
A sound, it made a sound that I sensed it was, it was, you know, sort of alerting everyone in that realm,
00:16:01 ►
hey, there’s this thing here and it’s seeing us.
00:16:03 ►
And so it communicated telepathically with me and it told me, you know,
00:16:08 ►
well, the first thing was like, what the hell are you doing here? Why are you seeing us?
00:16:11 ►
Like, you’re not supposed to be able to see us. And so,
00:16:15 ►
it just took a bunch of reasons.
00:16:21 ►
So, you know, it just seemed okay
00:16:23 ►
with that answer.
00:16:25 ►
And then it explained to me that what it was was this being that lived off of human thought
00:16:33 ►
and all of its kind.
00:16:34 ►
And the impression I got was that the Maga thing was really, you know, they were beings
00:16:38 ►
that hadn’t hatched yet and this thing was, you know, an adult.
00:16:43 ►
And so they fed on human thought,
00:16:45 ►
and human thought was their nourishment,
00:16:49 ►
like food, actual food,
00:16:50 ►
and it was also kind of like used as currency somehow.
00:16:54 ►
And I got this idea from them,
00:16:57 ►
or from him, or it,
00:16:58 ►
that they weren’t necessarily entirely friendly,
00:17:08 ►
and that some types of human thought were more valuable than other types of human thought.
00:17:11 ►
So if you’re just sitting around watching TV,
00:17:13 ►
maybe that’s not that valuable,
00:17:14 ►
but if you’re having an orgasm
00:17:16 ►
or if you’re stabbing someone and killing them,
00:17:20 ►
you know, the very extreme types of human thought
00:17:23 ►
or human emotion were more valuable
00:17:25 ►
and that somehow these creatures would manipulate the human experience in such a way
00:17:31 ►
so that they would be able to get these better thoughts to live off of.
00:17:36 ►
And so it didn’t, you know, it was a very parasitic kind of singing thing
00:17:39 ►
and didn’t leave me with a very good feeling.
00:17:42 ►
I thought, well, okay, you know, this is a very strange experience,
00:17:48 ►
and I was on drugs at the time, and so how seriously do I take this?
00:17:53 ►
It seemed very real. It wasn’t, you know, it didn’t seem, you know, so maybe they’re out there.
00:18:03 ►
So it’s a creepy thought, really. I mean, because you feel like, you know, in one way, you know, if you think that what if an alien being or alien culture came to our planet from somewhere else and they saw the way that we treat animals, for example, and that we kill them and eat them and bathe them and cage them and do all of these things to animals that are not particularly nice necessarily to do to another being
00:18:29 ►
or the way that we treat insects, we spray poisons and just, you know, I don’t think we started on insects but
00:18:37 ►
I think that insects are the embodiment of the other, they’re so different from us. They have an exoskeleton. So they’re the exact
00:18:47 ►
opposite of us. They’re fleshy stuff on the inside and they’re skeletons on the outside.
00:18:51 ►
And I think that that not only does it represent sort of the other to us, but I also think
00:18:55 ►
that they have what is a death charge to them, which is because of that skeleton, because
00:19:01 ►
the skeleton to us is representative of death. And so I think that insects, you know, sometimes if you see an ant, your immediate reaction is to squish it with your finger, right?
00:19:12 ►
Without even thinking, ah, killing the gist of it, kill it, you know.
00:19:16 ►
And then, so they have so much of a death charge that it’s kind of like it’s a them or me thing.
00:19:22 ►
You know, mosquitoes, people have got no problem killing mosquitoes, right?
00:19:26 ►
So, you know, so it’s kind of a pretty thing to think that maybe there’s this other dimension
00:19:30 ►
where these things are feeding off of us and controlling what it is.
00:19:33 ►
So how seriously should I take this?
00:19:35 ►
I mean, if I take it really seriously and say that, yes, this is true,
00:19:40 ►
what can I do?
00:19:42 ►
What should I do about it?
00:19:44 ►
And the other option is to say,
00:19:46 ►
well, you know, I was just on drugs
00:19:48 ►
and it’s just something weird that happened
00:19:49 ►
that couldn’t possibly be true,
00:19:51 ►
that provides rational, you know,
00:19:54 ►
we have no proof for this.
00:19:55 ►
It’s possible there’s misinterpretation.
00:19:57 ►
It’s also possible that these,
00:19:59 ►
if we’re going to accept that there are these things
00:20:01 ►
that are interdimensional or other dimensional,
00:20:04 ►
that they’re just lying to us. I mean, you mean, I don’t know how seriously to take the things that some of these things are saying.
00:20:11 ►
So I wanted to relate that experience because it’s an experience that I had where in the end
00:20:16 ►
what I sort of, you know, how I dealt with it was like, okay, well, weird drug experience
00:20:21 ►
and I’m not going to go around preaching to everyone. Look, be careful about what you think, because, you know, really, what you think,
00:20:28 ►
you know, you’re feeding these things, and maybe they’re, you know, growing in numbers.
00:20:33 ►
And so, you know, I don’t know.
00:20:37 ►
But the next thing I wanted to lead to was a person whose name is Zoe Seven,
00:20:44 ►
who I actually met at the first MindStays conference that I produced.
00:20:49 ►
Not the first or the second, but anyways, one of the conferences that I produced.
00:20:54 ►
He wrote this book called Into the Void, which when I read the first…
00:21:00 ►
He contacted me and said, hey, I’d like to speak to your conference.
00:21:03 ►
When I read the first page, I was just immediately turned off by it
00:21:06 ►
because it was very new age-y,
00:21:08 ►
and I don’t tend to hold a lot of new age beliefs.
00:21:12 ►
And just talking about, well, I’ll just give you a little flavor of it.
00:21:16 ►
Don’t let this turn you off from the book because it’s a great book,
00:21:19 ►
but let us first begin by introducing ourselves.
00:21:23 ►
We are Zoe7, a multidimensional synergy personality cluster.
00:21:28 ►
In this reality, we now inhabit the physical body and mind of Joseph Marzi.
00:21:33 ►
The other five personalities that I find in his body and mind are Max McCullen, the hero…
00:21:38 ►
Anyway, so he lists the names of the different people that are living in his body.
00:21:43 ►
He says, as you probably have noticed
00:21:45 ►
by now, as a group, we are six in number, yet we call ourselves Zoe7. Let us explain the reason
00:21:51 ►
for this peculiarity. The psychological and psychic merger we have recently undergone is a
00:21:55 ►
new experiment in consciousness for all of us. This consolidation follows the principle of synergy,
00:22:00 ►
which combines individual units, parts of a whole, in such a way so as to produce a result that is greater than the sum of the units.
00:22:07 ►
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:22:08 ►
So, you know, it just seemed like it was a bunch of New Age crap.
00:22:12 ►
But on the other hand, you know, I thought, well, it was a free book, so I’ll keep reading.
00:22:17 ►
And so as I kept reading it, I realized that there were a lot of very interesting things
00:22:23 ►
to me.
00:22:23 ►
One was that Zoe came to psychedelics sort of later in his life than I did.
00:22:28 ►
I think he was about 31 when he first started experimenting with them.
00:22:31 ►
And he’s, I think he just turned 36.
00:22:36 ►
So it was not that long ago that he started messing around with psychedelics.
00:22:40 ►
He was doing so in a vacuum.
00:22:43 ►
He didn’t have any friends that were taking psychedelics. He didn doing so in a vacuum. He didn’t have any friends that were taking psychedelics.
00:22:45 ►
He wasn’t,
00:22:46 ►
he didn’t know anything about it
00:22:47 ►
and
00:22:48 ►
sort of a little bit
00:22:49 ►
pre-internet
00:22:50 ►
although he was getting some
00:22:51 ►
you know,
00:22:53 ►
information from the internet.
00:22:54 ►
So he just started taking
00:22:55 ►
a whole lot of stuff
00:22:56 ►
just randomly
00:22:58 ►
sort of
00:22:58 ►
to see what it would do to him.
00:23:00 ►
Things like
00:23:01 ►
you know,
00:23:01 ►
motion sickness pills
00:23:02 ►
in high doses.
00:23:07 ►
Whatever he could get his hands on because he wasn’t very well connected.
00:23:11 ►
And he wrote down the experiences that he had,
00:23:17 ►
and he’s not particularly someone who has had a great deal of formal education.
00:23:20 ►
So his book, another thing that first sort of turned me off from the book was it’s just riddled with sort of typos and grammatical errors
00:23:23 ►
and things that I thought, this guy’s not too bright.
00:23:28 ►
But what really impressed me was that he just kept going into the trenches and taking things
00:23:33 ►
and taking things and writing down his experiences.
00:23:36 ►
And when I started going through it, I would notice over and over again experiences that
00:23:41 ►
either were very similar to ones that I had, that he described very well,
00:23:48 ►
or things that I’d heard other people say that they had experienced.
00:23:52 ►
So he had a really good overview of the psychedelic experience.
00:23:55 ►
One of the things that he was doing was he was taking psychedelics along with various mind machines,
00:23:57 ►
which can be anything from something that fits over your eyes,
00:24:02 ►
that has sort of a light and sound kind of situation going on,
00:24:07 ►
and has earplugs where it changes your brainwave state.
00:24:10 ►
And he would do that in conjunction with taking psychedelics.
00:24:14 ►
And he started realizing that he was having experiences in other sort of dimensions as other people
00:24:22 ►
that were just as real as these experiences that we’re
00:24:25 ►
having here.
00:24:27 ►
And he could go back and replicate them.
00:24:28 ►
I mean, not replicate them, but he could go back to the same person’s body in some other,
00:24:34 ►
he calls them parallel universes or probable universes and kind of delves into Lehman’s
00:24:41 ►
understanding of quantum mechanics to explain his theory as to how all of this works.
00:24:46 ►
And it’s a very interesting theory.
00:24:48 ►
But very out there.
00:24:50 ►
I have some extra copies of these books.
00:24:54 ►
So if you aren’t familiar with it
00:24:55 ►
and it sounds interesting to you,
00:24:56 ►
just take one.
00:24:58 ►
I don’t have enough for everyone,
00:25:00 ►
but I have a few.
00:25:03 ►
So we became friends, and he’s someone who I kind of would categorize
00:25:12 ►
if we’re kind of, you know, we’re very interested in the same things, but we’re kind of on opposite
00:25:17 ►
spectrums as far as our beliefs about the things that we’re interested in, and I would
00:25:21 ►
put him more into the camp of a true believer.
00:25:25 ►
And by that, I mean someone who, if he had gone through the experience that I did with
00:25:30 ►
the insect thing that was sucking our thoughts, he would very much be like, look, there are
00:25:35 ►
these insect things that are sucking our thoughts, and you guys need to wake up.
00:25:39 ►
You know, I mean, it’s, you know, you’re laughing, but they’re sucking your thoughts right now,
00:25:44 ►
and your laughing response to me is, you know, it’s something that, so, I mean, you’re laughing, but they’re sucking your thoughts right now, and your laughing response to me is something that…
00:25:48 ►
So, I mean, but the reason that I think it’s important is that
00:25:53 ►
his experience of that and his embracing the ideas that have come to him in these psychedelic states
00:26:00 ►
is from his own experience.
00:26:02 ►
He’s actually experienced it.
00:26:04 ►
It’s like I said, it’s not,
00:26:05 ►
you didn’t read it in a book.
00:26:07 ►
He went into the trenches and was told various things
00:26:09 ►
by these creatures
00:26:10 ►
or entities or things.
00:26:12 ►
And, you know,
00:26:13 ►
they said,
00:26:13 ►
well, this is the way to do it.
00:26:14 ►
Well, this very much parallels
00:26:17 ►
the ideas embraced in shamanism,
00:26:20 ►
in traditional shamanism
00:26:21 ►
that you go in
00:26:23 ►
and you can work in these spaces
00:26:25 ►
with those things that you come in contact with.
00:26:28 ►
And it’s a very different sort of a belief than the, you know,
00:26:32 ►
the Western kind of rationalist or scientist view that we have here.
00:26:38 ►
So I went down to the Amazon where Zoe was involved in producing ayahuasca sessions,
00:26:48 ►
and I was speaking at one of those.
00:26:51 ►
And, again, if that’s something you’re interested in,
00:26:54 ►
I highly recommend that you go to one of these things.
00:26:57 ►
I have some flyers for that, too, up here.
00:26:59 ►
I’ll throw them in between so they don’t fly away.
00:27:02 ►
But the next one that they’re doing has the artists,
00:27:06 ►
Robert Vinoza and Martina Hoffman,
00:27:08 ►
which maybe some of you are familiar with their artwork.
00:27:10 ►
So you go to the Amazon, you take ayahuasca every other night,
00:27:14 ►
and then in the mornings the next day,
00:27:17 ►
you discuss your experiences where they have art painting sessions
00:27:21 ►
where you can paint visions that you have.
00:27:24 ►
So when I was there with him,
00:27:26 ►
we were taking ayahuasca and one of the people who was there was a Peruvian shaman named Pablo
00:27:35 ►
Amarillo. I think you might be familiar with some of his art. This is an example of his art on Lorenzo’s shirt. So he is just the sweetest guy and a wonderful man and he gave up shamanism because, just sort of a brief description of why he gave up shamanism is that he was a shaman. And in South America, there’s a lot of belief that illness is magically produced.
00:28:07 ►
And so you go to the shaman to get healed.
00:28:10 ►
So he would wake up in the morning, there’d be people who would always get to his door
00:28:13 ►
because he was very successful at what he did.
00:28:15 ►
And he would heal these people, and the next day there’d be more people who would heal them.
00:28:19 ►
After a while, he started getting very sick.
00:28:24 ►
And so he went to another shamanaman and he found out that what was
00:28:27 ►
going on was that the shaman that were making people sick were pissed off at him because he
00:28:34 ►
was sort of negating what they were doing. He was healing these people that should be sick according
00:28:39 ►
to them because they were making people sick. And so you know his attitude was like well if you just better shamans, you know, I wouldn’t be able to cure them. It’s not my
00:28:48 ►
fault. I’m a guy who cures people. And you were people who make people sick, and we each
00:28:53 ►
do our thing, and it’s not my fault that you’re not, you know, doing a very good job. But,
00:28:58 ►
so a number of shamans sort of ganged up and ended up making Pablo very sick. And so he went to this one shaman
00:29:06 ►
and said, you know, what am I going to do
00:29:08 ►
about this?
00:29:10 ►
And what the shaman said to him was,
00:29:11 ►
you need to kill those other shamans.
00:29:13 ►
You have to, the only way for you to get out
00:29:15 ►
of this situation and to continue
00:29:17 ►
being a shaman is if you kill them.
00:29:20 ►
Because if they’re still alive,
00:29:22 ►
they will keep fighting you, they will keep
00:29:23 ►
making you sick, and it’s not going to get any better, and it will get worse.
00:29:27 ►
And so Pablo was like, well, I’m a healer,
00:29:31 ►
I’m not someone who kills people,
00:29:32 ►
and so he decided that his best course of action was to give up shamanism,
00:29:37 ►
and so he stopped being an ayahuasca shaman.
00:29:40 ►
He doesn’t do that anymore.
00:29:42 ►
But he’s an artist, and he paints these beautiful paintings
00:29:46 ►
of the visions that he had while he was on ayahuasca.
00:29:50 ►
And it’s neat because when you look at his paintings,
00:29:52 ►
you can see some things in there that you think,
00:29:54 ►
this is really weird that in the sort of pre-enshama
00:29:57 ►
we have UFOs in their paintings.
00:30:00 ►
And how does this tie into our ideas of UFOs?
00:30:03 ►
Or angels or mermaids
00:30:06 ►
or other things that you wouldn’t think necessarily,
00:30:09 ►
but it’s because he’s had experience
00:30:10 ►
interacting with those beings.
00:30:12 ►
So anyway, Pablo was there at this seminar,
00:30:15 ►
and Zoe was there, and this woman, Sylvia Coloboy,
00:30:19 ►
was there, who was the person who produced the seminars.
00:30:22 ►
And there were maybe about 20 people at a session.
00:30:25 ►
And so one of these people,
00:30:27 ►
we’re all really stoked on Iowa Oscar.
00:30:30 ►
And one of these people was apparently
00:30:36 ►
a psychic of some type.
00:30:39 ►
Now, when someone says that they’re a psychic,
00:30:41 ►
I don’t know, I tend to be skeptical and think,
00:30:44 ►
okay, what number am I thinking?
00:30:47 ►
But I have never gotten a sufficient answer to that, so I tend to be a little skeptical
00:30:54 ►
about psychics to some degree, although I’ve also had experiences which, I had an experience
00:30:59 ►
with my friend Carlo, which was very strange, it occurred to me, like wow. It almost seemed like you were a psychic.
00:31:07 ►
So, you know, that whole thing with the bracelets and the salt
00:31:13 ►
and, you know, when you were like,
00:31:16 ►
oh, you should put those bracelets in salt.
00:31:18 ►
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:31:19 ►
Anyway.
00:31:21 ►
So what happened, at every point, it just seemed like I’m rambling, so we’ll get a question.
00:31:30 ►
So what happened was this woman who was a psychic apparently, under the influence of Ayahuasca, became convinced that Pablo was there to steal our energy. Like he was not there for good reasons. He was there to use shamanic tricks and steal our energy.
00:31:48 ►
So the person who produced the seminar came up to me and said,
00:31:53 ►
John, what do you think about this woman?
00:31:56 ►
She says, she’s not here for good reasons.
00:32:00 ►
And she clearly was taking it very seriously because she’s a psychic I’m like well
00:32:06 ►
I think I would take it with a little bit of a grain of salt
00:32:10 ►
and just see how it develops
00:32:12 ►
maybe she’s interpreting things not correctly
00:32:14 ►
or I don’t really think that Pablo is here to steal our energy
00:32:17 ►
but what it made me realize that interaction was
00:32:21 ►
how through the use of psychedelics people can become very
00:32:28 ►
primed to a mind state that allows them to believe magical thinking that the
00:32:35 ►
world is a magical place and this is probably part of the reason why those
00:32:41 ►
cultures that use psychedelics regularly have this sort of belief system that illness is created magically and can be cured magically. So it would be an
00:32:50 ►
interesting thing to be witness to this kind of shifting in belief
00:32:56 ►
systems where you come into it from a more of a rational perspective and then
00:33:02 ►
after doing it for a while you kind of shift into this perspective of,
00:33:06 ►
you know, maybe there are a whole lot of things out there
00:33:09 ►
that are beyond belief that we can’t explain
00:33:11 ►
that are just happening in this future.
00:33:14 ►
You know, coincidences.
00:33:15 ►
One of the things that Zoe’s very big on is coincidences.
00:33:19 ►
There’s something also that comes up with ketamine users a lot.
00:33:22 ►
I mean, if you’re using a lot of ketamine,
00:33:23 ►
it’s that all of a sudden everything becomes very coincidental and significant. And so, so anyway, the next day with
00:33:31 ►
Pablo, the woman said something like, oh no, no, Pablo’s not here to hurt us, you know, I was,
00:33:37 ►
I don’t know, I was on drugs here, I misinterpreted things, and he’s here to help us, you know, we’ve been scared.
00:33:43 ►
But at the time, this there was a crisis.
00:33:45 ►
You know, we were, what are we going to do? It’s like those insect things stuck in our thoughts.
00:33:50 ►
Pablo’s there and it’s not good. Are we going to rebuild him?
00:33:54 ►
So I want to talk about another, I’ve mentioned ketamine and I want to talk about two experiences with ketamine. One was that I had here on the playa in 96.
00:34:08 ►
And
00:34:08 ►
it was the first time
00:34:09 ►
I had done
00:34:10 ►
ketamine intramuscularly.
00:34:13 ►
Thankfully,
00:34:13 ►
for me,
00:34:14 ►
I mean,
00:34:14 ►
it’s making me a little
00:34:15 ►
less nervous about it,
00:34:16 ►
but the person
00:34:17 ►
who was shooting me up
00:34:18 ►
was actually
00:34:18 ►
an anesthesiologist
00:34:19 ►
who happened to bring
00:34:21 ►
a whole lot of ketamine
00:34:23 ►
and some
00:34:23 ►
equipment,
00:34:24 ►
pulse oximeter.
00:34:26 ►
My eyes are good, it’s just my throat is sound. Thanks, man.
00:34:29 ►
So anyway, I got shot up with this ketamine, and I’m having my ketamine experience.
00:34:35 ►
I really hadn’t had a ketamine experience before that, although I did it once.
00:34:38 ►
I didn’t get off on it at all.
00:34:40 ►
So part of the experience was kind of a typical or out-of-body experience, I guess you’d call it.
00:34:49 ►
And I was floating above the camp.
00:34:51 ►
And I was looking down at all of Burning Man from sort of an aerial perspective.
00:34:55 ►
And I was seeing the whole camp, how it was laid out.
00:34:58 ►
And just floating along like Superman, but not real fast, you know, above everything.
00:35:03 ►
And checking out the camp.
00:35:04 ►
I was like, huh, it’s really weird to get this aerial view of the camp. But I didn’t think that I
00:35:09 ►
really actually had been floating above the camp, I just thought that in my mind I
00:35:14 ►
created this thing. Here I am at Burning Man and this is the kind of what primes me going into the
00:35:19 ►
experience and so it makes logical sense that I might have some visions of Burning Man.
00:35:25 ►
So I didn’t give much thought to it other than I thought it was a neat experience.
00:35:29 ►
So, uh, the next day or two years later we were going to watch an ad burn.
00:35:38 ►
And I had taken some PCB for that and I was walking along and I had this real
00:35:43 ►
strong feeling of David Abu and it was very strange because
00:35:47 ►
you know it was a really strong feeling that everything around me sort of looks familiar but it didn’t look exactly familiar
00:35:53 ►
it just sort of looked familiar so I kept walking and I had the experience again and I was like
00:35:58 ►
all this looks really familiar and I knew that I had not seen what I was looking at previously because we purposely were taking a route to the man that we had not walked
00:36:09 ►
because we wanted to see more of the city.
00:36:13 ►
And so after the third time, it hit me that I felt like I’d really seen where
00:36:18 ►
I was kind of seeing landmarks, but I’d seen this before, but I hadn’t seen it before.
00:36:23 ►
What I realized was that I had seen this before, but I haven’t seen it before. What I realized was that I had seen
00:36:26 ►
it before, but from above.
00:36:28 ►
I was looking at it from a different perspective,
00:36:30 ►
so the landmarks were all the same,
00:36:32 ►
but it was my viewpoint on them that
00:36:34 ►
wasn’t the same, so it sort of,
00:36:36 ►
you know, in my mind, it seemed like, well,
00:36:38 ►
okay, this is really weird, because
00:36:39 ►
it kind of does seem like
00:36:41 ►
what the Kevin explains I had was an out-of-body
00:36:44 ►
experience, and I was actually looking at things.
00:36:46 ►
I don’t have any way of reconciling that in a rational perspective other than to say that
00:36:52 ►
maybe I was having an out-of-body experience and that that’s actually the way things work.
00:36:56 ►
So I want to briefly mention another ketamine story because I think that ketamine is an
00:37:00 ►
interesting drug.
00:37:02 ►
I’ll mention two stories that relate to this kind of metaphysical
00:37:06 ►
thing. And the first one
00:37:08 ►
is a gentleman who I met on the
00:37:10 ►
playa a couple nights ago
00:37:11 ►
who I guess was maybe a ketamine
00:37:13 ►
dealer, so he had lots of ketamine.
00:37:17 ►
And
00:37:17 ►
when there’s lots of ketamine around, what I’ve noticed
00:37:20 ►
is people tend to get into patterns
00:37:21 ►
of a lot
00:37:24 ►
of use of ketamine.
00:37:26 ►
So this guy apparently was using ketamine a lot, maybe every day, maybe multiple times a day, and said that he realized, when he realized that he had a problem, was that he had these alien entities that were talking to him, and that were telling him that they were sort of controlling the world.
00:37:48 ►
And so this seems in some way, it’s a weird kind of repeating theme,
00:37:53 ►
you know, this idea that there’s these alien, sometimes alien things that are controlling the world because of kind of what John Lurie was talking about,
00:37:56 ►
and it’s sort of that insect thing that I ran into.
00:37:58 ►
And so his experience was there were these alien things controlling the world.
00:38:01 ►
And how they communicated was that they had altered his DNA
00:38:05 ►
and that they were sending messages through his hair
00:38:13 ►
to each other by wind transference.
00:38:17 ►
So, his DNA had changed
00:38:18 ►
and somehow they were communicating through his hair.
00:38:23 ►
Whenever the wind blew, they would send messages back and forth.
00:38:26 ►
And he had been shaving all his body hair off because he, you know, they weren’t friendly
00:38:33 ►
entities.
00:38:34 ►
They were, they were, so he had been shaving his hair everywhere because he didn’t want
00:38:39 ►
the messages to be sent.
00:38:42 ►
And so that was when he kind of realized, well, maybe I’ve gone too far.
00:38:45 ►
Maybe I’m taking too much ketamine.
00:38:48 ►
And he backed off a little bit.
00:38:50 ►
But other people might just, you know,
00:38:51 ►
go further with that and say,
00:38:54 ►
okay, well, you know,
00:38:56 ►
the true believer might take it further
00:38:58 ►
in the way that John Lowe took it further
00:39:00 ►
and really, you know, actively
00:39:02 ►
sort of understood the world
00:39:04 ►
through this coincidence control
00:39:05 ►
sensor.
00:39:07 ►
Another sort of interesting ketamine-related metaphysical thing, a friend told me recently
00:39:14 ►
about an experience where he and several others were all on ketamine, and they’d all
00:39:18 ►
entered a shared mind state.
00:39:20 ►
So the idea is, should we make value judgments about these substances with regard to their use
00:39:25 ►
insofar as presenting something, I mean, I’m paraphrasing what she said,
00:39:30 ►
but insofar as presenting something that is truthful or useful to us
00:39:35 ►
rather than just allowing us to sort of become deluded.
00:39:39 ►
I was just going to comment that my friend had made a comment about different drugs
00:39:43 ►
and the reliability of the information that you get through them and he said something like
00:39:47 ►
well you know with mescaline you get kind of 80% of what you get from that
00:39:52 ►
it’s good information it’s true and good and with mushrooms maybe about 50% of it
00:39:57 ►
or 60% of it is true and good and with ketamine zero percent it’s true and good
00:40:02 ►
but I don’t I don’t buy 0% because I think that my own experience
00:40:06 ►
with that sort of out-of-body situation
00:40:08 ►
seemed very provable.
00:40:12 ►
I mean, it seemed like…
00:40:14 ►
So, yeah, but I think that, you know,
00:40:16 ►
people do need to realize that ketamine is not…
00:40:20 ►
I’ve known a lot of people
00:40:22 ►
who’ve had problems with ketamine.
00:40:24 ►
So, you know, you can get…
00:40:27 ►
I have a friend who used ketamine in a way that I could never…
00:40:31 ►
To me, ketamine is just very strange and a bizarre experience,
00:40:36 ►
but I don’t find it to be a particularly useful experience.
00:40:39 ►
Sometimes it’s enjoyable and it’s always interesting,
00:40:42 ►
but it’s not something that I’ve ever felt,
00:40:44 ►
like when I came back from it, that there not something that I’ve ever felt like when
00:40:45 ►
I came back from it that there were things that I could apply in my life
00:40:48 ►
necessarily and make changes to the beneficial but I have a friend who has
00:40:53 ►
told me that when he goes into the Academy it’s like looking at sort of a
00:40:56 ►
computer screen and that he can go through files and see like okay well
00:41:02 ►
here’s one that’s the file where it causes me to have the urge to
00:41:06 ►
smoke cigarettes and just hit the delete key and then and he actually says that this this is
00:41:13 ►
something that he uses ketamine for sort of metaprogramming to change his behavior in this
00:41:19 ►
reality that it works for him that he’s able to do that i you know that’s not something that’s
00:41:23 ►
been my experience so i can’t speak to it except to say that I believe
00:41:27 ►
what he’s saying and certainly it seems reasonable for you know I don’t think
00:41:31 ►
he’s lying to me so so for some people I think it can be a useful tool like that
00:41:35 ►
but and the problem is you need to in order to find out if it’s a useful tool
00:41:39 ►
like that then you need to take it enough that you know and maybe if you’ve
00:41:43 ►
taken it that much then you become sort of polluted I don’t know so okay so the idea is that maybe it’s
00:41:50 ►
better to take natural naturally occurring chemicals rather than
00:41:54 ►
artificial chemicals because they have a longer history of use and so perhaps
00:42:01 ►
they’ve I don’t know, maybe they’re safer.
00:42:08 ►
Yeah, I think the thing about chemicals, when people say,
00:42:11 ►
well, I prefer natural chemicals to synthetic chemicals,
00:42:12 ►
or not synthetic, but artificial chemicals,
00:42:19 ►
one of the things that happens is that we later then find out that,
00:42:22 ►
oh, it turns out like methamphetamine is a good example of a synthetic or artificial rather chemical but now it’s been found in a plant so and DMT was
00:42:31 ►
another one that was you know found in plants later after it had been
00:42:34 ►
synthesized so it may be that someday we find LSD in a plant the idea of building
00:42:40 ►
a relationship with synthetics goes into ideas by a gentleman named Rupert
00:42:46 ►
Sheldrake, well that’s where I’m going to segue it to.
00:42:50 ►
And he has these ideas of fields of energy, morphogenetic fields, what he calls morphogenetic
00:42:56 ►
fields, where for example if something is brand new it doesn’t have very much or any
00:43:02 ►
of a morphogenic field.
00:43:04 ►
And he’ll use the example of rats running through a maze where the first time they run through a
00:43:08 ►
maze it takes them a certain while to do it but then later rats all over the
00:43:12 ►
world will be able to do that same maze quicker and so this is something he’s a
00:43:16 ►
biologist and he’s actually sort of studied this and come up with this theory
00:43:19 ►
I don’t know that I buy into it or don’t buy it I don’t have a strong feeling one
00:43:24 ►
way or another to it,
00:43:25 ►
but he’s actually someone who’s trying to take the scientific method and look at sort of paranormal things.
00:43:34 ►
And one of the things that he’s, he’s just written a book recently called The Sense of Being Stared At,
00:43:40 ►
and he actually has done studies, it’s a real easy study to replicate, so he’s got a lot of data points on it.
00:43:46 ►
And the idea is that if someone’s staring at us from behind,
00:43:51 ►
sometimes we might get a feeling that there’s somebody staring at us
00:43:54 ►
and turn around and we’ll see that there’s somebody staring at us.
00:43:56 ►
And so he’s actually looked at this kind of in a scientific way,
00:43:59 ►
and when you look at all of the data points that he’s gathered,
00:44:02 ►
it’s somewhere between 55% and 60% of the time
00:44:07 ►
people can tell when they’re being stared at.
00:44:09 ►
But they can’t tell when they’re not being stared at.
00:44:12 ►
When they’re not being stared at,
00:44:13 ►
it falls back to random 50% of the time,
00:44:16 ►
which is what you would expect just randomly,
00:44:18 ►
that 50% of the time if you were guessing,
00:44:20 ►
you’d get it right and you’d get it wrong.
00:44:22 ►
So he’s saying well what’s
00:44:25 ►
going on well he thinks that there’s some connection between what the person
00:44:28 ►
who is doing seeing and what they’re looking at the objects are not
00:44:33 ►
necessarily in our mind that you know our mind is projecting outwards and this
00:44:39 ►
is one of these things tied into this idea of morphogenetic field I wanted to
00:44:44 ►
bring up ketamine just
00:44:45 ►
one more time with relation to this story that I was talking about earlier where my
00:44:51 ►
friend took this ketamine with a group of people and they all had this singular mind
00:44:55 ►
state where they were all apparently sharing one mind and somebody else walked into the
00:45:01 ►
room and didn’t know that they were on ketamine and smoked some acacia obtusifolia resin,
00:45:07 ►
which contains primarily a high amount of DMT,
00:45:11 ►
and was launched into a ketamine mine state
00:45:15 ►
and was there with them in the shared mine state from smoking DMT
00:45:20 ►
and was very confused because he had never done ketamine.
00:45:23 ►
He was looking at what was going on.
00:45:24 ►
You know, I’ve never experienced this.
00:45:26 ►
This isn’t what it was supposed to be like.
00:45:27 ►
And why is this?
00:45:29 ►
Why am I?
00:45:29 ►
So he thought that he, you know, in his mind state,
00:45:33 ►
he thought that he had kind of broken the world
00:45:35 ►
or that he was the one that was responsible for this thing happening
00:45:38 ►
because he was smoking his DMT.
00:45:39 ►
So what’s going on there?
00:45:41 ►
What’s happening when people share a mind state from taking substances,
00:45:46 ►
sort of telepathic kind of experiences?
00:45:48 ►
Art Gordon Lawson, when he first did mushrooms in Mexico,
00:45:54 ►
with his wife, he apparently had a situation
00:45:58 ►
where he realized, I think, that his daughter had had a baby.
00:46:02 ►
He knew that she had given birth on a particular day at a particular time.
00:46:06 ►
It’s like, oh, yeah.
00:46:07 ►
And then later verified that that was true.
00:46:09 ►
So there’s some interesting things that can occur on psychedelics
00:46:13 ►
that I think fall into like a paranormal or DSP or telepathy area.
00:46:19 ►
And it’s very unfortunate that the substances are illegal
00:46:23 ►
because it kind of precludes any serious scientific study.
00:46:28 ►
All that sort of stuff has to be done underground,
00:46:30 ►
and so I encourage people to do that,
00:46:34 ►
to try to take things and see if they can test out
00:46:37 ►
whether or not these things enhance telepathic communications.
00:46:43 ►
Your conversation reminded me of something I wanted to mention.
00:46:46 ►
I sort of lost the train of thought. I brought up Zoe Seven and his work and the reason that I brought him up
00:46:53 ►
is because more recently he has had experiences where what he is doing is combining
00:47:00 ►
salivative neurone and ayahuasca. And so he feels, and I don’t know if it’s true, but he feels like he might have been the first person who has, while on a spiff dose of ayahuasca, smoked a very potent extract of salivative norm. in doing that was he had this huge download of information from these
00:47:25 ►
entities that were saying okay well it’s very important that people take
00:47:31 ►
ayahuasca and salvia together what we are is a hybrid entity that is being
00:47:36 ►
created through the combination of these two plants and what has happened in the
00:47:41 ►
past is okay there’s ayahuasca and there’s salmididinorm. But both of these things have kind of been profaned through improper use.
00:47:49 ►
And so the download of information told them, okay, well, you’ve got to take ayahuasca eight times,
00:47:53 ►
you’ve got to take salmididinorm eight times, and you have to start taking them together.
00:47:57 ►
And in doing so, you’re helping to create this hybrid, which is an energy that is a love-based energy which is going to kind of help us those
00:48:06 ►
as Zoe feels it kind of we’re all in danger that humanity is in danger and
00:48:12 ►
that there are these kind of alien reptilian creatures that are kind of
00:48:15 ►
sucking our energy or working on the outskirts of reality what we perceive as
00:48:22 ►
reality and it’s only this hybrid that’s sort of
00:48:25 ►
going to save us. So he’s moved into areas where, you know, this is, again, this is all
00:48:31 ►
coming from his own personal experience with the plants, with the plants that told him these things.
00:48:37 ►
So he’s taking their advice and he’s, okay, I’m going to try to… So so another one other idea that I wanted to
00:48:45 ►
bring up is there’s in Australia there’s acacia trees that grow that contain DMT
00:48:51 ►
and there’s just some people who have been cutting down and harvesting the DMT from
00:48:56 ►
them and there’s a resin that’s going around which people are just calling
00:48:59 ►
acacia resin from the plant acacia obtusifolia which is a plant that you can grow here
00:49:06 ►
there’s no reason that people should be growing it it takes about five years to
00:49:10 ►
reach sort of the tree height and then you can harvest it so it’s something
00:49:14 ►
that’s very reasonable and doable to grow here and but in Australia they grow
00:49:19 ►
and all over the place and so this guy went and decided he’s going to cut one down and
00:49:24 ►
harvest the DMT from it.
00:49:25 ►
And he did so in what some people are saying is very cavalier manner. He was just looking at making a buck,
00:49:31 ►
selling this stuff, went in with no, without good intentions towards the trees, chopped it down, cut it, extracted it,
00:49:39 ►
and then he went back to do it again. And so he it with another tree and the tree didn’t contain any BNT
00:49:45 ►
there was nothing, he got nothing out of it
00:49:47 ►
and so the speculation that these people have
00:49:50 ►
is well, the trees knew
00:49:52 ►
that he was sort of like
00:49:54 ►
didn’t have good intentions
00:49:56 ►
with what he was doing
00:49:56 ►
and so when he came to cut down the next tree
00:50:00 ►
they stopped their BNT production
00:50:02 ►
they just stopped it right there
00:50:03 ►
but then if somebody else came
00:50:05 ►
who had good intentions
00:50:06 ►
and was to cut down a tree
00:50:08 ►
that person would be able to harvest the DMT.
00:50:11 ►
Now, I don’t know
00:50:12 ►
they wanted to test this.
00:50:14 ►
Their idea was
00:50:15 ►
we’re going to create some type of
00:50:17 ►
rigorous scientific test
00:50:19 ►
and make sure that
00:50:20 ►
or see if this is actually occurring
00:50:22 ►
because they believed it was occurring.
00:50:24 ►
My question is how do you test the intentions of a plant?
00:50:28 ►
How do you, I mean sure you can test whether or not the plant contained
00:50:32 ►
ENT or whether it didn’t contain ENT and at what time and whether the human had
00:50:37 ►
intentions but how can you prove that it was the plant that had these intentions?
00:50:41 ►
You can use plant medicines and ask the plant to stop you.
00:50:44 ►
Ask the plants. So it’s an idea that sort of, you know, in some ways it’s beyond belief. It’s not, but this is what, they believe it to the degree that they want to actually, you know, do some testing to see if it’s true. I have to say just on the mechanics of smoke DMT, I was someone who had a very difficult time smoking DMT
00:51:05 ►
because I felt, but for me, the smoke was so harsh in my lungs that I would get a nice
00:51:12 ►
big hit and I’d immediately cough it out. And so I, you know, I started to feel like
00:51:16 ►
a jackass wasting the DMT. After the first hit, I did not want to smoke another one because
00:51:22 ►
my lungs hurt so bad and so what I
00:51:26 ►
recently have come across is an idea for the production of a pipe and the pipe is called the
00:51:33 ►
machine is just the slang term for it and the way that it’s made is you take like a little tiny
00:51:39 ►
Hennessy cognac bottle which you can buy at any hard liquor store the type of thing that
00:51:45 ►
you would get on an airplane and the reason that you use the Hennessy bottle is because
00:51:49 ►
the way that the bottle is constructed it has like a divot in the bottom of it
00:51:53 ►
with this sort of preformed weak spot and you can hit that with a nail or a
00:51:57 ►
pair of scissors or something to break it out you could drink the Hennessy first
00:52:00 ►
unless you’re drinking glass jars but so so then you’ve got this empty Hennessy first, unless you’re drinking glass jars. So then you’ve got this empty Hennessy bottle,
00:52:09 ►
and you go to the store and they sell in the grocery store, or sometimes like places like Rite Aid,
00:52:14 ►
will sell these steel wool scrubber pads. It’s not steel wool and don’t use steel wool because
00:52:21 ►
steel wool can ignite. If you get a really coarse type of steel wool, that will work,
00:52:27 ►
but the fine steel wool ignites.
00:52:29 ►
It’s flammable, so you don’t want to use that.
00:52:31 ►
But get the really coarse rubber-pad steel wool,
00:52:36 ►
soak it in alcohol or something if you’re concerned about it
00:52:38 ►
containing any kind of treatment with oils
00:52:40 ►
or burn it a little bit first to try to burn that stuff up.
00:52:44 ►
But then you just put a little plug of the steel wool in the
00:52:48 ►
neck of the bottle and then so let’s say that this is it so you plug up the neck
00:52:54 ►
with the steel wool and then how you hit off it is you draw from the hole like
00:53:00 ►
that and you heat the BMT until you put the DMT just on powder on top of the steel wool,
00:53:06 ►
and you heat it until it melts but doesn’t vaporize into the steel wool.
00:53:10 ►
Now, what this does is when you then heat it from below and you take the hit,
00:53:15 ►
what it does is because of the properties of the steel wool,
00:53:17 ►
the DMT sort of chases all up the steel wool, doesn’t have anywhere to run to,
00:53:22 ►
it runs all over the place, and it vaporizes very quickly.
00:53:26 ►
So you get a really big hit of DMT from this pipe. Big enough to get off good on one hit.
00:53:33 ►
And I don’t know why, but for some reason using this pipe the DMT is not as harsh as it is if you
00:53:38 ►
smoke it like in a regular crack pipe or something. Vaporizes the smoke maybe? Yeah. Yeah, maybe because when you’re actually burning the DMT it produces ion oxides and things.
00:53:50 ►
So anyway, now I have a good way to smoke DMT so I’m excited about doing more of that.
00:53:58 ►
For me DMT is just, it’s not particularly, I don’t know if it’s particularly insightful
00:54:03 ►
for me.
00:54:04 ►
It’s just entirely weird. It’s not particularly, I don’t know if it’s particularly insightful for me.
00:54:05 ►
It’s just entirely weird. It’s just different. It’s very different and I can’t explain.
00:54:13 ►
It doesn’t seem like it’s coming from my imagination.
00:54:16 ►
Like some things that I take I think, oh, I could have just seen that or thought it or whatever.
00:54:20 ►
But DMT is so other that, you know.
00:54:23 ►
So the question is, if you consume monomine oxidizing inhibitor
00:54:26 ►
prior to smoking DMT does it make the DMT experience longer and anecdotal
00:54:32 ►
evidence is yes absolutely and you can even smoke small quantities of
00:54:38 ►
harmaline or even yeah even just straight syrian rue prior to smoking DMT
00:54:44 ►
you’ll extend it it slows it down it changes the character of it so what you Or even, yeah, even just straight serum room prior to smoking the T.
00:54:45 ►
It will extend it.
00:54:46 ►
It slows it down.
00:54:47 ►
It changes the character of it.
00:54:48 ►
So what you were saying about it moving so fast,
00:54:50 ►
that’s one way to kind of slow things down a little bit.
00:54:53 ►
Yeah, there’s concerns about monoamine oxidizing inhibitors
00:54:56 ►
and consuming those with certain pharmaceuticals
00:55:00 ►
that might give you either very high blood pressure or very low blood pressure.
00:55:04 ►
And so everybody before you take any sort of
00:55:07 ►
mononucleic inhibitor should be aware of what you shouldn’t take with that but DMT is something that is okay to take.
00:55:14 ►
I have a, after that machine for smoking DMT was sort of first brought into a friend of mine’s awareness, he smoked a dose of acacia resin with it
00:55:26 ►
and entered a place,
00:55:29 ►
he said he’d never been,
00:55:29 ►
and he’s got a lot of experience with ENT,
00:55:32 ►
and he said he’d never been this far in,
00:55:34 ►
and in this place,
00:55:36 ►
what he became aware of was that
00:55:38 ►
we’re sort of all one being
00:55:42 ►
that has been divided and split up
00:55:44 ►
into all these little beings
00:55:45 ►
but that what we are now
00:55:48 ►
working for is
00:55:49 ►
we’re working towards becoming one being again
00:55:52 ►
or the ability to
00:55:53 ►
have the knowledge that we’re one being
00:55:55 ►
at all times rather than just
00:55:57 ►
through these sort of brief glimpses
00:55:59 ►
and he came back
00:56:01 ►
really really convinced
00:56:02 ►
he’s sort of on a mission now.
00:56:05 ►
Look, we’re all one being.
00:56:07 ►
Because of the intense experience that he had.
00:56:10 ►
After he smoked this big hit, you know, he went into this place and was having a great time.
00:56:17 ►
Well, in this world, his body started convulsing, landed on the ground,
00:56:24 ►
started doing the flippy-floppy fish
00:56:25 ►
kind of epileptic seizure thing.
00:56:27 ►
His friends became very concerned
00:56:29 ►
and were holding him down
00:56:30 ►
so that he wouldn’t hurt himself.
00:56:33 ►
And, you know, so when he came back to,
00:56:35 ►
all his friends were there
00:56:36 ►
and with this very loving,
00:56:37 ►
like, oh, my friends are giving me a big hug.
00:56:39 ►
You know, that’s how he interpreted it.
00:56:41 ►
Later he felt like, gosh,
00:56:42 ►
if I had interpreted it like
00:56:43 ►
they’re all physically manhandling me
00:56:45 ►
to make sure that I don’t…
00:56:47 ►
But he turned purple, and everybody was very concerned.
00:56:50 ►
So that’s one thing.
00:56:51 ►
You really can get, using this machine,
00:56:53 ►
you really can get just a huge dose.
00:56:56 ►
Apparently it’s not harmful.
00:56:58 ►
I mean, everybody’s probably seen the films
00:57:00 ►
of the traditional peoples who blow this stuff up their nose
00:57:03 ►
and then fall on the ground and thrash it out
00:57:04 ►
and then get up and do it again.
00:57:08 ►
But if you’re going to be doing it, it’s probably good to have some friends around
00:57:12 ►
to make sure that you don’t have any problems.
00:57:16 ►
If you have not taken nitrous while you were on a strong psychedelic,
00:57:20 ►
you are missing out.
00:57:23 ►
And I mean that really seriously. I’ve met people, I couldn’t believe
00:57:27 ►
I’m like, you’ve never taken nitrous on top of a juicy bean? I mean, you know, there’s
00:57:32 ►
no point in doing nitrous without being on a strong psychedelic as far as I’m concerned.
00:57:37 ►
Well, I mean, basically it’s like slamming everything into hyperdrive. You just get so much more. It goes to 11.
00:57:45 ►
If you were on a desert island, you could only take one thing with you.
00:57:51 ►
It became out of this. I mean, to me, and I’m not like a daily smoker. I don’t smoke a lot.
00:57:57 ►
But it’s so useful. It’s so useful for introspection and for psychological
00:58:03 ►
evaluation and for meditation. And like
00:58:06 ►
you said, going into it with intention.
00:58:08 ►
And people kind of use
00:58:10 ►
a lot of people, and I’m not placing
00:58:11 ►
any judgment on this, but a lot of people use cannabis
00:58:13 ►
in the same way that a lot of people use alcohol,
00:58:15 ►
which is just, oh, I feel good and it’s fun
00:58:17 ►
and whatever. But I think
00:58:20 ►
that cannabis is a hugely important tool
00:58:22 ►
that is downplayed
00:58:24 ►
by many people.
00:58:31 ►
Also, I don’t buy into the, the, the mozotex will take the mushroom during the nighttime.
00:58:36 ►
There’s this, there’s this idea that if you take them during the day that it’ll cause you to go insane.
00:58:41 ►
And a lot of people who will doahuasca rituals over the night, and
00:58:45 ►
I don’t buy into that myself.
00:58:48 ►
I think it’s very good to take these things during
00:58:49 ►
the day, and in fact, I think that
00:58:51 ►
you are more likely to have
00:58:54 ►
sort of very dark,
00:58:55 ►
disturbing, like bodily
00:58:58 ►
fluids and maggots and going through
00:59:00 ►
the earth and just all this very disturbing
00:59:02 ►
imagery, which is, you know, it’s good to
00:59:03 ►
go through that once in a while, but I don’t’ll do that every time and I think you’re more likely to
00:59:07 ►
have that at night than you are in the daytime I think you’re more likely to have sort of very
00:59:11 ►
loving positive energetic experience that is not sort of mired down in kind of you know
00:59:17 ►
banks of blood and all that very wormy stuff I just when you were describing that it actually
00:59:24 ►
just reminded me
00:59:25 ►
that I have
00:59:25 ►
had the great
00:59:26 ►
experience
00:59:26 ►
during the day
00:59:27 ►
and I used to
00:59:28 ►
get this when I
00:59:29 ►
was a kid
00:59:29 ►
on acid
00:59:29 ►
and it always
00:59:30 ►
was just
00:59:32 ►
right before
00:59:33 ►
I lost it
00:59:34 ►
it would all
00:59:36 ►
come together
00:59:36 ►
and snap into
00:59:37 ►
place onto this
00:59:38 ►
grid and then
00:59:38 ►
at that point
00:59:39 ►
I would
00:59:40 ►
you know
00:59:40 ►
I mean I was
00:59:41 ►
it was
00:59:42 ►
I don’t know
00:59:43 ►
if they say a bad
00:59:43 ►
trip but it was
00:59:44 ►
the thing like
00:59:44 ►
it was very meaningful
00:59:46 ►
that this code was moved there.
00:59:48 ►
Everything aligned, everything was synchronous, and yeah, so yeah, it was not a good thing
00:59:54 ►
necessarily.
00:59:55 ►
When it locked into place, then it was this sort of delusional…
00:59:59 ►
It was kind of like a latticework.
01:00:01 ►
It’s really easy to get into bad spaces when you’re on drugs.
01:00:04 ►
It’s much easier to get into bad spaces when you’re on drugs. It’s much easier to get into bad spaces.
01:00:08 ►
And, yeah, exactly what you said.
01:00:11 ►
It’s like going down the wrong…
01:00:12 ►
And it’s a trap in a way because one wrong thought leads to another wrong thought leads to another.
01:00:17 ►
So we have to be very careful about that, too.
01:00:21 ►
On the other hand, some people just don’t want to be here.
01:00:26 ►
And that’s their decision, too. too, then that needs to be respected. But it’s a little harder to respect it when
01:00:32 ►
it was, I mean, I don’t know if it is or not, but for me it is a little harder to respect
01:00:37 ►
it when it seems like it was a drug-induced action that it seems like, well, maybe if
01:00:43 ►
they had been considering that from a non-drug-induced point of view,
01:00:46 ►
they wouldn’t have taken that action.
01:00:48 ►
But on the other hand, I think that if you have a really important decision to make in life,
01:00:52 ►
like if something very, very important is weighing on you,
01:00:54 ►
one thing that I found that works very well is to take MDMA
01:00:57 ►
and consider it from a straight perspective,
01:01:00 ►
and then take MDMA and consider it from that perspective,
01:01:03 ►
and to try to equally value both perspectives. Don’t just go off on whatever MDMA and consider it from that perspective and to try to equally
01:01:05 ►
value both perspectives. Don’t just go off on whatever MDMA told you, but to try to view
01:01:10 ►
it from those two perspectives. That’s a hugely helpful tool for me that I don’t use that
01:01:15 ►
much, but if I have something very serious that I need to…
01:01:18 ►
Okay, on that note, I think we’re going to wrap it up. I do and maybe Lorenzo will say some more about this but there’s going to be talks here every day at noon and at two and so is it two now have I just been no we’re
01:01:35 ►
good okay so come back and somebody else who’s going to be talking and there’s a scheduled poster
01:01:45 ►
and again there’s my flyers here and then also I’m going to give us just a short commercial plug
01:01:49 ►
for this book that Lorenzo mentioned, which is now in its fourth edition,
01:01:54 ►
and it’s the Psychedelic Resource List. It’s a book that I’ve written,
01:01:57 ►
and it just pretty much is exactly what it says.
01:02:00 ►
If there’s something related to psychedelics you’re interested in,
01:02:02 ►
this will give you a clue as to where to find it, including things like research chemicals, you know, all good stuff.
01:02:11 ►
We’re going to thank John for our initial Blanque Norte lecture.
01:02:17 ►
I thank all of you for being here.
01:02:19 ►
It’s going to be very memorable.
01:02:20 ►
A little messy, but it’s going to make it memorable.
01:02:24 ►
So there
01:02:25 ►
you have
01:02:25 ►
it.
01:02:26 ►
The historic
01:02:27 ►
first Palenque
01:02:28 ►
Norte lecture
01:02:29 ►
at Burning
01:02:29 ►
Man.
01:02:30 ►
And I do
01:02:31 ►
hope you
01:02:31 ►
paid some
01:02:31 ►
attention to
01:02:32 ►
John’s
01:02:33 ►
comments about
01:02:33 ►
Zoe 7.
01:02:35 ►
And the
01:02:35 ►
years that
01:02:37 ►
have passed
01:02:37 ►
since John
01:02:37 ►
gave this
01:02:38 ►
talk, Zoe,
01:02:39 ►
who I
01:02:39 ►
consider to
01:02:40 ►
be a good
01:02:41 ►
friend, by
01:02:41 ►
the way,
01:02:42 ►
has really
01:02:43 ►
moved the
01:02:43 ►
bar up quite
01:02:44 ►
a bit higher
01:02:44 ►
when it
01:02:44 ►
comes to consciousness exploration. Right now he’s spending most of friend, by the way, has really moved the bar up quite a bit higher when it comes to consciousness exploration.
01:02:47 ►
Right now, he’s spending most of his time in the Amazon,
01:02:49 ►
and it’s obviously agreed with him.
01:02:52 ►
We’re lucky enough to corner him the next time he comes California way.
01:02:56 ►
I hope to have him on as a guest here in the Psychedelic Salon.
01:03:01 ►
So, thank you to John for giving Zoe a plug there.
01:03:05 ►
Speaking of plugs, I’d like to also give one to my friends Jacques Wells and Cordell at Chateau Hayouk.
01:03:11 ►
They’ve been kind enough to let us use some of their fine music for our theme song here in the Psychedelic Salon.
01:03:17 ►
I guess that’s about it for today.
01:03:19 ►
I do hope you’ll join us for the next edition of the Psychedelic Salon
01:03:23 ►
when we’ll be presenting Alex Gray and his wife Allison and daughter Zena
01:03:28 ►
in a talk they gave at the Blanque Norte lectures at the 2003 Burning Man.
01:03:34 ►
It was titled, Art, Love, Family, and Psychedelics.
01:03:38 ►
I’m sure you’re not going to want to miss this one.
01:03:42 ►
For now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.
01:03:46 ►
Be well, my friends.