Program Notes
Guest speaker: Sheldon Norberg
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
02:40 News of a Mexican informant for the DEA who committed murder while wearing a wire for the U.S.
05:30 Reminiscences of (and synchronicities at) Burning Man 2006
08:15 Discussion about Sheldon’s book, Confessions of a Dope Dealer
10:44 How Sheldon got into the dope dealing business
18:24 Using cannabis is a socializing ritual for young people
24:25 On being un-comfortably numb and doing work with psychedelics
31:08 Do most heavy users eventually reach a point where they move from using psychedelics primarily for pleasure to using them primarily for a studied expansion of their own consciousness?
34:36 Psychedelics are astronomically more powerful and completely different from alcohol
36:40 The “Third I” theory of tripping
43:38 Living in tripland isn’t always beneficial
Links:
Sheldon Norberg – Progressive Drug Educatornull
“Confessions of a Dope Dealer”
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065 - Chaos and Imagination (Part 1)
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:21 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:26 ►
Okay, I know it seems like almost every other podcast I have to warn you about the sound quality,
00:00:33 ►
so I’ve decided to only mention it when I do something for the first time.
00:00:38 ►
Like today’s podcast, which is my first live telephone interview.
00:00:43 ►
For a first attempt, I guess it’s not too bad, but I’ll let you decide for yourself.
00:00:48 ►
And, yes, I do realize that there’s a lot of room for improvement.
00:00:53 ►
So please don’t hesitate to send your tips for improving these podcasts to Lorenzo at MatrixMasters.com.
00:01:01 ►
And I’ll do my best to follow some of the good advice I’ve been getting. www.matrixmasters.com go under the title Confessions of a Dope Dealer. Now, how’s that for coming out of the psychedelic closet, so to speak?
00:01:28 ►
I think you’ll find Sheldon to be one of the more forthright of today’s progressive drug educators,
00:01:34 ►
and I’m sure that you’re going to find him both as interesting and entertaining as I do.
00:01:40 ►
When we begin our conversation, the first thing that you’re going to hear me say is,
00:01:45 ►
it’s kind of hard to miss that.
00:01:48 ►
What I was talking about is that when I clicked the record button on the Gizmo project,
00:01:53 ►
which is the software I was using to record the conversation,
00:01:57 ►
there was this really loud voice from above that said the record feature had been turned on.
00:02:03 ►
that said the record feature had been turned on.
00:02:11 ►
Of course, that omnipotent voice didn’t get recorded as well as the rest of our conversation did, so we probably sound a little like hunched-drunk old fighters who were hearing voices in our heads.
00:02:21 ►
Kind of hard to miss that.
00:02:22 ►
Yeah, that’s different than the FBI one.
00:02:25 ►
They don’t miss that. Yeah, that’s different than the FBI one. They don’t play that.
00:02:27 ►
So, yeah, that turning on the record button here on the Gizmo Project
00:02:31 ►
lets you know that we are recording this.
00:02:34 ►
We are being recorded.
00:02:35 ►
That’s right.
00:02:36 ►
If only Big Brother would do this, huh?
00:02:38 ►
Yeah.
00:02:38 ►
Did you see the news today about this Mexican informant guy?
00:02:46 ►
Oh, my God.
00:02:48 ►
Going straight to the White House.
00:02:51 ►
This informant that the DOJ had working out of El Paso
00:02:58 ►
was not only privy to but conducted 14 murders
00:03:04 ►
while wearing a wire at his house
00:03:08 ►
where they were burying people and pouring quicklime on them
00:03:11 ►
in Jalisco, or in Juarez, right across the border.
00:03:16 ►
He would drive across the border,
00:03:17 ►
and they would ice these guys, lawyers,
00:03:19 ►
and other drug runners and whoever.
00:03:22 ►
And yet he was a federal agent?
00:03:24 ►
Well, he was a federal rat.
00:03:27 ►
Wow.
00:03:29 ►
He was running loads for the cartel, for the Juarez cartel,
00:03:34 ►
and he, I don’t know, somehow got under the scrutiny of the Department of Justice.
00:03:43 ►
They did not tell the DEA.
00:03:46 ►
This guy working there.
00:03:47 ►
And they wound up almost getting a couple of DEA guys
00:03:50 ►
and their families put in a hole.
00:03:54 ►
Gee.
00:03:54 ►
Who were, you know, working undercover under the border.
00:03:59 ►
But, yeah, apparently the guy who oversaw it
00:04:02 ►
was the regional attorney general who was Bush’s transition team director
00:04:09 ►
who has a direct line to Alberto Gonzalez, and the stuff had to be approved by the top level of the Department of Justice.
00:04:16 ►
So it’s probably run across Bush’s desk.
00:04:19 ►
It’s certainly within his circle of friends that they have this guy who is conducting murder after murder,
00:04:26 ►
having called in and said, oh, we’re going to go down and kill somebody now,
00:04:30 ►
you know, to his boss in the Department of Justice.
00:04:36 ►
So, you know, advance notice, tape-recorded murders, one after another,
00:04:41 ►
and they still didn’t, you know, pinch the guy that he was informing on.
00:04:45 ►
And therefore, of course, they finally figured out who he was and put him in a whole tale.
00:04:51 ►
Well, you know, this whole war on drugs, war on consciousness,
00:04:55 ►
it’s just the only people it makes sense to are the ones like the Bush crime family
00:05:01 ►
and all who are making money off this thing through the prison industry and the construction industry and the war industry.
00:05:08 ►
Exactly.
00:05:09 ►
You know, and, you know, it’s just kind of strange that we’re living in strange times, to be sure.
00:05:19 ►
About the only normal time I’ve experienced lately was back on the playa last August,
00:05:25 ►
which is the last time I saw you, I think.
00:05:28 ►
It was rather normalizing.
00:05:30 ►
It was a particularly interesting time for me because I didn’t use any substances
00:05:36 ►
other than some cholinergic memory enhancement formula that I took in the evening
00:05:46 ►
to just make sure I had my show down,
00:05:50 ►
make sure I was remembering everything
00:05:52 ►
so I could perform my show best.
00:05:54 ►
And that was the evening that was such a nice evening.
00:05:56 ►
No one showed up for my show,
00:05:58 ►
so I wound up packing it in.
00:05:59 ►
But, you know, that was the second show.
00:06:02 ►
The first show, you had a nice audience there.
00:06:04 ►
Yeah, well, it was kind of weird,
00:06:06 ►
because I had a guy lighting me with a flashlight.
00:06:09 ►
Yeah, it was my flashlight the guy was using.
00:06:12 ►
That was your old military flashlight there.
00:06:14 ►
He did a great job, too.
00:06:16 ►
He really worked at it.
00:06:17 ►
He did a great job.
00:06:18 ►
Okay, that Burning Man, amazingly,
00:06:23 ►
without having used anything,
00:06:26 ►
was so synchronistic.
00:06:30 ►
It was like every time I was going to turn right and decided to turn left,
00:06:35 ►
there was somebody I needed to see or meet or had never met and wanted to or wanted to meet me.
00:06:38 ►
It was really amazing. When I was leaving and I had promised that guy, the guy who had flipped the show from
00:06:46 ►
the front row, that I’d give him a book, and I packed up my whole truck except for one
00:06:51 ►
thing.
00:06:51 ►
I needed to go back into the big tent there and get my rolling chair.
00:06:57 ►
And I went back to get my chair, the last thing to pack up, and that guy was sitting
00:07:01 ►
in my chair waiting for me, you know, two days later, you know,
00:07:08 ►
at that particular moment.
00:07:09 ►
I was like, hey, I’ve got a book for you.
00:07:13 ►
You know, that’s the way it’s working out there on the playa.
00:07:16 ►
The little synchronicities like that are just amazing.
00:07:20 ►
Yeah, and I really enjoyed your show.
00:07:23 ►
I know Dale Pendle and his wife are sitting next to me, and it was an interesting crowd,
00:07:27 ►
and I really got a lot out of it.
00:07:30 ►
Well, you know, thank you.
00:07:33 ►
It’s so funny because I couldn’t tell there was anybody there except for that guy in the front row.
00:07:38 ►
I’d never met in my life.
00:07:39 ►
He was laughing at my face.
00:07:41 ►
He was just like, oh, I think this place is empty, but I don’t know.
00:07:44 ►
There seems to be some people laughing back there, so I’ll keep going.
00:07:47 ►
Well, you know, if you’ve seen the aerial shots of the playa this year,
00:07:51 ►
you’ll see that that tent was, I believe, the biggest structure on the playa.
00:07:55 ►
It was over 6,000 square feet.
00:07:56 ►
So, you know, even with a few hundred people in there, it looked kind of empty.
00:08:00 ►
But there was a nice audience there, and I know we really enjoyed it over on my edge of the wing there.
00:08:07 ►
Yeah, I kept hearing from people the next couple of days.
00:08:10 ►
I saw your channel.
00:08:11 ►
I was like, oh, really?
00:08:12 ►
Okay, great.
00:08:13 ►
Thanks.
00:08:14 ►
Hey, you know, your show, of course, is of the same name as your book, Confessions of a Dope Dealer.
00:08:20 ►
And a question I’m sure a lot of people have is, have you ever been hassled having
00:08:25 ►
a book out there with that title and then flying around the airports with a case of
00:08:30 ►
books like that? Anybody give you a hard time about that?
00:08:35 ►
A couple of times the TSA guys who are generally uneducated have stopped me or made light of, you know,
00:08:45 ►
actually at Oakland Airport they stopped me one time when I had a case of books
00:08:49 ►
and they were, you know, trying to see if it was an explosive case of books.
00:08:52 ►
No, it’s going to blow up your mind, you know.
00:08:55 ►
And they pulled it out and they’re like, you know,
00:08:57 ►
and the girl behind the counter is like, check this out, this guy’s a dope dealer.
00:09:01 ►
And her friend there is going, oh, you know, I’ve sold some weed before.
00:09:06 ►
I was like, okay, I’m at my home airport here.
00:09:10 ►
But, you know, I meant to look at the Federal Register for a while.
00:09:16 ►
Well, I think the Center for Cognitive Liberties was posting the reading list of the DEA.
00:09:23 ►
They had done a Freedom of Information Act,
00:09:26 ►
and just to see what they were buying, what location they were buying,
00:09:30 ►
and I was waiting to show up on it.
00:09:33 ►
But I don’t know if I ever did.
00:09:34 ►
I never dealt to coke or heroin or any tonnage of imported products,
00:09:41 ►
of imported products.
00:09:50 ►
So maybe I’m less of a cog in the big economic world of drug dealing.
00:09:53 ►
I’m not that kind of a player.
00:09:57 ►
And so maybe I’m insignificant in that respect.
00:10:01 ►
Or maybe they just don’t really care because they’re busy.
00:10:03 ►
Well, of course. They’re listening to this conversation so they can hear it before they get the podcast.
00:10:08 ►
They’re not tapping my phone, and I don’t really worry about them too much.
00:10:12 ►
Well, you know, the fact of the matter, of course, is that on everything that you’ve done in the past,
00:10:16 ►
the statute of limitations are already run, and so it’s really just a free speech issue that we’re dealing with here.
00:10:22 ►
That’s pretty much the deal.
00:10:23 ►
I mean, I respond on lawyers before I put it out there.
00:10:26 ►
You know, it’s kind of more just avoid lawsuits
00:10:28 ►
and avoid hassles from the Grateful Dead.
00:10:34 ►
That was my one concern,
00:10:37 ►
whether I could write the song lyrics down.
00:10:40 ►
Their lawyers advised me against it.
00:10:44 ►
But whatever got you into it, how did you wind up being a dope dealer?
00:10:50 ►
Well, the summer of my junior year, it was really…
00:10:54 ►
This in college or high school?
00:10:56 ►
In high school.
00:10:57 ►
Like all the weed ran out and the guy who was selling weed disappeared
00:11:00 ►
and he was a senior, he graduated and I like to say he flunked out.
00:11:07 ►
But I think he made it.
00:11:09 ►
We tried growing some weed in my friend’s backyard,
00:11:12 ►
and I was really excited about it, and I was reading a bunch of books.
00:11:15 ►
I was reading what books I could have been.
00:11:17 ►
I sprayed it down with some fish emulsion,
00:11:21 ►
hoping to really boost its plant strength, and it killed it.
00:11:28 ►
And we smoked these leaves off that plant.
00:11:31 ►
They were kind of still had some fish emulsion residue on them, and that just about killed
00:11:35 ►
us.
00:11:36 ►
And I thought, wow, you know, this is a drag.
00:11:40 ►
Somebody’s got to do something about this really terrible situation here.
00:11:44 ►
Somebody’s got to do something about this really terrible situation here.
00:11:47 ►
And, well, gee, maybe it should be me.
00:11:52 ►
Because, you know, at the time I had, my brother was living in Berkeley,
00:11:56 ►
and I had been, you know, visiting him in Berkeley and hanging out and smoking pot with his college friends for a couple, three, four years, about a few years.
00:12:02 ►
I think I started going down there in seventh grade.
00:12:05 ►
You started early then, right?
00:12:08 ►
Yeah, well, it was just a sort of jaunt
00:12:09 ►
that my parents approved of my intellectual pursuits.
00:12:13 ►
I said, I’m going to go spend the weekend in Berkeley with Dave
00:12:15 ►
and go over to Cal.
00:12:17 ►
They thought that was cool.
00:12:18 ►
They didn’t really quite understand what was going on
00:12:24 ►
over at the infamous Arrington Hall.
00:12:27 ►
What a wonderland that would be for a 12-year-old.
00:12:32 ►
So some of my elders who have told me that they were just really, really paranoid
00:12:38 ►
about the idea that they would actually sell me pot,
00:12:41 ►
it took a lot of convincing to get them to sell me.
00:12:45 ►
I was a fairly astute teenager.
00:12:48 ►
They weren’t into dealing with any teenagers, but I managed to convince them to sell me some weed,
00:12:54 ►
which was far away unimaginably much better than any other weed anyone had ever seen.
00:13:03 ►
At least it didn’t have fish oil on it, huh?
00:13:06 ►
It did not have any nasty residue.
00:13:09 ►
It was not paraquat.
00:13:10 ►
You didn’t have to worry about that.
00:13:13 ►
I was getting the Humboldt when Humboldt first started in high school,
00:13:17 ►
and that was fantastic.
00:13:20 ►
And all of a sudden I developed a huge community.
00:13:23 ►
And, you know, all of a sudden I developed a huge community.
00:13:32 ►
It became a community service for me to acquire weed and take care of all my friends’ weed needs and develop this rolling, rollicking party that just went nonstop for the, well, the year and the years and the years after that.
00:13:43 ►
Well, the year and the years and the years after that.
00:13:47 ►
When you were a senior in high school,
00:13:53 ►
instead of being one of the homecoming king and the jock,
00:13:55 ►
you had your own scene going on there, I take it, huh?
00:13:57 ►
Well, there were stoners.
00:13:58 ►
We had cowboys and stoners, too.
00:14:00 ►
There were jocks.
00:14:08 ►
And I sort of crossed the bounds because I was a nerd, you know, an intellect.
00:14:10 ►
I was at the top of the class.
00:14:29 ►
I was doing smart stuff and, you know, captain of the debate team and photographer and a lot of boundaries and it was very interesting for me to be in that position and really be a hub that made a lot of people come together and we all had a lot of fun and crossed a
00:14:36 ►
lot of boundaries with each other, I think, that way.
00:14:38 ►
Particularly when my friends convinced me that they wanted to start trying acid too. And a bunch of guys would be dropping acid every week on Friday before class.
00:14:51 ►
And it was always an interesting sort of field trip.
00:14:56 ►
Who was doing what on any given day in my high school.
00:15:01 ►
So now you started smoking cannabis in 7th grade, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, and yet
00:15:09 ►
you’re at the top of your class, which, you know, kind of is the opposite of the stereotypes
00:15:14 ►
that the war on druggers try to put out there.
00:15:18 ►
And so, you know, did you feel that it helped you any, you know, opened you to…
00:15:23 ►
Probably academically?
00:15:21 ►
Do you feel that it helped you any?
00:15:23 ►
Probably academically?
00:15:26 ►
Well, not necessarily academically.
00:15:33 ►
But as far as did it take down some barriers and allow you to ask questions,
00:15:36 ►
explore academically farther than you might have otherwise?
00:15:38 ►
You were pretty young then. Did it have any objective in your use other than just having a good time?
00:15:43 ►
Well, I certainly haven you know, having come from Berkeley, you know, my use, when I first started
00:15:48 ►
Smith Pot, I was the narc kid at my school.
00:15:52 ►
I had studied the drug kit, and I gave presentations to my class on how bad drugs were and how
00:16:00 ►
they would do this and that.
00:16:01 ►
And at the same time, you’re selling them?
00:16:03 ►
Well, that’s, no,‘s when I was in seventh grade.
00:16:06 ►
Oh, okay.
00:16:07 ►
And then at this point, after seventh grade,
00:16:09 ►
my brother says,
00:16:10 ►
Hey, I’ve been smoking pot for years now.
00:16:14 ►
Maybe you should check it out.
00:16:16 ►
And I was just like aghast at that idea
00:16:19 ►
with everything that I had been.
00:16:23 ►
My indoctrination, the American indoctrination,
00:16:26 ►
had told me that the next thing was you were a heroin addict laying in the gutter.
00:16:30 ►
How could this possibly be?
00:16:31 ►
And how could these smart, happening guys be using this evil drug?
00:16:37 ►
And so I went and started checking it out.
00:16:40 ►
And certainly the kids in seventh grade where I went to school and were smoking pot were smoking dirt,
00:16:46 ►
and they were all smoking cigarettes and stealing alcohol from their parents
00:16:52 ►
and just getting wasted because they were already thrashed.
00:16:56 ►
And now that I have a better perspective on it, they came from more difficult home situations and were already ground up by the educational industry.
00:17:11 ►
And so they were looking for outs.
00:17:15 ►
They weren’t looking for intellectual experience.
00:17:17 ►
I came to it thinking, wow, this is, and was pretty much indoctrinated by my brother and his friends,
00:17:24 ►
the idea that this was an intellectual avenue.
00:17:28 ►
So I didn’t tell anybody in Seven Acres, total secret.
00:17:32 ►
I would take my trips to Berkeley, I wouldn’t tell anybody that I was smoking pot
00:17:36 ►
because they would just, yeah, they just thought I was an archer.
00:17:39 ►
Okay, this is a super, this is a good cover for me.
00:17:42 ►
And so I was allowed to carry out my experimentation.
00:17:46 ►
But it wasn’t until years later when I went to high school,
00:17:50 ►
because I moved right after junior high to a high school where I knew no one.
00:17:55 ►
The week before I started my freshman year, I moved to another place.
00:17:58 ►
It was just the ruin of my life, and I was just consoled.
00:18:04 ►
I was stuck in this small town.
00:18:06 ►
That’s got to be difficult.
00:18:07 ►
I know I moved at the beginning of my sophomore year, and it was really devastating to me.
00:18:11 ►
Yeah, all your friends gone, and you have to pick up the pieces.
00:18:14 ►
So you try to find a new social network, and what do you know?
00:18:23 ►
Using this particular drug is a socialized
00:18:27 ►
ritual.
00:18:28 ►
You’re talking about cannabis here, right?
00:18:30 ►
Using cannabis is a major ritual of youth socialization. And, you know, as a fairly
00:18:39 ►
modern phenomenon, but certainly within the 70s context. I remember my first PE class there in ninth grade.
00:18:48 ►
I didn’t know anybody, and they’re picking teams,
00:18:50 ►
and one kid looks at me and he’s like,
00:18:52 ►
you smoke pot?
00:18:53 ►
I was like, in ninth grade, I’m like, oh, yeah?
00:18:56 ►
He’s like, okay, you’re on my team.
00:18:59 ►
So all of a sudden I went from being an intellectual,
00:19:02 ►
you know, secret stoner, to being on the stoner team.
00:19:05 ►
But it was, you know, entree into at least making some friends
00:19:08 ►
and eventually making a lot of friends.
00:19:14 ►
But back to the whole intellectual question,
00:19:16 ►
I like Mitch Earlywine’s book on marijuana statistics and studies.
00:19:23 ►
It indicates that students who use marijuana
00:19:25 ►
don’t do poorly in cognitive measures,
00:19:29 ►
but students who have done poorly in school tend to use marijuana more.
00:19:35 ►
So the statistics look like students who are doing poorly,
00:19:39 ►
that if you use marijuana you would do poorly,
00:19:42 ►
but actually it’s the other way around.
00:19:44 ►
If you do poorly, you’re looking for an out.
00:19:46 ►
Right.
00:19:47 ►
And smoking pot is a simple way to buzz off.
00:19:52 ►
Well, you know, let’s face it.
00:19:53 ►
The way our schools are structured, you know, it’s pretty boring.
00:19:58 ►
I just can’t believe the mind-numbing events of high school, you know,
00:20:03 ►
and sitting in these classes and not studying
00:20:06 ►
what I wanted.
00:20:07 ►
Yeah.
00:20:08 ►
They turn out nice little robots, but it seems to me like these medicines have kind of broken
00:20:16 ►
you out of that.
00:20:18 ►
In the long run, I know there’s downsides.
00:20:22 ►
I have an intensive educational program for my kids.
00:20:25 ►
He’s three, and he’ll be reading pretty soon,
00:20:29 ►
and he’s learning at some incredibly accelerated pace
00:20:32 ►
because I was faced with the ridiculous question of,
00:20:37 ►
oh, am I heading toward the unaffordable choice of private school,
00:20:41 ►
or am I going to find out how the brain works from the beginning
00:20:44 ►
and realize that your kid can be brilliant if you give him the opportunity and don’t
00:20:49 ►
choke him down the way that the schools choked me down and everybody else down.
00:20:55 ►
And you remove that obstacle and, wow, you can do anything you want.
00:21:00 ►
Well, you know, I was just talking to Norm Herbert a couple weeks ago,
00:21:12 ►
and he and his wife were two of the people that were extremely instrumental in starting a homeschooling curriculum.
00:21:18 ►
And I asked him, I said, well, how did you first decide you were going to do this?
00:21:25 ►
And he said, well, the day our son came home from his first day in kindergarten. I asked him, what did you learn today?
00:21:28 ►
And he said, I learned how to stand in line.
00:21:32 ►
And that was the birth of the homeschooling programs.
00:21:42 ►
We’ve now been totally co-opted by Jesus people with these incredible curriculums of God-invented science books.
00:21:42 ►
Right. I know that actually’s actually homeschooling.
00:21:45 ►
It’s gotten kind of a bad name through them,
00:21:47 ►
but we’ve got some friends living in Costa Rica
00:21:49 ►
who, well, it’s been several years since I’ve seen them,
00:21:53 ►
but when their children were seven and nine,
00:21:55 ►
these two young boys,
00:21:57 ►
we were as anxious to be around those two boys
00:21:59 ►
as around their parents,
00:22:00 ►
that they were just really bright kids
00:22:03 ►
and fun and interesting and new stuff we didn’t know, you know, that they were just really bright kids and fun and interesting
00:22:05 ►
and new stuff we didn’t know, you know, that done right.
00:22:09 ►
It’s really a marvelous way to educate your kids.
00:22:12 ►
It’s like from training, the Institute for the Achievement of Human Potential,
00:22:15 ►
which teaches parents to teach their children basically the fact that a child’s mind
00:22:20 ►
has a thousand times much more capacity than your old brain does.
00:22:25 ►
Right.
00:22:26 ►
And that if you feed it and don’t cheat it by treating it like it’s some kind of infant thing,
00:22:32 ►
it is the super machine at its peak of capacity.
00:22:38 ►
And if you understand how to feed the machine, the results you get will blow your doors in.
00:22:43 ►
Well, you know, it’s interesting that we’ve kind of headed down this track here
00:22:46 ►
because a lot of people think when they hear the word psychedelic
00:22:49 ►
that it only has to do with these powerful medicines,
00:22:53 ►
but it’s really about mind manifesting and these little minds that manifest themselves
00:22:58 ►
and these biological avatars we’re walking around in.
00:23:02 ►
If they all had psychedelic parents,
00:23:05 ►
and by that I mean parents who are open to helping them expand their minds,
00:23:11 ►
yeah, what a wonderful world we could have.
00:23:15 ►
Yeah, but it’s tremendously frightening for most people who are sheltered in some way.
00:23:21 ►
I mean, oh, at what point is my kid going to know more than me
00:23:24 ►
and be asking me questions about things I don’t understand?
00:23:26 ►
How am I going to deal with that?
00:23:27 ►
Where am I going to send them to, you know, become more informed?
00:23:31 ►
Or am I just going to tell them to shut up and watch TV?
00:23:34 ►
Yeah.
00:23:35 ►
And because that’s where I think most people go.
00:23:38 ►
You know, the question of internal chatter and noise
00:23:43 ►
that I think most people can’t confront,
00:23:47 ►
which is why everyone has the music pumping and the TV on all the time,
00:23:52 ►
because to sit alone with their own thoughts, let alone psychedelically amplified thoughts,
00:23:58 ►
is completely overwhelming.
00:24:10 ►
overwhelming. Yeah, and the alcohol and cocaine and television are three good drugs to get you numb and comfortably numb, but the psychedelic medicines are somewhat different in that they’re
00:24:16 ►
pretty challenging. Not that there isn’t pleasure involved, but sometimes I think it’s possible to
00:24:24 ►
even get uncomfortably high sometimes.
00:24:26 ►
Has that ever happened to you?
00:24:27 ►
Ever have any ultimate highs?
00:24:30 ►
Yeah.
00:24:31 ►
Just about half of my life.
00:24:34 ►
And it’s funny because now I’ve kind of come to a point where the idea of using psychedelics is more about work.
00:24:48 ►
And particularly if I were thinking about going into some sort of deep state,
00:24:54 ►
it’s to challenge myself and work through stuff,
00:24:59 ►
not to be seeking the flashing glittering lights of pleasure.
00:25:03 ►
be seeking the flashing, glittering lights of pleasure.
00:25:13 ►
Although there’s always the opportunity for incredible pleasure in those places,
00:25:29 ►
that’s usually not what I’m thinking if I were to venture in that direction because chasing the idea of pleasure for as long as I did, using psychedelics and being blasted constantly by all of my psychological material that I
00:25:37 ►
was not prepared to observe or comment on or appreciate or work with made me sort of burnt out on that recreational
00:25:50 ►
style of light chasing, as it were.
00:25:56 ►
In fact, at Burning Man, I was like, wow, is this what I want to be doing, wandering
00:26:03 ►
around looking at flashing lights?
00:26:04 ►
is this what I want to be doing, wandering around looking at flashing lights?
00:26:10 ►
Although there was someone’s assembly of flashing lights there that was truly amazing and probably would have been stunning to look at in a psychedelic state,
00:26:14 ►
and I’m sure it was for thousands of people there.
00:26:16 ►
You’re talking about the Cubitron?
00:26:18 ►
The Cubitron.
00:26:20 ►
And, you know, interestingly, like you, and I don’t know why I even decided to do this,
00:26:26 ►
but this year, like you, I had no substance of any kind, including alcohol, and did it on the natch.
00:26:33 ►
And it’s really an interesting experience that way.
00:26:36 ►
Yeah. I mean, it’s not like you can’t appreciate art in your normal state.
00:26:47 ►
state. And for me, what I’ve learned, and particularly talking to a lot of the elders in the psychedelic community, the therapeutic communities, and particularly working with
00:26:53 ►
people in the shamanic context, and what I was saying about tripping was that of all
00:27:01 ►
the amazing and unbelievable things that you could see out on the playa
00:27:05 ►
while you were high on whatever you were high on,
00:27:10 ►
if you laid down on the dirt, shut your eyes, and put on a mask so you couldn’t see anything
00:27:16 ►
but the inside of your mind for however many hours you were amplified,
00:27:21 ►
you would see a thousand times more incredible visions.
00:27:26 ►
you were amplified, you would see a thousand times more incredible visions, and you would also be able to interpret the archetypal much more clearly than if it were being projected
00:27:35 ►
onto your external reality.
00:27:38 ►
And I think that is where I sort of lost track, and with my my book i’m going through trip after trip after trip where i’m
00:27:46 ►
amplifying my paranoid visions which are really uh projections of my internal discomfort
00:27:54 ►
onto my external reality so i can no longer trust what i’m seeing in these amplified states
00:28:02 ►
because i’m not sitting down and dealing with what is pouring out of my mind.
00:28:08 ►
You know, let me ask you a question here.
00:28:11 ►
About how many years since you first started in seventh grade, I don’t know how old you are
00:28:17 ►
because I’ve known you forever it seems like, but I know you’re not nearly as old as I am,
00:28:23 ►
but about how many years would you consider
00:28:26 ►
were like really kind of intensive tripping years before you’ve gotten to this point where now
00:28:30 ►
you see it in a little different light, more that, wow, I’m going to have to do some work if I go
00:28:36 ►
ahead and do this. And, you know, how many years were you a serious psychedelic user before you
00:28:44 ►
kind of shifted gears from the pure pleasure part into the hard work part.
00:28:50 ►
Well, you know, that real intense period of my youth where I went from tripping every week to tripping every other day in the course of a few years really kind of scarred me.
00:29:07 ►
And after that, you know, after a certain while, I realized I didn’t have to trip at
00:29:10 ►
every dead show.
00:29:11 ►
And my tripping went down to, you know, every couple months or something.
00:29:18 ►
And, but intensified in, you know, I kept raising the scale of what I’d be doing so that I’m going to try
00:29:27 ►
to smash through my own barriers.
00:29:29 ►
After having read LSD psychotherapy, I decided that I needed to just keep taking higher doses
00:29:35 ►
so that I would, you know, break through my ego structure, my solidified ego structure.
00:29:46 ►
And so I was doing, you know, what were fairly large doses,
00:29:51 ►
you know, thousand-mile doses here and there,
00:29:53 ►
and not too frequently, but, you know, constantly just, you know, car crashing them.
00:30:00 ►
And so at a certain point, I just had to quit.
00:30:03 ►
I came to the point where I just, like, I couldn’t, you know,
00:30:06 ►
I was overwhelmed by my own fear of what I would, you know,
00:30:11 ►
wind up as or, you know, what kind of accident would befall me
00:30:16 ►
if I were to keep tripping.
00:30:21 ►
And I took 10 years off before I sat down to write my book,
00:30:26 ►
which is why my book is sort of a little behind the times
00:30:29 ►
on what drugs everybody’s using and where people are at,
00:30:33 ►
because I missed the entire Palenque Revolution
00:30:37 ►
and the Terrence lecture tour
00:30:40 ►
and the whole, I think, formation of the new psychedelic culture, I was back,
00:30:52 ►
well, not backtracking, I was training in meditation and Chinese medicine and other
00:30:58 ►
things to sort of restore myself to the place where I would be most functional.
00:31:04 ►
myself to the place where I would be most functional.
00:31:10 ►
Well, you know, it’s really fascinating to hear you tell this story because I remember when I first met Terrence McKenna, it was pretty late in his career.
00:31:14 ►
He only had a couple years to live.
00:31:15 ►
I think it was the summer of 98.
00:31:18 ►
And I remember at the time him saying something to the effect that he only tripped very, very seldom anymore. And that came
00:31:27 ►
at a time when I was really at a
00:31:31 ►
peak level of doing it real frequently, like you were talking about
00:31:36 ►
daily, and being way out there
00:31:40 ►
and thinking, wow.
00:31:43 ►
You’re just like the most grounded, straightest guy I’ve ever met.
00:31:47 ►
Well, I’ve had my moments, you know.
00:31:51 ►
And at the time I was thinking, wow, you know, God, I’m older than him
00:31:55 ►
and he’s just kind of, you know, easing back now.
00:31:58 ►
And then I started meeting, because, see, I got a late start at this whole thing.
00:32:02 ►
You look at the places he’d been already.
00:32:04 ►
Right, exactly. How much higher can you get he’d already been there and and i was just
00:32:09 ►
you know i was 42 years old before i got started in this whole thing and so now it’s uh 22 years
00:32:14 ►
later and all of a sudden you know not all of a sudden a few years back all of a sudden uh it’s
00:32:19 ►
like a switch was thrown i thought wow you know had, I don’t know, how many countless experiences,
00:32:25 ►
and, you know, I’ve just got to take a breath here.
00:32:29 ►
And I’ve noticed this in a lot of people that I know now, that somewhere around the 10 to
00:32:35 ►
15 year mark, if you’re serious about being a psychedelic person, that you get a point
00:32:41 ►
where you say, okay, now I’ve got to really get serious
00:32:45 ►
and each one of these make it count.
00:32:48 ►
And that’s sort of what I’m getting out of what you were saying.
00:32:53 ►
And, you know, I’ve come to the same conclusion,
00:32:57 ►
and yet I want to be careful that I don’t come across saying, you know,
00:33:03 ►
everybody should cut back, et cetera. You know, this may be a way these things, we’ve evolved to use them in that we have to kind of overwhelm ourselves.
00:33:12 ►
You know, I’m not saying there’s a right way or a wrong way because I don’t have a clue.
00:33:15 ►
But in my case, you know, as long as you keep yourself healthy and don’t get in any real risky situations,
00:33:24 ►
you can live through some
00:33:25 ►
high doses
00:33:28 ►
like this and then
00:33:30 ►
come out on the bright side
00:33:32 ►
leaping across mountaintops
00:33:34 ►
that’s right
00:33:35 ►
but the thing is
00:33:38 ►
you know
00:33:39 ►
it’s
00:33:40 ►
what I was looking at and doing research
00:33:43 ►
for lectures and kind of studying drug history
00:33:46 ►
and our whole cultural connection to drugs is so alcohol-based
00:33:53 ►
that the only way that we think about drug use,
00:33:59 ►
besides going to the doctor and taking a drug to make you better,
00:34:02 ►
which is not the way we think about medicines because those are drugs, not medicines, is to get completely fucked up.
00:34:11 ►
We drink alcohol, we binge drink alcohol to get wasted, unless we’re, you know, old moderates.
00:34:20 ►
And when we meet up with a drug, we say, ah, it’s a drug, let’s get wasted.
00:34:27 ►
And the drugs are so astronomically more powerful and completely different than alcohol
00:34:37 ►
that all of a sudden you have completely lost your access.
00:34:41 ►
And it can be fantastic and wonderful to be blasted open like that.
00:34:47 ►
But I’ve come to what I call a third eye program, which is intention.
00:34:58 ►
You have to have an intention for using medicine, something you’re seeking, some information you’re seeking.
00:35:05 ►
The final key is integration.
00:35:08 ►
And if you don’t integrate your experiences,
00:35:15 ►
if you don’t take the time to integrate each one of your experiences
00:35:20 ►
and spend the time, because it can take you months and even years to catch up with what the information really was that you were being handed during that trip,
00:35:37 ►
then you haven’t really grasped the value of it.
00:35:42 ►
And that’s criminal it’s a tremendous loss of the potential that you have
00:35:49 ►
in using that medicine and you know that i think that’s what the judicious and uh certainly the
00:35:55 ►
shamanistic perspective is going to be um middle eye that i you know forgot about there was one we talked about already, internalization. You can’t
00:36:06 ►
really gather
00:36:10 ►
information that
00:36:12 ►
well if you’re wandering
00:36:13 ►
down the boulevard.
00:36:17 ►
You know, stripping
00:36:18 ►
is pretty fucking
00:36:19 ►
amazing. I’ve done it, you know, it’s
00:36:21 ►
got to be done, but
00:36:23 ►
you know, when you’re finally it, you know, it’s got to be done. But, you know, when you’re
00:36:25 ►
finally back, you know, down, was it all about the moving carpet and the wheels
00:36:31 ►
spinning around and the lights flashing? Or, you know, was there something talking
00:36:36 ►
to you that you missed?
00:36:38 ►
That’s your third eye theory of tripping. It’s intention, internalization, and integration.
00:36:47 ►
So you
00:36:48 ►
intend to go somewhere. You shut
00:36:50 ►
your eyes and turn off the
00:36:52 ►
noise, the externals,
00:36:54 ►
and go inside your mind
00:36:56 ►
for the information.
00:36:58 ►
And then you take however long it takes you
00:37:00 ►
to
00:37:00 ►
complete the journey by
00:37:04 ►
integrating the information that you got.
00:37:06 ►
That can take a while.
00:37:08 ►
You get blown across the galaxy.
00:37:10 ►
Sometimes it takes a while to fit in.
00:37:14 ►
I may be catching up right now with a trip I had 20 years ago
00:37:20 ►
where I had atomic, astronomic open-heart surgery
00:37:27 ►
and my heart was replaced by a sun from another galaxy,
00:37:32 ►
which made me feel really bad because I felt like,
00:37:35 ►
wow, I’m just such one cold, dead fuck
00:37:37 ►
that my heart is burnt out already at 25
00:37:41 ►
and I need to be replaced with a sun from another galaxy. I better do something useful in my life to have
00:37:48 ►
cost the universe a whole sun to keep me alive.
00:37:51 ►
That sounds like an interesting trip. Was that a high-dose acid?
00:37:56 ►
Or what was that?
00:37:57 ►
Yeah, that was a very high-dose acid.
00:38:01 ►
And yes, near-death freezing in the wilderness in the middle of winter.
00:38:08 ►
Do you have any specific techniques that you use to try to bring information back?
00:38:15 ►
Like, for example, when I do some of my solo journeys,
00:38:19 ►
I take a little tape recorder with me and just record things as I go,
00:38:24 ►
and, of course, it would be nonsensible to most normal people,
00:38:29 ►
but I can play things back and bring back the visuals
00:38:34 ►
and a whole lot of information from trips years ago.
00:38:38 ►
Wow, I want to listen to some of your tapes.
00:38:39 ►
Well, they wouldn’t mean anything to you.
00:38:42 ►
Do you have any, like you take notes?
00:38:44 ►
I’ve got one of those little
00:38:45 ►
recorders now, and, you know, actually
00:38:47 ►
I find that those little things flash
00:38:49 ►
upon me all the time, but
00:38:51 ►
I usually take
00:38:53 ►
a book. I usually take a
00:38:55 ►
notebook, and a friend of mine convinced me a long time
00:38:57 ►
ago, he’d take a notebook and write stuff
00:38:59 ►
down. I’m not
00:39:01 ►
as big on drawing mandalas,
00:39:04 ►
but sometimes I will have to craft something.
00:39:07 ►
But usually I’ll take a notebook with me if I’m going and if I have some questions.
00:39:13 ►
But on the way in, you know, in directing yourself, I’ve taken up a couple of practices of visualization techniques, different meditative techniques.
00:39:28 ►
Sometimes I work with some divinatory practices where you would seek information from some kind of mythic character or place or ask to meet elders or power beings to give you information,
00:39:49 ►
to retreat through your own personal history,
00:39:53 ►
or ask for doorways to appear to present you with information.
00:40:01 ►
But most of those have to do with doing a certain amount of spilling the mind at a certain point
00:40:10 ►
so that you can engage in that process.
00:40:13 ►
And that certainly benefits your ability to get the information and pull it back.
00:40:21 ►
Yeah, I think all those are good ideas. You know, the other day I was talking to Gary Fisher, and he said, you know, back in the
00:40:28 ►
50s and early 60s when they were doing a lot of research, that they never did a session
00:40:34 ►
without a sitter.
00:40:36 ►
And so they always had a sitter in the room with them, which is not a way I go about it,
00:40:42 ►
but he was telling some of the more funny LSD stories from his experiences,
00:40:48 ►
which there are many.
00:40:49 ►
And he said one time he was the subject and had taken a high dose
00:40:54 ►
and had a sitter there, and the sitter was just off on the side,
00:40:58 ►
just reading or something like that.
00:41:00 ►
And Gary said all of a sudden he had this really important flash,
00:41:04 ►
and he told his sitter
00:41:05 ►
to get paper and pencil. He had this real revelation that he wanted him to write down.
00:41:11 ►
The message was, Gary, never take this stuff again. He couldn’t figure out why the sitter
00:41:20 ►
was laughing at him, but I’ve been there.
00:41:21 ►
Sitter was laughing at him.
00:41:24 ►
But I’ve been there.
00:41:26 ►
Yeah.
00:41:29 ►
Some days that is the message. And that’s kind of one of the things I wound up looking at a lot
00:41:35 ►
in both my meditation training and my Chinese medicine training
00:41:40 ►
is that I’ve had a lot of serious injuries and accidents.
00:41:48 ►
And I think from an early age, I was really into, you know,
00:41:53 ►
skydiving and doing things that were involved throwing my body off of
00:41:57 ►
anything possible.
00:41:59 ►
And I’ve always had this sort of desire to transcend my body,
00:42:07 ►
to leave my body and fly off.
00:42:11 ►
And after smashing my body into the pavement enough times
00:42:16 ►
and injuring it seriously enough doing so,
00:42:19 ►
I kind of came to the appreciation of the fact that I have this body in this lifetime
00:42:24 ►
and it’s kind of came to the appreciation of the fact that I have this body in this lifetime,
00:42:27 ►
and it’s kind of groovy.
00:42:31 ►
You know, theoretically, it’s a really lucky thing to have a body.
00:42:39 ►
And to live in my body for this lifetime is extremely valuable to me. And all the time I’m chasing these super conscious experiences,
00:42:51 ►
these stratospheric highs, I’m generally leaving my body behind
00:42:56 ►
and leaving it in the dirt somewhere while I’m off tripping around the galaxy.
00:43:02 ►
And I think there was a certain sense of disconnection from my body
00:43:08 ►
that came from that and came from that chase.
00:43:11 ►
And I think my body kept reminding me,
00:43:13 ►
by running itself into walls and things,
00:43:16 ►
that I’m here in this physical body and I have this life to live in this body
00:43:20 ►
and to stay here.
00:43:24 ►
Use these experiences to benefit this life and be aware of things.
00:43:28 ►
But, you know, living in trip land isn’t necessarily beneficial.
00:43:36 ►
It’s hard for me to say it’s not, you know, it’s not an evil.
00:43:40 ►
You know, it’s not, you know, I don’t have anything against it, but I think that it’s
00:43:44 ►
important to, you know, I don’t have anything against it, but I think that it’s important
00:43:45 ►
to, you know, be with your body.
00:43:49 ►
Well, you know, that’s interesting to hear you say that because I was just sitting here
00:43:55 ►
thinking that people who have never had a psychedelic experience would most likely say,
00:44:02 ►
hey, this is pretty obvious, you know, but most of the people listening to these podcasts have had the great good fortune to have a few of these experiences.
00:44:13 ►
And once you have, then what you’re saying really resonates on a totally different level.
00:44:20 ►
And I would be surprised if most of our listeners didn’t also have had some kind of experiences like that.
00:44:28 ►
I know I have myself.
00:44:32 ►
Well, listen, we’re about out of time here.
00:44:35 ►
And I want to do this again because I’ve got a lot more questions.
00:44:39 ►
Yeah, we didn’t even go over any of the questions we had.
00:44:42 ►
I know.
00:44:44 ►
Well, we’ll save those for another one.
00:44:46 ►
It’s just been fun talking with you.
00:44:48 ►
But before we go, I don’t know if you want to, but we’ve got a couple of minutes.
00:44:52 ►
Do you care to mention anything about what I would call, I guess, psychic house cleaning that you do?
00:44:59 ►
Oh, actually, I meant to say, you know, I meant to give myself a plug.
00:45:03 ►
I always do these things and forget to give myself a plug and say,
00:45:05 ►
hey, people, if you want to read about any of my insanity,
00:45:09 ►
my book, Confessions of a Dope Dealer, is available through my website,
00:45:14 ►
SheldonOrberg.com, signed from me, or you can get it.
00:45:18 ►
I recommend people use the Airwid link to Amazon because I don’t really support Amazon,
00:45:26 ►
but if you’re going to give Amazon less money for my book
00:45:29 ►
than you would pay me,
00:45:30 ►
use Airwood’s click-through so that they get money out of it.
00:45:35 ►
And I agree.
00:45:36 ►
Help Airwood any way you can.
00:45:38 ►
Those people are just the best.
00:45:40 ►
They are so good for everyone.
00:45:43 ►
But, yeah, I’m working on a new book now,
00:45:46 ►
and I think I’m just another couple weeks from a contract on my book,
00:45:50 ►
on my really weird job.
00:45:55 ►
It was a long time I didn’t talk to people about my work as a drug dealer.
00:45:59 ►
Certainly I had to keep that secret for most of my life from many people.
00:46:05 ►
But my work as a psychic housecleaning guy,
00:46:08 ►
I certainly always felt very nervous about talking about it
00:46:14 ►
because as insane as I may have become taking psychedelics at any period,
00:46:21 ►
I can always still present myself as a rational adult.
00:46:28 ►
And once you cross the line and say, yeah, I work in houses where people have co-ops
00:46:36 ►
from people who have been murdered and died of cancer or other really unbelievably strange things happening from energetic situations that aren’t related
00:46:49 ►
to somebody dying and aren’t related to bizarre phenomenon, then you have to really wonder
00:46:56 ►
about your own sanity and the sanity of anyone who agrees with you.
00:47:01 ►
But apparently, what I do working on people’s houses
00:47:05 ►
is that have…
00:47:09 ►
Where things go bump in the night, shall we say?
00:47:12 ►
Yeah, things go more than
00:47:13 ►
bump in the night.
00:47:15 ►
The energy is somewhat toxic to them
00:47:17 ►
and to the people living there.
00:47:20 ►
It’s been a very
00:47:21 ►
interesting practice that I’ve been working on
00:47:23 ►
for the last
00:47:24 ►
dozen years or so.
00:47:28 ►
And I’d like to say it’s the kind of most interesting job I could find after selling acid.
00:47:34 ►
You need an interesting job after that.
00:47:39 ►
So after having developed my meditation practice, I sort of stumbled into this field and really developed my own practice,
00:47:47 ►
which I am writing this book about, which looks like a really good book,
00:47:51 ►
which, interestingly enough, has 100 times the marketability than a drug book
00:47:57 ►
because everyone is so afraid of drug books except for people who are upfront about their drug use and while
00:48:07 ►
everyone is concerned about having the anti-rational finger pointed at them, they certainly are
00:48:17 ►
interested in on phenomenon.
00:48:21 ►
This book certainly catalogs pretty much the range of what might be going on in your
00:48:26 ►
house if it has something weird going on and how you might want to think about it.
00:48:33 ►
Well, I definitely have some personal experience in that line in that years ago I was living in
00:48:41 ►
a house that had a bad hold on me, and I was having difficulty extracting myself.
00:48:49 ►
So I actually invented my own little ceremony.
00:48:52 ►
And, you know, the old cult I was raised in called the Catholic Church had given me at least an idea of ceremony. And so what I did is I went around the house,
00:49:06 ►
and instead of using the holy water that I’d been taught,
00:49:10 ►
I got even holier water, which was my bong water,
00:49:13 ►
and did a ceremony and released that spirit from the house,
00:49:19 ►
and I got out of there myself.
00:49:21 ►
So it was a little improvised ceremony,
00:49:25 ►
but in the future I would prefer to call an expert like you.
00:49:29 ►
And we’ll put links up on our website when I podcast this
00:49:34 ►
to some of your sites and your book
00:49:36 ►
so people can get in touch with you.
00:49:39 ►
Yeah, I mean, that’s the basic thing.
00:49:41 ►
We forget about how powerful we are and how powerful ritual is and how powerful our minds are.
00:49:46 ►
And certainly on the really gnarly jobs that I get,
00:49:53 ►
I wouldn’t recommend that anybody do it themselves.
00:49:55 ►
But for most everyone, it’s important to set up their sacred space
00:50:02 ►
and use their ritual space and their intentions to create their life.
00:50:07 ►
And the place you live is your sacred space, or it’s just some place you’re passing through.
00:50:16 ►
Well, you’re exactly right there, that every place you be and live should be your sacred space
00:50:22 ►
and turn this world into the paradise
00:50:26 ►
it’s meant to be.
00:50:28 ►
Well, listen, I really appreciate you spending time with us here today, and we’ll definitely
00:50:34 ►
have to do this again in the not-too-distant future, and that way we don’t have to worry
00:50:41 ►
about doing these things on the plow when there are other things to do than record podcasts, right? Yeah, like keep the dust out of your teeth.
00:50:48 ►
Right. Well, listen, you have a wonderful week, and
00:50:51 ►
thank you again for everything. I really appreciate this, Sheldon. It’s always great talking to you, Lorenzo,
00:50:56 ►
and the salon is a great service
00:50:59 ►
to our community and to our future community. Well, we’re
00:51:03 ►
happy to have you here in with us us and look forward to the next time.
00:51:08 ►
So you be well, Sheldon.
00:51:09 ►
You hear?
00:51:10 ►
Thank you, sir.
00:51:11 ►
Take care now.
00:51:12 ►
Bye-bye.
00:51:15 ►
Well, there you have the first of our psychedelic salon phone interviews.
00:51:20 ►
As you might have guessed, Sheldon and I never really got to the questions we planned on covering in the interview.
00:51:28 ►
Instead, we just kind of had one of our normal conversations.
00:51:32 ►
I hope you enjoyed it as much as we did, mainly because we plan on doing it again.
00:51:38 ►
And I’ll try to let you know ahead of time when I’m planning on recording one of these interviews.
00:51:43 ►
And maybe you can email me with some of your own questions for our guests
00:51:47 ►
in an attempt of some kind to make these conversations a little more interactive
00:51:53 ►
with all of us out there in the cyberdelic space.
00:51:58 ►
Speaking of being a little more interactive,
00:52:01 ►
I do want to thank all of you who sent me your comments via email.
00:52:06 ►
And after listening to several podcasts from the Dope Fiend and from Queer Ninja, I can
00:52:13 ►
see that I’ve been remiss in not commenting on your emails here in the podcast from time
00:52:19 ►
to time.
00:52:20 ►
But that certainly doesn’t mean that I don’t really appreciate it when I get notes like the one I got from John in the UK the other day,
00:52:28 ►
who wrote to say that he was just listening to Rupert Sheldrake’s explanation of the different states of creativity at different states of temperature.
00:52:37 ►
And he ended by saying, wow, absolutely fascinating.
00:52:41 ►
And I completely agree with you, John.
00:52:44 ►
Absolutely fascinating. And I completely agree with you, John.
00:52:49 ►
Isn’t it interesting to hear how Terrence McKenna picked up on that,
00:52:54 ►
and then he went off on a riff of his own about the cooling down of things.
00:53:01 ►
You know, listening to the interplay of these great minds, like you say, is absolutely fascinating.
00:53:06 ►
And Meredith, I tried to answer your email and I said thanks for the kind words.
00:53:08 ►
I’m glad you are enjoying them as much as I am.
00:53:13 ►
But I got a message back that said
00:53:15 ►
your mailbox is currently unavailable
00:53:17 ►
and to please contact a correspondent directly.
00:53:21 ►
So I guess this is as directly as is possible.
00:53:24 ►
But hey, thanks again for your kind words.
00:53:27 ►
I really do appreciate them.
00:53:29 ►
One thing, another thing that came up the other day was a suggestion that came from old Joe,
00:53:36 ►
who said that he thought we should have some coffee mugs made up with the Psychedelic Salon’s logo on them.
00:53:43 ►
And I had to tell him that it probably wouldn’t be too great of an idea to have a coffee mug
00:53:48 ►
at work with the word psychedelic on it.
00:53:51 ►
But he came back and said he didn’t have to be that obvious, but of course neither one
00:53:56 ►
of us could come up with any good ideas for one.
00:53:59 ►
So I’ll leave that idea up to you artists out there.
00:54:02 ►
If any of you want to submit ideas for a logo at the Psychedelic Salon,
00:54:07 ►
well, just send them to
00:54:08 ►
Lorenzo at MatrixMasters.com
00:54:11 ►
and I’ll post them on our
00:54:12 ►
website and hopefully we can get
00:54:14 ►
some feedback about them.
00:54:16 ►
Or maybe this is just
00:54:18 ►
another idea whose time has not
00:54:20 ►
yet come. I guess we’ll just have to
00:54:22 ►
wait and see about it.
00:54:25 ►
Oh, and one last thing before I go.
00:54:27 ►
I got a really great email from Tim, who’s way up there in Newfoundland.
00:54:32 ►
At least it seems like it’s way up there to me, way down here in Southern California.
00:54:37 ►
But anyway, Tim brought up a couple of points that I thought might be worth clearing up.
00:54:43 ►
One has to do with the number of podcasts I’ve done from the Psychedelic Salon so far.
00:54:49 ►
And maybe some of you can help me here.
00:54:52 ►
This podcast you’re listening to right now is the 64th in the series.
00:54:57 ►
And the podcasts that are shown on the RSS feed are only about the last 20 or so. My problem is that no one seems to have a really good answer about what to do when these RSS listings start getting really long.
00:55:12 ►
Should I include all 64 podcasts on the feed?
00:55:15 ►
And then what happens when the number gets over 100?
00:55:19 ►
I guess my thinking has been I ought to set up archives, say, in groups of 25 and have a separate feed for each group.
00:55:27 ►
And then just keep this main feed that you’re subscribed to right now as always having the most recent 25 programs on it.
00:55:35 ►
But I’m wide open to any ideas that any of you might have as to how to handle this.
00:55:41 ►
And if you do, send them to me, Lorenzo at MatrixMasters.com.
00:55:47 ►
The other issue that Tim brought up is kind of a dicey one, I guess.
00:55:51 ►
That has to do with why I’ve never played any talks by Tim Leary.
00:55:55 ►
And here I know I’m going to piss off quite a few of my friends, most of whom are major Leary supporters.
00:56:02 ►
But personally, I’m kind of ambivalent about Leary.
00:56:06 ►
I can argue both sides of his case and convince myself that he was both really good for the
00:56:12 ►
psychedelic community and on the other side that he was its worst enemy.
00:56:16 ►
But I’ve made my decision to not podcast any of his work based not only on my own opinions
00:56:22 ►
about him, but also on the opinions of two friends of mine who both had close relationships with Leary during the 60s.
00:56:30 ►
And in the future, I hope to get more into this.
00:56:33 ►
But until I get both of their remembrances recorded and podcast, I’m going to hold back on lectures by the good Dr. Leary, or St. Tim, as many of you like to call him.
00:56:47 ►
So, Tim, Newfoundland Tim, that is.
00:56:51 ►
That’s at least part of your answer.
00:56:53 ►
As for Ram Dass and Dr. Hoffman,
00:56:56 ►
well, my wife actually has quite a few Ram Dass lectures on tape,
00:57:00 ►
but they all have copyright notices on them,
00:57:03 ►
and I simply don’t have the time to try and track down the recording companies to ask for permission.
00:57:09 ►
So if any of you out there in cyberdelic space happen to have a recording or two that you made at a Ram Dass lecture,
00:57:17 ►
I’d love to have a copy to podcast here in the psychedelic salon.
00:57:22 ►
And Tim also mentioned Dr. Hoffman.
00:57:21 ►
here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:57:24 ►
And Tim also mentioned Dr. Hoffman.
00:57:26 ►
Well, you might be in luck there,
00:57:30 ►
as long as you speak German, that is.
00:57:34 ►
I think I’ve got a copy of one of his talks at his 100th birthday celebration,
00:57:36 ►
and if I can find it,
00:57:38 ►
I’ll tag it on to the end of a future podcast
00:57:41 ►
for you German speakers to enjoy.
00:57:47 ►
Well, there’s a lot more I’d like to get into today,
00:57:50 ►
but if I’m going to get this podcast out yet tonight,
00:57:51 ►
I’d better sign off for now.
00:57:54 ►
My next podcast, by the way,
00:57:56 ►
will hopefully be out by the end of this week,
00:58:00 ►
and it’ll be the first side of the next tape in the Trilog series.
00:58:02 ►
That tape’s titled Chaos in the Imagination.
00:58:06 ►
And thanks
00:58:07 ►
again to
00:58:08 ►
Chateau Hayuk
00:58:08 ►
for the use
00:58:09 ►
of their music
00:58:10 ►
here in the
00:58:11 ►
Psychedelic Salon.
00:58:12 ►
And a special
00:58:13 ►
thank you to
00:58:14 ►
all you guys
00:58:15 ►
out there in
00:58:16 ►
the psychedelic
00:58:16 ►
space.
00:58:17 ►
It’s really
00:58:18 ►
amazing how
00:58:19 ►
many of us
00:58:19 ►
there are
00:58:20 ►
who are being
00:58:21 ►
interconnected
00:58:22 ►
through this
00:58:23 ►
podcast and
00:58:24 ►
through other
00:58:24 ►
interconnecting programs like some of my favorites,
00:58:28 ►
the Sea Realm and all of those podcasts from dopecast.co.uk where you can hear Dope Fiend and Xandor and Queer Ninja and all of those guys.
00:58:42 ►
They produce some really top-notch programs.
00:58:41 ►
all of those guys.
00:58:44 ►
They produce some really top-notch programs.
00:58:46 ►
I did put up links to them on our podcast page, which is at
00:58:48 ►
00:58:52 ►
slash
00:58:52 ►
podcasts, in case
00:58:54 ►
you want to check them out.
00:58:56 ►
I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. I know
00:58:58 ►
I’m really enjoying going back and listening
00:59:00 ►
to all of their old programs.
00:59:02 ►
So, check out KMO,
00:59:07 ►
The Dope Fiend, Xandor, and Queer Ninja. And if you get a chance, please do stop back by here for the next podcast from the Psychedelic Salon.
00:59:15 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:59:20 ►
Be well, my friends.