Program Notes
Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson
[NOTE: All quotations below are by Robert Anton Wilson.]
“Every evaluation is an evaluation of the organism as a whole, because the nervous system interlocks with the immunological system, and the endocrine system, and the neuro-muscular system and so on. So every evaluation you make is an evaluation of your whole body, and separating it into mind and body is a fictitious dichotomy. It’s a synergistic process.”
“What the front brain knows does not control you at all. It just thinks it does.”
“The idea of reality as a singular noun doesn’t make any sense to me at all any more.”
“Everybody has their own neurological reality-tunnel, which is why we misunderstand one another so often, and why we misjudge one another so profoundly.”
“I don’t think there’s a single drug, psychedelic, antibiotic, aspirin, or anything you can name that has the same effect on two people. People have to find out for themselves which drugs are safe for them.”
“Among the drugs that are currently controversial, that is to say illegal, I would say marijuana is the safest.”
“I think the dangers of LSD have been overstated to an incredible extent.”
“Most problems exist because the verbal form you put them in creates the problem.”
“So what you experience tomorrow, if it entirely fits your beliefs today, it’s because you’re not paying attention.”
“Every child is intensely curious until they get to school, and the function of school is to kill the curiosity by telling them there is one correct answer, and we know it already, and don’t do any thinking of your own.”
Podcasts Mentioned In This Program
The C-Realm with KMO
The Cannabis Podcast Network
The Dopecast with the Dopefiend
Lefty’s Lounge
Psychonautica with Max Freakout
BB’s Bungalow
Pothead’s Coffee Shop
The Entheogenic Evolution with Martin Ball
Ape Reality with Tom Barbarlet
Biota.org’s Artificial Life Interviews with Tom Barbarlet
Shrink Rap Radio with Dr. Dave
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
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So, how are you doing today?
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Or as Terrence McKenna often said, how are we doing in the here and now? Hopefully you’re doing as well as I am right now because even with all of the little difficulties that always seem to
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keep popping up, on the whole I have to say that I have no serious complaints
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about life these days.
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And I suspect that a lot
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of my positive energy comes from
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getting together with you here in the salon
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each week. It’s always good
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to come back here to
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cyberdelic space and tune in
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to your vibe.
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And a couple of salonners whose
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vibes were in the generous mode
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this past week
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are Garth A. and Jason M.,
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both of whom made very generous donations
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to help offset the expenses
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of producing these podcasts.
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And I should point out
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that both Garth and Jason
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are repeat donors
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and, quite frankly,
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have done more than their part
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in helping out. So Jason
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and Garth, hey, thanks again for being such an integral part of the salon. I really couldn’t
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keep on doing these podcasts without help from you and our other fellow donors out there throughout
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the years. So hey, you guys really rock. And let me say one more thing here about all of the wonderful things that people are doing to show their appreciation for the salon.
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And I think you can probably relate to this.
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The thing is that I almost always feel kind of uncomfortable receiving gifts.
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Even on holidays, I’d rather give something than receive something.
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And we’ll let the shrinks out there get into why this is, but whatever the reason, I never
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feel like I can adequately say thank you.
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For example, my dear friend Jarrett from Feedback Art just gave my wife and I a wonderful painting
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that he created for us, and all I could say was, thank you, thank you.
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But after all of the work he put into it, those words just don’t seem to be enough.
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Yet that’s all I can come up with. It just never seems enough.
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And so I came up with a little idea that might get me out of this bind.
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And if any of our fellow salonners wants to give me something, And so I came up with a little idea that might get me out of this bind.
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If any of our fellow salonners wants to give me something,
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well, here’s a way that’ll keep the pressure off me,
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satisfy your desire to give, and maybe also help us find the others.
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Instead of sending me that gift, why don’t you give it to someone else,
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maybe even a stranger, and tell them that I asked you to give it to them. Actually, I can see this leading to some pretty funny
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encounters, but it might also be a good way to spread the word about the salon. But in
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any event, Jarrett, Garth, Jason, and all of our other past supporters, hey, thank you again.
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And one more thing I want to mention.
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That’s one of our recent donors, and I can’t remember if it was Jason or Garth or maybe David from last week,
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who sent a note along with their donation asking me to mention the name of one of their friends
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in whose name the donation was being made.
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Well, I had the best of intentions in doing that, but between the time I received your message and today,
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well, I finished my move to a new computer.
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Unfortunately, I made one big mistake.
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I’d been running Eudora on the new machine for about three weeks with all your messages coming in.
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And then a couple days ago, I did a Laplink transfer of my old machine to the new one.
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And it didn’t occur to me that this would overwrite my inbox with the one from my old PC.
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So I managed to wipe out about 200 unread emails and another 50 or so that I planned on answering
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someday. Now all of those emails are gone. So if you resend that email, I’ll be sure to mention
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your friend in the next podcast, assuming that I have the energy to look at my email again.
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But that’s another story. But today’s story, and I like that word better than lecture, don’t you?
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Today’s story is a great one.
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And it comes to us from Robert Anton Wilson,
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via a friend at the salon, E-Rock X1,
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who sent me the recording we’re about to hear.
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The talk is from an interview Robert Anton Wilson gave
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on the subject of consciousness change and the Eighth Circuit Model.
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And since I’m anxious to listen to this talk again myself,
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I’m going to stop talking and play this very interesting interview
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in which Robert Anton Wilson talks about one of his favorite subjects.
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So, Bob, one of your major themes in all your works is consciousness change,
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and it seems to even have been a huge theme in your life.
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Why is this so interesting to you?
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There’s an exercise I learned from Alistair Crowley,
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who learned it from a Buddhist monk in Ceylon.
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It’s a simulation of enlightenment.
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Buddhist monk in Ceylon.
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It’s a simulation of enlightenment.
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You sit down as long as you can and think of as many aspects of the answer to the question,
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why am I sitting here doing this exercise?
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Well, I’m sitting here doing this exercise
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because I read about it in a book by Alistair Crowley.
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And he heard about it from a Buddhist monk in Ceylon.
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But why did I read a book by Alistair Crawley?
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Well, because Alan Watts recommended a biography of Crawley.
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And you go on adding reasons, and after a while you come up with things like,
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I’m sitting here doing this exercise because the Scandinavians overfished the North Sea in the 5th century,
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and they couldn’t make their living as fishermen anymore, so they turned to piracy.
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And they couldn’t make their living as fishermen anymore, so they turned to piracy.
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And that’s why my grandmother’s name was O’Loughlin, which means son of the Dane in Gaelic.
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And then, of course, ultimately you come to because the sun is the kind of star that has planets,
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and this is the one planet that we know of in the solar system that can support this kind of life.
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If you try that exercise, you should do it at least three times in a month to find out the infinite number of factors and coincidences and synchronicities and accidents and utterly inexplicable connections you can find that explain why you’re sitting here
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doing that exercise. But one day I discovered I was sitting there doing that exercise because I
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had polio when I was 40 years old,
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which I think made me look less athletic than most boys and therefore more bookish,
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which led me more and more from fiction to nonfiction, from nonfiction to science and philosophy, etc., until I developed an enormous curiosity about all the questions that everybody thinks they have
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the answer to and all the philosophers and
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scientists are still arguing about
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and so of course
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the riddle of consciousness is one of the central
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ones, a major
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turning point was Krasivsky’s
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Science and Sanity which persuaded
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me that we can’t make meaningful
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statements about one reality
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all we can do is talk about
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comparative realities as perceived by different instruments, which includes the instrument that
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reads all the instruments, which is the human nervous system, not the brain, the whole nervous
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system. Every evaluation is an evaluation of the organism as a whole because the nervous system interlocks with the immunological system,
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the endocrine system, the neuromuscular system, and so on.
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So every evaluation you make is an evaluation of your whole body
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and separating it into mind and body is a fictitious dichotomy.
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It’s a synergetic process.
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And after years of teaching this
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in various ways,
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just a couple of months ago,
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I came up with a new way of teaching it,
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which is the following.
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Remind yourself that you know
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the difference between a movie and real life,
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and you can keep the two quite distinct
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in your head,
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and you can control yourself with that knowledge.
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And remember the role of the editors, the camera people camera people and so on as well as the actors then go see one of these
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really gory slasher movies that are so popular these days and see if you can keep you remember
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all through it this is only a movie see if the director doesn’t make you jump or cringe at least
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once or grab the chair or something like that or do some kind of physical reaction.
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That shows how reactions are reactions of the organism as a whole
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and what the front brain knows does not control you at all.
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It just thinks it does.
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So if all reactions are reactions of the organism as a whole
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and evaluations of the organism as a whole,
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then you start thinking about things like cultural relativism and neurological
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relativism and so on. And I suppose the major next step in my explorations of this area was
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reading Robert D. Ropp’s Drugs and the Mind sometime in the late 1950s. I’ve always all my
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life read a lot of books on psychology. It’s one of the several topics I try to keep up to date on. And Robert D. Ropp’s a completely new approach attributing
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mental illness to chemical imbalances in the body rather than to psychological factors.
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And that was only the first half of the book, though. I read that with great interest and
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a feeling that he was probably right. I still think more of what’s called mental illnesses,
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neurochemical accidents rather than psychological problems per se.
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And a lot of it more and more looks to be genetic too.
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But the second part of the book was about chemicals that change the nervous system in a way that creates mystical and religious experiences.
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And I thought, gee, I’d like to try one of them because I’ve never had a mystical or religious experiences. And I thought, gee, I’d like to try one of them
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because I’ve never had a mystical or religious experience.
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It might be interesting to have one
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and see if I retained my skepticism afterwards.
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A rather risky proposition, but I was young and ballsy
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and had more adventure than brains and me.
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And so eventually I got a hold of some peyote
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and I had a mystical experience I’ve had
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a lot of experiences which have changed my idea of reality profoundly the idea of reality is a
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singular noun doesn’t make any sense to me at all anymore what model do you use I like the
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sociological term glass and grid, which some sociologists use.
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Kojupski called it your system of abstractions,
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which means a lot if you know the mathematical school he was working from,
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but doesn’t mean much to most readers.
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Leary coined the magnificent term reality tunnel.
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I call it a neurological reality tunnel.
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Everybody has their own neurological reality tunnel,
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which is why we misunderstand one another so often
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and why we misjudge one another so profoundly.
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Can you describe what a reality tunnel is?
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We receive, I think, more than a billion signals every minute from the environment.
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Most of them we’re not even conscious of receiving.
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They affect our legs, our arms, our eyes, our ears, our nose, our chest.
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All this information is pouring in,
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and the nervous system is making evaluations at different levels,
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working its way up.
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One of the classic models is that we’ve got three brains,
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the reptile brain, the mammal brain, and the human brain.
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I’ve heard that for so long.
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I don’t know how far back that goes.
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I knew that when I was in my 20s, which means back in the early 1950s.
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If we try to be conscious of all the signals, we couldn’t do it.
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Because to be conscious of that many signals simultaneously means we only perceive
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chaos which is the usual first reaction to LSD things turn into chaos then they turn into
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different kinds of patterns the chaos is because we can’t handle that much information and organize
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it rapidly so we throw out all the information that seems unimportant, which means we also
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throw out all the information that seems threatening to our belief system or to our dogma or to
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our ideology. We throw out everything we think can be ignored safely, so we concentrate on
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the things that seem important. Then our brain constructs a model out of all the information
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coming up from the rest of the nervous system and we project the
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model outward and consider it reality it’s not reality it’s our reality tunnel everybody else
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in the same room is constructing a different reality tunnel about 40 years now i’ve been
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teaching workshops and seminars first on general semantics then on neurolinguistic programming and
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various other things but but I have done
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this experiment hundreds of times where I get the whole audience to describe the hall
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outside the seminar room.
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I never have had a case yet in hundreds of experiments where two people described the
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hall exactly the same.
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The differences are sometimes astonishing.
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We all perceive a different world because our brains are organizing it
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according to patterns the brain has created to organize.
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And those patterns seem to be created, at this date it appears they are created,
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by our genetic programs, by our early imprints, by our subsequent conditioning,
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by our learning, and by whatever experiments we have done in reprogramming our nervous systems,
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which involve such things as yoga, psychotherapy, general semantics,
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neurolinguistic programming, psychedelic drugs, brain-tuning machines.
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And every time we reprogram our nervous system,
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our reality tunnel should change a little.
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If it doesn’t, we haven’t learned anything
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through that experiment and it was wasted time.
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If our reality tunnel changes a little,
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then we have to spend a lot of time
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in the next couple of years
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checking our new reality tunnel
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and see if we can communicate it well enough to others
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that we don’t get locked up as raving maniacs.
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If we don’t get locked up as raving maniacs. If we don’t get locked up as raving maniacs,
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then you can consider your new reality tunnel possibly just as good as your old one
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and maybe more accurate in some ways.
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It’s traditionally been part of alchemy for a couple of thousand years, both east and west.
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The multiplication of the first matter really means changing your nervous system from inside,
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what John Lilly calls metaprogramming.
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So after I read Drugs and the Mind and got interested in metaprogramming,
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I found out that most of the interesting research was being done at Spring Grove in Maryland and up in Harvard.
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And the next thing I knew, the Harvard project was closed down,
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and then the Spring Grove Project was closed down.
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And then the FCC passed a rule that no favorable reference to psychedelic research
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would be allowed on television, only unfavorable ones.
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And I began to feel like, oh, I know this scenario.
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I remember reading about it.
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This is called the Inquisition.
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So we live like the scholars of the Inquisition.
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There are thousands, I don’t know,
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tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people in the United States
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experimenting with psychedelics on themselves to see how much they can change their brains for the
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good, and some of them are screwing up and changing their brains for the worse. But that does not
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justify the ban on scientific research. We write notes to each other in code
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so the inquisitors can’t find out what we’re doing.
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What do you think are the most useful drugs for metaprogramming?
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Well, I don’t look at it that way.
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It varies with the individual.
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I got turned on to pot in the 1950s
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in the men’s room at the Village Vanguard while the
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Modern Jazz Quartet was playing there. And man, I always liked the Modern Jazz Quartet, but after I
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got stoned and come out of the men’s room, they were playing better than they’ve ever played before.
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Over the decades of criminal activity or forbidden science or the dark arts or whatever you want to
00:16:48 ►
call it i’ve come to the conclusion that we not only have different neurological reality
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we have different genetic blueprints that we start from and i don’t think there’s a single drug
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psychedelic antibiotic aspirin or anything you could name that has the same effect on two people.
00:17:06 ►
People have to find out for themselves which drugs are safe for them.
00:17:10 ►
And no czar can decide for you.
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I mean, he can enforce his will on you by the use of soldiers, cops, guns, etc.
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There’s no way he can decide which drugs are safe for you and which are dangerous for you.
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There is no way he can decide which drugs are safe for you and which are dangerous for you.
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By and large, among the drugs that are currently controversial, that is to say illegal,
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I would say marijuana is the safest.
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I’ve known a few people that have bad experiences with marijuana,
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but that’s usually because they’re combining it with either booze or amphetamine.
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Very bad idea.
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Never combine pot with either booze or amphetamine. Very bad idea. Never combine pot with either booze or amphetamines.
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In my opinion, amphetamines are useful if you’re cramming for an exam,
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but otherwise they should be avoided.
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I’ve seen so many people get paranoid on meth and the other amphetamines.
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And cocaine is dangerous for almost everybody, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t times when it isn’t very useful,
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especially for people who do a lot of traveling and lecturing.
00:18:09 ►
But I’ve never known anybody who got heavily into coke
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who didn’t show some symptoms of paranoia after a while.
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It may be because there’s so much violence in the coke smuggling business,
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or it may be because coke does have a tendency to put you in a paranoid headspace.
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And another thing I’ve noticed, and Wavy Gravy,
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great counterculture hero of the 60s, also has noticed
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that people who use a lot of coke tend to die of heart attacks pretty young.
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So I regard that as a pretty dangerous one without much benefit in it,
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except when you’re about to go to sleep and you need to give a two-hour lecture.
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I think the dangers of LSD have been overstated
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to an incredible extent.
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All we know is our own experience, of course,
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and all I’m talking about is what I have experienced
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and what I have heard from others
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and what I have read in the literature.
00:19:02 ►
But I would say that
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under very good medical psychological supervision,
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like in the experiments of the early 60s,
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I think there was like one out of a thousand bad LSD trips,
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and they didn’t last very long.
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Once it became illegal and it was fashionable for people
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who didn’t have much philosophical or scientific training
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to take it just to have a weird trip.
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You had more bad trips then
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because they didn’t know what they were doing
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and they weren’t properly prepared.
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And who knows if it’s even LSD.
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There are no safe generalizations
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about which drugs are dangerous for which people.
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Although, by and large,
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anybody who’s ever been pronounced psychotic,
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even if they’ve been pronounced cured, I would say they should stay away from psychedelics.
00:19:48 ►
Psychedelics seem to make the crazy crazier.
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Not always, but that’s a tendency that should be kept in mind.
00:19:57 ►
There was a series of experiments with autistic children where they gave them LSD and some of them came out of their autism.
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And some of them came out permanently and some only came out for a week
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and then retreated into autism.
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Now, if we were living in a free scientific society
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like most people think we are,
00:20:15 ►
we would have had 30 years more of research into this area
00:20:18 ►
by reputable scientists,
00:20:20 ►
published and refereed scientific journals.
00:20:22 ►
We know a hell of a lot more.
00:20:24 ►
All we know is the personal experiences of underground outlaw alchemists
00:20:29 ►
who are hounded by the Inquisition all the time
00:20:32 ►
and don’t dare to reveal half of what they know.
00:20:35 ►
And I really think the Inquisition is kind of old hat and should be abandoned.
00:20:40 ►
The Roman Catholic Church gave up the Inquisition in 1819.
00:20:44 ►
Why the hell does the United States government feel they had to start their own Inquisition?
00:20:48 ►
There were dozens of other researchers who were making claims that sounded astonishing to orthodoxy.
00:20:54 ►
We cured a case of a guy who was sexually impotent for 40 years on one dose of LSD.
00:20:59 ►
We cured a guy of cancer.
00:21:01 ►
We don’t understand that ourself that the cancer went away during the LSD trip.
00:21:04 ►
These kind of reports were quite common.
00:21:06 ►
The conservative medical establishment
00:21:08 ►
thought their researchers were being careless
00:21:10 ►
or stupid or overenthusiastic or something.
00:21:13 ►
And then there is the factor, again, of conspiracy.
00:21:17 ►
The CIA was doing a lot of LSD research
00:21:20 ►
and they didn’t want any competition.
00:21:22 ►
They didn’t want people knowing too much about it.
00:21:24 ►
The more people know about LSD,
00:21:26 ►
the harder it is to use LSD to brainwash them.
00:21:29 ►
I’m pretty sure if somebody gave me LSD
00:21:31 ►
and tried to brainwash me,
00:21:33 ►
the first thing that would happen is
00:21:34 ►
I’d realize I was under the influence of LSD.
00:21:36 ►
The second thing, I’d realize they’re trying to brainwash me.
00:21:39 ►
And the third thing is I’d kick them the hell out the door.
00:21:42 ►
But if people don’t know anything about LSD
00:21:44 ►
and they start having weird sensations,
00:21:46 ►
you can implant incredible ideas in them.
00:21:49 ►
I have several times been called on by friends
00:21:54 ►
to deal with people who were having their first LSD trip
00:21:56 ►
who knew nothing about acid, nothing about philosophy,
00:21:59 ►
nothing about neurology or psychology.
00:22:02 ►
They just thought they were going to have a good time
00:22:03 ►
and they found themselves having anxieties.
00:22:06 ►
The majority of cases where somebody’s having a bad trip of that type,
00:22:10 ►
anxious about everything, all they’ve got to do is sit down and tell them,
00:22:13 ►
this is called the 15-minute jitters.
00:22:15 ►
It only lasts for 15 minutes.
00:22:17 ►
What, you’ve been having it for 10 minutes now?
00:22:19 ►
Well, you’ve only got five minutes more, and it’ll be,
00:22:21 ►
nine out of ten times they’ll come out of it within five minutes.
00:22:24 ►
They’re very suggestible.
00:22:27 ►
Did acid become your major brain change tool for a while?
00:22:33 ►
For a while, but I have also done a lot with peyote and psilocybin
00:22:39 ►
and a lot of non-drug techniques like yoga techniques like asana, pranayama,
00:22:46 ►
and Sufi exercises, especially the heart chakra exercises.
00:22:52 ►
And for about three years, I was trying every new brainwave machine that came on the market.
00:22:58 ►
And I gave up the brainwave machine research at the point they were coming out with five or six new ones every month.
00:23:06 ►
And I had reached the point where I couldn’t be sure what was the result of the latest machine I tried,
00:23:11 ►
what was the result of the machine I tried the week before, the delayed result,
00:23:14 ►
what was the cumulative effect and what was the individual effect.
00:23:19 ►
And I’ve been doing a lot of work with neuro-linguistic programming in recent years and I’ve always had a tendency to recast verbally anything that seems insoluble, paradoxical or unbearable
00:23:35 ►
to me by examining it with the tools of general semantics so I can put it into a formulation
00:23:41 ►
where I can find I can do something about it. Most problems exist because the variable formula you put them in creates the problem.
00:23:49 ►
Can you give me an example?
00:23:51 ►
For instance, right now I can’t get around without a walker and a wheelchair.
00:23:56 ►
It depends on how I variably formulate that.
00:23:59 ►
I started out by saying right now, did you notice that?
00:24:01 ►
I didn’t notice it myself.
00:24:03 ►
That’s part of the programming I’m giving.
00:24:05 ►
I’m not assuming this condition is permanent.
00:24:07 ►
I’m assuming this is a temporary condition,
00:24:09 ►
which since it was cured once before, it can be cured again.
00:24:14 ►
I learned to walk twice.
00:24:15 ►
I can learn to walk a third time, and I’m doing better every day.
00:24:19 ►
That’s a very practical nitty-gritty example, very meaningful to me right now.
00:24:23 ►
But take an example
00:24:25 ►
from the heights of intellect.
00:24:27 ►
For about a hundred years,
00:24:30 ►
physicists were arguing
00:24:31 ►
whether light travels as discrete particles
00:24:33 ►
or whether it travels in waves
00:24:35 ►
like sound or water.
00:24:38 ►
And there were experiments
00:24:40 ►
that supported both theories.
00:24:42 ►
So there were arguments
00:24:44 ►
back and forth for a long time.
00:24:46 ►
Is light waves or is it particles?
00:24:49 ►
In the 1920s, some joker whose name I don’t remember
00:24:53 ►
coined the word wavicles.
00:24:56 ►
He said light travels as waves and particles.
00:24:58 ►
This was a joke at the expense of other physicists,
00:25:01 ►
but a lot of them picked it up
00:25:02 ►
just to express their total bafflement
00:25:04 ►
that the fact
00:25:05 ►
the evidence just didn’t seem to make sense.
00:25:08 ►
And then Niels Bohr came up with the Copenhagen Interpretation,
00:25:12 ►
which underlies almost all my work.
00:25:15 ►
All my work, whatever I’m writing about it,
00:25:17 ►
basically comes from the point of view of the Copenhagen Interpretation
00:25:20 ►
of quantum mechanics, which is whatever model we make of the world,
00:25:23 ►
whatever reality tunnel we organize our perceptions into is not the world.
00:25:28 ►
It’s a model we’ve made.
00:25:31 ►
So some experiments support the particle model
00:25:35 ►
and some support the wave model.
00:25:36 ►
We shouldn’t be astonished at that.
00:25:38 ►
It just shows our brain can construct two different patterns
00:25:40 ►
depending on which instruments we’re using.
00:25:43 ►
To ask what light really is is basically a meaningless question. Science can’t answer that. Science can only answer questions
00:25:50 ►
like how does it register on this instrument and how does it register on that instrument.
00:25:55 ►
That’s the way I look at psychology, sociology, and things in general is in terms of what does
00:26:02 ►
this model include and what does it exclude. Nobody can make a model that includes everything,
00:26:07 ►
although all the dogmatists on the planet think they’ve done that.
00:26:11 ►
If you included everything, all you’d perceive is chaos.
00:26:14 ►
Or as Buckminster Fuller states the case very well,
00:26:19 ►
scenario universe is non-simultaneously apprehended.
00:26:23 ►
In other words, we do not perceive the whole universe,
00:26:25 ►
the whole space-time continuum in any one instant.
00:26:28 ►
If we did that, our brain couldn’t handle all the information.
00:26:32 ►
We perceive it in cross-sections.
00:26:36 ►
And if you do Zen meditation or any type of yogic meditation,
00:26:39 ►
you’ll see how long a minute is.
00:26:41 ►
You can’t keep track of the millions or billions of signals.
00:26:44 ►
How many different signals are coming in that you usually don’t notice
00:26:49 ►
what I call model theism is making a model then worshiping the model as if it
00:26:55 ►
were a god and hating everybody who has a different model model theism is the
00:27:01 ►
idea that your universe has been so apprehended. That’s impossible according to general relativity.
00:27:07 ►
It’s non-simultaneously apprehended.
00:27:10 ►
So what you experience tomorrow, if it entirely fits your belief today,
00:27:15 ►
that’s because you’re not paying enough attention.
00:27:18 ►
So speaking of models, it seems that your favorite psychological model comes from Dr. Timothy Leary.
00:27:25 ►
Is that correct?
00:27:26 ►
Yes.
00:27:27 ►
The Eighth Circuit model, yes.
00:27:30 ►
Could you describe for listeners the basics of this model?
00:27:35 ►
I’ve done two-day workshops on the Eighth Circuit model,
00:27:38 ►
and I’ve done one-hour lectures, and I’ve done two-hour lectures.
00:27:42 ►
Let’s see how brief I can condense it to
00:27:45 ►
without making it totally incomprehensible.
00:27:48 ►
Leary’s basic assumption is that our personality
00:27:52 ►
or interpersonal reactions results from genetic blueprints
00:27:57 ►
as modified by early imprints
00:28:00 ►
and later conditioning and learning and re-imprinting,
00:28:03 ►
if we learn anything about re-imprinting.
00:28:06 ►
We start out with basically a me-boyed floating consciousness
00:28:11 ►
recapitulating the beginning of life,
00:28:15 ►
and we have to bond to a mother or a mother substitute,
00:28:19 ►
depending on how lucky we are.
00:28:21 ►
If we’re lucky, we get a mother.
00:28:22 ►
If we’re not lucky, we imprint something else.
00:28:25 ►
There’s a case in one of Robert Audrey’s books,
00:28:28 ►
a giraffe whose mother was shot by hunters right after it was born,
00:28:33 ►
and the giraffe imprinted the jeep.
00:28:35 ►
And it followed the jeep around and tried to nurse from it, etc.,
00:28:38 ►
and treated the jeep as a mother.
00:28:41 ►
Now, let’s show the biological basis of the Jungian archetypes.
00:28:44 ►
A jeep has four wheels, sort of like the four legs of a mother. Now let’s show the biological basis of the Jungian archetypes. Jeep has four wheels,
00:28:46 ►
sort of like the four legs of a giraffe. There was research where birds that were brought from
00:28:52 ►
the Galapagos Islands, where there haven’t been any predators in about a million years,
00:28:58 ►
were tested by having cardboard cutout kites in the shape of hawks fly over them, and they all crouched and tried to hide.
00:29:06 ►
So that archetype had existed in the birds’ brains for over a million years
00:29:10 ►
when there were no predators around.
00:29:12 ►
They still had the archetype hawk meant danger.
00:29:15 ►
So we’re born with archetypal images
00:29:18 ►
and desire to find the equivalent that we can attach to in the external world.
00:29:25 ►
Leary calls that the biosurvival circuit.
00:29:28 ►
I call it the oral biosurvival circuit
00:29:31 ►
to emphasize the importance of the nursing experience.
00:29:35 ►
And the oral biosurvival circuit Leary conceives of is basically one-dimensional.
00:29:40 ►
You either imprint what I call an infophilic tendency in varying degrees,
00:29:46 ►
which means the world seems like a safe place and you keep on exploring more and more of it,
00:29:51 ►
or you imprint an infophobic reflex in which the world seems like a sinister and threatening place.
00:29:59 ►
In the extreme form, it’s autism, where the whole external world is just turned off.
00:30:03 ►
It’s too sinister to be dealt with. So once you’ve imprinted, that’s autism where the whole external world is just turned off. It’s too sinister to be dealt with.
00:30:05 ►
So once you’ve imprinted, that’s it?
00:30:08 ►
Well, that’s the general opinion.
00:30:10 ►
Leary’s heresy, one of his heresies, was that imprints can be changed
00:30:14 ►
with strong psychedelics and the right type of program.
00:30:18 ►
Timothy was one of the most prestigious and respected psychiatrists
00:30:22 ►
and psychologists in the country when he started
00:30:26 ►
his lsd research by the time that was closed down he was the most disreputable when the government
00:30:32 ►
started closing down lsd research every all the major researchers became to quote a famous irish
00:30:38 ►
saying as silent as moonlight on a gravestone leary didn’t he went around the country raising
00:30:44 ►
hell and saying the
00:30:45 ►
government should not shut down scientific research and science should be free of government
00:30:49 ►
interference and all sorts of subversive and sinister things like that. So eventually,
00:30:55 ►
according to Leary’s story, he was framed by a cop in Orange County. They planted half a marijuana
00:31:01 ►
cigarette in his car and then busted him and sentenced him to 37 years in prison.
00:31:08 ►
The regular sentence for possession of half a joint in California at that time was six months.
00:31:13 ►
For some reason, they gave him 37 years.
00:31:16 ►
It does look like there’s a certain desire for revenge against Leary for going around telling people science should be free.
00:31:23 ►
It should not be controlled by the government. It’s a subversive Jeffersonian constitutional idea of the type a present government wants to destroy entirely,
00:31:31 ►
doesn’t want anybody to hear of or think about.
00:31:34 ►
The basic idea is that there’s eight, quote, circuits, unquote, in the human organism.
00:31:40 ►
Leary liked the word circuits because he was in love with computers very early on.
00:31:44 ►
Leary liked the word circuits because he was in love with computers very early on.
00:31:52 ►
And from the 1970s on, he tries to use cybernetic and computer-type metaphors as much as possible.
00:31:56 ►
Some people object to it on the grounds that they think it’s mechanistic.
00:32:04 ►
And I had a long talk with a naturopath who told me it would make a lot more sense if you said systems instead of circuits. So instead of saying the oral biosurvival circuit,
00:32:07 ►
if you said the oral biosurvival system,
00:32:10 ►
it would fit the organism as a whole more clearly and sound less mechanistic.
00:32:14 ►
And I thought that over, and I tried to write about the eight systems
00:32:19 ►
rather than the eight circuits.
00:32:21 ►
But meanwhile, books of mine in print are talking about the eight circuits,
00:32:24 ►
so most people expect me about the eight circuits so most people
00:32:25 ►
expect me to say eight circuits and so i have this kind of uh drag on my vocabulary
00:32:33 ►
okay so you’ve described the oral bio survival circuit as which has the two polarities infophilia
00:32:41 ►
and infophobia it’s everybody’s on a spectrum somewhere along that line, depending on their early experience.
00:32:47 ►
Between the world is a safe place and the world is a terrible place.
00:32:51 ►
Those are the extremes.
00:32:52 ►
There’s lots of places in between.
00:32:55 ►
You can imprint that this neighborhood is safe, but all other neighborhoods are dangerous.
00:33:00 ►
Just think of it as a line.
00:33:02 ►
One end is total info-philia.
00:33:08 ►
You’re continually looking for new information about everything,
00:33:12 ►
and you’re continually deliriously happy about the new, no matter what it is.
00:33:15 ►
Oh, a new atomic plant? Hey, that sounds groovy.
00:33:19 ►
New pesticides? Yeah.
00:33:22 ►
And the other end is total info-phobia.
00:33:24 ►
It’s new, it’s evil, it’s dangerous, we don’t want it, we’re not going
00:33:25 ►
to take that goddamn vaccination, we’ll have
00:33:27 ►
the witch doctor do a spell and cure the disease
00:33:30 ►
that way, you know, and so on.
00:33:31 ►
And we’re all somewhere on that spectrum between
00:33:34 ►
infophilia and infophobia.
00:33:36 ►
And according to Leary, we
00:33:37 ►
shouldn’t be stuck in one place, we should be able
00:33:39 ►
to move depending on the evidence.
00:33:42 ►
But the standard science would say that
00:33:44 ►
once we have that imprint, that’s where we’re stuck.
00:33:47 ►
Yeah.
00:33:48 ►
And I think that’s pretty true, except I think that Leary is right.
00:33:52 ►
You can change the imprints.
00:33:53 ►
And not just with LSD.
00:33:55 ►
There are other ways of changing the imprints.
00:33:58 ►
So what’s the second circuit?
00:34:00 ►
The second circuit is the anal territorial circuit.
00:34:05 ►
All mammals mark their territories by excretions.
00:34:08 ►
When you take your dog out for a walk, the dog pees on a dozen different places.
00:34:13 ►
That’s not because they don’t have bladder control.
00:34:15 ►
It’s because they have exquisite bladder control.
00:34:18 ►
What they’re doing is marking a territory.
00:34:20 ►
If you made a map of the neighborhood and marked the places that the dog pees,
00:34:24 ►
that’s the territory that dog is claiming
00:34:26 ►
if he sniffs another dog’s urine
00:34:28 ►
on a part of his territory
00:34:30 ►
he’ll pee there extra long
00:34:31 ►
to reiterate his claim to that territory
00:34:34 ►
all mammals do this
00:34:35 ►
as Timothy said in one of his more whimsical moments
00:34:38 ►
the only intelligent way to discuss politics
00:34:41 ►
is on all fours
00:34:42 ►
because it’s all about territorial squabbles.
00:34:45 ►
Who’s in charge around this habitat?
00:34:48 ►
And the anal territorial circuit
00:34:50 ►
is a sort of an up-down at right angles
00:34:54 ►
to the forward back of the oral biosurvival circuit.
00:34:57 ►
You’re either at the top of the hierarchy
00:34:59 ►
and claim most of the territory.
00:35:01 ►
You’re at the bottom and don’t have any territory
00:35:03 ►
and just take directions from those above you or you’re somewhere in between. When you put these two axes together,
00:35:09 ►
the right left oral biosurvival circuit and the uptown anal territorial circuit, you get the
00:35:14 ►
leery interpersonal grid and divide it into four parts. In interpersonal diagnosis, he divides it
00:35:20 ►
into 64 parts. It depends on how much precision you need in diagnosis.
00:35:28 ►
By the time you’ve started to walk around the house and meddle in family politics
00:35:29 ►
and struggle with your siblings and your parents
00:35:31 ►
for how important you’re going to be in the hierarchy,
00:35:35 ►
and you find out where you fit in,
00:35:37 ►
you find out who you can bully and who can bully you
00:35:40 ►
and who you’ve got to submit to
00:35:41 ►
and who you can dominate and so on,
00:35:44 ►
you’ve got this scale on the up-down and you’ve got the submit to and who you can dominate and so on. You’ve got this scale on the up-down,
00:35:47 ►
and you’ve got the forward-back scale of innovation or conservatism.
00:35:51 ►
This makes four quadrants, which Leary calls friendly strength,
00:35:55 ►
which is you have a high status and an innovative personality.
00:36:00 ►
The quadrant below that is friendly weakness,
00:36:04 ►
which is you’re basically willing to accept the new, but you feel very insecure.
00:36:09 ►
And you’re always looking for somebody to give you orders and tell you what to do.
00:36:13 ►
That’s the quadrant that Leary put himself in when he was tested by the California prison system.
00:36:18 ►
So they put him in minimum security.
00:36:21 ►
And then there’s hostile strength which is dominant but not friendly
00:36:28 ►
it’s dominant and somewhat sadistic
00:36:30 ►
leaning toward the egotistic and the narcissistic
00:36:33 ►
and that tends to be conservative
00:36:36 ►
this type of power is afraid to show itself
00:36:40 ►
it needs to dominate but it’s very much afraid of the people it’s dominating
00:36:44 ►
then below that you got hostile weakness It needs to dominate, but it’s very much afraid of the people it’s dominating.
00:36:48 ►
Then below that, you’ve got hostile weakness.
00:36:50 ►
You see them in the tabloids all the time.
00:36:53 ►
They have born-to-lose tattooed on their arms,
00:36:58 ►
and they’ve been accused of crimes so atrocious you can’t believe a human being could do it.
00:37:04 ►
Derek Brain popularized this whole system in a wonderful set of game rules.
00:37:08 ►
Friendly strength, the game rule is is I’m okay. You’re okay
00:37:14 ►
That’s obviously the healthiest the relationship you can have as long as you can maintain it Of course, you can’t maintain it with everybody because some people aren’t okay
00:37:17 ►
The sons of bitches was long as you can maintain I’m okay. You’re okay
00:37:22 ►
You’re in living in a very happy world and then weakness is, I’m not okay, but you’re okay.
00:37:29 ►
The overwhelming majority of people in psychotherapy have that basic quadrant.
00:37:34 ►
They’re not okay, but they’re quite convinced the therapist is okay,
00:37:37 ►
and they’re waiting for him to produce the magic jewel out of the drawer that will cure them all at once.
00:37:42 ►
And all they have to do is please the therapist long enough
00:37:45 ►
and the magic jewel will come out.
00:37:46 ►
Most of them really believe in it, although not that literally.
00:37:50 ►
And then hostile weakness is, I’m not okay, you’re not okay.
00:37:55 ►
That’s why they have the tattoos saying,
00:37:57 ►
born to lose or born to raise hell, et cetera.
00:38:00 ►
And then the mean hostile strength, Eric Burns’ slogan for that game is, I’m okay,
00:38:08 ►
you’re not okay. And that is the favorite game of ideologists of all stripes. The person
00:38:15 ►
is always going around telling everybody else what’s wrong with them and trying to straighten
00:38:20 ►
them out. Never in a kindly way like friendly strength, but always in a morally reproving way.
00:38:27 ►
Now, the first circuit seems to have been known to our ancestors
00:38:32 ►
and projected outward as the moon goddess,
00:38:36 ►
the great white moon goddess with her three aspects.
00:38:39 ►
And that’s why the first day of the week in almost all European languages
00:38:43 ►
is named after the moon goddess.
00:38:46 ►
Monday in English, Montag in German, Lunace in Spanish.
00:38:52 ►
I did this in Amsterdam once with a very multi-lingual class.
00:38:55 ►
We worked our way all around Europe, and it’s always the day of the moon goddess,
00:38:59 ►
which is the mother symbol, the old providing breast.
00:39:04 ►
And Tuesday is Martes in Spanish.
00:39:09 ►
It’s always named after a war god
00:39:11 ►
because it deals with the territorial circuit.
00:39:13 ►
Mardes, it’s always Mars.
00:39:16 ►
Tis was an ancient Anglo-Saxon war god.
00:39:19 ►
The Tuesday is named after.
00:39:21 ►
And so we got the moon goddess and the war gods,
00:39:24 ►
and the next day is
00:39:25 ►
Voltenstag or Wednesday or Mercolay is named after the god of communication. And that circuit is
00:39:33 ►
activated when we first begin to realize all the noises the adults making are a code and we learn
00:39:40 ►
to decipher it and we begin to be able to communicate. And this, I call the time-binding circuit, in honor of Alfred Kojubski.
00:39:49 ►
Leary called it the laryngeal manual circuit.
00:39:52 ►
It has to do with making speech units that communicate to others
00:39:56 ►
and manipulating the world with your hands.
00:39:59 ►
You build a model made out of words or other symbols.
00:40:03 ►
Then you test it by manipulating the world and see if the world fits your model.
00:40:07 ►
You do that just naturally and instinctively.
00:40:10 ►
It’s a genetic program until you get to school,
00:40:13 ►
where they train you to lose all your curiosity
00:40:15 ►
and just memorize the correct answers the teachers give you.
00:40:19 ►
Every child is intensely curious until they get to school.
00:40:23 ►
And the function of school is to kill the curiosity
00:40:25 ►
by telling them there’s one correct answer
00:40:27 ►
and we know it already
00:40:28 ►
and don’t do any thinking of your own.
00:40:30 ►
They stop that by the time you reach the college level
00:40:33 ►
and they allow you to begin thinking then,
00:40:36 ►
unless you go to a Catholic college.
00:40:38 ►
So the third circuit is kind of a thinking circuit?
00:40:41 ►
Yeah, it’s in terms of Jungian psychology,
00:40:44 ►
the first circuit is sensation, the second circuit is jungian psychology the first circuit is sensation the
00:40:46 ►
second circuit is feeling and the third circuit is reason and freudian it’s the oral stage the
00:40:54 ►
anal stage and the latency period anyway with the third circuit we have a revolution the first two
00:41:02 ►
circuits tend to be basically conservative they keep repeating the same patterns over and over throughout history.
00:41:08 ►
That’s the major theme of Finnegan’s Wake,
00:41:10 ►
how these first two circuits throughout history continue to produce the same patterns over and over.
00:41:15 ►
Cain and Abel, Napoleon and Wellington, it’s all the same story.
00:41:19 ►
It’s always the two brothers trying to kill each other.
00:41:22 ►
This is an evolutionary relative success for most mammals
00:41:25 ►
and most vertebrates, as a matter of fact.
00:41:28 ►
But the third circuit, by letting the information be transmitted across generations,
00:41:33 ►
creates this information acceleration,
00:41:36 ►
which gets faster and faster as it goes along.
00:41:40 ►
Koshypsky called that the time-binding function,
00:41:43 ►
and he said it’s what differentiates people from other mammals.
00:41:47 ►
And once you get into the variable and symbolic world,
00:41:50 ►
if you only learn words, you stay in one reality tunnel or belief system.
00:41:56 ►
I always abbreviate belief system as BS.
00:41:59 ►
I think a very useful abbreviation coined by my friend David J. Brown.
00:42:05 ►
When you learn mathematics, you find there’s a variety of symbol systems.
00:42:08 ►
If you can think in both words and mathematics,
00:42:11 ►
you’ve got a lot more freedom than people who only think in words.
00:42:14 ►
If you’re good at visualizing, you have another semantic circuit
00:42:17 ►
that word people don’t have.
00:42:20 ►
Einstein, for instance, considered a great mathematician,
00:42:23 ►
said all of his ideas came to him as images first,
00:42:25 ►
then he got the equations, and the third step was getting the words to explain the equations.
00:42:31 ►
This acceleration of information leads to faster and faster change,
00:42:37 ►
which is very disagreeable to the people in high positions of authority
00:42:41 ►
who have this burden of omniscience that they’re supposed to be
00:42:45 ►
doing all the thinking, perceiving, smelling, sensing, hearing for the whole society because
00:42:51 ►
everybody else is just supposed to follow orders.
00:42:54 ►
With this burden of omniscience and information doubling all the time, they get more and more
00:42:58 ►
out of contact with objective reality in the sense of what’s going on in the sensory, sensual,
00:43:03 ►
space-time continuum and so they
00:43:06 ►
more and more are making their decisions based on the basis of things they learned when they were
00:43:11 ►
in college 40 years ago or things they heard from older politicians before they got into it
00:43:17 ►
and everybody’s afraid to tell them when they’re wrong because that’s the way you get a pink slip
00:43:21 ►
and wind up on the unemployment lines so So we’ve got the acceleration factor of information
00:43:27 ►
and the deceleration factor of the authoritarian structure,
00:43:30 ►
which doesn’t like the acceleration factor and keeps trying to slow it down.
00:43:35 ►
And that, to me, is the basic dialectic of history,
00:43:37 ►
information attempting to break free and ruling elites
00:43:40 ►
trying to stop the flood of information from unseating them
00:43:44 ►
and creating a world they can’t manage because they can’t understand.
00:43:49 ►
So back to Circuit 3, how does that affect us personally?
00:43:54 ►
Well, it gives us the capacity to perpetual learning
00:43:57 ►
and perpetual intake of new information and transformation of ourselves and our societies.
00:44:03 ►
And it also tends to trap us in the cocoon of our favorite symbolism
00:44:07 ►
so that we can’t think outside that.
00:44:10 ►
Then our BS or our belief system becomes a set of blinders
00:44:14 ►
which keeps us from letting any new signals in.
00:44:17 ►
If you’re talking about abortion and somebody keeps saying baby killers,
00:44:23 ►
you can’t get anywhere because they have created
00:44:25 ►
a semantic grid in which the fetus is by definition equal to a baby and nobody has claimed this that
00:44:32 ►
about any other species nobody claims that an acorn is an oak tree or an egg is a hen
00:44:37 ►
but for some reason in the human class of life the the fetal form is equivalent to the
00:44:42 ►
post-birth form i think that’s one of the more
00:44:45 ►
remarkable metaphysical ideas floating around in our society so you were saying that the um
00:44:52 ►
first circuit gives us a forward backward orientation and the uh second circuit gives
00:44:59 ►
us an up and down orientation is that that correct? Yeah. And so this third circuit orients us how?
00:45:05 ►
The third circuit seems to correlate with the fact that the majority of the population
00:45:09 ►
uses the left brain much more than the right brain
00:45:13 ►
and uses the right hand much more than the left hand.
00:45:16 ►
The left brain is connected to the right hand,
00:45:18 ►
the right brain is connected to the left hand.
00:45:21 ►
And this creates a basic left-right polarity in our thinking.
00:45:24 ►
And when you put together
00:45:25 ►
the forward back of the oral biosurvival circuit the up down of the anal territorial circuit
00:45:31 ►
and the right left of the time binding circuit you got three-dimensional space which is the
00:45:36 ►
first type of space mathematically organized by euclid or somebody writing under the name euclid
00:45:42 ►
or somebody earlier that euclid ripped off or whatever.
00:45:49 ►
And that seemed to be the only real space up until the 19th century when mathematicians discovered other kinds of space.
00:45:52 ►
The reason it seems like the only real space is because it’s the way our nervous system stacks information.
00:45:58 ►
And that’s why the third day of the week is the day of the god of communication,
00:46:04 ►
Mercury or Wotanan as the case may be
00:46:07 ►
so where do we go on the fourth day of the week
00:46:11 ►
or in the fourth circuit?
00:46:13 ►
well Thursday, Thortog
00:46:15 ►
so is a thunder god and a father god
00:46:18 ►
this is the domestication circuit
00:46:22 ►
this is the socio-sexual circuit.
00:46:25 ►
At puberty, the DNA, which has been sending out RNA messenger molecules,
00:46:30 ►
making changes every day of your life probably,
00:46:33 ►
but at puberty it sends out a whole bunch of new RNA messenger molecules.
00:46:38 ►
Your whole body changes.
00:46:40 ►
And since the mind and the body are one system,
00:46:43 ►
the organism as a whole, the nervous system and all of its links to the endocrine and the body are one system, the organism as a whole,
00:46:45 ►
the nervous system and all of its links to the endocrine and the muscular and other systems,
00:46:50 ►
suddenly you find yourself the bewildered possessor of a new body and a new personality
00:46:58 ►
for whom the only important question in the universe is, where do I get laid?
00:47:03 ►
And that remains the most important question until you’re in your 40s,
00:47:07 ►
at least sometimes until you’re in your 80s, I hear.
00:47:11 ►
And to show how imprinting works on the Fourth Circuit,
00:47:16 ►
there’s a case in Masters Johnson, human sexual dysfunction.
00:47:20 ►
A guy who was about to make out for the first time in his life in the back seat of a car.
00:47:26 ►
At the crucial moment, a cop flashed his light in the window and said, what are you two doing in
00:47:30 ►
there? And this guy remained impotent until he arrived at the Master’s Johnson Clinic for
00:47:36 ►
re-imprinting. They managed to re-imprint him and create normal male potency. But he was impotent
00:47:42 ►
for, I think it was 20 years before he showed up at the master
00:47:45 ►
johnson clinic and we all tend to have our own favorite sexual profile depending on the
00:47:52 ►
incidents around our initial orgasm and mating experiences ergo we all seem a little bit queer
00:47:59 ►
to one another i call the fourth circuit the guilt circuit because every society has its own sexual
00:48:06 ►
rules. Whatever tribe you’re born into, you got to learn the local sexual rules and obey them,
00:48:12 ►
or at least pretend to obey them, or if you can’t obey them, try not to get caught.
00:48:17 ►
Most people do not have exactly the imprint desired by their societies. Most people spend
00:48:22 ►
most of their time trying to conceal from their neighbors what their actual sexual life is like.
00:48:27 ►
So the Fourth Circuit determines
00:48:29 ►
how we deal socially.
00:48:32 ►
How we deal with social and sexual relations.
00:48:37 ►
And of course,
00:48:38 ►
if your imprints and conditioning
00:48:40 ►
are very close to what society demands,
00:48:44 ►
you’ll have a happy life if they’re a little bit
00:48:46 ►
off kilter you’ll consider yourself neurotic and anybody who realizes your problems will consider
00:48:52 ►
you neurotic if they’re way off kilter you’re not neurotic anymore you’ve become a goddamn
00:48:58 ►
pervert meanwhile you’re stuck with these imprints and these genetic programs and so on and all the
00:49:03 ►
things that are going to make up our personality.
00:49:06 ►
And most of the taboos in most societies don’t make any sense at all.
00:49:12 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:49:15 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:49:21 ►
Wow, what can I say about that cascade of interesting ideas?
00:49:26 ►
And before either of us forgets it, I want to remind you about that little exercise Bob talked about at the beginning of this interview.
00:49:34 ►
If you don’t remember it, I think you’ll find it worth your time to re-listen to how it works and give it a try.
00:49:41 ►
With a little practice, I’ve found that it can produce something akin to a little mini-trip in On the Natch at that.
00:49:48 ►
So you might want to check that out, think about it, give it a try.
00:49:52 ►
And I have to say that I definitely agree with Bob when he said,
00:49:57 ►
So what you experience tomorrow, if it entirely fits your beliefs today, it’s because you’re not paying attention.
00:50:04 ►
In other words, what you believe today, it’s because you’re not paying attention.
00:50:09 ►
In other words, what you believe today, you may not want to believe tomorrow.
00:50:15 ►
It’s taken me a long time and a lot of concentration in how I select my words,
00:50:20 ►
but I’ve been making a real effort to eliminate all of my beliefs.
00:50:23 ►
Instead, I operate on a box full of assumptions, but should one of them prove to be no longer operable, I simply throw it out and form a new one to replace it.
00:50:32 ►
Now, this may only be a word game, but word games are what we’re all about, aren’t we?
00:50:37 ►
In any event, it just feels better when I say I’m changing my assumptions, mainly because that doesn’t seem as earth-shaking as changing
00:50:46 ►
a belief.
00:50:48 ►
And I’ll bet that you also sat up and took notice when he said, every child is intensely
00:50:54 ►
curious until they get to school, and the function of school is to kill the curiosity.
00:51:00 ►
Then he went on to say, at least until you go to college, and then they allow you to
00:51:04 ►
begin thinking again, unless you go to a Catholic college.
00:51:08 ►
And as a graduate of a Catholic college, I feel I have the right to say amen to that.
00:51:14 ►
All puns intended, by the way.
00:51:18 ►
And did you notice that mention Bob made of some research that was done with autistic children?
00:51:23 ►
mentioned Bob made of some research that was done with autistic children.
00:51:27 ►
Well, like you, I immediately thought about Gary Fisher and the work that he did with autistic and seriously disturbed children.
00:51:31 ►
We’ve talked with him about that here in the salon a couple times.
00:51:35 ►
So I called Gary to ask if perhaps Wilson was aware of his work,
00:51:39 ►
which seemed kind of unusual since the results of Gary’s research has never been published.
00:51:45 ►
Now, I don’t have time today to tell you everything Gary had to say,
00:51:49 ►
other than the fact that there was a woman researcher at the time
00:51:53 ►
who gave LSD to some autistic children at bedtime.
00:51:57 ►
And she reported that it definitely did not help them sleep.
00:52:02 ►
I plan on looking into this a little more someday,
00:52:06 ►
but it seems to me that if that researcher had ever tried LSD herself,
00:52:10 ►
it would have become quite obvious that LSD isn’t a sleep aid.
00:52:15 ►
But we’ll leave those stories for another podcast.
00:52:19 ►
In fact, I just finished typing the report that Gary wrote about his work back in 1963, and after he’s had
00:52:27 ►
a chance to proofread it, I’ll be sitting down with Gary and Dr. Charlie Grobe to discuss the
00:52:32 ►
results of this really amazing research, and it’ll be the first time in public this has been
00:52:37 ►
discussed, as far as I know. Hopefully that’ll take place in the next month or so. Now, let’s see, what else is there I wanted to say today?
00:52:47 ►
Oh yeah, Terrence McKenna.
00:52:49 ►
As you know, last week I said that I’ve been receiving some complaints about playing too many McKenna talks,
00:52:56 ►
and that I was going to give him a rest for a little while.
00:53:00 ►
Well, this caused quite an unexpected surge in email asking for yet more of the good bard.
00:53:08 ►
Well, never fear, you’ll be hearing from him again in a month or so.
00:53:13 ►
But for now, there are some other really great talks that I’d like to play for you, like the one we just heard.
00:53:19 ►
In fact, I’m rapidly becoming hooked on Ra, or Bob as he’d like to be called.
00:53:25 ►
Before I started playing his talks here in the salon, I’d only known him through his books.
00:53:29 ►
But I now recognize what so many of you have been telling me for years.
00:53:34 ►
And that is that he’s really in the same league as Terrence McKenna when it comes to the spoken word.
00:53:41 ►
And now I see what you mean, and I agree.
00:53:44 ►
And now I see what you mean, and I agree.
00:53:50 ►
Now before I go, I want to mention a few other podcasts that you might find interesting.
00:53:56 ►
To begin with, there are some interesting podcasts that Tom Barbalet is doing,
00:53:59 ►
including some live podcasts that you can get involved in.
00:54:03 ►
There’s Martin Ball’s In Theogenic Evolution, KMO’s Sea Realm,
00:54:07 ►
and Dr. Dave’s Shrinkwrap Radio podcast.
00:54:13 ►
And I’ll put links to all of those along with the program notes for this podcast so you can read more about them.
00:54:22 ►
But I also want to mention that whole family of podcasts over at the Cannabis Podcast Network, which you can find at dopefiend.co.uk. You’ve already heard me talk about some of their programs,
00:54:26 ►
like Max Freakout’s Psychonautica,
00:54:28 ►
where lately I’ve been able to hear many of the talks
00:54:31 ►
from the recent World Psychedelic Forum that was held in Switzerland this year.
00:54:36 ►
And then there’s BB’s Bungalow and Lefty’s Lounge,
00:54:39 ►
both of which I eagerly look forward to.
00:54:42 ►
Lefty each week and BB once a month.
00:54:45 ►
And now I’ve started listening to Pothead’s Coffee Shop,
00:54:48 ►
which is a new program that’s already hooked me over there.
00:54:52 ►
So there’s some great stuff coming out of the Cannabis Podcast Network.
00:54:57 ►
And as for their flagship program, The Dope Cast with The Dope Fiend,
00:55:01 ►
well, what can I say about that great show?
00:55:04 ►
I guess if I tell you that I’ve been archiving The Dope Fiend, well, what can I say about that great show? I guess if I tell you that I’ve been archiving the Dope Fiend’s programs
00:55:08 ►
on DVDs for my grandchildren to listen to one day,
00:55:11 ►
you’ll get an idea of how highly I value the information,
00:55:15 ►
and most importantly, the advice that the Dope Fiend passes along each week.
00:55:20 ►
Even though he’s less than half my age,
00:55:23 ►
I consider the Dope Fiend to be one of our tribal elders
00:55:26 ►
he’s a psychonaut of the highest degree
00:55:28 ►
and we all owe him and his merry little band of podcasters
00:55:32 ►
a huge thank you
00:55:33 ►
now there’s one more podcast that I want to mention
00:55:36 ►
and even though I normally don’t do so
00:55:39 ►
until they’ve produced at least 10 programs
00:55:41 ►
so that we’ll know they’ll be around for a while
00:55:44 ►
but my friends from Chicago Sancho and Cody, are producing a show that I think is going to be around.
00:55:51 ►
It’s called Black Light in the Attic, and although they are still in the learning curve stage of podcasting,
00:55:58 ►
I’m here to tell you that they put a tremendous amount of work into their programs,
00:56:02 ►
and their post-production work is some of the best around.
00:56:06 ►
One of the things I like about the shows that Cody, Sancho, Pothead, Lefty, and Bebe are doing
00:56:11 ►
is that they contain a lot of variety.
00:56:14 ►
You know, I realize that the psychedelic salons, Psychonautica, and the Sea Realm
00:56:18 ►
are pretty heavy head trips,
00:56:20 ►
and they probably aren’t going to attract many listeners
00:56:23 ►
who aren’t already involved in the psychedelic community.
00:56:27 ►
Let’s face it, you have to be a very rare individual to spend your time listening to
00:56:31 ►
a lecture or an interview when you could instead be listening to some great music.
00:56:37 ►
So I applaud all of these efforts at finding the others, and I apologize to you podcasters
00:56:43 ►
who are also doing the same thing, but whose
00:56:45 ►
programs I’ve not yet had a chance to hear.
00:56:48 ►
I know that there are now a lot of choices for our community when it comes to podcasts,
00:56:53 ►
and I’ll do my best to spread the news about your programs whenever I can.
00:56:58 ►
Next week, I hope to have time to mention a few books I’ve been reading lately, but
00:57:03 ►
if you want to get a head start, I highly, very highly recommend a book by Paul Devereaux titled The Long Trip, A Prehistory of Psychedelia.
00:57:21 ►
I’d better get back to work on my book.
00:57:24 ►
So I’m going to have to say goodbye.
00:57:37 ►
And as always, I’ll close this podcast by saying that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are available for your use under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Like 3.0 license.
00:57:45 ►
And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
00:57:48 ►
And that’s also where you’re going to find
00:57:49 ►
the program notes for these podcasts
00:57:52 ►
and the links to the other podcasts
00:57:54 ►
I was just talking about.
00:57:56 ►
So for now, this is Lorenzo
00:57:58 ►
signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:58:00 ►
Be well, my
00:58:02 ►
friends.
00:58:02 ►
Be well, my friends.