Program Notes
Guest speakers: Richard Glen Boire, Erik Davis, and John Gilmore
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
05:08 Richard Glen Boire: “What if the government could inoculate you so you couldn’t get high, so if you took a drug it didn’t work in you?”
07:53 Richard begins a discussion about the U.S. Government’s research into anti-drug drugs, which he calls “Neurocops”. “So the question is, is it actually possible to treat illegal drug use with other drugs?”
08:25 Richard Glen Boire: “What I think the drug war is about to become is like truly a “drug” war. The war of your favorite drug against the government’s anti-drugs.”
09:09 Richard Glen Boire: “One of those [“anti-high”] vaccines that is now under production (they have these for all the major classes of illegal drugs right now, including marijuana), and this is the one that’s been tested now in humans, is only known as SR141716.”
10:10 Richard Glen Boire: “The most recent Drug Control Strategy Report, this year’s, has this term, ‘compassionate coercion’. This is a real government publication. [quoting] ‘Compassionate coercion requires the use of innovative techniques for fighting addiction, such as specialized pharmeceuticals.”
15:40 Richard Glen Boire: “What makes this kind of thinking by the government possible: That we’re going to create a vaccine, and you druggies are going to get it so you don’t continue to transmit your disease, is what’s made the drug war itself possible, which is the government’s total disrespect for what we call Cognitive Liberty. And that is the right to control your own neurochemistry, to think the thoughts you want to think triggered by whatever inputs those may be as long as you’re not causing harm to others.”
16:43 Richard Glen Boire: “I think we need in this country a Roe v. Wade of the mind.”
17:11 Introduction of Erik Davis who talks about “Waking Up In The Matrix”
20:16 Erik Davis: “What I talk about in Techgnosis is the way this sort of Gnostic hunch, this sense that there is some kind of false construct that I’m in is really part and parcel of technological society.”
21:02 Erik Davis: “By ’spirituality’ I really mean something very simple, which is the process of inquiry. And I mean inquiry on multiple levels… . Constant inquiry, such as ‘what is going on here?’ ”
30:14 Erik Davis: “As Dale Pendell said in a line that has just stuck with me, ‘When one learns to face the gods directly one no longer fears facing a king.”
30:37 Introduction of John Gilmore who talks about our Constitutional rights of anonymous travel and speech.
32:48 John Gilmore: “When the government says, ‘Terror … danger … evil … trouble,’ people sort of zoom in and look at that stuff. Instead, I kind of back away and say, ‘What are they doing around the edges while they’re trying to get your attention over here?’ ”
34:10 John Gilmore: “If you focus on the ability of individuals to do evil you forget about the ability of individuals to do good.”
36:40 John Gilmore: “The Bill of Rights, the Constitution, these are memes. They’re not alive. They’re not self-executing. They require human hosts to carry them and spread them around, and I’ve been infected by that meme, and I’m carrying it around.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:20 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:31 ►
This past weekend, I was wondering what I should do for this, my 99th podcast from the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:36 ►
But by Monday morning, I still hadn’t come up with anything that felt right.
00:00:43 ►
And then the snail mail came, and I was pleasantly surprised to find not just one package, but two.
00:00:48 ►
And the one I was expecting had a tape in it that I’ll be playing for you next week,
00:00:50 ►
and I’ll talk about that next week.
00:00:55 ►
But the other package contained a stack of CDs from my friend J.T.
00:00:59 ►
Now, if you’ve been a long-time listener of these podcasts,
00:01:04 ►
you’ll remember J.T. from the programs I did of some of the old MindStates conferences.
00:01:12 ►
Because JT, along with a couple of partners, has been doing the recording for John Hanna at his last few conferences.
00:01:15 ►
And he provided the recordings for me to use. So now he’s sent me these recordings of all the MindStates 4 and MindStates 6 conferences.
00:01:23 ►
And he’s given his permission to use the recordings in future podcasts.
00:01:27 ►
And as you know, John Hanna has also given his blessing for this project.
00:01:32 ►
I’ll have more to say about these recordings, as well as the most recent MindStates Costa Rica event a little later,
00:01:39 ►
but first I want to play three short talks from the MindStates4 conference that was held in Berkeley, California over the last weekend in May 2003.
00:01:50 ►
Now, the talks I’m going to play right now are the first three from a panel of six people that was organized around the topic of ways the government is using to control the direction and growth of our society.
00:02:11 ►
And it was called the Panel on Culture Control, or the Culture Control Panel, if you prefer.
00:02:18 ►
The six people on the panel included Richard Glenn Boyer, attorney and co-founder of the Center for Cognitive Liberty, the author Eric Davis, entrepreneur and civil libertarian John Gilmore, psychonaut and author Zoe Seven, author, editor and cultural icon Are You Serious? and myself.
00:02:35 ►
And today I’m going to play the opening remarks of the first three panelists.
00:02:43 ►
and although these talks were given over four years ago I think you’re going to find them still very much to the point
00:02:46 ►
and that’s not necessarily a good thing I’m afraid
00:02:50 ►
so let’s travel back in time to that beautiful Saturday in May
00:02:54 ►
and listen as Sue Blackmore introduces Richard Glenn Boyer
00:02:59 ►
who chaired our little culture control panel
00:03:02 ►
compose your minds in compliance with international law shared our little culture control panel.
00:03:09 ►
Compose your minds in compliance with international law,
00:03:12 ►
and we’ll look forward to hearing about control culture.
00:03:15 ►
I’m going to hand over to Richard Glenn Boyle, who is going to be the controller of the control panel.
00:03:20 ►
Over to you, Richard. Thank you very much.
00:03:22 ►
over to you Richard, thank you very much this is the control culture panel
00:03:31 ►
one person mentioned that
00:03:33 ►
which I thought was kind of apropos to at least what I’ll be talking about
00:03:37 ►
that you could call it the paranoid panel
00:03:38 ►
or the paranoia panel
00:03:40 ►
we have a great, great group of speakers here
00:03:44 ►
I think I will introduce them individually right before they speak very briefly.
00:03:49 ►
And we’re only going to talk shortly as individuals,
00:03:53 ►
and then we will have plenty of time for questions from the audience.
00:03:58 ►
Let me see.
00:04:00 ►
Okay.
00:04:01 ►
What we have here is a thing known as the variola.
00:04:07 ►
This emerged in human populations a number of several thousand years ago
00:04:12 ►
and replicated itself extremely quickly, particularly in very dense cities.
00:04:20 ►
It was a deadly virus.
00:04:22 ►
One out of every three people that were infected by this died.
00:04:26 ►
The people that didn’t die from it were blinded
00:04:29 ►
and sometimes left sterile or very scarred.
00:04:33 ►
By the turn of the century, by 1900,
00:04:36 ►
this virus had killed an estimated 20 to 30 million people,
00:04:43 ►
which was about 10% of the human population.
00:04:46 ►
And it’s a smallpox virus.
00:04:50 ►
The last reported case of this virus was in 1949 in the U.S., in Texas.
00:04:56 ►
The last worldwide was in 1977 in Somalia.
00:05:01 ►
And then there was a weird case a year later when a laboratory person got it.
00:05:06 ►
Now it’s been eradicated.
00:05:08 ►
It’s in some labs.
00:05:12 ►
And what killed it was finally a vaccination.
00:05:15 ►
It’s one of the most successful kind of stories in human history
00:05:19 ►
as far as people rising and overcoming something
00:05:23 ►
that was very, very deadly for a long time.
00:05:26 ►
What this has to do with mind states and altered states of consciousness,
00:05:31 ►
I think, unfortunately, has quite a bit to do with it, particularly in the coming years.
00:05:38 ►
Because one of the things I think to think about is what if the government had the power,
00:05:44 ►
the technological power to eradicate the altered state?
00:05:49 ►
What if the government could sort of inoculate you so you couldn’t get high?
00:05:53 ►
If you took a drug, it didn’t work in you.
00:05:56 ►
What if they could absolutely make it impossible for somebody to feel the effects of the drugs that they don’t like?
00:06:04 ►
for somebody to feel the effects of the drugs that they don’t like.
00:06:10 ►
This is like my image of the drug war.
00:06:14 ►
It’s kind of like drug war old school in a way.
00:06:17 ►
This is the war on drugs.
00:06:23 ►
The new school drug war, what I think is going to come about, unfortunately, is this. And this is kind of, you know, doctor with
00:06:29 ►
a needle and indicates what I’m viewing as a shift in the metaphor that the government uses now
00:06:35 ►
since about the mid-1990s. It’s no longer the metaphor of the war on drugs. If you read
00:06:41 ►
government literature about the war, it is now a big disease, and people are
00:06:47 ►
becoming infected with the disease of using illegal drugs. This is a quote from the 1997
00:06:54 ►
National Drug Control Strategy Report, where then Judge, I mean then the drug czar Barry McCaffrey
00:07:02 ►
said, the metaphor of a war on drugs is misleading.
00:07:05 ►
A more appropriate analogy for the drug problem is cancer.
00:07:10 ►
Dealing with cancer is a long-term proposition.
00:07:13 ►
It requires the mobilization of support mechanisms to check its spread,
00:07:17 ►
deal with its consequences, and improve the prognosis.
00:07:22 ►
And as we all know, the way that we fight disease in our culture and sort of
00:07:27 ►
Western society is through drugs. This is a quote from the 2001 National Drug Control Strategy
00:07:37 ►
Report. And it says, very plain, just like other chronic diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, and cancer, for
00:07:46 ►
which medications have been developed.
00:07:48 ►
Drug addiction is a disease that merits medication for its treatment.
00:07:53 ►
So the question, though, is, is it actually possible to treat illegal drug use with other
00:08:00 ►
drugs?
00:08:00 ►
Are there actually some pharmaceuticals or, yous or government-approved drugs,
00:08:12 ►
almost kind of anti-drugs, to treat people who use the bad drugs? And the unfortunate answer is that there are such drugs. They actually are being tested in humans now. And I like to just
00:08:18 ►
call them neurocops, which is where I think we are heading. Let’s get a glass of water real quick.
00:08:23 ►
which is where I think we are heading let’s get a glass of water real quick
00:08:24 ►
what I think the drug war is about to become
00:08:27 ►
is truly a drug war
00:08:29 ►
the war of your favorite drug against the government’s anti-drugs
00:08:34 ►
the NIDA, the National Institute of Drug Abuse
00:08:37 ►
has been pouring millions of dollars into
00:08:40 ►
creating these kinds of drugs that work in two ways
00:08:44 ►
either they police and make it so that your favorite illegal drug
00:08:49 ►
can’t cross the blood-brain barrier,
00:08:51 ►
so it’s in your body but it never gets to the brain,
00:08:53 ►
or they flood your body with a drug that plugs into the receptor sites
00:08:57 ►
that the illegal drug seeks to get into and it just can’t get in there.
00:09:02 ►
And what they’re going to do is turn these neurocops into vaccines.
00:09:09 ►
One of those vaccines, which is now under production,
00:09:13 ►
is they have these for all the major class of illegal drugs right now,
00:09:16 ►
including marijuana, and this is the one that’s been tested now in humans.
00:09:20 ►
It’s only known as SR141716.
00:09:24 ►
But this graph, which I don’t know how clear it is,
00:09:27 ►
shows that human subjects who were injected with SR141716 and then smoked a joint
00:09:34 ►
said that the high that they felt after taking this vaccine was roughly about 30%
00:09:41 ►
reduced from what they would normally feel. So this drug really does work.
00:09:47 ►
It stops you from feeling high or at least significantly reduces it.
00:09:52 ►
That’s a good thing.
00:09:53 ►
If people want to take a drug like this to not feel like the cravings to smoke marijuana, that’s great.
00:10:00 ►
The problem is that given the way the government has already handled the war on drugs,
00:10:05 ►
I think that we’re foolish if we think this will only be a voluntary medication.
00:10:10 ►
The most recent drug control strategy report this year has this term,
00:10:16 ►
compassionate coercion.
00:10:18 ►
Oh, my God.
00:10:20 ►
This is real government publications.
00:10:24 ►
And you can read it,
00:10:25 ►
compassionate coercion requires the use of innovative techniques
00:10:29 ►
for fighting addiction, such as specialized pharmaceuticals.
00:10:35 ►
Now what happened in the turn of,
00:10:37 ►
in the 1900s, there was a pretty big epidemic of smallpox in Boston.
00:10:44 ►
And they actually ended up, within less than a year of this epidemic sweeping the city,
00:10:50 ►
sending out what they called virus squads.
00:10:52 ►
And these were surgeons, doctors with vaccines, brought with three police officers each,
00:10:59 ►
who would go door to door and vaccinate people.
00:11:02 ►
And if they needed to, they would hold you down and do it.
00:11:04 ►
This is a newspaper article from the New York Times
00:11:06 ►
where it says 125 surgeons accompanied by police
00:11:10 ►
vaccinated 15,000 people yesterday.
00:11:13 ►
This is compulsory vaccination.
00:11:16 ►
This is another slide where it’s hard to see,
00:11:20 ►
but the image sort of to the right is a guy being held,
00:11:23 ►
and underneath it, it says,
00:11:29 ►
he strenuously objected that he was vaccinated.
00:11:37 ►
So I’m afraid that if the government’s already shown its general humanity,
00:11:39 ►
I guess, with respect to how it kicks in doors and roots out people who are using the drugs that aren’t authorized by the government,
00:11:45 ►
I’m afraid that when they continue developing these so-called vaccines,
00:11:48 ►
that they will be used in a compulsory manner.
00:11:52 ►
And there’s a number of factors I’ll point to very quickly.
00:11:54 ►
One is that most of the drug laws that we call drug laws
00:11:58 ►
don’t exist in the penal code section of our legal codes.
00:12:03 ►
They exist in the health and safety sections or the public safety
00:12:06 ►
sections where all the other laws exist with respect to infectious diseases and the control of
00:12:12 ►
them. I think that when these inoculations become available, the first place we’ll see them used is
00:12:18 ►
in prisoners. People who are confined into prisons already have a reduced amount of freedom.
00:12:30 ►
I think that after that, we’ll see them used for people who are convicted of a drug offense, even a marijuana offense, and who want to be granted probation or parole.
00:12:35 ►
One of the conditions will be, yeah, it won’t send you to prison, but you’re going to have
00:12:38 ►
to take this inoculation, which will make it impossible to get high.
00:12:42 ►
They already use something called antabuse, which is a pill that you can take that makes alcohol have a very strong reaction in your body.
00:12:53 ►
And this is routinely ordered for people involved in alcohol offenses to take.
00:12:59 ►
And I think we’ll see it used in the military.
00:13:01 ►
If you want to join the military, you have to take the anti-drug drug. And I think employers at some point, if they’re already starting to, you know,
00:13:10 ►
50% of employers are testing employees or pre-employees to see if they use illegal drugs.
00:13:16 ►
So why wouldn’t these guys just cut to the chase and say, you know, if you want to work for Walmart,
00:13:22 ►
get the anti-drug inoculation.
00:13:26 ►
It’s much cheaper.
00:13:30 ►
These inoculations are supposed to be about 4 a piece,
00:13:33 ►
as opposed to about $30 for a drug test.
00:13:37 ►
This is one of the big companies in the world of neurocops.
00:13:44 ►
It’s so big, in fact, that Barry McCaffrey, the drug czar who I mentioned earlier, and I think everybody’s aware of,
00:13:45 ►
when he quit being the drug czar, stepped down from that,
00:13:48 ►
he joined the board of directors of this company.
00:13:52 ►
The CEO of this company had this statement
00:13:56 ►
to a Wall Street Journal magazine.
00:13:59 ►
She said,
00:14:01 ►
Our company reminds me of Eli Lilly and Prozac in the depression field.
00:14:06 ►
In 1984, there was a $200 million market for depression.
00:14:11 ►
The market is now $10 billion.
00:14:14 ►
As Prozac and other products came in, the depression market evolved,
00:14:19 ►
and it elevated depression from being a closet disease to a fully recognized and accepted disease state.
00:14:27 ►
Our goal is to develop the addiction market.
00:14:30 ►
Well, the way to develop the addiction market is to recharacterize what addiction is,
00:14:37 ►
particularly if you can say that, hey, you know what?
00:14:40 ►
Anybody who uses one of these drugs is an addict, and they need treatment.
00:14:45 ►
Well, to get into the paranoia some more, this is from, again, the most recent government report.
00:14:53 ►
Whoops, let me go back.
00:14:55 ►
It said, drug use spreads because the vectors of contagion are not addicts in the streets,
00:15:01 ►
but users who do not yet show the consequences of their drug habit.
00:15:07 ►
This is the same quote continuing, last year some 16 million Americans used an illegal drug on at
00:15:13 ►
least a monthly basis, while 6.1 million Americans were in need of treatment. The rest, still in the
00:15:20 ►
honeymoon phase of their drug-using careers are carriers who transmit the disease
00:15:26 ►
to others who see only the surface of the fraud.
00:15:33 ►
Okay, so this is, time is running out,
00:15:37 ►
but I want to just quickly say that
00:15:38 ►
what makes this kind of thinking by the government possible,
00:15:43 ►
that, you know, we’re going to create a vaccine
00:15:44 ►
and you drug users are going to create a vaccine and you
00:15:45 ►
drug users are going to get it so you don’t continue to transmit your disease, is what’s
00:15:49 ►
made the drug war itself possible, which is the government’s total disrespect for what
00:15:55 ►
we call cognitive liberty.
00:15:57 ►
And that is the right to control your own neurochemistry, to think the thoughts that
00:16:01 ►
you want to think, triggered by whatever inputs those may be,
00:16:06 ►
as long as you’re not causing harm to others.
00:16:09 ►
Freedom of speech, for example, is dependent upon freedom of thought,
00:16:13 ►
because if you’re not free to control your own consciousness,
00:16:16 ►
there is no freedom left. So I think that what we need to do is, and what I’m working on doing,
00:16:33 ►
is updating the legal notion of intellectual freedom and freedom of thought
00:16:38 ►
so that it includes this recognition for the underlying functional neurochemistry.
00:16:43 ►
I think we need in this country a Roe v. Wade of the mind,
00:16:47 ►
a case that establishes this right.
00:16:50 ►
So I think we need to say no to the neurocops,
00:16:53 ►
no to the thought police,
00:16:55 ►
and yes to just basic human freedoms again.
00:16:58 ►
Thanks. Okay, next up is Eric Davis,
00:17:14 ►
who just is like one of the people,
00:17:15 ►
like many of the people on this panel,
00:17:17 ►
who continually just blows my mind
00:17:20 ►
with the stuff that he thinks about
00:17:21 ►
and is able to articulate.
00:17:24 ►
He’s the author of a book called Technosis, which is available in the bookstore in Back. He’s working on
00:17:30 ►
another book right now and just recently had a really cool article on Salon.com about the
00:17:36 ►
Matrix, and I think that is actually the topic of his discussion now. So this is Eric Davis.
00:17:51 ►
Alright, I just got a question to start out now.
00:17:53 ►
How many of you out there have seen
00:17:55 ►
The Matrix?
00:17:57 ►
How many of you have seen the movies?
00:18:03 ►
Now, one of the things that’s amazing about the uh the matrix films they’re they’re what i call a
00:18:08 ►
convergent myth because the basic myth structure they they lay out uh works on many many different
00:18:16 ►
levels simultaneously there’s a political level level of control and paranoia surveillance society
00:18:22 ►
the kind of things we’re talking about here. There’s a neurological level where there’s clearly something about fate and free will
00:18:29 ►
and the way we construct real-time perception of an ongoing world and how that works.
00:18:34 ►
Mark Pesci last night made a reference to that, that we’re really actually inside the
00:18:38 ►
matrix that our own minds create on the fly.
00:18:43 ►
And there’s a technological level
00:18:45 ►
where as we move towards this kind of convergence
00:18:48 ►
where the more we know about how the human nervous system
00:18:52 ►
produces the sense of reality
00:18:54 ►
on many different levels, proprioception, visual cues,
00:18:59 ►
cultural significance,
00:19:01 ►
as that kind of knowledge becomes embedded
00:19:03 ►
in ever more powerful technologies
00:19:06 ►
of perception, we move ever closer to this kind of vanishing point of total simulation.
00:19:13 ►
I think in many ways total simulation is a kind of myth in the sense that we’re not there
00:19:18 ►
yet, we don’t know what it looks like, this is a very old idea in many ways, and so there may always be some kind of crack.
00:19:27 ►
And yet, nonetheless, if you kind of chart the lines, you look at a sort of collapsing
00:19:32 ►
point, a sort of black hole of simulation.
00:19:36 ►
And finally, there’s the element which it didn’t really need to have for all those other
00:19:40 ►
things to be working out well, which is a profoundly spiritual one. The layers of religious and mystical and Gnostic symbolism and ideas in the movies go rather
00:19:50 ►
deep, and though they’re sort of a kind of playful comic book, ultimately, it’s still
00:19:57 ►
nonetheless remarkable how this kind of convergent myth where all of these different points wind
00:20:04 ►
us up in the same place, which is this
00:20:05 ►
fundamental suspicion, which is very old but manifests in very different ways in different
00:20:10 ►
kinds of cultures, that there’s just something fundamentally off about the world as I perceive
00:20:16 ►
it. What I talk about in technosis is a way this sort of Gnostic hunch, the sense that there’s some
00:20:21 ►
kind of false construct that I’m in, is really part
00:20:25 ►
and parcel of technological society, and there’s really no way outside of that.
00:20:31 ►
Now, what really interests me here, briefly, in terms of our panel, is to look at two aspects
00:20:37 ►
of this matrix scenario, which is the sort of spiritual one and the political one.
00:20:42 ►
And a way of saying it simply is, how does one practice spirituality,
00:20:47 ►
which I’ll mention in a second, or define in a second,
00:20:50 ►
in the context of this growing surveillance society
00:20:53 ►
and this very strange, rather tacky and low-rent dystopia
00:20:57 ►
that’s being produced all around us.
00:21:00 ►
Now, by spirituality,
00:21:01 ►
by spirituality I really mean something very simple, which is the process of inquiry.
00:21:08 ►
And I mean inquiry on multiple levels.
00:21:10 ►
So the kinds of neurological questions that someone like Susan Blackmore would raise is, for me, part of what I’m defining as spirituality.
00:21:18 ►
It might also imply moving through religions and religious systems and very non-rational modes of thought,
00:21:24 ►
experimenting with rituals, meditation, drugs, etc., etc.
00:21:27 ►
But it ultimately comes down to what I identify as a very modern sensibility of constant inquiry
00:21:34 ►
into what is going on here, what is going on here.
00:21:37 ►
So I don’t have any, here’s what we’re going to do about it,
00:21:40 ►
what we should do about this problem that we face, this imminent disaster on so many
00:21:45 ►
different levels? I don’t have an answer for that, but what I’m interested in more here is on a kind
00:21:49 ►
of meta level of like, how do you work with it? How do you work with the situation? And what are
00:21:55 ►
the sort of ways of integrating it into this continuing process of inquiry? And the main
00:22:01 ►
sort of thing you’re facing is fear.
00:22:10 ►
Paranoia is a nice subset of this, but let’s just talk about fear.
00:22:16 ►
Now, the first level of fear that we sort of are encountering now,
00:22:21 ►
and it’s a massive production of our whole media sphere, our politics or whatever, is the kind of, let’s say, official fears.
00:22:24 ►
The official fears. The official
00:22:25 ►
fears are the fears that are produced by the government and constructed in the media and
00:22:30 ►
that we have these marvelous orange alerts. I’m going to be traveling on Tuesday and I’m
00:22:35 ►
looking forward to putting on some oranges in all of my bags. So they’re like, why do
00:22:38 ►
you have all these oranges? And so we have this sort of mainstream fear mechanism and we’re all aware of it.
00:22:46 ►
Now, I’m not saying that there isn’t legitimate truth behind some of those fears, that there’s not.
00:22:50 ►
Actually, I’m sure somewhere, you know, out there, there are little teams of, you know, big bearded men going Golden Gate Bridge tasty.
00:22:59 ►
You know, I’m not saying that there’s not legitimate fears, but what I’m trying to do is that the rational question of the sort of statistical probability and the likelihood and the unlikelihood is in a way a trap.
00:23:10 ►
In a way, it’s sort of beside the point.
00:23:13 ►
Because at the same time, there’s always this level of magic, essentially.
00:23:16 ►
There’s always this level of manipulating imaginative possibility, which is what I mean by magic in this sense.
00:23:23 ►
So I’ll say a little bit more about
00:23:25 ►
that. Human beings in many ways are like these sort of scenario casting machines. We’re always
00:23:31 ►
casting scenarios. Well, if I go there and that thing goes way back. If we all kind of rush on
00:23:37 ►
these buffalo at the same time and then they’re going to fall over. It’s a very handy tool,
00:23:43 ►
scenario casting, building models,
00:23:47 ►
trying to figure out how we would do that, da-da-da-da.
00:23:49 ►
So this is a very basic thing that we have within us.
00:23:54 ►
And what we’re finding now is that the ability of the media to manipulate and produce scenarios that then kind of draw people in
00:23:59 ►
in a sort of tractor beam-like way is becoming more and more intense.
00:24:03 ►
I mean, in some sense this is always happening,
00:24:04 ►
but it’s more palpably invasive at this point.
00:24:08 ►
And it’s interesting to compare our current fear economy
00:24:11 ►
with the attention economy of the 1990s,
00:24:15 ►
because in some ways, nothing has changed.
00:24:18 ►
If you can go into the Wayback Machine for five, six years,
00:24:23 ►
one way of defining the sort of hysteria of the 90s economy,
00:24:27 ►
certainly in this part of the world,
00:24:29 ►
was that it was investing itself in this massive possibility machine.
00:24:33 ►
There’s an immense array of possibilities that our technology is producing,
00:24:37 ►
our connectivity is producing, our growing knowledge of any number of fields,
00:24:41 ►
so that by milking this possibility space correctly,
00:24:44 ►
we’re going to make big money, we’re going to do some great stuff, we’re going to move human beings forward.
00:24:49 ►
It was a tremendously optimistic, if also extremely manipulative and profit-driven kind
00:24:59 ►
of imagining.
00:24:59 ►
And yet it was essentially this kind of hyperactive production of scenarios, of possibilities.
00:25:05 ►
And that’s how, you know, dot com, I have a scenario.
00:25:08 ►
Give me some money.
00:25:09 ►
So that’s how it worked.
00:25:10 ►
And what happened post 9-11 is that we kept the scenarios going.
00:25:15 ►
They just like shifted 180 degrees from this kind of weird, you know, capitalist techno utopia to this dire dystopia.
00:25:22 ►
And, you know, immediately after the event, you had every media source
00:25:26 ►
you listened to, every professional came out that was like, here are the scenarios that
00:25:30 ►
I can produce. Well, we got these kinds of weapons, we have these kinds of diseases,
00:25:34 ►
we have this kind of weaknesses in the system, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There’s this
00:25:38 ►
mania for the production of these terrifying scenarios, many of which are legitimate. And
00:25:44 ►
then we’re going to hear more about them.
00:25:45 ►
We just heard about a terrible one.
00:25:47 ►
So what comes to me is, how do I deal with this?
00:25:50 ►
How do I work with this on a level that is not just,
00:25:55 ►
that in a way takes advantage of it?
00:25:57 ►
So maybe we are diving downward into darkness.
00:26:01 ►
Well, how do we ride through this with as much awakeness as possible?
00:26:06 ►
And it really has to do with confronting fear,
00:26:09 ►
and confronting fear on a very deep sort of imaginal level,
00:26:13 ►
as well as a level of being aware of how it’s being manipulated.
00:26:17 ►
Now, most people in this audience is kind of woken up
00:26:21 ►
from the mainstream matrix of fear manipulation.
00:26:24 ►
I doubt many of you get there. The orange alert really kind of gotoken up from the mainstream matrix of fear manipulation. You know, you don’t, I doubt many of you get there, you know, the orange alert really kind
00:26:27 ►
of, you know, got you all nervous.
00:26:29 ►
You know, I have a feeling that probably didn’t happen, even if you can still imagine the
00:26:33 ►
kinds of scenarios that terrorists or people who hate us might, you know, want to lay out
00:26:40 ►
on us.
00:26:40 ►
I think then in this audience, the kind of terror and fear that people face is a little bit
00:26:45 ►
more like what Richard just introduced us to, which is a little bit more fear of, you know,
00:26:48 ►
our own Big Daddy, our own government, our own control systems. I mean, that was what was
00:26:52 ►
remarkable about this. Even though I became very nervous and sort of rattled by the last year and
00:26:59 ►
a half, as a lot of people I think did, I didn’t really, the terrorist stuff just didn’t work on me. I
00:27:05 ►
just, you know, I didn’t feel it. It wasn’t in my heart. But, you know, big daddy government
00:27:10 ►
stuff was like right to the front, you know. I had some very spooky dreams. And as I said,
00:27:20 ►
I had a lot of very spooky dreams. I had a lot of insomnia. I had a lot of like that
00:27:23 ►
nighttime thing where you’re just playing out all these escapes and they’re half plausible and then they
00:27:28 ►
turn into some, you know, bad science fiction movie. And it’s like, what’s going on here? And I started
00:27:33 ►
to realize that I was dealing with this thing that has works on on sort of multiple levels and that
00:27:40 ►
paranoia and fear are way into engaging deeper kinds of forces, both political forces and behind
00:27:48 ►
that, I think, even more basic existential and symbolic and religious kinds of issues. What I
00:27:56 ►
mean by the politics, which is sort of a little bit more to the point here, is that, you know,
00:28:01 ►
we are, there is a political unconscious. There’s a sense of how power is distributed in society
00:28:07 ►
that we only really get to kind of through the imaginal realm,
00:28:11 ►
through the realm of dreams and intuitions and peripheral cues
00:28:15 ►
that we don’t get through the rational language
00:28:17 ►
that we’re always taught is the way we deal with these problems.
00:28:20 ►
Well, let’s dissect this issue.
00:28:22 ►
Oh, well, I take this. My opinion’s over here.
00:28:23 ►
It is an endless jabbering machine of quasi-reason
00:28:27 ►
when all around it there’s this sort of imaginal battle going on.
00:28:32 ►
I think the sort of most obvious and sort of amusing example of this
00:28:36 ►
is that marvelous logo for the Office of Information Awareness
00:28:39 ►
for Poindexter’s little, you know, vaporware project, essentially.
00:28:44 ►
I mean, when you look at what it actually was,
00:28:45 ►
it was some canny folks in various technology centers
00:28:50 ►
going, hey, we did some pretty good stuff.
00:28:52 ►
We can have little neural programs
00:28:55 ►
and genetic algorithms are going to sift through data, blah, blah, blah.
00:28:58 ►
Everybody wants to sift through data.
00:28:59 ►
How much real beef was behind the stuff that they were wanting to do?
00:29:03 ►
You know, more or less.
00:29:04 ►
But that icon, that image, that symbol,
00:29:08 ►
it was a gateway, it was a portal,
00:29:10 ►
it was like one of those resonant images you see
00:29:13 ►
that flash on the screen in The Matrix.
00:29:15 ►
And what it was a portal into
00:29:18 ►
was this irrational, imaginal,
00:29:22 ►
even sort of, you know, shamanic kind of game or war that’s going on
00:29:28 ►
in which our subconsciouses are being pulled and tugged in different kinds of ways.
00:29:34 ►
And so when we see these kinds of gestures emerge through the media,
00:29:38 ►
we are right to sort of paranoically question what’s sort of behind them. And that kind of work is exactly what I’m talking about
00:29:48 ►
in terms of bringing that deeper life into the sorts of experiences that we’re facing.
00:29:53 ►
One final little bit is the Tibetan practice of chöd,
00:29:59 ►
wherein you give your body to the demons.
00:30:01 ►
And we are facing demons on multiple levels.
00:30:04 ►
And it doesn’t mean you disappear.
00:30:06 ►
It doesn’t mean you stop fighting for whatever you’re fighting for.
00:30:10 ►
But there is a sort of process here, a kind of confrontation that I think is really profound.
00:30:14 ►
As Dale Pendell said in a line that’s just stuck with me, when one learns to face the
00:30:21 ►
gods directly, one no longer fears facing a king.
00:30:37 ►
Next speaker is John Gilmore.
00:30:40 ►
He’s another amazing person that I had the pleasure of meeting several years ago
00:30:46 ►
he’s done too many things to list
00:30:48 ►
the thing that I kind of like a lot is
00:30:51 ►
he created the whole alt. system
00:30:56 ►
of Usenet groups
00:30:57 ►
he’s made millions of dollars several times
00:31:01 ►
in various companies
00:31:03 ►
and now he’s just giving the money away to
00:31:06 ►
our group and other groups and is funding a lot of the progressive drug policy stuff.
00:31:18 ►
And he is now challenging John Ashcroft and the whole Department of Justice for making him show his ID
00:31:28 ►
and treating him like a suspected terrorist every time he wants to travel within our own country.
00:31:34 ►
So this is John Gilmore.
00:31:35 ►
So what I want to talk about is sort of how we’re here to talk about mind states.
00:31:43 ►
sort of how we’re here to talk about mind states,
00:31:46 ►
but when it comes to control culture,
00:31:53 ►
the issue is really people in the world who want to shape the state of your mind and want to shape the state of the world.
00:31:55 ►
I think the appropriate response to that is to use the state of our minds,
00:32:01 ►
reflect it back and reshape the state of the world.
00:32:08 ►
state of our minds, reflect it back and reshape the state of the world. In a sense, the shape of the world is really a reflection of how we think about it. A lot of what we’ve talked
00:32:13 ►
about in the last couple of days is like the things you see are the things you’re paying
00:32:16 ►
attention to. And actually something Eric said reminded me of the old line about if you fight with monsters,
00:32:28 ►
beware that you don’t turn into a monster and also know that as you gaze into the abyss,
00:32:33 ►
the abyss also gazes into you.
00:32:37 ►
So rather than looking too hard at the abyss, I’ve tried to find other ways to deal. A lot of people just sort of, when
00:32:48 ►
the government says, you know, terror, danger, evil, trouble, you know, people sort of zoom
00:32:55 ►
in and look at that stuff. And instead, I kind of back away and say, what are they doing
00:33:00 ►
around the edges while they’re trying to get your attention over here.
00:33:13 ►
And a lot of that stuff is hidden in plain sight.
00:33:19 ►
For example, I once, about five years ago, heard a lecture by James Woolsey, who used to be head of the CIA.
00:33:22 ►
And he said that he talked about this threat of terrorism that was there,
00:33:26 ►
and he couldn’t tell us all the terrible things they had already averted,
00:33:32 ►
but we had to believe that they existed, etc.
00:33:36 ►
But he said they’ve got this fundamental problem that they’re facing,
00:33:40 ►
which is that individuals, as our society has evolved up to this point,
00:33:45 ►
individuals are getting more and more and more power to change the world.
00:33:51 ►
A small number of people, 20 people working together,
00:33:55 ►
were able to take out a couple of major buildings.
00:33:58 ►
And that was the least of it.
00:34:00 ►
They were able to trigger the culture to do much more destructive things than
00:34:05 ►
that. But that power that’s available to individuals applies in both directions. If you focus on the
00:34:12 ►
ability of individuals to do evil, you forget the ability of individuals to do good. Which brings me
00:34:19 ►
around to another quote that I’ll mangle here, something on the order of,
00:34:27 ►
of course individuals can change the world.
00:34:29 ►
In fact, that’s the only way it ever happens.
00:34:32 ►
It doesn’t take a lot of people to change the world.
00:34:35 ►
What it takes is insight and ideas, perseverance.
00:34:44 ►
And fighting the whole system with humor
00:34:45 ►
is a good way to do it.
00:34:47 ►
It’s another way to turn your attention away
00:34:49 ►
from the terror and into
00:34:51 ►
the, instead of
00:34:54 ►
the gravity, you go for the comedy.
00:34:56 ►
One of the
00:34:57 ►
reasons that the
00:35:00 ►
total information awareness
00:35:02 ►
got so much attention in the
00:35:04 ►
press and so much attention from Congress eventually
00:35:06 ►
is that some guy put up
00:35:08 ►
a website called the John Poindexter
00:35:11 ►
Information Office
00:35:12 ►
and started searching
00:35:15 ►
out Poindexter information
00:35:17 ►
on websites
00:35:19 ►
and like Google him
00:35:21 ►
and read all the stuff
00:35:22 ►
and search him
00:35:22 ►
they found his home address and posted it.
00:35:25 ►
They got photos of his house and put them up,
00:35:28 ►
satellite photos of the neighborhood,
00:35:30 ►
found where he’d gone to college.
00:35:31 ►
His son is an astronaut.
00:35:33 ►
It’s like on and on and on.
00:35:35 ►
It was a way to take this vague threat
00:35:38 ►
and make it real as applied to the guy
00:35:41 ►
who was trying to make it apply to us.
00:35:46 ►
Penn Jillette does a lot of this stuff, too.
00:35:49 ►
He’s where I found out about this.
00:35:51 ►
This is the Bill of Rights Security Edition.
00:36:01 ►
It’s a piece of metal with the first ten amendments printed on it.
00:36:05 ►
The fourth amendment is printed in red, like the words of our Lord.
00:36:10 ►
And it’s a great thing to slip into your shirt pocket as you go through the magnetometer.
00:36:27 ►
Because then when the guards find it,
00:36:29 ►
it’s like, oh, I’m sorry, sir,
00:36:31 ►
you can’t take the Bill of Rights into an airport.
00:36:42 ►
So the Bill of Rights, the Constitution,
00:36:44 ►
these are memes.
00:36:49 ►
They’re not alive. They’re not self-executing.
00:36:54 ►
They require human hosts to carry them and spread them around.
00:37:00 ►
And I’ve been infected by that meme, and I’m carrying it around.
00:37:09 ►
Now, one of the memes I’ve been infected by is freedom of thought, and this man is partially responsible for this. How many people here have a freedom of thought light? Will
00:37:15 ►
you flash it if you do? Ah, got a few. Yeah, see? When you use that light, think about freedom of thought.
00:37:28 ►
Because it’s one of those freedoms that has been implicit for so long that we forget it exists.
00:37:36 ►
And then when they try to take it away, we don’t notice.
00:37:40 ►
And I think that’s been a lot of the strategy, is while they’re holding our attention over here,
00:37:42 ►
And I think that’s been a lot of the strategy,
00:37:44 ►
is while they’re holding our attention over here,
00:37:49 ►
is to take away all the freedoms that nobody thinks about because they’ve been ingrained in the culture for so long.
00:37:53 ►
Freedom of thought is one.
00:37:55 ►
It’s only those stupid drug users who, you know,
00:37:58 ►
and half of them are in prison anyway.
00:38:00 ►
So that doesn’t really matter if we get rid of that.
00:38:07 ►
Another one that I’ve been working on is freedom of movement. It’s taken for granted that we have the freedom to control our own
00:38:13 ►
movements, that if you want to walk across the room or across the street, you’re free to, that
00:38:17 ►
the government can’t stop you. If you want to move from one town to another, you can. Well,
00:38:26 ►
want to move from one town to another, you can. Well, the government has deliberately put in restrictions on freedom of movement, and I’ve been deliberately subjecting myself
00:38:35 ►
to those restrictions. I haven’t flown from one place to another in the United States since 9-11.
00:38:46 ►
I’ve gone to airports,
00:38:49 ►
and I’ve tried,
00:38:54 ►
and they wouldn’t let me fly because I wouldn’t show them an ID.
00:39:00 ►
And so I brought a case against John Ashcroft and the Transportation Security Agency
00:39:04 ►
and all of those other people,
00:39:07 ►
saying, wait, when I go back and read Supreme Court cases, I find things that go back more
00:39:13 ►
than 100 years that say we have freedom to travel, freedom of movement, that the government
00:39:19 ►
can’t restrict this. We have one Supreme Court justice who went so far as to say this is a right even
00:39:27 ►
stronger than most of the other rights because it can be asserted not only against the government
00:39:33 ►
but against private parties. If a private party restrains your freedom of movement,
00:39:36 ►
you call it kidnapping. But somehow people haven’t paid much attention to this.
00:39:48 ►
It turns out that not only are they putting arbitrary restrictions on who can fly,
00:39:58 ►
but also who can take inner city buses, who can take trains, and who can travel by water, who can take cruise ships.
00:40:07 ►
All within the United States.
00:40:09 ►
Now, the right to travel goes back before the Constitution to the original Articles of Confederation,
00:40:14 ►
where it was an explicit rule that said a citizen of any of the states has the right to travel through any of the other states.
00:40:24 ►
of any of the states has the right to travel through any of the other states.
00:40:32 ►
And another Supreme Court decision from about 100 years ago said that right is really what made the 13 colonies into a unified nation.
00:40:37 ►
The fact that if you were a citizen of Georgia, you were free to go to New York.
00:40:41 ►
New York couldn’t put up barriers and say, no, no, no, New York people get better treatment than Georgia people. Freedom of identity is another one. Some people
00:40:54 ►
call it anonymity. It’s been upheld many, many, many times by the Supreme Court. The most recent was when the Jehovah’s Witnesses
00:41:07 ►
were going door to door.
00:41:10 ►
It’s a case called Watchtower
00:41:11 ►
versus Village of Somewhere or Other.
00:41:15 ►
And the city tried to make them get a permit
00:41:18 ►
to go door to door and preach and solicit for donations,
00:41:21 ►
and they took it all the way to the Supreme Court.
00:41:23 ►
The Supreme Court said no.
00:41:25 ►
They have a right to go without government permission, without identifying themselves.
00:41:29 ►
You’re allowed to walk around your town and talk to your neighbors without government permission,
00:41:34 ►
without identifying yourself, without showing an ID.
00:41:38 ►
And cases all the way back talk about this.
00:41:42 ►
Freedom of association anonymously.
00:41:47 ►
back and talk about this. Freedom of association anonymously. The Supreme Court knocked out an Alabama law that would have required the NAACP to turn over its membership list. It was disguised
00:41:53 ►
as a tax. They put a tax on non-profit organizations and said, oh, we have to see how many members you
00:41:58 ►
have to see how much tax you should pay. So you have to turn this over. And really what it was,
00:42:03 ►
was an attempt to get the list of all the people who were supporting the rights of colored people and turn it over
00:42:09 ►
to the racist people who ran the government of Alabama. That was turned down. So
00:42:17 ►
I encourage you all to think about these rights that only affect a few people here and there at the
00:42:28 ►
moment, where the government is sort of going behind the scenes saying, well, we don’t really
00:42:33 ►
need to prove that you’ve committed a crime to put you in prison. We’ve only done it to
00:42:37 ►
a thousand people. That’s a tiny fraction of the population. Don’t worry about it. You
00:42:43 ►
don’t really need your anonymity to fly. Are you
00:42:47 ►
a terrorist? Who are you trying to protect? Notice when these things go away, assert your
00:42:54 ►
rights, because the only way you’ll find out what the real rules are is by insisting on
00:43:03 ►
having them. It’s really hard to change the rules unless you know what the rules are is by insisting on having them. It’s really hard to change the rules unless
00:43:08 ►
you know what the rules are. And as it turns out, the rules about showing ID in airports
00:43:14 ►
are not written down anywhere. Congress never passed a law that said you had to show an
00:43:20 ►
ID to get on an airplane. The FAA and the TSA never passed a published regulation that
00:43:26 ►
said you had to do it. It’s all happened in secret. And all of you have gone along with
00:43:33 ►
it. So quit. Now there’s the first time that just say no has made any sense to me.
00:43:57 ►
Just say no the next time somebody asks for your ID.
00:44:01 ►
As for an update to John’s case, I’m afraid the courts were of no help. Here’s what
00:44:07 ►
John has to say about the case from his website. And I’m quoting here. I petitioned the U.S. Supreme
00:44:15 ►
Court to examine whether the feds can enforce secret regulations. I lost every one of these
00:44:20 ►
lawsuits. The Constitution is a dead letter as far as one branch of the federal dictatorship is Thank you. open court. But each of these courts refused to make TSA stop lying to the public with airport
00:44:46 ►
signs telling every passenger that their ID is required. Well, I guess nobody really expected
00:44:53 ►
that one person could single-handedly force a change in our current culture of fear, but we all
00:45:00 ►
do have to applaud John for having the courage to bring this issue out into the open.
00:45:14 ►
What a difference the citizens of this country could make if everyone just said no to the continuing erosion of our basic rights as citizens and as humans.
00:45:22 ►
It’s not really too much of a stretch of imagination to see that we’re all inmates in some bizarre prison of our own making.
00:45:29 ►
The only question is, when do we inmates decide to take over the prison and run the guards out on a rail?
00:45:30 ►
Which ultimately is what these podcasts are all about, taking back the control of our
00:45:36 ►
culture.
00:45:38 ►
And I, for one, happen to believe that the culture that arises from the psychedelic experience
00:45:43 ►
is where we have to go if we’re going to survive as a species.
00:45:47 ►
So, where do we start?
00:45:50 ►
Just listening again to Richard explaining how the war on drugs is morphing into a war on some kind of disease you can be inoculated against is really frightening when you think about it.
00:46:02 ►
is really frightening when you think about it.
00:46:06 ►
Go back and re-read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and see if you agree with me that we’re now in that kind of a world.
00:46:11 ►
Can you even imagine what it would be like to live in a world
00:46:14 ►
where everyone’s been chemically manipulated by the government,
00:46:18 ►
immunized, they would say, so that it was impossible to get high?
00:46:23 ►
Are you ready to go through the rest of your life
00:46:25 ►
without even the possibility of altering your default consciousness?
00:46:31 ►
Well, I’m not. I can tell you that for sure.
00:46:34 ►
And if we’re not careful, our schools will soon be teaching our young people
00:46:37 ►
that this is a good idea, you know, to get an inoculation against getting high.
00:46:42 ►
And, you know, there once was a day when schools, some schools at least,
00:46:47 ►
taught people how to think, not what to think.
00:46:50 ►
But those days are long gone now, I’m afraid.
00:46:54 ►
It’s now the official law of the land in the U.S.
00:46:57 ►
that school principals can forbid students to even think about what they call drugs,
00:47:04 ►
you know, in any kind of a positive way.
00:47:05 ►
Let me read a few sentences here from a news report about a U.S. Supreme Court ruling
00:47:11 ►
that was handed down a couple of days ago.
00:47:14 ►
It says,
00:47:15 ►
In a 5-4 ruling involving free speech,
00:47:18 ►
the court ruled today against an Alaska high school student
00:47:22 ►
finding that educators can prohibit student expression
00:47:26 ►
that can be interpreted as advocating drug use.
00:47:31 ►
In the Alaska case involving free speech,
00:47:34 ►
the court found that a high school principal and school board did not violate a student’s rights
00:47:39 ►
by punishing him for displaying the words,
00:47:43 ►
bong hits for Jesus. That’s right words, Bong hits for Jesus.
00:47:45 ►
That’s right, bong hits for Jesus is what got him in trouble.
00:47:49 ►
Displayed it on a banner across the street from the school as the 2002 Olympic torch parade went by.
00:47:56 ►
Whatever rights students may have to express themselves,
00:47:59 ►
thumbing their noses at school officials’ anti-drug messages is not one of them, according to
00:48:05 ►
this article.
00:48:07 ►
Well, can you believe that?
00:48:08 ►
You know, students in the U.S. can’t even express their opinions about the insanity
00:48:13 ►
of the anti-drug messages going around.
00:48:17 ►
You know, if you’ve ever seen some of the nutty stuff educators put out on behalf of
00:48:21 ►
their comrades in the war on drugs, you just really have to laugh.
00:48:23 ►
put out on behalf of their comrades in the war on drugs,
00:48:24 ►
you just really had to laugh.
00:48:28 ►
For the most part, their information is so far off the mark as to make that old Reaper Madness movie kind of look rational.
00:48:33 ►
So any young person who’s either used an illegal substance
00:48:37 ►
or who knows someone who already has used them,
00:48:42 ►
well, that person knows that the propaganda masters
00:48:45 ►
really don’t have a clue about these substances.
00:48:48 ►
And if your teachers are so ignorant about drugs,
00:48:51 ►
well, what else are they ignorant about?
00:48:53 ►
Makes you think, huh?
00:48:55 ►
At least that’s the risk these so-called educators take
00:48:58 ►
in eliminating all intelligent discussion about this issue.
00:49:02 ►
So I guess these podcasts might now be against school
00:49:06 ►
rules in some places.
00:49:07 ►
Which is probably good news
00:49:09 ►
because if the war
00:49:12 ►
on drugs has taught us anything, it’s that
00:49:13 ►
prohibition only drives up demand.
00:49:17 ►
And if you want to keep up
00:49:18 ►
to date on legal issues surrounding
00:49:20 ►
the war on drugs, or more truthfully
00:49:22 ►
as Richard calls it, the war on
00:49:23 ►
consciousness, the war on consciousness,
00:49:36 ►
the best place to stay informed is at www.cognitiveliberty.org, which is the organization Richard co-founded with his wife, Rye.
00:49:38 ►
And it’s by far the best site dealing with these issues that I think you’re going to
00:49:42 ►
find.
00:49:43 ►
And in the interest of full disclosure, I guess I should add that Richard and Rye are also dear friends of Mary C’s and mine,
00:49:49 ►
and they also have our personal recommendations as well.
00:49:54 ►
And since some of the information in this podcast can be a little bit of a downer,
00:49:58 ►
you might want to go back and re-listen to what Eric Davis had to say about escaping the Matrix.
00:50:04 ►
And if you really want about escaping the Matrix.
00:50:09 ►
And if you really want to escape the Matrix, well, I’ll see you at Burning Man,
00:50:13 ►
because that’s about as far away from the Matrix as I can imagine.
00:50:18 ►
And if all goes according to plan, you can come and hear Eric Davis at one of the Blanque Norte lectures again this year.
00:50:21 ►
Anyway, I’d better move on, get away from Burning Man here for a minute,
00:50:25 ►
and get on to a couple emails that came in recently. One that may affect some of the others
00:50:31 ►
of you came from Andrew, who wrote, I would like to listen to all of your previous podcasts, but
00:50:36 ►
when I downloaded them, my pause option is disabled. I use that feature a lot to go back
00:50:42 ►
and forth, etc. Is there any way I can do this?
00:50:46 ►
So I wrote back and told him that I’ve noticed that when I downloaded one of these podcasts
00:50:50 ►
using iTunes, that seems to change a few things in the MP3 tag, like the name of the featured
00:50:57 ►
speaker, for example. So I suggested that he try downloading the MP3 files directly from our
00:51:03 ►
psychedelicsalon.org website
00:51:05 ►
and see what happens.
00:51:07 ►
Well, Andrew wrote back and said that that fixed his problem.
00:51:10 ►
So some kind of high weirdness like that is going on and maybe affecting your MP3 player.
00:51:17 ►
Well, you might want to try downloading the podcast directly from our website.
00:51:21 ►
And while I’m at it, I guess I should mention that for the last few podcasts, I’ve added a listen feature on the program notes page. Thank you. www.psychedelicsalon.org, you’ll see that it’s built with the open-source WordPress blog software.
00:51:49 ►
And so it has a category feature where you can more easily find a particular speaker or topic.
00:51:56 ►
One other email I want to mention comes from a young woman who lives in Norway.
00:52:01 ►
And here’s part of what she had to say.
00:52:04 ►
As you already know, you have an audience all over the world.
00:52:08 ►
I want to point out that you also have people listening to you who have never tried psychedelic drugs.
00:52:14 ►
I’m a very curious, spiritual, and intelligent person,
00:52:18 ►
and I see a great need in this world to expand horizons.
00:52:21 ►
I am sure that certain medicines can help you with that.
00:52:21 ►
to expand horizons.
00:52:23 ►
I am sure that certain medicines can help you with that.
00:52:25 ►
To me, it’s an inspiration
00:52:27 ►
just to listen to people’s experiences
00:52:29 ►
in the psychedelic realm.
00:52:31 ►
I believe that people can learn things
00:52:33 ►
from psychoactive drugs
00:52:34 ►
if they use them the right way.
00:52:37 ►
I wish that our society was aware of this
00:52:39 ►
and knew how to use them
00:52:41 ►
as a gift from nature.
00:52:43 ►
Anyway, I’m glad I’ve found your podcast.
00:52:46 ►
Previously, I thought very differently about people who experimented with drugs.
00:52:50 ►
I would never have thought that they could be this smart.
00:52:54 ►
Well, Carrie, it’s really nice of you to say that,
00:52:57 ►
and the fact that you have changed your view of the psychedelic community
00:53:01 ►
is something that brings joy to my heart.
00:53:04 ►
And I think that I speak for our fellow salonners when I say that
00:53:08 ►
it’s reassuring to know that people who haven’t had
00:53:12 ►
a psychedelic experience can still understand the potential
00:53:15 ►
importance of these substances. And while actually using these
00:53:19 ►
medicines has been important to many of us, the fact remains
00:53:23 ►
that ultimately psychedelic thinking
00:53:25 ►
is about how freely you can allow your mind to soar,
00:53:29 ►
and it’s not just some weird hallucination
00:53:32 ►
brought on by the ingestion of a plant or chemical.
00:53:36 ►
I think your open mind is a good sign
00:53:39 ►
that there still is hope for our species,
00:53:41 ►
if only we can learn to get along with one another a little better.
00:53:46 ►
That doesn’t really even seem like it’s asking for too much, does it?
00:53:50 ►
Oh, well, at least we get along here in the salon,
00:53:53 ►
even if we do disagree about a few things from time to time.
00:53:58 ►
And I guess before I go, I should also mention that
00:54:01 ►
this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
00:54:04 ►
are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution non-Commercial Share Alike 2.5 license.
00:54:10 ►
If you have any questions about that, just click on the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,
00:54:16 ►
which, as you know, you can find at www.psychedelicsalon.org.
00:54:22 ►
www.psychedelicsalon.org And if you have any questions, comments, complaints, or suggestions about these podcasts,
00:54:26 ►
well, just send them to lorenzo at matrixmasters.com
00:54:30 ►
A big thank you to Shatul Hayuk, again, for the use of your music here in the salon.
00:54:37 ►
And to Richard, Eric, and John, thanks again for contributing your thoughts to our community
00:54:42 ►
and to our conversation about the evolution of the culture.
00:54:46 ►
And to John Hanna and JT,
00:54:48 ►
who made the conference and the recordings materialize.
00:54:51 ►
Well, thanks again, guys.
00:54:53 ►
We all owe a big debt of gratitude to you
00:54:57 ►
for keeping these gatherings alive.
00:54:59 ►
And there are a few other people right now
00:55:02 ►
who I want to send a special thank you to
00:55:04 ►
on this, my 99th podcast from the Psychedelic Salon.
00:55:08 ►
They are Jeannie K., A. Andrew G., Stephen F., and Paul D., all of whom made very generous donations to help offset the expenses associated with these podcasts.
00:55:21 ►
And I deeply appreciate your very generous contributions, much more
00:55:25 ►
than you might suspect, I’m sure.
00:55:28 ►
I have to admit that a part of me finds it somewhat difficult to accept these donations,
00:55:32 ►
just like it’s hard to accept gifts from strangers at Burning Man, but I must admit that these
00:55:38 ►
donations are coming in quite handy for little things like gas to drive to L.A. to record
00:55:44 ►
those interviews with Gary Fisher, getting a new microphone and things like gas to drive to L.A. to record those interviews with Gary Fisher,
00:55:46 ►
getting a new microphone and things like that.
00:55:49 ►
So they really are appreciated.
00:55:51 ►
Thank you very much.
00:55:52 ►
And by the way, if I’m not mistaken, Paul D. was one of the very first people to send a donation to the salon last year.
00:56:01 ►
And just this morning I received an email from Yarov, who made a contribution to
00:56:05 ►
the salon a little while back, and just now he offered to send me the scanner that I mentioned
00:56:11 ►
in a previous podcast. And when I wrote back to thank him and say that a friend had just given me
00:56:17 ►
one, what did he do but turn around and send the money he’d set aside for the scanner anyway?
00:56:22 ►
around and send the money he’d set aside for the scanner anyway.
00:56:24 ►
Well, gosh, what
00:56:26 ►
can I say? Thank you.
00:56:28 ►
Just certainly doesn’t seem like enough
00:56:30 ►
there, Yarov and all of you
00:56:31 ►
donors, but hey, thank you
00:56:34 ►
all, one and all. And thank
00:56:36 ►
you, you know, thank you for
00:56:37 ►
spending some of your valuable time here with us
00:56:40 ►
in the salon today.
00:56:41 ►
And I really look forward to being back
00:56:43 ►
with you again next week.
00:56:45 ►
For now,
00:56:46 ►
this is Lorenzo
00:56:47 ►
signing off from
00:56:48 ►
Cyberdelic Space.
00:56:50 ►
Be well, my friends.
00:56:56 ►
Into the light
00:56:57 ►
Into the light
00:57:00 ►
Into the light
00:57:03 ►
Of bad naked truth