Program Notes
Guest speakers: Susan Blackmore, V.S. Ramachandran, Richard Glen Boire, John Gilmore, Ralph Metzner, and Jaron Lanier
Here are a few samples from the 2003 Mind States conference that was held in Berkeley, California in May of that year. Sound bites from the following talks are included here:
Susan Blackmore:“The Grand Illusion of Consciousness”
V.S. Ramachandran: “What Neurology Can Tell Us About Human Nature”
Richard Glen Boire: “Neurocops: Welcome to the REAL Drug War”
John Gilmore: “Our Constitutional Rights of Anonymous Travel”
Ralph Metzner: “Seven Phases of Social-Cultural Transformation Catalyzed by LSD”
Jaron Lanier: “Post-Symbolic Communication”
LINKS:
Mind States Conference Central
Previous Episode
022 - Natural vs. Synthetic Psychedelic Chemicals
Next Episode
Similar Episodes
- 165 - From Beats, to Hippies, to McKenna - score: 0.85859
- 151 - Posthumous Glory - score: 0.84925
- 200 - A Few Words From Our Elders - score: 0.83657
- 159 - Shulgin & Forte at Horizons 2008″ - score: 0.82827
- 500 - 500 Memories - score: 0.82420
- 079 - Feilding and Pesce at Burning Man - score: 0.81959
- 153 - Consciousness Change and the 8-Circuit Model - score: 0.80964
- 643 - Journeys to the Edge of Consciousness - score: 0.80818
- 241 - Philosophical Gadfly Part 2 - score: 0.80811
- 035 - In the Valley of Novelty (Part 9) - score: 0.80355
Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from psychedelic space. I’m Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
00:00:22 ►
salon. I’d like to do something a little different today, if you don’t mind.
00:00:28 ►
As you know, John Hanna has provided recordings of some of the talks
00:00:33 ►
that were given at the Mind States conferences he produced.
00:00:37 ►
In fact, thanks to John, I’ve got a lot more material here
00:00:40 ►
than I’m going to be able to get to right away.
00:00:43 ►
In fact, the last couple of podcasts in the Psychedelic Salon were from the Jamaica Mind
00:00:50 ►
States Conference in 2002, and more of those talks are going to be coming your way just
00:00:55 ►
as quickly as I can get them out.
00:00:57 ►
After that, in between some more of the Burning Man talks and some Terrence McKenna stuff I’ve got on tape.
00:01:06 ►
We’ll also be bringing you parts of the 2001 Mind States Conference in Berkeley.
00:01:11 ►
In fact, the very first podcast of the Psychedelic Salon
00:01:15 ►
was a talk that I gave at that conference.
00:01:18 ►
But I digress.
00:01:19 ►
All of this, I guess, is just a long way of explaining today’s program.
00:01:24 ►
As you can see, it’s going to be quite a long time for me to be able to get to a podcast
00:01:30 ►
of the great audio that I have sitting here on my desk right now, and all of that’s still
00:01:36 ►
in the queue, so I thought it might be interesting for you to hear some samples from the Mind
00:01:41 ►
States conferences in 2003 and 2005.
00:01:46 ►
Thanks to JT and his crew, both of those conferences were professionally recorded.
00:01:52 ►
While I’m trying to keep this channel here commercial free, I guess you could say that
00:01:58 ►
maybe today’s podcast is actually just a long commercial for those recordings, because if
00:02:04 ►
you don’t want to wait a year or so to hear the complete talks
00:02:08 ►
that I’m sampling for you here today,
00:02:10 ►
there’s a good chance they will eventually come out in podcasts.
00:02:14 ►
But if you really want to hear the complete version of some of these talks,
00:02:19 ►
because I think they’re very important,
00:02:21 ►
well, then you can go out and actually order a CD or MP3
00:02:25 ►
of the complete talk, and that’ll help John recoup a little of the money he lost in the
00:02:31 ►
last conference, and maybe we can convince him to produce another one of these family
00:02:36 ►
gatherings in the future here.
00:02:38 ►
But details about ordering are on our website, and I’ll also cover it at the end of this
00:02:43 ►
podcast.
00:02:43 ►
on our website, and I’ll also cover it at the end of this podcast.
00:02:51 ►
Now let’s start with John Hanna introducing Susan Blackmore at the 2003 Mind States Conference.
00:02:56 ►
Susan, by the way, was also the conference emcee for both years.
00:03:01 ►
So after the sample of her talk, you’ll also hear her introduce the next speaker.
00:03:06 ►
And then I’ll jump back in myself and introduce the speaker after that.
00:03:12 ►
She’s written a book called The Meme Machine.
00:03:16 ►
She’s also written a new book that’s coming out in about a month or two,
00:03:19 ►
which is a textbook on consciousness.
00:03:20 ►
Susan Blackmore.
00:03:22 ►
Thank you very much.
00:03:23 ►
Thank you.
00:03:28 ►
We’ve got plenty of interesting things happening here, haven’t we?
00:03:31 ►
Now, you, are you conscious?
00:03:32 ►
Sure?
00:03:33 ►
He’s pretty damn sure.
00:03:34 ►
What about you?
00:03:34 ►
Are you conscious?
00:03:36 ►
Yes, you are.
00:03:36 ►
Are you?
00:03:37 ►
You’re semi?
00:03:39 ►
Only semi?
00:03:40 ►
Well, that’s a slight advantage. Now, is there anyone who’s not conscious?
00:03:42 ►
Yes, you’re not.
00:03:43 ►
Excellent.
00:03:44 ►
We’ve got two or three. How do you know? Yeah. You don’t know. Okay. Now, you, are you conscious?
00:03:55 ►
While I’ve been doing that, you probably have become what feels like more conscious. Because
00:04:02 ►
just asking the question, are you conscious now does
00:04:05 ►
something rather peculiar it makes you kind of go and become aware of a whole
00:04:11 ►
lot more stuff were you conscious before I started that what about you you get
00:04:19 ►
this sense that a moment ago you weren’t and now you’ve become any of you
00:04:23 ►
recognize what I’m talking about?
00:04:25 ►
Yeah?
00:04:27 ►
It’s very peculiar, isn’t it?
00:04:30 ►
There are many peculiar things about consciousness.
00:04:33 ►
That’s just one that I happened to pick on.
00:04:35 ►
Is it doing something?
00:04:42 ►
Now, scientists at the moment have woken up to the fact that there’s a huge problem here.
00:04:45 ►
Most of the last century, people were just sort of not really allowed to talk about it. Now you get an awful lot of neuroscientists, psychologists, philosophers saying things like this.
00:04:51 ►
It’s the most important problem in the biological sciences.
00:04:54 ►
It’s the last surviving mystery.
00:04:56 ►
It’s one of the most baffling problems in science.
00:04:59 ►
It really is.
00:05:02 ►
This is really exciting.
00:05:01 ►
It really is.
00:05:03 ►
This is really exciting.
00:05:11 ►
You know, a lot of people kind of think that scientists like myself are kind of pushing the problem away.
00:05:12 ►
Some are.
00:05:18 ►
But there’s a huge excitement about what we do with this mystery.
00:05:21 ►
And it’s a very strange mystery indeed.
00:05:23 ►
What is the mystery?
00:05:24 ►
Okay, I need something. Can somebody give me something
00:05:25 ►
to demonstrate a mystery with? Anything will do. Oh yes, your hat will be lovely. Thank you. Excellent
00:05:30 ►
hat. Right, here is a hat. Yes, we agree there’s a hat. Now, do you think there’s a real hat here or
00:05:35 ►
some, you know, some object like a real physical thing? Yes? Yeah? Okay, it’s made of molecules or
00:05:41 ►
whatever people tell you it’s made of. Yeah? Now, are you having an experience of seeing this hat?
00:05:49 ►
Yeah?
00:05:51 ►
Yeah?
00:05:52 ►
That’s the only way you can perceive it.
00:05:54 ►
Of course you’re having an experience.
00:05:55 ►
Yes, you’re laughing, I know.
00:05:57 ►
But you are having an experience.
00:05:59 ►
The color of this hat, how does it look to you?
00:06:01 ►
I mean, how it looks to you, is that the same as how it looks to
00:06:05 ►
him? You can’t ever know, can you? It’s an old philosophical problem. Probably as kids, you
00:06:10 ►
went round and round that one and didn’t get anywhere. But the point is, there’s two different
00:06:16 ►
things here. Your experience of the hat, which is private and subjective and yours alone and nobody
00:06:22 ►
can know what it’s like. That’s what we mean by consciousness
00:06:25 ►
in contemporary science, what it’s like for you. That’s the definition. It’s not really a
00:06:32 ►
definition. That’s what we mean, what it’s like for you. But we also think there’s a real hat
00:06:37 ►
made of physical stuff. Now, you try getting away from that. Nobody’s successfully got away from that. In the 1890s, it was called the great chasm or the fathomless abyss.
00:06:50 ►
It’s the great chasm between mind and brain, the mind-body problem.
00:06:54 ►
It’s the great chasm between the inner and the outer, the experience that I’m having and the hat I believe exists in the real world.
00:07:02 ►
The hat, I believe, exists in the real world.
00:07:06 ►
It’s the chasm between subjective, how it is to me,
00:07:10 ►
and objective, how we believe it must be in the real physical world.
00:07:14 ►
Don’t underestimate this problem.
00:07:17 ►
There are probably lots of you out there who, if you don’t come and tell me stories about psychic phenomena,
00:07:20 ►
will tell me you’ve got a theory of consciousness that solves the problem.
00:07:23 ►
Well, if you have, you’re a genius. Tell the world about it.
00:07:28 ►
It’s a really difficult problem. It is not
00:07:31 ►
solved by having a kind of stuff called consciousness that hangs about
00:07:35 ►
somewhere. It’s not solved by being a pure materialist and saying it’s all
00:07:39 ►
stuff. It’s not solved at the moment anyway at all.
00:07:43 ►
So, we can have fun with it. My talk is suggesting that consciousness is an illusion.
00:07:51 ►
Now, when people say consciousness is an illusion, if they’re not thinking clearly about it, they think, I mean, it doesn’t exist.
00:07:59 ►
That’s not what I mean. Look up illusion in the dictionary and it says something that isn’t what it seems
00:08:06 ►
to be. So that’s the sense in which I’m going to use the word illusion. Something that it
00:08:12 ►
really does exist, it’s there, but it’s not what it seems to be.
00:08:18 ►
Well, it’s my great pleasure this morning to introduce V.S. Ramachandran. Rama, as his
00:08:24 ►
friends know him, is director
00:08:26 ►
of the Center for Brain and Cognition and a professor of psychology at UC San Diego
00:08:31 ►
and also a professor at the Salk Institute. He used to work mainly on visual perception,
00:08:36 ►
but he’s one of those amazing neuroscientists who seem to work on everything, not just art
00:08:41 ►
and synesthesia, but phantomantom limbs maybe some of you know his book
00:08:45 ►
Phantoms in the Brain
00:08:46 ►
in fact he’s made a claim to be the only person
00:08:49 ►
in the world ever to
00:08:51 ►
amputate a phantom limb
00:08:53 ►
so today he’s going to be
00:08:55 ►
talking about synesthesia and the meaning of art
00:08:58 ►
and where are you Rama?
00:08:59 ►
are you hiding?
00:09:00 ►
I’m here
00:09:00 ►
come up
00:09:02 ►
thank you very much.
00:09:17 ►
Well, first of all, thank you very much to John Hanna and the organizers for inviting me to be here and for Sue for that wonderful introduction. What I’d like to do is tell
00:09:22 ►
you a little bit about the work we’ve been doing in neurology, behavioral neurology, or what these days we call cognitive neuroscience. That is,
00:09:30 ►
when there is a small change in some part of the brain, or damage to a small part of the brain,
00:09:35 ►
what you often see is a specific change in your mind or your behavior, rather than an across-the-board
00:09:41 ►
reduction in all your mental abilities. You don’t see a general blunting of all your abilities.
00:09:46 ►
What you see is a highly selective loss of one function.
00:09:50 ►
So what we do is we systematically study these patients or these people who have changes in behavior,
00:09:57 ►
trying to find out what’s gone wrong in the brain, what’s changed in the brain.
00:10:02 ►
And what can these changes and their changes in
00:10:05 ►
behavior tell us about normal human behavior, about human nature, and about human consciousness.
00:10:10 ►
So that’ll be the main theme of this lecture. In fact, that’s what I do for a living.
00:10:16 ►
Now, to get you started, let me just tell you, you all know about the brain. It’s made up of
00:10:21 ►
100 billion nerve cells, and it’s got the frontal lobes, occipital lobe, parietal lobe, and temporal lobe.
00:10:28 ►
What I’d like to do today is start off with a syndrome, a very rare neurological syndrome.
00:10:33 ►
Tell you about that briefly, just to give you an idea about the sort of thing we do.
00:10:37 ►
Then talk about another fascinating phenomenon called synesthesia,
00:10:41 ►
which was discovered in the 19th century, but has not been studied intensively until recently. And the second half of the talk, or the third
00:10:48 ►
third of the talk, will be about art, and how the brain responds to
00:10:52 ►
art. So the first half is really about science, the second half about art.
00:10:56 ►
And I think that’s very appropriate, given this audience.
00:11:00 ►
Now, let me tell you about a patient we saw not long ago, who had a
00:11:04 ►
disorder called Capgras syndrome, Karpgras delusion.
00:11:09 ►
This was discovered around the turn of the century by a French neurologist.
00:11:12 ►
And typically the patient, I’ll tell you about the patient I saw, he’d been in a car accident and had a head injury and was in a coma for about two weeks.
00:11:21 ►
Then he came out of the coma and he seemed quite normal, mentally quite lucid,
00:11:26 ►
articulate, fluent in conversation, seemed quite a little bit slowed down given that he’d just come
00:11:32 ►
out of coma, but other than that, he seemed quite lucid and intelligent, except that he had one
00:11:37 ►
profound delusion. He would look at his mother and say, doctor, this woman looks just like my mother,
00:11:43 ►
but she’s an imposter. She’s some other woman pretending just like my mother, but she’s an imposter.
00:11:49 ►
She’s some other woman pretending to be my mother. And what is amazing is the selective nature of the delusion. That’s the only problem he has. Now, why does this happen? The standard
00:11:56 ►
explanation for this, oddly enough, is a Freudian one. And that is this chap, when he was a
00:12:00 ►
little baby, and this applies to all of you here, when you’re little babies,
00:12:05 ►
and I’m talking about the men here, but same argument applies for women, okay?
00:12:09 ►
So when you’re little babies, you have this strong sexual attraction to your mother.
00:12:13 ►
This is the so-called Oedipus complex of Freud.
00:12:15 ►
I’m not saying I believe this, but this is the sort of standard view, Freudian view, okay?
00:12:19 ►
Now, as the child grows up, these latent sexual urges get repressed by the cortex, which develops.
00:12:26 ►
So the cortical influences repress these latent sexual urges.
00:12:30 ►
And then along comes a blow to the head, damaging the cortex.
00:12:32 ►
And these latent sexual urges come flaming to the surface.
00:12:35 ►
And suddenly and inexplicably, this chap finds himself sexually aroused by his mother.
00:12:40 ►
And he says, my God, this is my mom.
00:12:42 ►
How come I’m sexually aroused?
00:12:44 ►
Something wrong here.
00:12:44 ►
This must be some other woman pretending to be my mom.
00:12:48 ►
Okay, so this is the standard view.
00:12:49 ►
Now, it doesn’t work because I’ve seen patients with the Kampgras syndrome
00:12:53 ►
who have the same kind of delusion, not about their mother,
00:12:57 ►
but about their pet poodle, about their dog.
00:13:00 ►
They’ll say, doctor, this is not Fifi.
00:13:03 ►
It looks exactly like Fifi.
00:13:05 ►
Okay. Now, you think about it. how would the Freudian account explain this?
00:13:10 ►
You would have to invoke the latent bestiality in all humans or something like that.
00:13:15 ►
So we came up with a much simpler explanation in terms of the circuitry in the brain.
00:13:21 ►
Visual messages go to the visual area in the occipital lobe,
00:13:25 ►
and they’re analyzed in 30 different visual areas for
00:13:27 ►
color, shape, movement, depth,
00:13:29 ►
all the different visual attributes, which all
00:13:31 ►
of you artists know about. After
00:13:33 ►
the analysis is carried out, the message goes to
00:13:35 ►
a structure here in the temporal lobes called the fusiform
00:13:37 ►
gyrus. And in the fusiform
00:13:39 ►
gyrus, you recognize what it is.
00:13:42 ►
Is it a face? Is it my boss?
00:13:44 ►
Is it my mother? Is it my boss? Is it my mother?
00:13:45 ►
Is it a pig?
00:13:46 ►
Is it a chair?
00:13:47 ►
Something completely animal.
00:13:51 ►
So I hope you’re starting to get a little feeling about what the 2003 Mind States conference was like.
00:14:00 ►
Susan Blackmore really got everybody into a little time warp,
00:14:05 ►
speaking about the grand illusion of consciousness.
00:14:08 ►
And actually following Susan, Pablo Amaringo gave a talk about his life as a shaman and artist,
00:14:16 ►
and he was followed by Mark Pesci, who had a real fascinating presentation called Memes to an End.
00:14:24 ►
The next cut I want to play for you from that conference
00:14:27 ►
came from a panel, I think the panel is actually the next day, the second day of the
00:14:31 ►
conference, and it was called the Control Culture Panel.
00:14:36 ►
We all thought it was clever just to call it the Control Panel, but nobody ever
00:14:39 ►
seemed to really get that joke. Anyhow,
00:14:43 ►
there were six people on the panel,
00:14:46 ►
and it was chaired by Richard Glenn Boyer,
00:14:49 ►
the attorney who heads up the Alchemind Association
00:14:53 ►
and the Center for Cognitive Liberty.
00:14:56 ►
That’s cognitiveliberty.org,
00:14:58 ►
a place you ought to go visit for sure.
00:15:01 ►
And the panel had on it Eric Davis,
00:15:05 ►
who gave a talk called
00:15:06 ►
Waking Up in the Matrix,
00:15:07 ►
Spiritual Evolution in a Surveillance State.
00:15:11 ►
Zoe Seven talked about media manipulation
00:15:14 ►
and mind control technology,
00:15:16 ►
short-circuiting awareness.
00:15:19 ►
And R.U. Sirius was there,
00:15:20 ►
and he gave a talk called
00:15:22 ►
How to Distinguish Conspiracy and Paranoia from Reasonable Fears.
00:15:28 ►
And by the way, on our podcast page at Matrix Masters,
00:15:32 ►
there’s a link to the R.U. Sirius podcast.
00:15:36 ►
He’s a friend and has a great show.
00:15:38 ►
You might want to catch that.
00:15:41 ►
I was also on that panel and gave a little talk called
00:15:45 ►
Living Under the Radar, Surviving in a Control Culture.
00:15:49 ►
And the two little excerpts I’m going to play from other speakers on that panel,
00:15:54 ►
one is John Gilmore who talked about our constitutional rights of anonymous travel, speech, and assembly.
00:16:01 ►
And then we’ll start off first with Richard who’s speaking about, he calls it neurocops.
00:16:07 ►
And just to this day, I’m still chilled when I think about this.
00:16:14 ►
Just imagine the horrible possibility that you could be forced to have a vaccination
00:16:20 ►
that actually carried with it some sort of a mechanism
00:16:25 ►
that kept you from ever getting high again.
00:16:29 ►
I just can’t imagine something that horrible,
00:16:32 ►
but it’s under development.
00:16:34 ►
It’s here, actually, or possible, apparently.
00:16:37 ►
Listen to Richard’s talk and see if you don’t get the same chill down your spine
00:16:42 ►
that it gave me.
00:16:43 ►
So, without any further ado, here is Richard Glenn Boyer.
00:16:51 ►
What we have here is a thing known as the variola.
00:16:57 ►
This emerged in human populations several thousand years ago
00:17:02 ►
and replicated itself extremely quickly,
00:17:06 ►
particularly in very dense cities.
00:17:10 ►
It was a deadly virus.
00:17:12 ►
One out of every three people that were infected by this died.
00:17:15 ►
The people that didn’t die from it were blinded and sometimes left sterile or very scarred.
00:17:32 ►
sterile or very scarred. By the turn of the century, by 1900, this virus had killed an estimated 20 to 30 million people,
00:17:45 ►
which was about 10% of the human population. And it’s a smallpox virus. The last reported case of this virus was in 1949 in the U.S. in Texas.
00:17:50 ►
The last worldwide was in 1977 in Somalia.
00:17:55 ►
And then there was a weird case a year later when a laboratory person got it.
00:17:57 ►
Now it’s been eradicated.
00:17:59 ►
It’s in some labs.
00:18:04 ►
And what killed it was finally a vaccination.
00:18:11 ►
It’s one of the most successful kind of stories in human history as far as people rising and overcoming something that was very, very deadly for a long time.
00:18:16 ►
What this has to do with mind states and altered states of consciousness,
00:18:20 ►
I think, unfortunately, has quite a bit to do with it, particularly in the coming years.
00:18:28 ►
Because one of the things I think to think about is what if the government had the power,
00:18:33 ►
the technological power to eradicate the altered state?
00:18:38 ►
What if the government could sort of inoculate you so you couldn’t get high?
00:18:42 ►
If you took a drug, it didn’t work in you.
00:18:42 ►
sort of inoculate you so you couldn’t get high.
00:18:44 ►
If you took a drug, it didn’t work in you.
00:18:52 ►
What if they could absolutely make it impossible for somebody to feel the effects of the drugs that they don’t like?
00:18:59 ►
This is like my image of the drug war.
00:19:02 ►
It’s kind of like drug war old school in a way. This
00:19:06 ►
is the war on drugs. The new school drug war, what I think is going to come about, unfortunately,
00:19:13 ►
is this. And this is kind of, you know, doctor with a needle and indicates what I’m viewing
00:19:23 ►
as a shift in the metaphor that the government uses now since about the mid-1990s.
00:19:29 ►
It’s no longer the metaphor of the war on drugs.
00:19:31 ►
If you read government literature about the war, it is now a big disease,
00:19:38 ►
and people are becoming infected with the disease of using illegal drugs.
00:19:42 ►
disease of using illegal drugs.
00:19:48 ►
This is a quote from the 1997 National Drug Control Strategy Report,
00:19:53 ►
where then Judge, I mean then the drug czar Barry McCaffrey said,
00:19:56 ►
the metaphor of a war on drugs is misleading.
00:20:00 ►
A more appropriate analogy for the drug problem is cancer.
00:20:04 ►
Dealing with cancer is a long-term proposition. It requires the mobilization of support mechanisms to check its spread, deal with its consequences, and improve the prognosis.
00:20:13 ►
And, you know, as we all know, the way that we fight disease in our culture and sort of Western society is through drugs.
00:20:21 ►
is through drugs.
00:20:28 ►
This is a quote from the 2001 National Drug Control Strategy Report.
00:20:36 ►
And it says, very plain, just like other chronic diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, and cancer,
00:20:43 ►
for which medications have been developed, drug addiction is a disease that merits medication for its treatment. So the question, though, is, is it actually possible to treat illegal drug use with other drugs?
00:20:52 ►
Are there actually some pharmaceuticals or, you know, government-approved drugs,
00:20:56 ►
almost kind of anti-drugs, to treat people who use the bad drugs?
00:21:02 ►
And the unfortunate answer is that there are such drugs. They actually are being tested in humans now.
00:21:08 ►
And I like to just call them neurocops, which is where I think we are heading.
00:21:14 ►
Let’s get a glass of water real quick. What I think the drug war is about to become is like truly a drug war,
00:21:21 ►
the war of your favorite drug against the government’s anti-drugs.
00:21:28 ►
Next speaker is John Gilmore.
00:21:32 ►
He’s another amazing person that I had the pleasure of meeting several years ago.
00:21:38 ►
He’s done too many things to list.
00:21:40 ►
The thing that I kind of like a lot is he created the alt-dot drug.
00:21:44 ►
I mean, he created the whole alt Alt. system of Usenet groups.
00:21:49 ►
He’s made like millions of dollars several times in various companies,
00:21:54 ►
and now he’s just giving the money away to our group and other groups
00:21:59 ►
and is funding a lot of the progressive drug policy stuff.
00:22:03 ►
Thank you. is funding a lot of the progressive drug policy stuff.
00:22:16 ►
And he is now challenging John Ashcroft and the whole Department of Justice for making him show his ID and treating him like a suspected terrorist
00:22:22 ►
every time he wants to travel within our own country.
00:22:25 ►
So this is John Gilmore.
00:22:27 ►
So what I want to talk about is sort of how we’re here to talk about mind states,
00:22:35 ►
but when it comes to control culture,
00:22:39 ►
the issue is really people in the world who want to shape the state of your mind
00:22:44 ►
and want to shape the state of the world.
00:22:46 ►
I think the appropriate response to that is to use the state of our minds,
00:22:53 ►
reflect it back, and reshape the state of the world.
00:22:56 ►
In a sense, the shape of the world is really a reflection of how we think about it.
00:23:03 ►
A lot of what we’ve talked about in the last couple of days is like the things you see are the things you’re paying
00:23:08 ►
attention to. And actually something Eric said reminded me of the old line about if
00:23:17 ►
you fight with monsters, beware that you don’t turn into a monster and also know that as you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.
00:23:28 ►
So rather than looking too hard at the abyss, I’ve tried to find other ways to deal.
00:23:38 ►
A lot of people just sort of, when the government says, you know, terror, danger, evil, trouble,
00:23:46 ►
you know, people sort of zoom in and look at that stuff. And instead, I kind of back away and say, what are they doing
00:23:51 ►
around the edges while they’re trying to get your attention over here?
00:24:01 ►
And a lot of that stuff is hidden in plain sight.
00:24:11 ►
For example, I once, about five years ago, heard a lecture by James Woolsey,
00:24:12 ►
who used to be head of the CIA,
00:24:18 ►
and he said that he talked about this threat of terrorism that was there, and he couldn’t tell us all the terrible things they had already averted,
00:24:23 ►
but we had to believe that they existed, et cetera.
00:24:27 ►
But he said they’ve got this fundamental problem that they’re facing,
00:24:31 ►
which is that individuals, as our society has evolved up to this point,
00:24:36 ►
individuals are getting more and more and more power to change the world, right?
00:24:42 ►
A small number of people, 20 people working together,
00:24:46 ►
were able to take out a couple of major buildings.
00:24:50 ►
And, you know, that was the least of it.
00:24:52 ►
They were able to trigger the culture to do much more destructive things than that.
00:24:58 ►
But that power that’s available to individuals applies in both directions.
00:25:02 ►
If you focus on the ability of individuals to do evil,
00:25:06 ►
you forget the ability of individuals to do good. Which brings me around to another
00:25:11 ►
quote that I’ll mangle here. Something on the order of, of course, individuals can change the
00:25:20 ►
world. In fact, that’s the only way it ever happens. It doesn’t take a lot of people to change the world.
00:25:26 ►
What it takes is insight and ideas, perseverance,
00:25:32 ►
and fighting the whole system with humor.
00:25:37 ►
Two Erowids, Earth and Fire Erowid first.
00:25:40 ►
As you know, the founders of the Vaults of Erowid,
00:25:43 ►
they’re both also contributing editors for Trip Magazine.
00:25:48 ►
And I think Earth is first, is that right?
00:25:50 ►
Oh, you’re going to talk together. Right, over to the two of them.
00:25:53 ►
So you have half an hour altogether. Thank you very much.
00:25:55 ►
Thank you.
00:26:08 ►
Hello.
00:26:12 ►
One of the things that’s continually striking about coming to these conferences is how much amazing amounts of information and how much knowledge there is.
00:26:21 ►
Talking to the people as we stand behind our tables,
00:26:24 ►
it’s really striking that so many people know so much
00:26:27 ►
and so little of that is really well documented. What we’re going to talk about today is LSD and what’s available
00:26:37 ►
on the street in terms of analysis.
00:26:41 ►
Celebrating the 60-year anniversary of LSD, we now have 60 years of data and published papers and people’s experiences,
00:26:49 ►
and yet we still don’t really have a very good sense of what it is exactly that’s sold on the street as blotter.
00:26:55 ►
One of the most persistent discussions around street acid is the sort of what you might call the good acid, bad acid debate.
00:27:01 ►
People really have very strong opinions about sort of one type of acid that they tried was very different from another type of acid, bad acid debate. People really have very strong opinions about sort of one type of acid
00:27:06 ►
that they tried was very different from another type of acid. And it’s unclear whether or not
00:27:10 ►
that can be described in terms, whether there is reason to think that that’s based on differences
00:27:16 ►
in the different things which are sold as acid or whether that really can be boiled down to just
00:27:21 ►
differences in dose set setting and individual reactions of the drugs.
00:27:26 ►
So for the last few years, we’ve been very interested in trying to collect what information is available about,
00:27:31 ►
specifically about what is sold on the street as acid.
00:27:34 ►
And so the first question is, when looking at that, why is there so little data available?
00:27:40 ►
The primary reason is obviously related to prohibition, that because of the regulatory systems that are in place,
00:27:47 ►
not only do we create a black market, but we also impede a great deal of research.
00:27:50 ►
So it’s very difficult to get research done.
00:27:54 ►
And starting in the early 1970s with the passage of the Controlled Substances Act
00:27:57 ►
and the creation of the DEA, tight restrictions were put in place
00:28:00 ►
over who is able to analyze and research controlled substances.
00:28:03 ►
In the early 70s, there were some labs doing some analysis of street acid.
00:28:10 ►
And the most prominent of these is probably PharmChem.
00:28:12 ►
They published a newsletter which collected information that they both did,
00:28:16 ►
both from their analysis in their lab and also from other labs around the United States
00:28:21 ►
that were doing that work at the time.
00:28:23 ►
But in 1974, they were publishing some quantitative data so that you could get
00:28:28 ►
information about how much acid was on a given type of blotter or in a given pill.
00:28:35 ►
But in 1974, the DEA issued guidelines to PharmChem and all other DEA-licensed
00:28:40 ►
labs which required that labs stop providing quantitative data for anonymously submitted samples of controlled substances.
00:28:48 ►
So they were no longer allowed to do quantitative testing only if people were willing to basically walk in
00:28:54 ►
and identify themselves as the person submitting the controlled substance.
00:28:59 ►
Although this wasn’t a law, the labs have very little choice about whether they’re going to comply or not because the DEA is the licensing agent for any lab that wants to handle controlled substances legally.
00:29:13 ►
So any lab that violates DEA regulations or just sort of pisses the DEA off risks losing their license.
00:29:21 ►
So not surprisingly, PharmCam and other labs quickly stopped publishing any quantitative data of street acid.
00:29:28 ►
So the question becomes, where do you go to get this good kind of information?
00:29:34 ►
And the answer is real simple.
00:29:35 ►
Go to Arrowwood, E-R-O-W-I-D.org.
00:29:40 ►
And it’s all free.
00:29:42 ►
You can get an amazing amount of information out there.
00:29:44 ►
And if you’re in a position to do so, I’m quite sure that the good folks at Arrowwood would really appreciate a donation of 25 bucks or so to help keep things running out there every day.
00:29:57 ►
I don’t know if you realize this, but Arrowwood is probably the number one psychedelic medicine archive on the Internet. I know that besides the tribe using it, the DEA and parents and law enforcement, all kinds of people go out there.
00:30:12 ►
It’s just an incredible resource, so help them out if you can.
00:30:17 ►
By the way, a $25 donation is also going to get you on their mailing list for the Arrowwood Extracts,
00:30:29 ►
which is a terrific little newsletter that they send out once or twice a year.
00:30:34 ►
And it’s amazing how many interesting things I would have missed without it,
00:30:39 ►
not to mention the cool quotes that they sometimes include.
00:30:45 ►
In fact, I’d like to read a quote that came out in the latest Arrowhead Extracts.
00:30:50 ►
It’s a quote from Teilhard de Chardin, and he said,
00:30:56 ►
There is an almost sensual longing for communion with others who have a larger vision.
00:31:03 ►
The immense fulfillment of the friendships between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality almost impossible
00:31:05 ►
to describe.
00:31:08 ►
I’ve read a lot of Teilhard’s work, but somehow I missed that quote, which really blew me
00:31:13 ►
away when I first heard it.
00:31:16 ►
You know, in a way, it really sums up how I feel about all of us here in the Psychedelic
00:31:20 ►
Salon.
00:31:22 ►
From the feedback I’ve been getting about these podcasts,
00:31:25 ►
I can tell you that there are a lot more of us out there
00:31:28 ►
than we might have suspected before.
00:31:31 ►
Right now, you know, it’s almost like the psychedelic community
00:31:33 ►
is invisible to the culture at large,
00:31:37 ►
and yet here it is, right out there in the open,
00:31:40 ►
invisible in plain sight.
00:31:42 ►
And one of the people who’s been out there in the front leading the intellectual endeavors of the tribe
00:31:48 ►
for many, many years now is our next speaker, Ralph Metzner.
00:31:54 ►
And since I’m sure that most of you are very familiar with Ralph’s work,
00:31:58 ►
I won’t insult you by giving a long introduction.
00:32:01 ►
But for those of you who may recall a name but not the details,
00:32:05 ►
just let me say that I think that it’s quite doubtful that you and I would be having this
00:32:10 ►
conversation right now had it not been for the intense dedication to these sacred medicines
00:32:16 ►
that Ralph has carried throughout his entire adult life. So without any further ado, here
00:32:22 ►
is Ralph Metzner.
00:32:25 ►
Next is Ralph Metzner. Next is Ralph Metzner.
00:32:28 ►
Thank you.
00:32:30 ►
So everyone who has experienced, I believe it’s true to say that everyone who has experienced LSD or another psychedelic would look on that experience, especially the first one, as a major life-changing event.
00:32:46 ►
What I’d like to do is to look at collective psychology,
00:32:53 ►
because the introduction of LSD and psychedelics into the culture
00:32:58 ►
produced a transformation of the entire culture, the consciousness of the culture.
00:33:07 ►
You could think of this as mass psychology or collective psychology.
00:33:12 ►
And I would like to take a look at that and see, it seems to me that there’s a certain pattern that can be detected.
00:33:20 ►
I’m sure there are many patterns.
00:33:22 ►
The situation is incredibly complex.
00:33:21 ►
I’m sure there are many patterns.
00:33:24 ►
The situation is incredibly complex.
00:33:38 ►
But I found it useful just recently to look at the historical development over the last 60 or 70 years of the transformations that the culture has undergone,
00:33:45 ►
catalyzed by the reintroduction of psychedelic substances.
00:33:49 ►
And I’m using for a framework of analysis a formulation by the Russian-Armenian-Greek philosopher,
00:33:57 ►
teacher George Gurdjieff, who is very influential in my work and my thinking,
00:34:03 ►
who is very influential in my work and my thinking,
00:34:10 ►
who formulated a principle that he said that any transformation on whatever level,
00:34:17 ►
whether individual or collective or planetary or cosmic or microcosmic,
00:34:22 ►
goes through seven identifiable phases like a musical octave.
00:34:25 ►
He called it the Law of Seven.
00:34:29 ►
And as you know, in the musical octave,
00:34:32 ►
he introduced this interesting point.
00:34:35 ►
In the musical octave, when you go from the note me to far, the third to the fourth,
00:34:37 ►
there’s a half note.
00:34:39 ►
And so what he said, to make the transition
00:34:42 ►
in the transformation from me to far,
00:34:44 ►
an external shock is necessary,
00:34:47 ►
and similarly for the transition from C to the next Do of the next octave. An external
00:34:52 ►
shock is necessary to keep the movement going. If that doesn’t happen, the movement of transformation
00:35:01 ►
kind of degenerates and gets diverted into something else.
00:35:17 ►
So what I would like to do then, what I’d like to suggest is that to look at the octave process of sociocultural transformation
00:35:26 ►
and that the first note in that octave, the dole, was the discovery of LSD by Albert Hoffman in 1943,
00:35:29 ►
which was a very peculiar event.
00:35:36 ►
And I believe Dave Nichols is later going to tell you something about the extreme peculiarity of that event.
00:35:41 ►
But we’re very aware of the consequences. I know all of you are.
00:35:46 ►
Well, it’s a great pleasure this evening to welcome an extraordinary eclectic.
00:35:53 ►
Jaron Lanier is, well, an artist, a computer scientist, a musician.
00:35:55 ►
What else are you, Jaron?
00:35:58 ►
A human being, I think.
00:36:03 ►
Probably best known for coining the term virtual reality. Most extraordinary when you think that that term has become embedded in our entire world,
00:36:10 ►
and this is where it came from.
00:36:12 ►
So I won’t say much more about him.
00:36:14 ►
You’ll hear more from himself.
00:36:15 ►
Charles Lanier.
00:36:16 ►
Thank you.
00:36:22 ►
Thank you, Sue.
00:36:24 ►
So since I knew nobody would show up on time at the start of this,
00:36:28 ►
I have a little thing to start with, which is some music.
00:36:30 ►
But it actually all is relevant to the talk.
00:36:34 ►
So I’m going to play a little bit first.
00:36:36 ►
Hello, hello, hello.
00:36:37 ►
Hello.
00:36:37 ►
Hello.
00:37:08 ►
Ah, what is the instrument?
00:37:11 ►
Well, no, no, no, no. It’s related to the Shang.
00:37:12 ►
It’s a different instrument,
00:37:13 ►
and there’s actually a reason I played that instrument.
00:37:16 ►
This instrument is the prototype for the computer,
00:37:19 ►
and let me explain why that’s true.
00:37:23 ►
4,000 years ago,
00:37:27 ►
these things were being made in Southeast Asia.
00:37:30 ►
This particular one is called a can, and it’s from Laos.
00:37:34 ►
Now, they were traded across the Silk Route, and they were known to the ancient Greeks and Romans.
00:37:37 ►
Now, they showed up in Rome, and the Romans thought,
00:37:41 ►
well, these things are amusing, but we’re Rome,
00:37:43 ►
so if we’re going to make one of these things, it ought to be big, like we’re big.
00:37:47 ►
So they made a giant steam-powered one.
00:37:50 ►
And it was a noisemaker in the Colosseum.
00:37:54 ►
So it would make sort of a hooting sound to go along with beheadings and whatnot.
00:37:58 ►
And then that thing, this is true.
00:38:02 ►
Look it up.
00:38:02 ►
It’s true.
00:38:04 ►
You know, human history is sad, but there’s a way to look at it to make it funny,
00:38:07 ►
and it’s important to do that once in a while.
00:38:09 ►
So that thing turned into the medieval pipe organ.
00:38:15 ►
Now, one thing you want to notice about these is that these are the first instruments,
00:38:18 ►
the first objects made by people with a lot of similar objects that had to perform in parallel.
00:38:23 ►
So it’s like the first memory,
00:38:26 ►
and roughly speaking, but it gets better.
00:38:29 ►
So the medieval pipe organ was often
00:38:32 ►
a semi-automatic instrument.
00:38:34 ►
And it was actually the mechanism of the pipe organ,
00:38:37 ►
which along with clocks, were the most sophisticated
00:38:40 ►
mechanisms of their day that inspired a guy named Jacquard
00:38:43 ►
to make a loom that eventually was copied into the first calculator and turned into the computer.
00:38:48 ►
So this is the ancestor. This is the thing.
00:38:52 ►
Now, first question you might want to ask
00:38:57 ►
is have they gotten any better or any worse?
00:39:00 ►
It’s not an easy question and a lot of this talk is going to be about that because I think
00:39:04 ►
in a multitude of ways in terms of beauty and expressiveness,
00:39:08 ►
quality of user interface, amount of control, number of parameters under simultaneous control,
00:39:14 ►
if you want to be technical, in a whole bunch of ways, this is, like, better than any computer that’s come since.
00:39:18 ►
All right?
00:39:19 ►
And that bothers me.
00:39:21 ►
So now continuing with our little historical approach to these things. So by the
00:39:29 ►
time we hit Princess Ada and the birth of this sort of programmable calculator, we start to have
00:39:38 ►
a version of this that’s not making music or art anymore. It’s just crunching numbers. So it kind
00:39:42 ►
of got more abstract. But doesn’t really turn into a computer until
00:39:47 ►
the darkest days of World War II, and we meet
00:39:51 ►
a young man named Alan Turing. How many of you have heard of Alan Turing?
00:39:56 ►
Okay, he’s an amazing character, and he invented
00:40:00 ►
a lot of what the 20th century was about. It’s just extraordinary. So let me
00:40:04 ►
tell you a bit about his life. Turing was the first hacker. He got hired by the British government to work with this huge,
00:40:14 ►
clunking, noisy, smelly sort of box car of a computer in a basement in England. And his job
00:40:22 ►
was to crack codes. Now, the Nazis had a code called the Enigma Code.
00:40:27 ►
And the way the Enigma Code worked is there was a physical box,
00:40:30 ►
these wooden boxes with knobs, and you could dial the knobs to a certain secret code,
00:40:33 ►
and there was a way to pass in strips of paper that were encoded with a secret message,
00:40:39 ►
and then you could get out the other side the message decoded.
00:40:42 ►
And the Nazi mathematicians were convinced that the Enigma code was unbreakable.
00:40:48 ►
But Turing, being the first computer hacker, broke it.
00:40:52 ►
Broke it both with his brilliance and with the ability to use this machine.
00:40:56 ►
So he became really one of the major heroes of World War II.
00:41:03 ►
There’s a darkness to this this because anytime you open up humanity to more information,
00:41:10 ►
more options, and more freedom, then the responsibility factor kicks in. So now suddenly Churchill
00:41:14 ►
knows who’s about to get bombed and has to sort of pretend he doesn’t in order for it
00:41:17 ►
to be useful. This very typical modern dilemma. Anyway, Turing has one little problem, which is his lifestyle is
00:41:29 ►
illegal. After the war, he’s a great war hero, one of the most important figures in England in the
00:41:35 ►
war. Turns out he’s gay, and it’s illegal to be gay in England. So how’s that for a wide variety of topics at a single conference?
00:41:47 ►
You’ve heard sound bites now from everything from the grand illusion of consciousness
00:41:52 ►
to gay computer scientists in England,
00:41:56 ►
the price of acid in the street or the quality of acid in the street these days.
00:42:00 ►
And actually, those little sound bites that you heard were only eight of over 30
00:42:07 ►
presenters at the Mind States 4 conference in 2003, which was held, by the way, at the
00:42:14 ►
International House in Berkeley, California, end of May. And it gives you some idea, I
00:42:21 ►
think, of the amazing amount of information covered in this and the other Mind States conferences.
00:42:27 ►
Over the three days of the conferences, I said, there were over 30 speakers who made presentations.
00:42:33 ►
And as I said in the beginning, the recordings of many, if not all, of these talks are available through the Muscaria website.
00:42:42 ►
And I’m sure I’m probably mangling the pronunciation of that name, so let me spell it out.
00:42:49 ►
The actual URL is www.musquaria.com slash mindstates.
00:43:01 ►
I’m going to put a link to it on the on our podcast page under the description of
00:43:07 ►
this podcast so you can link directly there if you want to that way if you heard anything here
00:43:12 ►
that tickles your fancy well uh be nice if you went to the muscaria site in order to talk or two
00:43:19 ►
in case you’re interested this isn’t a big money, and no, I don’t get a cut on the sales either.
00:43:27 ►
In fact, I seriously doubt if there’s anybody here making any kind of a profit.
00:43:32 ►
I know that JT and his team have put in a lot of time recording these talks and making them available online,
00:43:40 ►
primarily to help John recoup a little of the expense of producing these large events.
00:43:47 ►
Actually, they’re more of family gatherings than anything.
00:43:50 ►
And next month I’ll try to get to doing another one of these sampler podcasts
00:43:56 ►
with some soundbites from the 2005 conference that was just held this past May
00:44:03 ►
to give you an idea of what’s available in audio recordings from that year as well.
00:44:09 ►
Plus, you can get them on the Moose Curious site and see.
00:44:12 ►
But as I said earlier, thanks to John and JT and Kevin and a few others,
00:44:17 ►
and I hope to eventually podcast most of these talks.
00:44:20 ►
But that’s probably a year or so away, considering the fact that I’ve got dozens of other recordings already in the queue.
00:44:29 ►
So it looks like it’s going to be a fun year getting a bunch of podcasts out.
00:44:34 ►
As long as I’m promoting other people’s sites,
00:44:37 ►
I’d like to mention one other place on the net that you might find interesting,
00:44:41 ►
and it’s Solid Science.
00:44:43 ►
Solid Science.
00:44:44 ►
Solid Silence,
00:44:46 ►
00:44:52 ►
For one thing,
00:44:53 ►
they’ve got some really interesting podcasts,
00:44:56 ►
and you can find a link on our podcast page
00:44:59 ►
at Matrix Masters to their page.
00:45:01 ►
Another thing you’ll find there on their site
00:45:03 ►
is their festival CDs.
00:45:07 ►
I don’t know about you, but each year when Fraser Clark starts talking about the Buddha
00:45:11 ►
Field festivals in his Up newsletter, I just really wish I was living close enough to make
00:45:18 ►
it.
00:45:18 ►
You know, it’s a long hop across the ocean for the festival, just like it’d be a long
00:45:23 ►
hop for those guys to come over here for Burning Man.
00:45:25 ►
But now Georgina, through her Solid Silence website,
00:45:31 ►
is making it possible for me to tune in to some of those sounds of the other festivals
00:45:36 ►
through the magic of some CDs that she’s produced.
00:45:40 ►
And if I can remember it, I’m planning on bringing one of them to Burning Man next year
00:45:45 ►
to play during some of the breaks at the MAPS Blanque Norte lectures.
00:45:50 ►
You know, it’ll be sort of one of those Burning Buddhafield Man vibes, you know.
00:45:56 ►
Speaking of good vibes, I also want to again thank Jacques, Cordell, and Wells of Chateau Hayouk
00:46:03 ►
for the use of their music here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:46:07 ►
By the way, I just heard from Jacques the other day,
00:46:10 ►
and he tells me that he’s now recording some tracks for their next release,
00:46:15 ►
which, if all goes well, should be out early next year.
00:46:19 ►
So that’s good news for all of us Chateau Hayouk fans.
00:46:23 ►
Well, thanks again for joining all of us here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:46:28 ►
Our numbers continue to grow quite rapidly
00:46:31 ►
and I really do appreciate you all tuning in. It’s good to
00:46:36 ►
have you here. And for now, this is Lorenzo
00:46:39 ►
signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my
00:46:44 ►
friends.