162 - Cultural Healing

Program Notes

Guest speaker: Robert Forte

“Every revolution is followed by a counter-revolution, and the pendulum keeps swinging back and forth. No lasting change is effected by politics; it has to come from within.” –Nina Graboi

“How is it that people fail to see that when the stream dies we die. We are that stream.” –Robert Forte

4th International Amazonian Shamanism Conference:
FREE Mp3 Downloads

“Psychedelics, Science, and WTF”
(Comment thread with Robert Forte)

“>Operation Mockingbird

Project MKULTRA

Cointelpro

http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/1566567165 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press
David Ray Griffin shows that the official story about 9/11 is riddled with internal contradictions. Two contradictory statements cannot both be true. These contradictions show, therefore, that individuals and agencies articulating the official story of 9/11 have made many false statements. Congress and the press clearly should ask which of the contradictory statements are false and why they were made.

This book is purely factual, simply laying out the fact that these internal contradictions exist. As such, the book contains no theory. Politicians and journalists who deal with the issues raised herein, therefore, will not be giving credence to some “conspiracy theory” about 9/11. They will simply be carrying out their duty to ask why the official story about 9/11, arguably the most fateful event of our time, is riddled with so many contradictions.

http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/1566567297 The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Expose
Griffin has now written The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, which provides a chapter-by-chapter updating of the information provided in that earlier book. It shows that the case against the official account constructed by independent researchers – who now include architects, engineers, physicists, pilots, politicians, and former military officers – is far stronger than it was in 2004, leaving no doubt that 9/11 was a false flag operation, designed to give the Bush-Cheney administration a pretext to attack oil-rich Muslim nations.

http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/1566565529 The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11
Taking to heart the idea that those who benefit from a crime ought to be investigated, here the eminent theologian David Ray Griffin sifts through the evidence about the attacks of 9/11 – stories from the mainstream press, reports from abroad, the work of other researchers, and the contradictory words of members of the Bus…

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:20 ►

This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

00:00:24 ►

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

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And as you can tell by my nasal-sounding voice,

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I’m just coming back from a somewhat extended bout with some kind of winter bug that laid me low shortly after my last podcast.

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But I’m definitely on the mend now, and we’ll be back in full form soon.

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Actually, I had planned on getting this program out to you last week,

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but that just wasn’t possible.

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So it turns out that my announcement a few weeks ago

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about sometimes sliding between a weekly and a bi-weekly release format

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sort of eased my mind, since I knew you wouldn’t wonder what happened.

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But in last week’s podcast by the Dope Fiend,

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I heard him say that

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while he understood my reasons for slacking off a bit, that he still wasn’t thrilled with

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my doing a show only every other week, or as he called it, every fortnight. You know,

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here in the States, the word fortnight is seldom used. In fact, until I heard the Dope Fiend say

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it, I wasn’t sure if a fortnight was 14 days or 20 days.

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And don’t ask me where I got that strange idea.

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Anyway, my pledge is to go not more than a fortnight between podcasts.

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You Brits have a real classy way of saying things, don’t you?

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Fortnight. A lot better than 14 days.

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But even though it’s been two weeks since my last podcast

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Our friend and fellow salonner Christopher S. hasn’t forgotten about us

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And he sent in a generous donation to help offset some of the expenses associated with getting these podcasts out to you

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So Christopher, on behalf of all of our fellow salonners, hey, thank you very much

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Now I want to get right into today’s program

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because it may run a little longer than the hour or so that I’d like to see,

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but for some of our fellow salonners, and hopefully for you too,

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a few of the ideas in this show have the potential of cracking your cosmic egg.

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You know, the one you’ve been forced into by your family, school, church, friends,

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and your culture in general.

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To get through today’s podcast is definitely going to require some real psychedelic thinking on your part.

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The talk I’m about to play comes from the fourth Amazonian Shamanism Conference that was held in Iquitos, Peru last July.

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And if you’re a listener to KMO’s Sea Realm podcast, you already know a lot about these

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annual conferences.

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The next one actually is already scheduled for the 11th through the 18th of July 2009

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in case you can get down there, and I’m sure there’ll be a lot more announcements of that

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as the time gets closer.

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Last year, actually, there were over 25 speakers at the conference, and my guess is that next year we’ll also include as stellar a lineup as this year’s conference did.

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Thanks to fellow salonner ErockX1, who, by the way, is the proprietor of the Guyon Botanicals site that you can reach through a link at the top of the psychedelicsalon.org website.

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at the top of the psychedelicsalon.org website.

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And also, thanks to EROCX1,

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you can download around 20 of this year’s Shamanism Conference presentations from his blog at EROCX1, the number one,

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erocx1.blogspot.com.

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And that’s where I got the talk we were about to listen to.

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It’s by a friend of mine who you just heard from a few weeks ago, Robert Forte.

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In fact, one of the reasons that out of all the talks from that conference,

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it’s Bob’s talk that I want to play right now,

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is because his last appearance here in the salon produced what for us was a little controversy.

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In fact, we probably lost a few slaughters

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because they thought the show was getting political or something.

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Well, I’ll have more to say about that later,

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but for now, I’m just asking you to trust me

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when I say that you have nothing to fear about these podcasts

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turning into a political discourse or a conspiracy theory rant.

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That simply isn’t going to happen, so don’t let those little demons of distraction keep

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you from hearing the messages you’re about to hear.

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Now in a few minutes, once Bob gets into his talk a bit, you may begin to wonder if I actually

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listened to it all the way through before podcasting it.

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And the answer is yes.

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As you listen, you may think that some of the things Robert has to say are no longer applicable

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now that Obama is the president-elect, and that is exactly why I’m playing this talk now.

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I hate to continue to be the one who reigns on your parade,

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but the election of one man, admittedly a potentially great man,

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still isn’t going to change things on a dime,

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or even in a decade for that matter.

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The police state that’s been set up by the Bush crime family isn’t going to be easily dismantled.

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There is simply too much money involved for those who want to maintain the status quo.

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And don’t forget, Obama supported the FISA internal police law,

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and the first two people he appointed are two of the top drug warriors in the land.

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Now, our psychedelic community isn’t going to see any relief for at least another generation or two.

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Even if ending the drug war was Obama’s top priority, which it isn’t,

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he couldn’t bring an end to it in a single term or even in eight years.

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Our community most likely will be one of the very last to receive our equal rights,

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our right to control our own minds in any way we please,

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as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else.

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Okay, that’s already too much heavy stuff, I think.

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But enough of me for now.

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Let’s listen to what Robert has to say,

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and then I’ll be back with my two cents on these things after we hear Robert.

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So I thought I would divide this conversation with you into kind of three parts.

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So the first part, I’ll tell you a little bit about my personal history and how I came to be here.

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And the second part, I would like to discuss, what

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I’m calling cultural therapy, cultural healing. We’ve spent a lot of time here talking about

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our own personal healing and the use of these plants and drugs to heal ourselves. But it’s,

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I think, very important to look at how psychedelic drugs or entheogens, as we now call them, are part of a movement that really began slowly in, say, the 1940s with Albert Hofmann discovering LSD and really picked up speed during the 1960s through a close associate and friend of mine dr. Timothy Leary who’s

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had a kind of checkered reputation and maybe some of you know I also did a book

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about Timothy Leary a fetish for him which was is an attempt to kind of put

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his life and his ministry in some sort of context I mean Tim made a great many

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errors but and those errors were so extraordinary. He

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was such a charismatic and outrageous man that the kind of genius that was behind what

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he was trying to do, I think, has been lost. And so the third part of this presentation,

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I would like to try to engage in a conversation because I think that this attempted social saw in the 1950s as a rise of fascism in the United States.

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It was seen that after World War II, the same conditions that existed in Nazi Germany in the psychology of the population were beginning to arise in the United States.

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in the population were beginning to arise in the United States.

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And Tim, among many others, all this Huxley, Frank Barron, another teacher of mine,

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were looking for ways to avert this fascist takeover. And I think it should be clear now that, unfortunately, we failed.

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And the United States is now essentially a conquered nation, an occupied nation, which

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is a pretense of democracy, if that.

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And so I’d like the third part of this conversation to be a discussion about how we feel about

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that.

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I know there are many people from the United States here, but the political crisis in the

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United States affects everybody in the world.

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And so maybe we can put aside our personal issues and our personal

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healing and look at this a little more globally. Okay. So for me, this began three interesting

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events that happened in sort of a cluster when I was very young. It was about 1967 or

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8 when I was 11 or 12 years old. The first of these was I was on my way to school, and I had to give my, it was a show and tell day,

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bring something current events in.

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And I picked up Look Magazine, and I brought it into school.

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And on the cover of Look Magazine was LSD.

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And I brought this into my fifth grade class and I asked

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my teacher, what was this? What did LSD stand for? And she looked at me kind of slyly and

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gave a little smile and she said, let’s save democracy. Of course, I didn’t know what that

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meant. I didn’t know what LSD was. It went

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right over my little 11-year-old head. But it turns out to be quite a prescient remark.

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And it’s curious to me that in all my years of being deeply involved in this subject,

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with close relationships with Albert Hoffman and Gordon Wasson and Stan Groff and Timothy

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Geary and many other people, no one has ever heard that before, that funny little acronym of LSD.

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And we’ll see when we get to this, it’s really dead on.

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So the second incident was really my introduction to sacred plants.

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And I had this little stream near my house where I grew up in this affluent area just outside of New York City.

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And it was my paradise.

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This was my Eden.

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I would go down there, and it was just a really special place for me to be.

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And one day, I went down there, and the most remarkable thing happened.

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I was sitting by the bank of the stream, and there was a footprint in the sand that was from, I don’t even remember if it was a deer mystical experience when the flowing stream became

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like, I felt like it was my blood. And the wind rustled through the trees and I felt

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like this was my breath. And I felt the ground and it was my body. And it was so extraordinary

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and excited me that I ran home to tell my mother, and I was trying to explain this thing to her.

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Mom, I was, you know, I turned into the ground, the stream, it was my blood.

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And my mother looked at me, and she was kind of alarmed, and she said,

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Bobby, if I find out that you’ve been smoking that marijuana, you’re in big trouble.

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And I thought, marijuana will do this? So the third thing

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that happened, just a couple of weeks later, something had happened to the stream. Upstream,

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a couple of miles, they had begun to transform our, if you call it, community into a corporate headquarters for many big

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corporations, and construction began to happen.

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There were just hundreds of acres of apple orchards and woods, and Mercedes-Benz bought

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a big chunk of it and started to build their Western Hemisphere headquarters.

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They did something that changed the stream.

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I still don’t know

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what it was. They polluted it somehow. And the stream, which had been full of little

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trouts and frogs and snakes, and I went down there one day, and they were washed up on

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the shore. They were just, like, it instantly killed the stream. And I went home, and I

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complained to my mother and my father, and I said, you know, this is

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some terrible thing has happened.

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Something is killing the stream.

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And they explained to me that they knew that this might happen.

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We found that it was the construction upstream.

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I said, we have to stop this construction.

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And they said, well, no, the town had already voted on this, and that this construction was going

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to be a good thing. And I said, good thing? And they explained to me that it was going

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to make the taxes lower in our town. And I thought, taxes? What are taxes? They explained

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to me what taxes were and how the government worked, and I thought, something, there’s

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a grave evil that is starting to happen here.

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Somehow, paying taxes, lower taxes, was more important than the life of this stream.

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And not only did that concern me, but what concerned me even most was the fact that I was one of the only ones that cared about this.

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A few of my friends and I were the only ones that cared about this.

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Everyone else was kind of my friends and I were the only ones that cared about this.

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Everyone else was kind of happy that the corporations were coming and that they’d be making more money.

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Less fish, more money. I thought, something is wrong here. So it kind of set me away from my parents

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and it began me on this kind of quest to try to understand what I’m now calling and writing a book about called The Psychology of Non-Perception.

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How is it that people fail to see that when the stream dies, we die, that we are that stream?

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And so I began to study, and I first thought I would become a politician,

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and I thought, you know, you just have to organize the right people and change

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the way people vote and, you know, maybe we could get Mercedes Benz out of the town if

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we voted them out. And I realized after a little while that wasn’t going to work and

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I began to see this as a psychological problem, began to study that quite thoroughly. And

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then soon I realized that the crisis was so immense and so grave

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that it occurred to me as a spiritual crisis,

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a grave, a big cosmic problem that we had here on this planet.

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And so that’s what began to turn me into the study of religion.

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I’ve been very, very fortunate because I’ve been able to study

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with some very, very extraordinary people.

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As I said, Stanislav Grof.

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I went to graduate school where I worked with Mircea Iliade,

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through the familiar with Shamanism, one of the great scholars,

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one of the first Westerners to take seriously the claims of the,

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what he called, before Terence McKenna came up with his phrase,

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the archaic revival, Mircea I with his phrase, the archaic revival,

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Nirjha Iliade talked about the archaic therapeutics,

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the archaic consciousness, the archaic worldview,

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and realizing that if we were to have any chance of surviving

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as a planet, as a species,

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we were going to have to understand

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and recover this sort of archaic mentality and so forth.

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And so he devoted a great deal of time to that, and I was very lucky to be one of his

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very last students.

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I was put off by psychedelic drugs.

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Of course, they were used a lot when I was in college, and they were used even in my high school a little bit, but I failed to see anything significant about them.

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They were used generally in, to my mind, I was an athlete, they were used in reckless ways.

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I was concerned and manipulated by propaganda, maybe this saved me, that LSD caused chromosome damage, and that these were

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just too bizarre and too wild and too freaky for me.

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And so I, except for marijuana, I had no interest in them at all.

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It wasn’t until I was at Columbia University and I began to, I had taken up very seriously

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the study and practice of Buddhism and Theravadan, the Apostle of Meditation,

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and was so interested in that that I decided to really go deeply into that, and where do

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these techniques come from? Who invented meditation? And so I learned there, we were talking a

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moment ago about Soma, that Indian Eastern religions, from India, come from the oldest body of writings,

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of course, the Rig Veda.

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And the Rig Veda is a series of hymns, poems, actually,

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that were written thousands of years ago, mostly the Rig Veda,

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devoted to Soma.

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And Soma was a plant, and it was a god, and it was a drink.

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And scholars and historians have wondered for years what was Soma.

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And the first answer to that question that was convincing generally to the community of Indologists

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was the work of a banker, a very mysterious

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and interesting man who’s tried to keep himself out of the limelight, whose name is R. Gordon

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Walson. And Walson was a banker. He was not any banker. He was the vice president of J.P.

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Morgan, and that’s generally what people know about Gordon Lawson,

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that he was an amateur mycologist and a Wall Street banker.

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But I got to know Gordon Lawson toward the end of his life

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and spent some time with him and then was allowed into his archives

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and began to investigate first his mycological researches. But I also looked into his archives and began to investigate first his

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mycological researches, but I also looked into his

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personal life and I found some very interesting things

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about this.

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Now let me just back up a little bit.

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It has often been said about the introduction of psychedelics

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into our culture that the timing is very auspicious.

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That LSD was discovered sort of accidentally into our culture, that the timing is very auspicious.

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That LSD was discovered sort of accidentally just six months after the success of the Manhattan Project,

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after they first discovered nuclear fission underneath the ground at the University of Chicago.

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Six months later, Albert Hofmann has this idea. He wakes up in the morning with an idea

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that he should reexamine a molecule that he

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had found five years earlier.

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He actually discovered LSD in 1938 and then put it aside.

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They couldn’t find anything useful about it.

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And put it aside and then woke up that morning. This is right

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in the heart of one of the belly of the beast, one of the darkest periods until now in human

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history. April 1943, World War II is just raging. Fascism has swept over Europe. There’s

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a battle. And then out of this, this combination of things,

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on one hand, science has reached out far enough

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and learned how to split the atom

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and tear nature completely asunder.

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And at the same time, virtually,

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a molecule is introduced that has the opposite effect

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of allowing or occasioning a profound mystical experience.

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So Gordon Lawson was not just a banker.

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Gordon Lawson was part of a very close circle of people

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like Henry Luce and Alan Dulles, John Foster Dulles.

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These are people, if you don’t know, who are, they were basically part of the Nazi

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Party.

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They were part of the transformation, the rebirth of Nazism into the United States

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post-World War II.

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The terrible problems that we have in the United States and throughout the world with

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the propaganda of the media was, you know who started Time Magazine and Life Magazine, this enormous

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media empire. These were friends, close friends of Gordon Wasson’s.

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Now it’s very interesting that Wasson, as soon as he discovered, first white man really,

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As soon as he discovered, first white man really, to encounter this mushroom and to take it, he very soon after that quit his banking job.

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He was a guy that was making about a million dollars a year back in the 50s.

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This is a tremendous amount of money.

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He realized that he was now aware of something that was much more profound.

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And so he went into that.

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And that was the first real key to me,

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that there was a much more profound significance to psychedelic drugs than I had first been led to believe through the recreational use and all this.

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So I moved to California and I began my student-teacher relationship

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with a man who’s not very well known in this movement. His name is Frank Barron and he

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was a psychologist and an expert in the psychology of creativity. And he, among other things,

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was Timothy Leary was his best friend in graduate school and he he told him about the mushroom and urged him to try it. Now there were as I said a

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great many social scientists who were the first wave of them actually escaped Nazi Europe and came over to the United States

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and began to try to articulate the psychological factors that allowed fascism to arise in Germany.

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And one of them was a man named Solomon Ash, who was struck by how easily people conform to a social reality,

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even if or when that social reality is obviously unethical or violent or wrong.

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So this is how Nazism was able to flourish,

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So this is how Nazism was able to flourish, that the soul of Germany had been kind of devastated by World War I and by the accords right after World War I.

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And they didn’t really know who they were.

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And so they were susceptible to a powerful authoritarian figure upon which they projected their power.

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So, you know, as I’m beginning to understand this, this is when my fifth grade teachers remark, let’s save democracy.

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And how does that work? Now, if you look at the political spectrum, and you have democracy on one hand,

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and you have fascism or authoritarianism or a totalitarian system on the other,

00:24:16 ►

and look at the difference in the psychological makeup of the people. As I said, an authoritarian regime thrives on people not knowing who they are.

00:24:22 ►

They’re not connected to their source.

00:24:25 ►

They’ve been alienated from divinity.

00:24:29 ►

The complete opposite in a democratic society,

00:24:32 ►

in democracy, of course, the idea of democracy

00:24:35 ►

comes from the ancient Greece via the initiations of possibly

00:24:40 ►

and other of the Greek mystery cults.

00:24:48 ►

And these were experiences that people took part in where they took an indigent and they had this experience.

00:24:52 ►

They had a profound death and rebirth experience.

00:24:56 ►

Their ego, the parameters of our biological existence

00:25:01 ►

were temporarily removed and the greater self is revealed.

00:25:05 ►

And so it’s only when you have that experience, when you know, when you understand this,

00:25:12 ►

and this is one of my favorite Sanskrit phrases,

00:25:15 ►

tat-ra-ma-si, thou art that.

00:25:20 ►

This mysterious thing, we’ve heard several of our speakers talk about this,

00:25:24 ►

how the heart contains the whole.

00:25:27 ►

This mysterious equation of the microcosm and the macrocosm.

00:25:31 ►

Without that sort of connection,

00:25:34 ►

it’s with that sort of connection that democracy really works.

00:25:38 ►

You know that what’s good for you is really good for everybody else.

00:25:42 ►

And this kind of sense of the vast interconnectedness

00:25:45 ►

that we really don’t have in our culture

00:25:49 ►

that’s a little bit north of here.

00:25:51 ►

So I decided at that point

00:25:56 ►

that I was going to make this my career

00:25:58 ►

as a scholar or as a psychologist,

00:26:00 ►

that I would try to help revive this subject

00:26:03 ►

of psychedelic drugs

00:26:04 ►

and try to find a better context for it.

00:26:08 ►

For me, what worked, what validated the significance of psychedelics

00:26:12 ►

was this religious model.

00:26:14 ►

So that’s when I decided to go to divinity school

00:26:17 ►

and to do research with psychedelic drugs

00:26:20 ►

and to try to show again that these substances were not only not dangerous, but

00:26:26 ►

that they were profoundly important, and even more so now with this growing political crisis.

00:26:33 ►

And so another kind of mysterious thing happened to me when I was in graduate school.

00:26:39 ►

I had a very strong experience with psilocybe and mushrooms,

00:26:52 ►

and I heard these voices that told me that I was going to be part of a movement to help resurrect a mystery school.

00:26:55 ►

I didn’t even know what a mystery school was at that point,

00:26:59 ►

and I wasn’t sure what to make of these voices, but that happened.

00:27:03 ►

It was kind of brief, but it was very decisive, and it said things like people were going to come forward and be part of

00:27:10 ►

this, and that there were a number of us in this movement. This is about 1982. I was already

00:27:19 ►

a pretty smart guy, and I knew not to, I had what we call it Chicago hermeneutics of

00:27:26 ►

suspicion I didn’t take things literally you know I was I was already immediately

00:27:31 ►

inclined to claim you know analyze this and there’s some sort of you know

00:27:36 ►

compensatory grandiosity or something to make myself feel important but I took

00:27:41 ►

notes and and then mysteriously a weeks later, I got a phone call

00:27:48 ►

from somebody who said that he had heard through some people at Esalen, where I had lived,

00:27:54 ►

that I was in town and that I would be interested. We should get together. So I met this man.

00:28:02 ►

And it turns out that he was having a midlife crisis, he said.

00:28:08 ►

It’s funny, he was 45 years old, and I remember meeting him and thinking,

00:28:12 ►

oh, he’s just kind of an old guy.

00:28:13 ►

I was in my 20s, I guess.

00:28:15 ►

And his midlife crisis was the fact that his father had died a few years earlier

00:28:23 ►

and left him the family business, which was one

00:28:26 ►

of the largest bourbon and whiskey distilleries in the United States.

00:28:30 ►

He had inherited a fortune.

00:28:34 ►

He called it a moderate fortune, but it was a fortune.

00:28:39 ►

He didn’t know what to do with himself.

00:28:41 ►

I said, what do you like to do? Well, he was

00:28:46 ►

a student at Harvard in the early 1960s. He was an undergraduate and went to law school

00:28:51 ►

also at Harvard. And he bought a ticket to go to Zihuatanejo with Timothy Leary. Leary

00:28:59 ►

had a retreat in Mexico for a little while. And he bought the ticket to go there. He was

00:29:04 ►

very excited by what was going on. But between the time that he bought the ticket to go there. He was very excited by

00:29:05 ►

what was going on, but between the time that he bought the ticket and time to go, they

00:29:11 ►

closed down Zivuang Nejo. So he had this kind of unrequited desire to go to a place where

00:29:19 ►

people would take psychedelics and then support themselves. So he said, that’s what I would like to do. I’d like to create a psychedelic research center,

00:29:29 ►

or something like a mystery school, he said.

00:29:32 ►

He said this to me while we were sailing on his little boat

00:29:35 ►

in Lake Michigan.

00:29:36 ►

The boat was named Hermes.

00:29:39 ►

He was, of course, one of the main characters

00:29:42 ►

in the Greek of Assyrian mysteries,

00:29:43 ►

who’s the messenger who brings

00:29:46 ►

the message from the gods to the mortals. Hermes was also the one who rescued Persephone

00:29:51 ►

in the Scythian Mysteries, which is the longest-running religious ceremony, psychedelic or entheogenic practice right in all of history, excluding what is going on down here.

00:30:10 ►

So I was amazed by this, and I said, well, you’re the perfect guy to do this.

00:30:15 ►

You’ve got more money than you know what to do with.

00:30:17 ►

You’re a lawyer. You’ve been to Harvard. You know how important this is.

00:30:21 ►

And he said he was afraid to do anything too controversial.

00:30:26 ►

this is. And he said he was afraid to do anything too controversial. When you have this much money, he said you’re just afraid of losing it, or he was. So he said, you do it, and

00:30:32 ►

I’ll just stay behind the scenes here, and I’ll back you. And so this is what I called

00:30:39 ►

Stan Groff, just to make sure he wasn’t crazy, and I said, Stan, I had this experience on mushrooms

00:30:45 ►

a few weeks ago, and

00:30:47 ►

this guy, now this is happening,

00:30:50 ►

and I’m really sure what to do.

00:30:53 ►

And he said,

00:30:54 ►

he said, let me

00:30:56 ►

call you back. He called me back

00:30:58 ►

a few minutes later, and he said, well,

00:30:59 ►

we have the Esalen Institute

00:31:01 ►

for two weeks at the end of December.

00:31:05 ►

Organize a conference, bring together all of the significant people you can think of

00:31:11 ►

who have done legitimate work with psychedelic drugs, and we will make a go of this.

00:31:17 ►

Go ahead.

00:31:18 ►

So I dropped out of graduate school and I began to do this.

00:31:22 ►

And it’s from that conference that this book that Alan so kindly mentioned,

00:31:28 ►

Entheogens and the Future of Religion, which a little thing is not a book that I wrote.

00:31:33 ►

It’s a book that I brought together.

00:31:35 ►

I wrote some of.

00:31:36 ►

I compiled it and edited it, and I’m very proud of it.

00:31:38 ►

It was a great joy.

00:31:40 ►

So I did that.

00:31:59 ►

So I did that. Again, I began to realize that many people were absolutely kind of agreed with a lot of the criticisms of him

00:32:07 ►

he came across to me as a very

00:32:09 ►

self-ish person

00:32:12 ►

and beautiful, wonderful, brilliant man

00:32:14 ►

but there was something off about him

00:32:16 ►

and it wasn’t clear to me

00:32:18 ►

if he had ruined the possibility of entheogens

00:32:22 ►

having this s theory logical or

00:32:25 ►

salvation for humanity by being self-oriented it wasn’t clear to me but

00:32:31 ►

that’s what I thought at that time after three or four five six years of banging

00:32:38 ►

my head against the wall and trying to get permission and organizing people it

00:32:43 ►

occurred to me that the only way that entheogens were going to get permission and organizing people, it occurred to me that the only way

00:32:45 ►

that entheogens were going to get this kind of widespread boost in our culture would be

00:32:51 ►

through the kind of charismatic, just vault over the resistance that Timothy Leary had

00:32:58 ►

affected for us.

00:32:58 ►

So it was at that point that I turned my attention to Tim and became much closer friends and

00:33:04 ►

why I decided

00:33:05 ►

to do that second book about him. So I’ve said that I think that the psychedelic movement

00:33:16 ►

has failed because fascism has now taken over America. That is something that is most dramatically apparent to me

00:33:26 ►

in what we saw on September 11th in 2001 in the United States of America

00:33:32 ►

I was like many people immediately shocked and awed by these tremendous explosions in New York

00:33:40 ►

and was like a lot of people convinced by this official story of 9-11,

00:33:49 ►

even though it had seemed to me that buildings don’t fall down like that because of fire.

00:33:59 ►

Buildings only fall down and explode when they have explosives put in them.

00:34:06 ►

fall down and explode when they have explosives put in them. But I didn’t really have the courage within myself to acknowledge this. I thought about it. I thought, well, that

00:34:14 ►

would mean that nobody else is saying this, so that it can’t really be true. And so I put it aside for a couple of years. I went along with the crowd. I was

00:34:30 ►

like a subject. We all were like subjects in Solomon Asch’s great experiment. Now,

00:34:38 ►

do you know, does Solomon Asch, does that ring a bell to anybody? Let me tell you a

00:34:43 ►

simple experiment that Solomon Ash did.

00:34:46 ►

This was in the 1940s. Solomon Ash brought together, here’s how I explain this. Imagine

00:34:54 ►

somebody comes up to you and you’re in college or somewhere. Someone comes up to you and

00:34:58 ►

asks you if you want to take part in an experiment of your visual acuity. And you say yes, and it takes you into a room,

00:35:08 ►

and there’s 20 other people sitting in the room.

00:35:11 ►

And you don’t know this, but those 19 people, you’re the 20th person,

00:35:17 ►

the 19 people have already been picked by the experiment.

00:35:20 ►

They’re part of the experiment.

00:35:22 ►

You think they’re just off the street like you.

00:35:24 ►

the experiment. They’re part of the experiment. You think they’re just off the street like you.

00:35:33 ►

So Solomon Nash went to the board and he draws four lines. This line over here is eight inches long. This line is 10 inches long. This line is eight inches long. And this line is six inches long. He asks, which of these lines match? It’s obvious which line matches.

00:35:49 ►

It’s completely unambiguous. You’re the 20th person. He goes around the room and he asks

00:35:58 ►

each of you, and everybody gives the wrong answer.

00:36:06 ►

Now it’s your turn.

00:36:10 ►

What do you do when you’re in that situation?

00:36:13 ►

When I ask people this,

00:36:15 ►

almost everybody says,

00:36:18 ►

I would give the right answer.

00:36:23 ►

When Solomon Asch did this in the late 1940s, 85% of the population defies their own senses

00:36:30 ►

and conforms to the socially constructed but obviously false reality.

00:36:38 ►

This spells danger.

00:36:42 ►

That’s what happened in Germany.

00:36:44 ►

Stanley Milgram is another one of these great psychologists

00:36:47 ►

that showed us that people will just obey a man in a laboratory coat. The authorities

00:36:54 ►

of our society have the power instead of us. This is the problem that we face right now. And I wonder, like my teachers, Frank and Tim, wondered in the 1950s.

00:37:12 ►

They knew this in the 1950s.

00:37:14 ►

They said, the same thing is going to happen to us.

00:37:18 ►

We have to find a way to enliven the inner core of the human being.

00:37:23 ►

to enliven the inner core of the human being.

00:37:27 ►

And so when Frank Barron took those mushrooms in Mexico and had this profound mystical experience,

00:37:30 ►

he knew that he had found the holy grail,

00:37:33 ►

or he thought that he had found the holy grail of psychology,

00:37:36 ►

and that this would be the thing, if they could get it into the society,

00:37:39 ►

this would be the thing that would enliven a person’s own natural innate intelligence and not render

00:37:45 ►

them so susceptible to the kind of manipulation that we have been subjected to.

00:37:52 ►

So he told Tim about this, and Tim’s first comment was, you know, I’m not going to fuck

00:37:57 ►

around with any mushrooms, Frank, forget it.

00:38:00 ►

And then finally he prevailed, and Tim took them and agreed that this was going to be the thing that was going to save America from this kind of fascist threat.

00:38:13 ►

It didn’t work.

00:38:15 ►

And now we have a crisis that makes the 1950s seem like a minor problem.

00:38:30 ►

a minor problem. And one of the reasons that I came down here to Peru to re-explore ayahuasca,

00:38:37 ►

I was down here five or six years ago and drank heavily and explored these mysteries in the context of healing cancer, which is another very dramatic and important role of ayahuasca, I’ve decided to come back here now to explore

00:38:47 ►

these mysteries, to go into these mysteries with this question, because this is something

00:38:57 ►

that has to be answered. What do we do about the fact that the United States is basically, as my friend Marty Lee wrote,

00:39:06 ►

the beast has reawakened.

00:39:08 ►

The climate in the United States now is like the climate in Germany in 1934, 35.

00:39:17 ►

And I don’t mean to frighten any one of you.

00:39:19 ►

I would imagine that virtually everyone here is aware of this.

00:39:26 ►

I’m curious, if I may ask,

00:39:28 ►

is there anyone here who is not aware that 9-11 was an inside job,

00:39:34 ►

that it’s really very obvious?

00:39:37 ►

It goes from invisible to obvious with just a little bit of study.

00:39:42 ►

If you’re not seeing that,

00:39:44 ►

I will tell you that you haven’t looked at it carefully enough.

00:39:48 ►

That your perception of this very obvious event,

00:39:52 ►

like these subjects in Solomon Asch’s experiment,

00:39:57 ►

is skewed, your perception is skewed by your fear

00:40:01 ►

or by your unwillingness to face something that is so great that it’s

00:40:08 ►

that it just kind of boggles your mind quite literally. People get confused

00:40:13 ►

and try to, often people will try to justify their irrationality in

00:40:19 ►

their irrational ways and so my question that I’m exploring

00:40:26 ►

and that I would like to explore together here

00:40:29 ►

is if we think that our personal,

00:40:34 ►

spiritual, therapeutic pursuits

00:40:36 ►

with sacred plants and drugs,

00:40:39 ►

how does this figure in our addressing

00:40:42 ►

this planetary crisis?

00:40:47 ►

What has happened for me is I’ve become

00:40:58 ►

more of a Buddhist again. You know, the religious traditions of India are based on a world view

00:41:05 ►

that the sentient world is dukkha, samsara. Dukkha means fundamentally unsatisfactory.

00:41:08 ►

Samsara means around and around, death and rebirth.

00:41:12 ►

It’s a kind of false, insignificant, temporary, unreal world.

00:41:21 ►

And the goal of life, the goal of these practices in yoga and in Buddhism

00:41:27 ►

is not to make the world a better place. It’s to gracefully depart. It’s all about detaching

00:41:37 ►

yourself from this plane of existence. That’s one set of ideas and methodologies for salvation.

00:41:47 ►

The other one, which I have a foot in that world too, being a father of a much beloved young man now,

00:41:54 ►

who I named after Mircea Ayade, I have a kind of warrior spirit about me.

00:41:59 ►

And I feel like we need to somehow mobilize here. But how do you do this?

00:42:06 ►

How do you confront this kind of thing in the sense of political action

00:42:10 ►

once you realize how extensive this thing is,

00:42:14 ►

not only were the buildings brought down, obviously, from the inside,

00:42:19 ►

but you have a phenomenal collusion with the media.

00:42:26 ►

I’m sure there are people within the media who are quite deliberately conspiring to keep this from view.

00:42:33 ►

But then there are also these unconscious levels of conspiracy.

00:42:37 ►

My mother wasn’t part of the plot, but she thinks I’m crazy for thinking this.

00:42:42 ►

So how do we penetrate this kind of

00:42:46 ►

thing? Well, again, I still think that entheogens are going to have a role in this, and one

00:42:53 ►

of the reasons why is that I think that Plato kind of anticipated this crisis that we have here, because one of Plato’s most

00:43:06 ►

important contributions, his story, the Alivori of the Cave, is about something almost exactly

00:43:13 ►

like this.

00:43:14 ►

Now, Plato was an initiate of the Eleusinian Mysteries.

00:43:19 ►

Are we familiar with the Eleusinian Mysteries?

00:43:22 ►

Who doesn’t know about the Eleusinian Mysteries? Who doesn’t know about the Eleusinian Mysteries?

00:43:26 ►

Okay, great.

00:43:27 ►

So we know that at Eleusis,

00:43:29 ►

people would travel to this site outside of Athens once a year.

00:43:33 ►

They would go just once in their life

00:43:35 ►

and have this profound experience.

00:43:38 ►

And they would know that death was not the end of anything.

00:43:41 ►

It was actually the beginning of a much greater adventure.

00:43:44 ►

But you couldn’t talk about this. Because if you tried to talk about it with someone who didn’t

00:43:50 ►

know, they wouldn’t understand what you were saying, and they would be hostile. So Plato’s

00:43:56 ►

Allegory of the Cave is about exactly this scenario, right? You have a room full of people

00:44:02 ►

who are chained to their seats, and the only thing that they

00:44:06 ►

see their whole lives are the shadows on the wall in front of them.

00:44:11 ►

Behind them there burns a terrific fire, casting shadows in front of them.

00:44:16 ►

One person manages to get loose from the chains and turns around and sees the fire, gets out of the cave, sees the real world,

00:44:27 ►

comes back into the cave to tell his brothers and sisters.

00:44:33 ►

And they’re so unhappy with the news that they kill him.

00:44:38 ►

And so this is, you know, Plato depicted this as really the plight of the philosopher.

00:44:46 ►

And I suggest here that this is the plight that we now face,

00:44:52 ►

that awakens human beings,

00:44:54 ►

and I don’t mean that in any heavy spiritual sense,

00:44:59 ►

because we’re awakening.

00:45:02 ►

We are all in this room awakening, that’s for sure.

00:45:06 ►

This is the challenge that people who are in the process of awakening,

00:45:10 ►

the challenge that they face when they try to discuss their visions with people who haven’t had them.

00:45:16 ►

The idea that the United States has been conquered,

00:45:22 ►

that the Third Reich has been born again

00:45:25 ►

is just too big

00:45:28 ►

an issue

00:45:28 ►

00:45:30 ►

how do we get out

00:45:34 ►

of this crisis

00:45:35 ►

what do we do

00:45:37 ►

how can the entheogens help us

00:45:39 ►

so I’m

00:45:42 ►

willing to

00:45:43 ►

make this now

00:45:45 ►

a group discussion

00:45:46 ►

and they don’t have to be questions

00:45:49 ►

they can be

00:45:50 ►

comments and they don’t have to be about

00:45:53 ►

this we can talk about

00:45:54 ►

any number of things about

00:45:56 ►

the modern history of psychedelic drugs

00:45:59 ►

I have a friend

00:46:02 ►

take along the same line as I do I have a lot of friends that also think along the same lines as I do.

00:46:06 ►

They would be here also if they had the least.

00:46:09 ►

I have a lot of friends that think along the same lines as I do

00:46:13 ►

and would probably be here if they had the opportunity.

00:46:16 ►

But I think also that they fear a lot of fear, as you said,

00:46:21 ►

coming out and talking about stuff like this.

00:46:23 ►

I know a lot of people

00:46:25 ►

do believe that along the same lines that 9-11 was an inside job and other things like

00:46:30 ►

that, but are almost too afraid even to talk to siblings or parents about it. I think one

00:46:37 ►

of the things is just being able to get over that fear and being able to express that point

00:46:41 ►

of view so other people could know where you stand.

00:46:50 ►

Yeah, there’s no question about that, that one of the biggest obstacles that we face is going to be coming to terms with our fear.

00:46:54 ►

How do we do that?

00:46:56 ►

How do we do that?

00:46:56 ►

How did you do that?

00:47:01 ►

It was a lot of trouble, most of it.

00:47:03 ►

I mean, it just had to do with talking about it and

00:47:06 ►

getting over the fact that people are going to either ridicule you or try to sideline

00:47:11 ►

you. But I think you just have to have perseverance and a belief that what you’re saying is important

00:47:19 ►

and it needs to be heard.

00:47:21 ►

That’s correct. Thank you.

00:47:23 ►

What’s next? I actually wanted to say something that reminded me of what you guys were saying.

00:47:29 ►

Jordan Maxwell actually, one of his lecturers, said something kind of similar to this kind

00:47:34 ►

of a fear, which is like, when you shine a light that no one’s ever seen before, and

00:47:39 ►

it’s really bright, your first reaction is to close your eyes.

00:47:42 ►

That’s kind of what people do. So,

00:47:46 ►

basically, like, having

00:47:48 ►

the courage to open your eyes up.

00:47:50 ►

Yeah.

00:47:52 ►

And…

00:47:54 ►

Yeah, how do you…

00:47:56 ►

How or why would you open your

00:47:58 ►

eyes to something that is

00:48:00 ►

so ugly? That’s another…

00:48:02 ►

It’s a very thorny problem,

00:48:04 ►

isn’t it? Yeah. Hi. This whole thing, the connection between the Third Reich and Germany in the 30s and

00:48:13 ►

the current situation, it seems to imply that Hitler wasn’t an isolated individual, but

00:48:20 ►

he was sort of a spokesman for some thing, right? So I’m wondering, in that regard,

00:48:27 ►

how you see where the United States is at right now.

00:48:30 ►

We have this, I don’t know, quite cut to make of Obama.

00:48:34 ►

I’m Canadian, but I do follow this stuff closely.

00:48:36 ►

And Obama seems like a potential, you know, some change involved there.

00:48:42 ►

But I’m just wondering what your take on that current situation going on out there right now is politically.

00:48:49 ►

Is the Third Reich coming on even stronger? Is this sort of a ruse or a distraction?

00:48:55 ►

Or is he actually, in some even small way, representing rebellion of the people?

00:49:01 ►

That is the question right now among many of my friends and colleagues that are looking

00:49:06 ►

at this. If you’ve ever read Herbert Marcuse’s very important book, One Dimensional Man,

00:49:12 ►

which is about how totalitarian societies function, one of the things that they do is

00:49:17 ►

that they have these, Marcuse used the phrase, tension management. One way you manage the tension in an authoritarian culture, the tension

00:49:26 ►

between the authoritarian regime and the people who are virtually enslaved, is you have to

00:49:32 ►

give the appearance that there is change, there actually is a two-party system. And

00:49:38 ►

so, you know, Obama, who I have not met and honestly haven’t been paying very close attention to,

00:49:47 ►

but I’m aware, much more aware of, say, the Clinton administration, right?

00:49:51 ►

So here we had a very similar period, right?

00:49:55 ►

We had George Bush I in there, and in that administration, you know, his foreign policy team and Reagan’s foreign policy team, we had the

00:50:07 ►

Iran-Contra scandal, where we had these people working out of the White House engaged in

00:50:12 ►

multi-billion dollar weapon sales to terrorist nations, the Ayatollah Khomeini and Saddam

00:50:19 ►

Hussein, billions of dollars of drugs, of sales of heroin and cocaine.

00:50:26 ►

And these guys were flushed out.

00:50:29 ►

And they were eventually indicted by Congress.

00:50:32 ►

These are very serious crimes.

00:50:34 ►

Indicted by Congress for subverting democracy, practicing American foreign policy on their own.

00:50:41 ►

And then in the last week of George Bush’s administration,

00:50:46 ►

they were all pardoned by George Bush. And then a couple of years, a couple of weeks

00:50:51 ►

later, we have the Bill Clinton administration. And it is about, you know, we’ve got this

00:50:56 ►

now, we’ve got a saxophone playing quasi pot smoking baby boomer in there. And the

00:51:03 ►

progressive movement kind of took a little nap.

00:51:06 ►

We figured we’ve got it.

00:51:08 ►

And people don’t really realize, but, you know, one of the things, like the drug war,

00:51:12 ►

you know, was raging during the Clinton administration.

00:51:16 ►

And for all we think about, you know, Al Gore being the great environmental president,

00:51:20 ►

the environmental movement lost ground during the Clinton-Gore administration.

00:51:26 ►

Over a million people had been put in jail for marijuana.

00:51:30 ►

You see, the authorities knew what Leary was up to.

00:51:33 ►

Let me go back and say something about Tim that I forgot to say before.

00:51:37 ►

Tim was a rising star in American psychology in Berkeley in the 1950s.

00:51:46 ►

And the CIA attempted to recruit him.

00:51:50 ►

They came to Tim and had already established himself as a brilliant diagnostician

00:51:57 ►

who could predict and change human behavior.

00:52:02 ►

He was beginning to revolutionize psychotherapy,

00:52:07 ►

and the way he did it was by taking the authority out of it.

00:52:11 ►

Tim was one of the pioneers in group therapy.

00:52:14 ►

He did research that showed that, you know,

00:52:16 ►

psychotherapy where a person is a patient,

00:52:20 ►

and then there’s a doctor,

00:52:22 ►

and the doctor kind of talks down to the patient.

00:52:25 ►

That doesn’t work any better or worse than just the ordinary passage of time.

00:52:31 ►

And what was a far more effective therapeutic modality was an interaction with peers.

00:52:40 ►

See, he was already starting to democratize society.

00:52:44 ►

See, he was already starting to democratize society.

00:52:51 ►

And the CIA came to him and attempted to recruit him in an enormous program. One of the first things that the CIA did when they were started in 1947 was an operation called Operation Mockingbird.

00:53:00 ►

Mockingbird. What do mockingbirds do?

00:53:02 ►

They just repeat what you tell them.

00:53:04 ►

Okay, so Operation Mockingbird was the beginning of the rebirth of the Third Reich.

00:53:09 ►

This is how they did it in Germany. They take over the media. They take over publishing.

00:53:13 ►

They infiltrate universities. So they wanted Tim to work with them to anticipate where dissident groups were going to arise.

00:53:28 ►

where dissident groups were going to arise, and Tobey let him in on this mind control project. Basically, Operation Mockingbird was a vast mind control operation over the

00:53:34 ►

United States. They were going to take over America, mind first. MKUltra, which I’m sure

00:53:40 ►

if you’ve looked in the field of psychedelia, was their more specific project using psychedelic drugs to see how they could manipulate consciousness.

00:53:49 ►

So they tried to recruit Tim. And he said, no way, man. He said, we just fight a war

00:53:56 ►

against studies. That’s not what I’m doing. And it really motivated him. He saw the threat

00:54:00 ►

that was happening. And so, and to get back to your question, I don’t really know

00:54:07 ►

about Obama. I’m certainly going to vote for him. I’m going to support his candidacy profoundly.

00:54:13 ►

One of his foreign policy advisors is Brzezinski, who is one of these fascists from the Bush

00:54:20 ►

administration and with this whole New World Order. He has a very, very difficult

00:54:27 ►

job ahead of him. I was hoping, I’m sort of wildly optimistic, that somehow Janusz Kosinic’s

00:54:36 ►

campaign would catch on because he, I know for a fact, is tuned into this. Tuned in, yeah. So when Tim came up with his

00:54:45 ►

meme, oh this is what I was going to say,

00:54:48 ►

marijuana, Tim

00:54:49 ►

knew what

00:54:52 ►

they were up to, and he

00:54:53 ►

knew how to stop it.

00:54:55 ►

And he knew the way was to

00:54:57 ►

try to get in a

00:54:59 ►

widespread way these

00:55:01 ►

memes into our culture.

00:55:03 ►

Question authority, think for yourself. He

00:55:07 ►

encouraged people to turn on, tune in, drop out. That was very specifically directed to

00:55:16 ►

this socially constructed reality that was being manufactured by Operation Mockingbird.

00:55:21 ►

And he identified the psychedelic drugs and marijuana, especially

00:55:27 ►

at first, with this discovery of the inner world of the individual, this impoverished

00:55:35 ►

inner world, this 1950s one-dimensional man. Tim wanted to turn that on. So this is why psychedelic marijuana and psychedelic drugs are so illegal,

00:55:48 ►

because Tim had made this connection. And if you look at the transcripts, the tapes

00:55:59 ►

of Nixon, when they were first making marijuana illegal. You know, Nixon appointed these commissions, the first one, to come up with a reason why

00:56:10 ►

they needed, well, first Leary.

00:56:11 ►

Leary was busted for pot, and then he showed the Supreme Court that the laws against marijuana

00:56:17 ►

were unconstitutional.

00:56:19 ►

He won his first case at the Supreme Court.

00:56:22 ►

And then as soon as he did that, he announced his candidacy

00:56:25 ►

for governor of California. And it looked like it was going to be a big party. And then

00:56:31 ►

he was set up and busted again. And they redid the laws. And Nixon, needing a better reason,

00:56:39 ►

appointed a commission that investigated marijuana. And they came to Nixon and they said, sorry,

00:56:45 ►

Mr. President, it’s perfectly safe, and there’s really no reason to make it illegal. So Nixon

00:56:53 ►

went off on one of his drunken rages, and I’ve heard these tapes and seen the transcripts,

00:57:00 ►

that wire psychiatrists, you know, he was ranting and raving about psychiatrists

00:57:07 ►

are just a bunch of Jewish fags trying to bring down civilization and stuff like that

00:57:13 ►

and demanded another commission, which also came up with the same data

00:57:18 ►

and said we can’t do this.

00:57:19 ►

Nixon said to hell with all of you and they put in this Controlled Substance Act,

00:57:23 ►

which criminalized marijuana and all of you, and they put in this Controlled Substance Act, which criminalized marijuana

00:57:26 ►

and all of the psychedelic drugs.

00:57:28 ►

It’s got to be the most inane

00:57:30 ►

piece of legislation in the history

00:57:32 ►

of the United States government, and it’s put

00:57:33 ►

more people in jail and prevented

00:57:35 ►

us from freely exploring

00:57:38 ►

the origin of religion

00:57:39 ►

and the nature of our soul.

00:57:43 ►

Obama, I don’t know.

00:57:44 ►

Sorry, I don’t know.

00:57:43 ►

in the nature of our soul. Obama, I don’t know.

00:57:44 ►

Sorry.

00:57:44 ►

I went over there.

00:57:45 ►

That’s all right.

00:57:48 ►

Can you hear me?

00:57:51 ►

Can you hear me?

00:57:52 ►

Yeah.

00:57:52 ►

As far as, in my opinion, if there is one way we can challenge

00:58:04 ►

a dominated society is to take something we’ve learned from post-colonial studies

00:58:08 ►

and stop encouraging this master-slave dialectic and be naked psychonauts, be open about our spirituality

00:58:16 ►

and be unashamed because I don’t live in America so I suppose it’s a bit different

00:58:21 ►

but with me, I’m completely open with basically anyone I talk to about my spirituality.

00:58:27 ►

And in doing so, I think it’s a way to show, it’s a way to stop that process and stop it right there and say,

00:58:34 ►

I don’t agree with this denominator society and be completely, be naked in front of the universe,

00:58:39 ►

be naked with everybody else in that society as to what to do.

00:58:43 ►

Because if we were closeted about it, and I know it is different in America, it’s different in the body, but we’re told it

00:58:48 ►

and we’re effectively agreeing with that, agreeing that we’re practicing a dialectic

00:58:54 ►

for everybody.

00:58:56 ►

A Gandhian, yay, that’s right.

00:58:58 ►

We need to collapse the dialectic, you’re absolutely right.

00:59:01 ►

And the way that, one way to do that is just to thank you

00:59:07 ►

when you talked about 9 11 and you said who doesn’t know that it would i think you used

00:59:13 ►

the word no doesn’t know that it was an inside job am i quoting you correctly

00:59:19 ►

i guess i don’t know it i’m willing to be convinced of it but i would like to know

00:59:21 ►

I don’t know it.

00:59:23 ►

I’m willing to be convinced of it,

00:59:26 ►

but I would like to know who would do that and why would they do that?

00:59:29 ►

Okay.

00:59:32 ►

There’s three basic…

00:59:35 ►

There are a lot of smoking guns around this,

00:59:38 ►

but the three that I’d like to point out are,

00:59:41 ►

number one,

00:59:42 ►

the United States has a, you has a trillion-dollar defense system. It’s

00:59:47 ►

the most sophisticated air defense system in the world. The Pentagon is the most heavily

00:59:52 ►

guarded building in the world. As a matter of normal practice, it happened 60 or 70 times

01:00:00 ►

already that year in 2001. Whenever an airplane goes off course and doesn’t respond to air

01:00:09 ►

traffic control, within minutes, 10 minutes, anywhere in the United States, the Air Force

01:00:15 ►

is scrambled, meaning jets are taken off. Okay, I was going to get to that, but the first thing, this is one way to let you see that, number one, somebody turned off the alarm.

01:00:32 ►

Okay?

01:00:33 ►

Number two, the way I like to put this is, you’re either with the law of gravity or you’re with the terrorists.

01:00:41 ►

Buildings don’t fall down, turn into a pile of dust in 10 seconds

01:00:48 ►

because of fire. There have been many, many fires in buildings, you know, in skyscrapers

01:00:55 ►

that have burned for, there was one Madrid fire in a hotel that burned for 17 hours.

01:01:01 ►

Fire does not melt steel. Fire does not bring down steel-framed buildings. It

01:01:08 ►

does not happen. You might as well say that those buildings turned into butterflies and

01:01:14 ►

flew up into the sky for all of the adherence to number seven fall down. Okay.

01:01:31 ►

Okay.

01:01:39 ►

The who and why is they’ve… Now, let me just say there’s two ways to go about this.

01:01:42 ►

Now, let me just say, there’s two ways to go about this.

01:01:51 ►

There’s a document that was written in 1991 called Rebuilding America’s Defenses by a group called the Project for the New American Century,

01:01:55 ►

which is a group of ultra-right-wing hawks that were in the Bush administration.

01:02:00 ►

These individuals are, several of them are dual citizens of the United States

01:02:07 ►

and Israel.

01:02:09 ►

This document, the Rebuilding America Defenses, is what to do now that the Cold War is over.

01:02:17 ►

How are we going to justify this terrific military budget if we don’t have any more

01:02:22 ►

enemies?

01:02:24 ►

And so they say in this document, well, what we’re going to need to do here

01:02:27 ►

is we’re going to have to militarily dominate the Middle East

01:02:31 ►

for strategic purposes and for the oil.

01:02:35 ►

This is a plan that was the document written.

01:02:38 ►

It was a secret document.

01:02:40 ►

It was leaked to the press.

01:02:43 ►

There was a reaction against it because it was so outrageous.

01:02:47 ►

There’s a statement in there, a sentence in there that says the only way to get the American people behind such a plan,

01:02:56 ►

they didn’t call it a diabolical plan, they said the only way to get American people behind this plan

01:03:01 ►

is if there was another, a major galvanizing event

01:03:06 ►

like a new Pearl Harbor.

01:03:09 ►

Remember in World War II,

01:03:10 ►

the United States was very ambivalent

01:03:12 ►

about entering the war

01:03:14 ►

until Pearl Harbor

01:03:15 ►

and then the United States

01:03:17 ►

rushed into the war.

01:03:18 ►

So these people that wrote this document,

01:03:23 ►

when this monkey came into the White House, and

01:03:27 ►

I’m sorry if I’ve offended any of my monkey friends, when this administration took over,

01:03:33 ►

the people that wrote this document were his foreign policy team.

01:03:36 ►

They controlled the investigation, and that’s who we think did it.

01:03:42 ►

We won’t know until we really get into this. I’m sorry?

01:03:51 ►

Yes, I did say that. Yes. I believe that we should have an investigation to fully explore

01:03:59 ►

the role of certain individuals, such as Dov Zakhin, who was the Comptroller of the Pentagon

01:04:06 ►

and a signator to the Project of the New American Century. Dov Zakhin was the Comptroller of

01:04:12 ►

the Pentagon, who was in charge of the Pentagon’s budget. On September 10, 2001, one day before 9-11, Donald Rumsfeld made a startling announcement that there were

01:04:27 ►

$2.3 t r i ll i o nmi ss in g .$ 2.3 trillion. That’s a lot of ayahuasca. Missing from the Pentagon.

01:04:39 ►

It should have been the biggest news in the history of the United States, and it would

01:04:42 ►

have been, except on September 11th, even bigger news came down.

01:04:47 ►

Okay?

01:04:47 ►

So if you want to research this a little bit,

01:04:50 ►

you check out the Project for the New American Century,

01:04:52 ►

and in particular, this is most carefully described

01:04:55 ►

by one of the world’s foremost philosophers

01:04:58 ►

and Christian theologians, a colleague and friend of mine,

01:05:02 ►

Professor David Ray Griffin,

01:05:03 ►

has now written in the last,

01:05:06 ►

and his retirement has come out with six books since 2003 about this.

01:05:11 ►

And the first one you want to read is called The New Pearl Harbor,

01:05:14 ►

Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration’s Complicity in 9-11.

01:05:19 ►

And that will get you going on that.

01:05:21 ►

Please.

01:05:22 ►

The century is the Patriot Act, is it? No. The Project for the New American Century is actually a think tank, a consortium of these individuals. I could name a number of them, Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby. The Patriot Act was the 700-page document that just happened to be available for signing a couple of weeks after 9-11,

01:05:50 ►

which basically undermines the U.S. Constitution.

01:05:54 ►

That’s what that is.

01:05:58 ►

I just wanted to mention, though, that the first reference that I ever heard of the idea of a new Pearl Harbor

01:06:05 ►

is actually in this big new Brzezinski book, The Advisor to Obama,

01:06:11 ►

one of Obama’s advisors, the Grand Trust Board,

01:06:15 ►

where he first posits that idea that that’s exactly what you would need

01:06:18 ►

to mobilize the Americans to allow them to go into the Middle East.

01:06:23 ►

There’s very good reason to be suspicious of Obama,

01:06:27 ►

but he’s all we’ve got right now.

01:06:31 ►

So, please.

01:06:32 ►

I just wanted to return to how we…

01:06:35 ►

You were talking about the psychedelic movement

01:06:37 ►

kind of fail in liberating the minds of the masses,

01:06:41 ►

and MAPS published that only about 10% of the American culture has ever even considered trying psychedelic mushrooms which is the most

01:06:49 ►

popular psychedelic in the United States do you think of you know that increased

01:06:54 ►

or that number increased with that like create a greater movement and how like

01:07:01 ►

other ways that you thought of that they keep it like people could be more

01:07:04 ►

convinced that these are more medicinal than just drugs that are recreationally used?

01:07:10 ►

I see your question in kind of two parts.

01:07:13 ►

Because the first part of it, if more people took mushrooms, would this work?

01:07:18 ►

Right.

01:07:19 ►

Okay, so I hope so.

01:07:22 ►

And here’s a way where that might happen.

01:07:26 ►

I’m sure you’ve all looked at

01:07:28 ►

some of the new understandings in quantum physics

01:07:31 ►

and that what happens to an individual

01:07:33 ►

actually affects all of humanity.

01:07:37 ►

And there are these stories,

01:07:41 ►

perhaps they’re apocryphal stories,

01:07:43 ►

of yogis in the mountains

01:07:46 ►

in the Himalayas that are sitting

01:07:47 ►

and meditating and are in

01:07:49 ►

pure samadhi.

01:07:52 ►

And it’s that unitive

01:07:53 ►

experience that they live

01:07:56 ►

in that’s sort of keeping

01:07:58 ►

it in balance anyway, but that

01:07:59 ►

kind of enlightenment

01:08:01 ►

affects the whole. So if

01:08:03 ►

everybody were to take mushrooms,

01:08:06 ►

or more and more people were to take mushrooms,

01:08:09 ►

yes, I think that has a kind of reverberating kind of effect.

01:08:14 ►

Yes.

01:08:15 ►

The second part, say the question again.

01:08:18 ►

Part of what I do with my Open About Spirituality

01:08:21 ►

is refer to them as medicines, not like mushrooms,

01:08:24 ►

but mushroom medicine or ayahuasca medicine.

01:08:29 ►

And what are some of the ways you think that we could reestablish a culture of medicinal uses as opposed to recreational use of these substances?

01:08:36 ►

Yes, well, you know, there’s a saying of Confucius, I think, that, you know, when things go wrong, the first step to correcting them

01:08:46 ►

is to begin to call things by their

01:08:48 ►

true names.

01:08:50 ►

And so, this is one

01:08:52 ►

of the things that, in fact, it was Wasson

01:08:54 ►

and his colleagues that came

01:08:56 ►

up with this, that let’s change the

01:08:58 ►

name of psychedelic.

01:09:00 ►

And this is where the word now-entheogen

01:09:02 ►

comes from. So if we

01:09:04 ►

call these things something else and then begin to explain what’s an entheogen,

01:09:10 ►

well, an entheogen is a plant or chemical substance that’s been used since the beginning of time to affect religious experiences.

01:09:19 ►

That’s different than psychedelic, which you’re suggesting medicine, and I agree.

01:09:25 ►

Yes, we need to reframe this, and that would be one very important basic way to do it.

01:09:32 ►

Yes.

01:09:33 ►

Thanks.

01:09:34 ►

First of all, I really admire what you say, and I resonate with a lot of it.

01:09:43 ►

It’s more of a comment than it is a question,

01:09:47 ►

but we do have movements right now, like MAPS, for example,

01:09:51 ►

who’s seriously involved in psychedelic studies in the United States,

01:09:55 ►

and the psilocybin study that was done at UCLA

01:09:58 ►

that’s been publicized on television recently in the United States.

01:10:03 ►

And that was Johns Hopkins.

01:10:06 ►

Okay, John Hopkins, sorry.

01:10:11 ►

But this does bring awareness to people in the mainstream because obviously the media is a tool that’s used to manipulate people.

01:10:16 ►

And when people can see this, it brings some light to the subject.

01:10:19 ►

And there’s a possibility that more of the mainstream mentality will be turned on through these studies.

01:10:31 ►

I was at Mind States a few years ago, and there was a man speaking, I’m forgetting who it was now,

01:10:38 ►

and he was speaking about there being two types of humans on the planet right now,

01:10:43 ►

one being Homo sapien and the other one being

01:10:47 ►

Homo divinis, whereas the Homo sapiens are more like the monkeys and the Homo divinis

01:10:53 ►

are the people that are more conscious or have more awareness. And it’s really these

01:10:58 ►

people that have this consciousness or you know of or aware of the

01:11:05 ►

other by our eyes being open enough or we’ve had experiences whatever it might

01:11:09 ►

be that bring us to this awareness who are the warriors you know or the people

01:11:16 ►

the peaceful warriors that need to somehow through our own organization of our imagination,

01:11:29 ►

formulate a methodology to combat these homo sapiens

01:11:36 ►

that are out there.

01:11:37 ►

And I believe that a lot of people here,

01:11:40 ►

having the experiences that they’ve had,

01:11:43 ►

are these warriors, you know,

01:11:46 ►

and if we can organize ourselves somehow, a little bit more organization in, you know,

01:11:53 ►

through our imagination, you know, maybe we can be the tools, you know, or the catalyst

01:11:59 ►

to cause this change to happen, you know, it’s just a thought, you know, I would like

01:12:04 ►

to think or have optimistic, you think or have an optimistic view of the

01:12:08 ►

future, but it’s hard living in the United States with the general factuous mentality

01:12:15 ►

that exists. And so I don’t really know an answer. And I would like to think entheogenics

01:12:22 ►

definitely have a role in this.

01:12:26 ►

Obviously they do, because they change our consciousness and bring us to a more conscious awareness.

01:12:32 ►

But how we can spread that word.

01:12:35 ►

Timothy Leary was a little, like you said, he was a little bit too flamboyant maybe in his approach.

01:12:42 ►

But there might be more subtle methods.

01:12:45 ►

And the group ceremonies that people are doing,

01:12:48 ►

what Dennis McKenna said the other night about us all,

01:12:54 ►

just the plans, getting out there,

01:12:57 ►

and all of us being missionaries in a sense,

01:13:01 ►

or these medicines, spread the word,

01:13:04 ►

and turn people know, and turn

01:13:05 ►

people on. And don’t be afraid. You know, fear is definitely, you know, will hold us

01:13:11 ►

back. You know, so don’t be afraid to turn people on. And I don’t know. That’s all.

01:13:17 ►

Thank you. Thank you.

01:13:23 ►

I want to talk with you a little bit later.

01:13:27 ►

The conference that I mentioned at the beginning that I organized with Stan Grof

01:13:31 ►

was actually the, that conference gave rise to not only my first book,

01:13:37 ►

Enthusiasm in the Future of Religion, but it gave rise to several associations.

01:13:43 ►

You know, during the 70s, nothing was really going on with psychedelic drugs.

01:13:48 ►

I started this in the early 1980s in this quiet period. That conference gave rise to

01:13:55 ►

MAPS. It also gave rise to Terence McKenna’s Botanical Dimensions. It gave rise to the

01:14:01 ►

Albert Hoffman Foundation. the people that eventually started the

01:14:07 ►

Hafter Institute were also all there.

01:14:09 ►

So it was a very fertile conference.

01:14:11 ►

Now, Rick Doblin is an old friend of mine.

01:14:15 ►

He was actually turned on to MDMA.

01:14:18 ►

He was a subject in mine and my partner’s quasi-formal research with MDMA at the time that it was

01:14:26 ►

it was a secret substance it was not illegal it was not widely known we started working with it

01:14:32 ►

in 1981 Rick got turned on to it everybody was supposed to be quiet about it wasn’t really that

01:14:38 ►

quiet about it and actually there were articles about him as the Timothy Leary of the 80s. He was kind of, I’m the new Timothy Leary of the 80s,

01:14:48 ►

and this is going to be the new drug.

01:14:50 ►

Here’s this new legal drug, and called a lot of attention to it,

01:14:53 ►

and caused a lot of problems.

01:14:55 ►

Now, Rick has been incredibly tenacious

01:14:58 ►

and has done some really fabulous work with this MAPS thing.

01:15:04 ►

I have a problem with it because, to me,

01:15:08 ►

it’s legitimizing the authoritarian situation.

01:15:14 ►

We shouldn’t be, in a country like the United States,

01:15:17 ►

we shouldn’t be begging authorities to explore our own consciousness

01:15:20 ►

with the oldest form of religion on the planet.

01:15:24 ►

That’s like fundamentally

01:15:25 ►

wrong. And Rick, I just have a little problem with that, and I’m going to maybe talk with

01:15:33 ►

you about it later, but anybody that is a supporter and corresponds and is part of the

01:15:37 ►

MAPS thing, I would like to see a discussion about some of these issues that I’ve raised

01:15:42 ►

here. It would be interesting to talk with Rick about what he thinks about 9-11

01:15:46 ►

and remember some of the things that I said.

01:15:50 ►

I have a comment slash question.

01:15:53 ►

The comment is, like, it seems like the 60s movement was really brought down by a coin tell pro.

01:16:00 ►

It’s not, like, the only thing, but one of the major things.

01:16:02 ►

I’m not sure if you’re aware.

01:16:04 ►

You probably are, but, I mean, not everybody.

01:16:06 ►

And also like the problem with people organizing

01:16:10 ►

and then getting infiltrated

01:16:12 ►

and then the people looking up to these idols

01:16:14 ►

like Martin Luther King or John F. Kennedy.

01:16:18 ►

And then when their idols were brought down,

01:16:19 ►

that they thought the whole system

01:16:21 ►

that they were trying to build was brought down.

01:16:23 ►

So I just wanted to point out

01:16:24 ►

that people need to be very careful when they do organize

01:16:27 ►

and start doing these things because there will be other people that come in and disrupt

01:16:32 ►

you from the inside out.

01:16:34 ►

And then my question is, what do you think, like, efficient methods other than, like,

01:16:41 ►

openly organizing or, like, deciding when you want to turn open

01:16:46 ►

You know as far as like gathering your strength and being quiet about it and then turning over

01:16:52 ►

To show everybody else about it

01:16:56 ►

I’ll just say this that

01:17:03 ►

Ask me that question at the end of a few more drinks

01:17:08 ►

that’s about as much time as we have that’s it okay well thank you very much You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:17:32 ►

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

01:17:39 ►

So, are we all sufficiently paranoid now?

01:17:44 ►

I hope not, because that is not a very helpful emotion.

01:17:48 ►

And it certainly isn’t why I’m putting this information out right now.

01:17:52 ►

You see, I know one thing for almost certain,

01:17:56 ►

and that is that at some point in time,

01:17:58 ►

most of us are going to be seriously disappointed in young Mr. Obama.

01:18:03 ►

As you know, that is already the case with

01:18:06 ►

me. Yet I’m still a little schizo about it because I also see him as far and away the best person the

01:18:13 ►

U.S. political system has ever produced, at least in my lifetime, and I started with Roosevelt.

01:18:20 ►

Which is the point. It is the system itself that is fatally flawed, and we shouldn’t expect perfect leaders to arise from a very imperfect system.

01:18:31 ►

As I said earlier, I’m not talking about politics here because I’ve come to the conclusion that politics will never change anything.

01:18:40 ►

As my mother often said, everything’s changed, but nothing’s different.

01:18:45 ►

I spent a good deal of my life involved in political fights, primarily on the POW issue,

01:18:51 ►

and I came to see how fruitless it is to try to push against these big institutions.

01:18:57 ►

As I see it, today’s talk is about history and culture, and ultimately it’s our culture that matters most.

01:19:04 ►

To tell the truth, I’ve completely given up on politics. and culture, and ultimately it’s our culture that matters most.

01:19:07 ►

To tell the truth, I’ve completely given up on politics.

01:19:14 ►

My mission is to effect a change in our underlying culture in order to help nudge us into a more sustainable and human-oriented direction.

01:19:18 ►

But if we don’t know the history of how our culture has evolved, we’re doomed to repeat

01:19:23 ►

the mistakes of the past.

01:19:24 ►

of how our culture has evolved, we’re doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.

01:19:28 ►

It seems to me that it’s about time we made some new mistakes while attempting to bring an end to one of our biggest mistakes of recent history,

01:19:33 ►

namely the war on drugs.

01:19:35 ►

Now, I realize that some of the things Robert talks about

01:19:38 ►

are going to be a major challenge for a few of our fellow slaughters,

01:19:43 ►

and I don’t want you to worry that I’m going to go off on a

01:19:45 ►

tangent of conspiracy theories and

01:19:47 ►

keep bringing this up in future podcasts.

01:19:50 ►

But what I want to suggest

01:19:51 ►

is that you listen to this talk again

01:19:54 ►

and that you do your best to listen

01:19:55 ►

to it with a completely open mind.

01:19:58 ►

Try to shed the mental

01:20:00 ►

conditioning of several years of

01:20:01 ►

mainstream media only supporting

01:20:04 ►

the Bush-Cheney version of things.

01:20:06 ►

And please don’t think that I want you to spend your valuable time in researching this never-ending

01:20:10 ►

story and getting trapped in the never-ending trail of conspiracy theories. All I’m saying here

01:20:16 ►

is that Robert and I find it quite unusual that whenever the official story is contradicted,

01:20:22 ►

the one community that goes most overboard

01:20:25 ►

in attacking the doubters of the bush tale

01:20:28 ►

is the psychedelic community.

01:20:30 ►

In fact, there’s a really fascinating blog comment thread

01:20:34 ►

that you might be interested in.

01:20:36 ►

It began with a post on mysterytheater.blogspot.com

01:20:39 ►

that was titled,

01:20:41 ►

Psychedelics, Science, and the WTF.

01:20:44 ►

And in it, the author questioned why Robert Forte brought up the question of 9-11 at the Horizons Conference.

01:20:51 ►

And so Robert began what is becoming a very fascinating discussion in the comments section.

01:20:57 ►

And it’s all very civil, I might add, which is a nice change of pace for the net. But if you’re wondering, like I have,

01:21:05 ►

why the psychedelic community in general refuses to even think about the truth

01:21:11 ►

or non-truth of the official story,

01:21:14 ►

this is a thread I think you’ll find quite fascinating.

01:21:17 ►

Isn’t it amazing that after all of the wild exploits we’ve had romping about in Theospace,

01:21:24 ►

it just blows my mind that the minds of the wild exploits we’ve had romping about in Theospace, it just blows my mind

01:21:26 ►

that the minds of the psychedelic community

01:21:28 ►

haven’t been able to expand enough

01:21:31 ►

to even remain open

01:21:32 ►

to consider other possibilities

01:21:34 ►

about the events that have now led us

01:21:37 ►

to where we are living

01:21:38 ►

in an early-stage police state.

01:21:40 ►

An investigative reporter that I admire

01:21:43 ►

is Benjamin Fulford, and here is something that he has to say about why most people will never be clear-headed enough to look behind the curtain and see who is really pulling the strings.

01:21:55 ►

Fulford says, and I quote,

01:21:58 ►

Because to accept that it was a cabal in the U.S. government that did this, it means to accept that the entire belief system you have about your society is wrong.

01:22:11 ►

Now, do you really think the U.S. government would lie to you?

01:22:15 ►

Take a look at the war on drugs and then answer that question.

01:22:18 ►

So, are you ready for accepting that your entire belief system about your society is wrong? Can you accept

01:22:26 ►

the fact that perhaps everything you believe about freedom, democracy, and the American dream

01:22:31 ►

has actually been a crock of lies? It isn’t an easy thing to consider, that I know for sure.

01:22:38 ►

And the bottom line here is that it really doesn’t matter who was behind those events,

01:22:44 ►

nor do the specific details

01:22:46 ►

of how the events unfolded matter at this point. All that really matters right now is that we the

01:22:52 ►

people have lost a significant number of our basic rights as a result of it, and we will very likely

01:22:59 ►

see this erosion of civil liberties continue under an Obama administration, particularly when it comes to the war on drugs.

01:23:07 ►

There is simply too much momentum carrying it forward right now.

01:23:11 ►

So what do we do?

01:23:14 ►

Well, I wish I knew.

01:23:16 ►

But for now, I think Terence McKenna’s advice is about the best we have to go on,

01:23:21 ►

and that is keep the old faith and stay high. Now let’s move on to some

01:23:27 ►

more positive things. First of all, as long as we’re talking about high weirdness, I want to

01:23:34 ►

recommend a follow-up to my podcast number 150, the one where Terrence McKenna spoke about UFOs.

01:23:41 ►

That talk has generated a fair amount of discussion on several boards,

01:23:46 ►

and KMO followed up with two podcasts of commentary about it with Neil Kramer,

01:23:51 ►

who is also one of our fellow slaughters, by the way.

01:23:55 ►

And subsequent to these three podcasts,

01:23:58 ►

Cody of the Sancho and Cody duo,

01:24:01 ►

who produced the most excellent Blacklight in the Attic podcast,

01:24:05 ►

did what he calls a smash-up of these three podcasts and posted it as Blacklight number 9.5.

01:24:12 ►

Now, if this is a topic that interests you, my recommendation is to download that 9.5

01:24:17 ►

show and give it a listen.

01:24:19 ►

First of all, Cody has done a beautiful job of overlaying music and pacing the ideas with brief musical interludes,

01:24:27 ►

which gives you time to digest an idea before moving on to the next one.

01:24:32 ►

Both my wife and I have listened to Black Light’s 9.5 program twice now,

01:24:37 ►

and each time we came away with things we hadn’t heard in the original programs.

01:24:41 ►

So check them out if you get a chance. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

01:24:46 ►

Now here is something that one of our fellow slaughters

01:24:49 ►

might be able to help out with.

01:24:51 ►

A university researcher is working on a book

01:24:54 ►

about the psychedelic experience,

01:24:56 ►

and he has asked if anyone knows

01:24:57 ►

whether there are any written transcripts

01:25:00 ►

of Terence McKenna’s descriptions of the DMT experience.

01:25:04 ►

Something along the lines of what he said in my podcast number 27.

01:25:08 ►

I’m not aware of any such transcripts myself,

01:25:11 ►

but it wouldn’t surprise me if some of our slaughters

01:25:13 ►

hadn’t taken the time to create one or two of the transcripts of the Good Bards talks.

01:25:20 ►

So let me know at lorenzo at matrixmasters.com

01:25:23 ►

if you have a lead on something like that.

01:25:27 ►

In fact, I’d like to post any transcripts you know of on our website also.

01:25:32 ►

Another little item is a thank you to the people who occasionally buy a few books through our Amazon store at my news site, matrixmasters.com.

01:25:42 ►

And every once in a while, someone also purchases a video game there

01:25:46 ►

and hey, the 4% commission we get on those sales

01:25:49 ►

may not sound like much

01:25:50 ►

but every little bit helps

01:25:52 ►

and that’s how I actually support that site.

01:25:55 ►

So thanks a lot to you anonymous friends of ours.

01:25:59 ►

And finally, Chris writes to say

01:26:02 ►

I’m pretty sure I’ve listened to every McKenna lecture ever made.

01:26:07 ►

At least every one that was ever available for download on the net.

01:26:10 ►

If you can believe it, I have pretty much listened to McKenna lectures for eight hours a day, five days a week for a couple of years now.

01:26:17 ►

I am a courier and drive around all day.

01:26:21 ►

Wow.

01:26:29 ►

day. Wow. I don’t know if, I don’t know of anyone who’s listened to that much McKenna, so I’d sure like to meet you someday. Anyhow, he goes on. Talk about Terrence Overload, huh? Are there any lost

01:26:36 ►

McKenna lectures that have not been put on the web that you are aware of? In the Valley of Novelty

01:26:41 ►

was a great one that I have only been able to find on the salon.

01:26:52 ►

Well, Chris, my guess is that there’s still a lot of Terrence material that hasn’t made it to the net yet.

01:26:58 ►

After all, you know, he was sort of like the Grateful Dead in that he let anyone record his talks that wanted to.

01:27:02 ►

So if any of our fellow salonners know of some lost material,

01:27:06 ►

or maybe have a few old cassette tapes in your garage that you’ve forgotten about?

01:27:10 ►

It sure would be great if we could get them up here in the net for the world to hear.

01:27:16 ►

Our dear Terrence had his faults, and no one I know of agrees with him on everything.

01:27:23 ►

But on the whole, I think his work stands far and above that of most every other 20th century philosopher.

01:27:27 ►

Well, that’s about the extent of my energy level for today.

01:27:35 ►

And next week, by the way, and hopefully it’ll only be one week, I plan on podcasting a talk titled Reality Syndromes and Cyberpunk Symptoms.

01:27:40 ►

And I think you’re going to find that one quite interesting.

01:27:43 ►

And now, as always, I’ll close this podcast by saying that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are available for your use under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 license.

01:27:57 ►

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

01:28:06 ►

And that’s also where I’m going to post the program notes for this podcast.

01:28:11 ►

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

01:28:16 ►

Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

162 - Cultural Healing

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