159 - Shulgin & Forte at Horizons 2008″

Program Notes

Guest speakers: Robert Forte, Ann Shulgin, Sasha Shulgin

“I think it’s extraordinarily important, again, the context of set and setting that we use these drugs in, if we’re going to succeed in the Psychedelic Renaissance, is something that needs to be underlined again and again.” –Robert Forte

“I would say that, arguably, the oldest use of psychedelics in our Western culture, let’s say, is the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were a psychedelic drug ceremony that occurred every year for 2,000 years in ancient Greece.” –Robert Forte

“Using appropriate scientific methodologies and naturalistic observations, [Timothy Leary] showed that psychedelic drugs were safe. He showed their clinical effectiveness. He showed their effects on enhancing creativity.” –Robert Forte

“Personally, I think my most keen friend amongst the various phenethylamines and alkaloids I’ve worked with and synthesized has been 2CB. To me, it’s a vary favorable, warm, and very comfortable compound.” –Sasha Shulgin

[MDMA] is the most remarkable insight drug, and is a suburb tool for psychotherapy.” –Ann Shulgin

“Any drug, including MDMA, the most it can do is open up what’s inside you already.” –Ann Shulgin

“When I have not had a good psychedelic trip for, let’s say, six months, I begin to feel that I’m beginning to get out of balance. … I think that instead of regarding psychedelics as a drain on the system, frankly, they are my favorite vitamin. That’s the effect they have on me.” –Ann Shulgin

“And for all I know there are three, or four, or seven lives going on that I don’t remember either awake or asleep, but I feel consciousness is my living relationship with the world.” –Sasha Shulgin

“My belief is that when you get involved in a psychedelic experience you are in a communication with part of yourself that you’ve given up trying to communicate with or forgotten about communicating with. So it’s not something that’s imposed by a drug. It’s something [that is already there and] the drug allows you to experience and to function with. So I look upon it as being a revealing thing from within myself, rather than a thing imposed upon myself by an external drug.” –Sasha Shulgin

Horizons: Perspectives on Psychedelics
(2008 Conference)
Horizons Conference audio online
at the Internet Archive
The Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics
“Ghosts I” from Nine Inch Nails
The first 9 tracks from the Ghosts I-IV collection available as high-quality, DRM-free MP3s, including the complete PDF.

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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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

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Well, I guess that by now you’ve figured out the fact that I’ve slipped back into a more relaxed schedule for a bit.

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There are a whole lot of reasons for this, but mainly I need time to do a few other projects I’m involved in,

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one of which is working with Dennis Berry and Bruce Dahmer to help find a permanent home for the Timothy Leary Archives.

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And I’ll have more to say about that in my next podcast.

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Another reason that I don’t feel quite so pressed about getting a podcast out every seven days is that there are now a lot of other great podcasts for the psychedelic community.

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And by listening to some of them, I almost feel like I’m right here with you in the salon.

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And then there are all the forums over on thegrowreport.com

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that are building our geographically widespread community

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into a much more tightly knit group on the net.

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But don’t worry, I won’t let more than two weeks go without a new program.

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And who knows, there may be spurts of energy that come my way from time to time,

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and I’ll do a couple a week for a while or something.

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But hey, it’s the psychedelics salon after all, and I don’t know about you,

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but I’ve never found anything having to do with psychedelics to be very predictable.

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But one thing that I have found to be predictable is that our community hangs together

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even when times are tough.

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And from what I hear,

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the financial news from all around the world

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is pretty glum.

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Yet, in spite of all the uncertainty

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going around these past few weeks,

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John F. and James P.

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still had enough faith in the world

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to send donations to the salon to help with the expenses associated with producing and distributing these podcasts.

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So thank you very much, John and James.

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Your help is most definitely appreciated.

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And now let’s get on with today’s program.

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As you know, a while back I mentioned what was then the Upcoming Horizons Conference in New York City, I guess.

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Well, it turns out that two of our fellow salonners, Patrick and Carl, both of whom also have been past donors here too,

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well, both of them attended the conference after hearing about it here in the salon.

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And last week, Carl sent me an email with a link to the Internet Archive, where all

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of the talks have been posted under a Creative Commons license.

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And I’ll have more to say about this very interesting conference at the end of today’s

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program.

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But first, I want to play two selections from this conference for you, and then you can

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go to the Internet Archive and

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download any of the other talks that may be of interest to you, and I’ll give you the

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names of those speakers here at the end of this program as well.

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Right now, though, I’m going to play selections from two of the presentations to give you

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a little idea of some of the things that are being talked about at these kinds of events.

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give you a little idea of some of the things that are being talked about at these kinds of events.

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I have actually edited both of these selections down just a bit,

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mainly by cutting out the dead space where an audience member’s long question couldn’t actually be heard very clearly.

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Now, the first talk I want to play for you is by Robert Forte, who I’ve known for quite a while now.

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It seems that the two of us keep bumping into one another in the strangest places,

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like an island in Canada, a salon in Venice Beach, or at one of John Hanna’s conferences.

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And in case you didn’t know it, Robert is also the publisher of several important psychedelic books and is also the editor of Entheogens and the Future of Religion, which is one of

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my all-time favorite collections of psychedelic essays, and it also includes Terence McKenna’s

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brilliant piece, Psychedelic Society.

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Actually, I think that’s probably his best essay, at least it’s my favorite.

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So, without any further ado, here is Robert Forte speaking at the 2008 Horizons Conference,

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Perspectives on Psychedelics.

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Let me say what a pleasure it really is to be here.

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It feels really like a homecoming to me because, actually, it was exactly 30 years ago, perhaps to the day

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that I began my work in this field. I was a student of religion at Columbia University

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uptown and I was interested in religion because I had begun the practice of meditation. Actually

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I began the practice of meditation to improve my golf game.

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And it worked so well that I became interested in the origin and the history of these techniques and so began to study religion and Indian religion.

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And I think if word got out that golf was actually a gateway drug,

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then maybe we would find a problem with the Republican Party. Of course, on the other hand, if it could be discovered that small doses of psychedelic

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drugs actually improve one’s ability to play golf, perhaps we would see a real reclassification

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of the drugs.

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So Daniel was so effective, I think, in covering so many things that I had to run home after

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his talk and re-prepare some of my notes maybe to get a certain continuity here. Again, I want to just touch upon

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this Irish gene I think is so interesting that in our modern history of psychedelic drugs, we’ve had

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Timothy Leary, and then we had Dennis McKenna, and now we have Daniel Pinchbeck. And I hope I’m not

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offending Daniel by comparing him to Leary,

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who he made a sort of disparaging comment about,

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because I want to say a couple things about Tim and the method behind his madness.

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And I see that there’s a kind of lineage in these people that become spokesmen for our movement

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and that they keep getting more refined, more intelligent, and I hope more effective.

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So it was that first day of class at Columbia where we were learning about Indian religion

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and our professor mentioned the Vedas.

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And many of you know that the Vedas are the oldest body of writings in Indian religion.

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All of Indian mysticism and religion comes out of the Vedas.

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in Indian religion, all of Indian mysticism and religion comes out of the Vedas.

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And he told us that the oldest of the Rig Veda, the oldest of the Vedas is the Rig Veda.

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And the Rig Veda is a set of hymns, poems that are entirely devoted to the plant, the God and the drink, Soma, which provided visions of the cosmic order and instructions for humanity

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on how to live.

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And something shifted, whether it was the climate or whether it was political.

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We don’t really know, but Soma disappeared.

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And in India, they needed to devise other ways to come up with these ecstatic experiences.

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And this is the origin of meditation and yoga and so forth.

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Now, our professor on this day mentioned that the most convincing theory for the identity of Soma

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was that produced by a man named Gordon Wasson, an amateur mycologist and Wall Street banker,

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who has proven to the satisfaction of most endologists and historians

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of India that it was a psychedelic mushroom. I think he said hallucinogenic mushroom.

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And that was a real major paradigm shift for me because although, of course, I had known about

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psychedelic drugs, I had never heard anyone that I respected attribute any significance to them.

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anyone that I respected attribute any significance to them.

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You know, I grew up, I’m 51 years old, so I just kind of missed the 60s,

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and really all I saw about psychedelic drugs was them used in a recreational context in what seemed to me to be a trivial and sort of destructive way.

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And then here was this professor who was suggesting that, in fact,

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they were at the origin of what I had known from my own experience

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were some of the most simple and most profound psychotherapeutic and spiritual practices on the planet.

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So I remember very clearly that that day I left the class and I went and I began reading.

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I went to the bookstore across the street from Columbia

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and picked up a copy of The Joyous Cosmology by Alan Watts and Timothy Leary.

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And it really set me, and I just kept reading and reading and reading.

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And I didn’t have my first experience until about a year later after a month of meditation in a Buddhist center.

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I think I mentioned that because I think it’s extraordinarily important.

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Again, the context, the set and setting that we use these drugs in.

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And if we’re going to succeed in this psychedelic renaissance, you know,

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that’s just something that I think needs to be underlined again and again.

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So this was not, of course, my first interest in the subject.

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My first interest in the subject went back to 1968.

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I’ll never forget.

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I was in fifth grade, and it was current events day.

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We had to bring something in, and as I was going out the door,

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there was a copy of Look Magazine on the table.

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And I grabbed it and brought it in, and Look Magazine had LSD on the cover.

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So I brought it in to my fifth grade class, and my teacher, Helen McCloy, the only indication

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that the 1960s happened in my community, Woodcliffe Lake, New Jersey, not very far from here,

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I asked her, what is this LSD?

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What does LSD stand for?

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She kind of had this little sly smile, and she said, let’s save democracy.

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Of course, that just went right over my little 12-year-old head,

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but I mention it because, you know, ever since I’ve been interested in this subject,

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these two themes, the religious and the political, have been of great concern to me.

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Before I get into all that, I want to just tell a story or two

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that may say a little bit about the ancient history of psychedelic drugs

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and help define where we are today.

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The first of these is a story called When the Waters Were Changed.

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It’s a story I picked up in the wonderful book Tales of the Dervishes by Indries Shaw.

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I’m going to read this.

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Once upon a time, Kadir, I may be saying that wrong.

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I don’t know if Julie’s still here to correct me.

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Once upon a time, Kadir, a teacher of Moses,

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called upon mankind with a warning.

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At a certain date, he said,

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all the water in the world

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that had not been specifically hoarded would disappear.

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It would then be renewed with a different water,

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which would drive men mad

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only one man listened to the meaning of this advice

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he collected water and went to a secure place

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where he stored it

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and waited for the other water to change its character

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on the appointed day the stream stopped running

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the wells went dry

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and the man who had listened, seeing

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this happening, went to his retreat and drank his preserved water.

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What he saw from his security, the waterfalls again began to flow.

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This man descended upon the other sons of men.

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He found that they were thinking and talking in an entirely different way than from before,

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yet they had no memory of what had happened or of having been warned.

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When he tried to talk to them, he realized that they thought he was mad

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and they showed hostility or compassion, not understanding.

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At first he drank none of the new water,

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but went back to his concealment to draw on his supplies every day.

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new water but went back to his concealment to draw on his supplies every day. Finally, however,

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he took the decision to drink the new water because he could not bear the loneliness of living,

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behaving, and thinking in a different way from everybody else. He drank the new water and became like the rest. Then he forgot about his own store of special water, and his fellows began to look upon him as a madman who had miraculously been restored to sanity.

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The second story I want to tell is a shortened version of Plato’s famous story,

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The Allegory of the Cave.

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Perhaps you know this.

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This is in the Republic, and it’s about a dialogue with Socrates,

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This is in the Republic, and it’s about a dialogue with Socrates,

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and many people say that this is a story about Plato’s or Aristotle,

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Socrates’ initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries.

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Imagine an underground cavern in which there sits,

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chained to their seats, a number of inhabitants.

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They’ve been there their entire lives.

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In the back of the cave, there’s a fire.

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In front of the fire, a puppeteer playing with marionettes who are dancing puppets in front of the fire.

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All these people who are chained to their seats their entire life

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only know the shadows on the wall in front of them

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until one day one man manages to get free from the chains

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and turns around and sees the fire

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and gets out of the cave and comes up and sees the real world.

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Out of compassion for his brothers and sisters,

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he returns into the cave and tries to tell them what’s really going on.

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As they have no experience and no knowledge

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that can validate what this man is saying,

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they think he too is crazy

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and they kill him. So I’m very happy to see, I can’t see him right now, my old friend Sasha

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Shulgin. I thought I heard him laugh back there. And I understand there’s a documentary film being

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made about Sasha and it’s really about time because of all the people that I’ve known in

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this field, Sasha is really one of the most courageous and brilliant and funny and important ones, so I’m very glad there’s a

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film being made of him.

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I’m mentioning him now because I recall a very important talk that Sasha gave at the,

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it was either at the Humanistic Psychology Conference in 1984 in Boston, or it was at

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the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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But Sasha was one of many psychedelic scholars and activists who have pointed out these very

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interesting coincidences or synchronicities between discoveries and developments in psychedelic

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drug history and developments in nuclear science, nuclear radiation,

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that we see this kind of balancing effect going on in our culture.

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You know, the most dramatic example is perhaps that Albert Hoffman discovers LSD,

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as you all know, sort of accidentally, just six months after the success of the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago.

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Science, on one hand, now has the power to basically tear matter asunder,

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and at the same time, as if nature is somehow balancing herself in an accidental situation over in Switzerland,

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this man has a peculiar presentiment, he calls it,

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when he wakes up to investigate this molecule that he discovered five years earlier.

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And now science has a means to kind of put nature back together again

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to provide mankind and humanity with this unitive mystical experience.

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Many scholars have commented on this.

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I think it was maybe Aldous Huxley who first called LSD the atom bomb to the soul.

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Frank Barron, who was my teacher, and Timothy Leary’s initiator,

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was another one who had devoted his career to somehow trying to counter this savage,

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destructive property that man had now with the atom bomb

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by his interest in creativity and in psychedelic drug research.

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Daniels mentioned this in his work.

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Leary has.

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Lots of people have called this out.

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So I want to mention this because if indeed we’re having a psychedelic renaissance, and it seems that we are,

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it would be no surprise in this context because the crisis that we face now on the earth, whether you’re tuned into the environmental crisis, the financial crisis,

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Daniel or Terrence’s 2012 scenario, or if you’re like me,

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concerned with the profound psychological and political crisis that is apparent

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by the fact that still nearly half of Americans think that Arabs attack the World Trade Center

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when it’s plainly obvious to millions of people throughout the world

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and thousands of scientists in this country that that story is patently false,

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couldn’t possibly be true.

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Or, as Terence McKenna puts it in my first book, Entheogens and the Future of Religion,

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maybe you can tell by just looking around you that the shit will soon hit the fan.

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We are living in unusual times.

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I find this coincidentia positorum, a phrase used by my professor, Mircea Eliade,

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who maybe you know if you’ve read in history of religion at all,

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this meaning coincidence of opposites.

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So very interesting and long history in terms of

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psychedelic drugs in Western culture. In fact, I would say that arguably the oldest record,

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the oldest use of psychedelics in our Western culture, let’s say, is the Eleusinian Mysteries,

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which I’m going to talk in some detail about. the Licinian Mysteries were a psychedelic drug ceremony that occurred every year for 2,000 years in ancient Greece.

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This was considered the most important event in your lifetime

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if you lived in classical antiquity.

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It was Cicero who said at the end of the Roman Empire,

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although Athens brought forth numerous divine things,

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yet she never created anything nobler than those sublime mysteries from which we have advanced from a barbarous and rustic life to a civilized one, so that we not only live more joyfully, but also die with better hope.

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I think it’s interesting to compare these mysteries and this myth of creation to our Judeo-Christian Islamic culture, all

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of which, of course, emerge out of the same Old Testament. It’s important, I think, to

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examine this myth in the context of our discussions about psychedelic drug policy and research.

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As Goethe put it, we cannot solve the problems of the world, but to find out where the problems

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begin and then to take our stand within the limits of the intellig, but to find out where the problems begin, and then to take

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our stand within the limits of the intelligible.

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It seems to me that the authoritarian, dominator, anti-nature, sexist culture of death that

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defines and seeks to confine our spirit is laid out in this peculiar creation story of

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Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

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your creation story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

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Beautiful garden is created and Adam is put into it.

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And then he becomes lonely and Eve is given over to him.

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And there they are in this garden and God says,

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you can eat anything, you can do anything you want here except eat this fruit of this tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

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Another coincidentia

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positorum. So the serpent comes around and tempts Eve. Eve says, no, no, no, we can’t eat that.

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We’ll die. God said we’ll die. And the serpent says, well, God is lying. You won’t die. You’ll

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have a psychedelic experience. Your eyes will be opened. You’ll be

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free. And so they eat the fruit. And what happens? Well, the serpent is right. God’s lying. They

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don’t die. Not for another 900 years. They were following their constitutional right to freedom of religion. And they ended up being cursed for all time.

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Now, when we compare this story to the model of the Eleusinian mysteries,

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the myth and the mysteries of Eleusis,

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we see, I think, what we have in this culture is a need for a recontextualizing,

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a new set and setting, a new mythology that will define psychedelic drugs

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and give them a context that we can use them in.

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And so the Eleusinian Mysteries were a ritual reenactment of a story that’s told in the Homeric hymn to Demeter.

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As you may recall, Persephone, the goddess of grain and daughter of the earth, was kidnapped by the lord of the underworld.

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So enraged and despondent that Demeter was, she threatened to destroy the earth was kidnapped by the Lord of the underworld. So enraged and despondent that Demeter was,

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she threatened to destroy the earth

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and the whole race of mortals and all the gods.

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And so this dire crisis, this dire planetary crisis

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was about to basically end the world

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until Hermes, the trickster spirit, intervened

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and secured the release of Persephone. And so joyous

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was Demeter for the return of her daughter, I interpret that as the return of her future,

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that she granted humanity a gift, these mysteries, these mysteries that were based upon a sacred

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drink, the kikion, that has been identified, again,

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to the satisfaction of many scholars and Greek historians as a concoction derived from ergot,

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which contains substances from the same source as LSD.

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Taking the sting out of death has a very, very profound effect on one’s world view.

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It brings to mind a story about Albert Einstein, who was once asked if he had one question to ask of the universe, what would it be?

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And Albert thought about that for a minute and he said, is it friendly?

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Is it a friendly universe?

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is it friendly? Is it a friendly universe?

00:22:29 ►

This is a prescient remark for a physicist, a very psychologically sophisticated remark because psychologists have subsequently found that the difference between the authoritarian personality

00:22:35 ►

and the personality that is going to thrive and enable a democratic society

00:22:40 ►

is based on this difference in worldview.

00:22:44 ►

People who perceive the world as threatening or harsh or unfriendly are going to be inclined

00:22:51 ►

toward kind of authoritarian politics, whereas democracy is something that requires an individual

00:22:57 ►

to have a profound sense of meaning within themselves and understands this interesting

00:23:04 ►

equation of the microcosm and the macrocosm.

00:23:08 ►

This is, in fact, the essence of the method of Timothy Leary

00:23:14 ►

and why he so dramatically and overzealously popularized psychedelic drugs.

00:23:20 ►

Now, I realize that this conference is largely meant to encourage

00:23:24 ►

psychedelic research within

00:23:26 ►

the university and I am all in favor of that and I want to I want to try to kind of finesse my

00:23:31 ►

comments here by by acknowledging the importance of Timothy Leary at the same time I appreciate

00:23:38 ►

that in order to get these substances legitimately used in the institutions in our society where they need

00:23:45 ►

to be used, we need to take politics out of this.

00:23:50 ►

Timothy Zeal certainly did produce and encourage this backlash of repressive legislation that

00:23:59 ►

has put many of our friends in jail, and he made a great many very serious blunders.

00:24:04 ►

But at the same time, I think that we’re cheating ourselves and not really getting the right

00:24:09 ►

whole picture of what’s going on here in contemporary society unless we acknowledge a little bit

00:24:15 ►

about what’s going on inside of his head.

00:24:19 ►

So Timothy Leary came out of a tradition of psychologists in the 1950s that were very concerned with this authoritarian personality.

00:24:29 ►

In fact, it’s fair to say that the entire discipline of social psychology in our country, the United States,

00:24:35 ►

was based on the work of refugee scientists, refugee social scientists from Europe,

00:24:46 ►

refugee social scientists from Europe, people like Solomon Asch and Eric Fromm and Stanley Milgram,

00:24:53 ►

who saw this wave of fascism, authoritarian thinking, totalitarianism sweep through Europe.

00:25:00 ►

And they came over here and began to try to figure that out and became alarmed, many of them,

00:25:05 ►

that the exact same conditions that they had seen in Europe in the 20s and 30s and 40s were in fact beginning to ferment here in the United States.

00:25:11 ►

And so there was a great deal of attention paid to this.

00:25:15 ►

And if anybody wants to follow up on this,

00:25:18 ►

I think one of the most interesting books that emphasizes what I’m saying here

00:25:23 ►

comes from a very unlikely source, and that

00:25:26 ►

source is John Dean.

00:25:28 ►

John Dean was, of course, President Richard Nixon’s personal counsel during his administration,

00:25:34 ►

and John Dean has had an awakening, a revelation about that administration as he did during

00:25:40 ►

Watergate and has been writing very vigorously about the political crisis in America.

00:25:52 ►

And I want to call your attention to a book he came out with in 2006 called Conservatives Without Conscience,

00:25:58 ►

where he brings up this whole body of research of the social psychologists in the 1950s.

00:26:05 ►

And it struck me as so ironic when I read this book, because Dean is saying that this is what’s happened in Washington,

00:26:09 ►

that we have a psychological crisis, that these people have taken over our government,

00:26:15 ►

are authoritarians. And he brings up all this research and he has this one line in there where he says, you know, damn, he laments the fact that these psychologists in the 50s kept to themselves.

00:26:24 ►

They didn’t publish their findings well enough.

00:26:27 ►

It was only, you know, it was like they confined themselves to their ivory tower.

00:26:30 ►

I find that very ironic because, of course, Timothy Leary is criticized for exactly that.

00:26:35 ►

You know, here was a guy who found something that could, if used well, be a rebuke to authoritarianism,

00:26:47 ►

well be a rebuke to authoritarianism that could cause this shift in worldview from a hostile, unfriendly universe to a joyous cosmology and a joyous universe.

00:26:53 ►

So it’s not surprising that Dean’s boss at that time, President Richard Nixon,

00:27:03 ►

called Timothy Leary, of course, the most dangerous man in the world.

00:27:06 ►

And this is why, because they knew that Leary had his finger on the psychopathology of what was going on there.

00:27:14 ►

And Nixon’s outrage was really a form of psychological resistance.

00:27:20 ►

Tim was himself, the CIA attempted to recruit Timothy Leary in the 1950s and Frank Barron, his teacher,

00:27:28 ►

as part of a wide-ranging program called Operation Mockingbird,

00:27:32 ►

which was a vast mind-control operation that was being perpetrated on the American nation

00:27:38 ►

following the lead of what happened in Germany years before.

00:27:42 ►

When Tim realized what was going on here,

00:27:50 ►

that the CIA was actually infiltrating publishing and media and universities and other industries to create this hostile, fear-based, Cold War mentality

00:27:56 ►

to subjugate people to this, what George Bush later called the New World Order,

00:28:02 ►

he knew that he had to do something equally radical to thwart this threat.

00:28:09 ►

Frank Barron went into the psychology of creativity,

00:28:11 ►

and Tim went into a kind of anti-authoritarian, psychotherapeutic, and psychological diagnostic strategies.

00:28:19 ►

And when Frank first found the mushroom, he realized that this was the thing.

00:28:24 ►

This was going to be the Holy Grail.

00:28:26 ►

He came back and told Tim about it.

00:28:28 ►

Tim was at first very opposed.

00:28:29 ►

And, you know, it would be funny to look at these things that he said.

00:28:33 ►

You know, he told Frank, don’t talk like this.

00:28:35 ►

You’re going to lose your scientific reputation.

00:28:38 ►

You know, you’ll be laughed at of the academy.

00:28:40 ►

I’m not going to fuck around with any mushrooms.

00:28:43 ►

Finally, it took him a year, but he prevailed, and the rest is kind of history.

00:28:49 ►

You know, Tim, in a very short amount of time at the psilocybin project at Harvard,

00:28:53 ►

did these things that we are hoping to do now,

00:28:56 ►

using appropriate scientific methodologies and naturalistic observations.

00:29:01 ►

He showed that psychedelic drugs were safe.

00:29:03 ►

He showed their clinical effectiveness.

00:29:05 ►

They showed their effects on enhancing creativity.

00:29:09 ►

And he got more and more outrageous, and then we see this kind of dialectic happening.

00:29:14 ►

Now, I’m rushing here a little bit because, you know, I realized when I came up here

00:29:18 ►

that we’re kind of at cross-purposes.

00:29:20 ►

You may be interested in what I have to say from all the stuff that I’ve been studying

00:29:24 ►

and the people I know,

00:29:25 ►

but I remain a psychedelic researcher, and what is most interesting to me are the people that are in the psychedelic movement

00:29:33 ►

and what they think.

00:29:35 ►

So I have some material here to discuss methodologies for maximizing the effect of psychedelic drugs,

00:29:43 ►

and I could carry on about some of that stuff,

00:29:44 ►

but it would be most interesting to me to hear some of what is on your mind.

00:29:49 ►

I know we have a wide variety of people here, like we do often in psychedelic conferences,

00:29:55 ►

which reminds me of one objection I have to Daniel’s talk.

00:30:00 ►

The only thing I take issue with is where he said that this is the first time that we can have a conference like this.

00:30:06 ►

Well, that’s simply not true.

00:30:08 ►

There have been psychedelic conferences.

00:30:10 ►

I organized an enormous one in 1981, and there have been major conferences almost every year since then.

00:30:18 ►

And this is, again, to kind of credit Leary, because there truly does exist

00:30:22 ►

this vast underground network of people who know

00:30:25 ►

full well the potential and the grandeur of these substances. So here we are and what can we do?

00:30:32 ►

I’m going to just, I’m going to stop there and let’s have a conversation.

00:30:39 ►

Let’s talk later about that, okay? I’ll just say this, that in my studies, I’m trying to see if there is a relationship

00:30:47 ►

between one’s psychedelic experience and their susceptibility to the propaganda of the administration.

00:30:57 ►

In other words, I’m curious if Leary was right,

00:31:02 ►

and that by seeding a population with psychedelic experiences

00:31:07 ►

and changing a few enough world views, if they would be less susceptible to the political crisis like that,

00:31:13 ►

if there’s a tendency for people who have had profound psychedelic experiences

00:31:18 ►

where you can perhaps see the world dissolve into a sea of love

00:31:22 ►

and understand that your role in the creation of experience,

00:31:26 ►

if that gives you a little more freedom and autonomy from pre-programmed information.

00:31:31 ►

But that’s a very good question. I think we should talk about that.

00:31:37 ►

My short answer for that is to do it out of the…

00:31:40 ►

He’s asking for advice or suggestions on how one can engage themselves in legitimate scientific inquiry of psychedelic psychedelic drugs.

00:31:50 ►

You know, I was in Peru just a couple of months ago speaking at a conference there.

00:31:54 ►

And it was the first time in my 30 years in this world that it was legal to talk about to not only talk about, but to consume these materials.

00:32:05 ►

In fact, ayahuasca, you may know, has just been declared by the Peruvian government

00:32:11 ►

to be part of its cultural patrimony, is their phrase,

00:32:14 ►

which basically nails it as a cultural treasure.

00:32:19 ►

And so we can follow the lead of a civilized country like Peru and do something like that, I’m beginning to embark upon a kind of medical,

00:32:28 ►

anthropological study of ayahuasca and its effects on cancer.

00:32:32 ►

So I encourage people, my students, to look into the field of medical anthropology,

00:32:37 ►

that if we confine ourselves only to the methodologies that are given us by Richard Nixon

00:32:44 ►

in the Controlled Substance Act,

00:32:46 ►

it’s going to take a very long time, but there are lots of other possibilities.

00:32:51 ►

I want to also call your attention to Richard Boyer’s work in the Center for Cognitive Liberties,

00:32:56 ►

and that gives another model.

00:32:58 ►

I’ll talk with you more about that, too.

00:33:00 ►

Thank you.

00:33:01 ►

Thank you.

00:33:05 ►

Thank you.

00:33:15 ►

And before I forget it,

00:33:17 ►

that talk by Sasha that Bob Forte

00:33:20 ►

just referred to was the

00:33:21 ►

one that Sasha gave at the

00:33:24 ►

Santa Barbara conference in 1983.

00:33:27 ►

And you can hear that in my podcast, number 100, here in the Psychedelic Salon.

00:33:32 ►

And I also hope that you get a chance to read some of the essays in Robert’s book,

00:33:37 ►

In Theogens and the Future of Religion.

00:33:40 ►

It just may have an idea or two that you’re looking for that may spark your own psychedelic renaissance.

00:33:47 ►

That’s a great concept, by the way, don’t you think?

00:33:50 ►

Psychedelic renaissance.

00:33:52 ►

Now that is what the world really needs at this particular moment in time.

00:33:57 ►

But at this very moment in time, we are going to get to hear from two people who,

00:34:03 ►

as much as any other two people alive

00:34:06 ►

today have sparked a

00:34:08 ►

psychedelic renaissance.

00:34:09 ►

And you know who I’m talking about.

00:34:11 ►

Ann and Sasha Shulgin

00:34:13 ►

who entertained the crowd at

00:34:16 ►

the Horizons Conference with

00:34:17 ►

another edition of their famous

00:34:19 ►

Ask the Shulgin Session.

00:34:21 ►

But this one began with a question

00:34:23 ►

I’ve never heard Sasha answer in public before.

00:34:26 ►

And that has to do

00:34:28 ►

with a certain annual gathering

00:34:30 ►

at the Bohemian Grove,

00:34:32 ►

a place close to the hearts

00:34:33 ►

of many conspiracy theorists.

00:34:36 ►

In fact, Sasha’s participation

00:34:38 ►

with the Grove

00:34:38 ►

even sparked a recent thread

00:34:41 ►

on our forum over at thegrowreport.com

00:34:43 ►

that was questioning whether or not Sasha was part of the Illuminati.

00:34:49 ►

In fact, I’ve got to remember to send him a copy of that thread because I know it’ll give him a few laughs.

00:34:55 ►

Anyway, I’ll let you be the judge as to whether or not Sasha is part of a group intent on changing the world,

00:35:02 ►

or whether he just has a good excuse to get away with the boys for a big party every summer.

00:35:08 ►

In fact, you could probably think of Bohemian Grove as Burning Man for old Republicans.

00:35:14 ►

And I hope you also please take note of the fact that Sasha, along with Ann,

00:35:20 ►

also attends Burning Man every year.

00:35:22 ►

So now let’s join Ann and Sasha Shulgin, two pillars of the new psychedelic renaissance.

00:35:34 ►

Oh, sorry. What about the Bohemian Grove?

00:35:37 ►

Were you actually seen at Bohemian Grove?

00:35:40 ►

Oh, I was up there this year again, yes.

00:35:44 ►

Bohemian Grove is kind of a neat little retreat up in the Russian River area.

00:35:48 ►

And during the weekends, it’s maybe 2,000 or 3,000 people.

00:35:51 ►

But during the week, there are only about 200 or 300 people.

00:35:54 ►

It’s a delightful place, no radios, no television, just quietly sit over there.

00:35:59 ►

And you can start the whole day with a beautiful Bloody Mary and end up with a little red wine,

00:36:04 ►

which is a delightful way of spending two weeks.

00:36:07 ►

He’s actually been a member of the club for, what, 40 years?

00:36:12 ►

Oh, almost one year short of 50 years now.

00:36:16 ►

It’s not just Republican conservatives.

00:36:19 ►

85% Republican conservatives.

00:36:22 ►

There’s a very ex-presidents are Republican presidents, of course.

00:36:26 ►

And no president while he’s in office has ever been at the Grove.

00:36:29 ►

Because no president in office is ever off the record.

00:36:32 ►

And everything in the Grove is off the record.

00:36:35 ►

And so it’s a very nice, nice place to see ex-presidents.

00:36:38 ►

My first person, first ex-president I ever met there was a fellow named Herbert Hoover.

00:36:45 ►

This is some, probably before many of your time.

00:36:49 ►

But he was a very nice person.

00:36:51 ►

He had retired from the presidency.

00:36:53 ►

And he gave a lakeside talk, which the way I met him was this lakeside talk,

00:36:58 ►

where you go down to the lake and you give a talk for 25 minutes.

00:37:02 ►

And the name of the talk was something to do with…

00:37:07 ►

I think it was politics or the politics of fly fishing.

00:37:13 ►

I’ve been married to him for 27 years, so I’ve heard all these over and over again.

00:37:19 ►

Oh, yes.

00:37:22 ►

What’s the politics of…

00:37:23 ►

Of fly fishing.

00:37:25 ►

Of fishing. The politics of of? Of fly fishing. Of fishing.

00:37:25 ►

The politics of fishing.

00:37:27 ►

He loved fishing.

00:37:28 ►

And he was an ex-president, so I thought the politics of fishing would be using fishing as an analog for political goings-on.

00:37:36 ►

And, you know, he used the political goings-on as an analog of how you catch fish.

00:37:41 ►

Delightful talk.

00:37:43 ►

Totally unexpected.

00:37:44 ►

A very interesting person. He died next year. I’m sorry. More questions. Delightful talk. Totally unexpected. A very interesting person.

00:37:45 ►

He died next year.

00:37:47 ►

I’m sorry.

00:37:47 ►

00:37:48 ►

I have a question.

00:37:51 ►

You can’t get around the fact that it’s the first week.

00:37:54 ►

What?

00:37:57 ►

Oh.

00:38:00 ►

Did Sasha help with the transformation of Attorney General Mitchell at Bohemian Grove?

00:38:10 ►

Well, I have made a couple of little plays of playing the role of a waiter at the club.

00:38:16 ►

It’s a very nice way of meeting people who don’t know you.

00:38:18 ►

And you can make all kinds of wise-ass comments.

00:38:20 ►

And they are offended by the fact you’re employed here and making these

00:38:25 ►

nasty comments.

00:38:27 ►

But then someone tips them off so that you’ve actually been a member for 50 years.

00:38:31 ►

You’re getting away with it.

00:38:32 ►

No, actually, the Bohemian Grove is a very delightful, the whole Bohemian Club is known

00:38:38 ►

primarily as a bunch of ex-important people, Republicans of course, but there’s a small percentage, about maybe

00:38:49 ►

28%, who are in there as I have been for lots of years because I play the viola. So I’m

00:38:57 ►

in the orchestra, and the orchestra, they don’t have any waiting time to come in. Normally

00:39:01 ►

it’s a 10-year wait to become a member and something like a $25,000 membership fee

00:39:06 ►

or something horrible.

00:39:07 ►

But when you come in

00:39:08 ►

as a musician,

00:39:09 ►

you come in for a year of trial

00:39:11 ►

and you played

00:39:12 ►

in your orchestra

00:39:14 ►

for a while

00:39:15 ►

and if they like the way you play

00:39:17 ►

and you like them

00:39:18 ►

and you fit along with a crowd

00:39:20 ►

and you spent a year

00:39:21 ►

and you haven’t really

00:39:22 ►

made any trouble,

00:39:23 ►

then you’re in as a member

00:39:24 ►

and it doesn’t cost you a penny. made any trouble, then you’re in as a member.

00:39:26 ►

It doesn’t cost you a penny.

00:39:29 ►

It’s a very, very delightful way out.

00:39:31 ►

Despite all the mythology about Bohemian Club, it’s mostly about music.

00:39:34 ►

Actually, that’s what

00:39:35 ►

goes on most of the time. Music and art and play.

00:39:38 ►

Yeah.

00:39:39 ►

Play shows,

00:39:43 ►

writing shows,

00:39:44 ►

designing costumes, that kind of thing.

00:39:46 ►

Okay, next question. Oh, next question. Okay, another question.

00:39:53 ►

I think everybody heard that. Which one has had the most profound effect or did they enjoy the most?

00:39:58 ►

Personally, I think my most keen

00:40:02 ►

friend amongst the various phenethylamines and alkaloids I’ve worked with and synthesized has been 2C-B.

00:40:09 ►

It’s to me a very, very favorable, very warm, very comfortable compound.

00:40:13 ►

I don’t use any compound more than a couple, three times because I want to keep a rather virgin liver for developing new compounds and getting them in there and find what they do.

00:40:23 ►

I’m now in a group of compounds called the flies,

00:40:26 ►

which is fascinating. There’s pseudoflies

00:40:27 ►

and the semiflies and flies and dragonflies.

00:40:31 ►

They’re all compounds

00:40:32 ►

with a couple of rings on each of the two

00:40:33 ►

rings. On the middle ring, they have a couple more rings

00:40:36 ►

on them. And they’re

00:40:38 ►

substituted in various ways. And they

00:40:40 ►

are proving to be extremely versatile

00:40:42 ►

in amounts of potency

00:40:44 ►

and amounts of activity.

00:40:45 ►

And I am finding them very fascinating to explore.

00:40:49 ►

And that’s what I’m currently working on pretty much all the time.

00:40:52 ►

I should add that we’re beginning to hear from various sources that one of the dragonflies is to be avoided.

00:41:05 ►

What’s that?

00:41:10 ►

Well, I think the dragonflies are active at less than a milligram in potency.

00:41:17 ►

Yes.

00:41:19 ►

Whereas the flies are active in the 10 or they’re about 10 to 20 milligram levels.

00:41:28 ►

I was talking to somebody out on the steps just a few minutes ago.

00:41:37 ►

I think if you turn on Arrowid, and probably all of you know that particular site,

00:41:43 ►

they are completely reliable, and they’ll give you information about what’s on the street and different reactions to it.

00:41:47 ►

Your main question is basically what’s our favorite compound?

00:41:53 ►

Yeah, I used to answer that one, honestly, and I’m not going to do it anymore

00:41:59 ►

because there’s a particular one that has an effect on me, and no comments, please,

00:42:07 ►

that’s exquisitely exquisite.

00:42:15 ►

But after I had mentioned that at a few conferences,

00:42:22 ►

suddenly everybody was trying this, and most of them were bored stiff.

00:42:27 ►

It did not have the same effect on anyone else as it did on me, which is fine.

00:42:32 ►

It means there’s more for me to use.

00:42:35 ►

But everyone’s chemistry is different.

00:42:40 ►

And so if you say this is my favorite, it doesn’t mean anything for anybody else.

00:42:46 ►

So everyone has to choose their own ally.

00:42:49 ►

Well, I have to be a little careful on who I tell the structures and the identities of compounds to.

00:42:54 ►

I had an occasion, was it about two, three, four years ago, with 5-Methoxy-Dalt.

00:43:01 ►

A friend of mine on the East Coast was asking, what am I working on?

00:43:03 ►

I said 5-Methoxy-Dalt right now. I just finished it up. I’ve written a two or three page

00:43:08 ►

thing for the third book on Phytoxydalt.

00:43:11 ►

So I sent him the three pages I had written. Synthesis,

00:43:16 ►

activity in man, biological activity, pharmacology,

00:43:20 ►

the usual biochemistry thing. And he said, that’s kind of neat.

00:43:24 ►

And he put that thing in his thing. And he said, that’s kind of neat. And he put that thing in his website.

00:43:27 ►

And he said,

00:43:28 ►

one week afterwards,

00:43:29 ►

he took it off the website

00:43:30 ►

because it was obviously being copied

00:43:32 ►

by a lot of people.

00:43:34 ►

Three weeks later,

00:43:34 ►

that’s four weeks after I sent it to him,

00:43:36 ►

it had been synthesized in China

00:43:38 ►

and sent to this country by way of Holland.

00:43:40 ►

In four weeks.

00:43:42 ►

It was still not in the literature.

00:43:46 ►

It had never been published. So the authorities don’t know technically how to synthesize it

00:43:49 ►

but it’s all over the European

00:43:51 ►

field

00:43:52 ►

almost within four weeks

00:43:54 ►

so I’m a little hesitant about

00:43:56 ►

telling and now I just publish

00:43:58 ►

and let people have the published information

00:44:00 ►

yeah

00:44:01 ►

00:44:03 ►

when Ann takes Publish the information. Yeah. Excellent. Other questions?

00:44:12 ►

When Anne does therapy using psychedelics with clients,

00:44:15 ►

does she also take psychedelics to help them with their mishigas?

00:44:16 ►

It’s a technical term.

00:44:31 ►

The last time I did psychedelic psychotherapy as a lay therapist was before we started writing Pical, the first book.

00:44:39 ►

I soon discovered you can’t do that and do that kind of therapy and also write. It was impossible.

00:44:50 ►

possible. The material that a hypnotherapist friend of mine and I used was mostly MDMA, which of the therapists at that time.

00:45:06 ►

This was in the 70s.

00:45:09 ►

A lot of them would take the MDMA themselves with the patient.

00:45:15 ►

I did that twice and then realized that, first of all, I was wasting a good experience

00:45:22 ►

because you can’t pay attention to your own insight

00:45:25 ►

when you’re paying attention to a patient’s insights.

00:45:29 ►

It was a waste of the compound and of everything else.

00:45:34 ►

And the reason for a therapist taking it was that they were not relying enough on their own natural instincts and insight.

00:45:47 ►

They felt for a while they had to have the MDMA to sharpen their perceptions,

00:45:52 ►

and it’s not true because any drug, including MDMA,

00:45:58 ►

the most it can do is open up what’s inside you already.

00:46:03 ►

is open up what’s inside you already.

00:46:08 ►

And I think all but about one that I know of stopped taking any material with their patients.

00:46:13 ►

For one thing, it’s a selfish thing to do.

00:46:15 ►

You cannot be a good therapist while you’re doing it.

00:46:20 ►

Questions?

00:46:22 ►

Sir? Sir?

00:46:38 ►

So the question, given the obvious vitality of Ann and Sasha,

00:46:43 ►

it raises the question of body load and neurotoxicity,

00:46:46 ►

especially with MDMA documented as being neurotoxic. And so have they correlated the neurotoxicity of any of the novel substances

00:46:52 ►

that you’ve created with their neurotoxicity? And then in terms of your personal lives,

00:46:58 ►

how have you kept yourself so healthy with yoga or exercise, or what is your regimen?

00:47:03 ►

So healthy with yoga or exercise, or what is your regimen?

00:47:06 ►

Well, let me start with this new one.

00:47:13 ►

As far as correlating physiological, psychological difficulties with MDMA,

00:47:16 ►

I know there’s a lot of writing about this,

00:47:20 ►

but there’s an immense amount of writing that does not indicate that.

00:47:25 ►

I think it’s a few extraordinary bad trips or physiological psychological problems

00:47:27 ►

that get all the notoriety and all the

00:47:30 ►

press. So I don’t think there’s

00:47:32 ►

a believable

00:47:33 ►

correlation of neurological

00:47:35 ►

problems with MDMA use.

00:47:38 ►

Personally, I’m not a user

00:47:40 ►

of MDMA. I’m not a user of any regular drugs.

00:47:42 ►

My art is

00:47:44 ►

finding new ones. And if I kept

00:47:46 ►

stacking up on MDMA all the time, I’d lose my function of my liver and my responses.

00:47:53 ►

So I am a little bit more conservative in regular — I’m not a regular drug user,

00:47:57 ►

except for a little red alcohol occasionally. But basically —

00:48:01 ►

Red wine.

00:48:02 ►

Well —

00:48:03 ►

Red wine.

00:48:23 ►

When MDMA was pretty new on the scene, I found that its best use for me was in writing. All my parts of Picard, the first book, were written under the influence of MDMA.

00:48:30 ►

That was my writing material.

00:48:34 ►

It was not known at that time that if you use MDMA,

00:48:40 ►

this is a generalization, but I think it’s pretty close to the truth.

00:48:46 ►

If you use MDMA more than, let’s say, four times a year maximum,

00:48:52 ►

it won’t be too long before you find out it doesn’t have its magical effect anymore.

00:48:59 ►

Since I was using it once a week for at least a year,

00:49:07 ►

I found that I was beginning to take a dosage of around 250 milligrams with 150 supplement.

00:49:18 ►

And I realized that was a little overdoing it.

00:49:22 ►

So I stopped it completely, no difficulty.

00:49:26 ►

But I have not been able to use MDMA since, aside from the fact that it’s illegal, of course.

00:49:34 ►

I did try it once about a year after I’d stopped, and it had a depressive effect,

00:49:42 ►

which is completely opposite of what it usually was.

00:49:46 ►

So I haven’t tried it since.

00:49:48 ►

I would very much like to try it once more and see if there’s a difference.

00:49:53 ►

You’ve covered your responsibility.

00:49:56 ►

It’s a wonderful drug.

00:49:57 ►

I believe in its value for psychotherapy, absolutely.

00:50:03 ►

As far as psychedelics, because MDMA is not a

00:50:06 ►

psychedelic as far as psychedelics go we take less of them now than we used to

00:50:16 ►

because we don’t have as much energy as we did when we were in our 30s and 40s

00:50:22 ►

and 50s and also we don’t have enough time.

00:50:26 ►

We’re too damn busy.

00:50:28 ►

It’s as if you burned out one of the receptors or whatever it was that MDMA is active at, and it doesn’t repair.

00:50:34 ►

Oh, MDMA, but the psychedelics.

00:50:37 ►

Oh, no, in general, yes.

00:50:38 ►

We don’t take enough of them. And when I have not had a good psychedelic trip for, let’s say, six months,

00:50:45 ►

I begin to feel that I’m beginning to get out of balance.

00:50:51 ►

I get too irritable.

00:50:53 ►

My general view of life gets grouchy.

00:50:59 ►

I love her anyway.

00:51:00 ►

Then if I have a chance at a good trip, I feel revitalized, frankly, physically

00:51:09 ►

as well as mentally. I think that instead of regarding psychedelics as a drain on the

00:51:18 ►

system, frankly, they are my favorite vitamin. That’s the effect they have on me.

00:51:27 ►

Okay. Thank you.

00:51:37 ►

How do you define consciousness and how much of it is determined by chemistry?

00:51:44 ►

Well, that’s not a question.

00:51:46 ►

I consider consciousness where you are if you’re alive.

00:51:50 ►

And a lot of people put it as a brain function.

00:51:52 ►

I consider consciousness a mental function.

00:51:55 ►

And it’s there all the time.

00:51:57 ►

I mean, you may be sound asleep,

00:51:58 ►

but you’re dreaming and there’s a consciousness there.

00:52:01 ►

You may be awake and you may not remember what you dreamed.

00:52:05 ►

And so I know there are three or four or seven lives going on that I don’t remember

00:52:09 ►

either awake or asleep. But I feel consciousness is my relationship, a living relationship

00:52:16 ►

with the world. And so I don’t think it’s a matter of being conscious or unconscious.

00:52:22 ►

I think when you’re unconscious, you’re conscious in a different way.

00:52:26 ►

I really believe you’re part of the system.

00:52:29 ►

Do you want to add to that?

00:52:31 ►

Yeah, I think while we’re in human form,

00:52:34 ►

everything is chemistry.

00:52:39 ►

Everything is physics or chemistry

00:52:41 ►

or, you know, that’s part of the human life.

00:52:45 ►

The question of whether consciousness exists after death, I’m absolutely sure it does.

00:52:52 ►

But, you know, people have different opinions on that.

00:52:57 ►

It also depends on what you mean by consciousness.

00:53:00 ►

You know, do you mean essential knowingness?

00:53:04 ►

Well, you can go down the list

00:53:06 ►

chemistry while we’re

00:53:10 ►

human and

00:53:11 ►

nothing to do with chemistry

00:53:13 ►

when we’re out of the human phase

00:53:16 ►

I remember one time

00:53:18 ►

I was on an experiment I forget the chemical

00:53:20 ►

doesn’t matter but

00:53:22 ►

as I was in fact you were with me

00:53:24 ►

we were together and I was looking at the chemical, it doesn’t matter. But as I was, in fact, you were with me. We were

00:53:25 ►

together. And I was looking at the clock because it was interesting to see the second hand

00:53:29 ►

of the clock going around. And as I was watching the second hand of the clock, it was going

00:53:34 ►

slower and slower and slower. And then it began, almost, it went around in 15 seconds,

00:53:40 ►

16 seconds, 17 seconds. My God, it’s going to stop.

00:53:46 ►

And it occurred to me, if the clock were to stop, what defines death?

00:53:52 ►

And suddenly I realized I had taken a chemical that was causing the clock to slow down continuously.

00:53:57 ►

And we were both watching the clock.

00:54:00 ►

Well, we were making the second hand to slow down.

00:54:03 ►

Yeah.

00:54:04 ►

And suddenly we commented, made some comment, and we both snapped around out of it, and the clock went normally again.

00:54:10 ►

No.

00:54:11 ►

He chickened out.

00:54:17 ►

He chickened out.

00:54:23 ►

I think it’s a very interesting question though

00:54:26 ►

if we had actually made that second hand stop

00:54:29 ►

and we were very very close to it

00:54:31 ►

I think we wrote about that

00:54:35 ►

in the second book

00:54:36 ►

it was a very interesting experience

00:54:39 ►

the material was something called marijuana

00:54:42 ►

and

00:54:44 ►

I think we’d taken, a relative of mine had given us brownies of the pot type.

00:54:55 ►

And that was, I think marijuana is the greatest drug for fooling around with time.

00:55:03 ►

There’s no question. And we almost stopped that

00:55:08 ►

clock. I don’t blame Sasha, but I would kind of

00:55:11 ►

like to see what happens after

00:55:15 ►

the second hand quit. Okay. I’m glad we didn’t.

00:55:18 ►

Yeah.

00:55:23 ►

00:55:25 ►

00:55:26 ►

Robert?

00:55:34 ►

Okay, so Robert asked the ontological question.

00:55:40 ►

Similar to what Dan Merker was talking about earlier about true hallucinations versus pseudo-hallucinations,

00:55:45 ►

in some of these experiences we feel like we’re in touch with another world, another dimension.

00:55:47 ►

And so what’s your opinion?

00:55:50 ►

Is that real or is it internal?

00:55:56 ►

Well, from my personal point of view, I find that the psychedelic experience is not something that’s imposed upon me.

00:55:58 ►

It’s something that’s going on all the time inside of me, and I’m just not aware of it.

00:56:03 ►

I have not stopped to think about it.

00:56:09 ►

So my belief is that when you get involved in a psychedelic experience,

00:56:11 ►

you are in a communication with part of yourself

00:56:13 ►

that you’ve given up trying to communicate with

00:56:17 ►

or you’ve forgotten about communicating with.

00:56:19 ►

So it’s not something that’s imposed by a drug,

00:56:22 ►

it’s something that the drug allows you to experience and to function with.

00:56:27 ►

So I look upon it as being a revealing thing from within myself rather than a thing imposed upon myself by an external drug.

00:56:39 ►

Yeah, we once were called to Australia for a trial where we had to define hallucination.

00:56:49 ►

I forget what our definition was, but hallucination, sorry about that,

00:57:14 ►

is where you are seeing things that are not visible or experienceable by the rest of the people around you.

00:57:20 ►

And you have forgotten that you took a drug.

00:57:29 ►

Now, if you are aware of the fact that what you’re looking at is the result of having taken a drug,

00:57:33 ►

then that’s not a real hallucination as far as we’re concerned.

00:57:37 ►

Well, I hold the term hallucination to be an improper word for this.

00:57:42 ►

To me, the term hallucination is being aware of something that does not exist.

00:57:47 ►

And this had to do with mescopalamine is a good example of a true hallucinogen.

00:57:51 ►

And I remember one time, I think we were together.

00:57:53 ►

No, maybe not.

00:57:55 ►

Maybe before we got together.

00:58:01 ►

This one person had taken scopolamine in the apartment I was living in in Berkeley at the time.

00:58:06 ►

And he came out of the kitchen and walked across in front of me and into the door that led to where the piano was. And he ran right

00:58:12 ►

into the door. And I went over, are you okay? Oh yeah, I was just seeing where she was going.

00:58:18 ►

And he saw this young lady walking across the room and he was following her to see where

00:58:23 ►

she was going. And she went through this door that was not open and he was following her to see where she’s going and she went through

00:58:25 ►

this door that was not open and he went into the door because then he backed away and a true

00:58:31 ►

hallucination you see something that was not at all there and later on he wanted to lie down for

00:58:36 ►

a while maybe cast a little nap he didn’t catch a nap at all he wanted to go downstairs and follow

00:58:41 ►

the cars that are driving by on the street and see what’s going on.

00:58:46 ►

He did not remember any of this.

00:58:53 ►

When he finally sobered up enough to drive home, I found out that he had driven across the bridge.

00:58:57 ►

And on the other side of the Bay Bridge, where the towers are,

00:59:03 ►

he began talking to this fellow riding with him who had been in medical school with him.

00:59:07 ►

And the fellow hopped into the back seat. And he looked in the back seat, and the fellow disappeared.

00:59:12 ►

Boy. So what he did, he said, I’m going to turn up the radio a little bit. He said, turn up the radio to get the music louder. And the radio was not

00:59:16 ►

even on. And he realized

00:59:20 ►

he’s not out of this hallucination thing yet. And he got into San Francisco, parked

00:59:24 ►

the car, and took a taxi home.

00:59:26 ►

And I asked him a couple, three weeks later, how long did this last?

00:59:30 ►

When did it finally clear up?

00:59:33 ►

He said, how can you tell?

00:59:37 ►

So this to me is a definition of a hallucination.

00:59:46 ►

With my psychedelics, you don’t have this.

00:59:48 ►

You have the imagery, the self-interpretation, the ease of exploring things you have forgotten.

00:59:55 ►

Well, wait a minute.

00:59:57 ►

We haven’t had that because we usually don’t overdose.

01:00:11 ►

don’t overdose. A part of the answer to someone else’s question is how do you keep alive and healthy when you’re doing this kind of research. a nanogram, if necessary, as far down as you can imagine,

01:00:30 ►

at a point where it couldn’t possibly be active. And then he gradually, over days and weeks and months, works it up

01:00:34 ►

so that this way you become pretty quickly aware of neurological complications

01:00:44 ►

or flattened emotions, anything like that.

01:00:49 ►

And if you get certain symptoms, either physical or mental, you quit.

01:00:56 ►

It doesn’t go any further.

01:00:59 ►

Now, this kind of caution keeps us alive and well.

01:01:09 ►

I think that what was happening with that young man, he was probably overdosed.

01:01:21 ►

We’ve just never taken doses that large.

01:01:25 ►

But I think when you do, you probably have some real hallucinations.

01:01:31 ►

As far as the possible reality of what you’re experiencing,

01:01:36 ►

I think sometimes we do tap into what you, concurrent or alternate realities.

01:01:46 ►

I’m quite sure that happens, but there’s no proof of it, no.

01:01:52 ►

01:01:56 ►

The question is about the rewards and challenges of doing this sort of growth experience

01:02:02 ►

with your partner, with a couple, and how sometimes they’re not in the same space, and of course it can be rewarding as well.

01:02:09 ►

What about your experience?

01:02:12 ►

I think when you take psychedelics together, you become very aware of the ties you have to the other person.

01:02:26 ►

If there are places in your relationship that are not solid, you become aware of them.

01:02:34 ►

As far as sharing the same reality or the same images, that’s very rare, but it can happen and it does happen.

01:02:50 ►

Most of the time you find you’re having quite different imagery.

01:02:55 ►

And that’s fine.

01:02:56 ►

You’re two different people.

01:02:58 ►

They don’t have to be the same.

01:03:04 ►

the fact is I think it’s very important to recognize and accept

01:03:08 ►

and love the differences between you

01:03:11 ►

and your trips are going to be different

01:03:13 ►

but there is a certain experience

01:03:16 ►

I think probably a lot of you have had

01:03:19 ►

where you find yourself

01:03:23 ►

becoming one entity.

01:03:28 ►

And this happens with making love,

01:03:33 ►

and you find yourself not only together that way,

01:03:37 ►

but you are connected all over the world

01:03:40 ►

with other people experiencing the same thing the same way.

01:03:44 ►

It’s a magnificent experience.

01:03:49 ►

That brings us to the close of our Q&A session with Sasha and Anne.

01:03:53 ►

I want to thank them very much.

01:03:55 ►

Thank you. Yeah, that’s nice.

01:04:07 ►

Aww.

01:04:09 ►

Yes.

01:04:11 ►

Yes.

01:04:13 ►

Yes. Thank you.

01:04:23 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:04:26 ►

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:04:32 ►

Well now, between Anne, Sasha and Robert Forte just now,

01:04:38 ►

we have been exposed to a lot of interesting ideas,

01:04:42 ►

some of which I’m now seeing from a new point of view.

01:04:47 ►

I don’t know about you,

01:04:48 ►

but I’m going to have to go back

01:04:50 ►

and listen to both of those presentations again right now

01:04:52 ►

just to recapture a few of the things they said.

01:04:56 ►

There’s just that much there, I think.

01:04:58 ►

And I also think this is a good place

01:05:00 ►

to thank the producers

01:05:02 ►

and all those who spoke at

01:05:04 ►

and worked on the 2008 Horizons Conference.

01:05:08 ►

Although I wasn’t able to attend in person, thanks to the event promoters,

01:05:13 ►

many of these great talks are available for free download at the Internet Archive.

01:05:17 ►

And the direct URL is a little too long to read here, but you’ll find a link to it on our program notes page.

01:05:25 ►

to read here, but you’ll find a link to it on our program notes page. The speakers from the conference whose talks are already posted there, where you can download, include Alan Hunt Badner,

01:05:32 ►

who is co-editor of Zig Zag Zen, Buddhism and Psychedelics, Robert Forte, who we just heard,

01:05:38 ►

but there’s a little bit more Q&A that I didn’t have time to put in today. Dan Merker, who’s a psychoanalyst and author of

01:05:45 ►

The Aesthetic Imagination. Daniel Pinchbeck, who you already know from here in the salon.

01:05:51 ►

David Nichols, founder of Hester Research Institute and distinguished chair in pharmacology

01:05:58 ►

at Purdue University. Dimitri Mobengo-Mugianis, and I hope I’m close to a pronunciation that’s fair to you there,

01:06:05 ►

who is an Ibogaine therapist.

01:06:08 ►

And, of course, Anne and Sasha Shulgin’s full Q&A session are up there.

01:06:12 ►

And I noticed that there’s also a talk posted there by Dr. Roland Griffiths,

01:06:17 ►

who is the researcher at Johns Hopkins who’s made the news quite a bit lately.

01:06:22 ►

And so a big thank you to the producers of the Horizon Conference

01:06:25 ►

for making so much material available

01:06:28 ►

under the Creative Commons

01:06:29 ►

license. Your work to help

01:06:32 ►

our community grow and learn is

01:06:33 ►

greatly appreciated.

01:06:36 ►

Now, I’ve got a couple emails

01:06:38 ►

that came in, I think may be of

01:06:39 ►

interest to you and some of our fellow

01:06:42 ►

salonners. The first one comes

01:06:44 ►

from TheGuyinS comes from the guy in soldier,

01:06:46 ►

who says in part, Hi, Lorenzo, hope all is well at your end of the line. Once again, thanks for

01:06:52 ►

all of your great work. I know you’d get it all the time, but you really have changed my life

01:06:57 ►

and the way I view reality. Although a lot of it has also been from our beloved sacraments,

01:07:02 ►

but all the same, you keep my flame alight for the cause.

01:07:06 ►

Just the fact that you are doing these podcasts,

01:07:08 ►

and by some divine intervention, they somehow ended up on my computer.

01:07:12 ►

It’s funny the way things work sometimes, hey?

01:07:16 ►

Well, let me stop here for just a moment and say that

01:07:18 ►

while I normally don’t read the parts of emails that are thanking me for doing these podcasts,

01:07:24 ►

it doesn’t mean that your words of appreciation don’t mean a great deal to me.

01:07:29 ►

What the guy in Soulja just said just now is a long line similar to many of the messages I receive.

01:07:36 ►

And I know that this is true also for KMO, The Dope Fiend,

01:07:40 ►

and all the other podcasters out there who do this as a labor of love,

01:07:44 ►

and all the other podcasters out there who do this as a labor of love,

01:07:48 ►

our love for this wonderful community of free thinkers who are gradually finding one another here in cyberspace.

01:07:52 ►

So from all of us podcasters, hey, thanks again for your kind words and thoughts.

01:07:57 ►

That’s really what keeps us going.

01:08:00 ►

Now, back to the guy in soldier’s email.

01:08:04 ►

The reason I’m writing to you this time is to get your advice on starting my own podcast series,

01:08:10 ►

mainly on the content and rules of talking about such things deemed illegal.

01:08:15 ►

My aim is to be the medium for which people of the everyday consumer lifestyle

01:08:19 ►

can start to be influenced by the psychedelic salon.

01:08:22 ►

I found a lot of the people I’ve shown the lectures to

01:08:25 ►

seem to not have the time for it,

01:08:27 ►

or they plain just don’t understand what’s being said.

01:08:30 ►

Don’t get me wrong, I’m in no way trying to copy

01:08:32 ►

or plagiarize the psychedelic salon in any way,

01:08:35 ►

just to capture their attention and refer on to the bigger picture, you know.

01:08:40 ►

Well, Guy and Soulja, I’m 100% behind your efforts,

01:08:44 ►

and it is very reassuring to see that more and more people in our community are beginning to put their time and talents toward creating a truly wide range of programming.

01:08:56 ►

And I think it’s very important to continue building our interconnecting webs of ideas and audiences from as many different points of view as we can handle.

01:09:07 ►

Already, I’m learning a lot about what’s going on

01:09:10 ►

from Sancho and Cody’s Black Light in the Attic podcast.

01:09:14 ►

And there isn’t a program on dopefiend.co.uk

01:09:18 ►

that I don’t listen to regularly.

01:09:20 ►

And hey, Pothead’s Coffee Shop Shop guess who showed up there today

01:09:25 ►

you need to go listen to that one

01:09:27 ►

I was really pleasantly surprised

01:09:29 ►

to hear your guest DJ this morning

01:09:31 ►

and I’ve learned from all these too

01:09:34 ►

I might add

01:09:34 ►

I’ve probably bought more books

01:09:37 ►

after hearing KMO interview the author

01:09:39 ►

than from any other interviewer

01:09:41 ►

because first of all he’s one of us

01:09:44 ►

and so he seeks out authors who appeal to our interests.

01:09:48 ►

And then there’s a podcast from Tom Barbalet, Martin Ball, and Dr. Dave,

01:09:52 ►

and they’re all doing things like that, just to mention a few of them.

01:09:56 ►

And of course, now I’ve gotten into Reverend Zeke’s behind-the-eyelid shows.

01:10:01 ►

Now, I don’t mean for this very incomplete list of podcasts that I listen to to discourage

01:10:07 ►

you from beginning your own show. My point here is that there’s a huge audience out there who

01:10:13 ►

still has no idea that the worldwide psychedelic community exists. And I’ll be the first to agree

01:10:20 ►

that trying to convince somebody to listen to a lecture here in the psychedelic salon isn’t,

01:10:25 ►

that trying to convince somebody to listen to a lecture here in the psychedelic salon isn’t… That’s not the best way to let younger people know that they’ll find some like-minded spirits here.

01:10:31 ►

So let your creative juices flow and help us find the others.

01:10:36 ►

Now as to your main question, which has to do with talking about substances that are illegal,

01:10:42 ►

one of the first things I should point out is that not every

01:10:46 ►

kind of free speech is protected.

01:10:48 ►

For example, it’s not legal to yell fire in a crowded theater.

01:10:52 ►

And I don’t know if it’s actually legal to say where to find an illegal substance, but

01:10:58 ►

in my book, it would be really stupid on all kinds of levels.

01:11:02 ►

You know, in some of the salons out here on the West Coast,

01:11:05 ►

the physical on-the-ground ones,

01:11:07 ►

we generally have a hard and fast rule that there’s no buying, selling,

01:11:11 ►

and no talking about buying or selling any illegal substance.

01:11:15 ►

It’s not permitted.

01:11:17 ►

Or using them at the salon.

01:11:19 ►

And even though there have been several times

01:11:21 ►

when law enforcement goons have infiltrated our gatherings,

01:11:25 ►

since nothing illegal was being discussed or done,

01:11:28 ►

they quickly lost interest in our monthly get-togethers and left us alone.

01:11:33 ►

I guess none of that was very much help just now,

01:11:35 ►

but just use your common sense and you shouldn’t go wrong.

01:11:40 ►

In another email, Derbyshmadwhirtler writes,

01:11:44 ►

Lorenzo, isn’t it time for some Terrence again? I haven’t heard any for a while now, apart from the talks I’ve heard already. All these other people are exactly the mentalization, the rational debates and rehashing of the same old white man’s

01:12:06 ►

ego-based understanding of reality,

01:12:08 ►

of male head-based reality.

01:12:11 ►

Why not some Terrence again?

01:12:12 ►

Why not some Amazon shaman?

01:12:14 ►

Or some new ideas?

01:12:15 ►

I haven’t heard any new ideas in years.

01:12:19 ►

Well, you’re not alone, Werther.

01:12:22 ►

I’ve been getting a lot of requests for more Terrence McKenna lately, and I still have several yet unheard trialogue tapes that Ralph Abraham gave me to play here in the salon.

01:12:32 ►

And I’ll get one of those out soon, but next week I’ll be playing another talk from the Timothy Leary archive and hopefully also be able to announce some new news about the physical archive of Dr. Leary’s work.

01:12:45 ►

So please stay tuned, as they say in Radioland.

01:12:50 ►

Now in just a minute, I’ll be giving my usual spiel about where to find the program notes,

01:12:54 ►

but first I want to let you know what you’ll be hearing right after I sign off.

01:12:59 ►

It’s a little piece put together by fellow salonner Waking Sleep,

01:13:03 ►

whose blog you can find at wakingsleep13.livejournal.com.

01:13:08 ►

I just found out about this over in one of the forums at TheGrillReport.com where he said,

01:13:13 ►

In two weeks, I’m going to be going to an event in Delaware called Playa del Juego, which is described as the burning event of the Mid-Atlantic region.

01:13:23 ►

What I plan on doing is handing out copies of this project on CD,

01:13:27 ►

including a link to the Psychedelic Salon website

01:13:29 ►

and the Sea Realm, just for good measure.

01:13:32 ►

Hopefully I can introduce some new people

01:13:34 ►

to the amazing mind of Terrence McKenna

01:13:36 ►

and maybe bring some new listeners to the Salon and the Sea Realm.

01:13:40 ►

Anyway, I thought I’d provide a link

01:13:42 ►

to that part of the project I have finished.

01:13:44 ►

And so I downloaded it, listened to it, liked it, and asked Waking Sleep if it was okay to use it here in the salon.

01:13:52 ►

And here’s part of what he had to say.

01:13:55 ►

Thanks so much for listening to my project and responding. I’m glad you liked it.

01:14:00 ►

I had done something similar with a few other tracks, but I couldn’t have really put those out there because the tracks had traditional copyrights on them.

01:14:08 ►

But when Nine Inch Nails put out the instrumental album, under a Creative Commons license,

01:14:13 ►

I knew it presented a really cool opportunity to spread McKenna’s ideas around to people who might not otherwise listen to him.

01:14:20 ►

I’m working on other tracks, and I would still like to keep taking parts from that same talk

01:14:25 ►

It’s one of my favorites

01:14:26 ►

Funny though, how I started with the end

01:14:29 ►

I would also like to continue with doing this with other talks, not just from McKenna

01:14:33 ►

Though I’m going to have to search around for some good CC licensed music

01:14:37 ►

I’ll run out of tracks from the Ghosts album pretty soon

01:14:40 ►

Well thanks for putting this track together, Waking Sleep

01:14:44 ►

And also thanks for spreading the word about, Waking Sleep, and also thanks for

01:14:45 ►

spreading the word about the salon and the Sea Realm podcast. I should point out that Waking

01:14:52 ►

Sleep also said something about making a donation sometime in the future, but hey, you’re already

01:14:57 ►

doing more than your share. You know, it’s all about spreading the word, and your project is

01:15:02 ►

most certainly doing that. So thank you and uh thank you

01:15:06 ►

to all the rest of our fellow slaughters who are also working on projects like this and also i i

01:15:11 ►

definitely want to thank nine inch nails for putting some of their music online to be used

01:15:16 ►

without paying a royalty in non-commercial projects like this the album in particular is called ghosts

01:15:23 ►

and it’s uh all instrumental and is licensed under the same license that these podcasts are licensed under, namely the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 license.

01:15:34 ►

If you have any questions about the details of that license, just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.

01:15:45 ►

And that’s also where you’ll find the program notes for these podcasts.

01:15:50 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.

01:15:55 ►

Be well, my friends. Thank you. The real issue is

01:16:44 ►

what kind of mental worlds shall people inhabit?

01:16:50 ►

What kinds of hold shall be permitted?

01:16:54 ►

What kind of value systems shall be allowed?

01:16:59 ►

And the value systems that aggrandize the possession of things,

01:17:07 ►

Value systems that aggrandize the possession of things, the tearing up of the earth, competition, classism, racism, sexism, have led us to the brink of catastrophe.

01:17:31 ►

Now, I think we have to abandon Western cultural values and return to the deeper wisdom of the body

01:17:35 ►

in connection with the plants.

01:17:40 ►

That’s the seamless web that leads us back into the heart of nature.

01:17:47 ►

And if we can do this, then this very narrow neck of cultural crisis can be navigated.

01:18:12 ►

Very little of the past can be saved.

01:18:20 ►

The architectonics, the machines, the systems of monetary exchange and propaganda, the silly religions, the asinine aesthetic canons, very little of that can

01:18:28 ►

be saved. But what can be saved is the sense of love and caring and mutuality that we all

01:18:40 ►

put into and take from the human enterprise.

01:18:50 ►

We now hold, through the possession of these psychedelics,

01:18:56 ►

catalysts for the human imagination of sufficient power

01:19:01 ►

that if we use them, we can deconstruct the lethal vehicle that is carrying us towards

01:19:09 ►

the brink of apocalypse. We can deconstruct that vehicle and redesign it into a kind of

01:19:15 ►

starship that would carry us and our children out into the broad starry galaxy we know to be awaiting us.

01:19:27 ►

But it’s a cultural test.

01:19:29 ►

Nature is pitiless.

01:19:36 ►

Intelligence is a grand experiment upon which a great deal has been risked. But if it proves inadequate, nature will cover it over

01:19:40 ►

with the same kind of cool impunity that she covered over the dinosaurs and the

01:19:47 ►

trilobites across subterranean fishes and all those other folks who came before her. So what we must do, I think, is see our future in the imagination, catalyze the imagination,

01:20:28 ►

form symbiotic relationships with the plants, affirm archaic values, and spread the good news

01:20:37 ►

that what is out of control, what is in fact dying, is a world that had become too tongue-heavy with its own hubris,

01:20:50 ►

too bent by its own false value systems,

01:20:55 ►

and too dehumanized to care about what happened to its own children.

01:21:00 ►

So I say, good riddance to it.

01:21:03 ►

Bring on the archaic revival, and let’s create a new world. Thank you. Get the door, get the door!

01:22:14 ►

Get the door! Tim Leary once said, or I gave him credit for saying,

01:22:36 ►

he later told me he never said it, but whoever said it,

01:22:39 ►

this was a brilliant statement.

01:22:40 ►

Someone once said, LSD is a psychedelic substance which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have not taken it. Thank you. We have gone sick by following a path of untrammeled rationalism, male dominance, attention to the visible surface of things, practicality, bottom line-ism. We have gone very, very sick.

01:24:06 ►

And the body politic, like any body,

01:24:11 ►

when it feels itself to be sick,

01:24:14 ►

it begins to produce antibodies

01:24:16 ►

or strategies for overcoming the condition of dis-ease.

01:24:23 ►

the condition of dis-ease.

01:24:31 ►

The 20th century is an enormous effort at self-healing.

01:24:36 ►

Phenomena as diverse as surrealism,

01:24:39 ►

body piercing,

01:24:42 ►

psychedelic drug use,

01:24:44 ►

sexual permissiveness,

01:24:51 ►

jazz, experimental dance, rave culture, tattooing.

01:24:56 ►

The list is endless. What do all these things have in common?

01:25:03 ►

They represent various styles of rejection of linear values.

01:25:08 ►

The society is trying to cure itself by an archaic revival,

01:25:11 ►

by a reversion to archaic values.

01:25:15 ►

So when I see people manifesting sexual ambiguity

01:25:21 ►

or scarifying themselves

01:25:23 ►

or showing a lot of flesh or dancing to syncopated music

01:25:29 ►

or getting loaded or violating ordinary canons of sexual behavior i applaud all of this because

01:25:39 ►

it’s an impulse to return to what is felt by the body, what is authentic, what is archaic.

01:25:46 ►

And when you tease apart these archaic impulses, at the very center of all these impulses is the desire to return to a world of magical empowerment, of feeling. And at the center of that impulse is the shaman, stoned, intoxicated on plants, speaking with the spirit helpers,

01:26:57 ►

dancing in the moonlight and vivifying and invoking a world of conscious living mystery.

01:27:07 ►

That’s what the world is.

01:27:09 ►

The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists.

01:27:14 ►

The world is a living mystery. Thank you. Our birth, our death, our being in the moment, these are mysteries.

01:28:33 ►

They are doorways opening on to unimaginable vistas of self-exploration, empowerment, and hope for the human enterprise.

01:28:47 ►

And our culture has killed that, taken it away from us,

01:28:51 ►

made us consumers of shoddy products, shoddier ideals.

01:28:56 ►

We have to get away from that.

01:28:59 ►

And the way to get away from it is by a return to the authentic experience of the body and that means sexually

01:29:08 ►

empowering ourselves and it means getting loaded exploring the mind as a tool for personal

01:29:17 ►

and social transformation Thank you. The hour is late.

01:30:11 ►

The clock is ticking.

01:30:12 ►

We will be judged very harshly if we fumble the ball.

01:30:18 ►

We are the inheritors of millions and millions of years of successfully lived lives and successful adaptations to changing conditions in the natural world.

01:30:31 ►

Now the challenge passes to us, the living, that the yet to be born may have a place to put their feet and a sky to walk under.

01:30:44 ►

have a place to put their feet and a sky to walk under. And that’s what the psychedelic experience is about,

01:30:48 ►

is caring for, empowering, and building a future that honors the past,

01:30:56 ►

honors the planet, and honors the power of the human imagination. Thank you. There is nothing as powerful, as capable of transforming itself and the planet as the human imagination. Let’s not sell it straight. Let’s not whore ourselves

01:32:27 ►

to midwit ideology. Let’s not give our control over to the least among us. Rather, claim

01:32:37 ►

your place in the sun and go forward into the light. The tools are there. The path is known.

01:32:46 ►

You simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead

01:32:51 ►

and get with the program of a living world and a re-empowerment of the imagination. Thank you. you

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

159 - Shulgin & Forte at Horizons 2008″

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