Program Notes
Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary
[NOTE: All quotations below are by Dr. Timothy Leary.]
“We represent the aristocratic, exploring elite of our species, and we always have.”
“The purpose of human life is to go within and find out who you are. The purpose of human life is to grow.”
“American history is filled with people who knew how to use drugs intelligently.”
“He [William James] later wrote the book “Varieties of Religious Experience”, in which he said over and over again, no attempt at the metaphysical quest, no attempt to probe the philosophic wonders of the cosmos can be undertaken by those who don’t have some experience with chemicals. In his case it was peyote and nitrous oxide.”
“The ‘original’ sin was the intelligent use of drugs in the garden of Eden.”
“The problem with drugs is that stupid people use drugs stupidly.”
“As more and more people learn how to use drugs intelligently in the next twenty years, and get back to their microscopes and DNA mock-ups, we may have some more information on exactly how evolution got started.”
“All of you in this room have experienced more realities, more crisis, more of life, you’ve seen more than the wisest sultans and philosophers in the past.”
“The generation you belong to is of key importance.”
“Nobody died for my sins, man. I did my time for ‘em.”
“Let me give you an example of set and setting. If you take LSD under the following conditions: you’ve just escaped from prison where they want to put you in the gas chamber, and you find yourself in a hotel in Palm Springs where the FBI is having its local convention, that is bad set and bad setting.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:24 ►
And I think you’re going to enjoy today’s presentation.
00:00:27 ►
It’s a talk that Tim Leary gave back in 1982.
00:00:31 ►
And I’ll tell you about that in just a minute.
00:00:33 ►
But first, I want to take the time to thank two of our fellow salonners who have made donations in the past week
00:00:39 ►
to help offset some of the expenses associated with producing these podcasts.
00:00:45 ►
And these two kind souls are Christopher S. and Jeff M.
00:00:49 ►
And I thank you both for your kind support. You guys rock.
00:00:54 ►
Now, there are a couple things I want to mention later on, but first let’s get right into today’s talk.
00:01:01 ►
As I mentioned, it is by Dr. Timothy Leary, and it was given back in 1982. Thank you. Shulgin and Terrence McKenna gave the talks that I podcasted my 100th podcast.
00:01:26 ►
And that was also the conference where Dr. Andrew Weil gave his presentation that I published
00:01:31 ►
in podcast number 103.
00:01:34 ►
So I asked my wife, who was actually at that conference, if she remembered hearing Tim
00:01:39 ►
Leary’s talk, and she said, yeah, I thought he was, I think he was there, but her main memory
00:01:45 ►
turns out to be that of Terrence McKenna, who Dr. Leary doesn’t mention in this talk,
00:01:50 ►
probably because that was Terrence’s first big gig, and not too many people knew who
00:01:56 ►
he was at the time.
00:01:58 ►
Now, while Dr. Leary titled this talk, The Intelligent Use of Psychedelic Drugs, I think
00:02:03 ►
an equally appropriate title could be
00:02:05 ►
A History of the Tribe. As we listen to him talk about the positive potential he sees for the
00:02:12 ►
baby boomer generation when he gave this talk back in 1982, you may find it interesting to
00:02:18 ►
consider how they are actually turning out. It seems to me that they may have just bankrupted the country.
00:02:27 ►
Well done, boomers.
00:02:28 ►
As the song says,
00:02:29 ►
nobody does it better.
00:02:32 ►
So, now let’s join
00:02:34 ►
Dr. Timothy Leary, who
00:02:35 ►
I think was still on parole at the time
00:02:37 ►
this was given.
00:02:39 ►
He was released early
00:02:41 ►
from a 20-year prison sentence
00:02:43 ►
for possessing less than a half an ounce of cannabis.
00:02:47 ►
And if that sounds a bit harsh to you, it’s because you may not be fully aware of the fact that those kinds of sentences were being handed out to a significant number of people.
00:02:57 ►
States like Texas, for example, where I used to practice law, were still handing out life sentences for a positive cannabis test in 1990.
00:03:08 ►
In fact, I believe that poor Tyrone Brown is still in a Texas prison for a minor cannabis infraction.
00:03:15 ►
Of course, he’s black, which is almost still a crime in some parts of the South.
00:03:20 ►
But enough of my preaching to the choir.
00:03:23 ►
Let’s get on with the program,
00:03:24 ►
and I’ll be back after we listen to
00:03:26 ►
Dr. Timothy Leary speaking about
00:03:28 ►
the intelligent use of psychedelic drugs
00:03:31 ►
Tim’s going to be speaking on
00:03:38 ►
intelligent uses of psychedelic drugs
00:03:39 ►
here’s Tim Leary.
00:04:03 ►
Oh, thank you, thank you.
00:04:05 ►
Thank you. Thank you.
00:04:06 ►
Thank you.
00:04:07 ►
How about that, huh?
00:04:16 ►
Well, I think it is fantastic that we’re here tonight.
00:04:25 ►
You know, it’s 1982.
00:04:29 ►
This is the year of doom and gloom, isn’t it?
00:04:36 ►
And here we have assembled on the banks of the Pacific Ocean with Venus burning a golden hole in the velvet sky up there.
00:04:41 ►
The moon’s almost full.
00:04:45 ►
And we’ve assembled to discuss the intelligent sky up there. The moon’s almost full. And we’ve assembled to discuss
00:04:48 ►
the intelligent use of drugs.
00:04:52 ►
I think the world should take note.
00:04:57 ►
I think you should applaud yourself for being here.
00:04:59 ►
How about that, huh?
00:05:00 ►
Huh?
00:05:12 ►
The key to evolution in any species is swarming.
00:05:15 ►
And we’ve got enough intelligent members of any species together to decide they’re going to move in one direction into the future.
00:05:17 ►
It’s going to happen, so the more swarms like this, the better.
00:05:22 ►
Now, we are not alone tonight,
00:05:24 ►
because behind us and in front of us, there
00:05:27 ►
are many generations of intelligent women and men who I’ve met throughout the centuries
00:05:32 ►
to discuss what we’re going to talk about tonight, the intelligent use of drugs or how
00:05:35 ►
to access your brain efficiently to help yourself develop. Now, you know, people like us sometimes get a bad reputation
00:05:45 ►
In places like Iran or Judeo-Christian America and so forth
00:05:53 ►
Sometimes, you know, we’re led to believe that we’re not somehow straight arrow
00:05:59 ►
So I want you to remember and recall what you know anyway
00:06:04 ►
When you walk out of here tonight with your shoulders back and your eyes looking up to that beautiful star-filled sky
00:06:09 ►
that we represent the aristocratic exploring elite of our species, and we always have.
00:06:20 ►
Because we’re all united here on the eternal quest of inner exploration, discovery, the adventure of knowing yourself, of stimulating growth, personal evolution, and so on.
00:06:32 ►
It started, what, 2, 3, 4,000 years ago back in the banks of the Ganges when, perhaps for the first time in recorded history, women and men got together and said, hey, there’s more than just the caste system, there’s more than just survival, root animal existence.
00:06:46 ►
The purpose of human life
00:06:48 ►
is to go within and find out who you are.
00:06:51 ►
The purpose of human life is to grow.
00:06:53 ►
The Sanskrit word,
00:06:54 ►
as Andre tells us in that funny movie,
00:06:58 ►
the Sanskrit word for to be is to grow.
00:07:01 ►
Back there in the Ganges
00:07:02 ►
several thousand years ago,
00:07:04 ►
this idea developed.
00:07:05 ►
And, you know,
00:07:06 ►
the first recorded book
00:07:08 ►
of human development,
00:07:10 ►
of human religion,
00:07:11 ►
for that matter,
00:07:11 ►
are the Vedas.
00:07:12 ►
And the first book of the Vedas
00:07:13 ►
is a hymn
00:07:14 ►
in homage of Soma.
00:07:17 ►
And you all know what Soma is.
00:07:20 ►
Then we popped up again.
00:07:22 ►
Well, I could go on forever
00:07:23 ►
telling us about how great
00:07:24 ►
we are in the past. We popped up again in Athens, I could go on forever telling us about how great we are in the past.
00:07:25 ►
We popped up again in Athens.
00:07:28 ►
You remember that wonderful time in Athens?
00:07:29 ►
That was a hippie time
00:07:31 ►
when everyone went running around saying,
00:07:34 ►
I’m a philosopher.
00:07:36 ►
It’s up to me to figure out, you know,
00:07:38 ►
what are the elements
00:07:40 ►
or what life is all about.
00:07:50 ►
You remember Socrates said the purpose of an intelligent human life is self-discovery. Now, how come that funny little peninsula there, yet Sparta
00:07:56 ►
a few miles away, like San Luis Obispo, which was given over to military engineering. Sparta’s Gordon Liddy’s sort of town.
00:08:09 ►
How come places like Athens and Santa Barbara
00:08:11 ►
pop up now and then in human history
00:08:13 ►
where people have the courage and the ambition
00:08:17 ►
to pose these basic questions?
00:08:19 ►
Well, just north of Athens is a place called Eleusis.
00:08:24 ►
And you well know the Eleusinian Mysteries
00:08:26 ►
for hundreds and hundreds of years.
00:08:28 ►
We practiced there.
00:08:30 ►
Plato, Aristotle,
00:08:31 ►
most of those great philosophers
00:08:32 ►
went through the mysteries there.
00:08:34 ►
And recently, drug ethologists
00:08:37 ►
and scholars like Robert Gordon Watson and Lagra
00:08:39 ►
have told us that the key to the Eleusinian Mysteries
00:08:43 ►
was a ceremonial plant,
00:08:45 ►
which is probably related to LSD.
00:08:47 ►
Now, we popped up out history in France.
00:08:52 ►
The Hashishins, Baudelaire, Gautier, Verlin.
00:08:56 ►
We popped up in England, Wordsworth, Colleridge, Nietzsche.
00:09:06 ►
Nietzsche was over there in Germany you know he was very sickly
00:09:07 ►
they used to say when you went to see Nietzsche
00:09:09 ►
it was like going into a drugstore
00:09:13 ►
I wonder why he got all those crazy ideas
00:09:17 ►
now you’re never going to read about the history
00:09:21 ►
you’re never going to read about the history
00:09:23 ►
of brain exploration in the textbooks in institutions like this, tax-supported, run by academic
00:09:31 ►
politicians to keep young people serenely and productively stupid.
00:09:41 ►
You have to, you know, it’s an intelligence test. If you want to get smart, you have to learn how to get smart.
00:09:47 ►
You have to look through history, and you’ll find the fingerprints, the footprints,
00:09:51 ►
the vapor trails of people like us who have been doing what we’re doing here tonight,
00:09:59 ►
trying to learn how to grow and develop and make it a better planet.
00:10:03 ►
You know, American history is filled with people who knew how to use drugs intelligently.
00:10:09 ►
Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe.
00:10:12 ►
You know, Edgar Allan Poe was actually considered in Europe to be the ultimate North American
00:10:18 ►
writer, much more famous there than here.
00:10:22 ►
Coming from Harvard, as I used to
00:10:25 ►
it was a source of great amusement
00:10:27 ►
to realize that
00:10:28 ►
Ralph Waldo Emerson
00:10:29 ►
who really started
00:10:30 ►
the American Transcendental Movement
00:10:31 ►
who got kicked out of Harvard
00:10:33 ►
I think it was 1838
00:10:34 ►
because he went there and said
00:10:35 ►
don’t go to those
00:10:37 ►
big Unitarian
00:10:38 ►
and Presbyterian churches
00:10:39 ►
in Boston
00:10:40 ►
you’re going to find God within
00:10:42 ►
transcend this outer stuff
00:10:44 ►
they didn’t want him around.
00:10:45 ►
They kept him away for 38 years.
00:10:48 ►
How come he got that way?
00:10:50 ►
Well, it turned out that he, along with Margaret Fuller,
00:10:52 ►
our first great feminist woman,
00:10:54 ►
had gone over to Europe and hung out with the Wordsworths
00:10:57 ►
and the Hashishins in Paris.
00:11:01 ►
And we have well-documented stories
00:11:03 ►
of how they turned on intelligently to pursue
00:11:08 ►
the philosophic quest. My favorite Harvard intellectual is a man named William James,
00:11:13 ►
who actually founded the psychology department there. He’s considered to be the father of
00:11:17 ►
American psychology. At the age of 13, according to his brother Henry’s memoirs, William James was in France.
00:11:25 ►
Now talk about teenage punks.
00:11:28 ►
At the age of 13, William James, coming from one of our top Brahmin Boston families,
00:11:35 ►
was experimenting with all sorts of curious and strange brain drugs in France.
00:11:39 ►
He later wrote the book Varieties of Literature Experience,
00:11:42 ►
in which he said over and over again no attempt
00:11:45 ►
at the metaphysical quest
00:11:47 ►
no attempt to probe
00:11:48 ►
the philosophic wonders
00:11:49 ►
of the cosmos
00:11:50 ►
can be undertaken
00:11:51 ►
by those that don’t
00:11:52 ►
have some experience
00:11:53 ►
with chemicals
00:11:55 ►
in his case
00:11:56 ►
it was peyote
00:11:57 ►
nitrous oxide
00:11:58 ►
not to mention
00:12:02 ►
a man that I admire so much that you just heard talking here
00:12:06 ►
has just told us about the role of Harvard University and the CIA in the non-intelligent use of drugs.
00:12:16 ►
So, as I speak tonight and as we confer here tonight, we are not alone.
00:12:21 ►
This tradition of interquest has always been a little on the outs
00:12:25 ►
because the power holders, the politicians, the kings, the generals, the bishops, the popes,
00:12:30 ►
one thing they’re all agreed on,
00:12:31 ►
they don’t want human beings learning how to access their own brains.
00:12:36 ►
Because if they do that, self-reward, self-growth, self-development
00:12:40 ►
takes the place of slavery for the hive.
00:12:43 ►
Now, this was first brought to my attention in 1961
00:12:46 ►
by one of my great teachers,
00:12:48 ►
Alice Huxley,
00:12:49 ►
who came to join us at Harvard then.
00:12:53 ►
I remember one night,
00:12:56 ►
one night,
00:12:58 ►
during actually it was a psilocybin session,
00:13:03 ►
when I was kind of complaining to Alice Oxley
00:13:06 ►
about the slowness of the American public
00:13:08 ►
to catch on to the fact
00:13:10 ►
that you can access and activate your own brain.
00:13:13 ►
And Alice said,
00:13:14 ►
well, you must realize, Timothy,
00:13:16 ►
that the religion of this country
00:13:19 ►
is totally based upon opposition to drugs.
00:13:25 ►
I said, what do you mean?
00:13:26 ►
He said, well, haven’t you read the Bible?
00:13:28 ►
I said, no, there’s nothing about drugs in the Bible.
00:13:31 ►
He said, well, you should go back and read it again.
00:13:33 ►
Don’t you remember Genesis?
00:13:36 ►
The first book of the Bible?
00:13:38 ►
Jehovah?
00:13:39 ►
You know, he’s an old shepherd,
00:13:41 ►
Semitic, macho,
00:13:43 ►
mafia, condominium owner.
00:13:48 ►
Jehovah, just out of the hunter-gatherer stage, early paleolithic God.
00:13:54 ►
You know, looks around and said to Adam and Eve,
00:13:57 ►
Hey, this is my home and I’m going to let you live in this wonderful Garden of Eden.
00:14:02 ►
Do whatever you want.
00:14:05 ►
Except there are a couple of food and drug regulations.
00:14:11 ►
See this tree here?
00:14:12 ►
The fruit of this is a controlled substance.
00:14:20 ►
And you are forbidden by law to ingest, absorb, or in any way taste of this.
00:14:24 ►
Because if you do, the blinds will fall from your eyes.
00:14:28 ►
And you’ll see through good and evil and become a god like me.
00:14:32 ►
You don’t want to do that.
00:14:35 ►
Adam said, no, sir.
00:14:37 ►
See the fruit of this tree over here?
00:14:39 ►
There’s also a controlled substance.
00:14:40 ►
Because if you eat of this, you will become immortal and a god like me.
00:14:46 ►
You don’t want to do that, do you?
00:14:48 ►
Of course, Adam said,
00:14:49 ►
no, sir.
00:14:51 ►
Now, I was very curious
00:14:52 ►
about most of the organized
00:14:54 ►
political associations
00:14:55 ►
and the great, great monolithic,
00:14:57 ►
monotheistic power religions.
00:14:59 ►
They are all very male-oriented
00:15:01 ►
and they’re not very friendly
00:15:02 ►
to the female sex.
00:15:05 ►
You know, Christianity is not very friendly to the female sex. You know, Christianity
00:15:06 ►
is not very flattering to women.
00:15:09 ►
They lay all the blame on Eve, remember?
00:15:13 ►
That as soon as Jehovah
00:15:14 ►
had jumped in his squad car
00:15:15 ►
and gone back to headquarters,
00:15:17 ►
it was that naughty,
00:15:20 ►
hip-wiggling Eve
00:15:22 ►
that led poor straight-arrow Adam, Adam, you’ve got to try this.
00:15:34 ►
It gets kind of comic, you know, the sirens come and the first narcotics bust in history
00:15:39 ►
is Jehovah.
00:15:43 ►
So, Aldous Huxley continued you see that
00:15:45 ►
what’s Christianity all about
00:15:47 ►
well
00:15:48 ►
the only son of Jehovah
00:15:52 ►
Ralph came down here
00:15:54 ►
to sacrifice his life
00:15:57 ►
for our original sin
00:15:58 ►
oh yeah
00:15:58 ►
what was our original sin
00:16:00 ►
oh the original sin
00:16:02 ►
was the one in the garden
00:16:03 ►
I see
00:16:04 ►
the original sin was the intelligent use of drugs in the Garden of Eden.
00:16:09 ►
Now, this is not going to be easy, Timothy.
00:16:15 ►
Now, you know, believe it or not, I’ve come here tonight loaded with scientific and technological information to discuss the intelligent use of drugs.
00:16:26 ►
But after listening to John’s talk
00:16:29 ►
and this incredible rapport with the audience,
00:16:31 ►
I realized that most everyone in this audience
00:16:33 ►
is using drugs more intelligently than I am tonight.
00:16:39 ►
So, I’m in a bad position here.
00:16:42 ►
Well, I’m…
00:16:42 ►
So, I’m in a bad position here. Well, I’m…
00:16:48 ►
Odorless, colorless local water.
00:16:57 ►
Anyway, yes.
00:17:00 ►
Berkeley.
00:17:02 ►
Right.
00:17:25 ►
I’m with you. Robert Anton Wilson intended to give a list.
00:17:27 ►
Why don’t I do it anyway?
00:17:28 ►
Let’s have a little fun here tonight.
00:17:29 ►
We belong to such an incredible gathering.
00:17:32 ►
I listed all these historic people
00:17:34 ►
like Nietzsche and Plato,
00:17:35 ►
but listen, in our lifetime,
00:17:36 ►
we’ve seen some incredible people
00:17:37 ►
come through Richard Alpert,
00:17:40 ►
Baba Ram Dass.
00:17:41 ►
How about a round of applause for him?
00:17:42 ►
Yeah, man.
00:17:45 ►
And Ken Kesey, huh?
00:17:49 ►
And Alan Ginsberg.
00:17:53 ►
One of the greatest
00:17:54 ►
who’s not here with us at the moment,
00:17:55 ►
but we’ll meet him somewhere along the line.
00:17:58 ►
John Lennon, right.
00:18:02 ►
I was going to include him,
00:18:03 ►
but I was also going to mention
00:18:04 ►
someone who’s much less known than John Lennon,
00:18:08 ►
probably the most underestimated philosopher of our time, Alan Watts.
00:18:11 ►
How about him?
00:18:16 ►
Well, enough of this stroking of each other.
00:18:19 ►
Let’s get down to business.
00:18:26 ►
The intelligent use of drugs.
00:18:27 ►
Well, let me define my terms.
00:18:29 ►
First of all, when we talk about drugs, I’m not talking about the intelligent use of Rolaid.
00:18:35 ►
Or the new wonder drug that’s going to cure dread herpes, too.
00:18:41 ►
We’re talking about drugs that affect the brain.
00:18:43 ►
So at this moment, I think I should introduce a commercial
00:18:46 ►
from my sponsor, The Human Brain.
00:18:48 ►
This show is being brought to you by The Human Brain.
00:18:51 ►
It’s a 40 billion cell biocomputer.
00:18:56 ►
And I’m told by my turned-on computer friends
00:18:59 ►
that probably every neuron of the 40 billion
00:19:02 ►
is as complex as the most powerful computer
00:19:06 ►
that IBM has yet developed.
00:19:07 ►
So we’re talking about, you know, we’re talking about real stuff here, and we talk about the
00:19:11 ►
human brain.
00:19:13 ►
Now, anything about the human brain, there’s a secret about this incredible organ of intelligence
00:19:19 ►
and pleasure.
00:19:20 ►
The secret is this.
00:19:21 ►
We are not taught that the human brain is perfect
00:19:26 ►
unless you have a
00:19:28 ►
steel plate in your head
00:19:30 ►
or less than two inches
00:19:32 ►
of forehead
00:19:32 ►
you’re carrying around
00:19:37 ►
a perfect instrument
00:19:38 ►
to perform the human function
00:19:40 ►
now look at that
00:19:42 ►
little bird brain
00:19:43 ►
you know the little bird
00:19:44 ►
little bird brain that little bird brain. You know the little bird? Little bird brain?
00:19:45 ►
That little bird brain
00:19:46 ►
can take that little fella
00:19:47 ►
from Vancouver,
00:19:49 ►
6,000 miles down
00:19:50 ►
to Guatemala,
00:19:52 ►
uncharted, you know,
00:19:53 ►
without any roadmaps.
00:19:55 ►
Can land on a branch there
00:19:57 ►
in a scale of 50 miles an hour
00:20:00 ►
on those two little feet
00:20:01 ►
exactly where she or he’s
00:20:02 ►
supposed to be
00:20:03 ►
to get it on.
00:20:05 ►
Now, that’s something, huh? The tiny little the tiny little they’re working with what about 10 million of the little neurons we got
00:20:10 ►
40 billion of them now um well if the human brain so perfect man how come we get ayatollah
00:20:23 ►
or how come we get Ayatollah?
00:20:28 ►
Or how come we get Ronald Reagan?
00:20:37 ►
Well, listen, the Ayatollah is perfect.
00:20:39 ►
Ronnie’s brain is perfect.
00:20:43 ►
It was just that early imprinting that fucked them up.
00:20:50 ►
Because this brain is a computer,
00:20:51 ►
you know,
00:20:53 ►
you can only get out of the computer what you program it for.
00:20:55 ►
And you just get to a computer
00:20:58 ►
and you punch in,
00:20:59 ►
you know,
00:21:00 ►
you know,
00:21:01 ►
Ronnie Reagan,
00:21:03 ►
you know,
00:21:03 ►
rah-rah Iowa,
00:21:05 ►
you know, rah Iowa you know rah rah
00:21:07 ►
Air Force Army
00:21:08 ►
yeah
00:21:11 ►
rah rah
00:21:12 ►
World War III
00:21:13 ►
boy
00:21:14 ►
rah rah
00:21:16 ►
oil companies
00:21:17 ►
yeah
00:21:17 ►
you’re not going to get
00:21:18 ►
a very interesting
00:21:19 ►
program out of that
00:21:20 ►
computer
00:21:20 ►
now
00:21:23 ►
as a corollary I submit to you that all drugs are perfect too. Now,
00:21:31 ►
sure, drugs can be used stupidly. As a matter of fact, that’s probably the key
00:21:40 ►
to my address to you tonight, my dear friends. The problem with drugs is that stupid
00:21:46 ►
people use drugs stupidly. Coarse, crude, vulgar people use drugs in a vulgar way. On
00:22:01 ►
the other hand intelligent thoughtful adventurous
00:22:05 ►
you know
00:22:05 ►
serious minded people
00:22:06 ►
that want to have a lot of fun
00:22:08 ►
are going to use drugs intelligently
00:22:13 ►
and of course
00:22:16 ►
that’s what’s happening
00:22:17 ►
quietly and visibly
00:22:19 ►
without many
00:22:19 ►
you know
00:22:20 ►
you don’t go around
00:22:21 ►
with a big
00:22:21 ►
you know
00:22:22 ►
honk
00:22:23 ►
if you use drugs intelligently.
00:22:30 ►
Like the bumper sticker we have in LA says,
00:22:32 ►
honk if you think you’re Jesus.
00:22:48 ►
Well,
00:22:52 ►
an interesting thing about drugs being perfect is you know, God wouldn’t have made drugs
00:22:56 ►
if drugs weren’t perfect for us.
00:23:01 ►
I don’t know who you call God.
00:23:03 ►
You can call God DNA or you can biological wisdom.
00:23:06 ►
I don’t care what name you give her.
00:23:10 ►
But…
00:23:10 ►
The moon, right, the moon.
00:23:16 ►
But the point is that
00:23:19 ►
they’re finding out an interesting thing
00:23:20 ►
about the brain.
00:23:21 ►
The human brain has all these
00:23:22 ►
little receptors there
00:23:23 ►
and they’re morphine receptors
00:23:25 ►
like
00:23:26 ►
if there’s any
00:23:27 ►
kind of chemical
00:23:27 ►
that you can take
00:23:29 ►
and it suddenly
00:23:30 ►
starts your brain
00:23:31 ►
buzzing
00:23:31 ►
in a new reality
00:23:33 ►
program
00:23:33 ►
and zipping around
00:23:34 ►
faster
00:23:35 ►
or slowing down
00:23:36 ►
to honey swamp
00:23:37 ►
or changing
00:23:39 ►
your state of
00:23:40 ►
consciousness
00:23:40 ►
in any way
00:23:41 ►
you know
00:23:42 ►
it’s not
00:23:44 ►
bicarbonate of soda. It’s a drug,
00:23:49 ►
usually a botanical-based, I’d say, and we’ll learn much more about this tomorrow when Dr.
00:23:56 ►
Shogun and the real heavy… See, we’ve had the political know-how here and I’m here for the mid-brain tickling, right? I’m the cheerleader.
00:24:13 ►
My job to get you warmed up for the Super Bowl, which happens tomorrow, when the real and tell us what to do.
00:24:27 ►
Ask them.
00:24:30 ►
But, see,
00:24:34 ►
if the human brain,
00:24:34 ►
you know,
00:24:36 ►
if LSD is so terrible,
00:24:39 ►
well, how come the brain has all these receptor organs
00:24:41 ►
or these lowered thresholds
00:24:43 ►
or the serotonin,
00:24:45 ►
anti-serotonin.
00:24:46 ►
I’m sure Dr. Shogun
00:24:47 ►
and others will explain
00:24:48 ►
this in more detail tomorrow.
00:24:49 ►
But how come your brain
00:24:50 ►
is wired in such a way
00:24:51 ►
that if you take
00:24:52 ►
like a few millionths
00:24:53 ►
of a gram
00:24:54 ►
of this mysterious substance,
00:24:56 ►
you’re in an altered
00:24:57 ►
state of consciousness?
00:24:58 ►
Now,
00:24:59 ►
do you think there was a flaw?
00:25:01 ►
Do you think that God
00:25:02 ►
made a mistake?
00:25:06 ►
I don’t think so. I don’t think there are any mistakes in evolution Do you think that God made a mistake? I don’t think so.
00:25:06 ►
I don’t think there are
00:25:07 ►
any mistakes in evolution.
00:25:08 ►
I think that an
00:25:08 ►
evolutionary intelligence,
00:25:09 ►
a biological intelligence,
00:25:11 ►
a guy of wisdom that
00:25:11 ►
has taken us in four
00:25:13 ►
billion years from the
00:25:14 ►
Precambrian swamps,
00:25:15 ►
little cellular amoebas
00:25:16 ►
lying around floating
00:25:17 ►
and sucking, and in
00:25:19 ►
just four and a half
00:25:20 ►
quick million, billion
00:25:22 ►
years, they got us to
00:25:23 ►
the high altitude of
00:25:24 ►
Howard Cosell
00:25:25 ►
and Monday Night Football.
00:25:26 ►
I mean,
00:25:27 ►
there are no mistakes
00:25:29 ►
in evolution.
00:25:30 ►
And by the way,
00:25:32 ►
this Darwinian bullshit,
00:25:34 ►
you know,
00:25:36 ►
there’s an interesting thing.
00:25:36 ►
There’s a creationist
00:25:37 ►
versus the Darwinian
00:25:38 ►
fight going on now.
00:25:40 ►
Man, that’s like a fight
00:25:41 ►
between the Christians
00:25:42 ►
and the Arabs.
00:25:43 ►
They’re both wrong.
00:25:52 ►
The Christians believe that Jehovah did it. He got off his camel. And without even a computer,
00:26:00 ►
I mean, he just did it with, what, they have an abacus in those days. I was debating a man from the moral majority,
00:26:06 ►
state president of the moral majority from the state of Washington
00:26:08 ►
about a few months ago.
00:26:10 ►
And believe it or not,
00:26:11 ►
on a stage in front of about 3,000 or 4,000 college students,
00:26:13 ►
he said that he was convinced,
00:26:15 ►
and all his friends were convinced,
00:26:16 ►
and a lot of his scientific friends were convinced,
00:26:18 ►
that the universe was created about 4,004 years ago.
00:26:25 ►
And according to
00:26:27 ►
Secretary Watt,
00:26:28 ►
don’t worry about the Redwoods
00:26:29 ►
because it’s going to end
00:26:30 ►
before the next fiscal budget
00:26:31 ►
or something.
00:26:33 ►
It’s going to end
00:26:34 ►
with the Reagan administration,
00:26:35 ►
I’ll tell you that.
00:26:37 ►
Anyway,
00:26:38 ►
I’m a creationist.
00:26:40 ►
At that hearing
00:26:41 ►
down in Mississippi
00:26:41 ►
about two weeks ago,
00:26:43 ►
very interesting,
00:26:45 ►
you know, all the liberal, New York, intellectual, Darwinian,
00:26:51 ►
hotshot scientists came up and proved that evolution is a blind force,
00:26:56 ►
natural survival, four and a half billion years of rape,
00:27:00 ►
leading to bigger and better macho, you know, Darwinian theories all about.
00:27:04 ►
It’s very jockstrap playing fields of Eden.
00:27:07 ►
There was a man named Wickram Singh
00:27:09 ►
who wrote a book with a philosopher Hoyle,
00:27:12 ►
I think it’s called The Life Cloud,
00:27:14 ►
in which he was touting a theory of panspermia,
00:27:17 ►
which has also been touted by Sir Francis Crick,
00:27:20 ►
who won the Nobel Prize with Watson.
00:27:22 ►
The theory of panspermia is that
00:27:23 ►
it’s just as logical not to assume
00:27:26 ►
as a possibility, we’re not just
00:27:27 ►
doing final
00:27:29 ►
takes here, it’s not a final
00:27:31 ►
cutting procedure, that it’s very
00:27:34 ►
likely possible that life
00:27:35 ►
on this planet didn’t evolve by accident.
00:27:39 ►
You know, that’s what
00:27:40 ►
they’re teaching in the biology school
00:27:42 ►
today, that life is an accident here
00:27:44 ►
that started in a pre-Cambrian swamp
00:27:45 ►
about 4 billion years ago
00:27:47 ►
a bunch of
00:27:48 ►
ammonia molecules
00:27:49 ►
hanging around
00:27:49 ►
and right now
00:27:50 ►
it’s a methane molecules
00:27:51 ►
and they invited
00:27:52 ►
some hydrogen grills
00:27:53 ►
and oxygen buoys
00:27:53 ►
and the place
00:27:54 ►
got hit by lighting
00:27:54 ►
and they all began
00:27:55 ►
to copulate
00:27:55 ►
I mean
00:27:56 ►
it was a terrible accident
00:27:59 ►
you know
00:28:00 ►
and we’d still be
00:28:02 ►
little cellular creatures
00:28:03 ►
except for you know
00:28:04 ►
copying errors
00:28:05 ►
booboos
00:28:06 ►
glitches
00:28:07 ►
and making mistakes
00:28:08 ►
errors
00:28:08 ►
making men stronger
00:28:10 ►
and you know
00:28:10 ►
like you know
00:28:10 ►
what the Darwinian theory
00:28:11 ►
is like
00:28:11 ►
well this professor
00:28:12 ►
came to Mississippi
00:28:15 ►
and very few papers
00:28:16 ►
publicized that
00:28:17 ►
but you didn’t hear about it
00:28:17 ►
he said something
00:28:18 ►
very interesting
00:28:19 ►
he’s not a Christian
00:28:20 ►
you know
00:28:21 ►
he’s a
00:28:21 ►
he’s a
00:28:22 ►
called a Gaia theorist
00:28:23 ►
biology
00:28:23 ►
believes in some sort
00:28:24 ►
of biological intelligence he said the theory of Darwin you know that he’s a, he’s a, called a Gaia theorist biology, believes in some sort of biological intelligence.
00:28:25 ►
He said, the theory of Darwin, you know, that it all started by accident without any plan
00:28:30 ►
is essentially as though a tornado whipped through a junkyard and assembled a 747.
00:28:36 ►
Now, I’m not giving you any final answers here
00:28:45 ►
as to which one of my friends created the universe.
00:28:48 ►
But I’m simply opening up your mind
00:28:50 ►
to the possibility that neither Darwinism
00:28:52 ►
nor creationism of the Jehovah freaks
00:28:55 ►
is the final answer.
00:28:57 ►
And science is still out in this question.
00:28:59 ►
And as more and more people
00:29:00 ►
learn how to use drugs intelligently
00:29:01 ►
in less than 20 years
00:29:02 ►
and get back to their microscopes
00:29:04 ►
and their DNA mock-ups, we may have some more interesting information on exactly how evolution
00:29:09 ►
got started. Now, you think, I know what you think. You think I’m rambling, don’t you?
00:29:18 ►
You think I forgot what I was talking about. We’re here talking about the intelligent use of drugs. Don’t be hard on me here.
00:29:34 ►
Yeah. Well, there’s a time and a place and a purpose for each drug, right? Like, I think anyone that takes cocaine after midnight
00:29:45 ►
and asks it up the next morning is…
00:29:49 ►
Well, not very intelligent.
00:29:51 ►
He’s tired, right?
00:29:59 ►
And fucking talked out, huh?
00:30:04 ►
Well, anyway,
00:30:04 ►
we could go through
00:30:06 ►
all these different drugs.
00:30:07 ►
There’s a time
00:30:08 ►
you want to use a downer.
00:30:09 ►
There’s a time
00:30:09 ►
when you want to turn off your mind
00:30:10 ►
and get in your body.
00:30:11 ►
There’s a time
00:30:11 ►
you want to climb out
00:30:14 ►
of your body entirely.
00:30:15 ►
A ketamine is a good drug
00:30:16 ►
to do that.
00:30:17 ►
We could list you
00:30:17 ►
eight classes of drugs
00:30:19 ►
and I’m sure
00:30:20 ►
with any helpful question
00:30:23 ►
from the audience,
00:30:24 ►
Dr. Shogun will suggest to you many, many, many new possibilities
00:30:28 ►
for human intelligence and human sensation and so forth.
00:30:32 ►
But we’re here to talk about LSD, the psychedelic conference,
00:30:35 ►
and I want to tell you a very interesting definition of LSD that pleases me.
00:30:42 ►
One of my dear friends and a man that I admire very much
00:30:45 ►
who I hope is going to be here tomorrow
00:30:47 ►
is named Oscar Janager.
00:30:48 ►
How many of you know the name Oscar Janager?
00:30:50 ►
Oscar Janager is a psychiatrist
00:30:52 ►
from Los Angeles
00:30:54 ►
and he started in the 1950s
00:30:57 ►
a research project
00:30:58 ►
in which they were studying LSD.
00:31:00 ►
Now he’s a very modest person
00:31:01 ►
and a very extremely wise
00:31:03 ►
and intelligent person.
00:31:04 ►
He’s never been busted, for example.
00:31:09 ►
Although he gave LSD to over 700 people, thousands of administrations, never any problems,
00:31:16 ►
including people like Cary Grant and Jack Nicholson, you know.
00:31:19 ►
You know, many of you probably don’t know, in the high point of LSD advertising, we had
00:31:25 ►
the number one product commercial endorser that anyone would possibly want. We had a
00:31:31 ►
man going around the country saying, LSD has changed my life. LSD has made me this and
00:31:35 ►
made me that. You know who it was? Cary Grant. Do you remember that? How about a round of
00:31:38 ►
applause for good old Cary, huh? Anyway, the definition of the clinical effects of LSD.
00:31:46 ►
Oscar Channinger gave, let’s say, LSD sessions to over 700 people.
00:31:50 ►
He had them questionnaires, interviews,
00:31:53 ►
had a team of semantic psychologists do content analyses
00:31:58 ►
to pull out the phrases that were used most often.
00:32:00 ►
Then he had these typed on cards, so-called Q-sort, which you get very elaborate and
00:32:06 ►
sensitive statistical study of the power of these words. And he finally, after all this
00:32:12 ►
clinical psychometric work, came up with a list of the words most commonly used by people to
00:32:19 ►
describe their LSD experiences. That’s kind of an interesting issue, isn’t it? Now, one
00:32:26 ►
concept that was used by almost everyone that took LSD, the number one concept was
00:32:34 ►
it’s all alive. With the implication that it’s all got intelligence, it’s all
00:32:44 ►
communicating, it’s not a intelligence. It’s all communicating.
00:32:45 ►
It’s not a dead world out there.
00:32:47 ►
I mean, see that flower? It’s alive.
00:32:49 ►
See that tree? It’s alive.
00:32:49 ►
See that stone? It’s alive.
00:32:51 ►
Alice Huxley, in this famous Dora’s Perception chapter, you know,
00:32:54 ►
said, look at that chair sitting there just being alive,
00:32:57 ►
sending chair talk to me.
00:33:00 ►
Okay, the number one thing is everything is alive.
00:33:03 ►
Number two was everything moves.
00:33:08 ►
I think that’s hot.
00:33:11 ►
Number three was it comes in waves.
00:33:20 ►
Now tell that to Einstein and Albert will say, you bet.
00:33:22 ►
now tell that to Einstein and Albert will say
00:33:23 ►
you bet
00:33:24 ►
tell any quantum physicist
00:33:29 ►
those three little definitions
00:33:31 ►
of anything
00:33:31 ►
and they’re going to say
00:33:32 ►
yeah it’s not bad
00:33:33 ►
what equations are you using
00:33:35 ►
and there’s another one
00:33:38 ►
what was the other one
00:33:38 ►
oh yeah
00:33:39 ►
it’s all connected
00:33:42 ►
now this can go bad you know if you’re having a paranoid situation and it’s all connected. Now this can go bad, you know,
00:33:45 ►
if you’re having a paranoid situation.
00:33:48 ►
It’s all alive and it’s all connected
00:33:50 ►
and it doesn’t seem to like you.
00:33:58 ►
But we’re all beyond that, aren’t we?
00:34:02 ►
Anyway,
00:34:02 ►
now,
00:34:02 ►
I do want to
00:34:06 ►
be extremely serious here
00:34:08 ►
and to lay upon you
00:34:09 ►
a heavy rap
00:34:10 ►
about two books
00:34:11 ►
which I’ve read recently
00:34:12 ►
which really have changed
00:34:13 ►
a lot of my perceptions
00:34:14 ►
about myself
00:34:15 ►
about us
00:34:15 ►
about what we’ve been going through
00:34:16 ►
and what we will go through
00:34:17 ►
in the years to come
00:34:18 ►
these two books
00:34:19 ►
are tremendously
00:34:20 ►
changeable
00:34:23 ►
and they’re very optimistic
00:34:24 ►
on the bottom line.
00:34:26 ►
The two books are
00:34:27 ►
a book on the baby booms
00:34:29 ►
called Great Expectations
00:34:31 ►
by Landon Y. Jones.
00:34:32 ►
How many of you read it
00:34:33 ►
or heard about it?
00:34:33 ►
Great Expectations
00:34:34 ►
by Landon Jones.
00:34:37 ►
And the second is a book,
00:34:38 ►
I’m sure you’ve heard of this one,
00:34:39 ►
I don’t know if you’ve read it or not,
00:34:40 ►
The Third Way by Alvin Topper.
00:34:41 ►
How many of you read that?
00:34:43 ►
Okay.
00:34:43 ►
Let me tell you a little bit
00:34:44 ►
about the first book that is about the baby boom.
00:34:47 ►
According to Jones and my 40 billion,
00:34:51 ►
billion, as Carl Sagan would say, neurons,
00:34:55 ►
do the cha-cha-cha when I hear this concept.
00:34:59 ►
Landon Jones’ concept is
00:35:00 ►
that the greatest thing that ever happened to the human species since
00:35:05 ►
we climbed out of the caves or down from the trees happened between the years 1946 and
00:35:11 ►
1964 when the birth rate doubled. Now, doubling a birth rate is not doubling your income or
00:35:21 ►
doubling your grade point average or or doubling your football score,
00:35:28 ►
when you double a birth rate,
00:35:31 ►
you are throwing a monkey wrench
00:35:32 ►
into the whole process of evolution.
00:35:34 ►
Not negatively.
00:35:35 ►
You’re just totally changing everything.
00:35:37 ►
What that means is,
00:35:38 ►
between the years 1946 and 1964,
00:35:40 ►
they expected about 38 million people to be born.
00:35:44 ►
After World War II, there would be a little boom.
00:35:46 ►
When the boys come back from the front, they want to make up for lost time.
00:35:50 ►
And then they expected it to drop.
00:35:53 ►
So instead of 38 million people, we had 76 million.
00:35:57 ►
That’s roughly almost 38 million unexpected arrivals.
00:36:02 ►
Now, man, you simply can’t add 38 million people to a country like this. Like, suppose tomorrow you woke up and there were 40 million new arrivals. Now, man, you simply can’t add 38 million people to a country
00:36:05 ►
like this. Like, suppose tomorrow you woke up and there were 40 million new arrivals
00:36:09 ►
here. I mean, can you imagine the freeways? Can you imagine the, you know, the try to
00:36:15 ►
get a job? Can you imagine the problem? Well, that actually happened in this country. Now,
00:36:19 ►
I confess that I was caught up in this, what they call procreation ethic,
00:36:26 ►
or procreation.
00:36:27 ►
It was a mania.
00:36:28 ►
I tell you, it was a mania after World War II.
00:36:31 ►
I came back from World War II,
00:36:32 ►
and my wife and I,
00:36:35 ►
and all of our friends,
00:36:36 ►
we decided we were going to have babies.
00:36:38 ►
And we just had babies.
00:36:40 ►
Like no one ever had babies before.
00:36:45 ►
I tell you, there were so many babies,
00:36:46 ►
you couldn’t believe it.
00:36:47 ►
Everyone went with their babies.
00:36:48 ►
And people in those days,
00:36:49 ►
you didn’t have a baby.
00:36:50 ►
What’s wrong with you?
00:36:51 ►
Are you queer or something?
00:36:52 ►
You know.
00:36:55 ►
Now what happened with all these babies coming along?
00:36:57 ►
That’s from number one.
00:36:58 ►
We had to double the diaper factories.
00:37:00 ►
We had to double the factories
00:37:01 ►
that made little ointments
00:37:03 ►
and sweet-smelling things
00:37:04 ►
for the 40 million additional bottoms that we had.
00:37:09 ►
When they went to nursery school, we had to build new nursery schools for them.
00:37:11 ►
When they went to primary, we had to double the number of primary schools.
00:37:14 ►
When they went to high school, double the number of high schools.
00:37:18 ►
Now, we’re doubling the number of jails for you.
00:37:24 ►
You can explain so much
00:37:25 ►
about this baby losing.
00:37:26 ►
The reason there’s
00:37:26 ►
an unemployment situation
00:37:28 ►
here today
00:37:28 ►
is because there are
00:37:29 ►
twice as many of you
00:37:30 ►
for the expected jobs.
00:37:32 ►
The reason there’s
00:37:32 ►
a housing shortage,
00:37:33 ►
same reason,
00:37:34 ►
figure it out.
00:37:35 ►
Once you get this concept,
00:37:36 ►
it kind of changes
00:37:36 ►
a lot of things in your mind.
00:37:38 ►
I’m going to switch
00:37:38 ►
and hold that for one moment.
00:37:40 ►
There’s 76 million of you.
00:37:43 ►
76 million of you.
00:37:44 ►
In 1988, you’ll be between the ages of what? you’re 76 million of you 76 million of you in 1988
00:37:45 ►
you’ll be between the ages of
00:37:48 ►
what? 24 and 42
00:37:50 ►
yeah
00:37:50 ►
can you imagine what’s going to happen then?
00:37:55 ►
okay
00:37:55 ►
another thing that happened in 19
00:37:57 ►
what did he say?
00:38:02 ►
another thing that happened in 1946
00:38:04 ►
a very magical year
00:38:05 ►
was
00:38:06 ►
Toffler’s third wave
00:38:08 ►
started
00:38:09 ►
now Toffler says
00:38:11 ►
that the first wave
00:38:12 ►
was agriculture
00:38:13 ►
10,000 years ago
00:38:14 ►
farming, agriculture
00:38:16 ►
the farming culture
00:38:18 ►
civilization was based upon land
00:38:19 ►
it was feudal
00:38:20 ►
not much change
00:38:21 ►
you lived around your own village
00:38:23 ►
a very stratified
00:38:24 ►
static society.
00:38:26 ►
When after 10,000 years and about 200 or 300 years ago,
00:38:28 ►
the second wave was the Industrial Revolution,
00:38:30 ►
which everything moved to the cities because the factories were there.
00:38:32 ►
And human life in the second wave became factory-oriented.
00:38:36 ►
I want to tell you, I was brought up as a second…
00:38:38 ►
You people don’t even know what I’m talking about.
00:38:41 ►
Except you’ve seen the old people.
00:38:43 ►
I was brought up as a second-wave
00:38:45 ►
person.
00:38:46 ►
I’m not
00:38:46 ►
talking
00:38:47 ►
intellectual
00:38:47 ►
sociology here.
00:38:49 ►
I’m telling
00:38:49 ►
you that
00:38:50 ►
when my
00:38:51 ►
little red
00:38:52 ►
mouth wanted
00:38:53 ►
a baby or
00:38:53 ►
a nipple,
00:38:54 ►
I got it
00:38:54 ►
on schedule.
00:38:57 ►
My mother
00:38:58 ►
fed me
00:38:59 ►
food in
00:39:00 ►
cans because
00:39:00 ►
she was led
00:39:01 ►
to believe
00:39:01 ►
by the
00:39:02 ►
factory-oriented
00:39:03 ►
mentality of
00:39:04 ►
the time that
00:39:05 ►
anything that came from a factory in a can was better than something that just growed
00:39:08 ►
out in organic filth out there.
00:39:12 ►
I mean, it was insane.
00:39:14 ►
So our schools were like little factories.
00:39:19 ►
The principals were checking promptness.
00:39:21 ►
You were supposed to be on time.
00:39:22 ►
Everyone was taught the same thing.
00:39:24 ►
Standardization.
00:39:25 ►
Centralization. We lived in the same thing. Standardization. Centralization.
00:39:26 ►
We lived in little boxes.
00:39:28 ►
The nuclear family.
00:39:28 ►
No more grandparents and all that.
00:39:30 ►
We all moved to this.
00:39:31 ►
I mean, it was really an insane time.
00:39:32 ►
Obviously, we had to go through this in order to build the things we had to build to get us where we are now.
00:39:37 ►
But the third wave started in 1946.
00:39:44 ►
The third wave started in 1946.
00:39:49 ►
And the third wave has to do with intelligence, electronics.
00:39:51 ►
The third wave has to do with information,
00:39:54 ►
in which not power or mechanical force,
00:39:56 ►
but rain power is involved.
00:39:59 ►
And we’re talking here, computers are talking about video. See, let’s go back to the baby boom.
00:40:03 ►
Those of you in this room are an alien species.
00:40:08 ►
You are third wave critters.
00:40:11 ►
Because you were exposed to a world
00:40:14 ►
that no other human beings
00:40:16 ►
were exposed to before.
00:40:17 ►
Because a minute you climbed out of the crib
00:40:19 ►
and you crawled across the room
00:40:21 ►
with your little pudgy baby hands
00:40:23 ►
and you touched that TV dial.
00:40:27 ►
And you began dialing and tuning realities. All of you in this room have experienced more
00:40:34 ►
realities, more crises, more of life. You’ve seen more than the wisest sultans and philosophers
00:40:42 ►
of the past. By the time you were ten, man, you were burned up.
00:40:46 ►
Not to mention the fact…
00:40:47 ►
Not to mention the fact, Seth, I forgot to tell you this,
00:40:52 ►
that my wife and I, and everyone in our nursery school,
00:40:56 ►
and everyone that I knew in graduate school,
00:40:58 ►
we were agreed on one thing.
00:41:00 ►
We were going to raise you different than we had been raised ourselves.
00:41:05 ►
Were we insane or what?
00:41:09 ►
No, sir.
00:41:10 ►
See, we were brought into depression and all that stuff, you know, saluting the flag, authority, you know, submission, robot obedience.
00:41:18 ►
Not for you, kiddies.
00:41:21 ►
We’re going to give you the best of everything.
00:41:24 ►
We’re going to lay those old guilt trips on you.
00:41:27 ►
We’re going to force you to go to church
00:41:29 ►
because, you know, original sin and all that.
00:41:31 ►
We were going to treat you, believe it or not,
00:41:33 ►
as human beings.
00:41:34 ►
Now, that’s pretty reckless, isn’t it?
00:41:37 ►
So, we trained you to be consumers.
00:41:40 ►
We trained you to expect the best.
00:41:42 ►
And we had old Mr. Television
00:41:43 ►
sitting there in the corner of the room saying, hey, post-toasties are better than Wheaties. Yeah, listen you to expect the best. And we had old Mr. Television sitting there in the corner of the room saying,
00:41:45 ►
Hey, Postosie’s better than Wheaties.
00:41:47 ►
Yeah, listen, you deserve the best.
00:41:50 ►
What kind of diapers do you want?
00:41:51 ►
Hey, baby, you want this kind of little doll.
00:41:53 ►
Don’t you? You want a Barbie doll.
00:41:54 ►
You want the best. You want the best.
00:41:55 ►
So naturally, we’ve got 76 million of you now running around with Gloria Vanderbilt’s name on your ass.
00:42:01 ►
has Andrew Bilt’s name on your ass.
00:42:10 ►
The terrible thing about you alien creatures is you want excellence.
00:42:12 ►
You’re not going to settle for anything less than the best.
00:42:15 ►
You don’t realize that you’re supposed to go to work
00:42:17 ►
nine to five and punch that clock.
00:42:19 ►
Pay your dues, man.
00:42:21 ►
You don’t know about depression,
00:42:22 ►
the value of the dollar.
00:42:28 ►
your dues man you don’t know about depression the value of the dollar you know when I I talk this way when I’m debating Gordon Liddy and he gets up he
00:42:32 ►
says what you’re talking about is an infantile point of view people got to
00:42:41 ►
learn to grow up and learn that it learn that the world is a bad neighborhood.
00:42:50 ►
Because you totally freak out the adult population.
00:42:56 ►
Because you’re self-indulgent.
00:42:58 ►
And because, you know, I go back from college lecture tours and I talk to people in Hollywood and they say,
00:43:02 ►
Hey, what are the kids like in college?
00:43:05 ►
I say, gee, you are the kids like in college? I said,
00:43:05 ►
gee,
00:43:05 ►
you know,
00:43:06 ►
they’re amazing
00:43:07 ►
as though they’ve been
00:43:07 ►
through everything
00:43:08 ►
that we went through
00:43:09 ►
in 10 years or 60 or so.
00:43:10 ►
They went through it
00:43:11 ►
in high school
00:43:11 ►
or maybe junior high school
00:43:12 ►
and you know,
00:43:13 ►
the kids in college now,
00:43:14 ►
they’re really quite cynical.
00:43:17 ►
They’re very realistic.
00:43:18 ►
They’re very practical.
00:43:20 ►
They want to get ahead.
00:43:22 ►
They want to get
00:43:22 ►
their own act together.
00:43:23 ►
They want to get jobs.
00:43:24 ►
They want to make money. They’re thinking about their own act together. They want to get jobs. They want to make money.
00:43:25 ►
They’re thinking about their careers.
00:43:27 ►
And all these Hollywood people
00:43:28 ►
sit around and say,
00:43:29 ►
boy, that’s terrible.
00:43:33 ►
In other words,
00:43:34 ►
the college kids today
00:43:35 ►
are ahead of most adults.
00:43:40 ►
And some people think
00:43:42 ►
you’re doing this out of fear.
00:43:44 ►
I don’t believe it.
00:43:45 ►
I think that the average boom generation person…
00:43:48 ►
You see, the key thing in evolution,
00:43:50 ►
the key thing in psychology,
00:43:51 ►
which comes as an insult to psychologists, really,
00:43:53 ►
when you come to think of it,
00:43:54 ►
is, you know, the generation you belong to
00:43:57 ►
is of key importance.
00:43:59 ►
It didn’t matter, see, in the first wave,
00:44:02 ►
what generation, nothing changed.
00:44:04 ►
There was no change in the village.
00:44:05 ►
You know, the duke was there, the baron was there, the land was owned by those people, you know,
00:44:09 ►
and we worked in the fields or whatever.
00:44:10 ►
There was no change.
00:44:12 ►
But particularly in the last 50 years, the generation you belong to is a psychological determinant
00:44:20 ►
or a behavioral determinant of tremendous.
00:44:21 ►
Look, you notice all the old people today, whether they’re left-wing,
00:44:25 ►
right-wing, conservative, liberal,
00:44:27 ►
they’re all united.
00:44:28 ►
The Gray Panthers,
00:44:29 ►
they want more Social Security.
00:44:31 ►
See?
00:44:31 ►
They’ve got their generational
00:44:32 ►
thing together.
00:44:34 ►
So the fact that you belong
00:44:36 ►
to this generation
00:44:37 ►
that does want excellence,
00:44:40 ►
that does expect everything,
00:44:41 ►
and you’re reasonable enough now
00:44:43 ►
and realistic enough now,
00:44:44 ►
you’re not hippies anymore. Hey, peace and love, man, can I borrow a dollar? You know, you’re reasonable enough now and realistic enough now. You’re not hippies anymore.
00:44:45 ►
Hey, peace and love, man.
00:44:46 ►
Can I borrow a dollar?
00:44:47 ►
You know,
00:44:48 ►
you’re not at that stage anymore.
00:44:49 ►
You realize that, you know,
00:44:50 ►
you create your own world.
00:44:52 ►
You have to work for it.
00:44:54 ►
In other words,
00:44:55 ►
it takes much more responsibility,
00:44:57 ►
you know,
00:44:57 ►
to run your own reality movie
00:44:59 ►
than to be a dumb,
00:45:01 ►
badly paid,
00:45:02 ►
extra in somebody else’s
00:45:04 ►
dumb black and white documentary training film, right?
00:45:08 ►
You’ve got to run your own movie.
00:45:09 ►
It takes a lot of hustling out there.
00:45:12 ►
And it really is hard.
00:45:13 ►
It really is hard, you know,
00:45:14 ►
to run a 40 billion cell brain these days.
00:45:18 ►
You know?
00:45:20 ►
True.
00:45:21 ►
I don’t blame these born-again Christians
00:45:23 ►
where they say,
00:45:23 ►
hell, man, I can’t handle it anymore.
00:45:25 ►
I’m going down on my knees
00:45:26 ►
and let Jesus call the plays
00:45:29 ►
from the Dallas Cowboy Huddle.
00:45:33 ►
I don’t blame them.
00:45:34 ►
I don’t blame them.
00:45:35 ►
It’s hard getting up every morning,
00:45:37 ►
scientific pagan,
00:45:38 ►
trying to run this brain and say,
00:45:40 ►
Jesus, I’ve got to figure it all out myself.
00:45:41 ►
You know, there’s no big brother.
00:45:43 ►
Nobody died for my sins, man.
00:45:49 ►
I did my time for them.
00:45:58 ►
And no complaints.
00:45:59 ►
I loved every minute of it.
00:46:04 ►
Okay, baby boom, yeah, right. Now, of course, drugs, yeah,
00:46:11 ►
sure. When the baby boomers hit high school and college, that was around mid-60s. Well,
00:46:21 ►
you can imagine what happened. Hey, there are drugs that are better than beer?
00:46:26 ►
I want it.
00:46:34 ►
You know, people ask me all the time,
00:46:37 ►
well, do I feel responsible,
00:46:38 ►
or do I feel guilt,
00:46:40 ►
or do I feel this or that?
00:46:40 ►
I said, you know, it’s going to happen anyway.
00:46:42 ►
You know, we had this incredible demographic,
00:46:45 ►
genetics thing happening.
00:46:47 ►
76 million aliens running around
00:46:49 ►
this tiny little country of ours
00:46:51 ►
wanting the best of everything.
00:46:53 ►
They’re third world people.
00:46:54 ►
Now, the thing about LSD
00:46:55 ►
and the kind of drugs that we are here to talk about
00:46:58 ►
and that we take all the time,
00:47:00 ►
they’re third wave drugs.
00:47:04 ►
See, most of the old drugs, opium, hashish,
00:47:06 ►
been around for thousands of years.
00:47:07 ►
They’re first wave drugs.
00:47:10 ►
You can smoke opium or smoke hashish
00:47:12 ►
and you sit down there and watch the trees grow, right?
00:47:16 ►
Smoke that good Afghani stuff
00:47:18 ►
and you look at the wool growing a sheep for three days, right?
00:47:22 ►
But man, that’s your gig.
00:47:27 ►
But you’re running
00:47:28 ►
a factory civilization,
00:47:30 ►
you know, you don’t want people, you know,
00:47:31 ►
and I agree.
00:47:33 ►
When I take an airplane,
00:47:35 ►
as I sometimes do to go to
00:47:37 ►
Washington, D.C.,
00:47:39 ►
I do not want my pilot hallucinating.
00:47:47 ►
I don’t want him staring out the window
00:47:49 ►
wondering about the cosmos of it all.
00:47:53 ►
So,
00:47:54 ►
it’s inevitable that
00:47:58 ►
a factory-oriented industrial society like ours
00:48:02 ►
shuddered at the idea of millions of
00:48:05 ►
people, millions and millions of people, taking drugs, which were definitely motivation-loss
00:48:12 ►
syndrome deals.
00:48:15 ►
You see, she makes no mistakes.
00:48:19 ►
Miss Gaia, in charge of the egg-sper egg sperm division makes no mistakes. The reason why LSD probably came along, LSD’s been around, come on,
00:48:27 ►
the air god and peyote, all these drugs have been around for centuries.
00:48:32 ►
They weren’t hot, though, because the time when you were born,
00:48:35 ►
see, the industrial age is over.
00:48:39 ►
And all that shivering and upset that you feel, you know, the Republicans and Reagan and all that,
00:48:44 ►
they’re upset because their civilization is finito juanito.
00:48:49 ►
It ended.
00:48:49 ►
It ended.
00:48:52 ►
And we don’t need 36 million factory-going, time-punching industrial robots.
00:49:05 ►
We don’t need you doing that.
00:49:07 ►
We need you to lead the way
00:49:08 ►
into the information society,
00:49:11 ►
into the computer society,
00:49:13 ►
into the video society,
00:49:14 ►
in which decentralization and
00:49:15 ►
long-range communication, in the society
00:49:18 ►
of the head of space. Listen.
00:49:27 ►
LSD is a third- drug it speeds up, accelerates, jambles, scrambles
00:49:30 ►
you can use whatever metaphor you want
00:49:33 ►
but it’s not your tidy, compartmentalized
00:49:37 ►
compulsive, prompt
00:49:39 ►
second wave drug
00:49:41 ►
alcohol is great for that
00:49:43 ►
the industrialists,
00:49:47 ►
and I’m not knocking them really.
00:49:48 ►
They played their part
00:49:48 ►
and I love the fruits of industry.
00:49:50 ►
I came here not on a donkey
00:49:52 ►
or by levitation.
00:49:53 ►
I came here in a car today.
00:49:55 ►
I’m not knocking industry and so forth,
00:49:57 ►
but we don’t need human beings.
00:49:59 ►
Step by step,
00:50:00 ►
automation is taking away the jobs.
00:50:04 ►
And wonderful, wonderful.
00:50:06 ►
If a machine can do any muscular, low-level job,
00:50:10 ►
you know, better as well or better than a human being,
00:50:13 ►
let the machine do it.
00:50:14 ►
Because, you know, the idea shouldn’t be full employment.
00:50:18 ►
The idea is, you know, as much time as possible free
00:50:22 ►
to help us get together to make the next move
00:50:24 ►
into the information side of the future.
00:50:28 ►
So LSD is definitely a third wave drug,
00:50:31 ►
and that kind of explains to me,
00:50:33 ►
one of the explanations why it came along just when it did.
00:50:37 ►
Now, I’m sure you all know,
00:50:40 ►
how long have I been talking?
00:50:47 ►
I don’t want aesthetic judgments. I want time, man. We’re scientists. I know I’m great. I’m on a hot row, right?
00:50:52 ►
Okay. I want the time. What is it? How long have I been talking? 10, 15. If I want to worry, can I worry?
00:51:05 ►
Okay.
00:51:06 ►
I won’t worry.
00:51:07 ►
Yeah, the moon is full.
00:51:08 ►
Okay.
00:51:10 ►
I want to talk to you a little about the intelligent use of LSD and drugs like that.
00:51:13 ►
The key to it all, as you well know, is set and setting.
00:51:16 ►
We came out with that theory at Harvard about 20 years ago.
00:51:19 ►
And set and setting explains 99% of what happens in an LSD experience.
00:51:24 ►
Set, of course, means what you bring as a person to the experience,
00:51:27 ►
and setting is the environment.
00:51:28 ►
Now, let me give you an example of set and setting.
00:51:31 ►
If you take LSD under the following conditions,
00:51:34 ►
you’ve just escaped from prison where they want to put you in the gas chamber,
00:51:37 ►
and you find yourself in a hotel in Palm Springs where the FBI is having its local convention.
00:51:46 ►
That is bad set in bad setting. You’re going to have a bummer. Now, the obvious set for a
00:51:59 ►
mind-changing, altered states,
00:52:07 ►
brain-accelerating experience like LSD,
00:52:10 ►
the obvious intelligence set is you know why you’re taking the drug.
00:52:13 ►
You have a purpose.
00:52:13 ►
It’s part of your life pattern.
00:52:15 ►
You’re not just…
00:52:16 ►
I mean, you don’t go up to a computer
00:52:18 ►
and kick it and say,
00:52:19 ►
hey, turn it on, just let it go.
00:52:22 ►
You know, that’s a misuse of the computer.
00:52:25 ►
You’re going to get some crazy readouts
00:52:28 ►
if you do that.
00:52:29 ►
I’m not against crazy readouts, by the way.
00:52:35 ►
But
00:52:35 ►
it’s also
00:52:38 ►
sensible to know something about the
00:52:40 ►
bio-computer that you’re
00:52:41 ►
turning on. I think that anyone takes
00:52:43 ►
any kind of drug that doesn’t have some,
00:52:46 ►
doesn’t look,
00:52:47 ►
you read the
00:52:47 ►
at least Reader’s Digest
00:52:48 ►
literature,
00:52:49 ►
you know,
00:52:51 ►
what’s involved here
00:52:52 ►
when you take MDA
00:52:53 ►
or take OSD
00:52:53 ►
or what is a midbrain anyway.
00:52:55 ►
I think you should know
00:52:56 ►
something about
00:52:57 ►
the equipment.
00:53:00 ►
The facts are,
00:53:02 ►
as I view them
00:53:03 ►
from my
00:53:04 ►
far away position,
00:53:08 ►
this is not a scientific statement, but it’s my appraisal,
00:53:11 ►
that if you take LSD, and throughout the history of the last 20 years,
00:53:19 ►
those who have taken LSD with some thought and preparation,
00:53:24 ►
at a time when they
00:53:26 ►
were feeling good
00:53:27 ►
about themselves
00:53:28 ►
in a situation
00:53:29 ►
and environment
00:53:30 ►
where they were
00:53:31 ►
surrounded by
00:53:32 ►
pleasant and inspiring
00:53:33 ►
stimuli
00:53:35 ►
with little chance
00:53:38 ►
of intrusion
00:53:38 ►
by noxious elements
00:53:40 ►
and with
00:53:43 ►
a companion
00:53:44 ►
who’s had
00:53:45 ►
some experience
00:53:45 ►
with you,
00:53:46 ►
the chance
00:53:47 ►
of you having
00:53:48 ►
a serious
00:53:48 ►
harmful trip
00:53:49 ►
are less
00:53:51 ►
than 1%
00:53:52 ►
or 1%
00:53:53 ►
I mean,
00:53:55 ►
you’re safer
00:53:56 ►
there than
00:53:57 ►
you are
00:53:57 ►
on the
00:53:57 ►
Santa Barbara
00:53:58 ►
Highway
00:53:59 ►
at rush
00:54:01 ►
hour.
00:54:03 ►
I would
00:54:04 ►
also say that
00:54:05 ►
in the last analysis,
00:54:07 ►
99% of really bad trips
00:54:10 ►
or even moderately bad trips
00:54:11 ►
are due not to the drug
00:54:13 ►
or not to the set of the person
00:54:15 ►
but to the setting.
00:54:17 ►
Because we have found out
00:54:18 ►
in thousands of our own experiences,
00:54:19 ►
I’m sure you have too,
00:54:20 ►
that we all get freaked out,
00:54:22 ►
we all get moving too fast,
00:54:23 ►
we all…
00:54:24 ►
You look at computer people sometimes,
00:54:25 ►
you watch people using computers,
00:54:26 ►
sometimes they don’t know where they’re at.
00:54:28 ►
We’ve all been there.
00:54:29 ►
But if you have someone around,
00:54:31 ►
you know,
00:54:31 ►
put their hand on your shoulder
00:54:32 ►
or something,
00:54:32 ►
you say,
00:54:33 ►
it’s all right,
00:54:33 ►
you know,
00:54:33 ►
it’s just a computer.
00:54:38 ►
The chances of any long-range,
00:54:40 ►
serious problems are minimal.
00:54:43 ►
So in other words,
00:54:49 ►
LSD, bad trips, and there have been many,
00:54:55 ►
are easily preventable by intelligent, thoughtful people.
00:55:00 ►
Now, an unfortunate thing happened,
00:55:03 ►
a predictable thing happened in the 1960s
00:55:04 ►
when we were discussing LSD.
00:55:06 ►
See, we didn’t know anything about the baby boom.
00:55:08 ►
We didn’t know there were 76 million of you out there wanting the best of everything, including the best of drugs.
00:55:13 ►
We thought we were going to have our sedate scholarly centers where middle-aged intellectuals would get together and take drugs.
00:55:21 ►
And we’d write books and we’d write manuals and maybe in the next generation, you know, blah, blah, blah.
00:55:25 ►
We didn’t know there was a horde
00:55:26 ►
of 76 million aliens
00:55:28 ►
going around with your big mouths
00:55:29 ►
open wanting sugar cubes
00:55:30 ►
and instant bliss
00:55:33 ►
and total satori.
00:55:37 ►
We were as surprised as anyone else.
00:55:40 ►
So when we saw that happening,
00:55:43 ►
and believe me,
00:55:44 ►
I’m not to blame for the baby boom.
00:55:47 ►
I did my share.
00:55:51 ►
When we saw what was going on,
00:55:53 ►
we did rush out and we tried to program good trips.
00:55:58 ►
And we wrote manuals and we gave lectures
00:55:59 ►
and we had slides and we got the Beatles to write nice songs
00:56:03 ►
and we got the birds to write nice songs.
00:56:06 ►
We tried to brainwash.
00:56:09 ►
It’s all brainwashing.
00:56:10 ►
When you take a drug like LSD, you pull the old programs,
00:56:13 ►
and anything that comes in, you listen to it,
00:56:14 ►
so you’re totally vulnerable, helpless.
00:56:16 ►
We tried to give positive suggestions.
00:56:20 ►
It’s wonderful. Float downstream. Don’t worry.
00:56:23 ►
This is not dying. You remember.
00:56:25 ►
Go with the flow flow trust your own brain
00:56:30 ►
meanwhile the forces of Darth Vader and his narcotic agent commandos deliberately
00:56:43 ►
attempting to fuck up
00:56:45 ►
the brains
00:56:45 ►
of the baby boom
00:56:46 ►
and turn them
00:56:47 ►
against their own
00:56:48 ►
internal divinity
00:56:49 ►
were going around
00:56:50 ►
saying things like this
00:56:51 ►
if you take LSD
00:56:54 ►
you will
00:56:55 ►
jump out a window
00:56:56 ►
if you take LSD
00:57:00 ►
you will
00:57:02 ►
break your chromosomes
00:57:03 ►
crack you take LSD, you will break your chromosomes. Crack!
00:57:14 ►
See, we didn’t know that 8 million of you,
00:57:16 ►
8 million of you took LSD.
00:57:18 ►
We had no idea it was going to happen.
00:57:20 ►
We couldn’t get 8 million copies
00:57:22 ►
of our books out. We couldn’t be there
00:57:24 ►
when some poor person, you know,
00:57:26 ►
suddenly in the middle of Times Square, high on acid,
00:57:30 ►
and nothing to do but break their chromosomes.
00:57:35 ►
It was called the brainwash war of the late 60s.
00:57:41 ►
Another thing that happened then was
00:57:44 ►
we in advertising and promotion got way ahead of the production department.
00:57:52 ►
There simply wasn’t enough LSD for 8 million consumers.
00:57:56 ►
And everyone had 10 friends waiting.
00:58:01 ►
So, anything, you know, law law the economics of drugs
00:58:06 ►
is very different
00:58:06 ►
from money
00:58:07 ►
you know
00:58:07 ►
Gresham’s law on money
00:58:08 ►
that bad money
00:58:09 ►
drives out good money
00:58:10 ►
like bad money
00:58:11 ►
will drive out gold
00:58:12 ►
the thing is
00:58:13 ►
opposite in drugs
00:58:14 ►
good drugs
00:58:15 ►
will drive out bad drugs
00:58:16 ►
really
00:58:16 ►
you got a choice of
00:58:17 ►
you know
00:58:18 ►
Sandoz acid
00:58:19 ►
and PCP
00:58:21 ►
or some wonderful
00:58:24 ►
wonderful
00:58:24 ►
Colombian marijuana
00:58:25 ►
and, you know,
00:58:28 ►
Coors beer.
00:58:34 ►
Don’t offend anyone,
00:58:35 ►
but let’s be,
00:58:36 ►
got to face facts here.
00:58:43 ►
So you have 8 million consumers and baby, remember, you were consumers.
00:58:47 ►
You wanted it, and you wanted it, and you wanted it.
00:58:49 ►
You were going to take no for an answer.
00:58:50 ►
So in this vacuum, there moved two groups of people.
00:58:54 ►
Well, meaning people tried to make LSD, and they bungled, and that’s terrible.
00:59:02 ►
And then some really sleazy people would just take anything,
00:59:06 ►
you know,
00:59:06 ►
methadrine and put some strychnine in it
00:59:08 ►
or God knows what
00:59:09 ►
and sell it as LSD.
00:59:11 ►
I want to tell you something
00:59:12 ►
about bad experiences.
00:59:16 ►
I don’t care how you’ve been bummed out
00:59:17 ►
in love or losing money
00:59:19 ►
or whatever.
00:59:20 ►
There’s no experience in the world
00:59:21 ►
that is quite as miserable
00:59:23 ►
as a bad LSD experience
00:59:26 ►
when you start getting a headache or a stomachache about two hours into it.
00:59:30 ►
So there were a lot of very unpleasant trips, which was due.
00:59:35 ►
And I want to thank Bruce out there for calling my attention to this.
00:59:40 ►
It took me a long time to figure this out after he taught me.
00:59:43 ►
But yeah, there’s no question about it that there were a lot of bad substances going around.
00:59:48 ►
And bad, I said there’s no bad drugs or good drugs. Bad in the sense that a good drug is
00:59:55 ►
the drug that you need at the time you need it, the place you need it, to get your life
00:59:59 ►
and get your brain operating in a way that will create the reality you want. So this was unfortunate.
01:00:05 ►
And it did cause a slowdown, maybe, in the consumption of LSD.
01:00:12 ►
See, none of us are really sure.
01:00:14 ►
There’s one theory that says that people just went on taking acid all the time,
01:00:17 ►
but they just didn’t shout about it.
01:00:19 ►
People just went on taking LSD, and they didn’t run down the streets naked saying,
01:00:22 ►
Hey, I found God.
01:00:23 ►
You know, they’d roll over in bed and whisper it to someone maybe, but there was no big bumper sticker deal.
01:00:29 ►
And then there were other whims, you know, they’ve got the Vietnam War going and the hostages,
01:00:34 ►
so there are too many things for the press to be worried about than LSD.
01:00:38 ►
One thing I do know is true, and Dr. Shogun will tell you a lot more about this tomorrow,
01:00:43 ►
there are a lot of people that didn’t stop taking LSD and researching LSD.
01:00:48 ►
People in laboratories and universities and research departments
01:00:53 ►
and many of them in their own private institutions and even in their own homes.
01:00:57 ►
Serious-minded, quiet, well-educated pharmacologists and chemists and clinicians
01:01:04 ►
who were studying, studying, improving the drugs
01:01:08 ►
so that the drug movement, the LSD, psychedelic movement, has continued quietly.
01:01:13 ►
And apparently it seems to be blossoming and flowering again everywhere.
01:01:19 ►
It’s always interesting, you know, when the only way we really know
01:01:22 ►
from the newspaper what’s going on in the drug world
01:01:25 ►
is when you read the boastful statistics of the narcotics agents.
01:01:30 ►
They say, well, we just busted 3 million pounds of marijuana
01:01:35 ►
and $10 billion worth of cocaine, plus a lot of PCP and acid.
01:01:41 ►
Well, hooray.
01:01:44 ►
You notice LSD is appearing more and more and more
01:01:46 ►
on the bus rap sheets
01:01:48 ►
that you read in the newspaper, which may be
01:01:50 ►
a sign of the times.
01:01:53 ►
One thing did happen. I don’t know
01:01:55 ►
how this figures in here, but
01:01:57 ►
when the LSD boom
01:01:59 ►
dropped off,
01:02:01 ►
at least the talking about it,
01:02:04 ►
the mood went down, didn’t it?
01:02:08 ►
You know, the music was never as good.
01:02:11 ►
You know, I mean, John Lennon, you know, told me several times that, you know,
01:02:18 ►
the Beatles’ best music came during that period when they were getting really high and far out.
01:02:22 ►
that period when they were getting really high and far out.
01:02:31 ►
The space program, you know, was really, the outer space program was really booming in the late 60s.
01:02:32 ►
And as soon as Nixon came in and said, hey, we don’t want people getting out far beyond
01:02:36 ►
our radars, there’s always a perfect correlation between the inner space and the outer space
01:02:43 ►
movements, at
01:02:45 ►
least as we get
01:02:46 ►
them visibly.
01:02:48 ►
Another interesting
01:02:49 ►
thing, you know,
01:02:50 ►
the suicide rate
01:02:51 ►
among teenagers is
01:02:52 ►
now epidemic, and
01:02:54 ►
there are big
01:02:54 ►
television documentaries
01:02:55 ►
now.
01:02:55 ►
You read about
01:02:56 ►
that and heard
01:02:56 ►
about it?
01:02:57 ►
The suicide rate
01:02:58 ►
among adolescents
01:02:59 ►
isn’t interesting,
01:03:00 ►
you know, because
01:03:00 ►
there’s a lot of
01:03:01 ►
talk about people
01:03:02 ►
jumping out windows
01:03:03 ►
of the LSD and
01:03:03 ►
how LSD was dangerous and hurt people.
01:03:06 ►
Well, you know, the facts of the matter are that in the 1960s, you had two choices.
01:03:16 ►
If you went to Vietnam, less than 8 million went to Vietnam, 50,000 young American boys were killed in Vietnam.
01:03:23 ►
50,000 young American boys were killed in Vietnam.
01:03:26 ►
If you took acid on your induction day and dyed your hair purple,
01:03:30 ►
the chances of you living through the Vietnam War
01:03:32 ►
were practically perfect.
01:03:40 ►
You know, the suicide rate actually went way down
01:03:43 ►
during the 60s.
01:03:44 ►
I’m not saying that that’s due to LSD.
01:03:47 ►
The suicide rate always goes down when something exciting is happening,
01:03:51 ►
when something hopeful is happening,
01:03:53 ►
when something enthusiastic can be a war,
01:03:54 ►
can be anything that gets people, particularly young people.
01:03:58 ►
You’ve got to give young people hope.
01:04:00 ►
You’ve got to give young people something to live for.
01:04:02 ►
You’ve got to give young people something that makes it exciting to be on this planet.
01:04:07 ►
Sometimes I think about the kids growing up today.
01:04:09 ►
My wife is about to launch it.
01:04:10 ►
What do the kids need?
01:04:12 ►
They’re told by Reagan and by the powers that be and the economists and so forth, boom, doom.
01:04:17 ►
You’re never going to get any single houses again.
01:04:19 ►
You’re never going to have a chance.
01:04:21 ►
There are too many jobs and not enough people for jobs.
01:04:25 ►
I mean, there’s going to be a not enough people, you know, jobs.
01:04:27 ►
I mean, there’s going to be a World War III, baby.
01:04:27 ►
Get ready.
01:04:29 ►
We’re going to really bomb those Russians.
01:04:30 ►
I mean, oh, boy.
01:04:32 ►
I don’t call that a hopeful.
01:04:33 ►
I don’t call that a confidence,
01:04:37 ►
courage-instilling approach to young people.
01:04:40 ►
Well, it wasn’t that way in the 60s, was it?
01:04:46 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:04:48 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:04:52 ►
Ah, if only dear Tim could see us now.
01:04:56 ►
As my sainted mother sometimes said,
01:05:00 ►
everything is different,
01:05:01 ►
but nothing has changed.
01:05:04 ►
I’d like to pass along a few of my thoughts about the talk we just heard, but time is pressing down on me today.
01:05:12 ►
However, I can’t help but to mention one thing that he didn’t say when he was talking about the false rumor that LSD caused chromosome damage.
01:05:21 ►
The story he didn’t tell is that when a reporter asked him
01:05:25 ►
to comment about that story when it first came out, his answer was classic.
01:05:29 ►
Instead of explaining to the reporter that the story about broken chromosomes
01:05:34 ►
was totally bogus, completely false, he took a different tack. So rather than
01:05:40 ►
discuss the flawed science in the report, he instead said, Maybe so, but go back and tell them that it also gives you a two-hour orgasm.
01:05:50 ►
And that went a long way to getting people to look more closely at the story.
01:05:55 ►
Just a little bit of psychedelic trivia that I thought you’d enjoy.
01:05:59 ►
Now, for a little news from the rest of the world, I’ll spare you from any Facebook talk today,
01:06:05 ►
but I do want to let you know that both Dope Fiend and Queer Ninja are now on Twitter,
01:06:09 ►
for those of us who are big fans of all the programs on the Cannabis Podcast Network.
01:06:15 ►
Of course, we don’t yet have any kind of plan for using this tool to help define the others,
01:06:20 ►
but my hunch is that something interesting is going to grow out of all these little tweets.
01:06:26 ►
I also received a nice message from the artist Michael Perry, who had this very interesting
01:06:32 ►
take on art that I’d like to read.
01:06:34 ►
And Michael says,
01:06:36 ►
Hello Lorenzo, I thought I would send you some images to keep on file, just in case
01:06:41 ►
you ever decide to use them.
01:06:43 ►
I have chosen art as my mode of communication because the spoken word is such a limited And he goes on, and would instead say that a picture is worth a thousand conceptual subtleties
01:07:05 ►
that resonate with our higher consciousness on multidimensional planes of existence.
01:07:11 ►
I really like the way you put that, Michael,
01:07:14 ►
and I hope that our fellow salonners will give what you say some thought.
01:07:18 ►
If I had the time, I could go off on a left brain, right brain track from here,
01:07:23 ►
but I’ll leave that up to you to do on your own.
01:07:27 ►
Michael goes on,
01:07:28 ►
There is a plethora of incredible art out there that you could use on your platform.
01:07:33 ►
I would encourage you to create a featured art section
01:07:35 ►
that could be changed monthly or even quarterly.
01:07:38 ►
It would give your website a boost, I’m sure.
01:07:42 ►
Well, almost anything would probably give my websites a boost.
01:07:46 ►
And it isn’t for lack of
01:07:48 ►
volunteers who want to help.
01:07:50 ►
But even if I farmed out most
01:07:51 ►
of the work, my own involvement would
01:07:53 ►
take more time than I have available
01:07:55 ►
right now. I hope to change that
01:07:57 ►
situation once my novel is finished,
01:07:59 ►
but for now we’ll just have to struggle
01:08:01 ►
along without all of the
01:08:03 ►
bells and whistles that I hope to include one day.
01:08:07 ►
The last thing Michael had to say was,
01:08:10 ►
I have only just begun to publish a few pieces of my work.
01:08:14 ►
I would also be happy to send you a commission for many sales that resulted.
01:08:18 ►
This esoteric stuff is great, but we all have kids to feed.
01:08:22 ►
And if you’ve got teenagers, that’s no small potatoes.
01:08:25 ►
Ouch. LOL.
01:08:28 ►
And I really hate to point this out to you, Michael,
01:08:31 ►
but after the teenage years comes college
01:08:33 ►
and another never-ending stream of bills.
01:08:37 ►
But if all goes well, you may eventually have some grandchildren.
01:08:41 ►
And grandchildren, I’ve discovered, are really what makes life worth living.
01:08:46 ►
The other thing I’d like to pass along right now is that although I really appreciate all of the
01:08:51 ►
offers to receive commissions on various things, I’ve decided to keep it simple and not get involved
01:08:58 ►
in commerce. If you’ve been to our notes from the Psychedelic Salon blog, you’ve seen the banner for
01:09:04 ►
Guyon Botanicals.
01:09:05 ►
And this is the site of one of our fellow salonners who did a great deal of free work for me in the
01:09:10 ►
early days of the salon. And he also happens to have a top quality line of products. And even
01:09:16 ►
though he’s offered on many occasions to pay me a commission, I don’t take one for several reasons.
01:09:22 ►
The main reason is that, like Michael,
01:09:27 ►
E-Rock X1 also has a family to care for.
01:09:30 ►
And I’ve got my lifestyle reduced to a point where that extra money isn’t really necessary to keep me going.
01:09:34 ►
So a big thank you to all of our fellow salonners
01:09:37 ►
who have offered art and music and other things to promote through the salon.
01:09:41 ►
But for now, at least, I want to keep the salon as commerce-free as possible.
01:09:46 ►
And speaking of being free, in case you missed it, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, EFF,
01:09:53 ►
has published an extremely comprehensive and very readable guide that’s titled, Surveillance
01:10:00 ►
Self-Defense, Practical Advice on Protecting Your Private Data.
01:10:04 ►
Self-Defense, Practical Advice on Protecting Your Private Data.
01:10:11 ►
And you can find that project at ssd.eff.org.
01:10:15 ►
And I’ll post that link along with the program notes for this podcast.
01:10:20 ►
But here’s a brief summary of why this may be of some importance to you.
01:10:27 ►
EFF created the Surveillance Self-Defense Site to educate Americans about the law and technology of communications surveillance and computer searches and seizures, and to provide
01:10:32 ►
the information and tools necessary to keep their private data out of the government’s hands.
01:10:37 ►
The guide includes tips on accessing the security risks to your personal computer files and
01:10:42 ►
communications, strategies for interacting with law enforcement,
01:10:47 ►
and articles on specific defensive technologies,
01:10:49 ►
such as encryption, that can help protect the privacy of your data.
01:10:53 ►
You can imagine the Internet as a giant vacuum cleaner,
01:10:57 ►
sucking up all of the private information that you let near it.
01:11:01 ►
We want to show people the tools they can use to encrypt and anonymize data, protecting themselves against government surveillance, said EFF staff technologist Peter Eckersley.
01:11:11 ►
Privacy is about mitigating risks and making trade-offs.
01:11:15 ►
Every decision you make about whether to save an email, chat online, or search with or sign into Google has privacy implications.
01:11:24 ►
It’s important to understand those implications
01:11:26 ►
and make informed decisions based upon them.
01:11:30 ►
And we hope that surveillance self-defense will help you do that.
01:11:34 ►
So you may want to take a look at some of the tips that they give
01:11:38 ►
so that you can have a little more privacy than the average web surfer enjoys.
01:11:44 ►
And finally, I want to mention a TED talk that I’m, that’s T-E-D,
01:11:49 ►
a TED talk that I’m pretty sure you’ve already seen.
01:11:52 ►
It’s by Jill Bolte-Taylor,
01:11:55 ►
and if her 18-minute presentation doesn’t completely blow you away,
01:11:59 ►
then you either didn’t listen very closely or I don’t know what.
01:12:05 ►
But I’ve listened to it three times now, and I got something new to think about each time.
01:12:10 ►
I still haven’t integrated everything I learned from this talk into my own life,
01:12:14 ►
but she sure has given me a lot to work with.
01:12:17 ►
And you can find that talk through a link on your program notes
01:12:20 ►
or you can go to www.ted.com and search for Jill Bolte-Taylor. That’s B-O-L-T-E
01:12:28 ►
Taylor. And you’ll find it right at the top of the list. I promise you that it’ll be worth your
01:12:35 ►
time and I don’t say that very often. And I want to thank my new Facebook friend, Pele, who joins
01:12:41 ►
us here in the salon from Sweden for sending me that link and for
01:12:46 ►
reminding me of what a powerful presentation Jill gave.
01:12:50 ►
Well, that’s about all the time I have for just now, and so I’ll close today’s podcast
01:12:56 ►
by reminding you once again that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
01:13:01 ►
are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects under the Creative Commons Attribution
01:13:06 ►
Non-Commercial Share Alike 3.0 license.
01:13:09 ►
And if you have any questions about that,
01:13:11 ►
just click the Creative Commons link
01:13:13 ►
at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon web page,
01:13:15 ►
which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
01:13:19 ►
And that’s also where you’ll find
01:13:20 ►
the program notes for these podcasts.
01:13:23 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.
01:13:27 ►
Be well, my friends. It is the impossible become possible and yet remaining impossible.