Program Notes
Guest speaker: Ann Shulgin
This is a talk given byAnn Shulgin at the Mind States Conference in 2002. It provides a rare look into the world of psychedelic therapy during the years immediately preceding the scheduling of MDMA as a Category I substance. This schedule level means that the U.S. Government considers MDMA to have no medical value. After you listen to what Ann Shulgin has to report, you will see how wrong the government is about the medical value of MDMA.
SOUND BITES: A newborn baby has no shadow… . The shadow represents the parts of us that, for whatever reason, we have come to think of as parts of ourselves that are not acceptable, not lovable, and not OK… . Whenever you find yourself reacting negatively to a person or group of people, consider the possibility that you may be reacting to your own shadow.” –Ann Shulgin
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Three-dimensional, transforming, musical, linguistic objects.
00:00:10 ►
Delta machines.
00:00:17 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
I’m Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:24 ►
When I was putting today’s program together, I thought,
00:00:28 ►
well, this should be pretty simple since everybody already knows all about Ann and Sasha Shulgin.
00:00:34 ►
And I realized that this may not be the case since some of you haven’t been able to make it to one of the many conferences where they’ve spoken.
00:00:43 ►
But when I started pulling together some background information on the two of them,
00:00:49 ►
I realized it was going to take quite a few hours of me talking
00:00:53 ►
just to give you a little idea of how much Ann and Sasha have done for the psychedelic community
00:00:59 ►
and as a result, of course, for our whole species.
00:01:03 ►
In the next podcast, we’ll be presenting Sasha Shogun,
00:01:08 ►
discussing the relative merits of natural versus synthetic psychedelic medicines.
00:01:13 ►
But before we get to a discussion of the relative merits of some of these intriguing compounds,
00:01:19 ►
I think it’s more important that we first learn a little more about how to use them
00:01:24 ►
in a more intelligent manner than some people are doing at the present time.
00:01:30 ►
As many of you know, until the Empire made MDMA and other substances illegal to possess,
00:01:38 ►
Anne was one of the leaders in developing professional techniques for using psychedelic medicines,
00:01:43 ►
particularly in therapeutic sessions.
00:01:46 ►
And had the ruling class not interfered with her work,
00:01:49 ►
we would most likely be seeing clinics all over the country
00:01:52 ►
that base their treatment on methods that Anne and her fellow pioneers developed.
00:01:58 ►
But alas, that is not the case, is it?
00:02:01 ►
So, the next best thing, I think, is to pass a little of her valuable insights on to all of you to use as you see fit.
00:02:11 ►
I know over the last few years, I’ve attended a number of large all-night gatherings
00:02:16 ►
where people come up to me and they say,
00:02:19 ►
Man, what an incredible vibe this is.
00:02:21 ►
You know, I just wish that there’s some way to take this back to my job on Monday.
00:02:27 ►
Well, guess what?
00:02:28 ►
There is a way to hold on to that feeling, but it takes a lot of work.
00:02:33 ►
It would be nice if we could just go to a gathering, take a little pill, dance all night,
00:02:37 ►
and stay on that high for the rest of our lives.
00:02:40 ►
And I think it is possible to stay on a high like that.
00:02:44 ►
Just look at the Dalai Lama.
00:02:45 ►
He seems pretty blissed out to me all the time.
00:02:49 ►
But I’m sure it wasn’t very easy for him to attain that state,
00:02:53 ►
and most of us are never going to make it that far,
00:02:55 ►
but at least we can move in that direction
00:02:58 ►
if we learn to use these psychedelic medicines properly.
00:03:03 ►
And a good place to start learning about how to do exactly that is to listen to what Ann
00:03:08 ►
Shulgin had to say about psychedelic therapy in the shadow.
00:03:13 ►
This was a talk that she gave at the Mind States Conference in Jamaica that was held
00:03:18 ►
early in October of 2002.
00:03:20 ►
00:03:30 ►
We’re going now from the outside world to the inside world.
00:03:34 ►
And this is called psychedelics in the shadow.
00:03:38 ►
It’s actually more psychedelic therapy and the shadow.
00:03:50 ►
A long, long time ago in a place far, far away, I worked for about three years as a lay therapist.
00:03:58 ►
For two of those three years, I became the partner of a very skilled hypnotherapist.
00:04:08 ►
I joined her about twice a week when we would guide one or another of her patients through a session with mostly MDMA.
00:04:27 ►
With certain patients, after some time and much hard work, we would give them a session with 2C-B or perhaps LSD or mescaline, depending upon what the patient needed and wanted.
00:04:33 ►
All this took place before MDMA or 2C-B were scheduled.
00:04:37 ►
LSD and mescaline, however, were already illegal,
00:04:43 ►
so this was not what you would call out-in-the-open therapy. This was at a time when a great many of the more innovative therapists
00:04:50 ►
were trying MDMA out with their patients, with certain of their patients,
00:04:57 ►
and we were urging all of them to publish as soon as possible.
00:05:04 ►
all of them to publish as soon as possible.
00:05:08 ►
And, of course, they wanted to take their time because this was not generally approved medical practice,
00:05:13 ►
with the result that when all of a sudden the government declared
00:05:17 ►
that MDMA was going to be scheduled, nobody had put anything on paper.
00:05:23 ►
scheduled, nobody had put anything on paper.
00:05:31 ►
And so it was very easy for the government to declare this a Schedule I drug because there was higher people’s potential and obviously no medical utility.
00:05:39 ►
Nobody had published on any medical utility.
00:05:42 ►
So that was a sad thing to have happen.
00:05:47 ►
In case you’re wondering, the frequency of MDMA use in these sessions varied considerably.
00:05:55 ►
For some patients, one session seemed to be all they needed.
00:06:00 ►
This is, I would say, not frequent, but more often than you would think.
00:06:08 ►
The patient would be tremendously satisfied with one experience
00:06:12 ►
and simply didn’t particularly need to have another one.
00:06:18 ►
A single experience gave them all they wished to have or reach or accomplish.
00:06:24 ►
But for others, one session a month for several months
00:06:27 ►
or once every six weeks would allow them to complete their insight work.
00:06:34 ►
The single session with a true psychedelic,
00:06:37 ►
remember that MDMA is not a real psychedelic drug.
00:06:41 ►
One exposure to 2C-B or another of the classic psychedelics was usually
00:06:47 ►
given toward the end of the therapy. For one patient, it might break open images and emotions
00:06:54 ►
held deep in the unconscious, which had to be brought up to consciousness for there to
00:07:00 ►
be resolution. For another person, this single session would be a kind of graduation
00:07:05 ►
ceremony, a celebration after long and difficult work. Now, those three years were a time of
00:07:14 ►
intense learning for me. Every patient or client was a completely new universe, and
00:07:22 ►
I had to learn almost as much about myself and my own psychological
00:07:26 ►
barriers as I did about those of the patient. The learning about myself had to happen very
00:07:33 ►
fast, on the spot, so to speak, because what was at stake was my ability to do my job,
00:07:40 ►
and often the patient’s trust in me as a guide.
00:07:49 ►
I’ll give just one example for the moment, which is certainly not myself,
00:07:52 ►
but I very well could be another therapist.
00:07:57 ►
Let’s say the therapist has been brought up as a church-going Catholic,
00:07:59 ►
or even a Methodist for that matter,
00:08:03 ►
and the patient begins talking about memories of a previous life.
00:08:09 ►
The therapist’s mind is going to stumble over what the patient is saying, and suddenly there are going to be a lot of conflicting thoughts
00:08:12 ►
getting in the way of her ability to hear and tune into the patient’s story.
00:08:18 ►
She will have to spend a bit of time reminding herself that her own belief system
00:08:22 ►
has no place in the therapy situation
00:08:25 ►
and that she must remain completely unjudgmental and accepting of the patient’s truth.
00:08:33 ►
Not only that, she has to be sure that her feelings toward the patient
00:08:37 ►
are not clouded by deep-seated negative judgments
00:08:41 ►
which are inherited from a childhood that might have been steeped in religious teachings
00:08:47 ►
which emphasize the error of such concepts as reincarnation.
00:08:53 ►
Now the only way I know of to avoid this kind of problem is constant practice of an attitude
00:08:58 ►
that might be described as no matter what I hear from my patient,
00:09:06 ►
describe as no matter what I hear from my patient, I will open myself to his world and his beliefs, as well as his feelings and emotions, and I’ll put aside any inclination to decide
00:09:15 ►
the wrongness or rightness of his views until much later when we’ll work together to evaluate what works in his life and what doesn’t work.
00:09:27 ►
I’m talking here about therapy,
00:09:30 ►
but a lot of you may find yourself or may already have found yourself in a situation where,
00:09:37 ►
because you may have lived long enough and you have some sort of ability
00:09:41 ►
and interest in this sort of thing people start coming
00:09:45 ►
to you for sessions and so you you too can find yourself being a lay therapist
00:09:53 ►
without realizing that that’s what was going to happen but I’m presenting it as
00:10:00 ►
more of a sort of established therapeutic practice. By the end of my third year doing
00:10:08 ►
this kind of therapy, I come to realize that the most important part of the process was
00:10:14 ►
working with the shadow. I think you’ve all heard of what Carl Jung calls the shadow.
00:10:24 ►
I think you’ve all heard of what Carl Jung calls the shadow.
00:10:29 ►
The term most often used in the society at large is the dark side.
00:10:35 ►
I think it’s safe to say that this shadow aspect of the human psyche,
00:10:41 ►
while it remains unconscious, can be blamed for all wars,
00:10:48 ►
from tribal conflicts to battles between great nations. It causes racial prejudice.
00:10:56 ►
It underlies jealousy and resentment. You’re seeing the human shadow in every vampire and werewolf movie, and its face is the face of a very popular figure called the devil or Satan.
00:11:06 ►
In our present time, we have Darth Vader.
00:11:10 ►
However, there’s a difference between Darth Vader and the earlier demonic figures
00:11:14 ►
in that Darth Vader was created by a filmmaker who understood what he represented.
00:11:22 ►
After all, George Lucas was a student of Joseph Campbell.
00:11:27 ►
However, when work on the shadow is underway, when it begins to drift toward conscious awareness,
00:11:34 ►
it carries with it gifts for its owner. To give you a brief clue to what I mean, think
00:11:42 ►
about the great works of art art in painting and music for instance
00:11:46 ►
and recognize
00:11:48 ►
that pure light
00:11:50 ►
and beauty
00:11:51 ►
sweetness and gentleness
00:11:53 ►
by themselves
00:11:55 ►
will give pleasure only for a short time
00:11:58 ►
for what we
00:12:00 ►
experience as
00:12:01 ►
greatness and fullness
00:12:03 ►
and authenticity,
00:12:06 ►
there needs to be an edge, a touch of darkness,
00:12:12 ►
a bit of sweetness, even a shade of sadness or pain contained in the work.
00:12:19 ►
If you want an illustration, I hope I don’t really offend too many people saying this,
00:12:24 ►
but if you want an illustration of too hope I don’t really offend too many people saying this, but if you want an illustration
00:12:25 ►
of too much sweetness and light
00:12:27 ►
becoming
00:12:29 ►
cloying, to say the least,
00:12:32 ►
you may have seen
00:12:33 ►
the paintings of a very famous
00:12:35 ►
and very wealthy artist called Thomas
00:12:37 ►
Kincaid.
00:12:41 ►
That sort of
00:12:42 ►
illustrates
00:12:44 ►
what I mean.
00:12:45 ►
The shadow, made conscious, becomes an ally And that sort of illustrates what I mean.
00:12:50 ►
The shadow made conscious becomes an ally for us.
00:12:58 ►
A fearless, brash, not quite housebroken ally and friend.
00:13:02 ►
I want to go back to the beginning.
00:13:05 ►
A newborn baby has no shadow.
00:13:08 ►
He has a survivor function.
00:13:15 ►
All those instincts that are hardwired into him to maximize his chances at survival.
00:13:17 ►
But he has no shadow.
00:13:23 ►
At the risk of oversimplifying a somewhat complex matter, I think the best way to understand how the shadow
00:13:25 ►
is created is to remember that it is the part of us that we have learned, we have been taught
00:13:33 ►
to reject. We learn from our parents, our teachers, our rabbis and priests, and our neighbors, what parts of ourselves were not lovable, not acceptable, not okay.
00:13:49 ►
Certain actions were punished or at least disapproved of,
00:13:52 ►
so we came to feel that whatever it was inside us that made us want to do those forbidden things
00:13:59 ►
must be, quote, bad or quote unquote wrong
00:14:05 ►
every society
00:14:08 ►
and every community has to socialize
00:14:10 ►
its young
00:14:11 ►
in different countries there are different
00:14:14 ►
rules to be obeyed
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in some societies boys and girls are treated
00:14:18 ►
very differently
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just think
00:14:22 ►
of Muslim societies
00:14:24 ►
for instance
00:14:25 ►
but in all cases there are certain actions and words that are not acceptable
00:14:29 ►
and the children are gradually molded into what their particular communities
00:14:35 ►
regard as good citizens
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in some places and at certain times in history
00:14:41 ►
the desires and the urges and inclinations which led children
00:14:46 ►
and even some adults to act in ways their societies considered inappropriate and wrong
00:14:53 ►
were blamed not on simple human nature, but on demonic forces. The devil, in other words,
00:15:00 ►
made them do it. In fact, in some societies like those of the Puritans,
00:15:05 ►
what we called human nature was equated with evil,
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with what is still referred to in certain religions as original sin.
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In such communities, both kinds of nature,
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the natural world around us and human nature,
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were regarded with suspicion and distrust.
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This attitude, sad to say, is still alive and well in the world.
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If you’re brought up in such a community,
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the general attitude toward the natural world is one of taming and controlling it,
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not letting the natural forces in the world have their way.
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And the attitude toward human nature is pretty much the same.
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In a very restrictive society, it’s inevitable that most of the citizens will develop very
00:15:51 ►
big, ugly shadow monsters because so many of their natural instincts have been labeled
00:15:57 ►
wicked and bad.
00:16:00 ►
In such places, the most artistic and creative people will run into the most trouble,
00:16:06 ►
because creativity springs from forces in the unconscious
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that don’t easily allow themselves to be controlled and shackled.
00:16:16 ►
In order to be loved and accepted, to be smiled at by our parents,
00:16:21 ►
we learned gradually to control certain urges and to speak and
00:16:25 ►
act in the right ways. So what happened to those bad desires and unacceptable urges?
00:16:33 ►
They got stuffed down into the basement of ourselves, pushed into a dark corner, and
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the door to that secret room was locked with a heavy iron key.
00:16:49 ►
If you hear echoes of some fairy tales, you’re absolutely right. One of the reasons that many of the classic fairy tales have lasted hundreds of years
00:16:54 ►
is that they contain spiritual truths, which were disguised, I think, as tales for children.
00:17:02 ►
And these continue to resonate within the child and the adult.
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Beauty and the Beast, for instance, is a tale of the encounter of a soul called Beauty with its shadow.
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There’s the Beast.
00:17:16 ►
And the lesson couldn’t be more clear.
00:17:18 ►
Not until you can embrace and love and accept your shadow as a part of who you are,
00:17:25 ►
not until then can the rejected, feared, horrendous monster transform into a prince
00:17:32 ►
and join you in making a whole human being,
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which is, of course, the path that goes, and they lived happily ever after.
00:17:42 ►
So, what’s wrong with letting the difficult and unacceptable parts of yourself
00:17:47 ►
get banished to the cellar, where they can be kept chained in the dark and eventually
00:17:53 ►
forgotten? Well, the first problem you’re faced with is a philosophical one, which I’m
00:17:59 ►
not going to pursue at the moment, namely, who is defining what is acceptable and what is not? Whose
00:18:07 ►
standards are to be followed? Whose philosophy and view of the universe and man’s place in
00:18:13 ►
it is to be regarded as the one and only truth, which all citizens will accept, believe, and
00:18:21 ►
follow? As I said, we’re not going to step into that morass right now
00:18:26 ►
but going back to the original question
00:18:28 ►
what’s wrong with suppressing and then
00:18:30 ►
forgetting the more bothersome parts of yourself
00:18:32 ►
wouldn’t it make for a much more
00:18:34 ►
peaceful life and a happy society
00:18:36 ►
well
00:18:38 ►
it doesn’t work out that way
00:18:40 ►
the problem is
00:18:42 ►
those suppressed parts of you
00:18:44 ►
include not only destructive impulses,
00:18:47 ►
they also include creative ones. And above all, the shadow beast does not remain quiet
00:18:54 ►
and docile. The longer it remains in the dark and the deeper it’s hidden in the cellar of
00:19:02 ►
the unconscious, the more powerful it becomes. In fact, the
00:19:07 ►
name of the shadows game is power. I’ll give the most obvious and well-known example. The
00:19:16 ►
gentle, sweet-natured man who changes when he drinks alcohol. Suddenly everybody’s best friend becomes a sarcastic mean-spirited even a vicious
00:19:27 ►
enemy or destroyer and by the way this applies just as often to women of course
00:19:34 ►
it’s just easier for me to stick to one gender i usually refer to therapists as female and
00:19:40 ►
patients as male but that’s simply a matter of convenience. And I assume you realize that.
00:19:46 ►
Alcohol is in our society the most commonly used way
00:19:50 ►
by which the shadow gets released from its chains for a while.
00:19:54 ►
But it’s certainly not the only way.
00:19:57 ►
Some people under extreme stress or in situations involving intense emotions
00:20:02 ►
might burst out with words that shock,
00:20:06 ►
with their hate and malice.
00:20:09 ►
Others with even less control over themselves
00:20:12 ►
will actually become physically abusive and destructive.
00:20:16 ►
Certain drugs will allow the same kind of thing to happen
00:20:20 ►
for some people in some situations.
00:20:23 ►
Neither the alcohol nor the drugs are responsible.
00:20:28 ►
What is responsible is the unconsciousness of the shadow.
00:20:33 ►
Just to make things more complicated,
00:20:36 ►
let me remind you that while I’m talking about the most common kind of shadow,
00:20:41 ►
common to our society anyway,
00:20:43 ►
common kind of shadow, common to our society anyway,
00:20:48 ►
a shadow composed of repressed and forbidden anger,
00:20:55 ►
resentment, destructive impulses, malice and jealousy, among other nice things.
00:20:59 ►
There are multitudes of shadow monsters.
00:21:04 ►
For instance, let’s take a family in which the father is a Korean military man.
00:21:10 ►
The mother is a daughter of a military family, and most friends are in the military.
00:21:14 ►
Very often there’s a family tradition of military service,
00:21:20 ►
and the male children are expected to follow in their father’s and grandfather’s footsteps.
00:21:27 ►
Let’s take the boy child, because the girls in this family will be treated differently.
00:21:36 ►
As he grows up, the scorned aspects will be soft ones. They will often be referred to as woman’s feelings or inclinations. And the word woman will be said with a shade of contempt.
00:21:43 ►
and the word woman will be said with a shade of contempt.
00:21:48 ►
Inclinations toward gentleness and empathy,
00:21:53 ►
trying to understand other people, for instance, will be squashed.
00:22:00 ►
Professions such as social work, psychology and psychiatry will be talked of with sarcasm.
00:22:03 ►
People who follow such professions will be dismissed or laughed at.
00:22:09 ►
I’m sure you’ve met some of those particular people.
00:22:15 ►
The boy’s shadow in this case will be composed of all those feelings and ideas
00:22:19 ►
that tend toward compassion, sympathy, and the feminine.
00:22:26 ►
Aggressive acts, as long as they aren’t directed at authority figures,
00:22:30 ►
will be tolerated or shrugged at.
00:22:33 ►
Any signs of artistic ability will be ignored or even discouraged.
00:22:40 ►
Since acceptance and affection depend on the boy’s acting like a little warrior, his shadow will be made of artistic impulses, whimsicality, offbeat humor, empathetic feelings, and all desires to nurture small wild animals instead of shooting them.
00:23:01 ►
I exaggerate, but not much.
00:23:04 ►
One of my best friends was the son of two
00:23:07 ►
physicians. His siblings were doctors, and he was expected to go to medical school, too,
00:23:13 ►
which he did. He had a gift for intricate drawing, and he made absolutely delightful
00:23:19 ►
pictures, which I first saw in the margins of an autopsy report which he’d put on my desk.
00:23:29 ►
When I made a fuss over the exquisite artwork, he was really taken aback.
00:23:36 ►
He explained that nobody in his family ever commented or even noticed his drawings,
00:23:39 ►
so he’d come to think of them as doodles of no importance.
00:23:46 ►
And when I expressed some outrage at his family treating his gift this way,
00:23:48 ►
he said that, well, he could understand their attitude because their entire world was medicine and only medicine.
00:23:53 ►
And art simply didn’t matter to them.
00:23:56 ►
So, all right, back to the point, which is that the shadow is not in itself evil or bad.
00:24:02 ►
It is only whatever is repressed,
00:24:01 ►
in itself evil or bad.
00:24:04 ►
It is only whatever is repressed,
00:24:08 ►
whatever has been forbidden and treated with contempt by the authority figures surrounding a child.
00:24:12 ►
It is those aspects of the person which he has come to think of
00:24:15 ►
as unacceptable, awful, terrible, unlovable, and even dangerous.
00:24:25 ►
And all of those so-called bad aspects of himself
00:24:29 ►
have become unconscious,
00:24:32 ►
gradually gathering power in the dark.
00:24:36 ►
Now, power to do what?
00:24:38 ►
If the shadow aspects of a person remain unconscious,
00:24:42 ►
they get projected.
00:24:44 ►
One of the best illustrations
00:24:45 ►
of how this works is something like this.
00:24:48 ►
Let’s say you go to a party
00:24:50 ►
and you see a person you haven’t
00:24:52 ►
met before. Now,
00:24:54 ►
you in this case are
00:24:55 ►
a woman.
00:24:57 ►
You dress well. You’re always
00:24:59 ►
carefully groomed.
00:25:01 ►
Your fingernails are clean and so is your hair.
00:25:07 ►
This stranger is also a woman, but she appears to be just a little slobby. Her movements are loose and unguarded
00:25:14 ►
and her voice is just a fraction too high for your comfort. You find yourself watching
00:25:20 ►
her with increasing dislike. After a while, you realize that you’re feeling more than dislike
00:25:27 ►
it’s closer to hostility and you don’t seem to be able to look away or focus on anybody else
00:25:33 ►
you leave the party early disturbed by your own feelings of antipathy toward a complete stranger
00:25:40 ►
you think to yourself all she was doing was enjoying herself. Why
00:25:46 ►
do I feel such, you know, dislike? It doesn’t make sense. What you just experienced is a
00:25:53 ►
projection. The stranger has reminded your unconscious of certain aspects of your repressed
00:26:00 ►
self, your shadow. But since your shadow has been buried in the unconscious
00:26:07 ►
in the dark for years, you’re unaware of its existence or what it contains. Certain traits
00:26:15 ►
have projected themselves onto this other woman where you’ve been able to see them and
00:26:20 ►
react to them with revulsion. And any time you find yourself reacting with unusually
00:26:26 ►
strong negativity to a person or a certain group of people, you should suspect that you’re
00:26:32 ►
experiencing a projection of your shadow. This applies, of course, to racial prejudice.
00:26:38 ►
This is where it originates. Now, under the influence of a psychedelic drug projections are common
00:26:45 ►
we’ve all seen the faces of friends or lovers distorted
00:26:50 ►
sometimes pleasantly and sometimes not
00:26:53 ►
and the first inclination is to assume that what you’re seeing is some hidden aspect of the other person
00:27:00 ►
after a while most of us learn that what we’re seeing is a projection of a part of ourselves
00:27:05 ►
as long as the shadow remains unavailable to conscious awareness it can determine a lot of
00:27:14 ►
how we live our lives and respond to others around us it can erupt unexpectedly with malicious words, and do damage to a really valuable relationship.
00:27:27 ►
We are not in control of ourselves as much as we would like to be
00:27:31 ►
because this other inside us can take charge suddenly,
00:27:37 ►
leaving emotional or even physical wreckage behind it.
00:27:42 ►
Now, most of us don’t have to be afraid of a hidden axe murderer
00:27:46 ►
lurking in our psychic basement, though actually more of us are afraid of something equivalent
00:27:53 ►
to that than you’d expect, which is, I suspect, one of the reasons people are very frightened
00:27:59 ►
of psychedelic drugs, you know, people who haven’t taken them. But there are people who have grown up with parents so dysfunctional and hostile
00:28:08 ►
that by the time they reach young adulthood, their shadows are indeed murderers.
00:28:14 ►
Eruptions of these shadows will truly cause death and destruction around them.
00:28:20 ►
Our society is presently in the dark ages when it comes to understanding, much less knowing how to handle such traumatized and ruined people.
00:28:32 ►
And part of our shadow is the nations. We don’t really want to understand them.
00:28:38 ►
It’s not only individual human beings that have shadow identities, nations do too.
00:28:48 ►
Again, it’s easy to oversimplify such matters,
00:28:52 ►
but our own country can serve as an illustration of this.
00:29:01 ►
Our consciously accepted identity is one of generosity, kindness, tolerance,
00:29:06 ►
lawfulness, and respect for the individual’s citizens’ rights.
00:29:12 ►
Yet to give just one example, the instant a person is placed under arrest,
00:29:16 ►
he becomes a victim of the society’s projection of its own shadow.
00:29:28 ►
Our press, without which I think our country would be a huge nuclear-armed totalitarian menace on the world scene.
00:29:32 ►
This valuable press of ours gives voice to our national shadow by trying, convicting, and all but executing the arrested person
00:29:38 ►
before he ever sees the inside of a courtroom.
00:29:42 ►
All of us have seen it happen over and over again. Adopting the British
00:29:47 ►
system, which forbids discussion in the press of any criminal matter before the accused
00:29:53 ►
is tried in court, which I think is just wonderful, simply cannot be suggested for this country.
00:30:00 ►
We need our bad guys too much as scapegoats for our hidden desires
00:30:06 ►
and unconscious shadow cells
00:30:08 ►
how the British ever got that through
00:30:10 ►
I don’t know but
00:30:11 ►
it would be a great thing for our country
00:30:15 ►
if the priests could be persuaded
00:30:17 ►
just to leave alone
00:30:19 ►
anybody who was
00:30:20 ►
arrested for anything
00:30:22 ►
until he’d been tried
00:30:23 ►
and found guilty or innocent.
00:30:26 ►
So what is it that happens to our shadow, our individual shadow,
00:30:30 ►
if we manage to bring it up to the light?
00:30:34 ►
It transforms.
00:30:36 ►
It changes.
00:30:38 ►
It’s still there, but no longer as a monster.
00:30:42 ►
but no longer as a monster.
00:30:50 ►
When you allow yourself to acknowledge without fear and without hatred the part of you that wants to punish or even kill the guy who cuts in front of you on the highway.
00:30:59 ►
When you can accept the fact that along with your love of your grandmother,
00:31:03 ►
there exists a purely
00:31:05 ►
selfish hope that she will leave you some of her money when she dies. When you can allow
00:31:11 ►
yourself to have those darker thoughts and feelings, along with the more lovable and
00:31:17 ►
admirable ones, you become free. And you become authentic. Or at least you’re on your way to authenticity.
00:31:33 ►
Now, how does one go about bringing the hidden beast out of the cellar and into consciousness?
00:31:37 ►
In other words, how do we turn that nasty monster into a prince?
00:31:39 ►
Well, it takes work.
00:31:47 ►
It also takes a therapist who has undergone her own confrontation with her shadow. Only someone who has done this kind of work on herself can begin to understand the overwhelming
00:31:55 ►
fear that can threaten to take over a patient at certain stages of this process.
00:32:01 ►
After all, he is being asked to go down a long stairway to a place inside himself
00:32:09 ►
where there is no light, or barely enough, and to allow himself to see a figure of darkness
00:32:16 ►
which is the embodiment of everything he hates and fears about himself, everything he’s ashamed of, everything he wants to reject and forget.
00:32:29 ►
Not only is he being urged to face this thing, which by the way often takes the form of a
00:32:38 ►
huge, dark, sometimes vicious animal, but after he’s faced it, he has to deliberately go up to it and step into
00:32:49 ►
it and turn around and look out its eyes. This is something that my hypnotherapist friend
00:32:58 ►
and I developed, which is one stage beyond what the Jungian therapists will have you do.
00:33:08 ►
The Jungians encourage the patient to first see,
00:33:15 ►
let themselves see this figure, this animal or whatever form it’s taken.
00:33:22 ►
And then with a lot of help from the therapist, they begin to understand
00:33:27 ►
where it evolved from, what was the beginning, what words were said at what times, if that’s
00:33:34 ►
possible. We took it one step further and had the person step inside the skin of his own shadow.
00:33:50 ►
And then feel what it’s like inside and look out at the world through the shadow’s eyes.
00:33:56 ►
It was quite an amazing experience.
00:34:00 ►
Remember, all this time,
00:34:04 ►
a part of him, the patient, believes that this shadow monster, this horrid, putrid, evil beast, is actually the bedrock identity, the real essence of who and what he is.
00:34:29 ►
who and what he is. So I believe that this process takes more courage than just about anything else anyone could ever expect to be asked to do in his life. That’s why his
00:34:40 ►
therapist must have undergone this experience herself.
00:34:46 ►
Only someone who’s made the same
00:34:48 ►
journey can be believed
00:34:50 ►
when she tells her patient
00:34:52 ►
that, you know, quote,
00:34:54 ►
what you’ll see is
00:34:56 ►
not your true self.
00:34:58 ►
It is part of you, certainly,
00:35:00 ►
but it’s not what you truly
00:35:02 ►
are. Once
00:35:04 ►
you’re inside it, you’ll discover that there’s no more
00:35:07 ►
fear the only thing your shadow is afraid of is being discovered it prefers to stay in the dark
00:35:15 ►
where it can keep its power once you’ve found it and stepped inside you’ll feel only power
00:35:21 ►
and total lack of fear, unquote.
00:35:26 ►
Or she’ll say something like that.
00:35:27 ►
And that’s actually what happens.
00:35:30 ►
There’s no more fear inside there.
00:35:32 ►
It’s just great power.
00:35:35 ►
So when does the princely transformation take place?
00:35:40 ►
It begins at the point where you find yourself looking out the monster’s eyes,
00:35:45 ►
which is also the point at which you forget to be afraid.
00:35:49 ►
When you’ve reached that place, you can step outside the beast again
00:35:53 ►
and go back up the stair because you have nothing to be afraid of anymore.
00:35:59 ►
What is there to fear?
00:36:02 ►
This confrontation with the shadow usually takes a long time,
00:36:07 ►
several days of intense work.
00:36:10 ►
However, I have seen it happen, I think it’s twice, in one day.
00:36:18 ►
I think we were using MDMA, and the person, the patient was a very positive-minded, optimistic kind of person.
00:36:38 ►
She or he, I think it was one of each.
00:36:43 ►
They’re the kind of people who just didn’t let things get them down in life.
00:36:47 ►
I love people like that.
00:36:49 ►
I wish I were one.
00:36:51 ►
And they somehow managed to discover enough courage to actually do that whole thing in one single day.
00:37:03 ►
It was long days, I remember.
00:37:07 ►
Probably closer to eight to ten hours. But it can be done. But most people take quite a few sessions.
00:37:15 ►
It can take, it usually takes several days of intense work. And of course it
00:37:20 ►
isn’t finished until you’ve gone back and gone back yet again to look at the shadow monster who will be shrinking in size
00:37:28 ►
and beginning to look quite different.
00:37:31 ►
No longer hairy and probably without his sharp teeth, so to speak.
00:37:36 ►
The process is not truly finished until you have, with the help of your therapist,
00:37:43 ►
learned to feel compassion,
00:37:46 ►
then affection for your shadow beast,
00:37:50 ►
if you remember the fairy tale.
00:37:53 ►
The compassion is not so terribly difficult
00:37:56 ►
once your therapist helps to point out
00:37:59 ►
that all of this shadow form took place
00:38:06 ►
because of things that were told to you, done to you,
00:38:11 ►
that you are not responsible for,
00:38:15 ►
that you dealt with all of this rejection and repression
00:38:21 ►
the only way you could,
00:38:24 ►
and repression the only way you could,
00:38:34 ►
and that it is important as the patient to look back on the completely vulnerable child you were and how helpless you felt and how completely lacking in understanding you were
00:38:42 ►
about these things that you were being told were bad.
00:38:45 ►
So after a while, you can begin to feel a bit of compassion for this hard self thing.
00:38:57 ►
Feeling love for it takes a little longer.
00:39:01 ►
But eventually it will happen.
00:39:07 ►
Now how and in what way does the transformed shadow become your ally? Well, if you face aspects of yourself that you used to be ashamed
00:39:15 ►
of and try to deny, you will be able to deliberately decide whether or not to make use of any of these aspects at certain times in your life.
00:39:26 ►
To give a relatively minor and benign example,
00:39:31 ►
when I sit down at a chessboard,
00:39:33 ►
I can give myself permission to turn on my aggressive side.
00:39:38 ►
You know, no more Mrs. Nice Guy.
00:39:41 ►
And if my opponent doesn’t like it, to hell with him.
00:39:44 ►
That’s just tough. Or more
00:39:47 ►
seriously, if I find myself walking a dark street in a strange city and he has footsteps
00:39:53 ►
behind me, I don’t have to hesitate before I become my growling big cat killer self.
00:40:02 ►
growling, big cat killer self.
00:40:04 ►
It’s okay.
00:40:06 ►
My killer is there to be used if he’s needed.
00:40:10 ►
The difference is that I’m not in danger of being taken over by one of these aspects of my shadow
00:40:13 ►
without my consent
00:40:15 ►
and perhaps under the wrong circumstances,
00:40:19 ►
which is what happens when it remains unconscious.
00:40:21 ►
I can make conscious choices
00:40:23 ►
about whether to use my
00:40:25 ►
darker ally
00:40:27 ►
or not.
00:40:30 ►
Now, having worked with a hypnotherapist
00:40:32 ►
as a co-therapist
00:40:34 ►
for two of my three years
00:40:36 ►
doing this sort of work,
00:40:38 ►
I have tremendous respect for
00:40:40 ►
and faith in
00:40:41 ►
hypnotic trance as a tool
00:40:43 ►
for this kind of work.
00:40:45 ►
We used MDMA for most of the work, and it seemed to do very well with the hypnotic state.
00:40:52 ►
Her patients had already gone through six months to a year of hypnotherapy with her,
00:40:57 ►
and they all knew how to induce the trance state.
00:41:01 ►
What MDMA brought to the situation was its magical way of allowing insight while
00:41:08 ►
eliminating self-rejection. I don’t think there is any other drug known that will do
00:41:17 ►
that in that way. This is what you have to begin with if you’re going to do shadow work.
00:41:26 ►
Insight into your darker side, but without self-hatred and without shame.
00:41:33 ►
Very hard to manage for most of us.
00:41:37 ►
And MDMA is the only drug I know of that can show you how to open up that way of feeling toward yourself.
00:41:47 ►
Acceptance of all the things you are with love and compassion. As for the duration of each session when you’re doing shadow work,
00:41:56 ►
it’s pretty much the same as when you’re doing so-called psychedelic therapy that isn’t mainly
00:42:01 ►
shadow work, which is a minimum of six hours if you’re using MDMA,
00:42:06 ►
and up to eight hours if you’re using the other best therapy drug, the real psychedelic 2C-B.
00:42:14 ►
Sadly, they are now both illegal in the U.S., though 2C-B held out for a long time.
00:42:22 ►
My hypnotherapist friend and I use the term intensives to describe such sessions.
00:42:30 ►
They also could have been called the long, long sessions. One of the unbreakable rules
00:42:37 ►
was that if a patient got into an interior struggle at about the time the session would ordinarily have come to a
00:42:46 ►
close, which sometimes happens.
00:42:50 ►
Those of you who have little kids
00:42:52 ►
know that the most
00:42:54 ►
riveting
00:42:56 ►
and important questions are
00:42:57 ►
asked just before bedtime.
00:43:00 ►
You know?
00:43:01 ►
And you’ve got a long
00:43:03 ►
hour or so
00:43:05 ►
of very careful
00:43:07 ►
delicate talking ahead of you
00:43:09 ►
the same thing happens in therapy sometimes
00:43:12 ►
one of the unbreakable rules
00:43:18 ►
was that if a patient got into an anterior struggle
00:43:20 ►
we kept going
00:43:22 ►
no matter how long it took, especially with shadow work.
00:43:29 ►
We would not close down until the patient had worked through whatever he was confronting
00:43:35 ►
and had come out the other side. You cannot do the classic 50-minute hour with this sort
00:43:42 ►
of work. There’s no question of doing that. Now, this
00:43:45 ►
didn’t happen often, but it did mean an occasional 8- to 10-hour day. You can’t take too many
00:43:52 ►
of those in a row, but they don’t happen that often. But the rule has to be maintained.
00:44:02 ►
If there’s something important in progress, you do not
00:44:06 ►
cut it short.
00:44:08 ►
There’s no excuse for doing that.
00:44:11 ►
I wouldn’t
00:44:12 ►
hesitate to recommend doing
00:44:14 ►
shadow work with hypnosis only.
00:44:17 ►
Now MDMA and
00:44:18 ►
drugs like 2C-B aren’t available.
00:44:21 ►
Hypnosis
00:44:22 ►
can open the same psychic
00:44:24 ►
doors as the drugs.
00:44:27 ►
It may take a bit longer to bring the patient
00:44:29 ►
to a point where he can allow himself to feel
00:44:32 ►
acceptance and compassion for his shattered self,
00:44:36 ►
but it can be done.
00:44:38 ►
It will still take a therapist who has done that work herself, however.
00:44:43 ►
The Buddhists teach that
00:44:45 ►
immediately after death,
00:44:49 ►
the soul will meet demonic figures
00:44:51 ►
known as, I think it’s guardians of the gate.
00:44:55 ►
I don’t know whether it’s at the gate or off the gate,
00:44:58 ►
but off, okay.
00:45:00 ►
And that he must keep in mind
00:45:02 ►
that they are all aspects of himself
00:45:05 ►
and that he cannot move ahead into the spiritual world
00:45:10 ►
until he has acknowledged and embraced them,
00:45:15 ►
until he has owned them,
00:45:17 ►
which is another way of reminding us that spiritual wholeness
00:45:22 ►
requires that we accept and own all parts of ourselves and
00:45:28 ►
that we must find a way to love all that we are and eventually to love all that other
00:45:36 ►
living things are, rejecting none. I don’t know whether it was Oscar Wilde or somebody before him who made that wonderful statement,
00:45:48 ►
which came up in the middle of a northern exposure.
00:45:54 ►
If you remember northern exposure, that was…
00:45:57 ►
The quotation is,
00:45:59 ►
nothing human is alien to me.
00:46:04 ►
That’s what we have to get to.
00:46:08 ►
The closest most of us will come to looking in the eyes of God
00:46:12 ►
is when we look at the face of a newborn baby.
00:46:18 ►
Looking in the eyes of a newborn is quite an experience.
00:46:22 ►
And what does the newborn show us? All the possibilities
00:46:27 ►
for light and dark, good and evil, love and hate. The potential is there for everything
00:46:36 ►
and anything that a human being can be. Now those of us who have used psychedelics to achieve greater consciousness
00:46:47 ►
have sometimes managed to understand
00:46:51 ►
just a little bit
00:46:52 ►
that the great mind we call God
00:46:56 ►
if we believe in such a thing
00:47:00 ►
contains all things
00:47:02 ►
all dualities
00:47:04 ►
all opposites all light, all dualities, all opposites, all light and all darkness.
00:47:12 ►
The difficult part of that is that some psychedelic travelers,
00:47:20 ►
like some non-psychedelic travelers in these realms also come back and state
00:47:27 ►
that everything that exists is contained in love which makes no sense whatsoever
00:47:33 ►
it seems to be part of the truth in doing work to bring our own shadow
00:47:39 ►
selves into awareness and finding that we can feel compassion for our dark, twisted, ugly aspects
00:47:50 ►
thereby transforming them
00:47:53 ►
we might come a little closer
00:47:56 ►
to understanding
00:47:58 ►
not with the mind
00:47:59 ►
but with the heart
00:48:01 ►
what is meant by that otherwise
00:48:04 ►
incomprehensible phrase?
00:48:07 ►
God is love.
00:48:10 ►
Now, questions and answers.
00:48:15 ►
I’m afraid we’re going to have to leave the Q&A for another day
00:48:19 ►
because it goes on for an hour or so longer.
00:48:22 ►
The file size of this podcast is kind of reaching its upper limit right now.
00:48:28 ►
We’ll get that out to you in a later podcast. I’ve got a plan to come out later this year, if all goes according to schedule.
00:48:36 ►
And as I mentioned in the introduction, the talk you just heard was from one of John Hanna’s MindStates conferences.
00:48:41 ►
of John Hanna’s Mind States conferences.
00:48:44 ►
So in addition to thanking Ann for the excellent information she’s given us,
00:48:47 ►
I want to thank John for making these Mind States talks
00:48:52 ►
available for me to podcast, too.
00:48:54 ►
In the months and years to come,
00:48:57 ►
we’ll be working with John and some of his other compatriots
00:49:00 ►
to podcast many more of these talks,
00:49:03 ►
including one by Sasha Shulgin,
00:49:05 ►
which actually will be our next program.
00:49:08 ►
So thank you, John.
00:49:09 ►
I really appreciate it for this program and all you’ve done and continue to do for the tribe.
00:49:14 ►
It’s greatly appreciated.
00:49:16 ►
For those of you who don’t already know it, by the way,
00:49:19 ►
John was the very first speaker at our first Palenque Norte lecture series
00:49:24 ►
that we produced at Burning Man.
00:49:26 ►
You can actually hear a podcast and some other recordings of John at Burning Man, too.
00:49:33 ►
They’re all on our website.
00:49:35 ►
If you get a chance, you can go to mindstates.org, which is John’s site,
00:49:40 ►
and there you’ll find a link to a page where you can actually buy copies of, I think,
00:49:46 ►
almost all of the talks from Mind States in 2003 and 2005.
00:49:50 ►
They’re all broken up by speaker, et cetera.
00:49:53 ►
A professional job of it done.
00:49:56 ►
And in a few weeks, we’ll actually be bringing you a sampler of some of those talks.
00:50:01 ►
So stay tuned for that.
00:50:03 ►
In addition to John, we,
00:50:05 ►
I think,
00:50:05 ►
owe a very special debt of gratitude
00:50:07 ►
to Kevin Whitesides,
00:50:09 ►
who provided the recordings
00:50:10 ►
of this talk for us.
00:50:12 ►
He dug down through all his
00:50:13 ►
stacks of recordings
00:50:15 ►
and pulled these out,
00:50:16 ►
and we certainly appreciate it.
00:50:18 ►
I’m sure the whole tribe
00:50:19 ►
appreciates Kevin.
00:50:21 ►
If you go to our website,
00:50:23 ►
palenqueinorte.org,
00:50:24 ►
or you can get there through matrixmasters.com
00:50:27 ►
and either click on the Palenque Norte link or the podcast link,
00:50:32 ►
one way or another wind up on the podcast page,
00:50:35 ►
and there you’ll find Ann and Sasha’s name in the description of Podcast 21,
00:50:41 ►
which is what you’re listening to right now.
00:50:43 ►
And you’ll find some pictures, if you follow those links, of the shoguns at several conferences Thank you, Bill, for that.
00:50:55 ►
Also on that page, the Shulgens, by the way, are links to their two main books, P. Call and T. Call.
00:51:02 ►
And no psychedelic library should be without those books.
00:51:06 ►
We’ll talk about that more next week, next podcast, I should say.
00:51:10 ►
And those books, by the way, there are available links on that page
00:51:14 ►
and most bookstores on Amazon,
00:51:16 ►
and you can get them also directly from Ann and Sasha
00:51:19 ►
by ordering through their press, which is Transform Press, Post Office Box 13675, Berkeley, California, 94712.
00:51:30 ►
And again, the details are on that web page,
00:51:34 ►
because I know I said that too fast.
00:51:36 ►
Well, that’s about it for today.
00:51:38 ►
Thank you again to Chateau Hayouk for the use of their music.
00:51:43 ►
And thank you to all of you for joining us here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:51:49 ►
Now, signing off from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo.
00:51:53 ►
Be well, my friends. you