Program Notes
Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary
[NOTE: All quotations below are by Dr. Timothy Leary.]
“Psychedelic art is the public face of the communication device of our new religion.”
“Man’s attempt to turn on just staggers the imagination. There’s hardly anything that hasn’t been used one time or another, or in one culture or another, to get this [psychedelic] experience.”
“We don’t care what method people use [to turn on]. We treasure and glorify any method that can get you high, that can turn you on. But we also insist that no one tell us that we can’t use our sacraments that seem to work for us.”
“We’re convinced, and I think it wouldn’t be hard to prove my point, that most Americans are involved in a meaningless, robot, assembly-line series of activities. They don’t really know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, but they’re just pushed off to this assembly-line and off they go.”
“[By drop out] we mean drop out of the meaningless and tune in to the productive.”
“You have to go out of your mind to come to your senses.”
“There’s no more room for mythological, supernatural religious teachers.”
“We use this word ‘psychosis’ the way we used the word ‘devil’ or ‘devil-possession’ or ‘witchcraft’ two or three or four or five hundred years ago.”
“When the time comes, let your kids turn you on. That’s my message to the middle-age, middle-class, whiskey-drinking American suburban family.”
“So jail to us is not a middle class disgrace. Here I am, a former Harvard professor, I’ve been arrested three times in the last year. Isn’t that disgraceful? To me that just means I’m doing my job. And if I don’t get the establishment a little worried, I wonder if my message is not getting through.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:24 ►
And it sure is good to be back with you again.
00:00:27 ►
Seems like it’s been too long since my last podcast.
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But we’ve got an interesting program today, one I think you’ll get a lot out of.
00:00:35 ►
It’s another recording from the Timothy Leary Archive,
00:00:39 ►
for which I want to thank Dennis Berry and Bruce Dahmer for sending it to me to podcast today.
00:00:44 ►
which I want to thank Dennis Berry and Bruce Dahmer for sending it to me to podcast today.
00:00:50 ►
And I also want to thank two fellow salonners who have donated some of their hard-earned cash to help offset the expenses associated with producing these podcasts.
00:00:55 ►
And these two friends of the salon are Guy D. and Andy W.
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I know it takes an extra effort to remember to go to the psychedelicsalon.org webpage and make a donation.
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And so, Guy and Andy, I really appreciate your efforts and your support.
00:01:13 ►
And there’s one more gigantic thank you that I want to pass along, and that is to the Magic Mutt Foundation,
00:01:20 ►
who sent me what can only be described as a grant.
00:01:25 ►
This is the second grant we’ve received in the three and a half years of these podcasts.
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And I have to say that once again, I’m blown away by people’s generosity
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and by their dedication to helping us get the true information out about our sacred medicines
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and getting it out to as many people as we can reach.
00:01:43 ►
So how do we find the others, you ask?
00:01:45 ►
Well, I’ll talk about that a little bit more at the end of today’s program,
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but I’ll tell you how I found the Magic Mutt Foundation.
00:01:53 ►
I went to a conference in Palenque, and on my second or third day there,
00:01:57 ►
I sat down by the pool and started talking with a man who we affectionately call Wild Bill.
00:02:04 ►
And now, almost ten years later, with Wild Bill on one side of this continent and me on the other, we’re still in touch.
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And in fact, we’ve had several grand adventures together in the interim.
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And then, just out of the blue, I get this grant from the Magic Mutt Foundation,
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which happens to be Wild Bill’s new cover, I might add.
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And that is how the psychedelic community takes care of its own. Thank you. Bill as well. And there’s always a chance you’ll bump into him at Burning Man or Cosm or at the
00:02:45 ►
conference somewhere. And when you do, you can also give him your thanks for keeping the psychedelic
00:02:50 ►
spirit alive. And talk about keeping the spirit alive. I’ve noticed that several of our fellow
00:02:57 ►
saloners are now linking to our site, and I also appreciate your help. Each of us, in our own ways, are doing what we can to help spread the word
00:03:07 ►
about our worldwide community of psychedelic thinkers,
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us average people who are just trying to figure out a few better ways
00:03:15 ►
to live our short lives on this beautiful little planet.
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We’re all in this together, you know,
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and I can’t think of another group I’d rather make my stand with.
00:03:24 ►
But since life is so short, I’d better get on with today’s program,
00:03:28 ►
which is an interview with Dr. Timothy Leary.
00:03:32 ►
This tape is from the Leary Archive, as I said,
00:03:35 ►
and it was noted that the person asking the questions was Elsonite Thompson,
00:03:40 ►
and that the interview took place in the San Francisco Bay Area sometime in
00:03:45 ►
January of 1966.
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Now, in this interview, Tim doesn’t mention the fact that on January 3rd, which must have
00:03:53 ►
only been a week or so earlier, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, along with their
00:03:58 ►
house band, The Grateful Dead, conducted the first of their famous acid tests at the Fillmore.
00:04:04 ►
So, the LSD vibe was already in the Bay Area air on the day of this interview.
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And I think that as we listen to this, it’s also important to keep in mind
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when you hear him describe things like the light show they’re about to put on,
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that this is 1966 technology.
00:04:23 ►
There were no personal computers or lasers back then,
00:04:26 ►
but what he is describing was actually a state-of-the-art multimedia experience for the time.
00:04:32 ►
So now let’s pretend that we are back in the first month of 1966.
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And I know that’ll be difficult for some of you because you weren’t here then.
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But back then, the war in Vietnam is just now heating up.
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Segregation is still the law in much of the land.
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The threat of a sudden nuclear war is constantly being talked about.
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And the baby boomers are just entering college.
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Now let’s pretend that you and I are sitting at home in the Bay Area, where we’re either in high school or college,
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and we turn on our radios and hear this Harvard professor talking about a new religion
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whose initials are LSD.
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I wonder what we would have made of this back then.
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My guess is that for at least some of the people who heard Dr. Leary that night,
00:05:24 ►
well, for them, it was probably the beginning of what we now call the 60s.
00:05:29 ►
One of the predictions you’ll hear Dr. Leary make in a few minutes was that within a year or so, anywhere from one-third to two-thirds of all the kids in school, that’s high school and college, would be presented with an opportunity to try LSD and or cannabis.
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Now, I don’t know if that happened or not, but I do know that many historians say that
00:05:52 ►
what they mean by the 60s was a period that actually began around 1967.
00:05:58 ►
Now, one thing I do know about that part of the country around that time is that there
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was a lot of really good acid going around back
00:06:05 ►
then. So now try to clear your mind of everything that you know about the 60s and about psychedelics
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and pretend that you’re a novice about all this stuff. And now let’s turn on our January 1966 and join Dr. Timothy Leary. I’m not completely a visitor. The reason I’m coming right now is that January 27th and 28th,
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we are going to bring our psychedelic religious celebration
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to Berkeley in San Francisco.
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Well, now, what would that mean?
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Well…
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It’s referred to, I believe, as a concert.
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Oh, no.
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Isn’t it?
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No.
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Well, somebody used that phrase in describing it,
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and I wonder what that could mean. Well, let me backtrack a bit to put this in context. As you
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probably know, three months ago, we formed a new religion called League for Spiritual Discovery.
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Like every other religion, we have our own sacramental methods and our own goals,
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and we practice the religion in small groups privately.
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But like other religious groups, we have our public educational and demonstration ceremonies,
00:07:36 ►
which we call celebrations.
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And the private ones are the esoteric side of the situation, I gather?
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And the public ones are, as all religions have been, translated
00:07:48 ►
for the masses? Or not so much the masses as the non-initiated or the non-communicants.
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This, of course, is the, this may sound strange to Americans, but actually it’s the most orthodox
00:08:00 ►
form of religion, and indeed it’s not that much different from the way that, for example,
00:08:05 ►
the Catholic Church or the Jewish religion operates. You have your sacramental services,
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which are reserved to the communicants, and then you present to the public what your aspirations
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are, and you try to show people what you’re discovering. So in the last three months in
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New York City, every Tuesday night we’ve been running what we call psychedelic religious celebrations. Could you tell me something about them in more detail? I think there are
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numbers of people in our audience who have some concept of what the psychedelic experience
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is, and I’d like you to speak fairly directly to what you do. Yes, well, thousands of years
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men have been having what we now call psychedelic experiences, mystics,
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visionaries, far-out artists and poets. And after you have this experience, you
00:08:57 ►
struggle, you hunger to communicate it, mainly of course for yourself. It’s a way
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of reminding yourself what it was, but also to communicate to your fellow men.
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We think that every religious group in its origin
00:09:10 ►
struggled to start a new art,
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and indeed you can test the validity of any new religion
00:09:16 ►
by the art that it creates,
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because words, after all, are a fragile freight
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for carrying the deepest impulses of man.
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So like other religions in the past, we have developed our own art form.
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Rather, it is automatically developed.
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Psychedelic art is the public face or the communication device of our new religion.
00:09:37 ►
Now, what is psychedelic art?
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Psychedelic art is multi-energy.
00:09:42 ►
Instead of using one form of light or movie or slides, we’ll have up to 26
00:09:51 ►
slide projectors and motion picture cameras or projectors going on one huge cinemascope screen.
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The screen is undulating with cellular forms and changing patterns, stroboscopic flashes, and swimming in and out of this Niagara of visual material
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are what we call mythic forms.
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It’s as though your own protein memory banks,
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your genetic code is being decoded,
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and these millions of file cards that have been stored for thousands of years
00:10:22 ►
begin to flash.
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Each week in our celebration,
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we reenact or we renew
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one of the great ancient religious stories.
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We just finished doing the reincarnation of Jesus Christ.
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In the present time, we’re doing the illumination of the Buddha.
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These great religious figures of the past
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are men who have been turned on
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and who have worked out a new metaphor for stating the divine plan or the way things are.
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And we seek to use modern methods, electronic and multimedia, to turn on the audience, literally.
00:10:59 ►
Do you use sound?
00:11:00 ►
Oh, yes. We use up to six or eight sources of sound,
00:11:06 ►
some live and some tapes.
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We’ll have four or five tapes going at one time, for example.
00:11:13 ►
Well, now, what is the net result of this
00:11:18 ►
in terms of what you expect the members of your audience to do?
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Is this to encourage them to use LSD,
00:11:32 ►
or is it to encourage them to reach
00:11:36 ►
some kind of expanded level of awareness
00:11:40 ►
without such use?
00:11:43 ►
Because whether or not psychedelic aids were
00:11:50 ►
invoked, it is obviously true that all the great religious teachers were aware
00:12:01 ►
in a quite different way of the reality around them
00:12:05 ►
than the average human being.
00:12:09 ►
That altered perception.
00:12:10 ►
Is this something you simply want people to accept as being a fact?
00:12:14 ►
Is it something you feel all people should experience?
00:12:18 ►
What’s the implementation here?
00:12:21 ►
Well, as I said before, the aims and goals of our religion are highly orthodox. We seek to
00:12:27 ►
find the divinity within. Call that what you will. But it’s been well known for thousands of years
00:12:32 ►
that man can focus his microscope inside and turn on to energies and revelations which are built
00:12:39 ►
into your nervous system and your cells. Your body is an instrument of communication which has been around for two billion years and there’s a lot to learn from it. Now, we don’t want other people necessarily
00:12:52 ►
to use our sacraments, LSD and marijuana. We’re not advocating the use of these. And
00:12:57 ►
in our celebrations, which we’ll be putting on January 27th and 28th here in the Bay Area,
00:13:01 ►
there will be no attempt to urge people to use drugs. We are
00:13:07 ►
attempting to get people to turn inside, to look within, and to turn on. And we don’t care what
00:13:12 ►
sacrament people use. Throughout human history, the human race has used the most incredible
00:13:19 ►
variety of techniques for turning on. They’ve used flagellation and dance, they’ve used immobility, solitude,
00:13:26 ►
noise, some… Meditation. Exactly, meditation, fasting, sacramental foods. The interesting
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thing is that man’s attempt to turn on just staggers the imagination of hardly anything
00:13:42 ►
that hasn’t been used in one time or another, in one culture or another,
00:13:46 ►
to get this experience.
00:13:49 ►
And often the most opposite things have been used.
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It’s well known that overstimulation and noise and crowds is one way
00:13:53 ►
of flipping you out of your external mind within.
00:13:58 ►
On the other hand, silence is something else.
00:13:59 ►
Mobs, in other words.
00:14:00 ►
Mobs, yes, or chanting,
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or you get a large group together
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and you get a kind of a hypnotic effect.
00:14:04 ►
Sexual renunciation is one method.
00:14:07 ►
On the other hand, ritual use of sex,
00:14:09 ►
where the mates become gods and goddesses for each other,
00:14:12 ►
is another.
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Of course, throughout human history,
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men have used chemicals, plants, vines, roots.
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Wine itself was originally a sacramental method
00:14:22 ►
of turning people on.
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So we don’t care what method people use.
00:14:26 ►
We treasure and glorify any method that can get you high,
00:14:30 ►
that is, can turn you on.
00:14:32 ►
But we also insist that no one tell us
00:14:37 ►
we can’t use our sacrament if it seems to work for us.
00:14:41 ►
Well, now, there are a number of aspects of this that I would like to ask some
00:14:48 ►
fairly frank questions about. I have heard it stated, and with some understanding, that some
00:14:57 ►
of the people who become involved with the use of LSD, that it becomes a sort of dead end. In other words, here is an experience which is
00:15:10 ►
highly stimulating and extremely exciting in the deepest sense of the word.
00:15:21 ►
And the repetition of that experience, the sort of going off in a corner, as it were,
00:15:27 ►
mentally and spiritually, becomes some kind of an end in itself. I’ve heard it stated that
00:15:34 ►
quite a number of creative people, for example, who have gotten into this, no longer produce.
00:15:52 ►
longer produce. Now I’m going to pose a theory, namely that the proper use of such awareness is bound up with what you bring back and implement in the society around you, and that as everything can be abused,
00:16:10 ►
so could these methods of hyper-awareness be abused, and in fact have been abused, is exactly using the same powers.
00:16:26 ►
And I have the idea
00:16:30 ►
that no one creates,
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either in their life
00:16:37 ►
or in any visual outward sense,
00:16:42 ►
without submitting themselves to some kind of discipline, either their own
00:16:46 ►
or some higher discipline to which they are prepared to submit. Now, where along this line
00:16:54 ►
does the creative, in sense of our society, in sense of the world that we live in,
00:17:04 ►
how do you tie this all in?
00:17:06 ►
Well, you’ve raised several points, and I find myself in complete agreement with each
00:17:10 ►
point as I followed what you just said.
00:17:14 ►
Number one, the internal experience cannot be the final goal.
00:17:19 ►
Of course, monastics and people in my profession, shamans and alchemists and people who have attempted to change consciousness
00:17:27 ►
for thousands of years have debated this point.
00:17:30 ►
As a matter of fact, in Southeast Asia, there are two schools of Buddhism.
00:17:34 ►
Northern Buddhism, Mahayana Buddhism, says exactly what you’ve just said.
00:17:39 ►
It’s one thing to turn on, but then you’ve got to come back to society
00:17:42 ►
and make it show in your behavior.
00:17:46 ►
There’s another school of Buddhism, as most of you listeners probably know, Southern Buddhism,
00:17:50 ►
which says, no, just stay high all the time. Anything is a trap in the way of going back
00:17:55 ►
to society. Well, we belong to the school which believes that by your fruits you shall
00:18:02 ►
be known. It’s inconceivable to us that people could take LSD regularly
00:18:07 ►
and not be driven to come back to society
00:18:10 ►
and to try to glorify or to express what they have learned.
00:18:17 ►
And what is it that you think they have learned?
00:18:20 ►
Well, it’s highly individual, obviously.
00:18:23 ►
And, of course, you mentioned the misuse of LSD.
00:18:28 ►
It’s obvious.
00:18:29 ►
Every form of energy that man has invented has been misused.
00:18:32 ►
I think the auto engine is misused.
00:18:34 ►
I think even radio and television is misused by most other stations.
00:18:39 ►
It’s too much to ask that our new form of energy, which is LSD,
00:18:42 ►
is going to immediately
00:18:45 ►
cause everyone to become an ecstatic and productive saint. On the other hand, all we can do is
00:18:54 ►
say over and over again in every lecture and every performance that we give to the public
00:18:59 ►
that discipline and training and a conscientious attempt to express productively is the inevitable result of your LSD experience.
00:19:12 ►
And I think that’s one of the tragedies that many people take LSD and are so entranced and delighted by this internal world that they just turn off the external world. And this inevitably leads to tragedy because you just can’t stir up all this energy
00:19:26 ►
and get so many ideas flashing
00:19:28 ►
without harnessing it up.
00:19:30 ►
And if you don’t do that,
00:19:31 ►
then you get this endless rumination
00:19:33 ►
and you get this so-called LSD freak-out
00:19:35 ►
where the person is just spinning around in his own mind.
00:19:38 ►
The motto of our religion is
00:19:40 ►
turn on, tune in, and drop out.
00:19:43 ►
Turn on, of course, means contact these internal possibilities.
00:19:47 ►
Tune in means harness it back
00:19:49 ►
in works of art, in works of beauty, in works of harmony.
00:19:54 ►
So I couldn’t agree with you more
00:19:55 ►
when you make these comments about that.
00:19:57 ►
And what’s the drop out?
00:19:59 ►
Well, this is an easily misinterpreted phrase.
00:20:03 ►
By drop out, we mean dropout of meaningless activities.
00:20:07 ►
We don’t mean dropout of life.
00:20:09 ►
We don’t mean dropout of the really meaningful behaviors.
00:20:16 ►
We’re convinced, and I think it wouldn’t be hard to prove my point,
00:20:20 ►
that most Americans are involved in a meaningless robot assembly line
00:20:26 ►
series of activities. They don’t
00:20:27 ►
really know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, but
00:20:29 ►
they just push down to this
00:20:32 ►
assembly line and off they
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go. We tell people
00:20:35 ►
to drop out. This is the oldest
00:20:37 ►
message of visionary prophets, which happens
00:20:40 ►
to be my profession.
00:20:42 ►
My trade unions
00:20:44 ►
always come back to society
00:20:45 ►
and say, look, detach yourself
00:20:47 ►
from the immediate travel
00:20:48 ►
and be very careful how you spend your time
00:20:52 ►
and in what sort of activity
00:20:53 ►
you dedicate your energies.
00:20:56 ►
So by dropout, we don’t mean
00:20:58 ►
just to sit around and grow a beard
00:21:00 ►
and discuss the ultimates in philosophy.
00:21:04 ►
We mean drop out of the meaningless and tune in
00:21:07 ►
to the productive. We live, for example, in a large estate in upper New York. There are 60 of us who
00:21:18 ►
have dropped out of American society. We think we have our own country there. In addition to
00:21:23 ►
starting our own religion, we start our own country there. In addition to starting our own religion, we start
00:21:25 ►
our own country and we leave our little plot of land. I consider I’m going back to the planet
00:21:31 ►
Earth and to the United States in a friendly message of communication. And we are trying to
00:21:39 ►
develop their pilot study of how man can drop out, how Americans can drop out of the robot
00:21:45 ►
aspects of our society and tune back into the more basic human activities, which are
00:21:51 ►
familial, which are tribal, and which are involved in individual acts of beauty rather
00:21:56 ►
than huge mass movements of power and efficiency. Well, how do you solve the practical side of life?
00:22:08 ►
Because one of the things which has always struck me
00:22:12 ►
about Western society is that unless you’re,
00:22:17 ►
well, practically, I guess,
00:22:18 ►
unless you’re involved with the Catholic Church,
00:22:22 ►
no matter how much a human being
00:22:24 ►
might wish to devote
00:22:26 ►
themselves to the good of the world, there are not very many channels for
00:22:35 ►
this, you see. Now in India, for example, it’s quite customary that a person works
00:22:43 ►
productively for a certain number of years
00:22:45 ►
and then they simply pack up
00:22:48 ►
and disappear into the
00:22:49 ►
great sea of
00:22:52 ►
life and somehow
00:22:54 ►
or another their society however
00:22:56 ►
meagerly is geared
00:22:58 ►
to accept this
00:22:59 ►
and to do something about the survival
00:23:02 ►
of these people because
00:23:03 ►
society feels that these people, in their own odd way, have great value.
00:23:13 ►
What do you, supposing anyone were involved in the process of dropping out,
00:23:19 ►
what do they do to survive?
00:23:21 ►
Well, there are two ways this has been done throughout human history.
00:23:24 ►
One is the way you suggest, and that’s not just Indians.
00:23:26 ►
The Catholic Church, as you point out today,
00:23:29 ►
supports thousands and thousands of monastics.
00:23:32 ►
And did all during the medieval and the dark age period and so on,
00:23:38 ►
and acted without any question as the carrier of the culture,
00:23:43 ►
and a culture that practically inevitably would have died
00:23:48 ►
without that concentration of power at the given point.
00:23:55 ►
I think you’re going to see a return to this tradition in the United States today.
00:23:59 ►
Our country is now so affluent, and we have the problem of leisure,
00:24:02 ►
and I think that we’re going to be able to tolerate in the future
00:24:05 ►
more and more Americans
00:24:06 ►
dropping out
00:24:07 ►
for a limited space of time,
00:24:10 ►
perhaps for a longer
00:24:11 ►
space of time.
00:24:12 ►
It’s no longer
00:24:13 ►
an economic problem
00:24:14 ►
if several million Americans
00:24:16 ►
just retire to a life
00:24:19 ►
of meditation and contemplation.
00:24:20 ►
But that’s not…
00:24:21 ►
It wouldn’t be
00:24:21 ►
if they were accepted
00:24:22 ►
by the society.
00:24:23 ►
It would be for the millions
00:24:24 ►
of Americans who did it if they did tomorrow, Well, the Protestant Puritan ethic… You see, it was the Protestant Church which knocked out the monistic tradition. The Protestant Church glorifies work, virtue, and money in the bank. And we’re licking that. And that’s one of the campaigns we have going to teach Americans that the Protestant ethic just doesn’t work anymore. And we’re going to have to tolerate more people dropping out and following and following spiritual life but that’s not the real central solution that we see there’s another as a second
00:24:51 ►
way in which people have dropped out in the past and I would cite the men who founded this country
00:24:55 ►
the pilgrims and the different groups who dropped out of England they said to to the fellows over
00:25:01 ►
there we don’t like your establishment and we’re going to drop out of it. And they climbed in leaky boats and came over here
00:25:06 ►
and they started their own tribal culture,
00:25:09 ►
which is essentially what it was.
00:25:11 ►
And they worked hard
00:25:12 ►
and they built up their own economic system
00:25:16 ►
and that’s how America was founded.
00:25:18 ►
We’re returning in our little colony in Millbrook
00:25:21 ►
to the original American formula.
00:25:23 ►
Now we can’t climb in leaky boats
00:25:25 ►
and find an island someplace because our globe is no longer open. So we have gone up to upper
00:25:32 ►
New York State, and we’ve done as the Pilgrims have done. We set up our own economic community.
00:25:37 ►
We can support ourselves. And surprisingly enough, when you think about it, there are
00:25:42 ►
many ways in which small groups who just can’t take this society in its industrial computer sense can support themselves. you know, urban insanity, there are enormous vacuum and gaps that are left where thoughtful people can move back into the country
00:26:07 ►
and make a way of life.
00:26:12 ►
See, there’s one thing that a machine culture can’t do,
00:26:15 ►
and they can’t really please the senses.
00:26:17 ►
It’s very hard for a machine-made object
00:26:20 ►
to do what works of art are supposed to do, really delight the hands and delight
00:26:27 ►
the eye and delight the body.
00:26:30 ►
So that in each of these groups that drops out of society in the next five or six years,
00:26:36 ►
ten years, it’s going to have to work out its own economic method.
00:26:39 ►
They’re going to have to establish a favorable balance of exchange with the larger society.
00:26:45 ►
And if you’re not competent enough and creative enough to do that, you’re not ready to drop out. See,
00:26:48 ►
our motto is, turn on. You have to get the revelation first. After you’ve turned on,
00:26:54 ►
tune it back in, in acts of production and beauty, then you’re ready to drop out. And
00:27:00 ►
if you’re not creative enough and free enough, and if your LSD sessions haven’t given you
00:27:05 ►
enough real meaning that you can do this, then you obviously haven’t learned your LSD lesson,
00:27:12 ►
you’re not ready to drop out. Well, it still seems to me, observing the scene around me,
00:27:21 ►
that there is some danger here, and you have talked about this earlier in
00:27:28 ►
this conversation of people particularly very young people who do not perhaps
00:27:38 ►
bring enough experience enough suffering enough knowledge to this process,
00:27:47 ►
where the simple use of LSD could be highly fraught with danger.
00:27:56 ►
Yes, I deplore the social reality of hundreds of thousands,
00:28:03 ►
perhaps millions of high school and college students
00:28:07 ►
taking LSD and not knowing what they’re opening up. On the other hand, it’s also a social reality
00:28:14 ►
that they’re going to do it. Just like the automobile is here and it can be misused,
00:28:18 ►
the kids are going to use alcohol. They’re going to use any form of energy around. They are going to use LSD. I see the current younger generation as a transition generation.
00:28:28 ►
We gave them a world which was meaningless.
00:28:31 ►
They’re trying to salvage the best that they can from it.
00:28:35 ►
And we should be very patient with this younger generation.
00:28:38 ►
And the only solution, of course, is training and education and preparation.
00:28:42 ►
And that’s why we’re bringing our celebrations to the West Coast.
00:28:46 ►
Our celebrations are not entertainments,
00:28:49 ►
although we hope they’re entertaining.
00:28:50 ►
They’re mainly didactic.
00:28:51 ►
We’re trying to show people what the LSD experience is.
00:28:56 ►
We’re trying to show people how to use it.
00:28:58 ►
It’s quite didactic in the sense that each celebration
00:29:00 ►
takes up different sense organs and different levels of consciousness.
00:29:04 ►
At times I get very dry in my sermon, explaining to people what they’re seeing on the screen.
00:29:10 ►
Training and discipline and, of course, suffering is part of any yoga.
00:29:16 ►
And I want to say this about LSD.
00:29:17 ►
Sometimes people think that LSD is just pure ecstasy.
00:29:21 ►
It’s not. There’s nothing in life that doesn’t have the other side to the coin.
00:29:25 ►
And as you leave your tribal mind with its narrow limits and open up these other possibilities,
00:29:32 ►
there’s just as much potentiality for fear as there is for delight.
00:29:38 ►
And that’s where the training comes in, how to handle the fear and how to not let it pull you over and harness these energies
00:29:46 ►
you speak repeatedly of the internal experience of LSD meaning I presume the working out within
00:29:58 ►
the human being of whatever expansion of consciousness he is achieved. But it is also true that this has a
00:30:11 ►
very incredible effect on the physical plane and on all of the sensory processes. That’s what I mean by internal. That’s why I wanted to clarify.
00:30:27 ►
Western man
00:30:28 ►
has been so deceived by his
00:30:30 ►
priests and by his bureaucratic
00:30:32 ►
institutional religions.
00:30:35 ►
Most of the great
00:30:36 ►
gospels and teachings of the past
00:30:38 ►
are absolutely correct, except
00:30:40 ►
that our priests have externalized
00:30:42 ►
them. When Christ said, seek ye the
00:30:44 ►
kingdom of heaven, it is within, he meant that literally it’s within your body. The aim of our religion
00:30:50 ►
is to ask man to come to his senses. You have to learn how to use your sense organs and
00:30:55 ►
how to deal with the energies which inundate the retina of your eye and the delicate membrane
00:31:00 ►
of your ear. You have to go out of your mind to come to your senses. You have to learn how to resurrect your body. Christ meant that literally, that the revelation
00:31:12 ►
is in tissue. The revelation is in cell. And this is what we learned from LSD. And we’re
00:31:18 ►
not inventing an imaginary soul inside. To me, the soul, one aspect of the soul is a
00:31:24 ►
genetic code, which is a tiny little strand of protein
00:31:27 ►
which has the entire blueprint and memory of two billion years of life on this planet.
00:31:32 ►
These are the exciting territories that you can get into if you know what you’re doing
00:31:37 ►
with LSD. I have always suspected that either
00:31:41 ►
the great religious
00:31:44 ►
teachers were completely irrelevant, or else
00:31:48 ►
what they said was not some kind of pious hope, but in fact an observation of fact.
00:31:58 ►
Exactly. That’s something else that most Americans and Westerners don’t realize, that the science
00:32:03 ►
of consciousness is just as regular, just as lawful,
00:32:06 ►
and just as complicated as the science of energies outside.
00:32:09 ►
One of the early mottos of my profession was her hermetic code.
00:32:15 ►
It was on the emerald tablet of Hermes back in Alexandria.
00:32:17 ►
It says, what is without is within.
00:32:20 ►
That’s simply reminding us that there’s no energy transformation
00:32:23 ►
that you find outside around you that isn’t recorded in protein historical records inside your body.
00:32:49 ►
of unidentified flying objects in the metaphorical sense that whizzed by your projectors. All of the political and all of the scientific problems of the external world have been worked out over and over again
00:32:58 ►
by your cells and your tissues, and unless you get into some contact with this, we think that you’re really kind of a robot
00:33:05 ►
just being pushed around and reacting to external forces.
00:33:10 ►
In what role and at what level of that role do you visualize yourself, Dr. Larry?
00:33:20 ►
Well, I’ve given a great deal of thought to that.
00:33:23 ►
I think as I read history, and of course in my profession, which is religious teacher or shaman, you have to look back. We have our tradition, just like the physicist knows about Einstein and Bohr and Newton.
00:33:41 ►
which is a changing of consciousness.
00:33:44 ►
I don’t think we’re ever going to have any more holy men or any more messiahs,
00:33:45 ►
and I hope we’re not going to have any more martyrs.
00:33:48 ►
You see, a thousand years ago,
00:33:49 ►
someone stumbled on a new method of turning on.
00:33:52 ►
Maybe it was the Buddha over in India.
00:33:55 ►
His original method was the sit-down.
00:33:57 ►
He sat under that tree and stayed there till he had to sit in.
00:34:02 ►
He found a method, and he came back, and he taught it.
00:34:06 ►
Well, by the time that method and the name of the Buddha
00:34:09 ►
reached the Mediterranean, it was maybe 100 years,
00:34:12 ►
slave galleys and folk singers,
00:34:15 ►
and it’s always the young and the lower class
00:34:18 ►
and the alienated that carry the message.
00:34:20 ►
By the time it got over the Mediterranean,
00:34:21 ►
the Buddha was perhaps two or three generations dead.
00:34:24 ►
So then you set him up as a special person
00:34:27 ►
who had a virgin birth or a miraculous death and so forth.
00:34:31 ►
That’s not true.
00:34:32 ►
He was just a human being struggling to find meaning
00:34:34 ►
the way the rest of us are.
00:34:36 ►
Now, in the present technological age,
00:34:40 ►
you see, that’s never going to happen.
00:34:42 ►
When we announced the formation of our religion in New York
00:34:44 ►
three months ago,
00:34:46 ►
at 10 o’clock in the morning, by 10.10 it was on the news ticker in London,
00:34:50 ►
and 10.15 it was on the news ticker in Tokyo,
00:34:52 ►
and probably 10.17 it was on the news ticker in Peiping,
00:34:55 ►
and they were wondering, what am I doing over there now?
00:34:59 ►
There’s no more room for mythological, supernatural religious teachers. I’m simply an American of Irish
00:35:09 ►
descent with all of the faults and virtues of my time and culture, struggling for meaning,
00:35:15 ►
and we have got a method which works for those people who know how to use it, so that I don’t
00:35:20 ►
see myself as a historical figure in this old sense.
00:35:25 ►
We’re not going to have any of these legendary…
00:35:32 ►
Messiahs.
00:35:32 ►
Yeah, that’s right.
00:35:34 ►
I think that religion in the future is going to be much more personal.
00:35:39 ►
Every man should start his own religion.
00:35:41 ►
That’s my advice to young people today.
00:35:43 ►
Don’t think it was all done 2,000 years ago or 500 years ago. The great challenge of human life is really to found your
00:35:49 ►
own religion. That means you personally cast off your tribal mind and come to real tissue and
00:35:57 ►
fleshly grip with these ancient problems. And you hammer out your own ethical cone on your tablets
00:36:03 ►
of whatever they are. You become your own Copernicus. You probe these mysteries yourself and come
00:36:09 ►
out with your own answers. Now, you’re going to come out with pretty much the same answers
00:36:13 ►
that Christ and the Buddha came up with, because that’s the science of it. There are certain
00:36:18 ►
basic truths, but you can’t take them in cliché, static form. Nobody can pass on these truths
00:36:24 ►
to anyone
00:36:25 ►
else, or they’re just meaningless formula. You have to have your dark night of the soul,
00:36:30 ►
you have to have your LSD flip out, you have to wonder what’s real, who am I, and then
00:36:35 ►
slowly you’re going to have to recapitulate the evolution history of the human race yourself.
00:36:42 ►
That’s what the challenge of LSD is.
00:36:48 ►
And come out with your own prayers,
00:36:49 ►
your own rituals,
00:36:51 ►
which work for you and your family and perhaps a few friends.
00:36:53 ►
That’s the excitement of it.
00:36:54 ►
And we deplore the mass conformity
00:36:59 ►
of most religions today,
00:37:00 ►
which become just like General Motors
00:37:02 ►
and NBC television.
00:37:05 ►
You mention repeatedly the universe as being contained within each body.
00:37:14 ►
Has your group any attitude about the universe when not contained within a body?
00:37:21 ►
You’re asking about immortality.
00:37:24 ►
Whenever that question comes up, I know the
00:37:26 ►
conversation is getting to a higher and higher level. We’re no longer talking about danger and
00:37:30 ►
the social problem of one generation of Americans struggling for a new social order. Well, it can’t
00:37:39 ►
have failed to occur to you. Right, yeah. That’s a good sign that the interview is progressing nicely.
00:37:46 ►
We have no answers to the question of immortality.
00:37:49 ►
It seems, and of course each person has to work this out himself,
00:37:53 ►
I don’t think that my body, with my appendectomy and my gold tooth
00:37:57 ►
and my graying hair is going to reappear in a new afterlife.
00:38:06 ►
The words of another great member of my profession,
00:38:11 ►
St. Thomas, come to mind.
00:38:13 ►
He said, why do ye ask about the end
00:38:17 ►
when you have not found the beginning?
00:38:19 ►
If you find the beginning,
00:38:20 ►
then you realize that questions about immortality
00:38:23 ►
are game questions.
00:38:24 ►
They’re chessboard questions. Does a that questions about immortality are game questions. They’re
00:38:25 ►
chessboard questions. Does a tree ask about immortality? Does the honeybee ask those questions?
00:38:31 ►
No, because they’re tuned in. They know exactly where they came from. They know where they are
00:38:36 ►
in the entire process, and they realize that the process goes on, and that immortality is really
00:38:41 ►
turning on and locating yourself in this timeless process.
00:38:49 ►
Once you’ve really had this experience, this classic visionary mystic experience, when you’re really tuned into the entire picture, you don’t worry about immortality anymore.
00:38:55 ►
You’ve had it. You know you’re immortal right this second.
00:39:01 ►
If you are ever going to be.
00:39:03 ►
Right. Even though your body is wearing out
00:39:05 ►
and you have to face the fact that
00:39:07 ►
the whole universe is going to end.
00:39:10 ►
That’s the beauty of some of these ancient Indian myths
00:39:13 ►
which make perfect LSD sense.
00:39:15 ►
They talk about cycles of history and cycles of evolution.
00:39:19 ►
Vishnu goes through all the reincarnations
00:39:21 ►
and then he goes to sleep for several billion years
00:39:24 ►
and then he wakes up again.
00:39:26 ►
These are the cycles of nature,
00:39:28 ►
of growing and dying, of light and darkness.
00:39:33 ►
And there is an immortal sense or a cyclical sense to this
00:39:38 ►
which really satisfies me much more than the notion
00:39:41 ►
that my body, with its particular scars and stigmata,
00:39:49 ►
will be around again in another circle.
00:39:52 ►
Well, of course, there have been religions which believe that the physical
00:39:56 ►
resurrection of the body was not an essential part of this process of immortality.
00:40:02 ►
So the gold tooth wouldn’t necessarily have to come along with it.
00:40:06 ►
But we certainly believe in the soul, and the closest definition we give of the soul is a genetic code.
00:40:13 ►
That’s an invisible, ancient, incredibly intelligent blueprinting apparatus with enormous power to spin off bodies the way Detroit assembly lines spin out new
00:40:25 ►
models of cars, which is almost a timeless process.
00:40:31 ►
We literally think that man’s nervous system can decode the genetic code.
00:40:37 ►
After all, the genetic code produced our nervous system and is in touch with it that way.
00:40:42 ►
Why can’t we contact it the other way?
00:40:44 ►
system and is in touch with it that way, why can’t we contact it the other way?
00:41:00 ►
Well, in some of the Eastern religions, at least, one of the things, if I have understood it, which arises is whether or not the sense of personal identity is maintained
00:41:07 ►
throughout this process and that i think is something which causes considerable concern
00:41:15 ►
to many people and if again if i have understood it properly there is a very widespread school of mystic thought which believes that simply all is one all the time.
00:41:33 ►
It is just a question of recognizing
00:41:36 ►
the interrelatedness of all life
00:41:42 ►
and that this totality is what is the reality,
00:41:48 ►
rather than the narrowing down of this particular focus point,
00:41:55 ►
focal point, which is what you conceive to be you.
00:42:00 ►
Yeah.
00:42:01 ►
Well, of course, that’s where the science of internal exploration is very convincing once you study the ancient text. All of the great visionary mystic philosophers, East and West, come up with the same data. That is all one process, and if you just throw off your tribal mind and participate in this greater flow, you’ll see that. Now, the embarrassing thing about the human mind is
00:42:27 ►
that 99.99% of your nervous system, which is your seat of consciousness, doesn’t know
00:42:33 ►
that you exist, or doesn’t know, in my case, that Timothy Leary exists.
00:42:38 ►
And couldn’t care less.
00:42:39 ►
And couldn’t care less with our little problems of ambition and status and so forth. All that they’re concerned
00:42:47 ►
with is that we keep the universe alive and going. And of course, we’re basically seed carriers.
00:42:51 ►
From the standpoint of genetic code, we’re here to carry on the flame of life. Now, here’s where
00:42:56 ►
we get into the LSD psychosis or the LSD freakout. For several years now, we have defined… Of course,
00:43:03 ►
we think that psychiatry is our modern devil inquisition.
00:43:08 ►
Psychiatrists don’t know what psychosis is and have no cure for it.
00:43:11 ►
Sure, they can load you up with tranquilizers and make you neat and tidy in the back ward,
00:43:15 ►
but psychiatry has not come up with the answer to psychosis.
00:43:19 ►
But we use this word psychosis, but we use the word devil or devil possession or witchcraft
00:43:24 ►
two or three, four
00:43:25 ►
or five hundred years ago.
00:43:27 ►
Now, the LSD psychosis or the LSD panic, we think, is a religious crisis, and it comes
00:43:32 ►
exactly and routinely this way, that the person takes LSD and suddenly discovers that 99%
00:43:40 ►
of his nervous system doesn’t know or care about him.
00:43:43 ►
Then he begins to scream,
00:43:49 ►
where’s Shattuck Avedu? Where’s the University of California? Where’s Timothy Leary? And your nervous system is inundating your consciousness with these enigmatic, smiling, cellular transformations.
00:43:57 ►
Never heard of Timothy Leary. Now, never heard of Berkeley. What’s all that about? It’s the
00:44:02 ►
language of tissue in this relentless, beautiful,
00:44:06 ►
but inexorable process of life which is going on inside of you
00:44:11 ►
that becomes frightening.
00:44:12 ►
And then people scream, get me back, get me back.
00:44:15 ►
The tragedy is that the LSD panic today is seen as a psychiatric problem.
00:44:21 ►
And, of course, a psychiatrist can’t deal with a person
00:44:23 ►
whose ontological crisis is occurring or whose sense of reality is distorted. You can’t use
00:44:30 ►
logic to talk to a two-billion-year-old energy process that’s converting things into a cellular
00:44:37 ►
flow. The tragedy is that the LSD panic person is dragged off to a mental hospital and treated as a nut.
00:44:45 ►
And then this can result in several weeks of confusion and depression and anxiety.
00:44:52 ►
Our recommendation is to see the LSD experience as life itself,
00:44:57 ►
as a religious quest, a religious confrontation,
00:45:02 ►
and not as a psychiatric pathological situation. Well, what will
00:45:08 ►
your advice be to these younger people who are experimenting, whether anyone
00:45:18 ►
likes it or not, with these forms? Under what circumstances and with what type of help and supervision
00:45:28 ►
should they approach what you feel to be
00:45:32 ►
a very profound and important experience?
00:45:37 ►
Well, we say prepare yourself for a spiritual experience.
00:45:42 ►
Find a guru or a spiritual teacher
00:45:44 ►
and study with
00:45:47 ►
him and have him guide you through your visionary experience and have your LSD
00:45:53 ►
session in a shrine, in a place completely devoted to the spiritual quest.
00:45:58 ►
Of course, nobody can do this today because we don’t have any gurus and we
00:46:02 ►
don’t have shrines and people take LSD in apartments in the North Beach
00:46:07 ►
or apartments in Berkeley,
00:46:09 ►
which is not the best place to have a mind-rending confrontation.
00:46:16 ►
We have, for the last seven years, been training people
00:46:20 ►
in Mexico, in Millbrook, in our summer sessions,
00:46:24 ►
and in our psychedelic celebrations,
00:46:26 ►
training people how to understand and approach this really awesome experience.
00:46:32 ►
One other thing that I always say when I have a chance to talk to the public
00:46:37 ►
is a word to the parents who are concerned about their children.
00:46:42 ►
Now, the brute statistical reality is that in an urban center like this,
00:46:48 ►
almost every young person is going to be confronted with marijuana or LSD
00:46:53 ►
in the next year or two.
00:46:55 ►
And a high percentage, which varies from one-third up to two-thirds,
00:46:58 ►
depending on the college or the high school,
00:47:01 ►
will actually take LSD or marijuana.
00:47:05 ►
Now, the tendency of the law enforcement officers is to try to get parents to
00:47:09 ►
become policemen just like cuba or china or
00:47:12 ►
germany
00:47:13 ►
to get the uh…
00:47:14 ►
uh… parents to inform on their kids and to do detective work on their
00:47:18 ►
children this just appalls us
00:47:21 ►
my advice to parents is uh…
00:47:23 ►
that you should…
00:47:25 ►
What’s really scaring you is the breakdown
00:47:27 ►
between you and your kids
00:47:29 ►
in the way of real honest communication.
00:47:31 ►
And instead of swilling your martinis and your cocktails
00:47:37 ►
and then calling your kids dope addicts,
00:47:41 ►
sit down quietly and ask your youngsters
00:47:43 ►
why they’re interested in taking marijuana and what they’ve learned and
00:47:48 ►
find out what other kids are experiencing and make it a family adventure of
00:47:54 ►
study and exploration and then I say after two or three months of this
00:47:58 ►
discussion and research and talking to people if you and your kids think that this is a risk worth taking
00:48:04 ►
Do it together.
00:48:05 ►
One of the keys to our religious approach, social, is to bring the family back together.
00:48:11 ►
And in Millbrook right now we have about eight families who are LSD families who live together,
00:48:17 ►
husband, wife, and children.
00:48:18 ►
They take LSD together.
00:48:21 ►
Bonds of union and communication and family meaning develop,
00:48:26 ►
which I think have been lost in much of American institutional life.
00:48:33 ►
No government agency is going to solve our spiritual problems.
00:48:37 ►
I say to the parents, no government agency is going to stop your children from exploring consciousness.
00:48:42 ►
This is your problem of communication and collaboration
00:48:45 ►
and mutual understanding with your kids. Sit down and talk to them. And when the time comes,
00:48:50 ►
let your kids turn you on. That’s my message to the middle-aged, middle-class, whiskey-drinking,
00:48:57 ►
suburban American family. Well, I’ve heard some of the young people say that when under the influence of marijuana or LSD that it’s perfectly all right to, for example,
00:49:16 ►
careen around, drive a car, and do this kind of thing.
00:49:19 ►
What would your response to that be?
00:49:21 ►
Well, that’s just ridiculous and inconceivable
00:49:27 ►
that anyone would take
00:49:28 ►
one of these powerful consciousness-changing chemicals
00:49:32 ►
and careen around in bowling alleys
00:49:35 ►
or in cars or motorcycles.
00:49:37 ►
Sure, if you want to bowl or careen around in a car, do it.
00:49:40 ►
But the essence of the marijuana
00:49:43 ►
or the honesty experience
00:49:44 ►
is that you’re opening up these
00:49:45 ►
internal possibilities. It makes no more sense to me that someone would take LSD and drive
00:49:52 ►
a car than on the height of your honeymoon you would be making love in an automobile.
00:49:57 ►
Sure, you can do it, but that’s a ridiculous waste of a sacred moment. It’s just a sign of bad training. People don’t know what they’re
00:50:08 ►
doing, what they’re getting into. As a matter of fact, we urge people, of course, I never
00:50:12 ►
urge anyone to take LSD or marijuana. That’s your last frontier of personal choice, what
00:50:18 ►
you do in your nervous system. But if you’re going to take LSD and marijuana, select a place that will tap
00:50:26 ►
the highest aesthetic and spiritual possibilities.
00:50:29 ►
Never take LSD in a city.
00:50:31 ►
Never take LSD in an apartment.
00:50:34 ►
Go out to the country and take time.
00:50:38 ►
Set up an environment which is beautiful
00:50:40 ►
and which will elevate you,
00:50:44 ►
and then there’ll be no problem with LSD
00:50:46 ►
freakouts or anguish in the streets. Well now what do you feel your practical
00:50:54 ►
front is like in relation to what you are doing? Do you have difficulty with
00:51:02 ►
the authorities in New York and do you expect further difficulties? What do you have difficulty with the authorities in New York and do you expect further difficulties?
00:51:09 ►
What do you feel the attitude is?
00:51:10 ►
Well, of course. See, my profession as spiritual teacher with the new sacrament
00:51:14 ►
is a risky one. Throughout history, people in my profession
00:51:18 ►
are always in a little trouble with the law.
00:51:19 ►
As a matter of fact, of the men whom I idolize and model myself after,
00:51:23 ►
with no implication of comparing myself with these people,
00:51:26 ►
but my ideals and my models have all been in jail, at best.
00:51:31 ►
The last four presidents of India, for example,
00:51:34 ►
have all spent time in jail.
00:51:36 ►
So jail to us is not a middle-class disgrace.
00:51:40 ►
Here I am, a former Harvard professor.
00:51:42 ►
I’ve been arrested three times in the last year.
00:51:44 ►
Isn’t that disgraceful?
00:51:45 ►
To me, that just means I’m doing my job.
00:51:48 ►
And if I don’t get the establishment a little worried,
00:51:50 ►
I wonder, my message is not getting through.
00:51:54 ►
Every time I’m arrested,
00:51:55 ►
it gives me a chance to spend a day with the other team.
00:51:59 ►
I spend six, eight hours in jail until I’m bailed out.
00:52:03 ►
And I do with the police what I do with everyone else.
00:52:05 ►
I discuss with them, I argue with them,
00:52:08 ►
they ask questions, I challenge them,
00:52:10 ►
and when it’s all over and I leave with my lawyer,
00:52:13 ►
I usually give them a copy of one of my books and autograph it,
00:52:16 ►
and we go back to the playing field to keep it going.
00:52:20 ►
This is the ancient dialogue or tension
00:52:22 ►
between what belongs to Caesar
00:52:24 ►
and what belongs to the divinity which we locate within.
00:52:29 ►
And we have a very simple solution or formula to this old problem of Caesar and God.
00:52:37 ►
Anything that’s outside of your body, anything that moves out there in the streets, property, territory, weapons, money, and so forth, that belongs to Caesar. And you can choose the Caesar you like and vote for him or kill for him if you’re
00:52:49 ►
led that way. There must be laws, and we certainly agree to obeying Caesar when it comes to secular
00:52:58 ►
tangible, visible activities. When it comes to anything that goes on inside your body,
00:53:04 ►
that’s the kingdom of heaven for you. And I cannot let Caesar, whether he’s a public tangible, visible activities. When it comes to anything that goes on inside your body,
00:53:06 ►
that’s the kingdom of heaven for you.
00:53:10 ►
And I cannot let Caesar, whether he’s a public health official or a narcotics policeman
00:53:11 ►
or one of your two gubernatorial candidates in California,
00:53:16 ►
I can’t let them tell me what changes I’m going to bring about inside my own body.
00:53:22 ►
No one should have anything to say about what touches your body,
00:53:26 ►
what goes into it.
00:53:28 ►
Now, taking LSD and marijuana
00:53:30 ►
leads me or any of my co-religionists
00:53:32 ►
to break any external laws.
00:53:34 ►
If we get into automobile accidents
00:53:35 ►
or if we take off our clothes
00:53:37 ►
and rush through the streets
00:53:38 ►
screaming about the second coming,
00:53:40 ►
arrest us for causing a social disorder.
00:53:42 ►
You’ve got plenty of laws in this society to arrest people for causing a social disorder. You’ve got plenty of laws in this society
00:53:45 ►
to arrest people for behavior.
00:53:47 ►
But when it comes to your body
00:53:50 ►
and your sense organs
00:53:53 ►
and changing consciousness,
00:53:56 ►
that’s the kingdom of heaven for you.
00:53:59 ►
And if you let the law say anything about that,
00:54:01 ►
that’s making profane what should be sacred to you.
00:54:06 ►
We are now going to court.
00:54:08 ►
Our League for Spiritual Discovery
00:54:09 ►
has several lawyers,
00:54:11 ►
and we are filing suit
00:54:12 ►
in the state of New York,
00:54:14 ►
which will allow the priests
00:54:16 ►
in our religion
00:54:17 ►
to import and distribute
00:54:19 ►
marijuana and LSD
00:54:20 ►
only to our communicants
00:54:22 ►
in our own shrines.
00:54:24 ►
And that case will be coming up?
00:54:27 ►
That’ll be coming up in the next two or three months.
00:54:30 ►
Of course, we’re asking nothing more there than the Catholic priests
00:54:33 ►
and the Jewish rabbis requested of Caesar 40 years ago
00:54:37 ►
during that last period of legislative lunacy,
00:54:40 ►
which we call alcohol prohibition,
00:54:42 ►
when Catholic priests could import and distribute an illegal drug,
00:54:46 ►
namely wine, only in their shrines and only to their communicants.
00:54:50 ►
Now, the priests didn’t give cocktail parties,
00:54:52 ►
and when we use LSD and marijuana,
00:54:54 ►
we won’t be just having turn-on sessions in the streets.
00:54:57 ►
And if we do that, take our license away.
00:54:59 ►
There’s no problem to society here,
00:55:01 ►
and the Constitution, wonderfully enough,
00:55:04 ►
guarantees this choice of conscience.
00:55:07 ►
Thank you very much, Dr. Leary.
00:55:12 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:55:14 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:55:20 ►
You know, I have to say that, at least in my humble opinion,
00:55:25 ►
the good Dr. Leary gave out a lot of really great advice just now.
00:55:30 ►
Granted, the screwheads who think they run things
00:55:33 ►
were terrified of his promotion of psychedelic medicines
00:55:36 ►
as a way to break the mental bondage we’ve been put in,
00:55:40 ►
but I didn’t hear him talking about dosing thousands at a time,
00:55:44 ►
and I didn’t hear him say that it was all fun and games.
00:55:47 ►
He seemed very responsible to me.
00:55:50 ►
And did you notice the question where it was insinuated that people who use LSD don’t produce?
00:55:57 ►
In fact, even the implication that not producing is somehow bad strikes me as kind of funny.
00:56:04 ►
But we can talk about that another day.
00:56:06 ►
What I want to point out right now is that
00:56:08 ►
how even in seemingly friendly interviews with Dr. Leary,
00:56:13 ►
the questions are often loaded to point out something possibly negative
00:56:17 ►
about an experience that he isn’t even trying to talk anyone into having.
00:56:21 ►
Other than possibly that one offhand comment
00:56:25 ►
he made one time about LSD providing you
00:56:28 ►
with a two-hour orgasm.
00:56:30 ►
That comment may have led a few people
00:56:32 ►
who wouldn’t have tried it otherwise
00:56:34 ►
to give it a test drive.
00:56:36 ►
But what I wanted to point out was that
00:56:38 ►
here we find way back even before
00:56:41 ►
there was a declared war on drugs
00:56:43 ►
that the powers that be were already planting false information about our sacred medicines.
00:56:49 ►
And I can safely say the information about LSD turning someone into an unproductive person is wrong,
00:56:56 ►
because some of the most productive people in our societies have used LSD in their work,
00:57:01 ►
including more than one Nobel Prize winner.
00:57:03 ►
So don’t let anyone tell you that these medicines will make you unproductive.
00:57:08 ►
You just have to read the label and use as directed.
00:57:11 ►
That’s all.
00:57:13 ►
And let me say one more thing about the interview we just heard,
00:57:16 ►
and that has to do with the fact that in some very small ways, at least it seems to me,
00:57:22 ►
we’ve actually made a little progress in improving our civilization.
00:57:27 ►
What struck me was Dr. Leary’s use of all-male terms when he was talking about historical
00:57:32 ►
events.
00:57:33 ►
For example, he said, for thousands of years now, men have been having what we call psychedelic
00:57:39 ►
experiences.
00:57:41 ►
Now, of course, we all know that it hasn’t only been men who have been having these experiences.
00:57:47 ►
In fact, some archaeologists are now suggesting that it may be women who first even experimented with these interesting plants.
00:57:55 ►
Today, at least for the most part, I find more people careful to not exclude half of the human population when making these sweeping statements.
00:58:04 ►
not exclude half of the human population when making these sweeping statements.
00:58:07 ►
That may not seem like much of an improvement to you,
00:58:11 ►
but just a couple of years before this interview was held,
00:58:15 ►
I visited the city of New Orleans and rode on streetcars that had signs directing people of color to the back.
00:58:19 ►
And there were separate drinking fountains, restrooms, hotels, and so forth.
00:58:24 ►
Granted, we still have a
00:58:25 ►
significant way to go before there’s anything close to equal opportunities for anyone who isn’t
00:58:30 ►
a white male in this country, but just in my lifetime I’ve at least seen some slight improvement.
00:58:37 ►
Now one last thing I want to mention today about Timothy Leary’s work has to do with his archive.
00:58:43 ►
Just now we heard him talk about the pilot study his group was doing at Millbrook
00:58:47 ►
in regards to figuring out how to get ourselves out of this robot society we’re now locked in
00:58:53 ►
and get back to the basics of being human.
00:58:57 ►
And what I want to mention is that all of the records of that work still exist in Dr. Leary’s archive.
00:59:03 ►
Last year I had the privilege of spending some time with this material
00:59:07 ►
and was astounded at some of the things I found.
00:59:11 ►
One of these was an experience report written by Gary Fisher,
00:59:15 ►
who we’ve hosted several times here in the salon.
00:59:18 ►
And when I told Gary about that particular checklist,
00:59:21 ►
he said that, yes, they went to great pains to document much
00:59:25 ►
of what transpired there during a very interesting time in the short history of the modern psychedelic
00:59:31 ►
movement, and it is in the preservation of that archive and several others that I would
00:59:37 ►
like to talk about very briefly right now.
00:59:40 ►
In addition to Dr. Leary’s archive, I’ve looked through many boxes of letters, books, experience reports, and other papers from some of the other early psychedelic pioneers.
00:59:53 ►
And right now, the great majority of this important material is languishing in cardboard boxes that are in various storage sheds all up and down the West Coast.
01:00:02 ►
various storage sheds all up and down the West Coast.
01:00:08 ►
On another track, there’s also some movement along the lines of establishing a center for the study of psychedelic medicine at one of the major universities out here.
01:00:13 ►
A dream of mine is to find a way to secure all of these precious physical records in
01:00:19 ►
a permanent archive associated with such a center, with the additional proviso, of course, that the
01:00:26 ►
majority of these records also be digitized and made available on the Internet.
01:00:31 ►
The reason I feel so passionate about preserving these resources is that as minuscule as they
01:00:37 ►
are, they now represent a small stake in the ground from which we can begin to recover
01:00:43 ►
some of the information and wisdom that has
01:00:45 ►
been lost in regards to these sacred medicines over the millennia.
01:00:50 ►
If you read Paul Devereaux’s brilliant book, The Long Trip, A Prehistory of Psychedelia,
01:00:55 ►
you’ll come away with a very clear understanding of how deeply intertwined the human psyche
01:01:01 ►
is with these plants and chemicals.
01:01:03 ►
intertwined the human psyche is with these plants and chemicals.
01:01:09 ►
We now know that from the late Stone Age until about a thousand years ago,
01:01:14 ►
that the use of psychedelic plants in medicine was a significant part of virtually every culture on earth.
01:01:19 ►
And so, how did all of this ancient knowledge disappear, you might ask?
01:01:32 ►
Well, we just heard another recounting of how it was the monks in the Catholic monasteries who, as this interviewer just said, acted, without any question, as the carrier of the culture.
01:01:36 ►
And that without those Catholic monks, the culture would have died.
01:01:46 ►
Well, guess what? monks and their inquisitor friends who followed, all traces of shamanism, witchcraft, astrology,
01:01:52 ►
medicine work, and all of those ancient traditions were systematically stamped out by the church and its ongoing lust for world domination.
01:01:55 ►
And since some people learned from history, when the U.S. of A. decided to challenge the
01:02:02 ►
church in the world domination game, It learned that suppression of these sacred plants
01:02:06 ►
was one of the keys to subduing the population,
01:02:10 ►
because without these sacred medicines,
01:02:12 ►
people just can’t think for themselves.
01:02:15 ►
And so the governments of the world have now declared
01:02:17 ►
that we shall not be allowed to eat of this fruit of the tree of knowledge,
01:02:21 ►
because they know that an awakened populace
01:02:24 ►
isn’t going to stand for things as they’ve been for far too long now.
01:02:29 ►
But I digress.
01:02:31 ►
The original point I was trying to make is that we should all take responsibility for
01:02:35 ►
preserving the cultural objects of our psychedelic society.
01:02:39 ►
I hear that early next year, Allison and Alex Gray will be moving into their own permanent chapel of sacred mirrors,
01:02:46 ►
where some of our community’s precious art will be preserved in a location where a great number of people will be able to experience it in person.
01:02:55 ►
So that is one huge step in the positive direction of bringing our culture more into the arena of public awareness,
01:03:03 ►
and hopefully we’ll be able to do something
01:03:05 ►
similar with all of these important archives out here.
01:03:09 ►
So stay tuned, and I’ll be talking more about this in future podcasts.
01:03:14 ►
Now, even though I’ve once again gone a little long, there are still a couple of emails I’d
01:03:19 ►
like to read parts of, and the first one comes from Phil, who says, and maybe this is from one
01:03:26 ►
of the forums that I picked it up on, I’m not sure, but anyhow, here’s what Phil says.
01:03:30 ►
Dear Lorenzo, my dilemma is that I have no contacts in Australia who share our common
01:03:36 ►
interest.
01:03:37 ►
Can you provide me with some, or at least somewhere I can begin my own search to find
01:03:42 ►
them?
01:03:42 ►
In this message, I can’t convey how and why I am so desperate to make contact with like
01:03:47 ►
minds, but I think you will understand.
01:03:50 ►
I look forward to hearing from you, or even from other Aussies who may read this.
01:03:55 ►
Cheers, Phil.
01:03:57 ►
Well, as we all know, finding the others sure isn’t very easy.
01:04:02 ►
But one place I’d start if I were you is to begin listening to Bebe’s Bungalow each month.
01:04:08 ►
You can find her podcast over at dopefiend.co.uk, along with quite a few other of my favorites.
01:04:15 ►
But Bebe is also from Down Under, and you may be able to pick up a few clues when you hear her mention a band or clubs or something.
01:04:25 ►
up a few clues when you hear her mention a band or clubs or something. Also, if you can get to Melbourne on December 6th of this year, which is 2008, in case you’re listening to this in another
01:04:31 ►
year, and that’s possible with these podcasts, of course. Anyway, on December 6th, 2008, at the
01:04:40 ►
Copeland Theatre at Melbourne University, there’s a conference titled Entheogenesis Australis.
01:04:47 ►
According to their website,
01:04:49 ►
which is www.entheo.net,
01:04:55 ►
Entheogenesis Australis, EGA,
01:04:58 ►
is a not-for-profit association
01:05:00 ►
that exists to create a supportive environment
01:05:03 ►
that fosters mature, open discussion about psychoactive plants and chemicals.
01:05:08 ►
We seek to explore ways to assess societal impacts and examine the positive applications of plant-based psychoactives and empathogens.
01:05:18 ►
So, why don’t some of you Aussies surf over to their website and see if maybe you can find a few of the others.
01:05:27 ►
Now, let’s see, there’s a couple more things I wanted to say today.
01:05:31 ►
And, oh yeah, the Psychedelic Salon Quarterly.
01:05:34 ►
A couple of podcasts ago, I announced the beginning of this project that Dean Haddock so kindly started.
01:05:41 ►
And in case you missed the original announcement, I’ll just briefly repeat
01:05:45 ►
part of it now.
01:05:47 ►
The Psychedelic Salon Quarterly publishes peer-reviewed articles on the subject of psychedelics,
01:05:53 ►
including thoughtful scientific, psychological, historical, and sociological works that for
01:05:59 ►
conventional or ethical reasons may not be accepted by mainstream publications.
01:06:04 ►
conventional or ethical reasons may not be accepted by mainstream publications.
01:06:11 ►
The PSQ aims to facilitate a thoughtful and scientific dialogue on the utility of psychedelic substances through legitimate research and experience.
01:06:16 ►
And if you’d like to participate, just surf over to psq.criticalmath.com for more details.
01:06:23 ►
That’s psq.criticalmath.com for more details. That’s psq.criticalmath.com.
01:06:27 ►
And Dean tells me that he’s already received our first submission.
01:06:31 ►
I also know that Mateo is working on a rather esoteric essay to submit.
01:06:36 ►
And just the other day, Charlie Grobe said that he’d work something up as well.
01:06:40 ►
But I don’t want you to think that you’ve got to have some kind of a big credential to have your work considered.
01:06:46 ►
So if you’ve been thinking about various aspects of the psychedelic experience
01:06:50 ►
that you may be able to shed some of your own bright light upon,
01:06:54 ►
well, why wait? Start writing today.
01:06:57 ►
And before you know it, you may be a published author in a peer-reviewed journal.
01:07:03 ►
Another announcement, one that brings me great pleasure, Thank you. you’re a big fan of KMO’s, then you can do him a great service by going to www.podcastawards.com
01:07:28 ►
and vote for his program.
01:07:31 ►
So let’s all just take a minute or two
01:07:33 ►
out of our overly busy lives
01:07:36 ►
and spend those few minutes in helping KMO,
01:07:38 ►
who’s done so much for all of us
01:07:40 ►
with his brilliant interviews.
01:07:43 ►
Finally, I want to mention an email that came from Samantha,
01:07:46 ►
who says in part, and don’t worry, Samantha,
01:07:49 ►
I’m not going to reveal any of your personal information.
01:07:52 ►
It’s just the question you asked because it’s an important one
01:07:55 ►
and one that I hope over time we can all somehow figure out an answer to.
01:08:00 ►
So here’s part of what Samantha has to say.
01:08:04 ►
Hi, Lorenzo.
01:08:05 ►
I’ve been listening to your podcast for quite a while now, and I really appreciate that you’re getting information out there, even if I don’t agree with every speaker you’ve had.
01:08:14 ►
And for what it’s worth, Samantha, I don’t agree with them all either.
01:08:16 ►
So that’s a good sign, I think, that we’re trying to think for ourselves a little bit.
01:08:22 ►
And she goes on.
01:08:23 ►
But what I’d really like to know is this.
01:08:25 ►
How do I get involved?
01:08:27 ►
Like a lot of people,
01:08:28 ►
I was raised in a society
01:08:30 ►
with a lot of bold-faced lies about psychedelics,
01:08:33 ►
and it wasn’t until my mid-30s
01:08:35 ►
that I researched for myself
01:08:36 ►
and discovered how much of what I’d been given
01:08:38 ►
was total misinformation.
01:08:40 ►
I think the problem is
01:08:42 ►
that I mostly work in a vacuum.
01:08:44 ►
I seem to know far more consumers than creators,
01:08:47 ►
and I haven’t really met a lot of people with the same sort of drive and passion that I have.
01:08:51 ►
So I want to get connected.
01:08:53 ►
I’d love to throw in and work with some other people
01:08:56 ►
and create positive and correct information to put out there for the world.
01:09:00 ►
So, any ideas or communities you could point me at?
01:09:09 ►
Well, here we are back at square one again as you know I’ve talked about this on several occasions
01:09:13 ►
but frankly I don’t think I’ve been able to add much in the way of ideas
01:09:18 ►
to answer this question
01:09:19 ►
which is a question that’s being asked every day
01:09:22 ►
by quite literally hundreds of thousands of people around the world
01:09:25 ►
who, like you and me, believe that these psychedelic substances quite possibly hold the key to our species’ long-term survival.
01:09:34 ►
And if we don’t soon learn, once again, how to integrate these magical medicines into our lives and our culture,
01:09:42 ►
we simply aren’t going to be able to expand our thinking to the point it needs to be
01:09:47 ►
if we’re going to work ourselves out of the ecological mess we’ve created here on our home planet.
01:09:53 ►
But getting back to Samantha’s question, how do we find the others and connect with them?
01:09:58 ►
How do we do something of value to help the community?
01:10:02 ►
I guess the first thing to say is that once you do find one of the
01:10:06 ►
others, you’ll most likely stay connected with them for a long time, just as Wild Bill and I
01:10:11 ►
have done, even though we live thousands of miles apart. And, you know, the same is true for other
01:10:16 ►
friends I’ve made at various conferences and festivals throughout the years. For example,
01:10:21 ►
my friend Fernando, who happens to live in Italy and who I also met in
01:10:25 ►
Palenque a decade ago, popped up at Burning Man in 2007 and we reconnected as if no time had passed
01:10:32 ►
since we were last together. My point being that the psychedelic experience is so powerful that
01:10:39 ►
friends you make in association with these experiences, or even just at conferences and only talking
01:10:45 ►
about the psychedelic experience, is enough to forge a strong bond between you.
01:10:52 ►
Now, in a few weeks, I’ll be meeting with a man who I’ve only talked with on the phone,
01:10:57 ►
but he’s been involved with the same small psychedelic community for over 20 years now.
01:11:02 ►
And I hope to be able to record some of our
01:11:05 ►
conversation and play it here if he can give me some ideas that may help answer Samantha’s
01:11:10 ►
question, which I suspect is your question as well. So for now, all I have to go on is my own
01:11:17 ►
experience. You know, for most of my life, I was like you, living out on the edge, but not being
01:11:22 ►
able to talk with anyone about it, not even my closest friends.
01:11:26 ►
Then I went to a McKenna three-day workshop and met a few people,
01:11:30 ►
a couple of whom I’m still in contact with.
01:11:33 ►
And six months later, I attended a week-long conference,
01:11:36 ►
and there I met dozens of people who are now among my closest friends.
01:11:41 ►
Of course, these friendships didn’t just blossom on their own.
01:11:44 ►
We stayed in touch via email and through mutual acquaintances. Of course, these friendships didn’t just blossom on their own.
01:11:48 ►
We stayed in touch via email and through mutual acquaintances.
01:11:50 ►
We exchanged ideas. We fought.
01:11:55 ►
And in some cases, we parted company for one reason or another, just like the rest of the world does.
01:12:04 ►
But there is something about being friends with another psychonaut that makes things seem slightly different in some unspoken way.
01:12:10 ►
Well, I’m just rambling again now, so I guess the short answer to the question is,
01:12:14 ►
no, I really don’t have anything new to say right now,
01:12:19 ►
but for a long time I’ve thought that if our community had a place to meet in cyberspace,
01:12:20 ►
well, that would be ideal.
01:12:23 ►
But, you know, there are a lot of problems involved with that due to the nature of laws of various countries
01:12:26 ►
and the fact that you can’t always keep people from doing or saying something
01:12:30 ►
that might get all the rest of the participants in such a virtual world into trouble.
01:12:35 ►
But perhaps something on a small, invitation-only basis might work.
01:12:40 ►
I’ve never mentioned this before, but the Psychedelic Salon existed for about five years before my first podcast.
01:12:47 ►
What I did was to set up an extremely secure voice channel on the net.
01:12:52 ►
That was back when I was still in geek mode.
01:12:55 ►
And six or seven of us got together for a couple of hours each week and just had some great conversations.
01:13:01 ►
And we were in all different parts of the country, a couple overseas actually.
01:13:04 ►
conversations. And we were in all different parts of the country, a couple overseas actually.
01:13:10 ►
But we all knew one another and we were very sure that no one could listen into our conversations.
01:13:15 ►
Even though we weren’t talking about anything that was illegal, just knowing that our conversation was private gave us much more leeway when we wanted to discuss something. So perhaps we need
01:13:21 ►
to have thousands of these little groups meeting online until we figure out a safe way to interconnect them all.
01:13:28 ►
But hey, my ideas are kind of old and tattered now.
01:13:31 ►
So maybe it’s time for everybody to start speaking out and then people will find you.
01:13:38 ►
That’s what I’ve done and an amazing number of people have found me. In fact, one final thing that I want to do today
01:13:45 ►
is to say hello to
01:13:47 ►
one of our fellow salonners who
01:13:49 ►
found me somehow. I don’t know his
01:13:52 ►
name, only that he’s a taxi
01:13:53 ►
driver on Maui. And
01:13:55 ►
he sent one of his friends to meet me
01:13:57 ►
at the last of our little salons
01:13:59 ►
that was held in Venice Beach this past Friday.
01:14:02 ►
So now, I’ve got
01:14:03 ►
two new friends in the psychedelic community,
01:14:06 ►
Philip and his taxi-driving friend on Maui.
01:14:09 ►
And I send peace, love, and light to you both.
01:14:12 ►
And I send it to all of our fellow salonners,
01:14:15 ►
especially you islanders in another part of the Pacific
01:14:18 ►
who are about to have a very mystic celebration in a couple days.
01:14:23 ►
And I’ll be with you guys in spirit you can count
01:14:26 ►
on that and now as always i’ll close this podcast by saying that this and all of the podcasts from
01:14:33 ►
the psychedelic salon are available for your use under the creative commons attribution non-commercial
01:14:38 ►
share alike 3.0 license and if you have any questions about that just click the creative
01:14:44 ►
commons link at the bottom of the psychedelicic Salon webpage, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
01:14:50 ►
And that’s also where you’ll find the program notes for these podcasts.
01:14:55 ►
For now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:15:00 ►
Be well, my friends.