Program Notes
Guest speaker: James Fadiman
From the Mind States conference in 2003, James Fadiman gives an entertaining account of his early days in psychedelic research. The Mind States program that year had this to say about Dr. Fadiman:
James Fadiman, Ph.D. has been involved in both teaching and facilitating creative problem-solving with and without psychedelics for more than three decades. His experience ranges from early experimentation with Ram Dass and Tim Leary at Harvard to government-sanctioned legal research with Myron Stolaroff and Willis Harman at Stanford. He co-founded the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology where he now teaches, is the co-author of Essential Sufism, and has just released a novel, The Other Side of Haight.
Books mentioned in this podcast:
The Other Side of Haight
Scrapbook of a Haight- Ashbury Pilgrim
“Higher Wisdom: Eminent Elders Explore the Continuing Impact of Psychedelics”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
3-Dimensional Transforming Musical Linguistic Objects
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Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:23 ►
Well, we have a real treat for you today.
00:00:26 ►
Thanks to John Hanna and J.T., we’re going to hear a talk that Jim Fadiman gave
00:00:31 ►
at the MindStakes Conference in 2001, which was held in Berkeley that year.
00:00:37 ►
That’s Berkeley, California, of course, if you don’t know where Berkeley is.
00:00:41 ►
Anyway, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the huge body of work that
00:00:46 ►
Dr. Fadiman has done in the area of consciousness research, here’s what the MindStates program said
00:00:52 ►
about him that year. And I quote, James Fadiman, PhD, has been involved in both teaching and
00:01:00 ►
facilitating creative problem solving with and without psychedelics for more than three decades.
00:01:06 ►
His experience ranges from early experimentation with Ram Dass and Tim Leary at Harvard
00:01:11 ►
to government-sanctioned legal research with Myron Stolaroff and Willis Harmon at Stanford.
00:01:17 ►
He co-founded the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, where he now teaches,
00:01:21 ►
and has just released the novel, The Other Side of Hate.
00:01:24 ►
where he now teaches and has just released the novel, The Other Side of Hate.
00:01:30 ►
Now, I can still remember that just before Jim gave this presentation,
00:01:35 ►
my wife and I were having dinner with Myron and Gene Stolaroff and a couple of their friends,
00:01:42 ►
and all during dinner, Myron kept hurrying us along because he wanted to be sure that we made it to hear Jim’s talk on time.
00:01:46 ►
And that evening, it was the last night of the conference, by the way,
00:01:48 ►
Jim was the final speaker,
00:01:51 ►
and he talked about ways in which psychedelics can also be used to enhance our capacity
00:01:53 ►
in the ultra-rational world
00:01:56 ►
of analytic, scientific, and engineering pursuits,
00:02:00 ►
which you acid heads who keep the Internet running smoothly
00:02:03 ►
already know, of course.
00:02:06 ►
So take a listen for yourself, and I think you’ll hear why Myron thinks so highly of him.
00:02:11 ►
And now, here is Jim Fadiman giving a presentation titled
00:02:15 ►
Using Psychedelics to Solve Technical and Scientific Problems.
00:02:23 ►
So let’s take a deep breath change probability realities
00:02:30 ►
put your sexual organs back where they belong
00:02:34 ►
because i have been asked to talk on the other end of the psychedelic spectrum,
00:02:46 ►
probably one of the few ways that this group hasn’t used psychedelics,
00:02:51 ►
for rational work on rational problems in the totally material world.
00:03:02 ►
And just for a moment,
00:03:03 ►
and just for a moment,
00:03:13 ►
we have just heard that one of the more beautiful of the pioneers has gone on,
00:03:19 ►
and this, in a peculiar way, has also a Memorial Day weekend,
00:03:27 ►
and while a lot of people are out there honoring some very strange ideas in American history,
00:03:29 ►
like war is good for you,
00:03:37 ►
there are a lot of people here who have taken a lot of risks with their lives and with their careers.
00:03:51 ►
And I’d like to take a moment for us all to honor all of us. And also a special thanks to the vendors,
00:03:55 ►
the wonderful botanical artists who’ve been helping us all weekend
00:04:00 ►
and the people whose careers have been to help create the information base that
00:04:06 ►
we need to survive until the end of the age of misinformation that we’re in.
00:04:19 ►
And what we seem to also have lost is a kind of part of our cultural sense of humor about
00:04:24 ►
what we’re doing.
00:04:26 ►
I was looking in a very useful reference book, which is the New Yorker book of cartoons from 1925 to 1975.
00:04:36 ►
And the one that seemed most appropriate for this weekend is a cartoon of a couple.
00:04:47 ►
Weekend is a cartoon of a couple, and they’re in a kind of gondola, kind of gorgeous gondola,
00:04:54 ►
floating between pillars and peacocks and weeping willows and songbirds, and they’re dressed in kind of 1960s Connecticut suburbia clothing. And he says to her, what was the
00:05:02 ►
name of that tranquilizer we took?
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And you just don’t see jokes about us much anymore,
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and that’s of great concern to me.
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It’s another one of that same era. It just shows six or seven Indians in a little teepee,
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and one of them is smiling.
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What kind of powwow is this?
00:05:23 ►
I mean, what’s in the pipe?
00:05:25 ►
And so we were taking it a little easier at some point.
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And what some of us were doing was
00:05:34 ►
taking the position
00:05:35 ►
that psychedelics were not entirely psychospiritual,
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not entirely, certainly not psychotomimetic, certainly not only entheogenic
00:05:49 ►
and all the other words we’ve used, but that they were something that enhanced capacity.
00:05:56 ►
And then the question of, well, what capacities might we try enhancing?
00:06:01 ►
And it is not clear to me why, but we decided that we could enhance the use
00:06:07 ►
of the ultra-rational, analytic, scientific mind, which I suggest to you is the opposite
00:06:15 ►
problem of the astral sex situation, and neither of us have done real well with either of these extremes. So that research was started and it was interrupted
00:06:28 ►
by one of the federal government’s less bright maneuvers,
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of which there are so many we could spend the whole evening just,
00:06:39 ►
can you top this, and we’d have our categories,
00:06:43 ►
idiocy in which department and so forth. Let’s
00:06:48 ►
ban hemp is one of my favorites because it looks like something that we like. So we did
00:06:57 ►
part one of that study and I felt what would be useful this evening is to start part two
00:07:01 ►
of that study. So I’d like you to think about, as we go along,
00:07:05 ►
whether you’re going to volunteer for this study.
00:07:10 ►
Okay?
00:07:10 ►
So that’s the setting that I want you to be in,
00:07:13 ►
so that as I go through what the first group did,
00:07:16 ►
you can make your own decisions.
00:07:18 ►
Because this is suddenly relevant again.
00:07:23 ►
It has been passed around through the email underworld that we’re all part of,
00:07:28 ►
the recent article in Forbes, which said, you know, given the situation in the capitalist world,
00:07:35 ►
what might be useful is an institute in which people can get the right stuff in the right setting
00:07:45 ►
and then can work on problems like mergers and acquisitions,
00:07:50 ►
stock transfers and new product development,
00:07:53 ►
which are areas, as you notice, we’ve not covered here at all.
00:08:01 ►
So we know it’s been presented throughout this conference
00:08:04 ►
and what most of us know from personal experience
00:08:08 ►
and while personally now my own work is almost entirely dealing with
00:08:13 ►
how do we create safe and sacred spaces for sacred safe substances
00:08:17 ►
there was this early experiment that we were working on the whole other side
00:08:24 ►
and the nice thing is when you say,
00:08:26 ►
let’s use psychedelics for scientific problem solving,
00:08:29 ►
is you get a whole new group of people against you.
00:08:34 ►
And there were really two groups.
00:08:36 ►
The scientific establishment,
00:08:38 ►
and I mean by that the dominant religious paradigm in this country,
00:08:42 ►
the scientistic fundamentalists, as we would call them,
00:08:47 ►
were clear that it was absurd to imagine that drugs which drive people mad or
00:08:51 ►
worse give them delusions that the world is more than matter and energy
00:08:55 ►
could be given to its priests, trained in MIT, Caltech, etc.,
00:09:01 ►
that it could help them in their chosen work to clear away the clutter
00:09:05 ►
of the irrational.
00:09:08 ►
This criticism we fully expected, particularly since our research team included a full professor
00:09:14 ►
of electrical engineering and a full professor of mechanical engineering, both teaching at
00:09:19 ►
these scientistic institutions.
00:09:22 ►
We were less prepared for the criticism we got from you all,
00:09:28 ►
from what we might call the radical left,
00:09:31 ►
who were horrified at the notion that using substances
00:09:38 ►
which from the dawn of time have been used without exception
00:09:41 ►
for spiritual exploration, for artistic revelation,
00:09:44 ►
mystical transformation, for the shallow purposes of a scientific and commercial establishment.
00:09:51 ►
This was a sacrilege beyond comprehension.
00:09:54 ►
We had a sudden sympathy for the money changers driven from the temple by Jesus, who were
00:10:01 ►
after all simply trying to make a buck.
00:10:03 ►
who are after all simply trying to make a buck.
00:10:09 ►
And as our friends added, you will fail utterly since the last thing anyone is going to want to do
00:10:12 ►
after ingesting a sacred substance
00:10:14 ►
is to piddle with their daily work issues.
00:10:20 ►
So I assume you are all part of that second group.
00:10:25 ►
So my invitation to invite you to join us in the replication of this study
00:10:30 ►
is going to be a difficult one,
00:10:31 ►
and I will try and make it as easy as possible
00:10:34 ►
by telling you how much fun the first group had.
00:10:40 ►
So if I can kind of slip back into that,
00:10:43 ►
let me welcome you then to the Revivified or Reborn International Foundation for Advanced Study.
00:10:52 ►
That was called IFAS.
00:10:58 ►
So you will not be confused with Leary, Alpert, and Metzner’s group, which was the International Foundation for Internal Freedom.
00:11:05 ►
If, if.
00:11:08 ►
They had a 50-room mansion in Millbrook
00:11:11 ►
where they could perform many experiments
00:11:15 ►
such as the ones we’ve just heard.
00:11:23 ►
We were above a beauty parlor in Menlo Park
00:11:26 ►
and we looked out over an oak tree
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which I have to admit was in the middle of a parking lot.
00:11:39 ►
So it was a somewhat more sober group.
00:11:43 ►
But should you come and join us,
00:11:45 ►
the room we’ll work in actually
00:11:46 ►
is a very comfortable living room.
00:11:49 ►
Beautiful chairs, easy, you know,
00:11:51 ►
soft couch, state-of-the-art stereo equipment
00:11:54 ►
and a deep, soft carpet.
00:11:56 ►
And our assumption is that any human function
00:12:00 ►
can be performed more effectively,
00:12:03 ►
which in a sense is a way of saying,
00:12:05 ►
you know, we only use X percent of our brain,
00:12:07 ►
da-da-da-da, you know that one.
00:12:10 ►
So what we tried to do is invent a setting
00:12:13 ►
that would maximize the characteristics
00:12:15 ►
that would make people want to solve technical problems
00:12:18 ►
and allow them to do so.
00:12:23 ►
And what we were looking for is concrete, valid, feasible solutions
00:12:27 ►
that modern industry and positivistic science could accept.
00:12:32 ►
Now this came out of, in a sense, most of you know a little of the work of Oscar Janager,
00:12:37 ►
who basically took a lot of far-out people in Los Angeles
00:12:40 ►
and gave them LSD or whatever he had around,
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and said, go do some far-out creative thing.
00:12:48 ►
And they all did.
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And they all said, that was really far-out and creative.
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And Janager and others said, you see, we can enhance creativity.
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And all of the people on the scientific right said,
00:13:02 ►
artists are screwballs before and after.
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And the question of which direction
00:13:10 ►
you have screwed their artistic stuff
00:13:14 ►
is not going to convince us
00:13:16 ►
that this psychedelic should be legalized
00:13:19 ►
and available to everyone.
00:13:22 ►
So we actually asked people,
00:13:24 ►
and this is now where we begin to distinguish
00:13:25 ►
which of you is going to be able to make it into this experiment, and we wanted people
00:13:31 ►
whose occupation normally required high-level problem solving. Now, if I’d given this talk
00:13:38 ►
a year or two ago when the dot-coms were all filled with people who thought they were solving
00:13:43 ►
these problems, I would have no problem getting volunteers,
00:13:46 ►
but now there’s a whole wave of humility that has struck the culture,
00:13:50 ►
which, knowing the Bay Area, will be transient.
00:13:57 ►
We ask people to be psychologically stable.
00:14:02 ►
This is kind of like three strikes, I know, for some of you.
00:14:04 ►
But if you’re still playing, it’s like the game, if you’re still in. And the people we asked
00:14:12 ►
had to be motivated to discover, verify, and apply solutions within their current work.
00:14:17 ►
This was not hobbyists. These were people who were getting paid to solve problems. And we also asked them to think about problems that they had been working on
00:14:29 ►
for up to three months with no solution.
00:14:33 ►
So we wanted them to be hungry.
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So have you any problems that you have not yet solved?
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Hey, we’re doing it one senator at a time.
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Now, one of the things we had at the beginning,
00:14:59 ►
which would not be useful here at all,
00:15:01 ►
is we had naive subjects.
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You can imagine how long ago this was
00:15:06 ►
that this research could have occurred.
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But there are still actually naive people left in the United States,
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most of them, unfortunately, in public office.
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But what we said is,
00:15:17 ►
since you have had very little experience with psychedelics,
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you will find there will be no distractions
00:15:22 ►
during the research sessions.
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There will be no problems with visions,
00:15:26 ►
involvement with personal emotional states, and so on.
00:15:29 ►
And that you will be able to direct your mind
00:15:31 ►
exactly as you choose.
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So we told them.
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And then we made even more suggestions
00:15:39 ►
to encourage mental flexibility
00:15:42 ►
and to suggest in a profound sense
00:15:45 ►
that a problem that someone has been working on
00:15:49 ►
and is in their own field of expertise
00:15:51 ►
is in some sense that answer is available
00:15:55 ►
somewhere in their mental framework
00:15:57 ►
because they have all the component parts.
00:16:01 ►
And it was that kind of remarks that we would make
00:16:04 ►
as if we totally believed that.
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And so we said you will, for instance,
00:16:10 ►
you can try and identify with a central problem
00:16:12 ►
from other vantage points than you would usually use.
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You can see the solution, visualize the parts,
00:16:18 ►
go inside the various parts of physical apparatus.
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You’ll find that you can go through solutions very, very quickly,
00:16:25 ►
that your memory will be flawless,
00:16:27 ►
and that you can simply go through possibilities.
00:16:30 ►
You can see it in fresh perspectives.
00:16:33 ►
And above all, we suggest not to be timid
00:16:35 ►
in the ambitiousness with which you ask questions.
00:16:38 ►
If you want to see the solution in the complete three-dimensional image
00:16:42 ►
or project yourself forward in time
00:16:44 ►
or view some microscopic physical process,
00:16:48 ►
by all means ask yourself to be allowed to do that.
00:16:52 ►
And what we did then,
00:16:53 ►
this was the night or two before their one-day session,
00:16:56 ►
is we basically got together,
00:16:58 ►
a group of four and about four of us as staff,
00:17:01 ►
and pitched it as well as we could that this was going to work, which
00:17:09 ►
for all we knew at the time, before we got our first subjects, might have.
00:17:14 ►
But we were deeply committed and enthusiastic and probably somewhat dishonest.
00:17:20 ►
This was, after all, what we would call research, so being dishonest is an appropriate stance.
00:17:27 ►
And then we told them, here’s what we’re going to do for the day.
00:17:31 ►
And again, if this is okay for you, because there are some shifts here,
00:17:35 ►
come in at about 8.30, light breakfast if you want it,
00:17:41 ►
then a 9 o’clock psychedelic material given. Now given, what did we use?
00:17:46 ►
After hearing the possibilities here,
00:17:48 ►
I feel like some very primitive beings.
00:17:50 ►
You know, like we took two sticks and rubbed them together
00:17:53 ►
and when they got very warm, we could…
00:17:57 ►
200 milligrams of mescaline.
00:18:01 ►
Now this was in our understanding
00:18:03 ►
from a lot of years of clinical work,
00:18:05 ►
but we considered it pretty low dose.
00:18:07 ►
Normally when people were interested in a psychedelic experience,
00:18:10 ►
a mystical experience,
00:18:12 ►
600 of mescaline was like an opener,
00:18:15 ►
and if people needed more, more,
00:18:16 ►
and if they were alcoholics, we’d double it,
00:18:17 ►
and so forth and so on.
00:18:20 ►
Alcoholics are tough.
00:18:22 ►
They just use up a lot of very expensive material.
00:18:31 ►
I mean, we would give enough materials,
00:18:33 ►
everyone else is flat out,
00:18:35 ►
and these alcoholics are walking around saying,
00:18:38 ►
well, is anything going to happen?
00:18:41 ►
Eventually.
00:18:43 ►
So, material given,
00:18:47 ►
and then what we said is from 9 to 12 for the morning
00:18:48 ►
we’re going to give you as much
00:18:51 ►
of an internal experience as you wish
00:18:53 ►
and that’s with stereo
00:18:55 ►
headphones
00:18:55 ►
eye shades, lying down
00:18:59 ►
kind of sensory
00:19:01 ►
isolation of a minimal sort and
00:19:03 ►
through the headphones we’re playing
00:19:04 ►
predominantly classical music.
00:19:08 ►
And at noon we’re going to ask you to take that stuff off.
00:19:13 ►
We’ll have some food available if any of you are interested,
00:19:16 ►
and you may or may not.
00:19:18 ►
And then in the afternoon, work on your problems.
00:19:22 ►
And bring what you need to work on them.
00:19:25 ►
And if your problem needs, in those days,
00:19:27 ►
slide rules or calculators,
00:19:30 ►
don’t think so.
00:19:31 ►
But sketch pads and physical objects
00:19:35 ►
if you need it and so forth.
00:19:37 ►
And then we will,
00:19:39 ►
after you’ve worked on that,
00:19:41 ►
you’ll basically go home
00:19:42 ►
and a week or two later send us in a report
00:19:44 ►
and six or eight weeks later we’re going to ask you basically to report again
00:19:50 ►
because these are real problems in real life.
00:19:54 ►
And what we said, and again test this against your own experience,
00:19:59 ►
that you will find certain mental strategies are available.
00:20:05 ►
And you may find yourself
00:20:07 ►
working in any of these ways.
00:20:09 ►
One is we suggested you’d find
00:20:11 ►
less inhibition and anxiety.
00:20:13 ►
Not surprising.
00:20:15 ►
Now, I’m now going to be
00:20:17 ►
going to a place where I want to tell you
00:20:20 ►
what the first people on the first group
00:20:22 ►
did experience.
00:20:24 ►
We said you’ll experience
00:20:25 ►
less inhibition and anxiety. They said, and these are now some quotes, there was no fear,
00:20:30 ►
no worry, no sense of reputation or competition, no envy. None of the things which in varying
00:20:36 ►
degrees have always been present in my work. Another subject, a lowered sense of personal
00:20:41 ►
danger. I don’t feel threatened anymore.
00:20:45 ►
Huh.
00:20:46 ►
On this afternoon,
00:20:49 ►
the normal blocks in the way of progress seem to be absent.
00:20:52 ►
And we said you can probably restructure the problem
00:20:54 ►
in a different context.
00:20:57 ►
Some of the reports say
00:20:59 ►
I could handle two or three different ideas
00:21:01 ►
at the same time and keep track.
00:21:04 ►
Normally,
00:21:08 ►
I would overlook many more trivial points for the sake of expediency,
00:21:10 ►
but under the drug, time seemed unimportant.
00:21:15 ►
I faced every possible questionable issue square in the face.
00:21:20 ►
You know, when you’re working on photoconductivity, that’s a tough thing to do.
00:21:24 ►
Ability to start from the broadest general basis. I return to the original problem
00:21:27 ►
and consciously to think of the problem in its totality rather than through the devices
00:21:33 ►
I’d used before. Then we talked about fluency and flexibility. Fluency and flexibility in
00:21:40 ►
the creativity world are the kind of buzzwords. Fluency is you can think of more ideas.
00:21:45 ►
Flexibility is more different ideas.
00:21:48 ►
And sure enough, surprise I know to many of you,
00:21:53 ►
I began to work fast, almost feverishly,
00:21:56 ►
to keep up with the flow of ideas.
00:21:58 ►
I worked at a pace I would not have thought I was capable of.
00:22:01 ►
I was very impressed with the ease with which ideas appeared. It
00:22:05 ►
was virtually as if the world was made of ideas, so it was only necessary to examine
00:22:12 ►
any part of the world to get an idea. I dismissed my original idea entirely and started to approach
00:22:20 ►
the graphic problem in an entirely radically new way. That’s when things began to happen.
00:22:26 ►
And the feeling during the period
00:22:28 ►
of intense production
00:22:30 ►
was one of joy and exuberance.
00:22:33 ►
Pure fun of inventing,
00:22:36 ►
creating, and playing.
00:22:40 ►
We had said, of course,
00:22:41 ►
you would not be bothered
00:22:42 ►
by visual imagery,
00:22:43 ►
but we also said
00:22:44 ►
that you would be able to use visual imagery exactly as you wished.
00:22:48 ►
Kind of cheating on both sides.
00:22:52 ►
Quote, was able to move imaginary parts.
00:22:56 ►
Ah, the next insight came as an image of an oyster shell
00:22:59 ►
with mother of pearl shining in different colors.
00:23:02 ►
I translated that into the idea of an infrarometer,
00:23:06 ►
two layers separated by a gap equal to the wavelength
00:23:09 ►
it is desired to reflect.
00:23:13 ►
Another.
00:23:14 ►
Somewhere along the way I began to see an image of the circuit.
00:23:17 ►
The gates themselves were little silver cones linked together by lines.
00:23:21 ►
I watched the circuit flipping through its paces.
00:23:26 ►
I began visualizing all the properties
00:23:28 ►
known to me that a photon possesses
00:23:30 ►
and attempted to make a model for a photon.
00:23:34 ►
You ever tried that?
00:23:39 ►
I guess not. Okay.
00:23:41 ►
Here’s a moment for you. Just go along with it.
00:23:43 ►
The photon was comprised of an electron and a positron cloud
00:23:47 ►
moving together in an intermeshed, synchronously helical orbit.
00:23:51 ►
This model was reduced for visualization purpose
00:23:53 ►
to a black and white ball propagating in a screw-like fashion through space.
00:23:58 ►
I put the model through all kinds of tests.
00:24:02 ►
Does this remind you of our prior speaker?
00:24:01 ►
through all kinds of tests.
00:24:04 ►
Does this remind you of our prior speaker?
00:24:10 ►
It’s all the same stuff, after all.
00:24:13 ►
If it’s all nothing, you can do it with anything.
00:24:17 ►
Increased ability to concentrate.
00:24:18 ►
This is very interesting,
00:24:21 ►
given the whole other way we normally talk about using these materials.
00:24:23 ►
I was easily able to virtually shut out all distracting influences.
00:24:28 ►
I was easily able to follow a train of thought to a conclusion where normally I would have
00:24:33 ►
been distracted many times.
00:24:35 ►
I considered the process of photoconductivity.
00:24:39 ►
This is the photon guy again.
00:24:41 ►
I kept asking myself, what is light?
00:24:44 ►
And subsequently, what is a photon?
00:24:46 ►
The latter question I repeated to myself several hundred times until it was being said automatically
00:24:53 ►
in synchronization with each breath. Okay, now this was, we were not teaching these kind
00:24:59 ►
of techniques. This was what he came up with, is, right, the mantra in the breath. I have
00:25:04 ►
probably never in my life
00:25:06 ►
pressured myself as intently with a question
00:25:08 ►
as I did this one.
00:25:13 ►
Tightened empathy,
00:25:14 ►
the sense of the problem as a living thing.
00:25:18 ►
I spent a productive period
00:25:20 ►
climbing down on my retina,
00:25:22 ►
walking around and thinking about certain problems
00:25:25 ►
relating to the mechanism of vision.
00:25:28 ►
Awareness of the problem itself
00:25:30 ►
rather than the I who is trying to solve it.
00:25:34 ►
Again, we were not talking about ego loss or ego death.
00:25:37 ►
That’s what occurred.
00:25:39 ►
But notice it occurs in this model.
00:25:42 ►
Subconscious data more acceptable.
00:25:44 ►
We just said you would not be troubled
00:25:46 ►
with personal memories.
00:25:47 ►
However,
00:25:50 ►
the session brought about
00:25:51 ►
almost total recall
00:25:52 ►
of a course I had in thermodynamics,
00:25:55 ►
which for those of us
00:25:56 ►
who ever had a course in thermodynamics
00:25:58 ►
was certainly a major traumatic incident
00:26:00 ►
in our lives.
00:26:04 ►
Let’s hear it for thermodynamics.
00:26:06 ►
Yes.
00:26:07 ►
Or get hot. Yes.
00:26:09 ►
Something I had never thought about in years.
00:26:13 ►
Then
00:26:14 ►
the lovely one here, which is
00:26:17 ►
how did you actually solve a problem?
00:26:20 ►
What ideas came together?
00:26:23 ►
I had earlier
00:26:23 ►
devised an arrangement for…
00:26:25 ►
And some of the vocabulary here is as obscure for some of you
00:26:29 ►
as some of the biochemical vocabulary has been for some of you this weekend.
00:26:34 ►
So, don’t worry.
00:26:36 ►
I’d earlier devised an arrangement for beam steering on the two-mile accelerator,
00:26:41 ►
which reduced the hardware necessary by a factor of two.
00:26:45 ►
Two weeks ago, it was pointed out to me that the scheme would steer the beam into the wall,
00:26:50 ►
and therefore was unacceptable.
00:26:52 ►
During the session, I looked at the schematic and asked myself, how could we retain the
00:26:56 ►
factor of two, but avoid steering into the wall?
00:27:00 ►
A flash of inspiration, which I thought of the word alternate.
00:27:05 ►
I followed this to its logical conclusion,
00:27:07 ►
which was alternate polarities sector by sector
00:27:10 ►
so that the steering bias would not add but cancel.
00:27:13 ►
I was extremely impressed with the solution
00:27:15 ►
and the way it came to me.
00:27:19 ►
And so it went.
00:27:23 ►
So what we found is that people were able to work on hard-nosed scientific data
00:27:30 ►
given two things.
00:27:33 ►
One is we told them they could,
00:27:36 ►
and psychedelics helped them to do what they believed was possible.
00:27:42 ►
So this is pushing set and setting a little harder
00:27:46 ►
than we are used to pushing it.
00:27:49 ►
But that, again, it suggests that psychedelics here
00:27:53 ►
are outside of the medical and the sacred models
00:27:55 ►
and extraordinarily useful.
00:28:00 ►
We also just kind of for our own amusement
00:28:04 ►
gave them psychological tests that night or two before and then during this afternoon.
00:28:13 ►
And one of the things we knew, of course, is who would want to take psychological tests in this state.
00:28:18 ►
And we said they would love it.
00:28:20 ►
So they said, okay, we love it.
00:28:23 ►
What do we know?
00:28:22 ►
So they said, okay, we love it.
00:28:24 ►
What do we know?
00:28:31 ►
And the only one that’s fun is something called the Wittgen embedded figures,
00:28:33 ►
which you are supposed to be able to see figures embedded in other figures,
00:28:36 ►
which you can think, you know, a little acid might help.
00:28:41 ►
And the reason we picked it, and we picked these tough measurements at the time, the last test, Wittgen, was reported to be stable under a variety of experimental interventions
00:28:47 ►
including stress, training,
00:28:48 ►
sensory isolation, hypnosis,
00:28:50 ►
and the influence of a variety of drugs.
00:28:53 ►
However, with our 27 subjects,
00:28:57 ►
most of them scored much, much higher.
00:29:00 ►
In some cases,
00:29:01 ►
improvement as great as 200%.
00:29:03 ►
So even at the kind of crummiest level of psychological testing,
00:29:09 ►
they were both able to function and function in a superior way.
00:29:12 ►
So if that would interest you to function in a superior way,
00:29:14 ►
even in psychological ways,
00:29:16 ►
consider signing up at the end of this talk.
00:29:19 ►
Now what did they work on?
00:29:21 ►
And what did they create, actually?
00:29:23 ►
New approach to the design of a vibratory microtome.
00:29:28 ►
New commercial building design accepted by the client.
00:29:31 ►
Space probe experiments devised to measure solar properties.
00:29:36 ►
The design of a linear electron accelerator beam steering device, alternates.
00:29:41 ►
Engineering improvements to a magnetic tape recorder.
00:29:45 ►
A chair design accepted by the manufacturer,
00:29:49 ►
a letterhead, a mathematical theorem regarding Norgate circuits.
00:29:56 ►
Now I confess, having run these studies,
00:29:59 ►
Norgate circuits are still something that I leave to the metaphysicians.
00:30:04 ►
But what happened is we had somebody who was working on Norgate circuits are still something that I leave to the metaphysicians. But what happened is we had somebody who was working on Norgate circuits
00:30:08 ►
and said he’d made incredible progress, and he went back and told his team.
00:30:11 ►
And then a few weeks later, another member of the team came,
00:30:14 ►
and we made another jump forward in Norgate circuitry.
00:30:17 ►
And we did that with a third individual.
00:30:19 ►
So I guess that’s a trifurcated consciousness in Norg, circuitry is one of the successes of the psychedelic era.
00:30:32 ►
Completion of more furniture, conceptual model of the photon, we’ve looked at a little,
00:30:37 ►
and a design of a private vacation home.
00:30:43 ►
And we then asked them, of course, weeks later, are you working any differently
00:30:50 ►
since you had this session? Since, again, mainly naive subjects, and we didn’t say anything
00:30:57 ►
that there would be any after effects other than this would be good for you for the day.
00:31:10 ►
day. Big surprise. About half of the people involved said that they had either significant or marked enhancement in their work life, in ability to solve problems, attitude toward
00:31:15 ►
job, productivity, you know, good stuff. So one of the things that we came out of that
00:31:21 ►
was even one experience, naive subjects, low dose, in this
00:31:26 ►
case no suggestion, led to improved functioning in this world, on this level, in their jobs.
00:31:33 ►
These were people from Stanford Research Institute, Varian Associates, Hewlett-Packard. I mean,
00:31:38 ►
these were very, very straight, usually kind of middle-aged scientists
00:31:45 ►
who had a long history of being middle-aged and straight.
00:31:57 ►
So in the write-up that we were able to get out
00:32:00 ►
before the government stopped allowing even publishing,
00:32:03 ►
we said we urge the desirability
00:32:06 ►
of further investigations, like who doesn’t. But what we said is what would be really cool
00:32:13 ►
is to not have naive subjects, which is where you come in. Because a lot of, obviously,
00:32:21 ►
your kind of initial flash and excitement does get in the way of what it
00:32:26 ►
is you’re there to do.
00:32:27 ►
And so we were really saying what would be sensible if we were a sensible country with
00:32:31 ►
sensible science would be to encourage people to take these more regularly as part of their
00:32:37 ►
scientific work.
00:32:38 ►
Now fortunately, while the federal government stopped our work, the people who were interested in the computer world continued theirs.
00:32:49 ►
And we do now have a computer revolution,
00:32:52 ►
and if you trace it backwards to the kind of original folks
00:32:55 ►
who made the original breakthroughs,
00:32:57 ►
most of them, while not officially subjects in our experiment,
00:33:01 ►
certainly had picked up on what we were doing.
00:33:07 ►
Some of them are doing it today.
00:33:13 ►
In fact, some of them are doing it right this very instant. I do read auras at a distance and you have been spotted. So that’s, while I have some kind of longer reports from some of the people,
00:33:30 ►
probably the most attractive, most fun was an architect, a man named Heinrich Bull.
00:33:37 ►
And what Heinrich Bull said of the, he brought in three different projects.
00:33:41 ►
One, which he had a very, very difficult client who had just been rejecting and rejecting and rejecting
00:33:45 ►
without telling him exactly what he didn’t like about the proposal.
00:33:49 ►
This was for a home.
00:33:50 ►
It was actually for a set of buildings on a piece of property.
00:33:55 ►
He had a college building to design,
00:33:58 ►
which came with an 82-page list of specs.
00:34:02 ►
And he also had some other things.
00:34:04 ►
And at one point point he decided that he
00:34:07 ►
didn’t really have any way to begin the process of working on, this was a particular project
00:34:13 ►
which was an arts and crafts center with some restaurants and parking on like a three acre
00:34:18 ►
site. And he took out his big drawing pad that he’d brought with him, and he marked it out, the area of the acreage.
00:34:29 ►
And then he just looked at it, and it was blank, blank, blank, blank, blank.
00:34:31 ►
And then he said, then I allowed it to appear.
00:34:35 ►
And what he saw was the fully developed project.
00:34:38 ►
Done.
00:34:41 ►
So he would do things like he would do with a completed drawing,
00:34:44 ►
which was still blank.
00:34:48 ►
He would count the number of parking spaces to see whether it met that particular criteria
00:34:50 ►
yes, did it meet the setbacks
00:34:52 ►
did it meet all the zoning requirements
00:34:54 ►
and it had
00:34:54 ►
and he literally walked into the project
00:34:57 ►
and looked around so he could go up under
00:34:59 ►
and see what kind of bolts he had used
00:35:02 ►
and some weeks later he began, he took his,
00:35:08 ►
he did make some sketches that afternoon because he was making, in a sense, notes.
00:35:13 ►
And then several weeks later, with his sketch pad next to him,
00:35:17 ►
he began to do the serious architectural drawings,
00:35:21 ►
the first kind of major renderings that show the whole project.
00:35:24 ►
And he was able to do that with some ease. The interesting thing to him was he didn’t
00:35:28 ►
open his sketchbook. That he had
00:35:31 ►
been into that project well enough so he simply
00:35:36 ►
drew what he had seen, not what he had drawn.
00:35:40 ►
And found that it also was exactly to scale
00:35:44 ►
as it had been during the session.
00:35:48 ►
So, that’s what we started with, and now we’re ready to go to the next step,
00:35:54 ►
which is to take volunteers, and to prove that Forbes, or Fortune, was once again guessing the future correctly.
00:36:02 ►
once again, you know, guessing the future correctly.
00:36:07 ►
So, since I’m asking for volunteers,
00:36:12 ►
are there any questions before we take you off into the next room and start?
00:36:15 ►
That way we’ll keep the kind of theoretical questions to a minimum because this is
00:36:20 ►
your life. Or at least one of them, yes.
00:36:25 ►
Yeah, I think a more knowledgeable group
00:36:27 ►
will react better than this group did
00:36:31 ►
because there is the realization,
00:36:34 ►
one is this isn’t your last chance.
00:36:37 ►
Some of you have read Rick Strassman’s book, DMT,
00:36:41 ►
which he gave DMT in, as he describes it,
00:36:44 ►
a pretty rotten setting. And he knew it
00:36:47 ►
was lousy and he had all experienced subjects. Because that way he could tell the government
00:36:52 ►
we are not creating addicts. We are using addicts. You know, this is the same government
00:37:00 ►
that gave you poisoned food in World War II. So they thought that seemed to meet a lot of their criteria. But what he found is people would say, look, I know
00:37:09 ►
this is a terrible setting. You know it’s a terrible setting. Let’s do the best we can.
00:37:14 ►
And in that setting, Rick’s subjects did have really a wide range of experiences, for some
00:37:22 ►
of them much wider than they had had in their prior DMT experiences,
00:37:26 ►
some within their range.
00:37:27 ►
So it was basically working with sophisticated subjects
00:37:30 ►
made it much, much easier to do the work.
00:37:33 ►
So that’s, in general, I would say if we had sophisticated subjects
00:37:37 ►
who, again, the criteria that was important is
00:37:40 ►
these people wanted to solve those problems.
00:37:44 ►
And that was the driving force.
00:37:48 ►
And that would be the one criteria I would look for in the replication. Thanks. Yes, please.
00:37:57 ►
Okay, the question of the control group. Again, people in industry said to us, well, how do
00:38:02 ►
you know that if you didn’t take these really smart guys and put them in a room and relax them for three hours and give them lunch,
00:38:08 ►
that they wouldn’t do just as well?
00:38:10 ►
We said, we don’t.
00:38:12 ►
You do that.
00:38:20 ►
So that’s the kind of cheap answer, okay?
00:38:23 ►
But given our budget, that was what we could do.
00:38:27 ►
But the other thing is a double-blind study, so to speak,
00:38:31 ►
which is kind of what you’re suggesting,
00:38:34 ►
comes at a much later development
00:38:35 ►
and usually is based on the notion
00:38:38 ►
that set and setting are not fundamental.
00:38:41 ►
Almost all double-blind studies in the literature
00:38:43 ►
say we’re looking for the
00:38:45 ►
biochemical change between having something and not. And at one point, for reasons that
00:38:50 ►
you cannot imagine, I was looking at the anti-baldness preparations. What’s it called? Rigane? Rigogane?
00:38:58 ►
I didn’t buy it. And I was looking, I was reading on the back of the carton, in the very fine print that I carry glasses for,
00:39:07 ►
and it said in the placebo-controlled studies that if you use this stuff and you have the right kind of baldness,
00:39:15 ►
you get about a 44% little bits of hair back for a month.
00:39:21 ►
But the control group that got nothing had 30%.
00:39:25 ►
30% of them got hair back.
00:39:28 ►
So I wrote them and said,
00:39:30 ►
can you send me the control group stuff?
00:39:37 ►
Because that’s good enough odds for me.
00:39:43 ►
So, in a sense, what we did have have now third level to this question we did have a control
00:39:49 ►
group which is these same people one is they had been working without this before they now had a
00:39:54 ►
kind of relaxation methodology and what all of them said and i think heinrich said it very nicely
00:40:00 ►
said i didn’t become Frank Lloyd Wright.
00:40:06 ►
I just became more Henrik Fultz.
00:40:09 ►
That the houses,
00:40:10 ►
in this case the design of houses,
00:40:12 ►
they were like his houses,
00:40:14 ►
but he said freer.
00:40:17 ►
So in a sense,
00:40:19 ►
they all did try and replicate this
00:40:21 ►
in the following weeks, of course.
00:40:22 ►
And what they found is,
00:40:23 ►
sure, if you relax and get your ego out of the way, you can do better work, but in the words of
00:40:30 ►
Ken Kesey, if you’re ready to go, a dab will do you. So the dab turned out to be very useful.
00:40:37 ►
So that’s about the best set of answers to the control question. Ah, yes. Well, this dates this study. No. No women. This was, these
00:40:55 ►
were people with degrees in, you know, physics, biology, chemistry, and engineering. Some
00:41:03 ►
10 or 15 years later, I was teaching in design engineering at Stanford,
00:41:06 ►
and we were up to like 5% women in engineering.
00:41:11 ►
So simply, one is that wasn’t our concern.
00:41:15 ►
Our concern was subjects who were interested,
00:41:17 ►
willing, and had the criteria,
00:41:19 ►
and there were very few women to pick from.
00:41:21 ►
One of the co-researchers eventually
00:41:23 ►
was a woman professor
00:41:25 ►
of electrical engineering at Stanford
00:41:27 ►
who worked with us on some other studies
00:41:30 ►
and the issue of sexual differences
00:41:32 ►
didn’t seem to be,
00:41:34 ►
you know, it wasn’t an issue at the time
00:41:35 ►
and we had no way of looking at it.
00:41:39 ►
Oh.
00:41:40 ►
Has all of the work in creative problem solving
00:41:42 ►
been in the technical and so forth?
00:41:46 ►
No, zero, actually.
00:41:47 ►
This is just some little aberration in my career.
00:41:51 ►
I was trying to think as I was asked to prepare this,
00:41:54 ►
because John and I talked about my doing something,
00:41:56 ►
and I had a deep philosophical presentation
00:41:59 ►
about the past and the present and the future
00:42:00 ►
and social trends,
00:42:02 ►
and he said, no, nobody’s interested in that.
00:42:06 ►
At least not for me, they weren’t.
00:42:09 ►
And then he said, this is this little odd part
00:42:12 ►
which we haven’t really looked at very closely.
00:42:15 ►
And it’s an odd part which was totally accepted
00:42:18 ►
by the general culture.
00:42:20 ►
See, that’s why picking people
00:42:22 ►
who had no other interest in psychedelics
00:42:26 ►
other than for problem solving was a very interesting group.
00:42:30 ►
Certainly, I’ve done other things.
00:42:36 ►
Oh, why did we pick these kinds of problems?
00:42:39 ►
We wanted stuff that nobody could say,
00:42:43 ►
you’re making it all up, it’s bullshit, this is just another fantasy,
00:42:47 ►
you’re just a bunch of deluded researchers.
00:42:50 ►
Which is why the artwork never, you know,
00:42:52 ►
as you remember with John’s presentation,
00:42:55 ►
one of the questions was,
00:42:56 ►
what artist hasn’t been influenced by psychedelics is a better question.
00:43:02 ►
Well, and any of you noticed in the curriculum of art academies across this country
00:43:07 ►
the compulsory understanding of the use of psychedelics?
00:43:12 ►
Not yet.
00:43:15 ►
So basically the fact that every artist has been influenced by psychedelics in the past 30 years
00:43:19 ►
has done zero to change anything in the attitude of the establishment that creates artists.
00:43:26 ►
What we were after is the kind of data where no matter how strongly
00:43:31 ►
you were inclined to disbelieve in the validity of psychedelics to enhance human capacity,
00:43:37 ►
you couldn’t get away from the client bought the house,
00:43:42 ►
the guy with the photon published it in the peer-reviewed journal.
00:43:46 ►
The guy with photoconductivity built the thing
00:43:49 ►
and the company made a bunch of dough out of it.
00:43:52 ►
So it was the kind of research which is incontestable rather than debatable.
00:43:58 ►
And that was really why we picked the area.
00:44:01 ►
I mean, our prior research had been we were interested in alcoholism, for example.
00:44:07 ►
And it’s fascinating.
00:44:08 ►
You work with alcoholics, they stop drinking,
00:44:11 ►
and the head of NIMH drug alcohol research at the time
00:44:17 ►
was presented with data from Canada on alcoholism work,
00:44:22 ►
and it was just some sensational early work.
00:44:25 ►
And he said, you know, I don’t believe this data.
00:44:27 ►
That’s fair, that’s his job.
00:44:29 ►
And someone said to him,
00:44:30 ►
what data would you believe in this area?
00:44:33 ►
He’s a scientist,
00:44:34 ►
trained in one of those scientific institutions.
00:44:36 ►
He said, none.
00:44:39 ►
Well, that makes it really easy
00:44:41 ►
to design research for this guy.
00:44:44 ►
So given that kind of
00:44:47 ►
scientific rigidity,
00:44:49 ►
we picked what we picked.
00:44:51 ►
Does that make sense?
00:44:52 ►
Okay.
00:44:54 ►
Well, to tell you the truth,
00:44:56 ►
when I was preparing this,
00:44:57 ►
I swore we used LSD.
00:45:00 ►
And I read what Willis Harmon and I wrote up,
00:45:03 ►
and it said we used mescaline,
00:45:15 ►
and this is now gossip, but when we were working at the International IFAS, now and then the government would say, you can’t use mescaline. Or maybe your mescaline might not be good mescaline.
00:45:25 ►
Or your mother’s mescaline, you know.
00:45:29 ►
Or form 7D has not been filled out in the last week.
00:45:33 ►
So we say, okay, we use LSD.
00:45:35 ►
So we had gotten used to, in a clinical setting, kind of using whatever was around.
00:45:40 ►
And we used to believe that when you used mescaline, people would have a lot more stomach upset
00:45:47 ►
because that was our belief system.
00:45:51 ►
And then as we got better at working with people,
00:45:53 ►
we found that went away and the discomfort was entirely
00:45:56 ►
our subjective opinion of what people should feel.
00:45:59 ►
So one of the things you learn when you’re doing clinical work with guiding
00:46:02 ►
is you really got to keep your thoughts clean
00:46:05 ►
because the person who you’re working with certainly can listen.
00:46:11 ►
So we used what we used because that was that particular time. Now, I will now give you the
00:46:16 ►
unpublished work. This is now the secret of why we thought it would work.
00:46:24 ►
And I do have, by the way,
00:46:26 ►
a few copies of the publication
00:46:28 ►
for those of you who are actually serious about it.
00:46:30 ►
Don’t get excited and take it home
00:46:31 ►
and throw it away, please,
00:46:32 ►
because there’s only about 20.
00:46:36 ►
How did we come to the conclusion
00:46:38 ►
that we could do this?
00:46:40 ►
Now, how would you come to that conclusion?
00:46:45 ►
Got it!
00:46:48 ►
The four of us got together, that’s why I think it was LSD, because I think it’s what we took.
00:46:52 ►
It took a low dose of LSD and after a few hours we sat up and designed the experiment.
00:47:11 ►
So there’s a term that I learned from Doug Engelbart,
00:47:15 ►
who is the guy who invented the mouse and invented word processing,
00:47:21 ►
and unfortunately had already invented that pretty well before he was part of the study.
00:47:22 ►
Darn.
00:47:26 ►
But Doug had a term called bootstrapping,
00:47:28 ►
which is you have to pick yourself up by your own bootstraps
00:47:29 ►
to make the next move.
00:47:30 ►
So that’s how we designed it.
00:47:32 ►
And so we thought it might work,
00:47:36 ►
but then again,
00:47:36 ►
what do four stone people know about reality?
00:47:40 ►
So we did this first day
00:47:42 ►
and people were very happy and they showed us their solutions. They were ecstatic and we were, you know, and people were very happy,
00:47:45 ►
and they showed us their solutions,
00:47:46 ►
and they were ecstatic,
00:47:47 ►
and we were, you know, that’s very good,
00:47:49 ►
you had a nice day, good, I’m glad it’s working out,
00:47:51 ►
your sitter’s taking you home, da-da-da-da.
00:47:53 ►
Then they left.
00:47:54 ►
We all went hysterical.
00:47:55 ►
You know, it worked, it worked, it worked,
00:47:57 ►
we actually did it!
00:47:59 ►
That moment when you actually find out
00:48:01 ►
that which you envisioned actually is so
00:48:03 ►
is like nothing else on earth.
00:48:05 ►
Well, not, no, it’s second to whatever
00:48:07 ►
we discussed earlier in the evening.
00:48:10 ►
But for us it was close
00:48:12 ►
because we didn’t know about his work at this point.
00:48:19 ►
So if you don’t want to be in our study,
00:48:22 ►
go in his study.
00:48:24 ►
And I will see you back there with
00:48:26 ►
his group. Okay. So I think we probably have room for one or two more questions and that
00:48:33 ►
will be it. Oh, time for a shameless commercial plug. When I really wanted to get on to this whole thing so you would all buy my novel,
00:48:47 ►
The Other Side of Hate.
00:48:49 ►
It’s really good.
00:48:59 ►
Ken Kesey said, it’s really good.
00:49:03 ►
Ram Dass said, it’s really good.
00:49:08 ►
Do you really want to miss what they love?
00:49:18 ►
And in the spirit of loving and giving that makes this movement what it is,
00:49:20 ►
I have for each of you a genuine postcard
00:49:23 ►
which describes the book a little
00:49:25 ►
tiny bit and says how you can order it if you don’t buy it from Bob Wallace, which is
00:49:30 ►
what you should do. You can buy it from anyone else, but it’s not as righteous. And you will
00:49:38 ►
be very glad that you have this book, because hidden within it, remember all those wonderful diagrams we saw of secret
00:49:46 ►
mushrooms? Well, hidden within this book is a fairly detailed way to guide someone on
00:49:53 ►
a very successful psychedelic. And it’s a guiding which has basically been kind of removed
00:49:59 ►
from the public world. And I think it’s very important that we have that out there. And
00:50:04 ►
the story set in the 60s
00:50:05 ►
is really lots of fun. There’s a lot
00:50:08 ►
of evil in it, but all the evil is true
00:50:10 ►
and it’s done by the government.
00:50:13 ►
And all the
00:50:14 ►
good is true, even though it’s fictionalized
00:50:16 ►
and it’s done by us.
00:50:18 ►
So that was my shameless commercial bit.
00:50:21 ►
Thank you.
00:50:26 ►
Oh, the volunteers, right.
00:50:28 ►
Now the price,
00:50:31 ►
the volunteers
00:50:31 ►
actually will meet up here
00:50:33 ►
and as soon as the federal government
00:50:35 ►
Oh, someone is laughing at the federal government.
00:50:43 ►
This is
00:50:43 ►
as soon as the stars on that flag start to go, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, just phone me.
00:50:55 ►
Okay?
00:50:56 ►
So, I don’t anticipate that we will do this.
00:51:00 ►
And actually, the Fortune article was very interesting in that it fantasied a Leary-Huxley Institute
00:51:08 ►
in which you could go and, with trained supervision, take these materials for scientific problems.
00:51:15 ►
What was interesting in the article, even in this somewhat fantasy, they put it in another country.
00:51:22 ►
So, yes, this will occur,
00:51:25 ►
and I’m taking your question seriously for just a moment.
00:51:28 ►
This will occur,
00:51:30 ►
and my guess is it will not occur in this country first.
00:51:33 ►
And we are basically, you know,
00:51:35 ►
the hope of those of us who are working,
00:51:37 ►
as we all are, to make the planet a little more livable,
00:51:40 ►
is other countries are beginning to get
00:51:42 ►
that whatever the United States thinks about these substances is cuckoo.
00:51:48 ►
And that country after country is kind of sliding out from under its agreements with the United States.
00:52:05 ►
So if any of you are Swiss citizens,
00:52:11 ►
you live in a country where marijuana has been legalized for Swiss citizens, and this is the part I love,
00:52:15 ►
for Swiss-grown marijuana.
00:52:19 ►
No border problems.
00:52:22 ►
But also, if you think of it,
00:52:23 ►
what’s the most uptight country in Europe you can think of?
00:52:26 ►
Right.
00:52:27 ►
So, goodness knows,
00:52:29 ►
if the Swiss have figured a way out of the American idiocy,
00:52:32 ►
you know, can Italy be far behind?
00:52:36 ►
So, we’ll do sign-ups,
00:52:39 ►
but we’ve got to have your passport
00:52:40 ►
and, you know, the other things you need to get in and out of the country.
00:52:43 ►
So, thank you very much.
00:52:46 ►
And on to the next.
00:53:08 ►
Before we continue, I guess I’d better clear something up for any narcs who might be joining us here in the psychedelic salon today.
00:53:11 ►
And by the way, welcome! We’re glad you’re here.
00:53:18 ►
That’s true, because we hope you’ll learn that the psychedelic community isn’t where the bad guys are.
00:53:20 ►
We’re the good guys, for crying out loud.
00:53:25 ►
At least we’re doing what we can to be part of the solution and not just be one more part of the problem. Now where was I? Oh yeah, unless you’re really dense like
00:53:31 ►
the screwheads in the U.S. Capitol, you realize that Jim was joking about having people sign
00:53:36 ►
up for his grand experiment. There’s no list to sign in case you’re wondering. Also, early
00:53:43 ►
in his talk, Jim mentioned that one of our beautiful souls had
00:53:46 ►
just died that weekend, and I believe it was Elizabeth Gipps he was talking about. Elizabeth
00:53:52 ►
was one of the founding elders of today’s psychedelic community, and one of her books,
00:53:57 ►
which is titled Scrapbook of a Hate Ashbury Pilgrim, is now considered to be pretty much of a historical document and it’s really just
00:54:07 ►
packed with her prose and poetry and wisdom and drawings, all of which were inspired while
00:54:12 ►
she was living in San Francisco during the late 60s.
00:54:16 ►
Those who knew her well all say that Elizabeth was one of a kind, as are we all, I might
00:54:22 ►
add.
00:54:24 ►
If you’re interested in learning more about the era Jim talks about in this presentation,
00:54:29 ►
I think probably the first place I would go is to his novel, The Other Side of Hate.
00:54:34 ►
And again, for you narcs out there, that’s H-A-I-G-H-T, not H-A-T-E.
00:54:41 ►
We don’t hate anyone, even though that’s not as easy as it might sound sometimes.
00:54:49 ►
And for those of you who have truly inquiring minds and maybe want to do a little ad hoc research on your own,
00:54:57 ►
well, if you pick up a copy of Jim’s novel, you’ll discover that in addition to being a great story,
00:55:03 ►
you’ll also have in your
00:55:05 ►
hands an excellent how-to manual for guiding people on mushroom trips.
00:55:10 ►
And another good account of those heady days, no pun intended, is John Markoff’s excellent
00:55:17 ►
little book, What the Dormouse Said, which I talked about back in our podcast number
00:55:22 ►
13, where Charlie Grove spoke at Kathleen’s salon about his psilocybin study.
00:55:29 ►
And if you really want to know the nitty-gritty details about the Menlo Park research,
00:55:34 ►
well, you can try to find a copy of Malden Grange Bishop’s book,
00:55:38 ►
The Discovery of Love.
00:55:40 ►
That book is long out of print, I’m afraid,
00:55:43 ►
but you can read my review of it on the Albert Hoffman Foundation’s website at www.hoffman.org.
00:55:50 ►
That’s 1-F and 2-Ms, H-O-F-M-A-N-N.org.
00:55:56 ►
And there’s a link to that review on our podcast page, by the way, a page that describes this program, which is our 42nd, I might add.
00:56:05 ►
And that page, by the way, is at matrixmasters.com slash podcast.
00:56:10 ►
Just remember, you are the master of your own matrix.
00:56:13 ►
matrixmasters.com slash podcast.
00:56:16 ►
Oh, and one last book I want to mention,
00:56:19 ►
and I guess I probably should have mentioned it first.
00:56:22 ►
It’s Charlie Grove’s book, Higher Wisdom,
00:56:25 ►
Eminent Elders Explore the Continuing Impact of Psychedelics.
00:56:30 ►
And in that book, the opening essay in Part 1 is actually by James Badiman
00:56:35 ►
and is titled Transpersonal Transitions,
00:56:39 ►
The Higher Reaches of Psyche and Psychology.
00:56:42 ►
And in that essay, you’ll also find a detailed account of some of his work with Myron Stolaroff and Willis Harmon at the International Foundation for Advanced Study,
00:56:52 ►
which I sometimes casually just call the Menlo Park Experiments.
00:56:56 ►
Jim’s account in Higher Wisdom is really fascinating and, quite frankly, has shown me what it really means to have the wisdom to take advantage of being in the right place at the right time,
00:57:07 ►
even if it means a major change in the direction you thought your life was going to take.
00:57:12 ►
He certainly took a hard left turn, and we’re all the better for it.
00:57:17 ►
There’s one last comment I want to make, and that is to point out an interesting connection, I think,
00:57:22 ►
between one of the people in the Menlo Park Research
00:57:25 ►
Project and my favorite inventor, Nikola Tesla.
00:57:29 ►
Now, if you’ve ever read a biography of Tesla, you know that when he was working on a new
00:57:33 ►
invention, he would sometimes go into a trance-like state and be seen using imaginary tools and
00:57:39 ►
working on imaginary devices.
00:57:42 ►
And when he was asked about this, he’d say that these machines were just as real to him in that state
00:57:47 ►
as if they were made out of steel.
00:57:50 ►
Now think back to what Jim just said about the architect who saw his project
00:57:54 ►
and walked around in it like he was in a virtual reality simulation.
00:57:59 ►
And I think there’s a really interesting similarity there, don’t you think?
00:58:03 ►
Maybe old Nicola had figured out a way to release some of that DMT we’ve all got stored in our pineal glands.
00:58:10 ►
He was out there tripping on an etch.
00:58:13 ►
We’ll never know, of course, but it’s sure fun to speculate, don’t you think?
00:58:17 ►
I know from both personal experience and from talking to a lot of you psychedelic codeheads out there
00:58:23 ►
that a museum dose of LSD can work wonders for you
00:58:27 ►
when you’re trying to hold a complex structure in your mind
00:58:29 ►
while you’re deep into cutting some code.
00:58:32 ►
But, hey, that’s a story for another day.
00:58:35 ►
Right now, I guess it’s time to let you all get on with your lives once again.
00:58:39 ►
It is certainly nice of you to join us here in the psychedelic salon again today,
00:58:44 ►
and we’re all certainly glad that you stopped by.
00:58:47 ►
And a big thank you again to Jim Fadiman,
00:58:50 ►
not only for giving his permission to podcast this talk,
00:58:53 ►
but for everything he’s done throughout his life to further our knowledge about human consciousness.
00:58:58 ►
And don’t forget to check out his novel, by the way.
00:59:01 ►
I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
00:59:03 ►
John and JT, thanks for making
00:59:05 ►
this recording possible. And Jacques, Cordell, and Wells, my friends from Chateau Hayouk.
00:59:11 ►
Hey, guys. Thanks again for the use of your music. I really do appreciate it. And for
00:59:16 ►
now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends.