Program Notes
Guest speaker: Lorenzo
Essentially, today’s podcast is a series of short notes to myself, little things that I don’t want to forget”
[The following quotes are by Lorenzo]
“As my Mexican friends sometimes say, ‘If you don’t change your direction, you are going to wind up where you’re heading.’ ”
” My problem, I discovered, was that there had been far too much DOING in my life and not nearly enough BE-ing.”
“I didn’t own my stuff. It owned me. … I now finally understand that nothing I possess is more precious to me than the opportunity to be able to appreciate a cool breeze on a warm summer’s day.”
“When I stopped trying to save the world I also stopped trying to save myself . .. and THAT was a big mistake.”
“Perhaps we all will have to first revolutionize our own lives, and then, on the foundations of our individual revolutions, will a new global consciousness arise.”
“It seems to me that our beliefs are what ultimately shape our personalities. So who OWNS those beliefs? If I do, then I am a freethinker, in charge of my own destiny. But if my beliefs own me, well, then the institutions that formulate and promulgate those beliefs, they own me.”
“I have finally come to grok the fact that the purpose of my life is not to reach a destination. Nor is my life a journey. No, for me at least, the purpose of life is to dance. A dance with no beginning and no end, just an endless dance.”
“Here and now. Here and now. All else is but memory and fantasy.”
TERENCE McKENNA QUOTES FROM THIS PODCAST:
[The following quotes are by Terence McKenna]
“People don’t take enough [psychedelics], that’s all.”
“When we talk about the psychedelic experience, it’s not clear we’re all talking about the same thing.”
“The way to do psychedelics is, I believe, at higher doses than most people are comfortable with, and rarely, and with great attention to set and setting.”
“The psychedelic experience is as central to understanding your humanness as having sex, or having a child, or having responsibilities, or having hopes and dreams, and yet it is illegal.”
“These boundry-dissolving hallucinogens that give you a sense of unity with your fellow man and nature are somehow forbidden. This is an outrage! It’s a sign of cultural immaturity, and the fact that we tolerate it is a sign that we are living in a society as oppressed as any society in the past.”
“Get it straight. This is about an experience. Not my experience, your experience. This is about an experience which you have, like getting laid, or going to Africa. You must do the experience, otherwise it’s just whistling past the graveyard.”
“This is part of our birthright, perhaps the most important part of our birthright. These substances will deliver. It is the confoundment of psychology and science generally, and that’s why it’s so touchy for cultural institutions, but you are not a cultural institution, you are a free and indipendent human being, and these things have your name written on them in big gold letters.
MUSIC USED IN THIS PODCAST:
“Miss About You” (with vocals by Sharon), “Counting Days”, “Long Distance”
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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.
00:00:25 ►
Cyberdelic Space. This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:30 ►
And today, I’m going to step way outside of my normal comfort zone,
00:00:34 ►
which I’ve come to think of as my slow death zone,
00:00:36 ►
and I’m going to do something completely different.
00:00:40 ►
So if you have joined us in the salon today,
00:00:44 ►
expecting to hear another great lecture by one of the psychedelic luminaries that we’ve been so fortunate to listen to these past two and a half years. Well, you may be
00:00:50 ►
a little disappointed, because today you’re going to hear mainly from me, but with the
00:00:55 ►
addition of music from several of our fellow saloners, and one short soundbite from the
00:01:01 ►
Bard McKenna. But never fear, next week we’ll be back in our normal groove
00:01:06 ►
and I’ll be playing yet another lecture, interview, or conversation
00:01:10 ►
that I hope you will also find to be worth your time.
00:01:14 ►
However, today I have a few observations I want to make
00:01:17 ►
that have come to me during the past several weeks
00:01:20 ►
while I’ve been on a spiritual quest of sorts.
00:01:23 ►
Essentially, today’s podcast
00:01:25 ►
is a series of short notes to myself, little things that I don’t want to forget.
00:01:31 ►
First of all, I need to get a few housekeeping details out of the way by mentioning that
00:01:35 ►
all of my remarks here are offered under the Creative Commons Non-Commercial Attribution
00:01:41 ►
Sharealike 3.0 license, which basically means that you’re free to use them in your own non-commercial work
00:01:47 ►
without worry about copyright infringement.
00:01:50 ►
And you’ll find the details of that license at the creativecommons.org website.
00:01:56 ►
However, I will also be playing some music in today’s program,
00:01:59 ►
and that music is fully copyrighted by the respective musicians who own the music.
00:02:04 ►
In other words, if you want to use their music, you first must obtain their permission. That music is fully copyrighted by the respective musicians who own the music.
00:02:09 ►
In other words, if you want to use their music, you first must obtain their permission.
00:02:14 ►
And on the program notes for this podcast, I’ll post their contact information.
00:02:18 ►
Those program notes, by the way, can be found at psychedelicsalon.org.
00:02:26 ►
Also, I want to apologize in advance to the musicians and to you for the sound quality of this program.
00:02:31 ►
While many of our listeners in the States enjoy a broadband connection to the net,
00:02:35 ►
the great majority of our overseas listeners are still working with dial-up connections,
00:02:39 ►
and so I do my best to keep these file sizes to a minimum.
00:02:44 ►
What this means, of course, is that you aren’t hearing today’s music at its best.
00:02:45 ►
So I’ll post links to what online versions of these songs are currently available,
00:02:49 ►
and I’ll do that in the program notes for the podcast,
00:02:53 ►
and you can go to their sites and hear their music in much better fidelity.
00:02:57 ►
But I’m very pleased to tell you that the musicians whose music I’ll be playing today are all fellow Saloners, so I hope you think about today’s podcast as a group effort on the part of a few of us fellow Saloners
00:03:10 ►
who stitched today’s program together for you.
00:03:13 ►
My guess is that you already know the principal artist behind the first three songs you’ll hear.
00:03:18 ►
Although they are copyrighted by Liquid Alchemy,
00:03:21 ►
that is actually a music project that my dear friend Queer Ninja is involved in.
00:03:27 ►
The first song, Miss About You,
00:03:29 ►
also features the lovely vocal stylings of Sharon.
00:03:33 ►
And the second and third songs I’ll be playing
00:03:35 ►
are Counting Days and Long Distance,
00:03:38 ►
both of which feature the ninja himself.
00:03:41 ►
The next song in today’s podcast
00:03:43 ►
is by our new MySpace friend, The Sunblindness, with the lovely piece Velvet Apple.
00:03:50 ►
And the closing song is Anything Can Happen, by my friends Jacques Cordell and Wells, sometimes also known as Chateau Hayouk, and whose song El Alien is our theme song here in the salon.
00:04:02 ►
So thank you wonderful, beautiful musicians, one and all.
00:04:06 ►
It’s such an honor to also have you as fellow salonners,
00:04:10 ►
and it’s really nice to know you’re here.
00:04:13 ►
Oh, and before I forget to say this,
00:04:15 ►
if you want to comment on any of the things I have to say in this podcast,
00:04:20 ►
please do it either in the comments section of the program notes for the podcast,
00:04:24 ►
or on the Psychedelic Salon forum, which you can find on thegrowreport.com
00:04:29 ►
or on our myspace.com slash psychedelicsalon page.
00:04:34 ►
But please don’t send them to me in an email because I no longer have the time to read and respond to it all.
00:04:40 ►
And if you’re one of my longtime friends or relatives,
00:04:43 ►
well, I’m sorry I haven’t answered your email either
00:04:47 ►
sorry guys
00:04:48 ►
you see in order to concentrate my time on these podcasts from the salon
00:04:53 ►
and on my new podcast channel matrixcast.com
00:04:56 ►
I’m now trying to limit myself to no more than an hour and a half on the internet each day
00:05:02 ►
other than the time it takes for doing
00:05:05 ►
these podcasts and posting program notes, etc.
00:05:08 ►
And what that means is that virtually all of my net time now is going to be focused
00:05:13 ►
on those three online forums, and practically no time is going to be spent on email, at
00:05:18 ►
least for the time being.
00:05:21 ►
Now, where to begin?
00:05:23 ►
I guess the best place to start is to say that not long ago I left the jurisdiction of these no longer United States of America
00:05:31 ►
and I journeyed into some uncharted territory.
00:05:36 ►
And now that I’ve returned, I want to record a few recollections of my journey
00:05:40 ►
so that I can remember not only where I’ve been, but more importantly, where I’m heading.
00:05:44 ►
journey so that I can remember not only where I’ve been, but more importantly, where I’m heading.
00:05:45 ►
Because as my Mexican friends sometimes say, if you don’t change your direction, you’re
00:05:51 ►
going to wind up where you’re heading.
00:05:54 ►
Now for a couple of reference points.
00:05:57 ►
Should you want to follow up on some of the ideas I’ll be talking about today, there are
00:06:02 ►
two places you can go to begin entering into the mind space I was in when I began this latest quest.
00:06:09 ►
One is the excellent little movie, My Dinner with Andre.
00:06:14 ►
Although I first saw that film many years ago,
00:06:16 ►
it wasn’t until a few weeks ago, when I saw it again,
00:06:20 ►
that its message finally sunk in.
00:06:24 ►
The other point of reference is the marvelous book by Paulo Coelho titled The Zahir.
00:06:29 ►
That’s Z-A-H-I-R.
00:06:32 ►
I don’t intend to discuss that book in any detail right now, other than to mention one thing.
00:06:38 ►
And that is Coelho’s discussion of the concept of detaching from your personal history,
00:06:43 ►
which is one of the things I did on my recent journey.
00:06:47 ►
The reason I mention this is that Coelho gives proper credit
00:06:50 ►
to Carlos Castaneda for giving him the inspiration for this concept,
00:06:55 ►
but it’s Castaneda himself that I feel obliged to mention right now.
00:07:00 ►
I know that many of our fellow salonners are quite taken with Castaneda’s work,
00:07:08 ►
as I was for many years, and in a way still am.
00:07:13 ►
I’ve not only read all of his books, I’ve also read several books of commentary about his work.
00:07:21 ►
And there are many insights to be gained from reading Castaneda, but I think it’s very important for you to know that these are works of fiction.
00:07:26 ►
Don Juan is not a historical figure, but rather a composite of several people.
00:07:32 ►
And I know this with absolute certainty from my acquaintance with two people who know about these things from the inside,
00:07:37 ►
and who have had personal dealings with some of the Castaneda cult members.
00:07:43 ►
And make no mistake about it, poor Carlos eventually began believing his own fiction,
00:07:47 ►
and spun himself and his followers into what I believe to be a very dark place.
00:07:55 ►
Now that part is only my personal opinion, of course, but the part about his books being fiction is a fact that you can take to the bank.
00:08:01 ►
So be very careful that you don’t get too carried away, as I once did, with the wonderful stories he tells.
00:08:08 ►
Now, getting back to the business of detaching from one’s own personal history.
00:08:13 ►
That is a process that I have now completed in regards to the personal history of the first 60 years of my life when I was known to my friends and family as Larry.
00:08:20 ►
From where I now sit, Larry is dead and gone.
00:08:23 ►
But I have to admit that after completing a multi-day ceremony to lay Larry to rest,
00:08:29 ►
I had to go through a grieving process, which, to tell the truth, took me completely by surprise.
00:08:36 ►
And so, now here are a few of the thoughts that came to mind as I was laying Larry to rest.
00:08:42 ►
Perhaps a fragment or two will resonate with you.
00:08:46 ►
I certainly hope so.
00:08:51 ►
I’m not going to present these ideas in any coherent form of a story or essay.
00:08:54 ►
Each one more or less stands on its own,
00:09:00 ►
just like the random thoughts that flow through our consciousnesses all day, every day.
00:09:07 ►
You see, lately I’ve been brooding about the fact that I lost that special sense of being alive that I experienced 12 years ago once I began to believe that I would actually
00:09:14 ►
survive my struggle with prostate cancer. I didn’t want to take life for granted again,
00:09:20 ►
and yet I was. I had the feeling that I should be embracing life, living large, and yet,
00:09:26 ►
well, I spent my weekend sitting here, listening to some of my favorite music, and enjoying the
00:09:33 ►
gentle breeze that drifted through the windows, instead of going out and embracing life in the
00:09:38 ►
way that others expected me to. Instead, I just sat here and enjoyed the warm peace and being alive. Ah,
00:09:47 ►
the freedom to sit and do nothing. But I constantly thought, if only I could turn off that damn
00:09:53 ►
voice telling me to get up and do something. Why did it depress me, I wonder, when I just
00:09:59 ►
relaxed and didn’t accomplish something over the weekend. My problem, I discovered, was that there had been far too much doing in my life,
00:10:08 ►
and not nearly enough being.
00:10:10 ►
I felt as if I was forever balanced on the cusp of chaos.
00:10:14 ►
But now, finally,
00:10:17 ►
and as sad as it may sometimes seem to me to be,
00:10:20 ►
all of those old Larry thoughts are gone.
00:10:23 ►
Gone forever. Gone forever.
00:10:40 ►
Sunlight in your hair The diamond smile you wear
00:10:45 ►
The secrets that you whisper to me
00:10:52 ►
Oh, the love that’s in your eyes.
00:11:06 ►
The peace that you enshrine.
00:11:09 ►
The hope you weave in every word. guitar solo The dreams you let me see
00:11:51 ►
The things you’ll never need
00:11:57 ►
The open doors you held for me.
00:12:57 ►
Oh, the empty vials that broke, the bitterness that choked, the rain that Fell on the Day You Died This is things I miss about you too Things I miss about you
00:13:03 ►
This is things I miss about you.
00:13:09 ►
It’s things I miss about you.
00:13:15 ►
Things I miss about you.
00:13:23 ►
In retrospect, I now realize that I spent the best years of my life working incredibly long hours just to be able to afford to buy more stuff and to hold on to the stuff I’d already acquired.
00:13:31 ►
I didn’t own my stuff. It owned me.
00:13:34 ►
But the recent firestorm we went through here in Southern California taught me a valuable lesson.
00:13:50 ►
One of the things that I thought might be lost forever was a collection of several dozen family photo albums that my mother labored to create during the last decade or so of her life.
00:13:56 ►
And after the fires, I decided that I would scan all of them and save them online somewhere.
00:14:04 ►
But then it dawned on me that the project of scanning all those huge books would take me weeks, possibly months, and the time spent doing that
00:14:06 ►
would no longer be available for me to do more important things, like producing podcasts. And so
00:14:13 ►
I’m instead packing them all in the best airtight containers I can afford and storing them for my
00:14:19 ►
descendants to find one day, should they ever be interested in their distant family history.
00:14:24 ►
to find one day, should they ever be interested in their distant family history.
00:14:31 ►
And as for all of my own photos from my college years, well, I’m throwing them all out, because no one but me now knows what they’re all about or who’s in them.
00:14:35 ►
I no longer have time to spend looking back.
00:14:38 ►
So, whoosh, a large chunk of my personal history has now been discarded forever, and my load is already much lighter.
00:14:47 ►
I now finally understand that nothing I possess is more precious to me than the opportunity to be able to appreciate a cool breeze on a warm summer’s day.
00:14:59 ►
At long last, I understand that everything I do consumes some of my precious time in this dimension.
00:15:06 ►
And so I want to be sure that I am doing something of value for my spirit with what time I still have left.
00:15:14 ►
Something important, like cooking breakfast for a friend.
00:15:18 ►
It feels so long and far away from here
00:15:22 ►
Since I saw you without dreaming
00:15:27 ►
And all this time has served to separate
00:15:31 ►
The waiting from my heart
00:15:37 ►
My ship has sailed so long ago
00:15:41 ►
And the oceans come behind
00:15:46 ►
me
00:15:47 ►
and I still feel the gentle
00:15:50 ►
breeze
00:15:52 ►
kissing
00:15:53 ►
me goodbye Well, let me live the way that I can see
00:16:19 ►
Oh, it’s righteous and it’s sacred
00:16:25 ►
But help me leave that sticky web behind
00:16:29 ►
That holds me in the past
00:16:34 ►
And time plays tricks on memories
00:16:38 ►
And makes everything seem perfect
00:16:44 ►
Your parting words are so muffled now And makes everything seem perfect.
00:16:49 ►
Your parting words are so muffled now. But I still feel the truth. A million stars will split the night when I see you smiling with my waking eyes.
00:17:47 ►
Starlight Whispered the night
00:17:49 ►
With endless light
00:17:59 ►
Then I see you smiling with my waking eyes The End Years ago, I stumbled across an old Irish poem that, sadly, sums up the life I lived as Larry.
00:18:55 ►
It is simply called O’Driscoll.
00:18:58 ►
And to get you in the mood to hear this poem from the point of view I’m coming from right now,
00:19:03 ►
I really should play track three from Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon,
00:19:08 ►
the song called Time,
00:19:10 ►
particularly the line that talks about
00:19:12 ►
digging around on a piece of ground in your hometown,
00:19:16 ►
but then goes on to remind me that,
00:19:19 ►
yeah, maybe I do still have something more to say.
00:19:23 ►
However, during the time I was stuck in the belly of one
00:19:25 ►
of the great corporate beasts, this poem pretty much sums up what I was feeling.
00:19:31 ►
O’Driscoll drove with a song, the wild duck and the drake, from the tall and tufted reeds of a
00:19:37 ►
drear-heart lake, and he saw how the reeds grew dark with the coming of night tide, and he dreamt of the long, dim hair of Bridget
00:19:46 ►
his bride. Then
00:19:48 ►
he heard it, high up in the air,
00:19:50 ►
a piper piping
00:19:52 ►
away, and never was
00:19:54 ►
piping so sad, and
00:19:56 ►
never was piping so gay.
00:19:58 ►
Then he saw young men and young
00:20:00 ►
girls dance in a level place,
00:20:02 ►
with Bridget his bride among them,
00:20:03 ►
with a sad and a gay face.
00:20:06 ►
The dancers gathered around him, and many a sweet thing said. An old man brought him red wine,
00:20:13 ►
and a young girl white bread. But Bridget drew him by the sleeve, and away from the merry band,
00:20:19 ►
to old men playing with cards, with a twinkling of ancient hands. And he sat and he played in a dream and he talked not of evil chance
00:20:28 ►
till one bore Bridget his bride away from the merry dance.
00:20:33 ►
He bore her away in his arms, a handsomest young man there,
00:20:36 ►
and his lips and his neck and his arms were drowned in her long dim hair.
00:20:41 ►
O’Driscoll scattered the cards and out of his dream awoke
00:20:46 ►
and old men and young men and young girls were gone like a drifting smoke. Then he heard it, high up in the
00:20:55 ►
air, a piper piping away, and never was piping so sad, and never was piping so gay. I might add, and Larry has now gone away.
00:21:31 ►
No more TV movies No velvet smoky haze
00:21:35 ►
No coffee to make for you
00:21:39 ►
My spirit left me, baby
00:21:46 ►
For a while it left me cold
00:21:51 ►
You carried me on, you cooled
00:21:55 ►
I called to hear your voice
00:22:02 ►
But you screamed at me in whispers
00:22:07 ►
You flooded my head with tears
00:22:12 ►
I’ve given it all I had
00:22:19 ►
Just to stand and try to call you
00:22:23 ►
Too soon was way too late
00:22:27 ►
And all the time
00:22:32 ►
I’m asking why I did that
00:22:37 ►
Why my shadows hid your light
00:22:50 ►
I don’t know why I treated you so badly. I don’t know why I hate my life.
00:22:54 ►
I don’t know how to make things right.
00:23:07 ►
If I could find the words to say All the answers that you needed
00:23:10 ►
Would it make you change your mind?
00:23:19 ►
And if the ants were afraid
00:23:22 ►
Of the line you held for me,
00:23:27 ►
could you hold it one more time? I don’t know why I treated you so badly
00:23:54 ►
I don’t know why I hid my life from you
00:23:59 ►
I don’t know how to make things right Why I treated you so badly
00:24:10 ►
Why I hid my life from you
00:24:15 ►
How to make things right You know, once you lose heart, you have lost your life.
00:24:35 ►
I know that I lost heart when I came to believe that freedom is an illusion.
00:24:39 ►
But I now know that it’s an illusion without which I cannot live.
00:24:44 ►
And so I’ve decided that I must make the best of what I’ve got,
00:24:48 ►
because that alone is the difference between a well-spent life and a wasted life, at least for me.
00:24:55 ►
Like many people I know, I spent most of my life trying to get rich,
00:24:59 ►
because I thought that then I could do more good for people than I could as a poor person.
00:25:04 ►
I wanted to get rich and use the money to save the world.
00:25:08 ►
But that dream never materialized, and so I gave up.
00:25:12 ►
But when I stopped trying to save the world, I also stopped trying to save myself.
00:25:17 ►
And that was a big mistake.
00:25:21 ►
However, somehow, in spite of myself i i never lost my dream of at least making my own little
00:25:27 ►
corner of the world a slightly better place than it was when i first arrived here for a while i
00:25:33 ►
became involved in politics and various other causes but eventually i came to feel as if i was
00:25:39 ►
merely rearranging the deck chairs on the tit. And so I’ve abandoned all of those activities,
00:25:46 ►
for I’ve found that a true political revolution must first be preceded by a cultural revolution.
00:25:53 ►
And cultural revolutions, my friends, take place one mind at a time.
00:25:58 ►
And that revelation finally led me to get serious about my investigation of psychedelic medicines.
00:26:04 ►
finally led me to get serious about my investigation of psychedelic medicines.
00:26:08 ►
Ultimately, I quit using psychedelics recreationally in order to use them in a more spiritual way and experience their true power.
00:26:13 ►
And it was shortly after I made that decision
00:26:15 ►
that I heard Terrence McKenna for the first time.
00:26:21 ►
People don’t take enough. That’s all.
00:26:24 ►
people don’t take enough that’s all you know i mean people are confused about what’s going on first of all uh taking psychedelics has
00:26:34 ►
a certain measure of of chicness about it well everybody wants to be chic but and you can get into the club merely by saying you took it, but you don’t want
00:26:46 ►
to lie like a dog. So the way to get into the club without paying your dues is to take
00:26:52 ►
some pissant amount and then run around raving about that. So when we talk about the psychedelic
00:27:01 ►
experience, it’s not clear we’re all talking about the same thing it’s sort of like talking about France and you have the people who
00:27:10 ►
changed planes in the airport and the people who moved there for 30 years and
00:27:15 ►
learned the literature and got a job and married the locals so the way to do psychedelics is, I believe, at higher doses than most people are comfortable with,
00:27:31 ►
and rarely, and with great attention to set and setting.
00:27:39 ►
The social use of psychedelics in the club scene or at rock and roll concerts and so forth.
00:27:46 ►
I mean, when I go to those kind of scenes, I just smoke pot.
00:27:50 ►
I don’t, because I want to be part of what’s going on.
00:27:54 ►
I want to have a good time.
00:27:55 ►
But you would be nuts to take a major psychedelic in that circumstance.
00:28:03 ►
in that circumstance.
00:28:10 ►
Socially dense environments filled with light and noise
00:28:13 ►
are a strategy for coming down.
00:28:17 ►
You know, I mean,
00:28:17 ►
if you took a drug you didn’t like,
00:28:20 ►
the smartest thing to do
00:28:21 ►
would be to jog around the block ten times
00:28:24 ►
and then chop a bunch of wood.
00:28:27 ►
Very similar to dancing your ass off, in other words.
00:28:31 ►
So the way I recommend doing psychedelics is in silent darkness and with as little input from other people as possible.
00:28:43 ►
As little input from other people as possible.
00:28:47 ►
I mean, I say alone if you are experienced.
00:28:52 ►
If you’re really confident, just alone for crying out loud.
00:28:56 ►
If that gives you pause, and you must have a sitter,
00:28:59 ►
and let’s use the word sitter, not guide.
00:29:01 ►
My God, nobody’s guiding you anywhere. They have no more notion where you are than, you know,
00:29:07 ►
we know where Judge Carter is at this point.
00:29:11 ►
So the sitter, and my idea of the perfect sitter is, you know,
00:29:16 ►
you have a little Tibetan bell by your side, and the sitter is three rooms away,
00:29:21 ►
and if you need the sitter, you ring the bell,
00:29:23 ►
they stick their head in the room and say,
00:29:26 ►
it’s cool, lay down, and, you know, do that.
00:29:33 ►
And I, you know, as long as this question was brought up
00:29:38 ►
and so much of the lecture was somewhat high-toned,
00:29:41 ►
let me get into this for a minute.
00:29:44 ►
There are thousands of altered states.
00:29:48 ►
You know, we know them.
00:29:50 ►
Orgasm, indigestion, two cappuccinos, where tequila takes you.
00:29:59 ►
So endless altered states.
00:30:03 ►
And I’m not really interested in them more or less than any of you are.
00:30:06 ►
I mean, they’re part of life.
00:30:08 ►
But what I’m interested in,
00:30:10 ►
as an experimentalist,
00:30:12 ►
as a connoisseur of nature,
00:30:15 ►
you know, somebody who loves fossils,
00:30:17 ►
butterflies, rainforests,
00:30:19 ►
that kind of thing,
00:30:20 ►
is this family of compounds
00:30:23 ►
called the indole hallucinogens. Indoles. And they
00:30:29 ►
cause hallucination. And some people say, you know, that I’m a fetishist about this,
00:30:36 ►
that who cares, or that there are other things besides hallucination. Yes, I know, maybe, and of course, but the reason I’m so fascinated by hallucinations is because to my mind, when you’re hallucinating, you have an absolutely clear proof that you are not generating this material. You know, it’s not funny ideas, it’s not racing thoughts,
00:31:07 ►
it’s not insight into what your boyfriend really meant yesterday. That
00:31:13 ►
kind of thing we all can generate by just inspecting our own minds, but a
00:31:20 ►
hallucination is to be in the presence of that which previously could not be imagined.
00:31:28 ►
And if it previously could not be imagined,
00:31:32 ►
then there is no grounds for believing that you generated it out of yourself.
00:31:37 ►
I mean, we should each know our own inventory.
00:31:41 ►
You know what’s in your cupboard.
00:31:43 ►
You know what’s in your chest of drawers. For God’s sake, you ought to know what’s in your cupboard. You know what’s in your chest of drawers.
00:31:46 ►
For God’s sake, you ought to know what’s in your mind. Well, then if something comes forward and
00:31:51 ►
you say, that’s not mine, that’s not in my inventory, then you have a kind of perfect proof
00:31:59 ►
that this is coming from somewhere else. And then the question becomes, where?
00:32:06 ►
And we can set off into that.
00:32:09 ►
Opinions differ, and nobody has God’s truth on it.
00:32:14 ►
A reductionist, somebody who didn’t like these substances,
00:32:19 ►
would say, oh, well, it’s just neurological chaos.
00:32:24 ►
It’s just you’ve interrupted the normal functioning of good brain chemicals,
00:32:30 ►
and evil brain chemicals are now giving a sense of a chaos.
00:32:38 ►
Well, that just doesn’t cut the mustard.
00:32:41 ►
I mean, that kind of stuff may work if you’re talking to the troops,
00:32:44 ►
but not if you’re talking to anybody who’s ever been there. I know what a neurological
00:32:49 ►
chaos would look like. It would look like bright lights, moving patterns, colored this,
00:32:56 ►
something that. It would not be ruins, landscapes, machines, paintings, works of art, building plans, weapons, bits of manufactured technological detritus.
00:33:15 ►
These things are too coherent.
00:33:17 ►
They’re objects in some kind of superstructure of the mind.
00:33:23 ►
And for me, this was the revelation.
00:33:26 ►
I didn’t get into this business by being an airhead or a screwball.
00:33:32 ►
My attitude was always, if it’s real, it can take the pressure.
00:33:39 ►
You know, you don’t have to pussyfoot around the real thing.
00:33:42 ►
If they’re telling you, you know, oh, you must lower your voice and avert your gaze,
00:33:48 ►
then you’re probably in the presence of crap.
00:33:52 ►
Because the real thing is real.
00:33:57 ►
It doesn’t demand that you adjust your opinion to suit it.
00:34:03 ►
It’s real.
00:34:04 ►
That means it is preeminent. That means it
00:34:06 ►
sets the agenda. And I studied yoga. I wandered around in the East. I was fast shuffled by
00:34:15 ►
beady-eyed little men in dotis. I know the whole spiritual supermarket and rigamarole and and I find nothing there to interest me on the
00:34:29 ►
level of you know five grams of psilocybin mushrooms in silent darkness
00:34:34 ►
I mean that’s where the pedal meets the metal that’s where the rubber meets the
00:34:39 ►
road and the inspiration for me to get up and talk to an audience like this
00:34:45 ►
simply comes from the fact that I cannot believe
00:34:49 ►
that this could be kept under wraps the way it has.
00:34:54 ►
I mean, I kidded with you earlier that they would make sex illegal if they could.
00:35:00 ►
Well, they can’t, so it isn’t. But the psychedelic experience is as central to understanding your humanness
00:35:11 ►
as having sex, or having a child, or having responsibilities,
00:35:18 ►
or having hopes and dreams.
00:35:21 ►
And yet it is illegal.
00:35:23 ►
We are somehow told we are infantilized.
00:35:27 ►
We are told, you know, you can wander around within the sanctioned playpen of ordinary consciousness,
00:35:34 ►
and we have some intoxicants over here if you want to mess yourself up.
00:35:39 ►
We’ve got some scotch here and some tobacco and red meat and some sugar and a little TV and so forth and so on.
00:35:48 ►
But these boundary-dissolving hallucinogens that give you a sense of unity with your fellow man and nature
00:35:57 ►
are somehow forbidden.
00:35:59 ►
This is an outrage.
00:36:01 ►
It’s a sign of cultural immaturity, and the fact that we tolerate it is a sign
00:36:07 ►
that we are living in a society as oppressed as any society in the past.
00:36:20 ►
To a short question, but I think it’s really important. My thing is not about my opinion or what I saw in Africa or anything like that.
00:36:29 ►
This is, get it straight, this is about an experience.
00:36:34 ►
Not my experience, your experience.
00:36:36 ►
It’s about an experience which you have, like getting laid or like going to Africa.
00:36:42 ►
You must do the experience.
00:36:47 ►
Otherwise, it’s just whistling past the graveyard. And we’re not talking about something like being born again or meeting
00:36:54 ►
the flying saucers or something like that where good works and prayer are the method.
00:36:59 ►
No. If you take a sufficient dose of an active compound, it will deliver itself to you on the money.
00:37:08 ►
If it doesn’t work, take more.
00:37:11 ►
Nobody is in a position to dismiss this just because it didn’t work for them on one or two tries.
00:37:18 ►
This is an art. It’s an art. It’s something you coax into existence.
00:37:24 ►
I mean, you have to learn to make into existence you have to learn to make love
00:37:25 ►
you have to learn to speak English
00:37:27 ►
anything worth doing is an art
00:37:30 ►
that is acquired
00:37:31 ►
this is part of our birthright
00:37:33 ►
perhaps the most important part of our birthright
00:37:36 ►
these substances will deliver
00:37:38 ►
it is the confoundment
00:37:40 ►
of psychology
00:37:42 ►
and science generally
00:37:44 ►
and that’s why it’s so touchy for cultural institutions.
00:37:48 ►
But you are not a cultural institution.
00:37:51 ►
You are a free and independent human being.
00:37:53 ►
And these things have your name written on them in big gold letters.
00:37:58 ►
Well said, dear Terrence. Well said.
00:38:01 ►
And as I just mentioned,
00:38:02 ►
it’s my belief that the next great human revolution will take place at the individual level, one mind at a time.
00:38:11 ►
Perhaps we will all have to first revolutionize our own lives, and then, on the foundations of our individual revolutions, will a new global consciousness arise.
00:38:22 ►
It isn’t necessary for everyone to get it before our species jumps to a higher state of consciousness.
00:38:27 ►
As in almost all other aspects of human life,
00:38:30 ►
I think only a small number of tippers are required
00:38:33 ►
to tip us all into a more human basin of attraction,
00:38:37 ►
and it can’t come a moment too soon.
00:38:40 ►
It seems to me that our beliefs
00:38:43 ►
are what ultimately shape our personalities.
00:38:46 ►
So who owns those beliefs?
00:38:48 ►
If I do, then I’m a free thinker in charge of my own destiny.
00:38:53 ►
But if my beliefs own me, well, then the institutions that formulate and promulgate those beliefs, they own me.
00:39:02 ►
Flash of golden darkness in my mind the other day They own me. way you’re like a house
00:39:26 ►
in a house
00:39:28 ►
full of
00:39:30 ►
ties
00:39:32 ►
of
00:39:33 ►
love
00:39:35 ►
you’re
00:39:36 ►
seamlessly
00:39:37 ►
into your
00:39:40 ►
mind I’m not in line How do you feel?
00:39:55 ►
How do you feel? Blow it all to pieces
00:40:12 ►
Then we wander round inside
00:40:14 ►
There is suddenly no lack of nervous misery around
00:40:19 ►
What a strange time to be trying
00:40:21 ►
To dissolve into white light
00:40:24 ►
What an effervescent epilogue to years of paradise.
00:40:31 ►
You’re like a house in a house full of dying stars. Thank you. I love you Thank you. ¶¶ Moments. That is all we have, a few good moments.
00:42:51 ►
I’ll bet you can’t think of even one full day that was so great you remember every minute of it.
00:42:57 ►
No, at best we remember a few big moments that occurred on a few good days.
00:43:03 ►
That’s my quantum theory of memory.
00:43:06 ►
Time is measured in moments, and a moment, my friend, isn’t very long.
00:43:11 ►
So it is now, however, at long last, that I have finally come to grok the fact that
00:43:17 ►
the purpose of my life is not to reach a destination.
00:43:21 ►
Nor is my life a journey.
00:43:23 ►
No, for me at least, the purpose of life is to dance.
00:43:28 ►
A dance with no beginning and no end, just an endless dance. Here and now, here and now,
00:43:35 ►
all else is but memory and fantasy. And now I’d like to close with a poem from the
00:43:42 ►
mystical Sufi poet Rumi.
00:43:47 ►
It’s titled, Where Everything is Music.
00:43:51 ►
Don’t worry about saving these songs.
00:43:54 ►
And if one of our instruments breaks, it doesn’t matter.
00:43:58 ►
We have fallen into the place where everything is music.
00:44:02 ►
The strumming and the flute notes rise into the atmosphere.
00:44:05 ►
And even if the whole world’s harp should burn up,
00:44:08 ►
there will still be hidden instruments playing.
00:44:11 ►
So the candle flickers and goes out.
00:44:13 ►
We have a piece of flint and a spark.
00:44:16 ►
This singing art is seafoam.
00:44:20 ►
The graceful movements come from a pearl somewhere on the ocean floor.
00:44:23 ►
Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge of driftwood along the beach,
00:44:26 ►
wanting.
00:44:27 ►
They derive from a slow and powerful
00:44:30 ►
root that we can’t see.
00:44:32 ►
Stop the words now.
00:44:34 ►
Open the window in the center
00:44:36 ►
of your chest, and let
00:44:38 ►
the spirits fly in
00:44:40 ►
and out.
00:44:42 ►
For now,
00:44:43 ►
this is Lorenzo signing off from
00:44:45 ►
Cyberdelic Space.
00:44:48 ►
Peace to you, my friends. Ultimately, what we’re touching is the invisible, all-pervasive intelligence
00:45:20 ►
that surrounds us and penetrates us.
00:45:28 ►
It is grooming us to be able to tolerate its splendor.
00:45:37 ►
It’s something like that. We can’t just reveal it
00:45:55 ►
Because we would be fried We may never know what is Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.
00:46:30 ►
Sailing into the water.
00:46:38 ►
Of the ocean’s mystery.
00:47:46 ►
Thank you. Who loves to swim in the air?
00:47:54 ►
How could I live sidekicks over the moon?
00:48:04 ►
So I can’t do whatever I plan There will be a real shaman.
00:48:23 ►
A new shaman.
00:48:25 ►
A shaman who’s practicing full life science.
00:48:37 ►
Ultimately, what we’re touching is the invisible.
00:48:43 ►
All pervasive. Touching in the invisible, all-pervasive intelligence that surrounds us and penetrates us. Take care. The End