Program Notes
Guest speaker: Seabrook Leaf
Minutes : Seconds into program)
04:25 Lorenzo introduces Seabrook Leaf who then leads a playalogue titled “The Establishment of a Tribal Land Base” during the 2007 Burning Man festival.
06:44 Seabrook begins his rap. (See YouTube video beginning at 1:30)
11:30 Anonymous: “The coercive forces of control all work to keep people apart and separate, and so tribe is the healing medicine for that.”
12:05Anonymous: “You can’t choose your relatives, but you can choose your family.”
14:47 Seabrook Leaf: “I think it’s clear that working together like we do at Burning Man is going to be a crucial part of surviving the shift… . And I think this is the crucial part of this kind of tribalism, whether it’s putting up a yurt or raising food in a garden, we’re going to have to get back to the basics.”
16:59 Dale Pendell begins telling about a cooperative community on San Juan Ridge he was a part of in the 60s.
18:57 Dale Pendell begins telling about the May Day and Halloween festivals that the San Juan Ridge community created.
22:35 Anonymous: “We spend most of our time in a cyber-tribe, and I still feel connected. I feel like maybe the future of tribalism is going to reach beyond geographical locations, because we can’t really afford to travel everywhere and meet all these different people.”
29:25 Anonymous: “How can we expand our acceptance of people as a whole, but recognize the reality of what we can manage in our day-to-day resources and things we have to do to provide for our community?”
36:22 Anonymous: “If it doesn’t grow out of the ground it came out of a mine.”
40:53 Anonymous: “Bring a love-consciousness, always, as the focus of us being awake now. It has never been more urgent.”
46:37 La: “And it just came up so big for me that we have to eliminate fear as our motivator. We have to use what we see around us clue us in, but not operate out of that distress. It’s so tricky, slippery.”
49:39 Anonymous: “So in the best of situations you can pick an environment that has what you imagine to be the least potential for social corruption, but at the same time there’s a very big wild card that comes with saying ‘Let’s plant this here but we don’t know what all the rest of our neighbors are going to be doing in twenty years.”
53:51 Dale Pendell: “It’s wonderful for a child to know where they came from, what their tribe is, and they have a place to come back to if what they rebelled against turns out to be better than they thought it was.”
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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.
00:00:25 ►
Well, from what I hear, and from what I’ve been reading in my email, for the most part
00:00:30 ►
you’ve been okay with having a few more trial logs heading your way. And I’ll definitely
00:00:35 ►
get back to them in a little while, but today I want to get back to the Playa at Burning
00:00:40 ►
Man and play another of this year’s Playa Logologues I’ll spare you the explanation of why
00:00:46 ►
once again we failed to get
00:00:48 ►
good recordings of the
00:00:50 ►
palenque norte talks but
00:00:52 ►
suffice it to say that the talk
00:00:54 ►
you’re about to hear and the one by
00:00:56 ►
Bruce Dahmer that I podcast a few weeks ago
00:00:58 ►
may be the only two
00:01:00 ►
plyologues that make it to a podcast
00:01:02 ►
I’m actually
00:01:04 ►
asking around right now to see
00:01:06 ►
if other recordings exist, but I’m afraid that the ones we made to the 8-track recorder
00:01:11 ►
and to the mini-disc recorder, well, they didn’t make it. Actually, the plyologue I’m
00:01:16 ►
about to play for you was recorded on the 8-track machine, but it cut off exactly at
00:01:22 ►
the one-hour point, and so the last part of this conversation may have been lost.
00:01:27 ►
Nonetheless, I think that the entire exercise was worth the effort
00:01:31 ►
just to have had the conversation you’re about to hear right now.
00:01:35 ►
And I’ll have more to say about that after we listen to this plilogue
00:01:39 ►
that was led by Seabrook Leaf at the 2007 Burning Man Festival.
00:01:44 ►
And you’ll hear more from me about Seabrook Leaf at the 2007 Burning Man Festival.
00:01:47 ►
And you’ll hear more from me about Seabrook in just a minute.
00:01:51 ►
Now from my perspective, the pliologue that you’re about to hear is exactly what I had envisioned when I first came up with this idea.
00:01:56 ►
And I think that Seabrook did a brilliant job of engaging the entire group in the conversation.
00:02:02 ►
Had we not started so late in the afternoon,
00:02:04 ►
I’m sure that we could
00:02:05 ►
have gone on for several more hours because there were more people lined up at the microphones in
00:02:10 ►
the yurt than we had time to invite to speak. For the hour or so before this plow log began,
00:02:17 ►
we had to hunker down and live through the biggest windstorm and whiteout of the week.
00:02:22 ►
Until then, at least, little did we know that the next day
00:02:26 ►
we’d get even a bigger storm. But things had finally begun to settle down to where we could
00:02:31 ►
relax and begin looking forward to good weather for the evening’s parties. And so our final
00:02:37 ►
pliologue of the day began right after the storm of ideas that Dale Pendle had just filled the yurt with as the storm raged outside,
00:02:46 ►
and you’ll hear Dale join in in this conversation too.
00:02:51 ►
This recording begins where Seabrook is mentioning the symbiosis gatherings, and that’s followed
00:02:57 ►
by my introduction of Brook, during which my dust-addled mind kept calling him Bruce
00:03:02 ►
for some reason.
00:03:03 ►
my dust-addled mind kept calling him Bruce for some reason.
00:03:09 ►
So here is how it all went down in the yurt at the Pod Cluster around 6 p.m. on Thursday during the 2007 Burning Man Festival.
00:03:16 ►
It is the impossible become possible, and yet remaining impossible.
00:03:24 ►
So while we’re getting ready,
00:03:27 ►
I thought there would be time for a brief advertisement.
00:03:33 ►
Because I just noticed this sitting here,
00:03:37 ►
and I wanted to invite all of you to be aware of the Symbiosis Gathering,
00:03:41 ►
which has a lot of similarities to Burning Man.
00:03:44 ►
It’s a very conscious gathering, a very green gathering,
00:03:47 ►
a very art-centered gathering.
00:03:50 ►
And it’s a wonderful experience,
00:03:54 ►
and there’s no huge gales coming through, usually.
00:04:00 ►
But just go to symbiosisgathering.com if you want to learn more about that.
00:04:05 ►
It’s in Northern California in September 20th through 24th.
00:04:13 ►
All right.
00:04:14 ►
And the people who produced this gathering are all family and burners, etc.
00:04:22 ►
Really good people, good artists. And while
00:04:26 ►
this is really an anarchistic camp
00:04:28 ►
because I kept asking
00:04:30 ►
Brooke
00:04:32 ►
can I do this, can I do that?
00:04:34 ►
And he says, I don’t know, who’s in charge?
00:04:36 ►
So I’d ask La and ask John
00:04:38 ►
and nobody’s in charge
00:04:40 ►
but look at the magic that’s happened
00:04:42 ►
here and John and I were talking the other day
00:04:44 ►
how good Brooke is that he’s not not a boss or anything he just says you know it’d be kind of
00:04:48 ►
nice if that got done that got done and pretty soon he gets the yurt up and everything and this
00:04:53 ►
is the guy to work for he’s uh done a good job he’s he really has uh been the keystone of this
00:04:59 ►
this camp and uh in our lives we’ve we’ve met bruce at conference or bruce i keep calling calling you Bruce instead of Brooke, but I guess that’s not too bad.
00:05:07 ►
Bruce Dahmer’s not a bad guy.
00:05:10 ►
But anyhow, Bruce.
00:05:14 ►
I’m just going to introduce C. Brooke and stop talking.
00:05:17 ►
The dust has clogged my brain.
00:05:19 ►
But I want to personally thank Brooke for all he’s done to help spearhead this camp,
00:05:25 ►
and La, who she and her team have decorated it.
00:05:28 ►
Not only that, but La and John and the rest of the team built all this thing and transported it,
00:05:33 ►
and we want to thank the whole camp for allowing us to have our platylogues here
00:05:37 ►
and to be part of the camp ourselves, too.
00:05:39 ►
So thank you, La, John, and Brooke, even though you guys weren’t in charge.
00:05:44 ►
Tell the person in charge we said thanks.
00:05:47 ►
You’re welcome, Seabrook.
00:05:48 ►
That would be you.
00:05:51 ►
You’re in charge.
00:05:53 ►
Thank you.
00:05:55 ►
So, hi, everybody.
00:05:58 ►
The topic that I was hoping we could discuss here I think is really very, very important.
00:06:08 ►
And a lot of our friends who are planning on being here, who have really strong interests in this topic,
00:06:14 ►
obviously couldn’t come because they’re probably fixing their structures.
00:06:21 ►
But I’m grateful for the people who are here.
00:06:24 ►
but I’m grateful for the people who are here,
00:06:31 ►
and the topic of this discussion, which Lorenzo asked me to do,
00:06:35 ►
and I was delighted because it’s something that has been on my mind a lot lately, and it’s very dear to my heart, is the establishment of a tribal land base.
00:06:44 ►
And I’d like to share a little poem first
00:06:47 ►
to start us off about that,
00:06:49 ►
because I really believe that this is a crucial topic,
00:06:53 ►
and the time has come to recreate
00:06:56 ►
as we take control of our own fate.
00:06:59 ►
It can clearly see what is coming down
00:07:01 ►
in the global village it can be found.
00:07:04 ►
Participation across all nations at every galactivation station. We’ll be right back. Bottom to the top, it ain’t gonna stop until all the people can wake up and be real. Now eyes are opening and lies unraveling.
00:07:26 ►
We turn off the media and go out traveling.
00:07:29 ►
Organize, emphasize, harmonic infestation.
00:07:31 ►
Body, mind, spirit into psychoblastivation.
00:07:34 ►
Turn on your mind and what you will find.
00:07:36 ►
Everywhere you look, you can see, see, see.
00:07:38 ►
Oppressed generations about to be freed from the shackles and the tangles and the hands that strangle.
00:07:43 ►
We are the free ones.
00:07:44 ►
We fight without guns. See, feel, and hear without all the fear. I live tangles and the hands that strangle. We are the free ones. We fight without guns.
00:07:45 ►
See, feel, and hear without all the fear.
00:07:47 ►
I live fast, but I won’t die young.
00:07:49 ►
I’m making sure that my song is sung.
00:07:51 ►
So sing it with me and it’ll set us free.
00:07:54 ►
For we are the children of the omniverse with an old new view of Gaia Earth.
00:07:58 ►
From the east to the west, we’re going to take the test.
00:08:00 ►
And when we pass it, going to take my assets out in the streets with the freaky funky beats, holding on to the vision of my conscious decision, holding on to the vision
00:08:09 ►
of my conscious decision.
00:08:20 ►
Thank you, it’s an honor to share that.
00:08:22 ►
Thank you. It’s an honor to share that.
00:08:34 ►
And so I wanted to start out the discussion also by asking the question,
00:08:38 ►
what does it mean to be a tribal land base?
00:08:40 ►
Because that was the topic that we decided on.
00:08:43 ►
And that’s kind of an undefined thing.
00:08:47 ►
What is a tribal land base and i’d like to throw out the idea of tribalism tribes what what is a tribe in this modern day and are we a tribe and
00:08:57 ►
what defines our tribe and how can we be a tribe and why do we want to be a tribe if we do?
00:09:06 ►
These kinds of things to clarify some of, I think, the roots of what we’re getting at here.
00:09:12 ►
And I was really hoping this could be a discussion.
00:09:15 ►
And I have a lot of things to say and questions to ask.
00:09:19 ►
I’m wondering, where are the mics for the audience?
00:09:21 ►
Can we make sure those are easily accessible?
00:09:21 ►
Where are the mics for the audience?
00:09:23 ►
Can we make sure those are easily accessible?
00:09:36 ►
Because I feel like there’s a big mess going on, obviously.
00:09:38 ►
I like to call it the mess collectively.
00:09:44 ►
There’s all of the war and all of the environmental destruction,
00:09:50 ►
the water shortages, global warming, so on and so forth.
00:09:52 ►
It’s really one big mess,
00:09:54 ►
and it’s going to take a shift in consciousness to fix it,
00:09:56 ►
not just one part at a time.
00:10:01 ►
And so I’m wondering, what are we going to do to make it through this shift?
00:10:04 ►
And what is a tribe, and how can we use tribalism
00:10:09 ►
to help us move to the next phase?
00:10:15 ►
Does anyone want to say anything about tribalism,
00:10:19 ►
or if you feel you’re part of a tribe, or what this tribe is?
00:10:24 ►
Do you feel you’re part of a tribe or what this tribe is?
00:10:36 ►
I just want to add that Gary Snyder, one of his essays in his book Earth Households,
00:10:40 ►
1966 maybe, 1967, is Why Tribe?
00:10:45 ►
Which is right to the point of what we’re still discussing.
00:10:51 ►
And I just want to add that there’s a long historical context, not just going back to the 60s, but going back, well, for one, 100 years before that to the 1840s when a lot of groups formed in upstate New York
00:11:07 ►
and other locations as collectives and tribal groups.
00:11:17 ►
And it goes back to our most ancient roots of how we cooperate and work together.
00:11:26 ►
And we can get a lot done that way.
00:11:31 ►
The coercive forces of control
00:11:34 ►
all work to keep people apart and separate.
00:11:39 ►
And so tribe is the healing medicine for that.
00:11:45 ►
Nice. Nice. Tribe is a healing medicine for that. Nice.
00:11:47 ►
Nice.
00:11:47 ►
Tribe as a healing medicine.
00:11:51 ►
There is an axiom that someone, I don’t even remember who told me when I was really young,
00:11:57 ►
that it stayed with me and it’s very, you know, I feel when I think about tribalism
00:12:01 ►
and choices of our lifestyles is when someone told me once is that
00:12:05 ►
you can’t choose your relatives, but you can choose your family. And something about that,
00:12:12 ►
you know, and it’s gotten me through a lot of times where I’ll be like, oh, geez, my relatives
00:12:16 ►
are really, you know, intense or screwed up people or whatever. And then I look around and I’m like,
00:12:20 ►
well, I can choose to resurround myself with the kind of people that support my ideals and ethics and lifestyle choices.
00:12:28 ►
And that is something that’s a very empowering feeling to be able to make those choices actively.
00:12:35 ►
And in some ironic ways, the very mechanisms which we view as our captivators are some of the very things which give us the freedom to make these choices in our life now.
00:12:46 ►
You know, the irony of living in America and being able to travel freely around the world, for example,
00:12:51 ►
with my American passport has enabled me to meet a lot of more people that I consider my family and members of my tribe.
00:12:59 ►
So just to think about that, there is some dualities that we examine in what contains us
00:13:06 ►
and what frees us as well and in our ability to make these selections of our tribe
00:13:11 ►
and what we want to do with that.
00:13:13 ►
It’s just a lot of factors to consider.
00:13:15 ►
Okay.
00:13:18 ►
Yes.
00:13:19 ►
And what about the future and how does tribalism fit into that or whatever you wanted to say?
00:13:25 ►
Well, I just want to pick up on the thoughts that you were saying about you can’t choose your family,
00:13:31 ►
or you can’t choose your relatives, but you can choose your family or your tribe.
00:13:40 ►
And tribe is about cooperation and being there for each other.
00:13:48 ►
I mean, I love my family, but I start to talk about psychedelics,
00:13:51 ►
and they start freaking out, and they want to go out the door, you know?
00:13:54 ►
So when you come here, like setting up this camp, you know,
00:13:57 ►
we were over there, and we were feeling guilty watching you guys put up the yurt here,
00:14:00 ►
and we should go over and help them while our thing’s blowing away,
00:14:01 ►
so we’ve got to fix that and all that.
00:14:04 ►
And we did that, but then we came over, and, you know, we’re like, okay know okay we give you 20 minutes here and 15 minutes here and like brooke said something needs to be done
00:14:09 ►
and somebody would just come in and fill it in and to me that’s what tribe is all about is really
00:14:12 ►
working together and filling in and and being complimentary and really celebrating the diversity
00:14:19 ►
one of the things i love about this tribe is the diversity and all the people from different
00:14:24 ►
countries that come.
00:14:26 ►
And here’s somebody who can barely speak your language, and you totally connect.
00:14:31 ►
So I think you’re stuck with family and you choose your tribe,
00:14:34 ►
and I think a tribe is superior from, like, you know, a nuclear-contracted family unit.
00:14:38 ►
Let’s all hunker down and get our shotguns and wait.
00:14:41 ►
You know, it’s a difference.
00:14:40 ►
shotguns and wait.
00:14:42 ►
It’s a difference.
00:14:49 ►
I think it’s clear that working together like we do at Burning Man
00:14:52 ►
is going to be a crucial part of surviving
00:14:54 ►
the shift. I’m trying to think
00:14:56 ►
about the future generations and my
00:14:58 ►
grandchildren and great-grandchildren
00:15:00 ►
and
00:15:01 ►
I’m knowing that
00:15:04 ►
there’s going to be a huge shift with peak oil happening
00:15:07 ►
and the whole food system is going to collapse.
00:15:11 ►
So obviously we’re going to need to be learning new skills
00:15:15 ►
and growing new foods and growing foods and working together.
00:15:21 ►
And I think this is the crucial part of this kind of tribalism,
00:15:25 ►
whether it’s putting up a yurt or raising food in a garden.
00:15:29 ►
We’re going to have to get back to the basics.
00:15:33 ►
I was just going to add that after spending many years, part of my time in Bali,
00:15:40 ►
and noticing the cultures that have had tribalism as their base,
00:15:45 ►
they come from a more homogenous space.
00:15:49 ►
And, of course, we’re the highly accentuated, individualized situation.
00:15:54 ►
And so we’re going to have this completely new version.
00:15:58 ►
Sometimes the word bugs me.
00:16:00 ►
I mean, I don’t mind it, but I don’t know that that’s really the word that we’ll end up with.
00:16:06 ►
Sometimes tribalism is also
00:16:07 ►
described in some of the spiral dynamics
00:16:10 ►
and some of that stuff as a lower
00:16:12 ►
level because it’s one tribe
00:16:14 ►
against another. You’re cool
00:16:16 ►
with your tribe, but then there’s the other tribe.
00:16:18 ►
And I think we’re really working
00:16:20 ►
with a way broader sense of
00:16:22 ►
diversity and autonomy
00:16:24 ►
inside of togetherness.
00:16:27 ►
Sweet.
00:16:28 ►
And it’s always going to be hard to define what is a tribe or our tribe
00:16:32 ►
because there’s so many overlapping.
00:16:39 ►
It’s so oddly familiar, some of this discussion.
00:16:44 ►
It’s kind of like deja vu.
00:16:49 ►
I support what you do deeply, heartily.
00:16:55 ►
And actually, I recognize that I’ve got Will Staple here beside me.
00:17:04 ►
And I don’t know, you might say we’re from the same tribe is that
00:17:08 ►
is that right will yeah um so there were a lot of experiments of how to pull this off
00:17:15 ►
and make it work back in the 60s you know if you will indulge us to
00:17:20 ►
speak just a little of what some of the stuff that we did,
00:17:25 ►
some of which worked and some of which did not,
00:17:28 ►
from the model of Stephen Gaskin and the farm and collectivist
00:17:34 ►
to the way we did it on San Juan Ridge,
00:17:42 ►
which was a larger collective, sort of a loose federation of individual like-minded landowners,
00:17:53 ►
people who bought land all around one place,
00:17:56 ►
and groups of people who would pool their resources to buy a parcel of land,
00:18:09 ►
to buy a parcel of land, but that all managed to connect to form a community.
00:18:20 ►
And I think that was what was so remarkable about what we pulled off on San Juan Ridge that way.
00:18:21 ►
With CB radios?
00:18:25 ►
We did have CB. I was, I had the only telephone on the
00:18:27 ►
ridge for, in our part
00:18:29 ►
of the ridge for a long time, so I had one
00:18:31 ►
of those buttons and could make telephone
00:18:33 ►
calls for, you know, they would speak in the CB
00:18:36 ►
and I would push a button
00:18:37 ►
and like this link to the
00:18:39 ►
world. But yes, we had
00:18:41 ►
two CB breaks
00:18:44 ►
every day. I mean, CB breaks, yeah, we had two CB breaks every day.
00:18:45 ►
I mean, CB breaks.
00:18:47 ►
Yeah, CB breaks.
00:18:51 ►
Two CB breaks.
00:18:54 ►
I get it.
00:18:57 ►
But more particularly, I want to speak of our festivals.
00:19:01 ►
I want to speak of our festivals.
00:19:12 ►
Twice a year, everybody in the community along the ridge was kind of of like mind.
00:19:19 ►
And it was always tricky in a political thing, figuring who gets invited, who’s in and who’s out,
00:19:21 ►
and just how to do it.
00:19:25 ►
And different communities in different counties have done this different ways.
00:19:31 ►
There’s, you know, Nevada County was different from southern Humboldt, who kind of had a different, actually a more anarchistic open system, I think.
00:19:38 ►
Anyway, we had two festivals every year at May Day and Halloween,
00:19:42 ►
and everybody would come and we developed rituals,
00:19:47 ►
year at may day and halloween and everybody would come and we developed rituals which um the children learned and now carry on sounds tribal it’s very tribal yeah it’s a so there’s
00:19:57 ►
a there’s a maypole at uh may day and there’s a spirit altar with skulls and other things at Halloween.
00:20:09 ►
And, you know, Green Man comes out, and May Maidens are part of it every year,
00:20:13 ►
and people, you know, buy in the community,
00:20:15 ►
who’s going to be the May Maidens this year for the girls who are at a certain age to come into that.
00:20:24 ►
And it’s kind of in motion all the time
00:20:26 ►
but I think it takes something like that
00:20:28 ►
it takes some ritual
00:20:30 ►
or spiritual dimension
00:20:32 ►
to hold a community
00:20:34 ►
together and then if you
00:20:36 ►
can get it working at a community
00:20:38 ►
level then you can
00:20:40 ►
link up these smaller collectives
00:20:42 ►
and like minded
00:20:43 ►
residents and landowners
00:20:48 ►
and
00:20:49 ►
have some political clout.
00:20:55 ►
Will may have, you know,
00:20:58 ►
a different idea.
00:21:00 ►
No, I quite agree.
00:21:02 ►
I just wanted to
00:21:03 ►
say that one part, though there are many, the mothers have a thing,
00:21:10 ►
and they have a parade of the goblin children, and also we say aloud the name of the newborn,
00:21:20 ►
and we also say that everyone says aloud the name of anyone who has died,
00:21:26 ►
which is always quite moving.
00:21:30 ►
But we have a circle, and for 45 minutes,
00:21:34 ►
anybody can step inside the circle and have the attention.
00:21:37 ►
A free speech circle.
00:21:41 ►
And it takes a little bit of gumption to get out there,
00:21:44 ►
and it’s a little psychedelic when you stand up, because you have all the attention on you briefly. But a lot of things get said, and
00:21:49 ►
a lot of the things you are going to say, somebody else says. But I think that, and
00:21:55 ►
I think it’s important, though, that here is a place that anybody that wants to be heard
00:21:59 ►
can be heard. I just wanted to emphasize that one.
00:22:04 ►
Nice structure. heard i just wanted to emphasize that one nice structure well um i was just kind of responding
00:22:09 ►
to your question about maybe the future of tribalism and um me and my husband are actually
00:22:13 ►
from fairbanks alaska and you know there’s really not that many like-minded people in our physical
00:22:22 ►
community um that feel the same way we do
00:22:26 ►
about sacred plant allies and
00:22:27 ►
psychedelics.
00:22:30 ►
But actually, listening to
00:22:32 ►
Lorenzo’s show, listening to
00:22:34 ►
his podcast,
00:22:35 ►
we spend most of our time
00:22:38 ►
in the cyber tribe and I still feel
00:22:40 ►
connected. So I feel like
00:22:41 ►
maybe the future of
00:22:44 ►
tribalism is going to reach beyond
00:22:45 ►
like geographical location because we can’t really afford to like travel everywhere you know
00:22:49 ►
and you know meet all these different people and i mean so we came to burning man which is great
00:22:53 ►
because it’s like a gathering of the tribes you know we get to do it all at once but um i really
00:22:58 ►
think that like without that element you know like it would just be really hard to do something
00:23:04 ►
like that,
00:23:05 ►
because you can pull all the people from across the world that are interested, instead of
00:23:08 ►
just, like, in the general geographic region, and so it’s just been really exciting for
00:23:13 ►
us to be here, and actually be a physical part of it for the first time, you know, it
00:23:17 ►
feels like, so I just wanted to add that in about, you know, the internet and how exciting
00:23:22 ►
it’s getting, and I think that could have a lot to do with it.
00:23:27 ►
Sweet. Welcome.
00:23:28 ►
I have a question while you still have the mic.
00:23:32 ►
Moving a little beyond tribalism and that kind of discussion,
00:23:37 ►
in a more practical sense,
00:23:38 ►
what do you think are some of the most important ways
00:23:41 ►
that we can prepare for the coming shift?
00:23:48 ►
That’s a good question. I’ve thought a lot about that and we have and um it it used to be a few years ago that i really
00:23:57 ►
felt the need to be politically active like actively trying to like preach or missionize
00:24:03 ►
my point of view you know and um then lately i’ve
00:24:07 ►
kind of started to think that maybe the best way to do it is to just live your point of view and
00:24:11 ►
like be like a shining example to people who will go like well why are you so happy why is why is
00:24:16 ►
that person so fulfilled and you know or why is you know and so i think um which is what i’m saying
00:24:21 ►
about the tribalism thing it’s weird because it’s a collection of individuals who are doing that, you know,
00:24:26 ►
and they’re just getting together because they’re all doing that.
00:24:30 ►
And it’s like we live in a town where maybe, you know,
00:24:33 ►
nobody else is really doing the same thing we’re doing,
00:24:35 ►
but we can continue to do it and feel connected to other people, you know,
00:24:39 ►
that are doing the same thing without having to, like, necessarily preach or, you know. And so I think that, I don so I think that’s really important.
00:24:47 ►
I think it’s just preparing yourself
00:24:49 ►
and letting that be a guide for others.
00:24:54 ►
Sweet.
00:24:55 ►
Prepare yourself.
00:24:56 ►
Be a model.
00:24:58 ►
And how about others?
00:24:59 ►
What ways can we prepare for the shift?
00:25:04 ►
I mean, do you think buying land and setting up a community,
00:25:09 ►
as they’ve described on the ridge?
00:25:12 ►
Or what should be our goals if we’re going to try to get beyond this crazy shift?
00:25:23 ►
You know, the thing, because obviously we spend a lot of time talking and thinking about
00:25:28 ►
this, everybody, the whole group of us I know.
00:25:31 ►
And one of the things that has popped out pretty clearly to me is that there are such
00:25:37 ►
a wide range of requirements and needs to build something, to get together.
00:25:44 ►
And in particular, in 2012, I’m going to be 70 years old.
00:25:49 ►
And so I’m looking for a 420-friendly nursing home, you know.
00:25:55 ►
Not really, but it’s got to be 420-friendly.
00:25:58 ►
But what I’m getting at is I think that old people like us can add something to the tribe, like taking care
00:26:07 ►
of the young kids, which is what I’d like to do.
00:26:10 ►
But in your design, I think that we have to look at, are we going to, this is where we
00:26:17 ►
want to, this is a tribal land base, and so we’re going to have birthing facilities.
00:26:22 ►
And what about when we start getting old?
00:26:24 ►
Because you’re not that far behind me, only two or three decades, but they seem to swing by.
00:26:29 ►
So I think that as we’re thinking about these things, each one of us has to say, okay, I can do this right now,
00:26:37 ►
but ten years from now, are the facilities going to be here for me or the help?
00:26:41 ►
And so it circles right back to what you started with the tribe and i think if we really come together as a tribe who can do what just like
00:26:51 ►
we do here in the playa that’s the way i think it’ll work without uh i don’t know that we can
00:26:57 ►
do a top down i think this has got to come from the bottom up one of the things that’s really interesting about preparing to do things together as a group
00:27:08 ►
is what kind of group is a manageable number
00:27:13 ►
and coming together under what circumstances is something that’s really crucial.
00:27:17 ►
Because if you’ve done Burning Man a few times,
00:27:19 ►
you know there’s camps that are not big enough to provide enough resources.
00:27:23 ►
You can go renegade, you and your two guys, but you’re not going to have a yurt.
00:27:26 ►
You’re not going to have a microphone and discussions and things like that.
00:27:30 ►
Hopefully someone else will so you can go check it out.
00:27:33 ►
And then there’s groups that are too large.
00:27:35 ►
They’ve been involved in organizations where there’s hundreds of people.
00:27:38 ►
You don’t even meet all the other people involved there.
00:27:40 ►
And sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t.
00:27:43 ►
And you can look at scientific experiments where you put a bunch of rabbits in a box or you put two rabbits
00:27:48 ►
in a box with a lot of food and they’re going to multiply to the point of break and examining what
00:27:54 ►
resources people need and at what point we can establish groups of people that are able to manage
00:28:02 ►
that without overabundance of resources allocated
00:28:05 ►
to a group or overmanagement.
00:28:08 ►
You know, something like, you know, America was founded on the idea of state sovereignty,
00:28:12 ►
which we’ve spent 200 years kicking out now and moving into federalism.
00:28:17 ►
And that’s an analogous thing for taking the management out of the hands of a small group
00:28:22 ►
of people and moving it into a superstructure, which benefits less and less people,
00:28:28 ►
has kind of become obvious.
00:28:29 ►
So finding a group of people that is able to manage themselves
00:28:33 ►
and their resources in an appropriate manner,
00:28:37 ►
but once you overabundance resources,
00:28:40 ►
the group gets bigger and things like that.
00:28:41 ►
So creating a certain amount but not having too much, ironically, is a factor and things like that. So creating a certain amount but not having too much, ironically, is a factor.
00:28:48 ►
And things like that, having under or overabundance.
00:28:51 ►
I don’t know.
00:28:51 ►
These are things that I’ve considered as the size of groups.
00:28:54 ►
Because when I was listening to a lot, what you’re saying about it’s not always about tribe
00:28:59 ►
and these things of people coming together and, oh, I’m cool with these guys but not these guys.
00:29:03 ►
And that is something that’s an interesting factor because you have to deal with that.
00:29:07 ►
But at the same time, recognizing that, you know, that great psychedelic union with everything
00:29:13 ►
doesn’t always work out when you’re trying to decide, like, what to cook for dinner,
00:29:17 ►
you know, with 400 people or 4,000 or 40 or 4 million or whatever.
00:29:22 ►
And so these are all the things that I have personal challenges trying to decide,
00:29:26 ►
is like how can we expand our acceptance of people as a whole
00:29:31 ►
but recognize the reality of what we can manage in our day-to-day resources
00:29:37 ►
and things that we have to do to provide for our community,
00:29:40 ►
recognizing that some people are not comfortable, say, in a space where cannabis is being smoked.
00:29:46 ►
Now some of us have grown up in multiple generations of this
00:29:49 ►
and accepting that there are differences
00:29:51 ►
and trying to figure out how to put those together in a manageable way
00:29:55 ►
but without degrading into versus modes.
00:30:01 ►
I don’t know how to explain it more.
00:30:03 ►
It makes sense.
00:30:04 ►
I think these are going to be the challenges of the future,
00:30:07 ►
of how to create these communities or tribes or whatever.
00:30:13 ►
And we have a lot of past experience from the 60s and 70s,
00:30:19 ►
in this country at least, and throughout history.
00:30:22 ►
So maybe there’s plenty of models to draw from and so forth.
00:30:26 ►
What I’m interested in more right now
00:30:28 ►
is really what I can do in the next year or three years
00:30:34 ►
or five years to start paving the way for this.
00:30:40 ►
Obviously, we’re going to work out a lot of bugs as we go,
00:30:43 ►
and there will be different experiments and different sizes,
00:30:47 ►
and each spot will have its own formula that will work.
00:30:54 ►
But you mentioned resources, and that’s big on my mind.
00:30:59 ►
And I personally feel like the fresh water shortage is going to be the next huge problem i
00:31:07 ►
mean it already is a huge problem and besides the running out of petroleum and that all shifting
00:31:14 ►
and the heating up of the planet the the simple fact that we’re we’re running out of fresh water
00:31:21 ►
and there’s already wars being fought over this and there’s already people
00:31:26 ►
dehydrated and it’s and there’s already crop failures and so on so this is something that’s
00:31:33 ►
coming faster and faster and one of my big things is protecting resources so does anyone else have
00:31:42 ►
something to add about resources or what you think are the most important ways to prepare?
00:31:49 ►
I haven’t been able to figure out any kind of large community or global solution to our resource problems.
00:32:01 ►
But the way that I’ve decided to prepare is by getting and you know i think it’s a solid
00:32:07 ►
way for a start is by getting myself off off grids that i don’t um that i don’t see that are going to
00:32:15 ►
continue or that i don’t wish to continue for instance like my me and john my partner moved
00:32:22 ►
into an rv and we’re trying to to replace everything that we have with sustainable stuff
00:32:27 ►
and not stuff that’s dependent on a government system that we’re not interested in.
00:32:33 ►
We’ve tried to work with other communities or tried to form communities and tribes,
00:32:38 ►
but I can’t seem to get my head around how to do that appropriately.
00:32:42 ►
But it seems like what she was saying earlier is
00:32:45 ►
just to be the change first and once you’ve built yourself your own foundation where you can actually
00:32:50 ►
do what you preach what you’re doing first what you’d like to see happen
00:32:55 ►
that seems like the most solid way to start to me
00:32:58 ►
well one of the things that i thought was interesting about what you’re talking about
00:33:03 ►
about water is it’s one of the most pressing resources.
00:33:06 ►
It composes over 70% of your body, et cetera, et cetera.
00:33:09 ►
So, you know, one of the functions of tribes traditionally has been the preservation of knowledge,
00:33:14 ►
and important knowledge that’s relevant, especially to geographical spaces, because the world is large.
00:33:20 ►
Not every place handles a problem in the same way. And you could take water as a classic example,
00:33:25 ►
that there have been traditional ways of allocating the precious resource of water
00:33:30 ►
that have been forgotten due to the exact challenge that I was saying of, you know,
00:33:34 ►
micromanaged systems being exploded into, you know, federal governments or larger, larger systems.
00:33:40 ►
So if you look at somewhere like the Middle East where they’ve had an ancient system called canots, where it’s underground canals that literally carry the water in a responsible way,
00:33:51 ►
and people can go in the community and gather water from these places called canots. And,
00:33:56 ►
you know, there have been people taking the stones from the canots to go build things with them and
00:34:01 ►
slowly dismantling them. And they’ve been building dams and reservoirs instead, pumping aquifers.
00:34:07 ►
It hasn’t been working out so well.
00:34:08 ►
People forgot where the canots are.
00:34:10 ►
They don’t even know that they exist.
00:34:12 ►
They don’t know that they’re a perfectly functional and reliable way to get water.
00:34:17 ►
They believe that the only way they can get it is to turn on the tap because they’ve forgotten.
00:34:22 ►
And the same thing right now, an example in Western Europe where
00:34:25 ►
they have a totally different way of getting the water back is, you know, on top of hills where
00:34:30 ►
they have depressions, like in England, they used to build these condensation pools with a certain
00:34:35 ►
kinds of clay and stone that would actually take the fog and condense it into water again, into
00:34:42 ►
pools that were totally usable for irrigation and farming.
00:34:46 ►
And it’s an appropriate solution to that geographical area that’s been forgotten again.
00:34:51 ►
And people are starting to rekindle their awareness of these knowledges
00:34:55 ►
that had been preserved through small groups of people.
00:35:00 ►
And that’s one of the interesting challenges is that when things become larger,
00:35:03 ►
then they say, well, we’ve got to manage thousands of people.
00:35:06 ►
We should build a dam.
00:35:07 ►
And then, you know, next thing you know that you have the problem in China
00:35:10 ►
where the Yellow River is now not flooding the plains of southern Asia as it used to,
00:35:15 ►
and the river continues to divert its path every few years
00:35:18 ►
and cause new problems of flooding in the wrong places and not water where it needs to go.
00:35:23 ►
So kind of what the challenge of how to allocate our resources,
00:35:28 ►
a lot of these problems have already been solved,
00:35:31 ►
but we’ve kind of screwed them up by forgetting our very own solutions
00:35:35 ►
by looking beyond what we’re able to manage
00:35:39 ►
and not looking at Western Europe or the Middle East and saying,
00:35:42 ►
well, we built a dam over here in Colorado,
00:35:44 ►
so that’s going to work for you over in Saudi Arabia.
00:35:47 ►
And looking more closely at our specific situations
00:35:50 ►
and looking at what’s been done in the past
00:35:53 ►
and preserving that knowledge and passing it on,
00:35:56 ►
just like what you’re doing right now by asking,
00:35:58 ►
what have you learned?
00:35:59 ►
What have you figured out?
00:36:00 ►
And how can we share that?
00:36:01 ►
I think that’s one of the most important things
00:36:03 ►
that a tribe of people could do
00:36:05 ►
in order to preserve their resources is look at how it’s been done before.
00:36:09 ►
People have been around for quite some time,
00:36:11 ►
and we’ve only been screwing it up, so to speak, in the last 200, 300 years, arguably.
00:36:19 ►
There’s a really interesting phrase I heard not that long ago
00:36:22 ►
that if it doesn’t grow out of the ground,
00:36:26 ►
it came out of a mine. And if you think about everything that’s sitting in this room,
00:36:32 ►
every article of clothing, this roof, this microphone, every single thing that we’re
00:36:38 ►
touching was made by a machine that was made out of metal. So I’m always of this mind that this is not a time to go against anything.
00:36:50 ►
We are one tribe, whether we like to identify it or not.
00:36:54 ►
I mean, George Bush is part of the tribe.
00:36:57 ►
Every guy that’s a scientist working at a metallurgy lab is part of the tribe.
00:37:03 ►
These people are the ones who are providing the future,
00:37:08 ►
the science, the technology, that highest order of thinking.
00:37:12 ►
I think the problem is it’s just so abstracted.
00:37:16 ►
They get caught up in their laboratories.
00:37:18 ►
They get caught up in their paycheck.
00:37:20 ►
They get caught up in their retirement funds.
00:37:24 ►
And they get into the problem of
00:37:26 ►
they are their tribe
00:37:28 ►
and we don’t belong to their tribe
00:37:30 ►
and we have to avoid the same thing
00:37:33 ►
it’s really easy for us to start saying
00:37:35 ►
well we’re the open minded, crystal clear thinking
00:37:38 ►
hypnotically minded or whatever
00:37:42 ►
psychedelically minded people
00:37:44 ►
and then we become a them to them.
00:37:47 ►
So I think what’s really critical in all of this is
00:37:50 ►
we can’t turn against anything.
00:37:53 ►
We can’t turn against NASA.
00:37:55 ►
We can’t turn against satellites.
00:37:56 ►
We can’t turn against GPS.
00:37:59 ►
Water, the most important resource in the world,
00:38:02 ►
is primarily extracted from underground through steel pipes
00:38:06 ►
that run with very, very highly sophisticated water pumps that have to have an electrical grid.
00:38:14 ►
And you can’t do that with 12-volt solar-voltaic cells.
00:38:17 ►
So how do we maintain the idea of inclusive tribalism that includes everything that exists we’re not going to be
00:38:27 ►
able to turn off the need for electricity we’re not going to be able to go backwards we’re not
00:38:34 ►
going to be able to revert to ancient ancient ancient stuff unless the population just gets
00:38:40 ►
reduced by maybe 90 could happen it. It could happen, yeah.
00:38:45 ►
But that would be one thing to maybe
00:38:47 ►
work away from,
00:38:50 ►
but not necessarily go against.
00:38:52 ►
We can’t fight the military,
00:38:55 ►
but perhaps we can manifest
00:38:56 ►
a much better invitation.
00:38:58 ►
Because I don’t see the military
00:39:00 ►
offering any invitation.
00:39:01 ►
I don’t see the industrial corporate complex
00:39:03 ►
offering any invitation
00:39:04 ►
other than buy our shit.
00:39:07 ►
Other than become more like an Israeli protective island state,
00:39:13 ►
the whole weapons industry, military industrial complex is going in.
00:39:19 ►
There’s a whole segment.
00:39:20 ►
They’re just like, we’ve got this high-tech people who are like,
00:39:26 ►
well, the urgency that you’re talking about, the world situation last week with Iran and the United States
00:39:33 ►
and Iraq has just ratcheted up. The time frame before this shift could happen so quickly,
00:39:42 ►
so quickly. Iran is saying that the United States is going to have to get out of Iraq in a few months.
00:39:52 ►
They’re saying that the power structure there is, we do not realize how bad Baghdad is.
00:40:01 ►
They’ve blown up the bridges, four bridges, the main bridges around Baghdad.
00:40:05 ►
The place, the prime minister of Iraq has just gone to Syria and Iran in the last couple
00:40:13 ►
of weeks and is basically, those are Bush’s enemies. And the artificially low price of the pump we’ve got right now.
00:40:25 ►
The urgency that we use our resources right now,
00:40:31 ►
that our functioning system,
00:40:34 ►
and come together as a world spirit.
00:40:37 ►
There’s just nothing other than every opportunity
00:40:42 ►
to hold ourselves to a higher level of awareness right now.
00:40:49 ►
And every interaction you have with somebody, bring a love consciousness, always.
00:41:00 ►
The focus of us being awake now has never been more urgent.
00:41:07 ►
You know, McKenna’s archaic revival, tribalism,
00:41:12 ►
it is essential now that Bush is part of our tribe.
00:41:18 ►
Aminijad is part of our tribe.
00:41:21 ►
Putin is part of our tribe.
00:41:23 ►
Chavez is part of our tribe. Putin is part of our tribe. Chavez is part of our tribe. And right now,
00:41:29 ►
it’s preparing, there’s a third world war going on right now. There’s countries, energy
00:41:35 ►
is being used as a weapon. Gaza is just, Israeli stopped shipments of fuel into Gaza.
00:41:51 ►
And so Bangladesh is melting down.
00:41:53 ►
There’s the global warming.
00:41:58 ►
There’s urgency everywhere you look, everywhere you look.
00:41:59 ►
The mess.
00:42:01 ►
The mess. So what can you do?
00:42:01 ►
The mess.
00:42:02 ►
So what can you do?
00:42:12 ►
Hold ourselves responsible to be the best people that we can be and reach out to our friends, family, and tell them how much we love them
00:42:16 ►
and hug them and do it.
00:42:23 ►
That sounds like good medicine.
00:42:25 ►
I have a question.
00:42:27 ►
Does anyone know of any projects that you’re involved with or that you know of
00:42:31 ►
where people are actively doing something fresh,
00:42:36 ►
like buying land or protecting resources?
00:42:40 ►
And I also have another question related to that.
00:42:43 ►
If we are to start doing this, to start saying,
00:42:46 ►
okay, here’s a property with an amazing spring water flow
00:42:50 ►
that’s really safe for the future and good solar potential.
00:42:53 ►
Let’s focus on buying that for our future, back to the land, whatever.
00:42:59 ►
Do we have an obligation to stay in the United States and do those projects here?
00:43:04 ►
Or, you know, because this government is becoming increasingly fascist, et cetera,
00:43:10 ►
what about the idea of flight, of heading to other countries
00:43:16 ►
to start these kinds of places where we can grow food?
00:43:21 ►
Will the country be abandoned and taken over, or should we stay here and try to create something
00:43:27 ►
new or should we flee the crazy bush crime
00:43:32 ►
family or how does that all fit together and
00:43:35 ►
are there any projects that you know of that are doing this?
00:43:41 ►
Well, I had an idea from your
00:43:43 ►
earlier question and this sort of relates to what you were just talking about,
00:43:47 ►
and that is that I think that human beings have this propensity
00:43:51 ►
for projecting scenarios into the future,
00:43:54 ►
and we’re really good at that.
00:43:56 ►
If we exploit that, we can see possible ways that things might come down,
00:44:02 ►
and then we can, like the Boy Scouts motto, we can try to be prepared.
00:44:06 ►
One of the things in my life as someone who’s been interested in psychoactive drugs
00:44:12 ►
is that it seems that there have repeatedly been times where I’ve sort of been kicking myself
00:44:18 ►
because some window of opportunity to obtain something closed.
00:44:23 ►
And you can think one example is ketamine being scheduled,
00:44:27 ►
and it used to be much easier and cheaper, and you didn’t have to do any illegal smuggling.
00:44:33 ►
It was completely reasonable for you to come back from Mexico with some medicine.
00:44:38 ►
So being very aware that the window of opportunity that we have right now might not always be open,
00:44:47 ►
and to bring it back to what you were just talking about,
00:44:50 ►
I can foresee a time where it will not be possible for us to leave the United States.
00:44:56 ►
And so, I mean, I’m not saying that we should all run like hell to Costa Rica or wherever,
00:45:02 ►
but it could be that there will be a time in the future
00:45:07 ►
where the opportunity we have now to set up a tribal land base
00:45:11 ►
somewhere else, somewhere saner, somewhere that seems more stable,
00:45:14 ►
somewhere that the rest of the country doesn’t hate,
00:45:17 ►
I mean the rest of the world, rather, doesn’t hate,
00:45:19 ►
that that window will get smaller and smaller
00:45:21 ►
until it’s really hard to do.
00:45:27 ►
Time is now.
00:45:31 ►
I think La was waiting.
00:45:32 ►
Let me just say something really quick.
00:45:35 ►
I’m part of a group of people looking to buy land, and I know many in the same category and the urge to do so here at this time still remains with me because
00:45:48 ►
i still have this optimistical viewpoint that it’s going to shift and this is like a really
00:45:55 ►
tricky slippery slope because we’re all watching and we’re all creators and we’re all creating so
00:46:01 ►
like at what point are we responsible for not holding the imagination of our own future fully
00:46:10 ►
and doing it here where we already live?
00:46:13 ►
Yeah, but then there’s the question.
00:46:15 ►
How bad will it have to get?
00:46:18 ►
Or at what point would be the trigger point and would it be too late?
00:46:21 ►
And that’s just a weird paradoxical mind state to be in.
00:46:27 ►
So I’m just adding that in.
00:46:28 ►
But I think doing it anywhere, doing it now, but not doing it out of fear.
00:46:34 ►
I think that’s what I came to this year.
00:46:37 ►
I faced some fear issues in my life around a health issue,
00:46:40 ►
and it just came up so big for me that fear is not we have to eliminate that as our motivator
00:46:46 ►
we have to use what we see around us to clue us in but not operate out of that distress
00:46:53 ►
so it’s it’s so tricky slippery
00:46:56 ►
uh it’s kind of interesting to think about um you know, okay, so if you do go start up this thing,
00:47:07 ►
what happens when the next generation, you know, comes around?
00:47:10 ►
And you are in a place like America, for example, where cultural influences are not to be ignored.
00:47:16 ►
For example, I spent a lot of time in Australia,
00:47:20 ►
and there’s a lot of intentional communities that started in a certain area of Australia in the 70s.
00:47:25 ►
And there’s a specific group of people that I’ve spent a lot of time with.
00:47:29 ►
And a dear friend of mine, I wish he was here now, he’s here at Burning Man for his first time this year,
00:47:32 ►
grew up in a community in Nimbin, Australia,
00:47:36 ►
which is known as a very open-minded and traditionally very progressive community.
00:47:41 ►
In the 1970s, it was nothing but a bunch of mountain land,
00:47:46 ►
which was not attractive to the rest of Australia,
00:47:50 ►
who was promoting aggressive farming and pasteurization of the land, removal of trees.
00:47:55 ►
And so these guys were like, well, hey, we’ll take the land you don’t want up at the top of the mountains.
00:47:59 ►
It’s got water, and we can grow our pot there, or whatever we want to do.
00:48:02 ►
And that’s what they started doing in the 70s.
00:48:05 ►
So fast forward, 2007, there are people that have grown up there.
00:48:10 ►
They’ve lived that way.
00:48:11 ►
I know them.
00:48:12 ►
They’re my friends.
00:48:12 ►
They’re the same age as me.
00:48:13 ►
I know their parents.
00:48:14 ►
I hang out with them too.
00:48:15 ►
And one of my friends has grown up there, and when he was in his teenage years,
00:48:19 ►
he decided to purchase a piece of land that was a part of his intentional community.
00:48:24 ►
So he bought the land.
00:48:26 ►
He’s built a house on it now, and he lives there.
00:48:29 ►
And it isn’t all the kids that are in his generation or our generation don’t feel the same way about the place where they grew up
00:48:37 ►
because the cultural influences have made them not feel the same way.
00:48:41 ►
And another friend of mine, same area, different community,
00:48:45 ►
made them not feel the same way and another friend of mine same same area different community her her uh basically her brother of the community that another child of another parents on there
00:48:51 ►
has decided that he doesn’t really give a shit about the community anymore and he started
00:48:55 ►
putting landfill quite literally on his land just like old cars and like not disposing of his trash
00:49:02 ►
and just just basically turning this plot of land that belongs to him, technically,
00:49:07 ►
but is part of the community into a literal garbage dump.
00:49:11 ►
And the rest of the community is not sure what to do about it.
00:49:14 ►
And then in another situation, someone else wants to build a road through their piece of land to go to this other place
00:49:20 ►
so they can drive a water truck up there to do whatever they need to do at the top of the mountain, if you know what I mean.
00:49:24 ►
And the other guys are like no if you build a
00:49:26 ►
road that you know etc etc so you get on into these later plans and you got to remember that
00:49:31 ►
if you are going to start a community somewhere the rest of the people around you are still going
00:49:36 ►
to influence and you can’t guarantee that the next generation of people is going to feel the
00:49:40 ►
same way that you do so in the best of, you can pick an environment that has what you imagine
00:49:48 ►
to be the least potential for social corruption, but at the same time,
00:49:51 ►
there’s a very big wild card that comes with saying, like, let’s plant this here
00:49:55 ►
because we don’t know what all the rest of our neighbors are going to be doing in 20 years.
00:50:00 ►
Like, are they going to convince somebody that they just shouldn’t care anymore
00:50:03 ►
about this project their parents started?
00:50:05 ►
And that’s a concern for me because I’ve seen it happen.
00:50:10 ►
I think if it gets to a certain point of desperation,
00:50:15 ►
people will have no choice but to protect the little water they have or whatever.
00:50:22 ►
At the time of starting these communities communities don’t you think people then just
00:50:27 ►
felt the same as we do now that holy crap the end of the world might be tomorrow i mean if people
00:50:31 ►
have been thinking this for 40 years and their parents think that and like okay oh you figured
00:50:36 ►
that out but that hasn’t changed in australia it’s gotten worse in their very community where
00:50:41 ►
they’ve grown up with the ideal everything man like. Like, I mean, you’re talking ayahuasca growing over your maple trees or whatever.
00:50:48 ►
And the kids still just don’t get it.
00:50:51 ►
And that I’m having trouble with.
00:50:53 ►
Like, I see what you’re saying about desperation just making it so obvious,
00:50:58 ►
but it doesn’t seem to have worked that way.
00:51:00 ►
And so if it isn’t desperation that’s going to drive us there,
00:51:03 ►
or fear, as you’re saying, as a crucial non-motivator,
00:51:07 ►
what are the positive things that are going to make people say, yeah, man, I’m in?
00:51:11 ►
Well, we had pretty good luck that way, that the second generation really came in and really liked it
00:51:23 ►
and took over a lot of the stuff.
00:51:27 ►
And now they’ve pretty much taken over the planning of these ceremonies,
00:51:35 ►
like the May Day and the Halloween that the old farts used to get together every year
00:51:42 ►
and try and figure out what the proper order of things was.
00:51:45 ►
What’s first, the shooting of the arrows or the chanting of the shingo?
00:51:51 ►
It was never written down for some reason.
00:51:55 ►
But anyway, they do that then.
00:51:59 ►
And let’s see, a lot of the kids went off to college.
00:52:04 ►
And most of them had come back, actually.
00:52:11 ►
There’s going to be rebellion, intergenerational rebellion.
00:52:16 ►
That’s why we’re like our parents.
00:52:18 ►
And organic food and an outdoor lifestyle and elemental comforts is not going to be for every kid.
00:52:27 ►
And when they go to high school, they might not want to be picked up in an old beat-up pickup
00:52:33 ►
because their other friends are getting picked up in Mercedes or some other car.
00:52:39 ►
And when it comes to the prom, you know, you don’t want to, you know, it’s this big teenage thing.
00:52:46 ►
You want to be like everyone else.
00:52:48 ►
Okay, this is a given.
00:52:50 ►
But it’s true some people have gone to college and then they go to the city because they don’t want their old life,
00:52:57 ►
but they know where they came from.
00:53:00 ►
And when other things don’t work out, they have something to drop back into.
00:53:04 ►
And when other things don’t work out, they have something to drop back into.
00:53:09 ►
So, yeah, they go out and also they put down their parents.
00:53:12 ►
And you guys are just so simple, you know.
00:53:20 ►
But they gradually, oh, yeah, you’re not, you don’t have these big rents and you don’t have this big overhead and you don’t have this credit card debt
00:53:23 ►
that we just accidentally got into and now we can see and also uh now that we have a kid we don’t want to raise
00:53:31 ►
him in the city we want to go back to the country and you know uh know that when we the kid is not
00:53:38 ►
going to be ripped off uh between school and home so i like like your style because this isn’t like a simple thing.
00:53:46 ►
There are contradictions here, and it’s a little more complicated,
00:53:52 ►
but it’s wonderful for a child to know where they came from, what their tribe is,
00:54:00 ►
and they have a place to come back to if what they rebelled against turns out to be better than
00:54:06 ►
they thought it was yeah and and i just add that uh it was at the festivals at may day and halloween
00:54:14 ►
um all the kids would make a great effort i mean they would cross the country to come back from
00:54:20 ►
school uh to be there uh for halloween or for may. It was just really nice. And then they
00:54:28 ►
would get up and speak, you know, in the free speech period and kind of report to everyone
00:54:32 ►
what’s happening. And it was speaking from the heart. That’s what it was called. Yeah.
00:54:38 ►
Yeah. Speaking from the heart. That was it. Speaking from the heart. I myself found, you know, I mean, I’d been a mountain hippie for a long time
00:54:48 ►
and went back to school that, I don’t know, I had, you know, I had a tribe.
00:54:58 ►
They couldn’t push me around and tell me what to do.
00:55:00 ►
I mean, I felt like I was a foreign exchange student, but, you know,
00:55:04 ►
but like I had a
00:55:05 ►
culture that I came from. Yeah. So that I don’t talk all night because you guys have given me so
00:55:14 ►
many great ideas. And I think this conversation is really worthwhile. My first observation about
00:55:21 ►
your story of your friends and then your success stories, one little difference I noticed because you started out by talking about tribe
00:55:28 ►
is you brought the young people in to start planning the ceremonies.
00:55:31 ►
Instead of a hierarchy, it sounds like more of a hyperarchy, a cooperation thing.
00:55:36 ►
So I think making the tribe that you feel of really a tribe, not just a place to live.
00:55:43 ►
And if you look at the dance community from San Diego to Vancouver,
00:55:47 ►
there are a lot of different cultures.
00:55:50 ►
But collectively, there’s a lot of commonality.
00:55:54 ►
And I think we’re shaking loose.
00:55:57 ►
I’m really optimistic right now.
00:55:59 ►
And I agree with you, your analysis of the situation.
00:56:02 ►
If you’re for the status quo, you’re going to be unhappy, I’m afraid,
00:56:08 ►
because things are going to change.
00:56:09 ►
And so the best of times, worst of times situation,
00:56:12 ►
I think it’s going to be the best of times for those of us who want change
00:56:15 ►
and the worst of times for those who want status quo.
00:56:18 ►
Now, not that considering that, you still have to take in the fact that it’s going to be really ugly
00:56:25 ►
if the food supply does what I think it will do, et cetera.
00:56:28 ►
And so I’m now looking, what can I do to put a stake in the ground
00:56:34 ►
so that my grandchildren’s children will have a nice place to live?
00:56:39 ►
And I think possibly we have to look the seven generations out if we’re going to do it.
00:56:46 ►
Now, then you come back to reality.
00:56:48 ►
I’ve got to live the rest of my life, and I want to do some good things too.
00:56:53 ►
So the only little thing I want to add here is an experience that we went through.
00:56:57 ►
We had about a dozen of us down in San Diego,
00:56:59 ►
and we got together only with friends who were really close physically
00:57:03 ►
so that we could start planning exactly this.
00:57:06 ►
And we did really well for months.
00:57:10 ►
We started planning what we’re going to do, how, you know, working out the details.
00:57:14 ►
And then one of our group went out and bought a magnificent piece of land,
00:57:19 ►
and our group fell apart because it became his land project.
00:57:23 ►
And everything we’d read about the successful communities of the 60s,
00:57:27 ►
they said don’t buy the land until you’ve got the plan in place.
00:57:31 ►
And so a lot of us don’t have any resources or few,
00:57:36 ►
and what you talked about on the ridge was really cool,
00:57:38 ►
is that the people that could afford it were buying land close to each other
00:57:41 ►
and those that had to come together and do it.
00:57:44 ►
One of the suggestions that things I’ve talked to Sobe about before this weekend is if we can find a way in
00:57:53 ►
cyberspace between now and next year’s burn to do an accelerated evolution of ten years of building community
00:58:01 ►
relationships and all to get some idea of how we do it.
00:58:05 ►
How do we get along?
00:58:06 ►
What do we do for young kids, infants?
00:58:09 ►
Is there schooling?
00:58:09 ►
Is there daycare?
00:58:10 ►
What are our requirements and how do we interact with each other before buying the land?
00:58:18 ►
Because what we’ve learned the hard way is, and we were making really good progress,
00:58:23 ►
but once somebody owns the land
00:58:25 ►
herself or himself, then
00:58:27 ►
it’s their project and it’s no longer the group.
00:58:30 ►
And that’s, maybe not all
00:58:32 ►
the time, but that happened to us. So that’s
00:58:33 ►
my two cents.
00:58:36 ►
And there are many models
00:58:38 ►
for collective ownership, of course.
00:58:42 ►
And can you believe it?
00:58:44 ►
For some odd reason, the only two recordings we captured on the
00:58:48 ►
eight track box cut off at the one hour mark and so the remainder of this conversation will have
00:58:54 ►
to come later assuming we can recover the audio from a video recorder that may have continued
00:59:00 ►
working during all the dust storms that we had but But so far, no one has had the time or the courage to check that out.
00:59:08 ►
So stay tuned, as they say, for another chapter of our Burning Man adventures in a few weeks.
00:59:14 ►
In any event, I think you’ll agree with me that this was a really interesting conversation,
00:59:20 ►
and I hope it will inspire you to hold some ply logs of your own.
00:59:24 ►
Before going to Burning Man this year,
00:59:26 ►
I had a grand vision of creating a YouTube-like place for fellow salonners
00:59:30 ►
to post their own ply logs for others to comment on
00:59:33 ►
and to kind of organically grow these conversations around the world.
00:59:38 ►
But the more I thought about what it would take to set all this up,
00:59:42 ►
I decided that it was way more ambitious a project
00:59:45 ►
than I’ve got the time for.
00:59:47 ►
Like you, I’ve got to be careful
00:59:49 ►
to not let this podcasting thing
00:59:50 ►
take over too much of my time.
00:59:52 ►
So I’ve begun to limit myself
00:59:55 ►
as to how much time I spend online
00:59:56 ►
so that I can be sure to continue reading
00:59:59 ►
and doing a little bit more writing myself.
01:00:02 ►
And that’s why you don’t see me
01:00:03 ►
showing up on the forums every day
01:00:05 ►
and why even my longtime friends seldom get an email from me anymore.
01:00:10 ►
Now, don’t get me wrong.
01:00:11 ►
There is nothing I’d rather do each week than to put out these podcasts.
01:00:16 ►
And if I hadn’t already had a life when I began this little hobby,
01:00:20 ►
I’d probably be doing nothing but podcasting and interacting with you via email or on the forums over at thegrowreport.com.
01:00:28 ►
And I still haven’t had a chance to get very involved with that nice MySpace site that a couple of our fellow salonners set up for me.
01:00:36 ►
The truth is, I’d really rather hang out on the forums than continue working on this darn book that just won’t let me go.
01:00:43 ►
and continue working on this darn book that just won’t let me go.
01:00:47 ►
And then, of course, there are the DVDs that I make for my grandkids and the YouTube project of my Navy days that I’ve begun.
01:00:51 ►
So, you see, I’m not bored in my old age.
01:00:54 ►
But then again, as far as I’m concerned, old age is still a long way off for me.
01:00:59 ►
At least that’s how I still feel on the inside,
01:01:02 ►
even if the outside’s trying to tell me something else.
01:01:04 ►
And speaking of the world outside of podcast land, That’s how I still feel on the inside, even if the outside is trying to tell me something else.
01:01:08 ►
And speaking of the world outside of podcast land,
01:01:12 ►
last week I had the happy experience of meeting a fellow salonner, Max,
01:01:15 ►
who was attending the same conference I was.
01:01:18 ►
It was the conference on procession and ancient knowledge,
01:01:21 ►
and it was the second year there for both of us.
01:01:26 ►
Luckily, Max recognized me from the picture on the podcast, and so we were able to connect and spend some time together. But that chance meeting made me wonder how many times
01:01:32 ►
you might have been somewhere that other salonners were, and yet you never knew. You know, since there
01:01:38 ►
are usually at least 50 or more people downloading a Psychedelic Salon podcast at any time, not to mention the mirror and streaming sites.
01:01:47 ►
My guess is that if you go to places where the tribe hangs out,
01:01:50 ►
you’ll probably be in the company of a fellow salonner.
01:01:54 ►
Now, I’m not pointing that out to brag about these podcasts,
01:01:57 ►
but to encourage you to find ways to start reaching out
01:02:01 ►
and making some connections with others who are thinking about
01:02:03 ►
some of the same things that we’re interested in here in the salon.
01:02:07 ►
And you might even be surprised at who some of your new friends turn out to be.
01:02:12 ►
And now for a final note,
01:02:15 ►
although life has been a little hectic here around the salon these past few weeks,
01:02:19 ►
that really was no excuse for me to have missed doing something
01:02:22 ►
that had been on my work list, my unread work list, I guess, for over a week.
01:02:28 ►
And that was to send an audio greeting to my friend and fellow podcaster, KMO.
01:02:34 ►
Last week was KMO’s one-year anniversary of podcasting from the sea realm, which I subscribe to through iTunes, but you can also get it directly through links on our psychedelicsalon.org site. Thank you. like Scientific Americans. Not that that isn’t a good podcast. It’s just that KMO does his subjects a lot more justice
01:03:07 ►
by giving them the time they deserve.
01:03:09 ►
And it was KMO, by the way,
01:03:11 ►
who introduced me to the Cannabis Podcast Network
01:03:14 ►
over at dopetheme.co.uk.
01:03:17 ►
And had it not been for KMO,
01:03:18 ►
I might have missed that whole line of podcast stars over there
01:03:21 ►
like the Dope Thene, Zandor and Mrs. Zandor, and Lefty,
01:03:26 ►
Queer Ninja, Max Freakout, Black Beauty, and a whole cast of characters that I now think
01:03:31 ►
of as my extended family.
01:03:33 ►
Even though I’ve never met KMO or any of these other podcasters, it’s almost as if we seem
01:03:39 ►
to know each other in some strange new sort of way.
01:03:43 ►
For example, when I hear the Dope Fiend read an email from someone who has also sent an email
01:03:48 ►
to me, well, somehow that makes me feel more deeply connected
01:03:51 ►
to a really large and very loving extended family.
01:03:56 ►
Like somebody said in the plylog we just heard, you can’t
01:04:00 ►
choose your relatives, but you can choose your family.
01:04:03 ►
How did I get here?
01:04:06 ►
I guess it’s just a long way of saying congratulations to KMO,
01:04:11 ►
one of our family members, on the first anniversary of the C-Realm,
01:04:15 ►
which you can find at c-realmpodcast.podomatic.com.
01:04:20 ►
And before I go, I want to mention that this and all of the podcasts
01:04:24 ►
from the Psychedelic Salon are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 2.5 license.
01:04:32 ►
And if you have any questions about that, just click on the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which may be found at psychedelicsalon.org.
01:04:41 ►
at LXSalon.org.
01:04:43 ►
And if you have any questions, comments,
01:04:46 ►
complaints, or suggestions about these podcasts,
01:04:48 ►
hey, just send them to Lorenzo at MatrixMasters.com.
01:04:51 ►
And Jacques, Cordell, and Wells,
01:04:53 ►
my friends who make music under the name
01:04:55 ►
Chateau Hayouk,
01:04:56 ►
thanks again, guys, for the use of your music
01:04:58 ►
here in the salon.
01:05:00 ►
And Seabrook, La, John, Darren, Mark,
01:05:02 ►
and all of my fellow pod cluster campers,
01:05:06 ►
hey, thanks again for everything, you guys.
01:05:08 ►
You guys are the best.
01:05:11 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:05:15 ►
Be well, my friends.