Program Notes
Guest speakers: Mark Pesce, Erik Davis, Daniel Pinchbeck, Alex Grey, Allyson Grey, and Nick Sand
This was the most ambitious schedule yet for the Palenque Norte lectures, 39 speakers in four days. Thanks to the good folks at Entheon Village who provided the facility, which was one of the largest tents on the playa this year, they took place without too many problems sneaking up on us. In this podcast you will hear sound bites from the talks given by Mark Pesce, Erik Davis, Daniel Pinchbeck, Alex Grey, Allyson Grey, and Nick Sand. In the weeks ahead, their complete presentations will be podcast for those of you who weren’t able to make it to the burn this year.
Photo (at right) taken at Burning Man 2006 by Lorenzo
More of Lorenzo’s photos from the 2006 Burning Man Festival
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049 - Pharmacology and the Posthuman Phuture
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
3D Transforming Musical Linguistic Objects
00:00:09 ►
Help me out!
00:00:12 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:23 ►
So, here we are all back safe and sound from Burning Man.
00:00:29 ►
Well, safe anyway. I’m not so sure about the sound part, if you know what I mean.
00:00:35 ►
Some of you may remember that line from an old Willie Nelson song that goes,
00:00:39 ►
After taking several readings, I’m surprised to find my mind still fairly sound.
00:00:44 ►
After taking several readings, I’m surprised to find my mind is still fairly sound.
00:00:51 ►
And since I know that many of you psychedelic saloners were at this year’s Burning Man Festival,
00:00:56 ►
I suspect that you may be feeling the same way right about now.
00:01:03 ►
I think it was Alex Gray who said he loved Burning Man because there were so many freaks there.
00:01:08 ►
And, of course, he was using the word freak in its positive form.
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That’s what the good guys called themselves in the 60s.
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While the press called them hippies, they called themselves freaks.
00:01:19 ►
But if you take that word in its negative form,
00:01:24 ►
then I think you have to say that Burning Man is populated by normal people,
00:01:31 ►
and the freaks are the ones who are out here in the default world supporting the Bush crime family.
00:01:34 ►
But I don’t want to get started down that road right now,
00:01:38 ►
because today I want to talk about the positive side of life,
00:01:42 ►
and one of the best places to find all the good things in life is at Burning Man.
00:01:48 ►
Now, I know that some people have called Burning Man the world’s greatest party,
00:01:51 ►
but personally I’m not in favor of saying things like that.
00:01:57 ►
I can’t remember if it was a speaker here in the salon or somewhere else that pointed out the fact that this business of picking a favorite song
00:02:01 ►
or a favorite color or a favorite vacation spot or whatever
00:02:05 ►
is simply a way to further condition us
00:02:08 ►
into a culture of competition.
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Why do we expect little children to have a favorite color
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or a favorite uncle or a favorite anything?
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When you think about it,
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what’s the advantage in life to having a favorite song?
00:02:21 ►
And what are you supposed to do
00:02:23 ►
if you find a song you like better than your favorite?
00:02:25 ►
Are you obligated to go around to everybody you know and update them on your new favorites list?
00:02:32 ►
I guess you can see that spending 12 hours alone driving home from the playa
00:02:37 ►
gave me plenty of time to think about weighty things like this.
00:02:42 ►
So let’s get on with today’s program, which is going to be a summary of a few of the great
00:02:50 ►
Palenque Norte lectures at this year’s Burning Man Festival.
00:02:54 ►
If you had a look at this year’s schedule, it should be easy to tell that we tried to
00:02:59 ►
pack way too many talks into too short a time.
00:03:03 ►
A program with 39 speakers over four days on the playa is nothing short of insanity,
00:03:09 ►
and to that I plead guilty.
00:03:12 ►
I suspect that every one of the speakers would have liked to have had at least twice as much time,
00:03:17 ►
and the audiences wanted even more.
00:03:20 ►
It was a great lineup, though, of some really powerful minds,
00:03:24 ►
and if the goddess of the playa smiles on us, we may even have recorded most of them.
00:03:30 ►
However, as in previous years, our number three backup system, which is my ancient but trusty little cassette tape recorder, may have been the only recording device that caught most of the talks. Of course, the sound quality isn’t top-notch,
00:03:47 ►
but hopefully you’ll be able to pull out some of the wisdom and energy
00:03:51 ►
that filled our Black Rock City lecture hall this year.
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In time, I’ll sort through some of the mini-discs and videotape
00:03:59 ►
we also used to record this year’s Blanque Norte lectures,
00:04:02 ►
but in the interest of getting this podcast out in a reasonable amount of time, I’m going to play a few sound bites today that were
00:04:09 ►
recorded just as they sounded in the big tent in Theon Village.
00:04:15 ►
We’ll begin with a cut from one of the best received talks this year, which was given
00:04:19 ►
by Mark Pesci, and he spoke to a packed tent just before our panel of psychedelic artists came on.
00:04:27 ►
Here’s a little sample of what Mark had to say.
00:04:36 ►
Now, I am not John the Baptist. I am not declaring the coming of the end, nor should I make clear, did Terence McKenna.
00:04:49 ►
He put his received wisdom out there, and he did not say take and eat.
00:04:55 ►
What he said was take this and test this.
00:04:59 ►
And I think his greatest disappointment was that so few people actually took that challenge up.
00:05:09 ►
Instead, his fans took up his story.
00:05:12 ►
They took it up hook, line, and sinker.
00:05:14 ►
They set their clocks and they waited, but they did nothing.
00:05:19 ►
And I think that that is this era’s great disappointment.
00:05:29 ►
think that that is this era’s great disappointment. Now, what would we do if we really believed in our hearts that the eschaton was so close to hand? That knowing would transform us.
00:05:38 ►
It would transform our actions into perfection. It would transform our vision into utter clarity.
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It would transform our hearts into perfect love,
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perfect trust, and perfect understanding.
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And I do not see this.
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And yet we hope.
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And if only because of my own association with McKenna, people often look to me for that confirmation that it is coming, that it is true, even when it’s not on the menu.
00:06:15 ►
Last year I gave a talk at MindStates. I talked for 45, 50 minutes about social networks, organizing principles, new forms of communication, BitTorrent, media distribution networks,
00:06:25 ►
and how this was all changing the way we communicate.
00:06:27 ►
And we opened the audience to questions,
00:06:29 ►
and the first question was about the eaching and the end of time.
00:06:34 ►
I hadn’t talked about that.
00:06:36 ►
But because I’m associated with McKenna,
00:06:38 ►
and because people want to believe in this impending end of everything,
00:06:41 ►
despite any evidence they may or may not have of their own senses,
00:06:45 ►
they basically completely ignored everything I’d said in the hour before that
00:06:48 ►
and just wanted to focus on this one idea of theirs.
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Now, I’m making a public statement here today at Palenque Norte.
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I have grown weary of this.
00:07:00 ►
I have had enough of this.
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And fortunately, I’ll have no more of this.
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For now, I will simply demur.
00:07:17 ►
Now, for my part, I have often equated the eschaton with the idea of technological singularity. That’s what
00:07:26 ►
I want to talk about. That’s a term that was coined by science fiction author Werner Wenschen
00:07:31 ►
in a lecture that he gave at NASA Ames back in 1993. I’m a friend of Werner’s, and he
00:07:38 ►
and I have talked about technological singularity at great length, philosophical terms. And
00:07:43 ►
I remember in one of our first conversations, he suddenly just sort of
00:07:46 ►
skipped it up and said, you are a gradualist, as if it were some sort of slam.
00:07:51 ►
Now, I am perfectly willing to admit that this may be true.
00:07:55 ►
And I do admit that I hold to a certain sort of technological determinism.
00:08:01 ►
I do believe that we will ascend into something that at this moment is ineffable and unknowable and utterly different.
00:08:10 ►
But will this happen in a twinkling of an eye?
00:08:14 ►
I think maybe in retrospect it will look that way after we have recognized that the singularity has occurred.
00:08:22 ►
that the singularity has occurred.
00:08:28 ►
Now, a lot of people talk about the technological singularity as tied up into the idea of the rise of artificial intelligence.
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And if you read all of the signs,
00:08:34 ►
as you were coming into camp, you saw a long quote by Ray Kurzweil,
00:08:38 ►
whom I’ll come to a little bit later,
00:08:39 ►
who’s sort of the main proponent of this idea.
00:08:42 ►
I do not believe that there is such a thing as artificial intelligence. I don’t believe that there’s any sort of superhuman intelligence
00:08:51 ►
that will rise and overwhelm us all. It simply doesn’t work that way. We don’t have precedence
00:09:00 ►
in the natural world for that, or any historical or scientific record that it has ever happened.
00:09:08 ►
Instead, nature works by self-suption.
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When something new emerges, it subsumes the forms that came before it.
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The mitochondrion, which are in every cell in your body, are proof that this is the way
00:09:24 ►
that nature works. And so, what
00:09:29 ►
I would say is that there is no such thing as artificial intelligence. There is only
00:09:34 ►
intelligence. Whether it’s a vegetable, or animal, or mineral, all intelligence is one.
00:09:41 ►
intelligence is wrong.
00:09:46 ►
So, back to Kurzweil.
00:09:48 ►
He’s perhaps the most visible proponent of technological singularity.
00:09:52 ►
And for years, through his books,
00:09:53 ►
he’s promoted the idea of another kind of eschaton,
00:09:56 ►
where the machine intelligences
00:09:59 ►
multiply their capabilities so rapidly
00:10:02 ►
that they transcend all forms of human understanding.
00:10:06 ►
And he says that’s the singularity.
00:10:08 ►
And it seems to me that as interesting as that idea sounds
00:10:11 ►
and kind of rational as it sounds,
00:10:13 ►
it actually could only be possible
00:10:16 ►
if those machines were born in a universe
00:10:19 ►
entirely separate from us.
00:10:22 ►
But this is not that world.
00:10:28 ►
And we can draw a line between ourselves and our machines no more than I can draw a line between myself and my eyeglasses. These are
00:10:35 ►
prosthetics, these machines, or perhaps looking the other way around, we are theirs. But neither
00:10:41 ►
can really exist without the other.
00:10:49 ►
So this rise of artificial intelligence, it’s a misapprehension.
00:10:56 ►
The rise of intelligence, however, that seems historically inevitable.
00:11:02 ►
As you can tell from the sound quality, that recording was made on a cassette recorder that wasn’t connected directly to a mixing board of any kind.
00:11:07 ►
And with the exception of just five talks, these tapes may be the only recordings that survived the playa.
00:11:14 ►
Nonetheless, I’m going to podcast the ones that are salvageable, like the one you just heard.
00:11:20 ►
And thanks to Brian, one of the cool people from Seattle who came by and loaned us his mini disc recorder,
00:11:27 ►
we did get recordings of the artist panel, Eric Davis, Daniel Pinchbeck, the Shulgens, and Nick Sand.
00:11:35 ►
And those will be the first talks that I’ll be podcasting in the next few weeks.
00:11:40 ►
And a little side note here to Brian.
00:11:43 ►
Hey, I really appreciate your letting us use your recorder much more than you know. And I promise to return it to you as soon as I can.
00:12:06 ►
complete stranger and under less than optimal conditions for operating a piece of equipment like that,
00:12:10 ►
well, that’s exactly the kind of spirit you see all over Black Rock City,
00:12:17 ►
which, by the way, is the name of the town the Burning Man participants build and then tear down each year.
00:12:22 ►
And now that I’ve told you about our good recordings, I’m going to subject you once again to some sounds from my cassette recorder
00:12:28 ►
since it’s quicker to grab these sound bites from that little device for right now.
00:12:34 ►
And I can almost hear you sound guys moaning out there,
00:12:37 ►
but until Brian and I reconnect and he tells me how to transfer the digital recordings to my PC. I just don’t want to go through all the learning curve it’s going to take
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to patch yet another connection to my already creaky old PC.
00:12:53 ►
So you’ll just have to bear with me for the time being,
00:12:56 ►
and I’ll forge ahead now and play a few minutes from the talk that Eric Davis gave,
00:13:02 ►
which he titled, Pharmacology and the Post-Human
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Future. In the background, you’ll hear the normal Burning Man chatter that never stops,
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but once you’ve been there for a while, the never-ending music and voices just become
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part of the ambient environment, and you kind of tune it out. It certainly didn’t distract
00:13:22 ►
anyone in our lecture tent from listening to what
00:13:25 ►
Eric had to say, and hopefully it won’t distract you either.
00:13:31 ►
But there’s sort of always a deeper question behind that, and this brings me lengthily
00:13:36 ►
to my main topic, which is really what all this stuff is about. Is all this sort of,
00:13:42 ►
particularly in a spiritual or alternative religious context, is all the sort of, particularly in a spiritual or alternative religious context,
00:13:45 ►
is all this sort of grasping after new spiritual forms of meditation, of yoga, of cults, of gurus, of masters,
00:13:54 ►
of psychedelia, of mind-body practices, holotropic breathing, excellent self-help groups,
00:13:59 ►
that whole sort of sense of reconstructing the human spirit.
00:14:05 ►
Is it ultimately really about religion?
00:14:09 ►
No.
00:14:10 ►
No, I think this is a modern phenomenon that leaves aside the homogeneity
00:14:14 ►
and the authority structures of traditional religion.
00:14:18 ►
But is it even really about spirituality?
00:14:21 ►
And we throw that word around, but what do we really mean by it?
00:14:24 ►
And what I came to see is that while there are certain, and obviously this is about spirituality, and we throw that word around, but what do we really mean by it? And what I came to see is that while there are certain, obviously this is
00:14:28 ►
about spirituality, what is spirituality about? What is
00:14:32 ►
spirituality about in a historical context, meaning where are we
00:14:36 ►
now, and where are we going? Is it just about replugging
00:14:40 ►
in with the nature or the cosmos or the goddess or the god that we
00:14:44 ►
feel is missing from the
00:14:46 ►
modern world? Or is something else going on with this? And I think something else is going
00:14:50 ►
on. And this is where we get to the prophetic dimension of visionary culture. And I’ll talk
00:14:56 ►
more about prophecy later. Because what I think is being prophesied in this experimentalism,
00:15:03 ►
which we can talk about in terms of the history of California
00:15:06 ►
or the history of New Age or new religious movements, and we can certainly talk about here,
00:15:13 ►
the tremendous emphasis on invention, on creativity, on can-do, on technologies of perception.
00:15:20 ►
This is all pointing towards something that I think is on the horizon,
00:15:27 ►
and this is what I call the post-human self that there’s something going on inside the self
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and inside the way that we experience ourselves
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and the way that we perceive ourselves
00:15:35 ►
that is already happening and will continue to happen more so
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and so even if we leave aside
00:15:42 ►
global warming, potential catastrophe
00:15:44 ►
the takeover of the machines,
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all the myriad of fearful scenarios that lie on the horizon,
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that I think we face another kind of apocalypse.
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And I use that word very, very gingerly because I don’t mean a discrete moment in time when everything changes.
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I mean something more like the original term means, which is revelation.
00:16:09 ►
And we have certain revelations about the self that are on the horizon and coming down the pike,
00:16:15 ►
and they’re not necessarily so easy to take down.
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And I’ll get to that in a little bit.
00:16:23 ►
So what’s happening to the self?
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There’s two main ways I think about imagining or understanding how we’re transforming our sense of subjectivity,
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of who we are, of how we feel on a day-to-day basis.
00:16:40 ►
And those are media, particularly electronic media, and pharmacology.
00:16:44 ►
And those are media, particularly electronic media and pharmacology.
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In the media space, one of the things that characterizes the modern world,
00:16:56 ►
and people don’t usually think about it in these terms, is that it made a pact with electricity.
00:17:01 ►
In the pre-modern world, they tended to organize nature in terms of maybe four elements,
00:17:04 ►
sometimes five, air, earth, fire, and water.
00:17:08 ►
And these were imagined to be the kind of animating spirits behind all the different kinds of matter one would encounter, including the human body, including the temperament.
00:17:13 ►
Our own personality tendencies, our own temperament was seen as a kind of elemental operation
00:17:20 ►
in alchemy and in traditional medicine.
00:17:23 ►
in alchemy and in traditional medicine.
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And then something comes along, the sort of capturing and use of electricity.
00:17:35 ►
And in my view, electricity is as fundamental as one of these elements in terms of the way that it feeds in and transforms our sense of material reality.
00:17:42 ►
And just to give you a little bit about that,
00:17:41 ►
of material reality.
00:17:44 ►
And just to give you a little bit about that,
00:17:50 ►
electricity in its nature has a kind of cosmic dimension.
00:17:55 ►
It ties us to the cosmos in a more direct way than even the elements do,
00:18:00 ►
although, of course, the elements are ultimately products of vast stellar activity.
00:18:08 ►
By using your toaster in the morning, you’re tweaking particles on the far end of the universe. That’s what they tell us. So even the most mundane uses of this, in many
00:18:14 ►
ways very mundane technology, electricity does not hold the enchantment for us now that
00:18:19 ►
it once did. We’re participating in a kind of cosmic reality. But I think in making that pact, electricity has certain plans for us, plans that are not,
00:18:30 ►
that are sort of coming online, have been coming online.
00:18:33 ►
Things like the collapse of space and time.
00:18:36 ►
Things like the weaving of a collective intelligence.
00:18:40 ►
Things like the speed, the incredible speeding up of our inventiveness, our possibility spaces, our abilities to envision.
00:18:49 ►
So that rather than just talking about the computer, you can see all of electrical and electronic media as kind of an expression of this pact, this elemental pact with the spirit.
00:19:01 ►
The way that we think of air, earth, and fire as having spirits, like in a pagan ritual.
00:19:06 ►
Electricity has a spirit, but it’s not necessarily an easy one.
00:19:11 ►
It comes with some difficulty because it tends to undermine our rooted animal nature, our sense of being, living in a world of four elements.
00:19:22 ►
living in a world of four elements.
00:19:25 ►
You know, for the vast majority of human life,
00:19:28 ►
99.99999% of it,
00:19:31 ►
we’re like running around where most of the things we encounter,
00:19:33 ►
almost everything we encounter is nature,
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some form of nature or another.
00:19:37 ►
The weather, the food, the rocks that we’re, you know,
00:19:38 ►
hunkering behind.
00:19:40 ►
Yes, we make little primitive shelters or have very simple forms of culture,
00:19:43 ►
but we’re mostly swimming in nature.
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And now we’re swimming in culture, in largely electronically mediated culture.
00:19:51 ►
And that this process, this feedback loop, is going to intensify and intensify, and the
00:19:56 ►
kind of dislocation and sort of fluidity, multiplicity that one can experience in visionary states
00:20:05 ►
where images and patterns and sounds and lights
00:20:09 ►
all sort of feed into this kind of virtualized hyper-dimensional experience
00:20:15 ►
is going to increasingly become the reality of media.
00:20:19 ►
Alex talked a little bit about computer graphics
00:20:22 ►
and the ways in which these allow for an incredible intensification of our ability to actually simulate.
00:20:30 ►
Man, I wish we had time to get into Eric’s and Mark’s complete talks right now.
00:20:36 ►
They both were extremely compelling and gave us a lot to think about.
00:20:46 ►
lot to think about. I was lucky enough to catch a presentation Eric made last July at Kathleen’s salon in Venice Beach and was quite taken by some of the original ideas that he has come up with in
00:20:52 ►
his new book, Visionary State, which is not just about California but is also about the state of
00:20:59 ►
mind so many of us psychedelic salonners care so much about. But today’s program is more of a decompression experience for me,
00:21:08 ►
and I hope it helps a little for those of you who are also at Burning Man this year.
00:21:12 ►
It’s hard to believe that beautiful Black Rock City that we worked so hard to build
00:21:17 ►
has now completely disappeared from the playa.
00:21:21 ►
And thanks to those fine people who are still out there picking up peanut shells and
00:21:26 ►
cigarette butts, the five square miles or so of Black Rock Desert where the festival is held each
00:21:32 ►
year will remain the most pristine spot within many miles. Leave no trace. It’s a great way to
00:21:39 ►
live every day, not just at the burn. Well, enough of my preaching, huh?
00:21:48 ►
Let’s take a listen to our next Palenque Norte speaker,
00:21:53 ►
a man most of you are already quite familiar with, and that is Daniel Pinchbeck.
00:21:59 ►
As you already know, Daniel has followed his groundbreaking book, Breaking Open the Head,
00:22:05 ►
with an equally impressive book titled 2012, The Return of Quetzalcoatl.
00:22:11 ►
I’ll have more to say about Daniel and his new book when I podcast his full presentation,
00:22:17 ►
but for now, here’s a little sample of what Daniel Pinchbeck had to say at Burning Man this year.
00:22:23 ►
It’s happening right now, and it’s a very, very difficult process,
00:22:25 ►
and by no means do I think that my book completes the process. I mean, in the book I also
00:22:27 ►
talk about quantum physics
00:22:29 ►
and how quantum physics kind of,
00:22:31 ►
you know, if you read like the Tao of physics or
00:22:33 ►
Goswami’s The Self-Word Universe,
00:22:35 ►
some of this stuff was kind of banalized
00:22:37 ►
in what the bleeps we know, but there seems to be
00:22:39 ►
this relationship where you can say that
00:22:41 ►
quantum physics supports certain ideas
00:22:44 ►
in, or that’s much better, certain ideas
00:22:46 ►
in, you know, eastern religion
00:22:48 ►
that actually consciousness is fundamental
00:22:50 ►
to reality rather than matter.
00:22:53 ►
So it gives us
00:22:54 ►
this whole shift in our perception.
00:22:58 ►
So the
00:22:58 ►
other question is, we’re at 2006
00:23:00 ►
now, how could such a massive
00:23:02 ►
transformation happen so quickly?
00:23:04 ►
You know.
00:23:07 ►
And It’s 2006 now. How could such a massive transformation happen so quickly? And I think that, you know, it’s a very interesting situation.
00:23:12 ►
So I also want to just note that, you know,
00:23:14 ►
even if you didn’t pay attention to the Mayan calendar,
00:23:17 ►
there are a lot of people, and I’m reading this book called The Chaos Point by a scientist,
00:23:21 ►
and he says that the next five years are absolutely critical.
00:23:23 ►
It’s either a breakdown or a breakthrough for the human species.
00:23:26 ►
You know, he has no mystical reference to a Mayan calendar.
00:23:29 ►
If you look at the species extinction crisis,
00:23:31 ►
25% of all mammalian species are going to be extinct in the next 30 years.
00:23:36 ►
So if we’re somehow going to, you know,
00:23:38 ►
and we can see what’s happening with climate change and that acceleration,
00:23:42 ►
we can see what’s happening with the forests, you know,
00:23:44 ►
there’s all these feedback loops are now being triggered in the system. So the forests are burning,
00:23:49 ►
releasing more carbons, more forests burn, more ice caps are melting, they keep melting
00:23:54 ►
faster, which a lot of you saw in the Inconvenient Truths. So we somehow have to face this sort
00:24:01 ►
of disaster we have in our hands. And we have to do it very quickly.
00:24:06 ►
I think basically if the human species is going to survive in any decent form,
00:24:11 ►
it really is going to have to take place in the next two to three years.
00:24:14 ►
There’s going to have to be a very, very deep transformation of consciousness and perspective.
00:24:21 ►
And one way I talk about it in the book is we’re going to have to go from looking at ourselves as kind of individuated egos out for our own gain in this kind of
00:24:30 ►
capitalist game to really thinking about ourselves as sentient aspects of a planetary ecology
00:24:36 ►
and transformation and how do we use the skills and the knowledge base and the technical capacities that we’ve developed to really help that process
00:24:46 ►
and to, you know, ameliorate the damage that we’ve done up to this point.
00:24:53 ►
And it’s a little bit, yeah, I mean, it’s a little bit like a Hollywood movie in a way.
00:24:57 ►
I think it’s like, you know, Mission Impossible.
00:24:59 ►
There’s always like these down-to-the-wire endings.
00:25:01 ►
It may be that, you know, God is just like a great film director,
00:25:07 ►
and you want to just get it right at the last second.
00:25:13 ►
The other aspect that interests me is,
00:25:17 ►
okay, so we’re going to need to deal on a sort of technical, meta-strategic level
00:25:20 ►
with the global situation.
00:25:21 ►
We’re going to need a new kind of rational,
00:25:24 ►
organizing principle for the planet, and we’re going to need a new kind of rational organizing principle
00:25:25 ►
for the planet, and we’re going to need to make that happen pretty quickly.
00:25:29 ►
But then there’s this other level, which is the psychic level, which to me is equally crucial.
00:25:34 ►
And that’s where most of the people who are part of the liberal establishment,
00:25:37 ►
like the Doors and Filling Inconvenient Truth, just don’t even have the capacity to address that.
00:25:43 ►
And I see that this psychic evolution is taking
00:25:45 ►
place and synchronicities are happening. So the way I think about it is, if you look at
00:25:51 ►
the 1750s, people had seen lightning and had seen shocks and so on, but they had no idea
00:25:58 ►
that you could bring electricity into the planet and make it into a transformative power
00:26:04 ►
for the whole planet.
00:26:09 ►
And once they understood that and managed to do it,
00:26:11 ►
and at first it was just a very weak trickle, and then suddenly in a century and a half, which is absolutely nothing in terms of evolutionary time,
00:26:17 ►
the whole planet got transformed.
00:26:18 ►
And we absolutely transformed the planet through electricity and industrialization.
00:26:22 ►
absolutely transform the planet through electricity and industrialization.
00:26:24 ►
So what if we’re at that same moment
00:26:26 ►
with the psychic
00:26:27 ►
energy, psychic phenomena,
00:26:30 ►
and there’s going to be this tipping point
00:26:31 ►
where we’re going to learn how to
00:26:33 ►
access it for transformation
00:26:35 ►
on a very visceral
00:26:38 ►
level, maybe through global
00:26:40 ►
psychic ceremonies
00:26:42 ►
or concentrations of energy.
00:26:44 ►
At the end of the book, I go to visit the
00:26:46 ►
Hopi Indians and hear their prophecies
00:26:48 ►
from one of their elders.
00:26:51 ►
And
00:26:51 ►
that was amazing. I sort of knew
00:26:54 ►
all of that already.
00:26:55 ►
I was reading this Cambridge
00:26:57 ►
anthropologist who went down
00:27:00 ►
and lived with the Hopis for a few years. This guy was a total
00:27:02 ►
secular materialist. And in his book, he was like,
00:27:04 ►
look, I’m really embarrassed to say this, but sometimes I would go to these rain dances,
00:27:09 ►
and they would work.
00:27:10 ►
It would be 120 degrees, clear blue sky, they would dance for 20 minutes,
00:27:14 ►
clouds would gather, rain would come.
00:27:16 ►
He also said that sometimes he would go to these Hopi elders,
00:27:19 ►
and he’d have a whole list of questions for them,
00:27:21 ►
and they would just answer the questions without him asking them one after another.
00:27:23 ►
a whole list of questions for them, and they would just answer the questions without them asking them one after another.
00:27:25 ►
So, I mean, to me, I take that seriously.
00:27:28 ►
Like, if the potential is for these indigenous, magical tribal cultures to have had a real
00:27:35 ►
relationship with elemental forces, that they could influence weather patterns, you know,
00:27:39 ►
how fascinating is that when you think about the climate change situation that we’re in?
00:27:41 ►
fascinating is that when you think about the climate change situation that we’re in
00:27:44 ►
and, you know,
00:27:46 ►
maybe we could reverse that
00:27:48 ►
and maybe this kind of critical
00:27:50 ►
threshold that we’re being pushed into
00:27:52 ►
is the only way to force
00:27:54 ►
us to access those latent psychic
00:27:56 ►
powers. Because as long as people
00:27:58 ►
are, like, relatively comfortable,
00:28:00 ►
they’re relatively asleep. You know,
00:28:02 ►
it’s only when people are forced
00:28:04 ►
into crisis
00:28:05 ►
that they become super inventive and super experimental.
00:28:09 ►
So maybe that’s one of the things that’s taking place at this point in time.
00:28:12 ►
But I just wanted to also talk about this title of the talk,
00:28:15 ►
which was Cancel the Apocalypse, which is from a Solvangels poem.
00:28:19 ►
As you can probably tell,
00:28:21 ►
we could have had just Mark, Eric, and Daniel
00:28:23 ►
as the only speakers we featured this
00:28:25 ►
year, and I’m sure the crowd would have stayed there for three days just interacting with the
00:28:30 ►
three of them. But, fools that we are, there were another 35 speakers we fit into the lecture series
00:28:37 ►
this year, and four of them, I believe, are right out there on the leading edge of the art world. You probably already know who I’m talking about.
00:28:47 ►
Roberto Venosa, Martina Hoffman, Allison Gray, and Alex Gray.
00:28:53 ►
And as I mentioned a few minutes ago,
00:28:55 ►
we did actually use one of our five precious mini-discs
00:28:58 ►
to record the discussion they had with what turned out to be
00:29:02 ►
one of our largest audiences of the week.
00:29:06 ►
In the interest of time, and since I’m running out of steam already,
00:29:09 ►
I’m only going to play a little segment from one of Alex Gray’s riffs,
00:29:13 ►
but before too many weeks pass, I’ll get the complete recording of this panel of artists out to you in another podcast.
00:29:21 ►
Now here’s a little taste of Alex Gray, and I’ll follow that with a shortcut from Allison Gray’s opening remarks as well.
00:29:30 ►
Allison and I are extremely honored to be part of Antheon Village this year.
00:29:55 ►
and this is a kind of historic coalescing of the minds of science and art and spirituality to point toward a positive future for entheogens.
00:30:14 ►
future for entheogens. And it’s really what has come clearer is that for me, the future of visionary art, because this is a talk that will go around the subject of the future of visionary or psychedelic art. For me, it’s
00:30:31 ►
important for us to not only wander in the desert, but begin to build a temple that is based on this kind of new spirituality and urgency toward a more universal
00:30:48 ►
and embracing kind of love energy
00:30:54 ►
that cuts to the underlying core of the wisdom traditions
00:31:00 ►
to create spaces that birth new archetypes,
00:31:05 ►
the new universal archetypes that are emerging through our entheogenic experiences.
00:31:12 ►
I want to build the real entheon.
00:31:14 ►
I want to build the permanent temple that will house the psychedelic and spiritual,
00:31:24 ►
you know, realizations that’s coming through our communities
00:31:29 ►
and all the great artists that are making work now.
00:31:35 ►
You know, we’d like to contribute the Cosm, the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, to such a structure.
00:31:40 ►
We know that there’s numerous other kinds of collections of important relics. Because I was thinking, like, a thousand years from now, do you think that Dr. Hoffman’s
00:31:53 ►
invention will be relevant if there is a human race? And I think yes. We were just at Sharp Cathedral in France just earlier this summer.
00:32:08 ►
We made a pilgrimage there with Wisdom University.
00:32:11 ►
And this is a place dedicated to the Divine Mother.
00:32:15 ►
The mystery school that founded Sharp Cathedral was exactly a thousand years ago this year, 2006.
00:32:29 ►
Bishop Fulbert creates this mystery school that led to the creation of the cathedrals all over Europe.
00:32:38 ►
So a new kind of sacred space came out of this mystery school,
00:32:42 ►
and it was through them going to their enemies,
00:32:46 ►
the Muslims that were being killed in the Crusades, these people went with a sense of
00:32:52 ►
there is an underlying unity in our spiritualities. And they found the Sufis, and the Sufis gave
00:33:00 ►
them a sacred geometry that helped them to birth the cathedrals.
00:33:06 ►
And so, you know, a thousand years later, we’re still, you know, Christians killing Muslims.
00:33:13 ►
And, you know, humanity’s at this kind of crisis point.
00:33:17 ►
And for all the wisdom traditions and for the new kind of psychedelic visionaries to come together
00:33:27 ►
and find the underlying threads of the perennial philosophy and the perennial visions that
00:33:35 ►
will sustain our real kind of mystic realities, bringing them into form, validating them for
00:33:43 ►
other people.
00:33:43 ►
bringing them into form, validating them for other people.
00:33:48 ►
That’s what I feel like the real function of visionary art is,
00:33:52 ►
is it validates other people’s visionary states.
00:33:55 ►
And they say, you know, so many people come up to me and say,
00:34:00 ►
my God, that piece you did reminds me exactly of this experience that I had.
00:34:04 ►
And in a way, that validates me.
00:34:06 ►
But for them, many of them have said,
00:34:13 ►
hey man, I thought I was going crazy and could show people your crazy ass shit. And then I could demonstrate what I’m talking about. And so a sacred space would validate those
00:34:22 ►
kinds of sort of mystic breakthroughs that we have that we
00:34:25 ►
don’t see reflected in our world that often. And so there’s an almost amorphic resonance
00:34:33 ►
kind of importance to creating these outcropics like at Antheon Village here, because we’re
00:34:43 ►
wanting to load our unconscious and our superconscious
00:34:46 ►
with these possibilities of our own realization
00:34:51 ►
or our own, at least, spiritual growth.
00:34:56 ►
So I see it as a very…
00:34:59 ►
I’m really on fire about creating new permanent sacred architecture.
00:35:06 ►
And so I hope that it resonates with some of you.
00:35:10 ►
And we built this chapel of sacred mirrors in New York City.
00:35:17 ►
I wanted to invite you.
00:35:20 ►
See, this is sort of my scheme.
00:35:23 ►
I wanted to invite you to make sacred space in your home.
00:35:28 ►
You know, make yourself a chapel.
00:35:30 ►
You don’t have to call it a chapel if you don’t want to.
00:35:33 ►
Call it whatever you want.
00:35:34 ►
But a sacred space in your personal space.
00:35:37 ►
Now, you could do it like on an altar.
00:35:39 ►
We all have them.
00:35:40 ►
We probably all have their altars.
00:35:42 ►
I bet everybody does.
00:35:44 ►
With crystals on it.
00:35:45 ►
You know, something positive.
00:35:46 ►
Just so we go there and say,
00:35:48 ►
these are my beautiful, special things.
00:35:50 ►
But then, if you have ambition,
00:35:53 ►
like a lot of people here do,
00:35:54 ►
because it’s amazing art.
00:35:56 ►
If you have ambition,
00:35:58 ►
make a chapel in your backyard.
00:36:01 ►
Or in your community.
00:36:04 ►
You know, a community center. like the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors.
00:36:07 ►
Make it there.
00:36:07 ►
But if you want to make another Chapel of Sacred Mirrors,
00:36:10 ►
if you want to, say, use Alex’s art and make a replica of the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors
00:36:16 ►
in your community or in your…
00:36:17 ►
We can help you do that.
00:36:20 ►
I would love to help you do that.
00:36:22 ►
So, yeah, so we’re down for…
00:36:24 ►
But you’ve got to work with us.
00:36:26 ►
All right?
00:36:27 ►
That’s the promise.
00:36:29 ►
And the promise is not to do it without us because this is what it’s all about, really.
00:36:36 ►
This is the bottom line.
00:36:37 ►
It’s called honoring the source.
00:36:40 ►
See, we’re all here to honor the source.
00:36:43 ►
We go there.
00:36:44 ►
We journey there.
00:36:42 ►
see we’re all here to honor the source we go there, we journey there
00:36:45 ►
we see the source of creativity
00:36:47 ►
and the source of originality
00:36:49 ►
the source of our creativity
00:36:51 ►
and that’s who we honor
00:36:52 ►
it’s the one
00:36:53 ►
so I’m just saying
00:36:55 ►
honor the one
00:36:56 ►
make your own chapel
00:36:57 ►
but if you want to make it with us
00:37:00 ►
we’d love to help you
00:37:01 ►
just make it with us
00:37:03 ►
I hope you will take to heart
00:37:05 ►
what Allison had to say just now
00:37:07 ►
about creating a sacred space
00:37:09 ►
in your own home
00:37:10 ►
and if you’re so inclined
00:37:12 ►
I think it would be great
00:37:13 ►
if some of you created
00:37:14 ►
your own little mini chapel
00:37:16 ►
of sacred mirrors
00:37:17 ►
somewhere in your community
00:37:18 ►
in a week or so
00:37:20 ►
I’ll be podcasting
00:37:21 ►
more of what Alex and Allison
00:37:23 ►
had to say
00:37:24 ►
along with the talks by Martina Hoffman and Roberto Venosa In a week or so, I’ll be podcasting more of what Alex and Allison had to say,
00:37:28 ►
along with the talks by Martina Hoffman and Roberto Venosa,
00:37:32 ►
who are also on the art panel at this year’s Palenque Norte Lectures.
00:37:37 ►
And in that podcast, I hope to be able to pass along some other ideas about creating a sacred space that have been floating around in my own head for a while.
00:37:42 ►
But right now, I want to play a short cut from Nick Sandstock,
00:37:46 ►
and I’ll warn you ahead of time,
00:37:48 ►
this particular recording isn’t of the highest quality.
00:37:51 ►
The good news is that we actually did get Nick recorded
00:37:54 ►
with our last good mini-disc,
00:37:57 ►
but in order to get this podcast out today,
00:37:59 ►
I think I seem to be saying that over and over,
00:38:03 ►
I’m using my tape backup version,
00:38:06 ►
mainly because I don’t have the patience right now
00:38:08 ►
to figure out all the screwy crap my PC requires
00:38:11 ►
to input the mini-disc recording directly into my podcast software.
00:38:16 ►
Hopefully I’ll be able to graduate to a Mac next year
00:38:18 ►
and give you all a little better sound quality here in these podcasts.
00:38:24 ►
But for now, here is how it actually sounded in the big tent in Theon Village
00:38:28 ►
on the Saturday afternoon before the man burned.
00:38:34 ►
And the reason for that could be said in two words.
00:38:39 ►
It’s a comic bomb.
00:38:42 ►
And when I grew up, I grew up under the shadow of the atomic bomb. And when I grew up, I grew up under the shadow of the atomic bomb. And my father
00:38:49 ►
was on the second rank of the Manhattan Project and also the Chicago Substitute Outward Mills
00:38:56 ►
that made the first fissionable uranium. So I was very impacted by this growing up and watching the horrific destruction of,
00:39:07 ►
and vaporization of cities and people, and thought to myself,
00:39:13 ►
there’s got to be a better way than this.
00:39:16 ►
One of my father’s exchange students was an Indian man who was Raja.
00:39:21 ►
I thought that was his name.
00:39:22 ►
He was actually a Raja from India, studying under my father at Columbia in Brooklyn,
00:39:28 ►
to get his Ph.D. in chemistry.
00:39:32 ►
He taught me yoga.
00:39:34 ►
And so I began to realize that besides the scientific background,
00:39:39 ►
there was also a spiritual side to life.
00:39:42 ►
And I began to look for the things which would open the spiritual
00:39:46 ►
world to me, and soon
00:39:48 ►
discovered LSD,
00:39:50 ►
mescaline, ENT,
00:39:53 ►
and
00:39:53 ►
in those days, there were research
00:39:56 ►
chemicals. They were easily
00:39:57 ►
obtained by simply walking into a
00:39:59 ►
binocular house and saying,
00:40:02 ►
I’d like to count on number 1468
00:40:04 ►
the last generation of gases I have limited to our trade, please. Oh, I’d like your catalog number 1468, US Church of Gatsby, by Antoine
00:40:06 ►
Mitter, please. Oh, I guess so. And how much would you like to get? I want to say, Mr.
00:40:12 ►
Cotter’s got a tentative program, and I’m dressed in cap student boots and paisley pants
00:40:17 ►
and, you know, all of this. And they thought this was very novel, and I started to be friends
00:40:23 ►
with the presidents of these farm organic houses
00:40:26 ►
and making compounds for them.
00:40:30 ►
Rare intermediates that I was making, DIT and DET and LSB and mescaline,
00:40:37 ►
and I was selling them to these, which they could then resell to people interested in these compounds.
00:40:44 ►
As I started to use psychedelics, my first
00:40:48 ►
experience was mescaline. And I had such a profound experience taking mescaline. I did
00:40:54 ►
it with a three-day fast, meditation, yoga. I believe strongly in the elaborate preparation for a psychedelic sacrament.
00:41:07 ►
I think these are healing medicines, all of them,
00:41:12 ►
either the synthesized ones and also the plant helpers.
00:41:21 ►
I believe also that they can be used successfully and creatively for recreational use, and they
00:41:27 ►
could be also used for deep spiritual use.
00:41:32 ►
As the time went on, I had to make a decision, because the restrictions began to be applied
00:41:40 ►
by the FDA, who at that time were the only people who had any involvement with this.
00:41:47 ►
And so they would come around and they would say, oh, Mr. Sanders, you’re here on this
00:41:52 ►
list of what people have thought that this experimental compounding by surgical assays
00:41:56 ►
that I have for midtouching.
00:41:58 ►
Not that they could ever pronounce it correctly, but they had stated that I did too.
00:42:03 ►
And I said, oh, yes, that was really interesting.
00:42:08 ►
I thought there was, came in a little teeny
00:42:09 ►
bottle, and I said, oh,
00:42:11 ►
it dropped and fell on the floor.
00:42:14 ►
See that little stain? That’s very good, too.
00:42:16 ►
He said, yeah, but what about the two pounds
00:42:18 ►
of mescaline that you ordered?
00:42:20 ►
Oh, the mescaline. That was great.
00:42:21 ►
We have to put that on the cereal every morning.
00:42:23 ►
It was wonderful.
00:42:25 ►
It was a very, very spark every morning. It was wonderful. Thank you.
00:42:26 ►
I had a very, very sparkly day.
00:42:28 ►
It was all fine.
00:42:29 ►
I said, oh, well, if you can’t let me know,
00:42:31 ►
would you please be turning to the FDA or to the chemical company?
00:42:34 ►
Absolutely, sir.
00:42:35 ►
Don’t bother.
00:42:36 ►
Slowly, slowly, I began to realize that the FDA was not going to be able to do the job
00:42:42 ►
that it had been appointed to do,
00:42:44 ►
which is to guard our safety and to guarantee able to do the job that it had been appointed to do,
00:42:49 ►
which is to guard our safety and to guarantee the purity of the drugs and the safety of those drugs that we take.
00:42:53 ►
And that because of this weird gray zone that turned into a black zone
00:42:59 ►
of draconian and legally, politically motivated laws
00:43:04 ►
which had nothing to do with safe testing or anything like this,
00:43:10 ►
the drugs became more and more illegal, and as a result, people had to go deeper underground.
00:43:17 ►
They did not have the ability to find pure psychedelics.
00:43:23 ►
So then a lot of problems occurred.
00:43:27 ►
In fact, many years
00:43:28 ►
after I was arrested, I had
00:43:30 ►
the opportunity to speak to
00:43:32 ►
the head of the DEA
00:43:34 ►
chemist,
00:43:36 ►
Bob Sager,
00:43:38 ►
and he said, you know,
00:43:40 ►
Nikki, I was so glad
00:43:42 ►
when I busted you, and I was able to
00:43:44 ►
provide all the evidence.
00:43:46 ►
As we started to investigate this evidence, I noticed that all the orange sunshine had
00:43:52 ►
was from exactly 300 lights, not 299, not 310.
00:43:57 ►
I was kind of, like, perplexed at how you managed to get such great precision.
00:44:02 ►
Then we started analyzing the material, and we found it was absolutely pure,
00:44:05 ►
one-stop material.
00:44:07 ►
And then I began to wonder
00:44:10 ►
about what I had done.
00:44:11 ►
And when we had got to safely
00:44:13 ►
away in prison,
00:44:15 ►
I realized that I had done a
00:44:17 ►
disservice to the public because
00:44:20 ►
the rotten mixture
00:44:22 ►
that had come after that
00:44:24 ►
that poisoned so many people
00:44:25 ►
were
00:44:27 ►
actually the results of our work.
00:44:34 ►
Eventually I developed
00:44:35 ►
Arms Sunshine with Robert
00:44:37 ►
Timothy Scully who was a
00:44:39 ►
disciple of Augustus Housley Stanley
00:44:41 ►
who was the man
00:44:43 ►
who did the first production runs of LSD.
00:44:47 ►
That really kicked off the whole thing.
00:44:51 ►
If you’re a regular here in the Psychedelic Salon, then you probably already are familiar with Nick’s story.
00:44:58 ►
And if you haven’t heard it yet, you might want to download podcast number 37,
00:45:03 ►
which is a presentation of Nick’s 2001 talk at MindStates
00:45:07 ►
that he titled,
00:45:08 ►
Reflections on Imprisonment and Liberation as Aspects of Consciousness.
00:45:14 ►
One of the more interesting stories Nick told at Burning Man this year
00:45:19 ►
had to do with an aha moment he had many years ago, I might add,
00:45:24 ►
when he and four other major LSD chemists and or distributors
00:45:29 ►
realized that each of their fathers were deeply involved in the development of the atomic bomb.
00:45:36 ►
In fact, one of their fathers was even on board the plane
00:45:39 ►
that dropped the first atomic bomb on a civilian population center.
00:45:43 ►
Personally, I find it quite fascinating that, to begin with, Dr. Hoffman’s famous bicycle
00:45:50 ►
ride took place within a month or so of the first controlled atomic reaction at the University
00:45:55 ►
of Chicago.
00:45:57 ►
The first time I learned that little factoid, I think, was in a talk that Sasha Shulkin
00:46:02 ►
gave about 20 years ago, and it’s been bouncing around in my head ever since.
00:46:08 ►
What an interesting coincidence, if you still believe in such things.
00:46:14 ►
You know that the destructive power of the bomb was unleashed almost simultaneously
00:46:18 ►
with the discovery of what may be the world’s most powerful psychedelic medicine.
00:46:24 ►
And now, to learn about how so many children of these early atomic scientists with the discovery of what may be the world’s most powerful psychedelic medicine.
00:46:30 ►
And now, to learn about how so many children of these early atomic scientists became important figures in spreading the healing properties of LSD to the world
00:46:35 ►
makes me want to come back and look into this a little more.
00:46:39 ►
And so, one of the things I’ve lined up for the not-too-distant future
00:46:44 ►
is to do a more focused interview with Nick about this topic.
00:46:49 ►
So, if you have any particular questions you’d like to ask him, please send them to me, and I’ll try to work them in.
00:46:55 ►
You can just send them to Lorenzo at MatrixMasters.com.
00:47:01 ►
And while I’m at it, I guess I should mention our family of websites where you can find all of the past 47 podcasts in this series.
00:47:09 ►
There are a lot of ways to find us, like palenquinorte.org, psychedelicsalon.org.
00:47:16 ►
But the easiest way, at least if you’re somewhat spelling challenged like I am, is to just go to matrixmasters.com and click on the podcast link. Thank you. to do with the little gifts I made up to give out on the playa. For those of you who haven’t yet been to Burning Man,
00:47:46 ►
I guess I should explain that it’s a gifting economy.
00:47:50 ►
Not barter, but gifting.
00:47:52 ►
What that means is that whenever the mood strikes you,
00:47:56 ►
and if you’ve got something to give away,
00:47:58 ►
you just give somebody a gift for no particular reason at all.
00:48:02 ►
It’s really strange until you get used to it,
00:48:04 ►
because when somebody gives you something for no particular reason at all. It’s really strange until you get used to it,
00:48:08 ►
because when somebody gives you something for no particular reason,
00:48:12 ►
at least for me, it makes me feel a little awkward, you know,
00:48:15 ►
like I should be giving them something in return.
00:48:19 ►
Maybe we’ll discuss that in more detail one day, too,
00:48:23 ►
but the point I’m trying to get to is that the little gifts I made for this year were CDs with the first 30
00:48:25 ►
podcasts on them. And since my CD burner started smelling funny after I made about 30 of them,
00:48:31 ►
that’s all I had to take with me to the playa this year. And I gave them all away in the first few
00:48:37 ►
days. So those of you like Trevor and Robert and Joe and Brian and the dozens of others of you who
00:48:44 ►
were salonners that came up to me and said hello.
00:48:47 ►
I wish I’d been able to give all of you a copy.
00:48:50 ►
Until I gave a few away, it didn’t dawn on me that they would be of much use since you can still all download the podcast for free anyway.
00:48:59 ►
But as somebody mentioned, they said, who wants to spend so much time downloading when they can get 30 of them on a single CD?
00:49:08 ►
And so here’s what I’m wondering.
00:49:10 ►
Would it be of any interest to some of you if for every 30 podcasts or so that I do, I also produce a CD of them?
00:49:19 ►
Still in MP3 format, of course.
00:49:21 ►
For those of you who are just now joining us, though, and haven’t been able to download them as you go along,
00:49:27 ►
would this be anything that would be useful?
00:49:30 ►
If you’re interested, just please send me an email to lorenzo at matrixmasters.com
00:49:35 ►
and let me know.
00:49:37 ►
And if there is enough interest in this,
00:49:39 ►
I’ll have 100 or so of them professionally made.
00:49:43 ►
It looks like I can get them produced at a reasonable price,
00:49:47 ►
quantities as small as a hundred,
00:49:48 ►
but to invest in a hundred CDs that may never be sold
00:49:52 ►
isn’t something I can afford to do right now.
00:49:54 ►
So if this sounds like something that’s enough of you want,
00:49:57 ►
I figure I can probably hire a student to do the processing and shipping
00:50:02 ►
and still get them to you, I guess, for probably under 20 overseas,
00:50:09 ►
depending on what the freight works out to.
00:50:12 ►
Another thing, by the way, that I learned from the psychedelic salonners I met at Burning Man
00:50:17 ►
is that some of you would like to get an RSS feed that lists all the programs,
00:50:22 ►
not just the 15 most recent ones.
00:50:26 ►
So I’ll set up another feed to do this sometime soon, I hope. I can’t promise when I’ll get to it. And I’ll let
00:50:32 ►
you know about that in a future podcast, too. Well, I’m going to have to bring this to an
00:50:38 ►
end right now because mainly I’ve still got a lot of playa dust to clean up with my camping
00:50:43 ►
equipment, not to mention a pile of email to dust to clean off with my camping equipment,
00:50:47 ►
not to mention a pile of email to go through.
00:50:52 ►
But never fear, I’m not going to let so much time go by between podcasts again,
00:50:56 ►
at least not until next year’s burn, that is.
00:51:01 ►
I hope all is going well for those of you who weren’t as fortunate as I was to have made it to yet another Burning Man Festival.
00:51:04 ►
weren’t as fortunate as I was to have made it to yet another Burning Man festival.
00:51:10 ►
And I wish that all of you out there a speedy and gentle decompression to the default world.
00:51:17 ►
Darren and Mark and Michael and the rest of that gang that provided all the sound for us, hey, thanks a lot.
00:51:18 ►
Hope the default world is treating you okay.
00:51:22 ►
The good news is that by the time you all hear this, there’ll be less
00:51:26 ►
than 356 days until the man burns again. For now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.
00:51:35 ►
Be well, my friends. you