191 - The Ethnobotany of Shamanism Part 5

Program Notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“It seems to me that right under the surface of human neurological organization is a mode shift of some sort that would make language beholdable.”

“This is in fact what shamanism is all about, what the end of history is all about, what psychedelic drugs are all about, we are edge-walking on an ontological transformation of what it means to be human.”

“It’s a relationship [ingesting mushrooms] like to a crusty Zen master, or something like that. And it is really like another entity because you cannot predict the answers.”

http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0932551068“I said [to the mushroom], ‘What are you doing on this planet?’, and it said, ‘You’re a mushroom, you live cheap.’ ”

“To my mind this is what shamanic training must really be, is mnemonic training. If you want to bring the stuff back you have to train yourself to bring it back.”

“One thing that these Buddhists have certainly gotten right is that attention to attention is the key to taking control of your mental life.”

“Memory training is great psychedelic training.”

“There’s something in the Western mind that gets very nervous when you try to talk about the bedrock of ontology.”

http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0062506137” ‘Drugs’ and psychedelics are not two members of a family, they are antithetically opposed to each other. The pro-psychedelic position is an anti-drug position.”

“Alcoholism isn’t a disease. It’s a failure of self-image.”

“I can’t think of a society on Earth where people don’t take drugs
that any of us would want anything to do with.”

http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0810117495 http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0892819278

Transcript

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Greetings from cyberdelic space.

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

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

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Well, we’ve got another long program today as I’m going to finish playing that CIIS workshop we’ve been listening to for the past

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few weeks, and after that I’ve got several announcements, including

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a major change in my Burning Man plans. But first

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I want to thank Roman S. and Jacob P., both of whom sent in very

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generous donations to help offset some of the expenses

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associated with producing these podcasts.

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I realize that times are difficult

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for a lot of people right now,

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but Roman, and I think it’s Roman,

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it could be Roman,

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but Roman and Jacob,

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you should both feel good

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about helping these podcasts

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reach people in over 100 countries,

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which tells me that we are all a part of something that seems to transcend both nationalities and culture.

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And to me, anything that can do that is something that should be seriously investigated,

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which, of course, brings me around to introducing today’s talk.

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And as I said, today brings us to the end of these

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recordings of a Terrence McKenna workshop that were posted on our psychedelicsalon.org blog by

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fellow salonner Miguel Fernandez, who joins us each week from his home in Portugal. And I want

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to say thank you again, Miguel. This was a workshop I hadn’t heard before, and at least to me, it

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brought up some new ideas that Terrence had that I hadn’t heard before, and at least to me, it brought up some new ideas

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that Terrence had that I hadn’t heard before. So, hey, thanks again on behalf of the whole salon

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for doing that, Miguel. And so we’ll begin with Terrence answering a question about the difference

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in the quality of the experience between a 5-MeO DMT and NNDMT trip.

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And yes, I have to warn you again that there is one point in here where the tape just jumps from the middle of one thought right into the middle of another.

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I’d apologize for that skip if I’d made it myself, but that’s just the way I found it.

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However, I don’t think we missed very much.

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So anyway, here is Terrence McKenna speaking at the California Institute of Integral Studies

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on the first week in November, 1988.

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What’s the major distinction between 5-ethox DMT and NMT

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in terms of the quality of the studies?

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Oh, yeah, they are day and night.

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I mean, 5-MeO-DMT, some people like it.

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It’s a feeling, is what it’s been for me.

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It’s this huge feeling that kind of sweeps through you,

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and it’s velvety, and it’s hard to describe, actually. But the main thing that I’m noticing when it’s velvety and it’s hard to describe, actually.

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But the main thing that I’m noticing when it’s happening is I am not hallucinating.

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And, of course, the main thing that’s happening with DMT

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is you’re having hallucinations so intense, so three-dimensional,

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so highly colored, so sculpturally defined, that it’s more real than reality.

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And by that I mean, if you look at this room, notice how all edges are slightly feathered.

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There is, at all boundaries, a slight indeterminacy.

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But on DMT, it’s hard-edged. Everything is just defined.

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Sometimes people say it’s as though all the air had been pumped out of the room.

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You’re seeing it with that lunar starkness and clarity, you know.

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And unimaginable objects, objects off the art scale, and entities.

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DMT is the only one of these psychedelics where I have seen the entities.

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On psilocybin, it speaks, and it’s audio.

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On DMT, you see these things.

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And I don’t know whether it’s my personal mythology.

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For me, DMT is the center of the mystery.

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I mean, I fear it.

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I love it.

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I thank God for it.

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I wonder if I’ll ever understand it. It takes a huge mustering of courage on

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my part to do it, because it just is so, I mean, we talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk,

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change, transformation, other dimensions. This is not talk when you do that. I mean, you just do not know the parameters.

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I feel like I know more about what could happen to me if I’m in the Amazon jungle

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than I know what could happen to me when I’m in that place. And after many, many DMT trips,

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I’ve finally been able to paint a picture for myself of what is happening in there

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and what happens for me.

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And I don’t know anybody who’s done it as much as I have.

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I wish people did it more and talked more about it

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because, boy, if there is a landscape

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where we need some consensus, this is it.

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I have been present when people did it

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and they come back babbling

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about the same thing that I think I have encountered.

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I mean, they come back and one woman said,

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it was a carnival.

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It was a carnival.

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It was an extraterrestrial midway. And somebody else came back and said there were g I convey, there’s a period,

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an initial period of kind of hysteria and confusion.

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It’s almost as though time speeds up

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even before you take the first hit.

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Many people say,

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just before you do DMT,

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there’s this funny kind of impression

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in the room,

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almost as though there is backwash

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from the event about to happen.

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You’re caught in the psychic field of this event,

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and everything is moving faster and faster.

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This is like the Q phenomenon.

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And then you take the hit,

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and it’s building up in your body,

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and your heart is pounding and everything,

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and then you break through to this place.

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And what it’s like is, the first impression is of a loud,

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well, the first impression is of the sound of cellophane being crumpled.

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That crackling sound is just someone had just taken a bread wrapper.

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Yes.

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crackling sound?

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Is this someone who had just taken

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a bread wrapper?

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Yes.

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Crackle that cellophane

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for us.

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That’s it.

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More of that.

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Would that it were so easy.

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A friend of mine says,

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that’s the sound of the radio intellect-y

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of your soul tearing out of the organic envelope.

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Which is what it sounds like.

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It sounds like your body has just been wadded up

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and thrown into a corner,

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and now you’re a radio signal,

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approximately four light seconds in

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diameter spreading out through an alien

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universe and the next impression is of a

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cheer it’s hurrah welcome welcome and

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it’s them and they’re waiting,

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and they can hardly wait.

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I mean, there’s a moment when they’re not on me,

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just a moment, and then they say,

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you’re here, we’re glad to see you,

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why did you stay away so long?

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And then they come toward me,

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and the main thing for me in the DMT thing

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is to struggle not to go into shock of wonder

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basically I mean because there is a tendency a strong tendency and for the first few trips I

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couldn’t conquer it I was just I was a victim of it I mean I just go into this you know and I would say you know heart heart okay breathing breathing okay and I’m just

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that I’m looking and I can’t believe my eyes because there I’m in some kind of domed place

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and the impression don’t ask me why but the impression is of being underground,

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even though it’s a huge vaulted space

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and highly colored.

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But what is, of course, riveting my attention

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are these beings.

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And they’re small,

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and they’re like, I’ve described them as machine elves.

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They seem partially machine-like

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and partially elf-like.

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Yeah, no, they are not so mundane as that.

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They don’t have a fixed body outline

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and in fact that’s one of the things

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that’s going on in this space

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that’s so baffling they come toward you they’re singing in this alien language

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which you somehow understand it cannot be translated into English but you

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understand it in that moment and what they’re doing is they are using their voices

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to produce objects.

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And so song becomes thing.

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And there are dozens of these things,

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and they’re coming closer and closer,

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and the songs they sing

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condense into objects,

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and the objects themselves can sing.

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And these things come and they’re saying,

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look, look,

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and they’re holding this stuff out to you

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and you look at it

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and you’re fighting wonder

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because your entire being is caught up in

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this can’t be happening.

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And yet they’re saying you know just look and

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what it and what these things are are devices toys works of art objects but

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whatever they are they are amazing and you look into it and you can’t and and

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they seem to be shifting

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even though they’re made of metal and glass and gems and pulse it everything

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is migrating and shifting and changing and they make they say look at this one

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it’s the most astonishing thing you’ve ever seen and you just look at it from

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and they say look at this one look at this one and they’re piling up

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and these things are coming towards you

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and then they jump through you.

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They can pass through your body

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and they’re running around

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chirping and singing

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and making these objects

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and what they’re doing is

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they are saying,

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do what we are doing.

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Do what we are doing. Do what we are doing.

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And you say, I just want to go back to New York.

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Say, later for that.

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And the implication is, and I’m still, this is the mystery of my life,

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I’m teasing it out, trying to understand it, but the

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implication is, and the promise is, that ahead of us in time, six months, 50,000 years, is a visible

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linguistic channel of communication. That the thin channel of audio communication composed of small mouth

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noises is just a provisional kind of communication. And what is being proposed in this state is

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a true telepathy. Now, we always thought, or I always thought, that telepathy means you think,

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I hear what you’re thinking.

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What it actually turns out to be is you speak,

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I see what you mean.

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And I don’t mean that metaphorically.

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I mean I see what you mean.

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So that your linguistic intentionality

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condenses as a three-dimensional object

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in front of us,

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a sculptural modality.

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So then we both see what you mean.

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You made it,

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and I’m your conversational cohort,

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and we’re both looking at your meaning

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and we can walk around it

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we can adjust it

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and notice that no common

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dictionary is necessary here

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if you’re Witoto

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and I’m Polish

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I still see what you mean

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because what you mean

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is an objectified

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three-dimensional modality, not a

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string of Witoto words. And it’s saying, do this. Do what we are doing. Well, then,

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this took me about 15 trips to get this far. And then I began to experiment with sounding in that state.

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And I discovered that they were right.

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That mmm is a three and a half foot wide, eight foot long, magenta curved surface with lime auras.

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And that, um, shifts the lime auras into rose pink and adds gray silver pinstriping along one edge.

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And I thought, you know, my God, what is this?

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So then when you break out into actual chanting, actually linguistically modulated sound,

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you discover you too can make these objects. And what they apparently are, how this could be, don’t ask me, they are apparently a syntactical sculpture. Sculpture made of syntax. Syntax suddenly becomes not the rules that govern spoken languages, but the rules that govern the assembly of three-dimensional thought objects.

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And as the words were the shadows of hyper-dimensional intentions

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that can actually be broken through to.

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Well, my God, I just thought this is the weird, this takes the cake.

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I mean, I’ve never heard of such a thing.

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Nobody’s ever suggested to me this is possible.

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So forth and so on.

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So then, as is the case with most things,

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if you look long enough, you discover precursors.

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And what I discovered in a wonderful book,

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and any one of you would love this book, I’m sure,

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it doesn’t deal with the psychedelic experience by name,

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but it is a psychedelic book.

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It’s called The Phenomenon of Life

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by Hans Jonas, J-O-N-A-S.

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And if you can find this book what a read

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it’s a group of essays

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and one of the essays

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he is talking about

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the etymology of the word Israel

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and he says

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following Talmudic thinkers

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that Israel means he who sees God, that this is the actual etymological

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basis of the word Israel. So then, did I say that we’re talking now about the writings

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of Philo-Judeus? Yes, Philo-Judeus, in discussing the etymology of the word Israel, says it means, he who sees God.

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And then he says, what does this mean, he who sees God?

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Well, as you probably know, in the Hellenistic world,

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there was this phenomenon called the Logos.

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And the Logos was an informing internal voice

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that tells you the right way to live.

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It’s like a spirit ally

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that speaks to you and informs you.

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So Philo-Judeus said,

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what would be the more perfect logos?

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And then he goes on to answer his own question.

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He said the more perfect logos

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would go from being heard to being beheld

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without ever crossing over a quantized moment of distinct transition.

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This is precisely and in fact what is going on in these states.

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Because now I have learned or have found out how

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to evoke this DMT phenomenon

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in the more controllable environment

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of the psilocybin intoxication.

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And it happens like this.

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First of all, I form the wish

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for it to happen.

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I usually follow a line I learned in an old I Love Lucy rerun

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where she’s explaining to Ethel how she contacts flying saucers. And she says, I just say,

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come in, little green men, come in, little green men. So on mushrooms, I do this. I say, come in, little green men.

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And what begins to happen is this sound like bells,

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like very distant bells.

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And then it becomes louder and louder.

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It’s sort of like bells with wind.

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And it becomes louder and louder and more complicated and more complex.

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And at a certain very, very hard to precisely define moment,

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it begins to spill over into the visual cortex.

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And then I see the language and I can interact with it.

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Well, it is apparently a more perfect logos.

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This is what I had in mind in the back of my mind yesterday.

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Remember when I talked about how smoking was new to Europeans

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and they couldn’t understand what it was?

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And then I made this offhand comment that it was a new use for the human body only 500

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years old well it proves that there may be undiscovered uses for the human body I mean

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we’ve only been around playing with our bodies for 50,000 years and we’ve discovered most sexual

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configurations and all these acrobatic things and amazing things that people can do,

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like make pyramids of ten individuals and so forth.

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But smoking is pretty basic and yet only 500 years old.

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Well, it seems to me that right under the surface of human neurological organization

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is a mode shift of some sort that would make

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language beholdable and that if we could somehow kick over into this alternative

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mode we would become unrecognizable to ourselves now I realize this sounds

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pretty far-fetched but you always have to have reference to context.

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In a universe where there were no people, that would be a pretty far-fetched idea. But the fact

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that we already possess language seems to argue that we are in the process continually of evolving new applications for our bodies

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and that when language, spoken language, burst on the scene 35,000 years ago,

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which is most estimates, I mean, think of it.

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35,000 years ago, people invented language.

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What must it have seemed like to them?

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It must have seemed like a miracle.

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Hardly anything sets you up for it.

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I mean, the difference between a nine-hour recitation of oral poetry

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and three chickadees on a line is quite a leap.

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And I’m suggesting that somehow there could be a leap forward in the

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communication dimension and that this is

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in fact what shamanism is all about what

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the end of history is all about what

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psychedelic drugs are all about we are

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edge walking on an ontological

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transformation of what it means to be human.

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And the mode that this transformation will come in,

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it will not be political or technological.

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It isn’t star flight.

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It isn’t socialism.

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It’s a whole other way of making our minds known to each other by being able to show

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each other our minds. And in psychedelic states, you can do this. Yeah?

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Do you think there’s any relationship to the Australian Aboriginal belief that the world,

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Australian Aboriginal belief that the world,

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that the forefathers actually sung the world into being, that the song, that concept doesn’t seem too far off.

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That’s right.

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Well, yes, as you say, in our own tradition,

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in principio ad verbum, ad verbo carifactum est,

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in the beginning was the word,

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and the word was made flesh.

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That’s the whole story.

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What we need to do is pass through this transition

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and make the Word flesh.

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In other words, objectify the Word.

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Somehow the Word…

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And believe me, I talk about these things,

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but the pictures are provisional.

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I don’t understand how it could be done.

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I mean, I’m an engineering type on one level.

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Is it an acoustical hologram?

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How in the world could I make you see a concept in my mind

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as though it were hovering three feet above the floor.

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Is there a way?

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And I’ve noticed on psychedelics,

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and again, I don’t know whether this is a false trail

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or whether this is part of the mystery,

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but I’ve noticed on psychedelics that

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if you get a candle,

00:24:04 ►

if you get a person between yourself and a candle so that you have them in profile and they are raving and you can see the candle past them, there’s something coming out of their mouth.

00:24:30 ►

mouth. It’s like, you know how when you agitate oil in water and you see the swirling oiliness of water or when you’re in a swimming pool with too much suntan lotion in it, there’s this kind of

00:24:35 ►

roiling discontinuity in it that’s fairly subtle. Well, something like that is middle of my field of vision and I’m just watching them

00:24:46 ►

and they stop dead these two people they must be 500 yards away 1500 feet away over these rolling

00:24:54 ►

green lawns they stop dead and then they scan and then they start toward me and I cannot believe my eyes that these people

00:25:07 ►

have changed course 90 degrees and they’re now headed right for me and they

00:25:13 ►

and I kept telling myself it’s a hallucination it’s a lose an illusion

00:25:17 ►

they are not getting larger in your field of vision you are not going to

00:25:21 ►

have to confront these people please God make it so no reprieve they’re just getting larger and larger and larger Intel and

00:25:31 ►

so I said I’m gonna make this go away by not looking and I’m just gonna sit like

00:25:36 ►

this and I sat like this not moving until the guy’s feet entered my field of

00:25:44 ►

vision and then I just and then I didn’t move and I didn’t say anything and then until the guy’s feet entered my field of vision.

00:25:47 ►

And then I didn’t move and I didn’t say anything

00:25:48 ►

and then I just looked up

00:25:50 ►

and he said,

00:25:51 ►

you are from which place?

00:25:55 ►

You have been how long in India?

00:25:58 ►

And it was the grilling

00:26:00 ►

which any Indian tourist knows.

00:26:03 ►

Any citizen of the subcontinent can

00:26:06 ►

approach you any time of the day or night anywhere demand to know your name

00:26:11 ►

how long you’ve been in this country and then the kicker and what do you think of

00:26:17 ►

India and this question is asked for the specific purpose of observing your discomfiture.

00:26:27 ►

Because they know damn well what you think of India.

00:26:31 ►

And so…

00:26:35 ►

I looked up and I gave this guy my most penetrating gaze and I said,

00:26:44 ►

I cannot be interrogated and then I

00:26:49 ►

just put my head down and waited I don’t know an hour and when I looked up they

00:26:56 ►

were gone but only in that circumstance of being so stoned would I have ever

00:27:04 ►

behaved that way because the normal tourist

00:27:06 ►

reaction is and they watch this happen to you you just go into a tailspin of it’s their country

00:27:15 ►

everybody’s a person I’m a stranger I should be nice they’re harmless what’s so bad about this

00:27:23 ►

anyway and then you know and and so then you pair it out

00:27:26 ►

you explain

00:27:27 ►

I’m from San Francisco, California

00:27:29 ►

I’ve been here three months

00:27:31 ►

so forth and so on

00:27:32 ►

a friend of mine told me a funny story

00:27:35 ►

about taking the Bombay Calcutta mail

00:27:38 ►

and arriving in Calcutta

00:27:41 ►

on this train

00:27:42 ►

four o’clock in the morning

00:27:44 ►

and he gets off the train in Calcutta on this train, four o’clock in the morning,

00:27:47 ►

and he gets off the train,

00:27:51 ►

and there’s a little sadhu man over there,

00:27:53 ►

and the guy starts toward him and comes up to him,

00:27:55 ►

and my friend said,

00:27:57 ►

wait a minute,

00:27:58 ►

before you say a word,

00:28:01 ►

my name is Nathan Jones,

00:28:03 ►

I’m from Brooklyn, New York, I been in india three and a half months

00:28:07 ►

and i hate it and the guy said oh you’re a great baba you’re reading my mind you’re reading my mind

00:28:16 ►

you gotta be fast that’s all there is to it. Yeah.

00:28:27 ►

Over the last couple of days,

00:28:31 ►

you’ve said that the mushroom basically creates its own agenda.

00:28:34 ►

You’ve also given examples of how you’ve directed it.

00:28:36 ►

So which of those is true? And if you can direct it,

00:28:37 ►

are there ways to direct it to specific regions

00:28:42 ►

by doing specific things?

00:28:50 ►

What kind of a region? Well if you okay well the first thing is do the mushrooms have their own agenda and

00:28:54 ►

second of all if if you have some control over it how do you get to where you want

00:28:59 ►

to go whether you want to deal with certain issues like death or the body or whatever,

00:29:07 ►

or to get to certain regions of consciousness.

00:29:10 ►

Well, it has its own agenda in that it has certain qualities,

00:29:16 ►

this extraterrestrial outer space, a planetary history is ending, apocalypse, millennia kind of thing you can uh direct it

00:29:30 ►

if it likes the way you’re going it’s sort of like a very a strong horse you know if you’re

00:29:39 ►

going the way it wants to go you’re fully in control. Otherwise not. I mean, I can remember situations with

00:29:49 ►

mushrooms where I hadn’t taken it for a long time and I’d fall into confusion and it usually

00:29:54 ►

revolves around, am I doing the right thing? Whatever the right thing is. So then I’ll

00:29:59 ►

take mushrooms and wait until properly, and then put this question,

00:30:06 ►

am I doing the right thing?

00:30:09 ►

And it reminds me of a press conference

00:30:16 ►

that Lyndon Johnson had once.

00:30:19 ►

Shortly after he became president,

00:30:22 ►

somebody asked a question that he didn’t care for, and he

00:30:26 ►

said, what kind of a chicken shit question is that to ask the president of the United

00:30:34 ►

States? So when I go to the mushroom and say, you know, am I doing the right thing? It basically said, what kind of a chicken shit question is that to ask me?

00:30:54 ►

And I think that was a very good answer.

00:30:57 ►

That was what I needed to hear, you know.

00:31:00 ►

Are you kidding?

00:31:04 ►

So, you know, it can be, you know,

00:31:07 ►

my father used to say,

00:31:08 ►

you can drive a horse to water,

00:31:10 ►

but a pencil must be led.

00:31:12 ►

And I think that that’s sort of the situation

00:31:15 ►

with the mushroom.

00:31:17 ►

If the question pleases it, it will answer.

00:31:20 ►

If the question doesn’t please it,

00:31:22 ►

you’ll hear about it.

00:31:24 ►

And it is amazing how it

00:31:27 ►

gives people what they need you know that rolling stone song you don’t always get what you want you

00:31:32 ►

get what you need uh i have a friend dear friend but arrogant no doubt about it this guy is arrogant he definitely thinks he has his the truth by the throat in most

00:31:47 ►

situations and he won’t take mushrooms because it gives him such a hard time

00:31:52 ►

i mean and it says you know you’re arrogant you want to know what we do to arrogant people

00:31:58 ►

for god’s sake lift it off me so a me. So a certain amount of humility.

00:32:09 ►

It’s a relationship.

00:32:11 ►

Like to a crusty Zen master or something like that.

00:32:16 ►

And it is really like another entity because you cannot predict the answers.

00:32:23 ►

I mean, I remember a dialogue that I had with the mushroom early on

00:32:28 ►

where I said,

00:32:30 ►

what are you doing on this planet?

00:32:35 ►

And it said,

00:32:37 ►

you’re a mushroom, you live cheap.

00:32:43 ►

And so they said,

00:32:44 ►

huh. and so he said huh

00:32:45 ►

he said

00:32:46 ►

listen this neighborhood

00:32:47 ►

was not so bad

00:32:48 ►

till the monkeys

00:32:49 ►

moved in

00:32:50 ►

to you it may look

00:32:52 ►

like a mess

00:32:53 ►

to me it was paradise

00:32:54 ►

the mushroom is

00:32:58 ►

very very weird

00:32:59 ►

00:33:00 ►

I’ll tell one more story

00:33:02 ►

then I’ll try and get

00:33:03 ►

off stories

00:33:04 ►

but

00:33:04 ►

and all these stories why am I doing all these dialogue?

00:33:09 ►

But why am I doing all these ethnic imitations?

00:33:11 ►

I’m not sure.

00:33:13 ►

There’s one in this story, too.

00:33:15 ►

I was in Malibu with all these fancy film people.

00:33:21 ►

And we went out to dinner.

00:33:22 ►

Ralph Abraham was there, too.

00:33:25 ►

And there was this French woman there, a film producer,

00:33:29 ►

and she was seated next to me at dinner.

00:33:31 ►

And before dinner, we had been talking about the mushroom,

00:33:36 ►

or I had been introduced to her as the mushroom man and this and that.

00:33:40 ►

And she said to me,

00:33:42 ►

and you’ll see why the story I just told relates to

00:33:47 ►

this the story about you’re a mushroom you live cheap and she said to me at

00:33:53 ►

dinner she said you say that the mushroom speaks to you but I do not

00:33:58 ►

understand exactly how this works and I said well it’s sort of like it has many faces that it can show

00:34:09 ►

like sometimes it’s like the role that Rod Steiger played in the pawnbroker and

00:34:15 ►

at that precise instant Steiger shows up at the table to shake hands with

00:34:24 ►

everybody and slap a few backs,

00:34:26 ►

and then he just drifts off into the recesses of this restaurant.

00:34:30 ►

And Ralph Abraham, who was sitting across the table from me watching this whole thing

00:34:34 ►

and had heard what I said to this woman, reached across the table to me and said,

00:34:38 ►

You see, the mushroom is showing us that it can touch us anywhere, anytime.

00:34:48 ►

is showing us that it can touch us anywhere anytime strange stories synchronicity yeah yeah how do you remember to bring back what you’ve

00:34:54 ►

learned oh that’s a good question that’s it that’s an important question that’s a

00:34:59 ►

key question

00:35:02 ►

Roland Fisher who was a great psychedelic researcher

00:35:06 ►

with psilocybin

00:35:07 ►

and later retired

00:35:08 ►

to Majorca

00:35:09 ►

to be Robert Graves’

00:35:12 ►

next-door neighbor,

00:35:13 ►

coined the phrase

00:35:14 ►

state-bounded.

00:35:16 ►

This means

00:35:17 ►

you can’t bring it back.

00:35:19 ►

And I’m sure

00:35:19 ►

you all have had

00:35:20 ►

the experience

00:35:21 ►

of dreaming,

00:35:23 ►

being caught up

00:35:24 ►

in some incredible dream with strange people, foreign countries, exotic costuming.

00:35:30 ►

The alarm goes off.

00:35:32 ►

And as you stagger out of bed, this is just melting like an ice cube in a blast furnace.

00:35:38 ►

And by the time you’re out of bed and fully dressed, you have nothing, not a shred, not a hint, not a clue.

00:35:46 ►

It’s absolutely gone.

00:35:48 ►

This is a state-bounded memory.

00:35:50 ►

Chemically, what’s going on is apparently

00:35:53 ►

short-term memory transcription is just not occurring.

00:35:57 ►

You’re having the immediate impression of these things happening,

00:36:00 ►

and then it’s not going to not going to disc so to speak

00:36:05 ►

it just is lost

00:36:06 ►

yeah

00:36:07 ►

my experience

00:36:10 ►

is always

00:36:11 ►

dreaming

00:36:11 ►

is to

00:36:12 ►

not to be afraid

00:36:13 ►

that I’m

00:36:13 ►

I’m losing

00:36:14 ►

what I’m dreaming

00:36:15 ►

you know

00:36:15 ►

in the moment

00:36:16 ►

I’m afraid

00:36:17 ►

that I’m not

00:36:17 ►

getting hold of

00:36:18 ►

I know that’s gone

00:36:20 ►

and

00:36:21 ►

in training myself

00:36:22 ►

in knowing

00:36:24 ►

everything

00:36:24 ►

so I’m how do you say that I’m healing my body

00:36:30 ►

to remember everything what I’m getting I mean before having going to bed or you know I’m taking

00:36:36 ►

my dreams as learning also like you know being learning during the night time. And it’s that I’m telling my body to take everything.

00:36:50 ►

So even if I don’t know it really consciously the next morning,

00:36:53 ►

it’s there, and I make the experience that it’s really there.

00:36:56 ►

Sometimes I have just a feeling,

00:36:58 ►

and I’m noting down the feeling.

00:37:00 ►

I’m trying to just feel it again.

00:37:02 ►

And I’m knowing something happened,

00:37:04 ►

and I shifted something tonight, and it was like this and that. And I thought, I’m knowing something happened and I shifted something tonight

00:37:05 ►

and it was like this and that.

00:37:08 ►

And I know that I did my work

00:37:09 ►

also if I don’t know exactly what was going on.

00:37:13 ►

But it helped me a lot in just knowing

00:37:16 ►

that my body has so many possibilities to memorize,

00:37:22 ►

that it will memorize.

00:37:23 ►

So I’m not giving air to

00:37:26 ►

fear that I’m not memorizing

00:37:27 ►

what I’m doing

00:37:29 ►

and the dream is not truly lost

00:37:31 ►

in that situation where you wake up

00:37:33 ►

and it melts away and the proof of this

00:37:36 ►

and I’m sure you all have had

00:37:38 ►

this experience is

00:37:39 ►

then you go off about your

00:37:42 ►

daily business

00:37:43 ►

and then there will be, and it’s almost always by coincidence,

00:37:48 ►

an image, a chance phrase, a view of a street or something,

00:37:55 ►

and it will cause you to remember the dream.

00:37:58 ►

And once you get a hook into a portion of the dream,

00:38:01 ►

if you then work on it, you can probably bring a lot of it out.

00:38:05 ►

of the dream, if you then work on it, you can probably bring a lot of it out. How this works in psychedelics is if I have an insight or something that I particularly want to remember,

00:38:13 ►

first of all, I will say it aloud. This is strong imprinting. And then the real imprinting

00:38:21 ►

is to repeat it a few minutes later,

00:38:27 ►

and then a few minutes later again. And if you can carry it over a number of minutes to several different levels,

00:38:32 ►

it won’t leave you.

00:38:34 ►

A very useful shortcut for this is a tape recorder,

00:38:39 ►

where if you play the tape of the trip back after the trip,

00:38:43 ►

If you play the tape of the trip back after the trip,

00:38:48 ►

you will, certain, just a phrase spoken,

00:38:51 ►

will set off a chain of associative recall,

00:38:53 ►

and you will retain it this way. But to my mind, this is one of what shamanic training must really be,

00:39:01 ►

is mnemonic training.

00:39:03 ►

If you want to bring the stuff back, you have to train yourself

00:39:06 ►

to bring it back. Now, this state-bounded thing, it’s important to notice. We talk about

00:39:12 ►

how dreams are state-bounded, how psychedelic experiences are state-bounded, but what we

00:39:19 ►

fail to notice usually is that ordinary reality is state bounded I mean if I were to ask

00:39:28 ►

any one of you what did you discuss with the person you had lunch with yesterday

00:39:36 ►

it’s probably very touch-and-go to actually put this together. I had lunch yesterday with Richard. We discussed his television

00:39:48 ►

transmission system, but that was new to me and therefore easy to retain. And also Richard and I

00:39:57 ►

haven’t had thousands of hours of conversation together, but the person we are most familiar with is ourselves. Well, I don’t know if

00:40:08 ►

it works for you like this, but I am, let us say, cleaning my house, vacuuming, doing dishes, making

00:40:15 ►

beds, and I’m thinking all the time, thinking. And I understand why Rome fell. I realize what I said wrong to somebody two weeks ago.

00:40:27 ►

I recall a telephone obligation that I have to fulfill.

00:40:31 ►

I think about things that happened years and years ago.

00:40:34 ►

And then the doorbell rings and I go to the door and there’s someone there and they say,

00:40:40 ►

what are you doing?

00:40:41 ►

And I say, nothing.

00:40:43 ►

This is because the ordinary state of consciousness

00:40:47 ►

is highly state-bounded. We don’t, one thing these Buddhists have certainly gotten right

00:40:55 ►

is that attention to attention is the key to taking control of your mental life. And

00:41:02 ►

for most of it, it’s just like a river flowing by.

00:41:06 ►

And every once in a while, we check to see if the river is still flowing by,

00:41:11 ►

but we don’t attempt to retain it.

00:41:14 ►

So memory training is great psychedelic training.

00:41:20 ►

And of course, as I’m sure you know, there were arts of memory in the past.

00:41:24 ►

We are very poor memorizers because we rely on technologies to do it for us. But people in the past had all kinds of technologies for allowing them to remember things. instance, the most common one in use in late antiquity and up through the Renaissance was

00:41:46 ►

the memory palace approach. This is where you think of a place, a big place preferably, a place

00:41:55 ►

you know well, a school, a hospital, a cathedral, a university, but big, and sit and think about it. Think about how it looks as you go through the main doors

00:42:08 ►

and then what you see when you turn to the left

00:42:10 ►

and what you see when you turn to the right.

00:42:13 ►

Learn this building until you really can command it

00:42:17 ►

with reasonable vividness in most situations.

00:42:21 ►

Then, if you want to remember something,

00:42:28 ►

imagine yourself walking through the front door of this building, turning to your left, and there near the water fountain, you will place an emblem of this

00:42:36 ►

thing you want to remember. And then you will go down the hall and around the corner, and by the fire

00:42:43 ►

extinguishers, you will place another emblem

00:42:46 ►

of the next thing you want to remember well then the act of remembering this long list of things

00:42:52 ►

is the act of mentally moving through this imaginary building that you know and when you

00:42:59 ►

come to the water fountain the clue will be there when you pass the fire extinguishers in your mind the

00:43:06 ►

emblem you placed there will be there now i know this sounds highly unworkable and unwieldy but it

00:43:13 ►

actually is extremely workable and and people like catalysts and chichero the great late roman

00:43:20 ►

orators were able to speak for hours on end with lists of virtues and vices

00:43:27 ►

and interconnecting causes and this sort of thing

00:43:30 ►

because they were masters of this mnemonic memory palace technique.

00:43:37 ►

Well, psychedelics are a vivid…

00:43:40 ►

This is another one of these things like mantras, yantras, and so forth

00:43:44 ►

that works on psychedelics.

00:43:47 ►

You can do this.

00:43:48 ►

And so when you’re on a psychedelic and you have an experience that you want to remember, place it in your memory palace.

00:43:57 ►

And the next time you come past that point in your memory palace, this thing will be there. Now, the other trick is, any of you who are interested in this, the last word is the art

00:44:10 ►

of memory by Frances Yates, which is a wonderful woman, great scholar of Renaissance magic.

00:44:19 ►

And the final trick is to make the image extremely vivid

00:44:26 ►

so that, for instance, if you’re about to give a speech to your collegium

00:44:32 ►

on the seven deadly sins,

00:44:36 ►

well, then one of these sins is lust.

00:44:41 ►

I chose the easy one because I can’t remember what the other six are.

00:44:44 ►

It shows you where my problem lies

00:44:47 ►

so you don’t just place the word lust

00:44:51 ►

in the memory keeping spot

00:44:53 ►

you place some vivid and shocking image

00:44:57 ►

Yates suggests the image of a nun lifting her skirt

00:45:02 ►

I think this was a classically suggested one that

00:45:05 ►

people were taught to use. Well then, when you come around the corner and meet the

00:45:10 ►

nun lifting her skirt, you think, aha, lust. That’s the first, and then you go on and

00:45:16 ►

so forth. And books, some of the most astonishing products of the medieval

00:45:21 ►

engravers art, are these books of what are called emblemata emblemata are

00:45:28 ►

surreal juxtapositions of things and animal parts and bodies and machines that are memory

00:45:38 ►

emblems made as grotesque surreal surreal, and bizarre as possible

00:45:45 ►

in order to make them unforgettable.

00:45:48 ►

That was the technique.

00:45:49 ►

And the surrealists used this very consciously.

00:45:53 ►

There is something about the unexpected,

00:45:55 ►

the grotesque, and the surprising

00:45:57 ►

that is, almost by definition, memorable.

00:46:02 ►

And this will work very well

00:46:03 ►

in the psychedelic state as well.

00:46:06 ►

If you ask,

00:46:07 ►

just like that thing

00:46:08 ►

with your Isla Lucy,

00:46:09 ►

when I did the mushroom experience

00:46:12 ►

and there were certain issues,

00:46:14 ►

certain things I went to that ceremony with

00:46:17 ►

on my agenda to be healed from.

00:46:20 ►

And one of them was

00:46:22 ►

to be relieved from some

00:46:24 ►

of my early Catholic conditionings

00:46:28 ►

that I felt were hanging me up and when I was in the experience they talked

00:46:35 ►

about the little helpers that would come and I asked just like Lucy. I said, I need some help. What can you help me with? And I looked at my hand, and

00:46:48 ►

the, I mean, I can just forget something like this. The fucking blood started to come out of

00:46:56 ►

my hand, and right in the middle of my hand, this blood came right out of the palm and started dripping and I was like, I’m bleeding!

00:47:07 ►

It’s like, this doesn’t hurt. I’m bleeding to death here and this doesn’t even hurt me.

00:47:15 ►

It was like the whole suffering stuff of what Catholics are conditioned with.

00:47:21 ►

It came to me as a stigmata and I looked at my other hand the same thing was happening and I was going my god this is I’m feeling this

00:47:28 ►

this crucifixion you know saying in the st. Stephen and my name was didn’t

00:47:35 ►

Martin off and all this martyrdom shit I’ve subjected you know on and on I mean

00:47:40 ►

you could I can talk for another 30 minutes about what that how meaningful

00:47:43 ►

that was to me but talk about, you know,

00:47:46 ►

if you want an image,

00:47:48 ►

if you want a vision,

00:47:49 ►

ask the mushroom god,

00:47:50 ►

give me a vision,

00:47:51 ►

he’ll give you one.

00:47:52 ►

Oh yeah,

00:47:53 ►

ask and you’ll receive.

00:47:56 ►

I’m really interested in the legal aspect of this thing.

00:47:59 ►

You’re talking about something highly illegal.

00:48:02 ►

As far as the law is concerned,

00:48:04 ►

how do you handle it?

00:48:08 ►

Anybody that drives around with a license like this at NMDMP you know I wonder do you, are you paranoid about it? obviously not. no I’m not paranoid about it if they

00:48:18 ►

wanted me they should have come a long time ago because I was much more

00:48:22 ►

vulnerable then I sort of covered my ass. Naturally,

00:48:27 ►

if you speak about these things, you can’t do anything particularly illegal. And perhaps I’m

00:48:35 ►

foolish in the sense that I shouldn’t be worried about being arrested. I should be worried about

00:48:42 ►

being shot. If that’s how they play the

00:48:45 ►

game, then I’m in big trouble because they’ll just come and shoot me and you

00:48:50 ►

too if you get into this. But if we actually have a legal system that works,

00:48:55 ►

then this is called advocacy and it’s not a crime. It’s an exercise of the

00:49:03 ►

first, fourth, and I don’t know a couple of other amendments to the Constitution. it’s not a crime it’s an exercise of the first fourth and

00:49:05 ►

I don’t know a couple of other amendments

00:49:08 ►

to the constitution

00:49:09 ►

Henry David Thoreau

00:49:12 ►

you don’t get more American

00:49:14 ►

than that said that

00:49:16 ►

if you are right

00:49:18 ►

you are a majority

00:49:20 ►

of one

00:49:21 ►

and we live by majority

00:49:24 ►

rule I don’t feel heroic a majority of one and we live by majority rule

00:49:25 ►

I don’t feel heroic

00:49:28 ►

I mean it’s not false modesty or anything

00:49:31 ►

I don’t feel heroic doing this

00:49:33 ►

this is really humdrum to me

00:49:36 ►

I just could not behave any other way

00:49:39 ►

because of what I’ve seen

00:49:41 ►

I mean this transcends laws

00:49:44 ►

all that is because of what I’ve seen. I mean, this transcends laws.

00:49:50 ►

All that is seen as preposterous.

00:49:55 ►

I mean, there are, I believe in universal laws.

00:49:57 ►

You shouldn’t kill people.

00:49:59 ►

You shouldn’t lie to people.

00:50:05 ►

You shouldn’t inject yourself between lovers most cultures I think recognize a set of universal laws

00:50:11 ►

but thou shalt not smoke marijuana

00:50:14 ►

surely the god of Mount Sinai has better things to do

00:50:18 ►

than worry about that sort of thing

00:50:20 ►

we have to create a new option

00:50:24 ►

all social progress is made by people

00:50:27 ►

taking chances. If I am an anomaly, some kind of dangerous sociopath, then my message will

00:50:38 ►

be swamped and lost in the noise of the tumult of the world because there are thousands of messages out

00:50:46 ►

there. If, on the other hand, this is a great and important domain of truth, then they are

00:50:54 ►

crazy to try and repress it because it cannot be repressed. They have tried to repress it.

00:51:01 ►

Why have they tried to repress it? The use of

00:51:05 ►

psychoactive

00:51:05 ►

drugs is so

00:51:06 ►

good for the

00:51:07 ►

psyche.

00:51:08 ►

Why have

00:51:08 ►

they repressed

00:51:09 ►

it?

00:51:09 ►

They sought

00:51:10 ►

to repress

00:51:11 ►

it because

00:51:12 ►

there’s

00:51:13 ►

something in

00:51:13 ►

the Western

00:51:14 ►

mind that

00:51:15 ►

is very

00:51:16 ►

nervous,

00:51:17 ►

that gets

00:51:17 ►

very nervous

00:51:18 ►

when you

00:51:19 ►

try to

00:51:20 ►

talk about

00:51:21 ►

the bedrock

00:51:24 ►

of ontology.

00:51:26 ►

McLuhan talked about this.

00:51:28 ►

He met great resistance,

00:51:30 ►

and all he was saying was that print

00:51:33 ►

had created certain kinds of unconscious biases in society

00:51:38 ►

in favor of uniformity, linearity, and like that.

00:51:44 ►

And he was amazed at the violence of the reaction against this.

00:51:48 ►

And he concluded that those cultures that have evolved from the phonetic alphabet

00:51:54 ►

are so removed from the stuff of the world,

00:51:58 ►

as opposed to languages like Chinese or Mayan or something like that,

00:52:04 ►

where there is a retention of the

00:52:06 ►

image in the written language, that the cultures descended from the phonetic alphabet are extremely

00:52:14 ►

paranoid about questions about the nature of reality.

00:52:19 ►

And that’s what this is really about.

00:52:21 ►

The psychedelic issue does not relate to the drug issue at all. I mean,

00:52:26 ►

in fact, it’s important to make this point. Drugs and psychedelics are not two members of a family.

00:52:36 ►

They are antithetically opposed to each other. The pro-psychedelic position is an anti-drug position.

00:52:45 ►

Now, how can this be, since we are accustomed to thinking of psychedelics as drugs?

00:52:51 ►

Well, it’s like this.

00:52:52 ►

What is it that we object to about drugs?

00:52:56 ►

And I think everybody can agree, maybe not everybody, but most people can agree,

00:53:01 ►

we do have a drug problem.

00:53:04 ►

I mean, if you live in the inner

00:53:05 ►

cities, you see people getting all twisted up behind this stuff. We have a drug problem.

00:53:13 ►

So what is it about drugs that we find problematic? Well obsessive, destructive self or other behavior.

00:53:32 ►

Unconscious, obsessive behavior is intolerable because we are conscious people accustomed to

00:53:40 ►

injecting choice and meaning into our lives. You cannot have meaning if you do not have choice.

00:53:48 ►

This is why we don’t have to spend any time at all

00:53:51 ►

talking about whether the world is predestined.

00:53:55 ►

Because if the world is predestined,

00:53:57 ►

then I’m not saying what I’m saying

00:53:59 ►

because it’s what I want to say.

00:54:02 ►

I’m saying what I’m saying because I can’t say anything else.

00:54:06 ►

And you’re sitting there

00:54:07 ►

because you can’t not sit there.

00:54:09 ►

So it makes the world very dull and uninteresting.

00:54:13 ►

Compulsive, unexamined, obsessive behavior

00:54:16 ►

is the quintessence of anti-human behavior.

00:54:22 ►

It was Bertalanffy,

00:54:23 ►

the founder of general systems theory, who said people are not

00:54:27 ►

machines. Some of them are drugs which reinforce obsessive and unexamined and self-destructive

00:54:36 ►

behavior patterns. Well, what do psychedelics do? They destroy behavior patterns, destroy cultural assumptions,

00:54:46 ►

completely hold everything up for grabs,

00:54:49 ►

completely throw open the possibility that reality could be any of a number of ways

00:54:55 ►

that are not culturally sanctioned.

00:54:58 ►

So in that sense, the psychedelics are almost the answer to the drug problem

00:55:05 ►

and the early use of psychedelics

00:55:08 ►

reported spectacular

00:55:10 ►

progress with alcoholism

00:55:12 ►

well now see the people

00:55:14 ►

who believe that alcoholism

00:55:15 ►

is a disease

00:55:17 ►

and I don’t follow this literature

00:55:20 ►

closely, it seems to me

00:55:22 ►

this is a preposterous statement

00:55:24 ►

I mean a a disease?

00:55:25 ►

You mean like influenza and smallpox and AIDS?

00:55:29 ►

Alcoholism is a disease?

00:55:31 ►

Can you get it if you don’t practice safe sex?

00:55:34 ►

Or do you have to wash your eating utensils?

00:55:37 ►

It isn’t a disease.

00:55:39 ►

What it is, is it’s a failure of self-image.

00:55:45 ►

And the reason LSD, in many cases,

00:55:48 ►

had a tremendous impact on alcoholic behavior

00:55:51 ►

was because it just showed people what they were doing.

00:55:55 ►

It said, this is you.

00:55:57 ►

You’re a drunk.

00:55:59 ►

You’re a burden to your family,

00:56:01 ►

a bore to your friends.

00:56:03 ►

You smell bad and you’re useless. How do you

00:56:07 ►

like it? And somebody said, I don’t like it. I said, well then stop drinking. That’s how

00:56:17 ►

psychedelics cure addiction. And nobody, when they talk about addiction, nobody ever talks

00:56:24 ►

about what is called self-restraint.

00:56:28 ►

Terrence, there’s a new book that came out about a month or two ago.

00:56:31 ►

Incredibly, I don’t remember the name offhand,

00:56:33 ►

incredibly controversial.

00:56:34 ►

Like alcoholism?

00:56:35 ►

Yeah.

00:56:36 ►

How heavy drinking, myth of alcoholism is.

00:56:38 ►

Right, yeah.

00:56:38 ►

And the man takes the position that the last 30 or 40 years

00:56:41 ►

where we’ve seen alcoholism as a disease

00:56:44 ►

is just more bullshit from the medical model.

00:56:46 ►

We need another alternative.

00:56:48 ►

Of course, AA and everybody

00:56:49 ►

is just up in arms about the book.

00:56:51 ►

Well, yeah, AA has…

00:56:53 ►

I don’t remember now.

00:56:54 ►

What was your name of the book?

00:56:55 ►

The name of the book is by Finnegrad.

00:56:57 ►

It’s called

00:56:58 ►

Heavy Drinking, The Myth of Alcoholism as a Disease.

00:57:00 ►

It basically discusses the fact that

00:57:02 ►

eventually it’s a rationalization to say that it’s a disease.

00:57:07 ►

I mean, there are certain people, I think, that have certain chemical reactions to alcohol,

00:57:11 ►

but they’re the minority in that.

00:57:14 ►

This is very important to me as well because this is work that I’m interested in,

00:57:17 ►

and alcoholism has also touched my family.

00:57:20 ►

It has a lot of families.

00:57:21 ►

Yeah, I think the disease model has no,

00:57:25 ►

there’s no responsibility involved, you know.

00:57:28 ►

And AA, their position, their goal,

00:57:37 ►

is not to understand the nature of the universe.

00:57:40 ►

They’re not in the philosophy business.

00:57:42 ►

They’re trying to get people to stop drinking.

00:57:45 ►

So to maximize that goal, I think that they go far overboard.

00:57:50 ►

First of all, all substances, they say.

00:57:54 ►

If you’re an alcoholic, then you must forswear everything.

00:57:58 ►

I don’t know how they relate to tobacco.

00:58:01 ►

But see, what you’ve got to understand is we are set up for addiction. It’s just like

00:58:11 ►

language and cognition and all of these other things. We are the animal which addicts. Other

00:58:18 ►

animals don’t addict. And addiction is a way of relating to the world.

00:58:25 ►

We don’t not only addict to drugs,

00:58:28 ►

we addict to each other,

00:58:31 ►

to chunks of territory,

00:58:33 ►

to behavior patterns.

00:58:35 ►

It’s like attaching ourselves to what we see and what we see.

00:58:39 ►

Exactly. It’s attachment.

00:58:41 ►

We attach to everything.

00:58:44 ►

And it’s very real. It’s attachment. We attach to everything. And it’s very real.

00:58:46 ►

It’s physiological.

00:58:48 ►

I remember years and years ago,

00:58:51 ►

a woman left me for a homunculus.

00:58:55 ►

And I was appalled.

00:59:02 ►

And it became… I I mean I was like vomiting

00:59:07 ►

every four hours

00:59:09 ►

could not sleep

00:59:11 ►

would burst into tears

00:59:13 ►

in inappropriate situations

00:59:15 ►

of which there were many in my life

00:59:17 ►

and

00:59:18 ►

heroin withdrawal

00:59:21 ►

cannot be worse than that

00:59:23 ►

I mean are you kidding?

00:59:24 ►

vomiting every four hours?

00:59:27 ►

And then one night,

00:59:31 ►

in the middle of the night,

00:59:33 ►

I was just frantic

00:59:37 ►

because I felt like when I was awake,

00:59:40 ►

I felt like I wanted to be asleep.

00:59:42 ►

When I should have been sleeping,

00:59:46 ►

I couldn’t sleep. And I was just dragging myself to classes. I felt, you know to be asleep when I should have been sleeping I couldn’t sleep and I was just dragging myself to classes

00:59:48 ►

I felt, you know, this is crazy

00:59:49 ►

I should turn myself in

00:59:51 ►

but they don’t have crisis centers for broken hearts

00:59:54 ►

what are you going to do?

00:59:56 ►

so then in the middle of one of these bouts

00:59:59 ►

I went to the medicine cabinet

01:00:03 ►

and this woman who had left me

01:00:04 ►

had left all these pills there.

01:00:08 ►

And I sorted through all these pills and came upon a small bottle of tranquilizers,

01:00:14 ►

a very mild tranquilizer, like Valium or something.

01:00:18 ►

Well, I had never taken a Valium.

01:00:21 ►

So I said, I’ll take half.

01:00:30 ►

of Valium. So I said, I’ll take half. And I took it. And the next morning, or a few hours later, I went out to breakfast and somebody came up and sat at my table and said, well, how are you coping

01:00:37 ►

since Hermione left you? And I said, who? You know, I just jerk and and I it really gave me respect for tranquilizers

01:00:50 ►

I mean I was appalled I was appalled that something so real to me so so much me half the tab

01:01:01 ►

I didn’t care you know let him go and then I realized all the people

01:01:05 ►

around me this is how they deal with emotional crisis nobody wants to feel

01:01:11 ►

anything I mean the first at the moment that an unpleasant emotion rears its

01:01:16 ►

head people go take Valium or something else and cut themselves off from feeling.

01:01:26 ►

We addict to people.

01:01:28 ►

That’s the point of that story.

01:01:30 ►

And when they leave us suddenly,

01:01:32 ►

it’s just like having your heroin taken away and you become a mad thing for months, years sometimes.

01:01:37 ►

I mean, I still vibrate from this event,

01:01:41 ►

and it was 15 years ago.

01:01:44 ►

We addict to territory.

01:01:47 ►

This is war, our turf, our land.

01:01:51 ►

Now this arises, again, a consequence of agriculture.

01:01:55 ►

Before agriculture, nobody had land.

01:01:59 ►

Land was something you walked around on

01:02:01 ►

as you migrated behind your herds.

01:02:04 ►

Once it was

01:02:05 ►

cognized as an object and fixed upon, they were ready to knock the other guy’s

01:02:10 ►

brains out for setting foot on your territory. We all do this. I mean we are

01:02:17 ►

addicted to caffeine, outrageous caffeine addictions. Money, sugar, praise, television.

01:02:28 ►

Now this is the favorite one to talk about

01:02:31 ►

because television is a forerunner of very insidious drugs to come.

01:02:38 ►

It’s just the crudest and the first.

01:02:42 ►

But imagine if after World War II,

01:02:46 ►

a drug had been introduced into this country

01:02:49 ►

of right-thinking, hard-working, decent Christian people

01:02:53 ►

such that 20 years after its induction,

01:02:57 ►

the average American citizen would be spending

01:03:00 ►

six and a half hours per day involved in this drug.

01:03:05 ►

That’s the figure for television consumption in this country.

01:03:09 ►

The average American watches six and a half hours a day of TV.

01:03:14 ►

It is an electronic drug.

01:03:16 ►

It is an obsessive behavior pattern, an unconscious behavior pattern,

01:03:23 ►

and a physically destructive behavior pattern.

01:03:26 ►

I mean, it’s done more for the rebirth of hemorrhoid specialists than any other single

01:03:32 ►

force in our society.

01:03:34 ►

So, but people say, well, that’s not a drug, that’s entertainment.

01:03:39 ►

Six and a half hours a day of entertainment?

01:03:42 ►

You know, before electronic media,

01:03:45 ►

a person could regard themselves as a great patron of,

01:03:50 ►

let’s say, the musical community,

01:03:52 ►

and maybe they would hear 12 live musical performances a year

01:03:56 ►

when they would go to a theater.

01:03:58 ►

I mean, how many experts on Beethoven in his generation or the generation following

01:04:07 ►

heard, let’s say, the Ninth Symphony more than several times in their intellectual life?

01:04:13 ►

Because, you know, you have to get a lot of people together and cooperating to perform the Ninth Symphony.

01:04:21 ►

To us, the Ninth Symphony is an object.

01:04:24 ►

Listen to it. Listen again. Listen again. We are

01:04:29 ►

able to turn experience, we are able to objectify experience, and then addict ourselves to it. Well,

01:04:36 ►

is this bad? How can it be bad if it is so written into us? I don’t think it is bad. I think what we have to do is choose our addictions,

01:04:49 ►

choose our behavior patterns.

01:04:53 ►

One can choose to be addicted to punctuality.

01:04:57 ►

I’m accused of this.

01:04:59 ►

Other people are addicted to always being late. One can be addicted to, you know,

01:05:07 ►

meaningless sexual encounters.

01:05:15 ►

You mean because of the physiological angle? Well, I think that’s been much

01:05:22 ►

overplayed. I think, I mean, should we not fall in love because we pheromonally lock together with this person

01:05:32 ►

and become a single unified set of drives and goals?

01:05:39 ►

The physiological aspects of addiction have been, I think, very strongly overdrawn. I smoke cannabis

01:05:49 ►

every day at most opportunities and have for years and years, I mean, since I was 18 years old,

01:05:57 ►

every once in a while, I stop just to see what that’s like. It’s trivial. It’s utterly easy. All that happens is a shift

01:06:10 ►

in behavior patterns. I read more. That’s what happens when I stop smoking cannabis.

01:06:18 ►

And yet I’m supposed to be breaking out into cold sweats, wandering aimlessly through the streets of the city,

01:06:25 ►

staring up at lighted windows.

01:06:29 ►

Yeah, right.

01:06:30 ►

So I think we give each other too much permission

01:06:33 ►

to be weak in this area.

01:06:37 ►

What is never talked about in talk about addiction

01:06:40 ►

is self-restraint.

01:06:43 ►

I mean, for heaven’s sake,

01:06:45 ►

you know, just take hold of yourself.

01:06:48 ►

Yeah, responsibility.

01:06:51 ►

And if you tell people

01:06:52 ►

addiction is a disease,

01:06:53 ►

addiction is it’s because you’re black,

01:06:55 ►

it’s because you’re poor,

01:06:57 ►

it’s because you’re this,

01:06:58 ►

it’s because you’re that,

01:06:58 ►

you have just given them

01:07:00 ►

a whole bunch of reasons

01:07:02 ►

not to take responsibility

01:07:04 ►

for their own situation.

01:07:07 ►

And what is needed in these addictive situations, I think, is the shock of recognition.

01:07:15 ►

I believe, see, that if you don’t take drugs, you’re unbearable. And there’s no, I can’t

01:07:23 ►

think of a society on earth

01:07:25 ►

where people don’t take drugs

01:07:27 ►

that any of us would want to have anything to do with.

01:07:30 ►

I mean, let’s take Calvinist Geneva, say.

01:07:34 ►

I imagine that as an example of an environment of moral rectitude.

01:07:41 ►

I mean, these people did not wear bright colors,

01:07:44 ►

didn’t listen to music, never drank coffee, never smoked, forget about alcohol, sex-knowing, filled with hellfire and damnation.

01:08:14 ►

Everything is seen in terms of a moral dimension that makes impossible demands on the human animal.

01:08:27 ►

man’s on the human animal. Rather, I think what we should realize is that somehow our evolution into a civilized self-reflecting being is caught up in these synergistic relationships that our

01:08:35 ►

conscious mind has with various things in the environment, so that we should choose our addictions. Now notice that addictions to my mind,

01:08:48 ►

and you can argue with this if you want by choosing extreme examples,

01:08:53 ►

but addictions to natural substances are harmless.

01:08:59 ►

Let me name some natural substances that you might disagree with me on this point. I think probably

01:09:06 ►

the strongest one would be, people would say, well, what about opium? Surely this is the scourge of

01:09:13 ►

mankind. Actually, opium was never a problem in human populations until it was conceived of as a problem by British colonial policy makers

01:09:27 ►

who decided that they could manipulate the opium trade

01:09:31 ►

to get an entree into China.

01:09:37 ►

Alcohol was never a problem, particularly,

01:09:43 ►

until the discovery of distilled alcohol.

01:09:48 ►

And, of course, heroin is distilled opium, morphine also.

01:09:54 ►

Sugar is a refined vegetable substance.

01:10:00 ►

In every case, it has required the intercession of science and technology to take harmless habits and turn them into dangerous addictions.

01:10:14 ►

So that, you know, everybody has a solution to the drug problem.

01:10:19 ►

I think what I would suggest is something called the Vegetable Drug Act, where you just say, if it’s a vegetable,

01:10:27 ►

it’s not a drug. This was the position until very recently with British common law. In Canada,

01:10:34 ►

mushrooms were legal. Mushrooms aren’t psilocybin. Psilocybin is a refined chemical.

01:10:41 ►

It is technology which allows us then to create these super powerful addicting substances

01:10:48 ►

and there will be more and more of them downstream you may be sure

01:10:52 ►

so I think what we need to do is think of human beings as hardware

01:10:57 ►

as the computer if you will

01:11:01 ►

and drugs are forms of software.

01:11:06 ►

And the software that you run determines the kind of functions that you can perform.

01:11:13 ►

If you run distilled alcohol software, well then you take on the persona of the alcoholic. I believe that cannabis is probably the most harmless and benign drug around. It carries out this feminizing that I talked about. It lowers the profile of the male ego. Instead of wanting to duke it out, people just say,

01:11:45 ►

well, if that’s your thing,

01:11:46 ►

you know,

01:11:48 ►

and that’s what we need, you know.

01:11:52 ►

I mean, that practically boils down

01:11:54 ►

to what we call tolerance.

01:11:58 ►

So I think that this disruption

01:12:01 ►

of our relationships

01:12:03 ►

to psychoactive plants

01:12:07 ►

is what set us on the long, hard, downward path into neurosis.

01:12:13 ►

And it began with agriculture,

01:12:16 ►

with the narrowing of our spectrum of plant awareness

01:12:19 ►

from many, many plants down to the rye, the oats, the barley.

01:12:26 ►

And it’s interesting that then out of this came the cultivation of,

01:12:33 ►

I mean, I think beer preceded wine.

01:12:36 ►

Beer is an older thing than wine.

01:12:39 ►

That comes out of the fact of having created surpluses

01:12:44 ►

because the way beer was discovered

01:12:47 ►

was through the fermentation of grain that was stored.

01:12:52 ►

If you didn’t have surpluses,

01:12:54 ►

you would never discover the psychoactive properties of fermented grain.

01:12:59 ►

It’s very interesting.

01:13:00 ►

In Nepal, the Niwari people have an alcoholic beverage that when it’s put in front of you, it looks like a bowl of granola.

01:13:15 ►

It’s dry.

01:13:17 ►

They pour it out of a sack into your cup and you say, you know, this is beer?

01:13:22 ►

and you say, you know, this is beer?

01:13:26 ►

And then they come along with boiling water and pour it over it

01:13:27 ►

and then you get this foamy, lightly fermented,

01:13:32 ►

contaminated grain water.

01:13:35 ►

And to my mind, that clearly is then

01:13:38 ►

how fermentation of grains

01:13:41 ►

and production of alcohol was established.

01:13:43 ►

Notice that it was also the accumulation of surplus

01:13:47 ►

from the agricultural adaptation

01:13:51 ►

that creates the need for defense

01:13:55 ►

because now you’ve got a surplus.

01:13:58 ►

Now you have to guard your surplus

01:14:00 ►

from everybody who doesn’t have any.

01:14:03 ►

The other thing that creation of surpluses caused

01:14:06 ►

was the invention of barter and money and this sort of thing, because now you have something

01:14:15 ►

that you can trade for something that you don’t have. So all of these adaptations also,

01:14:22 ►

a nomadic people cannot move a grain surplus with them.

01:14:27 ►

So if your harvest one year, if you’re a semi-nomadic people,

01:14:33 ►

that’s the people who, like in the Amazon, they plant things

01:14:36 ►

and then they leave them and go away and they have like a yearly peregrination.

01:14:41 ►

And when they come back to that place a year later there’s all this food

01:14:46 ►

ready for them well imagine a nomadic people who were doing that kind of quasi-agriculture with

01:14:55 ►

cereal and then there’s one year of great weather and great rainfall and when they arrive at their

01:15:02 ►

little wheat patch so much wheat has been produced that they can’t move it.

01:15:08 ►

They can’t take it with them.

01:15:10 ►

So then they say, well, but we have food now, so we don’t have to keep hunting.

01:15:16 ►

So let’s spend the winter here. interruption of the cycle of nomadism to deal with unexpected surpluses obviously spawned the idea in

01:15:30 ►

people’s minds well wouldn’t it be great if we had surpluses every year and then that says well

01:15:36 ►

that won’t happen if we’re as careless as we have been about our sowing and harvesting, but maybe if we’re very careful and till the land

01:15:46 ►

and carefully plant and do careful weeding, we’ll have to stay here and weed, but then

01:15:52 ►

we’ll get this tremendous payback in the end.

01:15:55 ►

So to my mind, the invention of agriculture broke our relationship to the wild plants

01:16:05 ►

and the lowered profile of the male ego

01:16:09 ►

and set us on a path of defending wealth,

01:16:13 ►

creating fortifications,

01:16:16 ►

supporting more specialization,

01:16:20 ►

larger populations, so forth and so on.

01:16:23 ►

And from there to the present predicament,

01:16:26 ►

it’s only a moment.

01:16:30 ►

Pardon me?

01:16:31 ►

A lot of consequences come from that too.

01:16:37 ►

The fear of losing your wealth,

01:16:42 ►

the consequences of fighting for Texas. That’s right. A lot of consequences. that continent is hiking protects itself

01:16:45 ►

that’s right

01:16:46 ►

and also

01:16:48 ►

this idea of our land

01:16:50 ►

because you want to hang on

01:16:52 ►

to this good

01:16:53 ►

cereal growing land

01:16:55 ►

so it’s yours

01:16:56 ►

you say

01:16:57 ►

and then you put a wall

01:16:58 ►

around it

01:16:59 ►

and then you defend it

01:17:00 ►

and so forth and so on

01:17:02 ►

well

01:17:03 ►

yeah

01:17:04 ►

what do you see as the goal?

01:17:06 ►

We keep thinking it’s the strength of nature

01:17:08 ►

and the provision that we’ve gotten ourselves

01:17:10 ►

and we can’t see it anymore.

01:17:11 ►

Well, I think that we’re now,

01:17:14 ►

things are very far out of hand

01:17:16 ►

and we’re caught up now in the end game of history

01:17:20 ►

and that we are going to have to create

01:17:24 ►

a way out of this impasse that is probably going to

01:17:29 ►

mean a complete definite redefining of who we are and how we rate relate to each other and space

01:17:36 ►

and time and life and death and it appears that technology is now the thing that is guiding us forward. We are not being led into the future by

01:17:47 ►

politicians. Politicians are running frantically along behind the wagon of history trying to jump

01:17:55 ►

onto it. What is leading us, what’s pulling the cart is technology. And I think technology is the program of realizing

01:18:06 ►

the practical concerns of the imagination.

01:18:10 ►

And that really where we are headed is the imagination.

01:18:14 ►

It’s a place.

01:18:16 ►

I don’t know whether it’s in solid state circuitry

01:18:19 ►

or in the bones of the planet

01:18:21 ►

or in artificial arcologies in deep space.

01:18:26 ►

The future will figure out the details,

01:18:29 ►

but we are close enough to it now that we can anticipate it.

01:18:33 ►

It’s what the shamans always said was possible.

01:18:37 ►

A world of value and meaning lived in the light of nature.

01:18:48 ►

meaning lived in the light of nature. And I think if we can get through this narrow neck that rationalism has imposed upon us and overcome these poisonous paternalistic philosophies,

01:18:58 ►

we will return. That’s why I call it the archaic revival. It’s the myth of the eternal return.

01:19:02 ►

That’s why I call it the archaic revival.

01:19:04 ►

It’s the myth of the eternal return.

01:19:09 ►

History is something that you finish with as quickly as possible and then return to the archaic mode of eternity.

01:19:15 ►

And I think that’s the adventure that we’re all caught up in.

01:19:19 ►

That’s the agenda that the plants and the planet have always had in front of them.

01:19:26 ►

It’s just that we wandered away from an awareness of what was happening

01:19:31 ►

by deluding ourselves with our own inflated self-image.

01:19:38 ►

You know, man as master of woman and nature.

01:19:43 ►

man as master of woman and nature.

01:19:46 ►

And this distorted part of our self-image has now become so dangerous to us

01:19:49 ►

that we have to abandon it.

01:19:52 ►

We have to draw back from it.

01:19:55 ►

And under that kind of pressure, I think we will.

01:19:58 ►

So, harking back to another question,

01:20:00 ►

the reason I do this

01:20:02 ►

and the reason I don’t feel any great trepidation about it

01:20:06 ►

is because I believe that historical momentum is with us. This is what is destined to come to be.

01:20:15 ►

We are going to take control of who we are by taking control of the physiological and psychological foundations upon which the self rests.

01:20:27 ►

And that means the chemical re-engineering of ourselves into the state of Edenic innocence

01:20:36 ►

that was lost when we set out on the long trail of the sword and the hoe, basically.

01:20:48 ►

That’s it.

01:20:50 ►

End of weekend.

01:20:52 ►

Thank you very, very much.

01:20:56 ►

It’s a political point of view, you see,

01:21:00 ►

and as a practical matter, there’s no better way to succeed in politics than to champion the most out-of-it point of view.

01:21:26 ►

an era where beige fascism is apparently the rising rule of the day.

01:21:29 ►

Well, that means if you want to be on the cutting edge,

01:21:34 ►

you have to embrace something very akin to psychedelic anarchy,

01:21:38 ►

the absolute antithesis of the fascist state. And then you will participate in the turning of the tide

01:21:42 ►

and the vindication of this point of view and it will be

01:21:47 ►

vindicated there’s no doubt about it all other points of view are bankrupt on the face of them

01:21:54 ►

end of footnote

01:21:57 ►

you’re listening to the Psychedelic Salon,

01:22:05 ►

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

01:22:11 ►

I guess I should touch on something one more time here,

01:22:14 ►

and that is Terence’s great descriptions of what he sees when he’s in DMT space.

01:22:20 ►

It was only a year or so ago that I had an experience

01:22:24 ►

that finally made me realize that what I was seeing was what Terrence had called jeweled self-dribbling basketballs.

01:22:32 ►

Now, there’s no way I would have originally described what I was seeing in that way,

01:22:37 ►

but as I was having the experience and thinking about what words could describe it,

01:22:42 ►

I remembered those words of Terrence and saw how they could fit.

01:22:46 ►

But still, it wasn’t how I would describe the experience.

01:22:51 ►

What I’m getting at here is the fact that

01:22:53 ►

we seem to keep saying how ineffable these experiences are,

01:22:57 ►

and then we still go on and try to describe them.

01:23:00 ►

But the downside of us doing that is that

01:23:03 ►

we may be causing others to think that they aren’t having a genuine experience

01:23:07 ►

if they don’t see what they’re expecting to see

01:23:09 ►

well I’ve now learned that even if you have had a certain experience before

01:23:14 ►

it may not be anything like that the next time you use the same substance

01:23:19 ►

one of the things I’ve been trying to do to make sense of some of these experiences

01:23:24 ►

is to use the technique that Ann Shulgin talks about relative to our dreams,

01:23:29 ►

and that is to not get hung up on the details of what happened,

01:23:34 ►

but rather focus on the emotions that come up as the result of your dream

01:23:38 ►

or as the result of a psychedelic experience.

01:23:41 ►

How did it make you feel?

01:23:43 ►

That’s what I want to know.

01:23:45 ►

That’s something we can talk about

01:23:46 ►

because there’s simply no way,

01:23:49 ►

at least right now,

01:23:50 ►

for us to share those intense

01:23:52 ►

internal visions that sometimes show up.

01:23:56 ►

Another thing I’d like to comment on

01:23:58 ►

is what Terrence was saying

01:23:59 ►

about using a tape recorder

01:24:01 ►

on your journeys.

01:24:02 ►

I’ve done that for a long time now

01:24:04 ►

and while there isn’t anything on them that would make the least bit of sense to you,

01:24:08 ►

when I hear one even from ten years ago I can bring back huge pieces of that

01:24:14 ►

trip. And in some cases my descriptions of the visual patterns I was seeing can

01:24:20 ►

even bring those back to me. So if you haven’t’t tried that yet, you might want to consider it.

01:24:26 ►

After all, hey, what’s the point of going down into the mine

01:24:29 ►

if you aren’t going to bring any ore back?

01:24:32 ►

But to tell the truth, that’s all too much of a heavy trip for me to even think about right now,

01:24:37 ►

and so I think we ought to move on.

01:24:40 ►

In fact, to lighten things up a bit right now,

01:24:43 ►

I’d like to play a short song that was written and performed by fellow salonner, Trannon Global.

01:24:49 ►

And after we listen to it, I’ll of course have to add my own two cents about it.

01:24:55 ►

So, here’s Trannon’s song right now.

01:24:58 ►

Well, I was born in April 1975 But I left my heart with the hippies

01:25:08 ►

Back in 1969

01:25:10 ►

Tied high shirts and psychedelic tunes

01:25:14 ►

Put a smile upon my face

01:25:17 ►

It’s a shame that I was born

01:25:20 ►

Thirty years too late I wish I could have been on board the magic bus with Ken

01:25:33 ►

And all those merry pranksters, what fun it would have been

01:25:40 ►

What I wouldn’t give to see old Timothy Leary smile

01:25:46 ►

While tripping out on LSD in a Millbrook country mile

01:25:53 ►

When I find myself going down the road and feeling bad

01:26:02 ►

I just turn up to the N.S out to the song of the grateful dead.

01:26:09 ►

It’s a mystery I should have known, a history of fate.

01:26:16 ►

The shame that I was born thirty years too late.

01:26:23 ►

Thirty years too late I could have gone to San Francisco

01:26:29 ►

With a flower in my hair

01:26:32 ►

Could have danced in a rain of woodstock

01:26:36 ►

While a pot smoked to fill the air

01:26:39 ►

It’s a shame I wasn’t at Monterey

01:26:43 ►

To see the airplane fly

01:26:45 ►

Or to be in at the BN

01:26:49 ►

Neath the California sky

01:26:52 ►

When I find myself going down the road

01:27:00 ►

Beating back

01:27:02 ►

I turn up to the men and space out to the song of the great man.

01:27:09 ►

It’s a history I should have known.

01:27:12 ►

It’s a mystery to blame.

01:27:14 ►

It’s a shame that I was born 30 years too late.

01:27:23 ►

30 years too late 30 years too late

01:27:33 ►

30 years too late

01:27:40 ►

30 years

01:27:44 ►

Well, thanks for that, Trannon. I’m not here to tell you that you were born 30 years too late. I’m here to tell you that I was born 30 years too soon.

01:28:06 ►

Having lived through what the rose-colored glasses of history paint as a long, happy party,

01:28:12 ►

I have to tell you that none of my friends from those days would want to go back to that time,

01:28:17 ►

and neither would I.

01:28:19 ►

No, from where I stand, the 60s were just the preface, the preamble to what is now underway.

01:28:27 ►

Had we had the World Wide Web back then, I think we would be living in a completely different world today.

01:28:32 ►

So, what did a lot of those disillusioned hippies do?

01:28:35 ►

Well, they dropped a lot of acid, and then they went out and created the Internet that you see in all its glory today.

01:28:41 ►

But now that we have all of our tech in place, we find that we’re wearing out

01:28:45 ►

just when things are really falling into place

01:28:48 ►

and getting interesting.

01:28:49 ►

If I was only 30 years younger,

01:28:51 ►

many of us lament.

01:28:53 ►

And so your song strikes a real chord

01:28:56 ►

when you think about it from that perspective.

01:28:58 ►

Why are we all wishing for something that can’t be

01:29:01 ►

when right now, right here in the eternal present,

01:29:04 ►

we’ve got more going for us than anyone could even dream of in the 60s.

01:29:09 ►

So now I’m looking for a song that lets the world know that the next 10 years or so

01:29:13 ►

are going to make the 60s look like the 50s.

01:29:17 ►

Because, at least in my humble opinion,

01:29:19 ►

10 years from now we are going to be living in a completely different world.

01:29:24 ►

And I think it’s going to be one that is considerably more fun than the current one.

01:29:30 ►

But getting off my soapbox and on to another announcement.

01:29:34 ►

And this one comes from fellow salonner and contributor Jason Hendrickson, who says,

01:29:39 ►

Hi Lorenzo, I have recently been volunteering for Mitch Schultz, producer-director of DMT, The Spirit Molecule.

01:29:47 ►

As you are probably aware, this is a documentary still in production based on the research and book of Dr. Rick Strassman, who is also a producer on the project.

01:29:58 ►

The film is still in need of funding, and they recently got approved for non-profit status, which allows contributions made to be tax-deductible.

01:30:07 ►

They also are offering a film credit to anyone who contributes at least $100.

01:30:12 ►

The following link takes you to the donations page,

01:30:15 ►

and I’ll put that with the program notes, but it’s Cottonwood Research,

01:30:19 ►

all one word, CottonwoodResearch.org,

01:30:22 ►

and you can find the project’s link,

01:30:26 ►

and that project will be listed there.

01:30:29 ►

And Jason goes on,

01:30:32 ►

I was hoping you might mention this on the salon or post a notice on your page.

01:30:34 ►

As I am sure you would agree,

01:30:36 ►

this film could be mighty powerful propaganda

01:30:38 ►

for the good guys in our lifetime quest

01:30:41 ►

for mainstream legitimization of the psychedelic experience.

01:30:45 ►

Thanks very much, and I hope you are enjoying the summer.

01:30:48 ►

Best regards, Jason.

01:30:50 ►

Well, thanks for sending that, Jason,

01:30:52 ►

and I will post a link on our blog along with the program notes for today’s podcast.

01:30:57 ►

I’m sure that many of our fellow slauners have read Dr. Strassman’s book,

01:31:02 ►

DMT, The Spirit Molecule,

01:31:04 ►

and if you haven’t, I highly recommend it.

01:31:07 ►

As you most likely know, it was the groundbreaking research by Dr. Strassman

01:31:11 ►

that finally broke the logjam holding back psychedelic research in this country.

01:31:16 ►

And thanks to his hard work, there are now a dozen or more major psychedelic research projects underway.

01:31:22 ►

I know that isn’t much, but before Rick Strassman so boldly forged ahead,

01:31:27 ►

there were none at all.

01:31:28 ►

So if you can help this project along,

01:31:31 ►

even just by posting links to it on your own site,

01:31:33 ►

that would be quite helpful.

01:31:36 ►

Another email comes from longtime salonner Chris S.,

01:31:39 ►

who says,

01:31:40 ►

Hi Lorenzo, this is Chris.

01:31:42 ►

I sent you the TimeWave Zero software a while back, just to let you know who this is.

01:31:48 ►

Anyways, I just watched a promotional video for 2012, the movie that is coming out,

01:31:52 ►

with Woody Harrelson playing some guy named Charlie Frost.

01:31:56 ►

And he references Terrence without actually saying his name.

01:32:00 ►

I was just waiting for him to say it, but no go.

01:32:03 ►

Anyway, here it is.

01:32:04 ►

And I’ll put that link out on the website, too.

01:32:07 ►

It’s one of those esoteric YouTube links that you can’t spell out.

01:32:11 ►

And he mentions that Woody starts talking about Terrence at about the 53-second mark.

01:32:18 ►

Anyway, that’s quite an interesting clip, Chris.

01:32:21 ►

And I see exactly what you mean.

01:32:24 ►

But for now, I’ll reserve my comments about this film

01:32:27 ►

until I learn a little more about it.

01:32:29 ►

But I have to admit that if this clip is representative of the movie,

01:32:32 ►

I probably won’t be watching it.

01:32:35 ►

But seeing the clip out of context

01:32:37 ►

may not be too fair to the film or to Woody.

01:32:40 ►

I’ll be anxious to see if any buzz develops about it

01:32:43 ►

over on the forums at thegrowreport.com,

01:32:46 ►

where, by the way, there’s an extremely interesting thread on the Psychedelic Salon Forum about suffering,

01:32:53 ►

and I think that might be worth checking out if you have the time.

01:32:58 ►

Okay, I guess I can’t put this off any longer.

01:33:02 ►

It’s time for another Burning Man announcement.

01:33:04 ►

Now, if you aren’t going to the Burn this year, then this probably won’t be of any interest to you, guess I can’t put this off any longer. It’s time for another Burning Man announcement.

01:33:09 ►

Now, if you aren’t going to the burn this year, then this probably won’t be of any interest to you, but for our fellow salonners who are going to be setting up camp on the playa this

01:33:13 ►

year, I’ve got some bad news. After all of the wild hoopla that Bruce Dahmer and I created

01:33:20 ►

about our gigantuan McKenna and Leary extravaganza at this year’s burn,

01:33:27 ►

well, we’re going to have to cancel it.

01:33:31 ►

There are a lot of reasons for this,

01:33:36 ►

but the bottom line is that due to both of us having some unexpected changes in our lives,

01:33:39 ►

neither of us, and for different reasons,

01:33:42 ►

aren’t going to be able to make it to Burning Man this year.

01:33:46 ►

But don’t worry, it’s nothing serious in either of our cases,

01:33:49 ►

just some things that are taking a lot of time and resources from us.

01:33:54 ►

And for what it’s worth, we haven’t completely abandoned the Leary and McKenna project.

01:33:59 ►

In fact, we’ve decided to develop the concept a little more slowly, and we might even take it on the road to some more manageable venues,

01:34:04 ►

like local theaters or college campuses.

01:34:07 ►

And then hopefully we’ll eventually get it to Burning Man once we get it fine-tuned.

01:34:12 ►

As you may guess, it hasn’t been easy to make this decision,

01:34:16 ►

and for our fellow salonners who are still making plans to attend this year’s burn,

01:34:21 ►

I really wish there was some way to make it up to you.

01:34:24 ►

So far, the only idea I’ve come up with

01:34:26 ►

is this. In a few weeks, I’ll be introducing a new website to support my novel, The Genesis

01:34:32 ►

Generation, and it’s going to be much like Digg, but with the ability for you to organize your own

01:34:38 ►

groups of friends. So I’ve set up a Burning Man 2009 group that is restricted to fellow slaughters who are actually attending this year.

01:34:47 ►

And hopefully through that you might be able to coordinate some meeting places and things like that.

01:34:53 ►

I’ve set it up so that only those going will actually see the discussions going on until you want to make them public.

01:34:59 ►

But how do you get in, you ask?

01:35:01 ►

Well, simple.

01:35:02 ►

I’ll take your word on it if you just send me an email to lorenzo at matrixmasters.com.

01:35:09 ►

That’s all one word, Matrix Masters.

01:35:11 ►

And let me know that you’ll be going to this year’s burn, and I’ll send you the password and link to get in.

01:35:17 ►

I know it isn’t much, but maybe it will at least help a few of our fellow slaughters find a couple more of the others.

01:35:23 ►

And I guess I should also mention that I’ve got a ticket for sale if anyone needs one.

01:35:29 ►

I got it in the Tier 2 bracket, which means that, including fees and postage,

01:35:33 ►

it cost me $256.75.

01:35:37 ►

So if you know somebody looking for a ticket and that price is right for them,

01:35:41 ►

just tell them to send me an email to the address that I just gave,

01:35:45 ►

and it’s first come, first served.

01:35:49 ►

Oh, and a special thank you to our fellow salonners who made posters for our contest

01:35:54 ►

that never actually got off the ground,

01:35:56 ►

and I’ll be in direct contact with you and see what we can do to get your work seen anyway.

01:36:02 ►

Well, I don’t like ending on such a downer, but this has already

01:36:06 ►

gone on for too long, so I’ll try to get another happier podcast out before a week goes by, and

01:36:13 ►

just to let you know, it’s going to be the beginning of a Tim Leary workshop that he held in 1985.

01:36:20 ►

Well, that does it for now, and so I’ll close today’s podcast by reminding you that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike 3.0 license.

01:36:35 ►

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.

01:36:44 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from

01:36:48 ►

Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

191 - The Ethnobotany of Shamanism Part 5

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