Program Notes
Guest speakers: Julie Holland, Rick Doblin, Charles Grob, Ann & Sasha Shulgin, Alex Grey, and Lorenzo
Here are a few samples from the 2005 Mind States conference that was held in Berkeley, California in May of that year. Sound bites from the following talks are included here:
Dr. Julie Holland: “Medical Ecstasy: A Harm Reduction Model”
Dr. Rick Doblin: “Psychedelic Psychotherapy & Culture”
Dr. Charles Grob: “Psilocybin Use in Psychiatry”
Ann & Sasha Shulgin: “Ask the Shulgins”
Alex Grey: “Artists & Their Drugs”
Additionally, this podcast includes a talk by Lorenzo at a salon in Venice Beach, California in 2003, where he recapitulates his “Living Under the Radar” talk from Mind States IV.
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:22 ►
Well, it’s been a while since we last got together,
00:00:26 ►
and as strange as this may sound,
00:00:27 ►
I’ve missed getting together with you.
00:00:30 ►
I can’t quite explain it,
00:00:31 ►
but somehow I feel like we’re all together here
00:00:34 ►
in cyberdelic space at the same time.
00:00:37 ►
In a way, I guess we are, you know?
00:00:39 ►
Like the rest of you,
00:00:40 ►
I’ve probably got too many projects going on right now,
00:00:43 ►
but I don’t want to give any of them up besides these podcasts I’ve been working on the
00:00:49 ►
schedule for this year’s Planque Norte lectures at Burning Man it looks like
00:00:53 ►
we’re going to have an excellent program again this year by the end of June the
00:00:58 ►
schedule will be posted on the Planque Norte section of our website which you
00:01:02 ►
can get to the link at the top of
00:01:05 ►
the homepage at matrixmasters.com.
00:01:08 ►
And by the way, we’re going to have a couple of recording backup plans this year, so shortly
00:01:14 ►
after this year’s burn, I’ll begin posting some of the talks in podcast format for those
00:01:19 ►
of you who won’t be at Burning Man this year.
00:01:23 ►
Another little project I’ve got going is the remodeling of some parts of the Matrix Masters site.
00:01:29 ►
The main thing I’m adding is a chill space
00:01:31 ►
where there’ll be a wiki you can use
00:01:34 ►
to comment on these podcasts.
00:01:36 ►
You know, after receiving so many really interesting emails,
00:01:40 ►
all of which I wanted to write long answers to,
00:01:43 ►
I decided that the best way for these discussions to take place is online,
00:01:48 ►
where we can all join in,
00:01:50 ►
and I decided I’m using a wiki over a bulletin board format
00:01:54 ►
because this seems to be a lot easier to use
00:01:56 ►
and somewhat more interactive, I think, too.
00:01:59 ►
So I’ve been in a little coding vortex lately
00:02:02 ►
while I teach myself Ruby on Rails,
00:02:04 ►
which is the tool I’m using to build our chill space.
00:02:09 ►
Today I’m going to play a few sound bites from the 2005 Mind States Conference that was held in San Francisco.
00:02:16 ►
Since there were over 25 speakers at this conference, I’m only going to have time to give you a few highlights from five of the presentations.
00:02:25 ►
to give you a few highlights from five of the presentations. The cuts we’ll hear today are by Julie Holland, Rick Godlin, Charlie Grove, Ann and Sasha Shulgin, and
00:02:29 ►
Alex Gray. And during the program I’ll tell you where you can get the full
00:02:34 ►
version of each of these talks. And after these 2005 Mind States cuts I’m also
00:02:41 ►
going to play part of a talk I gave at Kathleen’s Salon in Venice Beach in June of 2003.
00:02:47 ►
So let’s get started here.
00:02:50 ►
The first cut I thought you might find interesting is from Dr. Rick Doblin’s talk, Psychedelic
00:02:55 ►
Psychotherapy Research and Psychedelic Culture.
00:02:58 ►
As you know, Rick is the chairman and founder of MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.
00:03:06 ►
You can find them online at www.maps.org.
00:03:11 ►
I first began corresponding with Rick in 1986 when he made headlines by leading the charge to actually sue the federal government for scheduling MDMA.
00:03:23 ►
Needless to say, a lot of us were really blown away by such a gutsy move.
00:03:28 ►
So let’s take a listen to a little of what Rick had to say to the good folks who attended
00:03:32 ►
the 2005 Mind States Conference.
00:03:37 ►
What I’m going to try to speak to you about today, and I’m going to leave a bunch of time
00:03:42 ►
for questions too, is the incredible dynamic nature of this historical moment when it comes to psychedelic
00:03:48 ►
psychotherapy and also medical marijuana research, that this has been building
00:03:51 ►
for about 40 years where we’re at now. It’s an incredibly
00:03:55 ►
fruitful time, very delicate, and
00:03:59 ►
the horizons can really extend, I think, into a
00:04:03 ►
much greater kind of integration with our culture
00:04:06 ►
that we attempted that began 40 years ago through the 60s,
00:04:10 ►
and I think we’ve learned a lot from that experience.
00:04:13 ►
So it’s really precious moments now.
00:04:16 ►
I’m going to then give you kind of the larger vision of why I’m doing this,
00:04:20 ►
where I think this can take us, the importance of it,
00:04:23 ►
and then talk a little bit about a war of images.
00:04:26 ►
We have in our culture the images of fear, mostly promulgated by the government,
00:04:31 ►
the images of hope, representing the potential of psychedelics,
00:04:35 ►
religious use, therapeutic use, recreational use, creativity enhancement,
00:04:40 ►
and these are really struggling in our culture.
00:04:42 ►
And so I’ll give you some images about that to show you where we’re at.
00:04:46 ►
And I think we’ve kind of moved a little bit towards the predominance of the hope-filled images at the moment.
00:04:53 ►
Then I’m going to review for you briefly where we’re at with psychedelic research
00:04:56 ►
and then where we’re at with medical marijuana research and make some contrasts
00:05:01 ►
and then open it up for questions.
00:05:03 ►
and make some contrasts, and then open it up for questions.
00:05:13 ►
So what I’d like to say first is that we are now, with MDMA research,
00:05:17 ►
at a point that it’s taken us 20 years to reach.
00:05:20 ►
You know, MDMA was really introduced in the middle 70s in these underground psychedelic therapy circles,
00:05:24 ►
pioneered by Sasha Shilgan
00:05:25 ►
who we’ve heard from and Leo Zeff
00:05:27 ►
who we’ve referred to as the secret chief
00:05:29 ►
and to give you a sense of how
00:05:32 ►
things are actually developing we’ve just got a second
00:05:33 ►
edition of the book which we call
00:05:35 ►
The Secret Chief Revealed
00:05:37 ►
his family has now been comfortable letting us
00:05:39 ►
put out his real name, putting out pictures
00:05:41 ►
and his family has written tributes to him
00:05:43 ►
for the work that he did.
00:05:45 ►
But when we first published the book, we were still more back in the fear-based states,
00:05:49 ►
and it wasn’t really something that they were comfortable with.
00:05:52 ►
So starting in 1984, the DEA moved to criminalize MDMA,
00:05:57 ►
and as a college student at New College down in Sarasota, Florida,
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I had already learned about this psychedelic underground,
00:06:04 ►
had become a little bit of a
00:06:07 ►
participant in it, and had the time to create
00:06:12 ►
a non-profit with Elise Agar and Debbie Harlow, and we knew
00:06:15 ►
that history was going to recapitulate itself. We knew that MDMA was going to be criminalized.
00:06:19 ►
It was already being referred to as ecstasy. It was already being used in public settings
00:06:23 ►
as well. Around half a million doses had been taken in these underground therapeutic settings
00:06:30 ►
under the code name ADAM.
00:06:31 ►
The government had no knowledge of that at all.
00:06:34 ►
And so when they tried to criminalize ecstasy,
00:06:37 ►
we had already been laying the groundwork through, in part, Robert Mueller,
00:06:42 ►
who was Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations,
00:06:45 ►
and he’d written this book,
00:06:46 ►
New Genesis, Shaping a Global Spirituality.
00:06:49 ►
And his thesis was that we have the United Nations,
00:06:53 ►
but that underlying the conflicts that we’re going through
00:06:56 ►
are wars of religion,
00:06:58 ►
and that eventually we’ll need this sort of united religions
00:07:01 ►
to try to have the mystics of the different religions come together.
00:07:04 ►
And I had written to him and asked him, in his book, he hadn’t mentioned psychedelics at all.
00:07:10 ►
And so I said, it seems to me that since psychedelics can’t help us understand mysticism and religion,
00:07:15 ►
this global spirituality, would you be willing to help out in efforts to restart psychedelic research?
00:07:22 ►
And to my utter astonishment, he actually sent me back a handwritten letter
00:07:25 ►
saying yes, he would be willing to help out.
00:07:27 ►
And not only that,
00:07:28 ►
he gave me a list of some monks and rabbis
00:07:31 ►
and Zen Buddhist priests
00:07:32 ►
who he wanted me to communicate with.
00:07:34 ►
And I interpreted what he said was
00:07:36 ►
send them MDMA
00:07:37 ►
and then have them send reports back to him
00:07:41 ►
about what they thought its potential was
00:07:44 ►
for aids to meditation,
00:07:46 ►
aids to spirituality.
00:07:47 ►
So we had done that.
00:07:48 ►
And we’d also been working with various people who were well-known in psychiatry, preparing
00:07:54 ►
for this eventual crackdown.
00:07:56 ►
So 84 DEA announces that they’re going to try to crack down.
00:08:00 ►
I walk into the DEA headquarters with a petition.
00:08:03 ►
We had excellent pro bono lawyers and said we want a hearing on MDMA.
00:08:07 ►
And this began my political work, and it shocked the DEA.
00:08:12 ►
Nobody had spoken up before on behalf of a drug that they had tried to criminalize.
00:08:16 ►
There had been some efforts on medical marijuana that they had successfully squashed.
00:08:20 ►
And they were able, though, to succeed in overruling the administrative law judge
00:08:26 ►
who said it should be in Schedule 3, meaning it should be available to therapists,
00:08:30 ►
and they stuck it in Schedule 1.
00:08:33 ►
And so in 86, what I did was I started MAPS in the sense as a nonprofit psychedelic pharmaceutical company.
00:08:41 ►
Now, the other things that I’ve learned in a way from the 60s is this
00:08:46 ►
overemphasis on the benefits and an underemphasis on the risks. And it’s natural to do that because
00:08:53 ►
the government is overemphasizing the risks and completely denying the benefits. And so it’s sort
00:08:59 ►
of a reflexive, natural thing to sort of just be oppositional to that. But I think that would be our downfall.
00:09:05 ►
And we need to be the leaders in the research into the risks of MDMA,
00:09:10 ►
the risks of LSD, the risks of all these drugs,
00:09:13 ►
because the government has lost credibility.
00:09:15 ►
The government educational programs, DARE programs,
00:09:17 ►
kids don’t believe them, parents don’t believe them,
00:09:20 ►
you don’t really believe the messages, they’re way exaggerated.
00:09:23 ►
And so where do you go for information about the risks? It has to be to those of us who are trying to make it into
00:09:29 ►
medicines, that we are looking at risks and benefits. And so the key to this approval at
00:09:34 ►
Harvard was that we brought them the best methodologically designed study to look at the
00:09:41 ►
risks of MDMA. This is in terms of neurocognitive consequences. So far,
00:09:45 ►
there’s been hardly anything that the government has really been able to say about functional
00:09:49 ►
consequences about how MDMA supposedly harms you. We can have all these brain images, but the
00:09:54 ►
question is, what do they mean in terms of our daily lives, in terms of our function? What import
00:10:01 ►
do they have, if any? And so the research, there’s no real significant harms to the body from MDMA.
00:10:07 ►
There is overheating at raves.
00:10:09 ►
People die from hyperthermia.
00:10:11 ►
There are problems that you can get from drinking too much water.
00:10:13 ►
But fundamentally, MDMA doesn’t hurt any bodily system, even in massive amounts.
00:10:19 ►
And we’ve done dog studies, rat studies, daily dosing for 28 days, high doses.
00:10:23 ►
MDMA, really, the government has tried to talk about MDMA and Parkinson’s.
00:10:27 ►
It hasn’t really been able to do that.
00:10:30 ►
In case you’d like to hear the rest of Rick’s talk or any of the other talks on today’s
00:10:34 ►
podcast, there are still a few CDs left that were produced at the end of the conference,
00:10:39 ►
and I’m sure that John and his associates would love to clear out some warehouse space.
00:10:50 ►
It’d be pretty cool if you went out to the Mascara site and picked up a CD or two.
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And there’s a link to their site under the description of this podcast at our main website, which is matrixmasters.com slash podcast.
00:11:16 ►
Also, you might want to listen to our podcast number 14, which has a talk that Rick gave at the National Press Club in Washington the same day that MAPS continued its lawsuit against the fascists in Washington who are trying to prevent an approved medical marijuana study from going forward.
00:11:23 ►
Now, let’s listen to part of Dr. Julie Holland’s presentation on medical ecstasy. Julie, as you probably know,
00:11:26 ►
wrote the book titled MDMA, titled Ecstasy,
00:11:29 ►
The Complete Guide,
00:11:30 ►
a comprehensive look at the risks and benefits of MDMA.
00:11:35 ►
Back in 1994,
00:11:37 ►
Julie received the Outstanding Resident Award
00:11:40 ►
from the National Institute of Mental Health,
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and at the time of this talk,
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Julie was an attending physician
00:11:45 ►
and board-certified psychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital,
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where she was working in the psychiatric emergency room.
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And as a liaison to the hospital’s medical emergency room and toxology department,
00:11:58 ►
Julie is considered an expert on street drugs.
00:12:01 ►
So now let’s listen to Dr. Holland tell us about how MDMA made it to the street Thank you. word choice because I actually changed the name of my talk. From medical ecstasy, a harm reduction model for MDMA use,
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to medical MDMA, a harm reduction model for ecstasy use.
00:12:34 ►
That’s the right way to say it, I think.
00:12:36 ►
And, you know, your point is very well taken and very true that what is ecstasy?
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It’s anybody’s guess.
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If you buy a tablet, what you’re getting.
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that what is ecstasy?
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It’s anybody’s guess.
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If you buy a tablet, what you’re getting.
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Medical MDMA, at least you know if you’re enrolled in a research protocol that you’re going to get pure MDMA, and you’ll know the amount.
00:12:57 ►
So when I say ecstasy, I imagine most of you conjure up some sort of a scene similar to this.
00:13:02 ►
Most of you conjure up some sort of a scene similar to this.
00:13:12 ►
But 20 years ago, when I first heard about MDMA back in 1985, there was no such thing as a rave.
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And I was hearing about it in terms of psychotherapists giving it to their patients, having tremendous results,
00:13:24 ►
and then the government coming down and saying that they were going to make it illegal, and all these psychiatrists and therapists coming out of the woodwork and saying,
00:13:27 ►
actually, I really wish you wouldn’t take this away from me because it seems like a pretty magical tool,
00:13:32 ►
and we’ve never had anything like it in psychiatry.
00:13:36 ►
So we have this great therapeutic tool in a field with very few tools.
00:13:41 ►
I mean, this is a catalyst that can be used during psychotherapy to make it go deeper,
00:13:46 ►
faster, to be more efficient and more effective,
00:13:49 ►
and I would also say potentially less painful.
00:13:53 ►
Really good therapy takes years and years, and it goes and fits and starts, and it hurts.
00:13:59 ►
So, you know, sometimes I am quoted as likening MDMA to a sort of anesthetic
00:14:06 ►
because it eases the process of psychotherapy.
00:14:09 ►
It makes it a little more comfortable.
00:14:12 ►
I just wanted to very quickly go through the history, which I imagine a lot of you already know.
00:14:16 ►
This was a drug that was patented because it was sort of a byproduct within a synthesis of a medicine called hydrostinin.
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And the patent was applied for in 1912 and received in 1914 by Merck,
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and so all of us sort of complain now that you can’t patent it again.
00:14:33 ►
Although it’s unclear whether you could perhaps do some sort of a use patent,
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but you certainly can’t just patent the chemical again.
00:14:39 ►
Tested by the Army in 1953 on animals, not people.
00:14:43 ►
First street sample was found on the streets of Chicago,
00:14:47 ►
Dr. Doblin. I don’t know if that’s some sort of a coincidence. In 1970, and it was published,
00:14:52 ►
I believe, in 75. And then in 78, Sasha Shulgin and Dave Nichols published the first
00:14:58 ►
sort of speaking about the subjective effects and what it felt like to take MDMA.
00:15:04 ►
of speaking about the subjective effects and what it felt like to take MDMA.
00:15:12 ►
And then Sasha Shulgin turned on this therapist, Leo Zeff, who sort of came out of retirement and turned on other therapists and, you know, sort of became like a Johnny Appleseed going
00:15:19 ►
from therapist to therapist around the country, which started a wave of underground MDMA psychotherapy,
00:15:27 ►
which still exists today.
00:15:29 ►
So this is Sasha, who we all know and love, truly.
00:15:36 ►
You couldn’t really design a better medicine for psychotherapy augmentation, I think, than MDMA.
00:15:42 ►
It’s a good combination of a sort of, it’s got a
00:15:45 ►
stimulant base, like an amphetamine base, but the sort of psychedelic half of it makes it a really
00:15:51 ►
potent serotonin agonist. It floods the brain with serotonin and, to a lesser extent, dopamine. And
00:15:57 ►
these are two chemicals that tend to make you feel very happy and relaxed when they’re flowing to
00:16:02 ►
this extent in your brain.
00:16:10 ►
There’s something about having a lot of serotonin flooding your synapses that makes you feel,
00:16:18 ►
in most cases, not all, really good about yourself and about the people around you and about your life and pretty optimistic.
00:16:20 ►
And in the therapeutic context, this is important.
00:16:23 ►
It’s nice to have some optimism.
00:16:30 ►
And it’s also nice to have some love and feel connected to your therapist and the person who’s trying to help you a lot of times psychotherapy really takes years and years before you know the
00:16:34 ►
patient or client um trusts that the therapist is really on their side and trying to help them
00:16:40 ►
and work with them and for some reason and i think that it has to do with the stimulant effect and the dopamine effect, MDMA seems to help you remember things that have happened in your
00:16:52 ►
past that may or may not have been very traumatic. And because it’s got the stimulant base, you’re
00:16:59 ►
very awake, you’re focused. I want to introduce next Charlie Grobe.
00:17:10 ►
I think he’s really, he’s not just a pioneer in this field,
00:17:14 ►
but I think he’s one of the courageous people who’s really out there on the firing line.
00:17:22 ►
He’s director of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Harbor UCLA Medical Center and professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at UCLA School of Medicine.
00:17:28 ►
He conducted the first government-approved psychobiological research study of MDMA,
00:17:34 ►
and I know it wasn’t easy to get approval for that,
00:17:37 ►
and there’s constant obstacles being thrown in the way of the continuing research.
00:17:42 ►
He was also principal investigator of an international research project in the Amazon in Brazil
00:17:48 ►
studying the visionary plant brew ayahuasca.
00:17:53 ►
He’s currently conducting an approved research investigation
00:17:56 ►
on the safety and efficacy of psilocybin treatment of terminally ill patients with anxiety.
00:18:02 ►
of terminally ill patients with anxiety.
00:18:10 ►
You know, 30 years ago, I got into my head that I wanted to study psychedelics.
00:18:13 ►
I thought they had extraordinary potential to help us understand the mind,
00:18:19 ►
help us understand illness, and as treatment models as well.
00:18:26 ►
So I actually had an epiphany at 3 in the morning one night and my father who was very concerned about my lack of
00:18:28 ►
direction as I had dropped out of college at that
00:18:30 ►
point
00:18:31 ►
was concerned where I was headed so
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I decided to call him up and tell him I had
00:18:36 ►
figured it out so I called him
00:18:38 ►
I said dad I know what I
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want to do I want to study psychedelic
00:18:42 ►
drugs and he said well son there might
00:18:44 ►
be something to it,
00:18:45 ►
but no one will ever listen to you unless you get your credentials.
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So I know at that point I had to go back to school,
00:18:51 ►
so I went and got my credentials.
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And I think my father hadn’t given me that direction.
00:18:58 ►
I don’t think this would have happened.
00:19:00 ►
Also, I think it’s fascinating to look back on when psychiatry did have freedom to explore the potential that these compounds might have for healing in the 50s and the 60s. the investigators and clinicians who worked in this area then was that the psychedelic model
00:19:27 ►
was utilized and found to be remarkably effective for many conditions that have otherwise proved to
00:19:34 ►
be very difficult to treat using modern medical and psychiatric treatments. And so I think there’s,
00:19:43 ►
for instance, one example would be the treatment of alcoholism.
00:19:47 ►
I would challenge anyone here to tell me a clinical condition for which modern medicine
00:19:54 ►
and psychiatry has advanced so minimally over the last 50 years than the treatment of alcoholism.
00:19:59 ►
Fifty years ago, the standard approach was to refer a hardcore alcoholic to a 12-step program,
00:20:06 ►
and if it was a good fit, it might work, and wonderful if it did, but if it didn’t, they’re
00:20:11 ►
out of luck.
00:20:12 ►
Today, essentially, we do the same thing.
00:20:14 ►
We refer to 12-step programs.
00:20:16 ►
There isn’t much else.
00:20:17 ►
So looking back on what earlier investigators found was some extraordinary responses to the worst alcoholics.
00:20:30 ►
And Humphrey Osmond, the great Canadian investigator, did a retrospective examination of what was it about his successes amongst these hardcore alcoholics
00:20:39 ►
that distinguished them from those who didn’t do so well.
00:20:43 ►
And he found that those who did well for a while and then relapsed
00:20:46 ►
may have had beautiful aesthetic experience,
00:20:50 ►
may have had important autobiographic experience, but that was the end of it.
00:20:53 ►
The group that maintained sobriety over years not only had the aesthetic experience,
00:20:57 ►
the important autobiographic experience,
00:20:59 ►
but they had what he defined as a psycho-spiritual epiphany,
00:21:03 ►
a mystical breakthrough, a transpersonal experience, as you will.
00:21:07 ►
I think that is really core to the healing capacity of these compounds when looking in populations of people that you’re treating.
00:21:16 ►
And it also reminds me of what William James, the great founder of American psychology,
00:21:21 ►
more than 100 years ago once said about treating alcoholism,
00:21:25 ►
that the best treatment for dipsomania, which is the old way for describing alcoholism,
00:21:30 ►
the best treatment for dipsomania is religiomania.
00:21:33 ►
And perhaps we have a treatment here that might reliably induce, under optimal conditions, such an experience.
00:21:41 ►
And when I worked in Brazil studying the members of the Ayahuasca church, many of the people I interviewed,
00:21:48 ►
both formally for the study and informally, had histories prior
00:21:52 ►
to their entry into the church of serious alcoholism, serious drug addiction,
00:21:56 ►
serious antisocial behavior, serious explosive, discontrolled, violent
00:22:00 ►
disorders. And they had transformed. Now, all religions can point
00:22:04 ►
to their success stories. Nevertheless nevertheless I thought it was something unique and that distinguished
00:22:08 ►
this phenomenon is that they had a psychoactive sacrament which under
00:22:12 ►
optimal conditions could reliably induce this this religious psycho spiritual
00:22:17 ►
transpersonal epiphanous state so again as something I learned that I felt was very, very important.
00:22:32 ►
Now, there’s the difference between a trained psychiatrist describing an ayahuasca experience and how a layman like myself describes it.
00:22:36 ►
While I fumble around for the right word, Charlie goes right to the heart of the matter and calls it what it is,
00:22:42 ►
a religious, psycho-spiritual, transpersonal,
00:22:45 ►
epiphanous state.
00:22:47 ►
That pretty well sums it up, don’t you think?
00:22:50 ►
In case you’re joining us for the first time today, you might want to know that we featured
00:22:55 ►
Dr. Grobe in Podcast 13 of the Psychedelic Salon, where he talked about a study he’s
00:23:00 ►
conducting that is using the active ingredient in magic mushrooms to treat
00:23:05 ►
end-stage cancer patients who are also suffering from anxiety.
00:23:09 ►
And if we get permission, we’ll soon be podcasting an interview Charlie gave on our recent radio
00:23:14 ►
program in L.A.
00:23:16 ►
Now let’s kick back and spend some time with the Shulgens.
00:23:20 ►
Previously, we featured Ann Shulgen in our 21st podcast where she talked about psychedelic psychotherapy in the shadow.
00:23:27 ►
And that’s been one of our most popular programs.
00:23:30 ►
Sasha has been with us before speaking about natural versus synthetic psychedelic chemicals in podcast number 22 and about cacti in podcast 25.
00:23:41 ►
Now here they are together in their popular Ask the Shulgins format that many of you have probably participated
00:23:47 ►
in at one point or another.
00:23:53 ►
Does anyone need
00:23:54 ►
a summary of who we are and what we do?
00:23:59 ►
Yes?
00:24:01 ►
Why don’t you explain because you know better than I do.
00:24:05 ►
Oops.
00:24:07 ►
Seriously?
00:24:07 ►
Seriously?
00:24:08 ►
All right.
00:24:12 ►
We’ve only got an hour.
00:24:15 ►
This gentleman, known as Sasha, is, I think at present,
00:24:31 ►
I think at present he’s probably the world’s top researcher in the effect of psychedelic drugs on human beings.
00:24:40 ►
Most people who deal in this area are a term uh lab i think it is
00:24:51 ►
lab right lab which means lab experiments lab uh it’s short for large animal biochemistry. Right. Large animal being human beings. Yes. The thing we’ve
00:25:08 ►
also done at a certain point in the
00:25:11 ►
80s, I think, Sasha
00:25:14 ►
published everything that he had
00:25:19 ►
discovered and that included
00:25:22 ►
dosage levels and their effects in humans, et cetera, et cetera.
00:25:30 ►
He was publishing in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry
00:25:35 ►
and other scientific journals who have peer review.
00:25:41 ►
But at a certain point, and I forget when,
00:25:44 ►
when was it that the lawyers for those journals got cold feet?
00:25:49 ►
It was in the 1980s.
00:25:50 ►
I think it was, yeah.
00:25:51 ►
The legal advisors of the various editors of the various medical journals and pharmacological journals
00:25:57 ►
were advising the editors not to let human experiments be published unless they had been approved by
00:26:07 ►
and had been overseen by a research advisory panel of some type.
00:26:12 ►
And so in our little research group, we decided to be a research advisory panel
00:26:16 ►
and advise ourselves as to how we should do things.
00:26:20 ►
And that went along for about two or three years, and then that was felt to be uncomfortable.
00:26:25 ►
The journals are strictly a little bit uncomfortable publishing human data that did not come from known clinical sources.
00:26:32 ►
Well, everybody was getting cold feet.
00:26:34 ►
It was the beginning of the war on drugs in general, and they decided it was just too risky.
00:26:41 ►
They decided it was just too risky.
00:26:50 ►
Actually, our research group did include the kind of people who are supposed to be included in a, what do you call it, advisory panel. A psychiatrist and a psychologist.
00:26:56 ►
Lawyers, yeah, not too many lawyers.
00:27:08 ►
That was the point at which we began to think that the best thing to do was to put all this information,
00:27:17 ►
all this knowledge into a different form, one that did not depend on peer review.
00:27:21 ►
And so we began writing the first book, which was Pical.
00:27:25 ►
And we very cautiously indicated that it was a fictional book.
00:27:28 ►
So there would be no complications.
00:27:30 ►
The chemistry is not fictional.
00:27:32 ►
Maybe it is.
00:27:33 ►
No.
00:27:36 ►
Nope.
00:27:38 ►
But the
00:27:39 ►
rest of the story, you might say,
00:27:42 ►
is
00:27:43 ►
non-fiction here and there.
00:27:46 ►
Let’s put it that way.
00:27:48 ►
But some of it is fictional.
00:27:50 ►
And as far as the authorities go, it most definitely is a fictional story.
00:27:59 ►
And as far as my children go, it certainly is fictional because there’s a lot of sex in it.
00:28:05 ►
And parents don’t do that kind of thing.
00:28:09 ►
It’s amazing what children don’t know their parents do.
00:28:13 ►
They don’t want to know.
00:28:17 ►
Children prefer not to know.
00:28:20 ►
So that was the beginning of the writing.
00:28:24 ►
And so that was the beginning of the writing.
00:28:30 ►
And I was doing work as a lay therapist at that time.
00:28:32 ►
I did that for about two and a half years.
00:28:37 ►
And that was incredible work.
00:28:40 ►
Using MDMA before it became illegal.
00:28:49 ►
And let me tell you, MDMA is an extraordinary psychotherapeutic drug and I’m so happy to know that various places around the world
00:28:55 ►
it’s now being used in what I think is going to be its most important way
00:29:02 ►
and that is dealing with PTSD,
00:29:07 ►
which is post-traumatic stress disorder.
00:29:13 ►
Especially for veterans of war, I think MDMA is going to save a lot of sanity.
00:29:20 ►
Well, I can tell you from personal experience that what Ann just said about MDMA saving a lot of sanity for veterans of war is true.
00:29:24 ►
I really doubt if I’d even be alive today if I hadn’t found MDMA saving a lot of sanity for veterans of war is true. I really doubt if I’d even be alive today if I hadn’t found MDMA.
00:29:29 ►
And so it was really encouraging for me to hear that the protocol for Michael and Annie Midoffer’s MAP-sponsored MDMA study
00:29:37 ►
has been expanded to include war-related post-traumatic stress disorder.
00:29:42 ►
And that reminds me that we’ve got an MP3 of the mid-offers at the 2004 Burning Man
00:29:47 ►
lectures where they talked about their study.
00:29:50 ►
And you can download that talk from the 2004 Burning Man page in the Flanque Norte section
00:29:56 ►
of our Matrix Masters website if you want.
00:29:59 ►
Now we’ll finish our 2005 Mindstate samples with a cut from Alex Gray’s presentation,
00:30:05 ►
which he titled, Drugs and Art.
00:30:08 ►
And if you happen to be an artist of any kind, whether with a brush, pen, writing code, whatever,
00:30:14 ►
you probably know that drugs and art go together like fish and water.
00:30:18 ►
At least that’s the case with really great art, don’t you think?
00:30:23 ►
I put together this show that I call Drugs and Art because to me
00:30:29 ►
it’s a fascinating subject how a drug will in some way mirror the character of a person. And
00:30:39 ►
sometimes there’s interesting blends of drugs and things like that. But I think that it can also typify an artist’s
00:30:45 ►
sort of body of work. What kind of drugs were they doing? That’s one of the questions that I always
00:30:52 ►
ask when I see a work of art that I’m really excited about quite often. What were they on?
00:30:58 ►
And so I wanted to look at kind of the history of art,
00:31:13 ►
and there were always these anecdotes about how, you know,
00:31:18 ►
Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote the entire Kublai Khan,
00:31:25 ►
probably his best-known epic poem, while coming off of an opium smoke.
00:31:33 ►
And there’s been various kind of catalytic moments in art when a drug has been there to really push the artist over the edge. It may be really just representing where
00:31:47 ►
that artist goes on the spectrum. Like we can look at
00:31:51 ►
Jackson Pollock, a famous alcoholic.
00:31:56 ►
his brush strokes
00:32:02 ►
and his whole demeanor and approach to art were, oh, thank you very much,
00:32:09 ►
were this kind of wild, expressive, expressionistic kind of handling.
00:32:16 ►
And all the abstract expressionists, in fact, well, a lot of them were alcoholics.
00:32:24 ►
All the abstract expressionists, in fact, well, a lot of them were alcoholics.
00:32:30 ►
So what does that say about the kind of art that they were doing? So first of all, I wanted to look at one of the most famous alcoholics in history,
00:32:38 ►
and that was Rembrandt.
00:32:41 ►
And so this goes along with my question about, well, what was it that characterized alcohol and alcoholism?
00:32:50 ►
And certainly it’s a loosening of boundaries and it’s a kind of loosening up to a kind of open flow.
00:32:59 ►
You become more capable of being a medium for good or bad kind of forces.
00:33:08 ►
Usually they tend toward the dark, I guess, I’ve always thought.
00:33:14 ►
But this is Rembrandt’s self-portrait with his wife Saskia,
00:33:19 ►
but they’re supposed to be enacting a scene from The Prodigal Son,
00:33:24 ►
where the son gets his portion and goes off and becomes a wastrel
00:33:29 ►
on wine and women and song and things like that
00:33:34 ►
and goes begging back to his family.
00:33:35 ►
But here he’s enacting this scene, I guess, in the cabaret or something,
00:33:43 ►
or he’s getting ready to get soused and laid, I guess in the cabaret or something, or he’s getting ready to get soused and laid, I guess.
00:33:48 ►
At any rate, he had that kind of famous nose.
00:33:51 ►
And I do think that really this is just a, you could call it a harebrained theory.
00:34:00 ►
But I’ve always thought that the great expressionists
00:34:04 ►
But I’ve always thought that the great expressionists and those who did the most rapid and spontaneous and beautiful brushwork
00:34:10 ►
were many of them alcoholics.
00:34:13 ►
Now Manet was one of the earliest painters to do this famous kind of
00:34:23 ►
bohemian archetype of the absinthe drinker. Now the absinthe
00:34:31 ►
is a peculiar kind of alcohol that here is so green and the wormwood is very bitter and they
00:34:39 ►
melt the sugar in it and things like that. And there’s a whole kind of ritual around the absence.
00:34:46 ►
And so here we have the feeling of the kind of decadent character there with his drink.
00:34:53 ►
And then Degas, also one of the French Impressionists of that period,
00:35:00 ►
was trying to portray the truth about life
00:35:05 ►
and not just some idealized, classicized thing.
00:35:09 ►
He loved David and Ang,
00:35:13 ►
but he deviated from their subject matter.
00:35:21 ►
As you just heard, Alex accompanied his talk with a slide presentation.
00:35:26 ►
And if you want to hear another of Alex’s talks and actually be able to see the images he refers to,
00:35:30 ►
you might want to check out our podcast number 24,
00:35:34 ►
which is from a talk Alex gave at the 2002 Mind States Conference in Jamaica.
00:35:39 ►
And in that podcast, I tell you where you’ll find the links to the photos of the paintings he describes.
00:35:46 ►
And now for something completely different, as the Monty Python troupe might say.
00:35:52 ►
In our podcast number 23, I played several cuts from the 2003 Mind States Conference
00:35:58 ►
and included bits by Richard Glenn Boyer and John Gilmore,
00:36:02 ►
who were part of a panel that also included
00:36:05 ►
Eric Davis, Zoe Seven, Are You Serious?, and myself.
00:36:09 ►
To change the pace here a little bit,
00:36:11 ►
I’m now going to play a recording of my part of that program,
00:36:14 ►
but not as I gave it at the conference.
00:36:17 ►
This recording was made about a month later
00:36:19 ►
at Kathleen’s Salon in Venice Beach,
00:36:21 ►
and as you’ll hear, the general tone that night was a lot
00:36:25 ►
less formal and considerably more raucous than what you’ve been hearing
00:36:30 ►
from these conferences the main reason I’d like you to hear these remarks and
00:36:35 ►
this informal setting is to encourage all of you to organize a similar salon
00:36:39 ►
in your area in fact I know from the email I’ve been receiving that many of
00:36:43 ►
you already do get together
00:36:45 ►
on a regular basis and talk about all things psychedelic. You know, it’s really a great way
00:36:49 ►
to learn, even though, as you’ll hear, there are times when it seems as if everyone is talking at
00:36:54 ►
once. But that’s part of the beauty of these little gatherings, simultaneous audience participation.
00:37:02 ►
The title of my talk was Living Under the Radar, Surviving in a Control Culture.
00:37:08 ►
And I think all the narcs there thought we were going to talk about how to smuggle drugs
00:37:14 ►
around the country.
00:37:15 ►
Everybody knows that already.
00:37:21 ►
I divided my talk into three parts.
00:37:26 ►
The bad news, some tips, and the good news.
00:37:29 ►
And what I’m going to say here is not anything that you don’t already know.
00:37:34 ►
This is just kind of putting it all together and focusing it, putting it in one basket.
00:37:40 ►
So let’s start with the bad news.
00:37:42 ►
And I think the bad news is as bad as the news on this planet has been
00:37:46 ►
since humans started walking upright.
00:37:49 ►
That, you know, this country, America,
00:37:51 ►
this has been the land of the free and the home of the brave.
00:37:53 ►
This is where my closest friend, who’s Vietnamese,
00:37:57 ►
you know, he was a boat person.
00:37:58 ►
He wanted to get here.
00:38:00 ►
People, you know, died to get here.
00:38:02 ►
This was it.
00:38:03 ►
And this country now is no longer the land of the free.
00:38:09 ►
The laws in the books now allow you to be arrested and detained
00:38:13 ►
without any public process.
00:38:16 ►
In other countries, it’s called, let’s disappear them.
00:38:19 ►
And now they’ve been disappearing people.
00:38:22 ►
There’s a lot of people disappeared since 9-11,
00:38:24 ►
and now they’re actually disappearing U.S. citizens.
00:38:28 ►
And with the Patriot Act II that’s going through Congress now,
00:38:32 ►
they can, a bureaucrat, if this law passes,
00:38:36 ►
a bureaucrat will be able to say,
00:38:38 ►
you contributed to a terrorist organization,
00:38:41 ►
and they can determine that Greenpeace is that organization,
00:38:44 ►
and they can take your citizenship away.
00:38:47 ►
I mean, that’s how serious it is.
00:38:49 ►
And right now, your house can be searched without a warrant.
00:38:52 ►
You know, it hadn’t been the cars.
00:38:53 ►
We lost the Fourth Amendment with the cars on it.
00:38:55 ►
But they can search and seize without a warrant.
00:38:58 ►
And the official policy of this country, as you well know, is first strike, wars of aggression.
00:39:04 ►
Now, what happened
00:39:05 ►
to fairness and justice and the American heroes? We’re attacking people that pose no threat,
00:39:13 ►
I think. But whether or not they pose a threat, we don’t attack people first. And free and
00:39:19 ►
fair elections. We know that the thief in the White House wasn’t elected. We’ve got a really
00:39:27 ►
serious problem on our hands. The FTC now is letting Rupert Murdoch have at least 45%.
00:39:34 ►
The Senate’s trying to move a little bit slowly to fight this back. But the media has been
00:39:40 ►
taken over. We’ve got the internet left, and that’s about it, but the Internet may be all we need.
00:39:45 ►
Let’s not kid ourselves
00:39:47 ►
that we can just wait this out
00:39:49 ►
and maybe in 2008 it’ll be gone.
00:39:52 ►
Even if somebody as good as Kucinich
00:39:54 ►
wins in 2004,
00:39:56 ►
it’s going to take years
00:39:57 ►
to roll back what’s going on.
00:39:59 ►
We are living in a fascist country.
00:40:01 ►
This is Germany in the 30s, friends.
00:40:04 ►
It’s really, really bad.
00:40:06 ►
The Internet is not guaranteed.
00:40:07 ►
Pardon?
00:40:07 ►
The Internet is not guaranteed.
00:40:08 ►
No, no.
00:40:09 ►
I know.
00:40:09 ►
We’ll get into all this in a little bit.
00:40:10 ►
We’ll open it up for discussion.
00:40:12 ►
But right now,
00:40:14 ►
this is really serious.
00:40:15 ►
And I would love to bury my head in the sand,
00:40:18 ►
but I think we don’t have that choice right now.
00:40:21 ►
And on top of that,
00:40:23 ►
I think the reason we’re here,
00:40:24 ►
people like us, that there’s some strange things going on in this whole planet. We’re in some
00:40:29 ►
really interesting times. 2012 is on the way. A lot of things going on. I think for every
00:40:35 ►
one of us here, there were a countless number of volunteers. This is the front lines of
00:40:40 ►
consciousness right now, and we’re the best. That’s why we’re here. It isn’t going to be
00:40:44 ►
fun, but I think we have to all do our part, whatever that is. And
00:40:47 ►
I don’t know what it is. All of this stuff that’s going on with the brutal Bush regime
00:40:51 ►
that’s taken over and the country disintegrating, this could be happening anyhow. So let’s look
00:40:57 ►
at the larger picture. And I’m not really qualified to speak about this, but Mary C.
00:41:03 ►
has taught me a lot about
00:41:05 ►
the larger picture of astrology
00:41:08 ►
and the change of ages.
00:41:09 ►
The difference between the age of Pisces
00:41:12 ►
and the age of Aquarius is not a line
00:41:14 ►
in the sky, it’s a 300 year window.
00:41:16 ►
And it’s really a change in consciousness.
00:41:18 ►
And the Mayans had that concept,
00:41:20 ►
the Hopi. A lot of ancient
00:41:22 ►
traditions have this concept of the great
00:41:24 ►
year, the 26,000 year determined by the procession of the equinox.
00:41:28 ►
And at the end of every great age, you can go back every 2,100 years or so and see what happened.
00:41:34 ►
And historically, the old temples were torn down.
00:41:38 ►
In some cultures, they were torn down very carefully, stone by stone.
00:41:41 ►
And new temples built in the same place out of the same materials to new gods.
00:41:48 ►
And so what’s going on here may be so big that it’s much bigger than just what’s going on in our country
00:41:50 ►
that we may be in a really rocky state
00:41:53 ►
between a change from Pisces to Aquarius.
00:41:57 ►
You’ve got the Enron-type corporations thing breaking down.
00:42:00 ►
You’ve got the Catholic Church falling apart.
00:42:02 ►
You’ve got this country’s democracy falling apart.
00:42:05 ►
So let’s just say maybe there’s so much going on that what do we do?
00:42:10 ►
How do we survive in this?
00:42:11 ►
How do we keep our sanity?
00:42:13 ►
Because I think it’s important we stay here and try to stay positive
00:42:17 ►
and pump good energy into the noosphere right now.
00:42:20 ►
So how do we survive in this environment?
00:42:23 ►
Well, step one, and I’ve taken a lot of flack
00:42:28 ►
since I said this at MindStates. I had a lot of people did not like what I had to say.
00:42:32 ►
They said this is very divisive. And we’ll circle back to this and talk about it when
00:42:36 ►
I open up for questions. But here’s what I say is step one. And that is we have to grok
00:42:42 ►
the fact that we are different from them.
00:42:45 ►
Now, that sounds very divisive, but I’ll tell you what.
00:42:49 ►
My consciousness, my state of mind is different from George Bush’s.
00:42:55 ►
I can’t get around that.
00:42:57 ►
Now, I know we’re all one.
00:42:59 ►
I know he’s another specimen of the Godhead.
00:43:01 ►
But you have one.
00:43:02 ►
Yeah.
00:43:02 ►
It’s different if you have one.
00:43:02 ►
Yeah.
00:43:07 ►
So I think, and I’m talking very literally here,
00:43:11 ►
that we have to understand that we are radically different.
00:43:16 ►
And who I mean by we is us, the tribe, the psychedelic community.
00:43:19 ►
Let’s not pull any punches and just say,
00:43:22 ►
well, we’re people in a pen, you know, we want to legalize marijuana and stuff. I’ll tell you what, if you take LSD and you
00:43:26 ►
come back, you’re not the
00:43:28 ►
same person.
00:43:31 ►
And the good news
00:43:32 ►
is, there are millions,
00:43:34 ►
there are at least 10 or more
00:43:36 ►
million people from the 60s
00:43:38 ►
that took LSD and are
00:43:40 ►
now in positions in government and business.
00:43:42 ►
I mean, there are a lot
00:43:44 ►
of sleepers. A phraser there are a lot of sleepers.
00:43:45 ►
Fraser calls them the zippy sleepers.
00:43:48 ►
Our job, those of us that are conscious of the waste
00:43:51 ►
and admitting that we are a part of the psychedelic community of the tribe,
00:43:55 ►
our job is to start tweaking them and waking these people up.
00:43:59 ►
Now, you can think of this as a metaphor or a mind game.
00:44:05 ►
I think of this as a fact.
00:44:07 ►
I think there are more than one human species walking on the earth right now.
00:44:12 ►
At one point in time, there were three.
00:44:14 ►
There was the Neanderthal, the Homo sapiens, and Homo erectus.
00:44:18 ►
I really think there’s always been a fourth species,
00:44:21 ►
and I think it was the original, the first human species,
00:44:26 ►
and I call it Homo Divinus.
00:44:28 ►
The humans that realize that they have the God within them, that we are part of the God
00:44:36 ►
net.
00:44:40 ►
Let me give a metaphor.
00:44:42 ►
I wasn’t able, I didn’t have the time at MindState to do this.
00:44:45 ►
But the way I see this is,
00:44:47 ►
whatever the legends are about where the first humans came from,
00:44:51 ►
it’s like a river of humanity.
00:44:53 ►
And there have been branches that have gone off,
00:44:55 ►
the Neanderthals, the Homo erectus.
00:44:57 ►
And there’s this branch that’s gone off now called Homo sapiens.
00:45:00 ►
And it’s a branch that has drained most of the water
00:45:04 ►
from the main stream of
00:45:05 ►
Homo Divinus. But there’s always been
00:45:08 ►
us Homo Divinus, you know,
00:45:09 ►
Buddha, people like that, the Christ,
00:45:12 ►
and the everyday people like us
00:45:14 ►
that have been in the stream. Well, now
00:45:15 ►
the sapes, as I call them,
00:45:17 ►
that’s short for sentient
00:45:22 ►
apes.
00:45:24 ►
The sapes have gone over there
00:45:26 ►
and they have drained so much of it.
00:45:29 ►
But I don’t mean to be a device of us and them
00:45:33 ►
because you know what?
00:45:34 ►
A lot of my friends, relatives, and neighbors are over there.
00:45:37 ►
And I love a lot of those people.
00:45:38 ►
I think what we need to be doing
00:45:40 ►
is digging a channel back up there
00:45:42 ►
to bring them back into the mainstream.
00:45:44 ►
Because here’s something about evolution that I didn’t know until I started researching it.
00:45:48 ►
I thought speciation, different species, had to be genetically different.
00:45:54 ►
And the genes are not the determining factor.
00:45:57 ►
That there are identical, genetically identical antelope, I believe, or elk,
00:46:02 ►
that got separated millennia ago by earthquakes.
00:46:06 ►
And they are considered separate and distinct species,
00:46:09 ►
even though their genes are 100% the same.
00:46:11 ►
And what determines this is their eating habits
00:46:15 ►
and their breeding habits.
00:46:17 ►
When you put them together, if they don’t interbreed,
00:46:19 ►
they’re another species by definition.
00:46:22 ►
Now, I was at a rave up in the hills
00:46:26 ►
of San Bernardino
00:46:27 ►
a few years ago, sitting around a fire
00:46:30 ►
and I heard these two young kids
00:46:32 ►
talking and they were both vegetarians.
00:46:34 ►
They ate a little different. And I heard
00:46:36 ►
one of them talking about Britney Spears
00:46:38 ►
and these were pretty young people
00:46:39 ►
and this one guy says, you know,
00:46:41 ►
I wouldn’t screw her with your dick.
00:46:46 ►
That kid is a different species.
00:46:55 ►
The thing about Homo Divinus is I don’t see it as divisive.
00:47:08 ►
Because I know there are Republican Homo Divinus is I don’t see it as divisive because I know there are Republican Homo Divinus,
00:47:10 ►
Democrat Homo Divinus, Green Homo Divinus,
00:47:12 ►
Aborigine Homo Divinus.
00:47:16 ►
I think the way I define it is a state of mind,
00:47:17 ►
a state of consciousness,
00:47:19 ►
the way you see yourself in the world.
00:47:20 ►
And just this week,
00:47:23 ►
it’s actually in Fraser Clark’s newsletter, I believe,
00:47:26 ►
I read this and I wrote it down. I wanted to read it. I think it’s very important because
00:47:28 ►
it speaks to this point. It’s an
00:47:29 ►
old Native American prophecy,
00:47:32 ►
and I think probably most of you have heard it already.
00:47:34 ►
It says, when the earth
00:47:36 ►
is ravaged and the animals
00:47:38 ►
are dying, a new tribe
00:47:40 ►
of people shall come unto the earth
00:47:42 ►
from many colors, classes,
00:47:44 ►
and creeds, and who by their actions and deeds shall make the earth green again. I think that’s Homo Divinis.
00:47:55 ►
I think that’s us.
00:47:56 ►
I think that’s who we are.
00:47:57 ►
So I don’t mean this divisively, but we really are different from they are.
00:48:05 ►
Just because they look human doesn’t from they are. Just because
00:48:06 ►
they look human
00:48:07 ►
doesn’t mean they are.
00:48:13 ►
You know,
00:48:14 ►
when you start thinking this way,
00:48:16 ►
it can possibly save your sanity.
00:48:19 ►
I mean,
00:48:19 ►
it’s like waking up in a zoo
00:48:21 ►
and you look around and think,
00:48:22 ►
gosh, what a beautiful place this is.
00:48:25 ►
And all of a sudden you say,
00:48:26 ►
damn, these apes are in charge.
00:48:29 ►
They’ve got nuclear weapons.
00:48:32 ►
But it does change for you.
00:48:35 ►
So the real question is,
00:48:36 ►
how are we going to, as humans,
00:48:38 ►
survive in the inhuman culture of the sapes?
00:48:41 ►
Because it’s very important for us to survive.
00:48:44 ►
Because if we don’t pull our species through, it’s very important for us to survive. Because if we don’t
00:48:45 ►
pull our species through, it’s
00:48:48 ►
just not going to make it. I mean, they are bent
00:48:49 ►
on destroying it. So, tip one.
00:48:52 ►
This is the hardest step. If you can
00:48:54 ►
do this, you’ve got to make it. Turn off your television.
00:48:57 ►
Now,
00:48:58 ►
a guy came up to me at MindStates
00:48:59 ►
and produced this documentary on
00:49:01 ►
Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing
00:49:04 ►
Consent. And he was really upset.
00:49:06 ►
He said, there’s good stuff on PBS and all that.
00:49:08 ►
I said, you know, I think people here are smart enough to know
00:49:11 ►
that when I say turn off the television,
00:49:13 ►
is quit getting bombarded with all that stuff that’s on there.
00:49:16 ►
You can be smart enough to know to turn on a good documentary or something.
00:49:20 ►
But what is television promoting right now?
00:49:22 ►
Two things. I don’t care how good they are.
00:49:24 ►
Two things they’re promoting.
00:49:26 ►
Fear and consumerism.
00:49:27 ►
And I think that goes for national propaganda radio as well.
00:49:31 ►
There are very few programs.
00:49:33 ►
Look who’s sponsoring and paying for it.
00:49:35 ►
Look who’s behind it.
00:49:36 ►
Tip number two.
00:49:39 ►
Remain consciously aware that as a species, Homo Divinis,
00:49:44 ►
we are invisible to those people
00:49:46 ►
in control. They think we’re
00:49:48 ►
the same as them. They look at us. They read
00:49:50 ►
these fake polls. And so
00:49:52 ►
we’re invisible. So don’t
00:49:54 ►
get too nervous about all this.
00:49:56 ►
And you know that
00:49:57 ►
we’re not them. They are like the
00:50:00 ►
dodo bird. They’re heading to extinction.
00:50:02 ►
Look what they’re, the way they’re
00:50:04 ►
eating and what they’re doing to the earth and the bird. They’re heading to extinction. Look what they’re, the way they’re eating and what they’re doing
00:50:06 ►
to the earth and the environment.
00:50:07 ►
They are, as a species, the sapes are
00:50:09 ►
going out. And so the
00:50:11 ►
only species, human species, that has
00:50:13 ►
a chance is Homo Divinus. And
00:50:15 ►
Burning Man is a really good thing to bring up right
00:50:18 ►
here because they think they’re in control.
00:50:20 ►
Well, when you, I was in Burning Man
00:50:21 ►
last year was my first year. I’m never going to miss it.
00:50:23 ►
It is going to happen this year. And by the way,
00:50:26 ►
some of the speakers at MindStates
00:50:28 ►
are speaking in a free lecture series we’re
00:50:29 ►
producing at Burning Man at Palenque
00:50:31 ►
Norte. And we’re going to even try to webcast it.
00:50:34 ►
But it’ll be up there. And we’re going to be there.
00:50:35 ►
It will happen. But at Burning Man, what I
00:50:37 ►
was struck so forcibly about
00:50:39 ►
last year, here are 30,000
00:50:41 ►
people, almost all of them
00:50:43 ►
on some sort of substance, and there’s
00:50:46 ►
not as many cops as there are
00:50:48 ►
people in this room, you know. And these cops
00:50:50 ►
are driving around giving me the peace sign.
00:50:53 ►
Because
00:50:53 ►
what if they wanted to shut that
00:50:56 ►
down? They would need to call
00:50:58 ►
out a very large army.
00:51:00 ►
They were there
00:51:02 ►
as our guests.
00:51:04 ►
And that’s the same with the police around here.
00:51:06 ►
We outnumber all of these people.
00:51:08 ►
But I think it’s really important to do what the students
00:51:11 ►
that really engineered that revolution,
00:51:13 ►
they didn’t get confrontational with the police authority.
00:51:16 ►
They’d say, hey, you guys are just trying to feed your family.
00:51:19 ►
You’re like us.
00:51:19 ►
And so when it finally came down,
00:51:21 ►
after Milosevic canceled the elections,
00:51:23 ►
and the students were coming into Belgrade and the army was there,
00:51:28 ►
the army and police finally melted away and just let them come in
00:51:31 ►
because they’d spent years making friends with them,
00:51:34 ►
saying, hey, we know you’re doing your job.
00:51:35 ►
They don’t get pushy.
00:51:37 ►
And so I think if you realize they’re working at our sufferance
00:51:40 ►
and they can do some good things for us, let’s be honest.
00:51:42 ►
We’ve all got friends that have served in the military or police.
00:51:46 ►
I thought I was defending American way of life and freedom when I went to Vietnam.
00:51:52 ►
It turns out I was getting screwed.
00:51:54 ►
But I think that we need to be conscious of the fact that they don’t know really who we are.
00:52:00 ►
They don’t know what we’re thinking.
00:52:02 ►
They don’t know that we’ve been to places that they’ll never even dream about and that we have seen the light. So that’s important.
00:52:08 ►
I think number three is maintain a balance between staying out of their way and always
00:52:13 ►
looking over your shoulder and being paranoid. I mean, we’ve got to live our lives freely
00:52:17 ►
and feel good about what we’re doing. Don’t marginalize yourself. We are not living on the edges of sapien society.
00:52:28 ►
We are mainstream Homo Divinus.
00:52:31 ►
We’re not marginalized people.
00:52:32 ►
We are the mainstream of consciousness of our tribe.
00:52:36 ►
But still, you want to stay out of their way.
00:52:39 ►
If for some reason tomorrow morning,
00:52:41 ►
you wake up in the San Diego Zoo,
00:52:43 ►
and you’re in the gorilla enclosure.
00:52:45 ►
What are you going to do?
00:52:46 ►
I don’t know what I’d do,
00:52:48 ►
but I’ll tell you what I wouldn’t do.
00:52:49 ►
I wouldn’t go up to the biggest, meanest,
00:52:51 ►
dumbest, ugliest, smelliest gorilla
00:52:53 ►
and poke him in the chest and say,
00:52:55 ►
I’m smarter than you.
00:52:58 ►
You can walk down to the police station
00:53:00 ►
and light up a joint and say,
00:53:01 ►
this should be legal.
00:53:03 ►
Or you can go to the hemp fest in Seattle
00:53:04 ►
with 100,000 other people and do it, you know. Pick your
00:53:08 ►
confrontations carefully, I think. Tip number four, avoid being Americanized. Now, I used
00:53:14 ►
to think, boy, you know, I love America. You know, I grew up really poor and I thought,
00:53:19 ►
you know, America gave me a chance and I went and defended my country and all this. But
00:53:23 ►
let’s look at what we’re doing to the world.
00:53:25 ►
We believe we’re fighting in Iraq for the American way of life.
00:53:30 ►
What is the American way of life?
00:53:31 ►
That’s to allow 5% of the world’s population to use 35% or 40% of the world’s resources.
00:53:38 ►
That’s not right.
00:53:39 ►
That’s simply not right.
00:53:41 ►
And the American way of life is about conformity, consumerism, and control.
00:53:46 ►
Now that’s not what it should be, but that’s what it is right now. So don’t get trapped in there.
00:53:50 ►
15% of the eligible voters in this country voted for the brutal Bush regime that’s in power right
00:53:57 ►
now. 15% of the eligible voters, all that did it. We can bring Bush down in six months, and I’ll
00:54:03 ►
tell you how. If the other 85%
00:54:06 ►
just did one thing, very peacefully,
00:54:08 ►
for six months, they quit shopping.
00:54:11 ►
Just quit shopping
00:54:12 ►
for six months.
00:54:13 ►
Don’t buy anything you don’t need.
00:54:15 ►
Don’t shop, just go buy necessity.
00:54:17 ►
And the economy would crash and they would be
00:54:19 ►
out of there. So, you know, just don’t be
00:54:21 ►
so Americanized. Tip number five.
00:54:24 ►
Remove your mind from the military-industrial prison complex. Now, you know, just don’t be so Americanized. Tip number five, remove your mind from the
00:54:26 ►
military industrial prison complex. Now, this is not easy. I’ve got a three-step plan. And
00:54:33 ►
from the time I decided to do it, it took me three or four years to actually do it.
00:54:38 ►
And I guess I should give a warning up front that if you do this successfully, you’re liable to be pretty much homeless.
00:54:48 ►
But with the friends that we have in the tribe,
00:54:52 ►
homelessness is a very delightful experience.
00:54:56 ►
Number one, if you’re working for a salary,
00:54:59 ►
you agree to work, most people, for 40 hours a week.
00:55:02 ►
But what do most people do?
00:55:04 ►
I know what I was doing when I was in the system.
00:55:06 ►
I was working 50, 60 hours a week,
00:55:08 ►
trying to make sure I proved my worth.
00:55:11 ►
That’s slavery.
00:55:12 ►
You’re giving your mind away.
00:55:14 ►
You’re 20, 30 hours of your life every week.
00:55:18 ►
Do what you agree to do,
00:55:20 ►
but don’t give them free time.
00:55:21 ►
Don’t give them more.
00:55:22 ►
Step two, refuse to work for anybody that does drug testing.
00:55:28 ►
That’s pretty hard.
00:55:29 ►
Again, it took me several years to do it.
00:55:31 ►
But how absolutely insane is it to say that to qualify for a job,
00:55:37 ►
you’ve got to turn over bodily fluids for people?
00:55:42 ►
I gave a workshop one day to a group of CEOs.
00:55:47 ►
They were all CEOs of mid to large companies.
00:55:50 ►
And one of the things we got into was drug testing.
00:55:53 ►
And I said, let’s be honest here.
00:55:56 ►
The reason you have drug testing is an intelligence test.
00:55:59 ►
Anybody that can’t pass a drug test is too stupid to work for.
00:56:04 ►
Well, guess what? They all knew that.
00:56:07 ►
They said, no, no, no. Don’t you realize that we can come in and test you at any time? I said,
00:56:12 ►
but nobody ever does. They said, we know that, but we want you thinking about us 24 by 7,
00:56:19 ►
seven days a week. When you go out to party on the weekends, we want you to think before you
00:56:23 ►
take that toke that we might, we want to be in your mind all the time. They’re consciously thinking that.
00:56:29 ►
Sick mother.
00:56:30 ►
You know, exactly. So, you know, find startup businesses, work for yourself, find organic
00:56:36 ►
farms that need help. I mean, it’s not easy and you’re going to have to lower your standard
00:56:40 ►
of living probably significantly, but that’s step two. Step three, things get really, really bad.
00:56:48 ►
You know, the middle class in this country, depending on how you define it, but the middle
00:56:53 ►
class, many people now are defining it, is only 20% of the population.
00:56:58 ►
They’re not getting the tax breaks, but they’re paying for all these armies.
00:57:02 ►
And our armies are no longer volunteers.
00:57:05 ►
breaks, but they’re paying for all these armies. And our armies are no longer volunteers. In San Diego, the recruiters are going to Tijuana to recruit non-citizens. Over half of the military
00:57:11 ►
recruits in this area, in L.A., are non-U.S. citizens. You know, this is a mercenary army.
00:57:17 ►
These people can’t get jobs. And the only way to confront that is to take the money away,
00:57:23 ►
take the tax base away, leave the country, and don’t
00:57:26 ►
work here. Don’t pay taxes.
00:57:28 ►
That’s the only way to do it,
00:57:30 ►
and it’s not easy. So, that’s all
00:57:32 ►
the tips. Now for the good
00:57:34 ►
news.
00:57:36 ►
Let’s back up.
00:57:38 ►
I want to have a little good news
00:57:40 ►
here. Let’s back up to the
00:57:41 ►
macro level and the cosmic level.
00:57:44 ►
You know, as if this Earth has been around for four and a half billion years,
00:57:49 ►
if you compress that whole time into one year,
00:57:52 ►
humans started walking upright somewhere around eight minutes before midnight.
00:57:57 ►
And the industrial revolution started one second before midnight.
00:58:01 ►
Let’s not kid ourselves.
00:58:03 ►
We’re barely out of the swamp.
00:58:05 ►
We’ve barely out of the swamp. You know, we’re just, we barely evolved. But from evolutionary standpoint, living in a
00:58:10 ►
really tightly fascistic control society, there is nobody better able to survive than
00:58:16 ►
the tribe, the psychedelic community. We’ve been living like this for years, you know.
00:58:22 ►
You know, the Patriot Act, Oh, well, I can search you.
00:58:25 ►
Well, what’s new?
00:58:31 ►
You know, the war on drugs
00:58:33 ►
has had two really positive effects.
00:58:38 ►
One is documented in a really good book
00:58:41 ►
called The Botany of Desire.
00:58:43 ►
No, not The Botany.
00:58:44 ►
Yeah, The Botany of Desire. No, not The Botany. Yeah, The Botany of Desire.
00:58:46 ►
And one of the four plants they talk about there is cannabis
00:58:50 ►
and what’s happened in the war on drugs.
00:58:52 ►
Before the war on drugs, cannabis was kind of grown wild as a weed
00:58:56 ►
and had 2% THC in it.
00:58:59 ►
Well, because of the war on drugs, it’s up to 20%
00:59:02 ►
from a genetic.
00:59:04 ►
If you’re a cannabis gene, you’re loving the war on drugs, it’s up to 20% from a genetic, if you’re a cannabis
00:59:06 ►
gene, you’re loving the war on
00:59:08 ►
drugs.
00:59:11 ►
And from a
00:59:12 ►
genetic standpoint, it’s been very successful.
00:59:13 ►
So it’s really improved the quality
00:59:15 ►
of life.
00:59:18 ►
But even more importantly
00:59:19 ►
is the tribe
00:59:21 ►
has evolved. And we’ve
00:59:23 ►
evolved a great deal of social capital.
00:59:25 ►
You know, that we don’t all know each other here.
00:59:28 ►
And, you know, maybe there’s a narc or two here,
00:59:31 ►
but nobody here is talking about buying or selling.
00:59:34 ►
People, you know, people think,
00:59:35 ►
well, you know,
00:59:36 ►
we shouldn’t even be talking about these things.
00:59:38 ►
Well, I’ve talked to several people,
00:59:40 ►
like one of them is a director of one of the big,
00:59:43 ►
not normal, but something like normal in D.C.
00:59:45 ►
and former prisoner in the war on drugs.
00:59:48 ►
And the other was Terrence McKenna
00:59:49 ►
and I asked them both about
00:59:50 ►
how much hassle do you get?
00:59:52 ►
Neither of them have ever been hassled once.
00:59:54 ►
Terrence will never be hassled now.
00:59:57 ►
But you don’t get hassled for talking about this.
01:00:00 ►
And it’s not against the law
01:00:01 ►
to take these substances.
01:00:03 ►
It’s possession, buying or selling. And so once it’s out against the law to take these substances. It’s possession, buying, or selling.
01:00:06 ►
And so once it’s out of your system…
01:00:09 ►
Isn’t that interesting?
01:00:11 ►
Now, what they’re really afraid of is what it does to your consciousness.
01:00:15 ►
It changes your consciousness.
01:00:17 ►
And I’ll tell you, probably one of the most dangerous substances from their standpoint,
01:00:23 ►
and I think they’re right, is MDMA. And I’ll
01:00:26 ►
tell you why they’re right. Because I was 42 years old, an attorney in Dallas, Texas,
01:00:34 ►
a Republican. I took some MDMA. It was my gateway.
01:00:52 ►
It’s dangerous from that standpoint.
01:00:56 ►
I think that the tribe, from an evolutionary point of view,
01:00:57 ►
we’re in pretty good shape.
01:00:59 ►
Now, one final thought here.
01:01:02 ►
I don’t think ultimately it’s enough just to live in a controlled society and survive.
01:01:05 ►
I don’t think that’s why we’re here, and I don’t think any of us would be happy with it.
01:01:08 ►
I think what we’re here for is to change society and to make a difference.
01:01:12 ►
And I think that the psychedelic community,
01:01:15 ►
I don’t necessarily think everybody needs to go out and take psychedelics.
01:01:19 ►
In the latest issue of Trip Magazine, which is an excellent magazine,
01:01:23 ►
James Kent wrote an editorial that was very, very well written and recent,
01:01:28 ►
and he sort of took Elvis Huxley’s idea that these substances aren’t magic pills
01:01:33 ►
that are going to make everybody well.
01:01:36 ►
They just open a door.
01:01:37 ►
You’ve got to be strong enough and smart enough and brave enough and willing enough
01:01:41 ►
to go through that door and do something and come back with it.
01:01:43 ►
So it’s not like we’re out there proselyting
01:01:45 ►
and trying to get everybody to use these substances.
01:01:47 ►
But those of us who have and know how to use them in a spiritual sense
01:01:51 ►
and know how they can really change our lives for the better,
01:01:55 ►
and one of the examples I’ll use is,
01:01:58 ►
I think it’s impossible to be psychedelic and not be green.
01:02:01 ►
There’s a deep connection there.
01:02:02 ►
There’s something very deep there.
01:02:04 ►
So what I think that as a tribe,
01:02:07 ►
those of us that do use these substances wisely,
01:02:10 ►
we have an obligation that has been given to us
01:02:13 ►
that we need to go forward and work with people
01:02:17 ►
and teach them how to use these things properly.
01:02:19 ►
I have no problem with using them for pleasure.
01:02:22 ►
I never would have been here
01:02:23 ►
if I didn’t get pleasure out of them to begin with.
01:02:25 ►
But then I learned there’s a lot more to this.
01:02:27 ►
There’s a lot of different substances for different things,
01:02:31 ►
and you bring different things back,
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and they affect you in different parts of your lives,
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and sometimes they send you to hell and sometimes to heaven.
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But we need to learn how to use them ourselves
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and then teach particularly the younger people to do them.
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I know in the rave and trance community that some people use them well and some don’t. And it’s great
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to dance all night. But people need to know that, boy, you can take MDMA and a group of
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four or five or six people and really do some work on yourself and make a better person
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out of yourself and solve problems. So I think mentoring people, and I don’t mean anything
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about ages here. I know some people who are in their 20s that are way ahead of me.
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I’m 60, and these kids are just way light years ahead of me.
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So I think that it doesn’t have to do, elders in this tribe doesn’t have to do with age.
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It has to do with having been around the block a few times.
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And so those of you who have really learned to do these things, if you get a chance,
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go to some of these parties,
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raves, trances, or just
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talk to kids. We’ve talked to kids
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just one-on-one, and when they find out
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that dusty old fart like me
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is willing to talk about, you know, ayahuasca,
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they just
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log on to it because they want
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this information and they need it from people
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who know a little bit about how to
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use it wisely. So I think that
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we have a great opportunity. I think that we’re
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here for some strange reason
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because we’re really good at what we do
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and quite frankly I’ve
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sworn that I don’t care what they
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say about reincarnation. I don’t want them back
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sometimes.
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But if you have any belief
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in reincarnation then you better
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realize that you are your own ancestor.
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So you ought to do something to leave this place kind of nice.
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That’s sort of it.
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And now if people have something they want to add, I’ll…
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I’m going to start this off by saying that I just read last week
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that people who subscribe to High Times,
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people who are members of Normal,
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these are not the people being busted or harassed.
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This is what you were saying.
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That actually, instead of being afraid to get involved,
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the more involved you get, the more immune you are to what they’re doing.
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Unless you are transporting kilos or you’re operating a medical marijuana clinic
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and growing a pot for it or whatever,
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which I don’t think anybody here qualifies as someone who’s a major trafficker. If you are, I don’t know it. And that’s good.
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I would have to say that I think most of us, but the more that we get involved with this
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and carrying your little ACLU card and knowing what to say, that we’re very strong in this together
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because they don’t want to mess with us.
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They don’t.
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Exactly.
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I’m just standing here
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after a couple of different events
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just being struck by how
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I’ve been party to
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basically the same conversation
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in three pretty different settings
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over the last week.
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Last night it was a Gucinich meeting where Danny Sheehan was talking about,
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basically this conversation about safes and us, except it was about worldview
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and how the people, in his eyes, the people that are progressive have a certain worldview,
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and he has eight levels of worldview, and how the Bushies are in the second level certain worldview, and he has eight levels of worldview,
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and how the Bushies are in the second level of worldview,
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which is very reactionary and controlling.
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And then a week ago I was at Gathering of the Tribes
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where John Perry Barlow and Barbara Marks Hubbard
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were talking to mainly 20-year-olds
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who are part of the rave generation
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and doing exactly what you’re talking about,
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in a sense, giving some
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thoughts on, from a spiritual, not necessarily psychedelic level, although we know that John
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Barlow had the psychedelic level, but he wasn’t talking specifically about that.
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And for me, I just wanted to just, I don’t really have any larger point other than to,
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if you’re not sure, if you haven’t experienced this conversation in a slightly different form
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in a lot of different places in your life right now, it’s coming.
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There’s a consciousness amongst all seemingly different groups
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that are really of the same homo divinus that is happening.
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And every time I turn around, there’s a person I’m really surprised to see at Moontribe
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I’m like whoa what are you doing out here
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and it just
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keeps happening at an
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incredibly rapid rate and it gives me
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a lot of hope for what’s going to
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happen next because I think what
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what this
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fascist state has done
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is really
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given us a lot less room to move in a way
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and so we keep bumping into each other a lot more.
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Yeah.
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I like that.
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That’s a really good point.
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And I’m really excited about what’s going to happen.
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Picking people different
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people picking up
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on strains of other people and making them grow
01:07:24 ►
and building on them.
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And I’m really excited about the next year, actually,
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as long as we can keep the earth non-nuclearized for one year.
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I think we can pull it off.
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I think there is a lot of hope.
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I think that in the 70s, I think it was Prigogine who got the Nobel Prize
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in his work in chemistry that’s been translated to social groups now.
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But just before a society or a chemical mixture moves to a higher state, it’s in total chaos.
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And, of course, it can disintegrate and fall apart,
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but it doesn’t have any chance to move to a higher level unless it gets to that chaotic state.
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And I think that’s what we’re approaching.
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And I like the idea of bumping into each other because it seems like you’re right.
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Everywhere I go now, you’re seeing more people come out of the closet, more or less.
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So I think there’s a lot of reason to be hopeful.
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Well, that seems to be a good point to stop for today.
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It’s always good to end on a hopeful note, don’t you think?
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Good point to stop for today.
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It’s always good to end on a hopeful note, don’t you think?
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As I mentioned before, that last talk was given in June of 2003,
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just two months before the first of our Palenque Norte Burning Man lectures.
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Now here it is, almost three years later,
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and only now have I at long last been able to take that big step one and turn off the television.
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With our latest move, my wife and I decided to eliminate television from our lives.
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Now that the tube isn’t available for me to veg out on, I’m wondering how I ever got anything done before.
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And I’m here to tell you that my stress level is significantly lower now that I’m no longer listening to those insidious TV news programs.
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There is one thing I should mention about that talk you just heard, by the way,
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news programs.
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There is one thing I should mention about that talk you just heard, by the way, and that’s the point I made about Schedule I substances being illegal to possess but not
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illegal to ingest.
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I’ve been told that this may not be correct, at least for everything on the schedule, so
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treat any legal advice I might throw out with more than a single grain of salt, to be sure.
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I want to thank my good friend Jared
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for the audio of this talk you just heard
01:09:27 ►
at Kathleen’s salon.
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He had his video camera with him that night
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and recorded my presentation
01:09:32 ►
and then stripped the audio out for me
01:09:34 ►
to use here in the psychedelic salon.
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Jared, by the way, is an artist and musician
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and you can see and hear some of his creations
01:09:42 ►
at his website, which you will find
01:09:44 ►
at feedbackart.com.
01:09:47 ►
Also, thank you again to Chateau Hayouk for the use of their music,
01:09:50 ►
and thank all of you for being here with us again,
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here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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For now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
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Be well, my friends.