Program Notes
Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary
This recording was made at a conference held at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1981. Panelists include: Dr. Timothy Leary, Frank Baron, Dr. Andrew Weil,Walter Houston Clark, Robert Anton Wilson, and Paul Krasner
[NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.]
“I think it’s all about the brain, or certainly the brain as the key to consciousness and intelligence. The brain, as we well know, is the taboo organ of the 20th century.”
“The introduction of a new technology, a new paradigm, a new world model to a primitive society takes a lot of delicate doing. You can’t spook them too quickly. … You have to attach the new model to some of the old theories.”
“It is now possible to access your brain. It is now possible to activate circuits that were undreamed of before. … There’s no limits to the creativity, and imagination, and novelty, and intelligence that can be generated by this instrument, the brain, whose function we are now realizing is to fabricate reality.”
“The more you understand about the complexities of the brain, and the psychopharmeucedicals which activate it, the more cautious, the more careful, the more experimental, the more scientific you are before you rush around activating this instrument.”
“The function of human life from now on is to learn how to access, to activate, to direct, manage, and control your own brain.”
“It’s not the survival of the fittest. It’s the survival of the people with a sense of humor who can say, ‘Hey, look at those dinosaurs. We won’t go that way.”
“You can only evolve and mutate when you can laugh at your old form and go beyond it.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:32 ►
And before I do anything else, I want to correct what I think might have been a mispronunciation of one of our donors’ names from last week.
00:00:41 ►
And I’m still not sure if I’m getting this right, but I think the proper pronunciation of her name is Carol Lynn F., not Caroline. But I do want you to know that even though I may mispronounce your names from time to time,
00:00:47 ►
I nonetheless have a very warm place in my heart for our donors.
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And this week is no exception in that I want to thank Tidoro.
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And again, I’m not sure about this pronunciation, but I think it’s Tidoro or maybe it’s Todoro.
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However, I do want you to know that your help in paying the expenses
00:01:07 ►
associated with producing these podcasts is very greatly appreciated. Now, let’s just get right
00:01:14 ►
into today’s program, and I hope that you’ll find today’s talk as interesting as I have.
00:01:20 ►
In fact, it’s only tape one of two, and so I’m planning on podcasting the second tape in just a few days because I want to hear the rest of it myself.
00:01:30 ►
Now, this tape comes, again, from the Dr. Timothy Leary Archive, and thanks to Dennis Berry and Bruce Dahmer, it’s also another one of the tapes that Michael Horowitz digitized.
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And Michael, as you know, was Dr. Leary’s archivist.
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was digitized, and Michael, as you know, was Dr. Leary’s archivist.
00:01:50 ►
Now, the only documentation I have on it is the file name, which indicates that the recording was made at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1982.
00:01:56 ►
But I think maybe the date is wrong, and that it probably should be 1981.
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But if any of our fellow salonners were there or somehow know otherwise, please let
00:02:06 ►
me know and I’ll correct this however I can.
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Now what we’re going to hear is a panel discussion and we’re going to hear the panel in this
00:02:15 ►
order.
00:02:16 ►
First will be Timothy Leary, next will be Frank Barron, who was a famous professor of
00:02:21 ►
civil engineering at Berkeley, among other universities.
00:02:27 ►
And he’ll be followed by Dr. Andrew Weil.
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And then we’ll hear from Dr. Walter Houston Clark.
00:02:36 ►
And let me tell you a little something about Walter Clark before we hear what he has to say.
00:02:39 ►
In fact, here is something that Ralph Metzner wrote about him.
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Old age is often synonymous with rigidity rather than wisdom.
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Not so with Walter Houston Clark,
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professor of psychology of religion at Andover Newton Theological School in Newton, Massachusetts,
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former dean and professor at the Hartford School of Religious Education,
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author of the Oxford Group in 1951,
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and the Psychology of Religion in 1958, and founder of the Society for the Scientific
00:03:08 ►
Study of Religion. In an article on mysticism as a basic concept in defining the religious self,
00:03:15 ►
Professor Clark wrote that, and I quote, the psychedelic drugs are simply an auxiliary which,
00:03:22 ►
used carefully within a religious structure, may assist in mediating an experience which, aside from the presence of the drug,
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cannot be distinguished psychologically from mysticism.
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Studies have indicated that, when the experience is interpreted transcendentally or religiously,
00:03:40 ►
chances are improved for the rehabilitation of hopeless alcoholics and hardened criminals.
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Even though observations like these mean that the psychologist can learn a little more of the religious life,
00:03:52 ►
in no sense does it ultimately become any less of a mystery.
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And that is just to give you a little idea of the caliber of person who you’ll be hearing from.
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Back in the day, Dr. Clark was at the pinnacle of the intellectual establishment
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when it came to the topic of theology,
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and he was a strong proponent and advocate of our sacred medicines.
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How bold he was, and how sorely brave men like him and Houston Smith and Alan Watts
00:04:20 ►
now seem to be in rather short supply.
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Now, after Walter Clark, we’re going to be hearing from Paul Krasner.
00:04:28 ►
And if you don’t know already who Paul is,
00:04:31 ►
you may want to take the time to Google him and read a little something about his life.
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While Paul may be best known as a comedian,
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he also has been one of the most important social activists of the last 40 years or so.
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He also has been one of the most important social activists of the last 40 years or so.
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And on top of everything else, he’s very approachable and is an extremely nice guy.
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So now let’s join this great cast of characters at UC Santa Barbara sometime in the early 1980s and hear what was on their minds.
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Well, hello.
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The next hour or two we’re going to have, I hope, an unending flow of higher intelligences
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moving around the room and coming up here. To start things off, I was going to ask two or three people
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to join me now
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with the hope and expectation
00:05:30 ►
that later on more will be coming up.
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The title of this afternoon’s colloquium
00:05:37 ►
is Higher Intelligence.
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Now, I did not suggest that,
00:05:42 ►
but being stuck with it,
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there’s only one thing to do and that’s go with it.
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I thought myself and other people have suggested that we should try to focus on the future of intelligence and the future of higher intelligence from the scientific point of view.
00:06:06 ►
intelligence from the scientific point of view. And so I was going to ask Frank Barron if he would come and join me. And Andy Weil said he would come. And Walter Clark, would
00:06:14 ►
you be willing to come up and join us for a few minutes? And then as we go on, we’ll
00:06:19 ►
be discussing things. And I hope that before the afternoon is over, we’ll be down there and everyone will be moving in an unbroken flow up and around.
00:06:34 ►
I think it’s all about the brain, or certainly the brain is the key to consciousness and intelligence.
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to consciousness and intelligence.
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The brain, as we well know,
00:06:48 ►
is the taboo organ of the 20th century.
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In the 19th century,
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a hundred years ago in Victorian England or in Freudian Vienna,
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it was the body that was the taboo organ.
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And strong men would faint
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at the sight of a young lady’s ankle, a young man’s ankle, and vice versa.
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I hope I haven’t left anyone out.
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In any case, the human body, for many reasons, is no longer such a taboo situation.
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Any newsstand, it’s now unavoidable.
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You can hardly walk down the streets of any city
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without seeing pictures of the glorious and wonderful instrument
00:07:40 ►
which is called the human body.
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So the brain, I think it’s safe to say, is now the taboo organ.
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We simply have not been ready as a species
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to understand, to come to grips with
00:07:52 ►
the meaning of the human brain.
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There are many other things
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that we have not come to grips with
00:07:58 ►
which are associated with the human brain.
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I say the same thing is true of the bomb.
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Wouldn’t you say so, Frank?
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That for the last… You know, it struck many of us, many of us, that there is quite a correlation
00:08:12 ►
between the development, the discovery of mass-produced, easily available, mass-consumption
00:08:21 ►
brain activators like LSD coming along exactly at the time when human intelligence
00:08:27 ►
and human neurology deciphered the secret of the atom and fish in the atom and made
00:08:35 ►
available for our use or abuse that source of energy.
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source of energy. The brain is 40 billion. They keep increases like inflation. I used to say it was 10 billion cells, then it was 15, then it was 20 for a while, and then it’s like gold,
00:08:56 ►
then it went up to… Scientific Americans said a few months ago that they’re actually like the cerebellum itself makes the cortex look like
00:09:07 ►
you know small potatoes so we are dealing with an instrument which we do know it has more
00:09:14 ►
connections than there are atoms in the universe the brain I am convinced and I’m sure that very few of you would debate this issue. The brain is a perfect instrument.
00:09:29 ►
Unless you have a steel plate in your head or your forehead is less than two inches,
00:09:33 ►
but the average, normal, middle class, dull person is equipped with essentially a perfect instrument.
00:09:44 ►
Now it’s the programming, it’s the accidental imprinting
00:09:46 ►
that creates the conflicts and creates the sufferings
00:09:52 ►
and the anguishes and the disillusionments and so forth.
00:09:55 ►
But I see no reason why to assume anything different,
00:09:58 ►
that the human brain is a perfect instrument.
00:10:01 ►
And because we are primitive, superstitious savages,
00:10:04 ►
kind of looking at it from the outside
00:10:06 ►
not understanding how to activate it
00:10:09 ►
how to access it
00:10:10 ►
what its dimensions are
00:10:12 ►
we do know
00:10:12 ►
certainly everyone in this room knows
00:10:14 ►
that there are realms and infinities
00:10:17 ►
and levels and circuits
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and spheres of intelligence
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and perhaps we haven’t even dreamed of,
00:10:25 ►
that reside within the few inches behind our skull,
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waiting and ready to be accessed when the genetic time has come.
00:10:37 ►
And I think that genetic time has come.
00:10:41 ►
I have been reading for the last few years a book,
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which I’m sure most or all of you are familiar with.
00:10:47 ►
It’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn.
00:10:52 ►
Michael Polanyi has also written about this.
00:10:54 ►
As a matter of fact, most philosophers of science have been discussing this issue.
00:11:14 ►
How does society, or indeed how does a species, handle a new technology, easy to introduce into a jumpy, easily spooked species
00:11:27 ►
of domesticated primates
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in the last 20th century
00:11:30 ►
whose heads have been screwed up
00:11:33 ►
for the preceding 2,000 years
00:11:35 ►
by the Judeo-Christian Bible.
00:11:41 ►
I’m sure most of you know this,
00:11:43 ►
but it’s always worthwhile to review the amusing fact that
00:11:48 ►
the first book of the Judeo-Christian Bible, Genesis, starts off with an evolutionary theory
00:11:57 ►
of creation, that everything was created by a man named Jehovah.
00:12:02 ►
Naturally, it was a man who admittedly
00:12:05 ►
without any shame
00:12:06 ►
laid his right out
00:12:07 ►
he’s a bad tempered
00:12:08 ►
mean paranoid
00:12:09 ►
jealous
00:12:10 ►
mafia
00:12:10 ►
cop
00:12:11 ►
condominium owner
00:12:12 ►
who
00:12:15 ►
who
00:12:15 ►
who created this
00:12:22 ►
Garden of Eden
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for Adam
00:12:24 ►
and then later Eve,
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who was thrown in as, you know, to help Adam as a servant.
00:12:32 ►
They read that, believe it.
00:12:33 ►
Even in the 20th century, they read it.
00:12:36 ►
And he said in the Garden of Eden, you can do anything you want,
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except there are two things you can’t do.
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There’s a tree there that has the fruit, and it’s a controlled substance,
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and you are forbidden by eternal law
00:12:46 ►
to ingest, absorb, sniff, or in any way.
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Because if you do, the blinds will fall from your eyes
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and you will see through good and evil and become a god like me.
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And Adam said, well, gee, I don’t want to do that, sir.
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And then…
00:13:02 ►
Anyway, there’s the other tree. I don’t want to do that, sir.
00:13:09 ►
Anyway, there’s the other tree,
00:13:14 ►
which is an FDA, DEA-controlled substance,
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and you’re forbidden to touch of that because if you eat that,
00:13:18 ►
you’ll become immortal and become a god.
00:13:21 ►
And of course, Adam said he didn’t want anything
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to do with transcending good and evil.
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He knew that would put a lot of people out of business.
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And he certainly didn’t want immortality
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because that would really blow the religious thing
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into a new dimension.
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As you know,
00:13:38 ►
the Judeo-Christian Bible is not very friendly to women.
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You probably know.
00:13:44 ►
They blamed it all on Eve, didn’t they?
00:13:48 ►
My theory is that
00:13:49 ►
Eve never bought that story right from the beginning.
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In the middle of the job,
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she jumped in the squad car
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and back to headquarters.
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She went over to that tree
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and she picked up the fruit
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and the rest is history.
00:14:03 ►
Going back to Polanyi and the Cune
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you thought I forgot about that, didn’t you?
00:14:11 ►
short term memory loss, right
00:14:12 ►
well, that’s just one of the
00:14:20 ►
goes with the territory, you know
00:14:22 ►
the higher you get and the faster
00:14:25 ►
you’re moving, you’d say, why did I come out on this trip anyway? Or you’ve all had the
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experience, I’m sure, of starting at sunset and, you know, looking at the stars up there
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or around you and watching the sunrise in the morning and having several thousand times
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solved the riddle of the universe
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and explained everything
00:14:47 ►
in the morning
00:14:47 ►
you forget what it was
00:14:48 ►
take notes
00:14:54 ►
that wonderful story
00:14:58 ►
of our old Harvard colleague
00:15:01 ►
hey we have a little
00:15:02 ►
Harvard reunion group here
00:15:03 ►
don’t we
00:15:03 ►
Frank I hope we can Our old Harvard colleague, hey, we have a little Harvard reunion group here, don’t we?
00:15:07 ►
Frank, I hope we can… There is a higher intelligence, isn’t there?
00:15:17 ►
Maybe we can fool around with that Harvard thing we’ve been talking about.
00:15:20 ►
Not about the old people, not the new stuff.
00:15:23 ►
I played the right wing in the 1960s.
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Right, right.
00:15:32 ►
Kuhn gives many examples of how difficult it was to introduce a new model
00:15:38 ►
which is going to change the structure of consciousness in any society.
00:15:42 ►
Lord Kelvin went to his deathbed saying that the X-ray was just an elaborate
00:15:47 ►
hoax.
00:15:50 ►
Rutherford, who was the leading atomic physicist at the time, said, you know, it was simply
00:15:52 ►
impossible to fish in the atom.
00:15:54 ►
You know, it happened to Simmelweiss because he told doctors to wash their hands before
00:15:57 ►
they treated patients.
00:15:59 ►
Lord Lister got the Nobel Prize a generation later for that.
00:16:02 ►
The introduction of a new technology, a new paradigm, a new world model to a primitive society takes a lot of delicate doing.
00:16:14 ►
You can’t spook them too quickly.
00:16:17 ►
Polanyi says you have to attach the new model to some of the old theories.
00:16:26 ►
That’s why I think in the 1960s,
00:16:29 ►
many people attempted to,
00:16:32 ►
we all did, didn’t we, Walter,
00:16:34 ►
say that the easiest way to understand
00:16:35 ►
the psychedelic experience was in the religious mode
00:16:38 ►
because psychology certainly had no terms or phrases
00:16:42 ►
except things like psychotomimetic, remember? I hope you don’t.
00:16:51 ►
So the use of the religious metaphor to comfort people and assuage people and somehow seduce
00:17:00 ►
people and to get them to relax about the notion that it is now possible to access your brain.
00:17:07 ►
It is now possible to activate circuits
00:17:09 ►
that were untreamed of before.
00:17:11 ►
It is now possible to learn how to dial and tune your brain
00:17:14 ►
so that this will be no more excuse
00:17:17 ►
to feel any way you want to feel.
00:17:19 ►
There’s no limits to the creativity and imagination
00:17:21 ►
and novelty and intelligence that can be generated by this instrument, the brain,
00:17:27 ►
whose function we are now realizing is to fabricate reality.
00:17:32 ►
So we use the religious metaphor, and that was a wonderful experience, wasn’t it, Walter?
00:17:43 ►
I think, though, that the time has come, we’re now one generation beyond 1960s,
00:17:49 ►
where we can really get down and address this problem with the intelligence and the discipline and the courage that is necessary.
00:18:02 ►
that is necessary.
00:18:05 ►
The next step in accessing and talking about the brain
00:18:07 ►
is to use the scientific metaphors.
00:18:11 ►
And I certainly hope
00:18:12 ►
that one of the many wonderful things
00:18:13 ►
that will come out of this conference
00:18:15 ►
this week is the feeling
00:18:19 ►
of encouragement and support
00:18:22 ►
and active participation
00:18:24 ►
in more and more scientific studies
00:18:27 ►
of the tools for accessing the brain, drugs.
00:18:30 ►
Now, I think I simply should say right in the beginning, my point of view on drugs,
00:18:37 ►
I’m a thousand percent pro-dope.
00:18:43 ►
I’m not advocating that anyone do any specific thing
00:18:46 ►
the more you understand about the complexities of the brain
00:18:48 ►
and the psychopharmaceuticals which activate it
00:18:51 ►
the more cautious, the more careful
00:18:54 ►
the more experimental
00:18:56 ►
the more scientific you are before you rush around
00:19:00 ►
activating this instrument
00:19:02 ►
but I think the time has come to be scientific.
00:19:06 ►
And the nice thing is that I think that the DNA code
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or the Gaia intelligence or egg wisdom,
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or I don’t know what name you give her,
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the person who has designed and created this wonderful adventure
00:19:19 ►
with the tools that we have at our access,
00:19:22 ►
I think what DNA had in mind at this moment in our revolution
00:19:27 ►
was that the first generation after World War II,
00:19:31 ►
the first baby boom generation,
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the greatest generation in human history,
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the largest of young people that were born
00:19:40 ►
in that wonderful position to become more intelligent,
00:19:44 ►
in an affluent, secure society like the American society,
00:19:49 ►
founded on the principle of individual freedom, individual exploration,
00:19:53 ►
frontier thinking, no stumbling at authority.
00:19:56 ►
I mean, it only really happened in a mass level in a place like America,
00:20:01 ►
at the moment of America’s highest moment, or almost highest moment.
00:20:09 ►
It was inevitable, too, that the technology generation of those who introduced this powerful tool
00:20:27 ►
would upset, irritate, offend, alarm, and spook society.
00:20:35 ►
It’s a wonder that any of us are alive.
00:20:41 ►
In any other time, in any other place except wonderful America,
00:20:45 ►
we wouldn’t be around as long as we have been around,
00:20:48 ►
or we wouldn’t be having reunions of this sort.
00:20:51 ►
So the time has come to become scientific about drugs.
00:21:01 ►
You know, I find it a scandal, a humiliation, an embarrassment to have to say some of the things that we’re saying here today,
00:21:11 ►
21 years after we all were there at Harvard.
00:21:15 ►
You know, what has the government done?
00:21:17 ►
Or what have the pharmaceutical companies done?
00:21:19 ►
What has our intellectual community done?
00:21:21 ►
our intellectual community done.
00:21:25 ►
You know, they just simply couldn’t look the fact in the eye
00:21:28 ►
that the human brain can be accessed,
00:21:31 ►
dialed and tuned.
00:21:32 ►
He not only has the government
00:21:34 ►
and religion and politics
00:21:37 ►
and every aspect of our intellectual community
00:21:40 ►
and everything in their power to derogate,
00:21:42 ►
you know, I mean,
00:21:43 ►
the taboos surrounding the word drugs,
00:21:47 ►
certainly we’re so used to it, we don’t realize how totally insane it is.
00:21:53 ►
The way it worked was that between seven and eight million people,
00:22:00 ►
most of them young people in the 1960s and early 70s, did access their
00:22:06 ►
brain. They learned how to do it and they did it. And now, 15 or 20 years later, there’s
00:22:10 ►
a new generation of young scientists and older scientists, too, because it’s in the air.
00:22:15 ►
It’s a zeitgeist. You know, when it starts to happen, it happens all over. When it backbones,
00:22:20 ►
it was Robert Anton. Is Robert Anton Wilson here? Anyways, Robert Anton Wilson says,
00:22:25 ►
how about a round of applause
00:22:26 ►
for Robert Anton Wilson?
00:22:31 ►
Oh, Robert, yeah.
00:22:32 ►
Would you come up and join us?
00:22:34 ►
Would you come up and join us?
00:22:36 ►
Yeah.
00:22:36 ►
Yeah.
00:22:50 ►
Paul Krasner expected to be on this panel. And we’re saving as a treat and as a surprise and as a wonderful package of joy,
00:23:02 ►
none other than Paul Kreisner you’re doing that
00:23:21 ►
watch it now
00:23:22 ►
that’s the zone
00:23:24 ►
you got through it.
00:23:25 ►
Good.
00:23:30 ►
I’m just going to say two or three more things,
00:23:32 ►
and then we’ll turn it over to the panel and the rest of you.
00:23:36 ►
The point of view that you can,
00:23:39 ►
that the function of human life from now on
00:23:42 ►
is to learn how to access, activate, direct, manage, and control your own brain.
00:23:47 ►
I mean, there’s simply no point in living if you don’t do that.
00:23:49 ►
Socrates said it, what, three centuries B.C.
00:23:52 ►
He said the only function of an intelligent life is to learn how to get smarter,
00:23:57 ►
the pursuit of knowledge, the increase of intelligence.
00:23:59 ►
It’s the oldest concept in human history.
00:24:02 ►
It dates back to the first book of the Vedas along the Ganges when Soma was introduced.
00:24:06 ►
This notion of higher intelligence, of yoga, of using your life as a continual hierarchy of getting higher, self-development, personal growth, so forth.
00:24:17 ►
It’s now taking over science. And I want to suggest six or seven branches of science in which the same notion of self-actualization,
00:24:27 ►
taking responsibility for your own destiny, realize that no one’s going to do it for you.
00:24:31 ►
You’ve got to manage it yourself.
00:24:33 ►
You know that the second law of thermodynamics has been repealed by Ilya Prigogine.
00:24:38 ►
I never believed in the second law of thermodynamics.
00:24:41 ►
If that wasn’t a Protestant ethic, God is some banker up there saying well you’re dreaming i never went for that well anyway
00:24:51 ►
prigogine has gloriously scientifically and empirically said that no there we get
00:24:57 ►
dissipative structures we can uh we have to dissolve it sure there’s entropy because
00:25:01 ►
simply uh loosening up before the next structure takes over.
00:25:06 ►
We’ve repealed the law of gravity, surely, not only internally,
00:25:12 ►
but our space adventurers are going where no women or men have gone before.
00:25:19 ►
It’s no accident that the space movement totally paralleled and correlated with the movement inward.
00:25:27 ►
And it’s no accident that when the inner movement, the great, you know, acid movement kind of went underground for a while,
00:25:34 ►
the space movement went underground during Nixon.
00:25:36 ►
And it’s no accident that now with the space shuttle and the new acid that’s around.
00:25:41 ►
the new acid that’s around.
00:25:49 ►
Okay, we’ve repealed the law of entropy so that now we can intelligently
00:25:52 ►
dissipate the structures around us
00:25:55 ►
and intelligently and harmoniously
00:25:57 ►
link up to make better.
00:25:59 ►
We have repealed the law of gravity.
00:26:02 ►
We’re not going to spend the rest of our lives
00:26:03 ►
like barnacles and snails crawling around the bottom of this 6,000 mile.
00:26:08 ►
We’re going to build our own cities in space.
00:26:11 ►
The DNA code, recombinant DNA research, the Gaia hypothesis of Lovelock and Margulis,
00:26:20 ►
the immunologists who are now learning how to inoculate us against not just typhoid and polio,
00:26:24 ►
but things like stupidity, impotency, aggression, and so forth.
00:26:29 ►
Our friends in Berkeley and at UCLA are telling us all the time that within two to five years,
00:26:34 ►
we’ll have a pill or inoculation which will double the human lifespan,
00:26:37 ►
so that the death, which has always been the ultimate source of helplessness and pessimism in Judeo-Christian money-making
00:26:45 ►
is going to be, you know, it’s simply dumb, stupid to die.
00:26:50 ►
So you notice running through every site, the new psychology, humanist psychology, of
00:26:54 ►
course, the new understanding of drugs, every one of these disciplines, quantum physics,
00:26:59 ►
Jack Sarfati and Nick Herbert and the rest of them saying, you know, the universe is
00:27:03 ►
exactly what you think it is.
00:27:04 ►
So you better make, think grandly and gloriously and high, wide and handsome.
00:27:09 ►
All these sciences are now saying the same thing.
00:27:12 ►
It’s up to us to step into the driver’s seat, as Henry Ford said, of our own machinery and write a new script.
00:27:21 ►
So it’s going to be science that’s going to lead the way.
00:27:26 ►
I happen to believe,
00:27:27 ►
and I think Paul agrees with me,
00:27:28 ►
that if it’s not…
00:27:32 ►
Yeah, you agree.
00:27:33 ►
All right.
00:27:35 ►
Then I can say it.
00:27:36 ►
If it ain’t funny, it’s not true.
00:27:50 ►
It’s not the survival of the fittest. It’s the survival of the fittest it’s the survival of the people with a sense of humor who can say look at those dinosaurs we won’t go that way you know the ability to laugh at
00:27:55 ►
yourself back there the you know the the butterfly giggling at the caterpillar because we are
00:28:02 ►
caterpillars and we are butterflies you can only evolve and mutate when you can laugh at your old form and go beyond it.
00:28:08 ►
So that’s why we’re on the circuit. Right, Paul?
00:28:12 ►
Also to pay the rent.
00:28:13 ►
Also to pay the rent.
00:28:14 ►
Pay the rent.
00:28:31 ►
I’d like to ask the rest of the panel to come on up, one after each other, and take this wonderful symbiotic community we have here,
00:28:39 ►
and new and higher in different directions.
00:28:41 ►
Frank, do you want to start off?
00:28:51 ►
Thank you, Tom.
00:28:57 ►
Well, those of you who were here last night will recall that I began by,
00:29:02 ►
out of some concern with what topics the colloquium would cover, I began by mentioning four or five problems that I hoped would be discussed. I see now that I had no need to worry. Everything has
00:29:11 ►
been covered so far. Tim, as for your title, the title of this session, Higher Intelligence
00:29:20 ►
and Creativity, I have it on good authority that there was a printer’s error involved.
00:29:26 ►
The printer, who is a member of linkage, dropped an ER at the end of the high.
00:29:35 ►
So we have high intelligence and creativity.
00:29:39 ►
I’ll make a few remarks about the word intelligence, which I would like to rescue from
00:29:43 ►
the word that’s usually put right after it, quotient. Intelligence quotient is the phrase that we
00:29:53 ►
hear most often, apparently referring to intelligence. And with due respect to Alfred Binet who is generally credited with being the inventor of the intelligence test
00:30:08 ►
he loathed the term intelligence quotient
00:30:12 ►
he did not invent it
00:30:14 ►
it was suggested by the German psychologist Stern
00:30:19 ►
and the arithmetic was done by Wundt
00:30:22 ►
and Binet who was the pioneer in the development of work on creative thinking,
00:30:28 ►
regretted that he had yielded to the initial practical request from the French government
00:30:37 ►
to develop a method for sorting out students who were beginning the schooling system
00:30:43 ►
and who would probably not profit from it,
00:30:45 ►
so that the intelligence quotient is a derivative of a test which was meant to identify factors in scholastic aptitude.
00:30:56 ►
And scholastic aptitude ain’t all there is to intelligence.
00:31:02 ►
but that the broadening of it
00:31:04 ►
requires quite a bit of I think
00:31:06 ►
new language and new ways of thinking
00:31:08 ►
about the general concept of intelligence
00:31:10 ►
even the word gift
00:31:11 ►
a very good word giftedness
00:31:14 ►
has been taken over
00:31:16 ►
so that it’s
00:31:18 ►
defined in terms of like the upper
00:31:20 ►
2% on an IQ test
00:31:22 ►
gift is a word that
00:31:24 ►
has a very much more general ancient meaning.
00:31:30 ►
And I think that that word or the word powers, mental powers,
00:31:35 ►
is what I should like us to be talking about.
00:31:38 ►
And mental powers include things that, oh, from the very ancient traditions, things that have to do with ecstasy,
00:31:48 ►
the leaving of the body,
00:31:50 ►
and some of the religious insights,
00:31:52 ►
the idea of bilocation,
00:31:55 ►
the powers of the Sita, the yogic powers,
00:32:00 ►
and beginning with Nietzsche’s popularization of the phrase,
00:32:05 ►
the idea of being able to act without the kinds of socially imposed internal controls
00:32:10 ►
defined as good or evil, but rather acting in a free, spontaneous manner
00:32:17 ►
that is constructive but that does not have that imposed as the rules by which one acts.
00:32:24 ►
That, plus the idea of conflict-free grace,
00:32:28 ►
something concerning psychological androgyny, the ability to appreciate and act upon both
00:32:36 ►
the masculine and feminine principles in oneself, in the mind.
00:32:40 ►
All of these things are parts of what we ought to be thinking about when we think about intelligence,
00:32:47 ►
mental powers, or giftedness.
00:32:50 ►
And those are the very things that are in all of us that we can develop but don’t always.
00:32:59 ►
And the work on creativity that I’ve engaged in has been, of course,
00:33:03 ►
within the context of
00:33:05 ►
empirical science and the development of research methods and findings. But I think
00:33:10 ►
the most important fact about it, as we proceeded with a kind of criticism and change
00:33:17 ►
of the sorts of intelligence tests that were then in use, was that we decided that
00:33:22 ►
creative thinking, creative reason, does not have any,
00:33:27 ►
there are no right answers to such tests.
00:33:30 ►
Whereas in the usual IQ test, you have to give the answer that has been already decided upon
00:33:35 ►
by the person who made up the test.
00:33:38 ►
Quite different from that are the functions that are involved in creative thinking
00:33:42 ►
where there is no right answer because it’s moving into a future that’s unknown.
00:33:46 ►
There’s no ceiling, as they say.
00:33:49 ►
The latitude is enormous for possibilities.
00:33:53 ►
So that is, I think, the essential meaning of the work on creativity,
00:33:57 ►
the other part of our topic here.
00:34:03 ►
That’s all I have to say.
00:34:14 ►
Let me give you a few examples in support of Tim’s argument from the field that I fight some of
00:34:20 ►
these battles in clinical medicine. Medicine is deeply conservative. And I see things beginning to happen in medicine today
00:34:27 ►
that I think happened in other areas of society in the 60s.
00:34:30 ►
And it’s both strange and frustrating and funny to watch it happen.
00:34:34 ►
And it revolves around this idea of the breakdown of the old model or paradigm
00:34:40 ►
and the beginning of a new one, which is very difficult for people to accept.
00:34:44 ►
In conventional medicine today, things that you can’t see or perceive with your senses
00:34:49 ►
or measure with instruments don’t exist.
00:34:51 ►
That includes the mind.
00:34:53 ►
So the mind does not exist for doctors.
00:34:55 ►
It’s not something that’s real, and although it may be given lip service
00:34:58 ►
and mentioned here and there in little phrases,
00:35:01 ►
it has no real meaning in medical theory or practice.
00:35:04 ►
That makes it very difficult
00:35:05 ►
for doctors, and this is how paradigms break down, to take account of a number of phenomena that
00:35:10 ►
pass before their eyes every day. Now, what do you do if you’re attached to an old model and
00:35:15 ►
anomalies begin to accumulate that you can’t explain? First, you try to explain them with
00:35:19 ►
ever more complicated theories. But if they’re too big for that, then you try not to look at them
00:35:23 ►
or sweep them under the rug or pretend that they have no relevance to what you’re doing. That is what I see happening
00:35:29 ►
all over the place in medicine today. The inability of doctors, for example, to explain
00:35:34 ►
why systems of treatment based on theories that make no sense in their terms cure people is one
00:35:41 ►
of the most interesting ones. And that’s one that’s been around for a long time. When homeopathy first came to America, it had tremendous successes.
00:35:48 ►
In the 1840s, homeopaths were much better than regular doctors
00:35:51 ►
at curing people of major infectious diseases.
00:35:54 ►
There were cholera epidemics in the Midwest, for example,
00:35:57 ►
and they had much better cure records.
00:35:58 ►
That’s why large numbers of allopaths began to convert to homeopathy.
00:36:02 ►
That scared regular doctors and eventually led to the creation of the AMA.
00:36:06 ►
One of the first attacks, organized attacks on homeopathy,
00:36:09 ►
the first one really,
00:36:09 ►
was a pamphlet written by Oliver Wendell Holmes,
00:36:12 ►
who was a professor at Harvard Medical School.
00:36:14 ►
And it was called Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions.
00:36:17 ►
And one of the things he said in that
00:36:19 ►
that I thought was wonderful,
00:36:19 ►
he said the fact that homeopathy cures people
00:36:22 ►
shouldn’t be admitted as evidence.
00:36:23 ►
He said the fact that homeopathy cures people shouldn’t be admitted as evidence.
00:36:31 ►
Because, he said, 90% of patients will get better no matter what you do to them.
00:36:33 ►
Now, that’s a very interesting statement.
00:36:34 ►
I happen to think it’s true.
00:36:36 ►
It’s very interesting.
00:36:41 ►
Look at the inability of doctors to grasp the placebo effect or its significance. I mean, that’s a marvelous, magical, wonderful thing.
00:36:44 ►
And the things that doctors believe
00:36:45 ►
about placebos are just amazing.
00:36:47 ►
One of the things they believe
00:36:48 ►
is that placebo effects
00:36:49 ►
are somehow less real
00:36:50 ►
and less important
00:36:52 ►
than so-called objective effects.
00:36:54 ►
When you can die of a placebo effect,
00:36:56 ►
there’s a well-known phenomenon
00:36:57 ►
called placebo death.
00:36:58 ►
There are placebo total cures of cancer.
00:37:00 ►
What more can you ask for
00:37:01 ►
from an effect?
00:37:02 ►
Often, placebo effects can be much. There’s no
00:37:05 ►
limit to their magnitude. Another misbelief about placebo effects that doctors like to parade out
00:37:10 ►
is that only some people show them. One common statement is that only people who are less
00:37:16 ►
educated are susceptible of placebo effects. If you’ve been to college and certainly been to
00:37:20 ►
medical school, you’re not supposed to show placebo effects. Nonsense. Or that southern
00:37:25 ►
Italians are very vulnerable to placebo effects, but Scandinavians aren’t. Everybody, everybody,
00:37:31 ►
if the circumstances are right, can show placebo effects. Another great misconception is the failure
00:37:37 ►
to distinguish between two kinds of placebos. What most people think of when we talk about
00:37:41 ►
placebos is sugar pills. That’s one kind of placebo. That’s the inactive placebo, something that has no intrinsic effect.
00:37:47 ►
But the much more interesting kind of placebo is the active placebo,
00:37:50 ►
something that does do something on its own,
00:37:53 ►
but it doesn’t directly cause the end effect that you look at.
00:37:56 ►
And active placebos are much more powerful than inactive ones
00:37:59 ►
at generating belief because they make you feel different.
00:38:03 ►
They make something happen to you. I have maintained, and I still still do that all psychoactive drugs are really active placebos.
00:38:09 ►
They make you feel temporarily different and you associate that feeling with a certain state of
00:38:13 ►
consciousness. Well, I think most medical procedures are active placebos. The act of
00:38:17 ►
walking into a doctor’s office is an active placebo. Certainly getting injected is an active
00:38:21 ►
placebo regardless of what’s in the syringe. And that can produce major, major effects.
00:38:26 ►
I like to tell stories about wart cures, something that I go around collecting.
00:38:31 ►
I have a huge list now of things people do successfully to get rid of warts.
00:38:35 ►
And they range from rubbing a cut potato on the wart and then burying it under a certain
00:38:39 ►
kind of tree at a certain phase of the moon, to being touched by the neighborhood wart
00:38:43 ►
healer.
00:38:44 ►
Some very strange ones. I’ve found a few that don’t phase of the moon, to being touched by the neighborhood wart healer. Some very strange one.
00:38:45 ►
I’ve found a few that don’t even involve the wart.
00:38:47 ►
I’ve met one guy who told me that his mother had told him in the middle of the night he
00:38:52 ►
should go down to the refrigerator and steal something from the refrigerator and she must
00:38:55 ►
never know what it was.
00:38:56 ►
And that was it.
00:38:57 ►
And the wart would fall.
00:38:58 ►
Now, what does that have in common with rubbing a potato on a wart?
00:39:04 ►
There’s no unity there,
00:39:05 ►
but there’s tremendous unity to the response. Very typically, somebody does one of these things
00:39:10 ►
in the afternoon or evening, and the next morning wakes up and the wart falls off and doesn’t grow
00:39:16 ►
back. The less common pattern is that you do one of these things, and over the next two to three
00:39:20 ►
weeks, the wart shrivels up and dries up. Now, compare that to the way we treat warts in regular medicine.
00:39:25 ►
We burn them out, gouge them out, freeze them off with liquid nitrogen,
00:39:29 ►
or put an acid on that’s so corrosive that you have to be very careful of getting it on normal tissue.
00:39:33 ►
And in better than 50% of the instances when we do that kind of treatment,
00:39:36 ►
the warts grow back, often multiply.
00:39:38 ►
Now, the reason I’m interested, this is a perfect example of what happens
00:39:42 ►
when a great big anomaly grows in your paradigm.
00:39:45 ►
The wart cures…
00:39:47 ►
Wart cures are not uncommon.
00:39:55 ►
I think better than about 50% of the population of this part of the world has experienced wart cures, usually as children.
00:40:01 ►
This is a very common phenomenon.
00:40:05 ►
experienced war cures, usually as children. This is a very common phenomenon. Despite the fact that this is so common and so dramatic, literally in 12 hours, a foreign tissue associated with strange
00:40:11 ►
foreign organisms, viruses, very disordered looking tissue growth, disappears, melts away, falls off,
00:40:17 ►
and doesn’t grow back. No one has researched that. No one has taken that seriously as a question for
00:40:23 ►
physiological research. What
00:40:25 ►
happens there? The unity unifying factor is the mind, its belief in what you do. And somehow that
00:40:31 ►
gets translated through the nervous system and something happens at the tissue level very
00:40:35 ►
dramatically and very fast. If I were in charge of giving out money for cancer research in this
00:40:41 ►
country, I would give a big chunk of it to trying to find out what the mechanism of a work cure is.
00:40:45 ►
And the fact that that is not taken seriously is an example of what happens when you cling
00:40:51 ►
to a model that doesn’t allow for things that are real and important, like the mind, which
00:40:56 ►
indeed, I think, in medicine has been very taboo and very forgotten.
00:40:59 ►
And to watch doctors painfully and awkwardly trying to discover the mind in 1981, as I
00:41:04 ►
say, is both frustrating and funny and I suppose ultimately hopeful.
00:41:18 ►
I guess most of you who were here at the last session suspect that my name is the same as it was when I talked in that session.
00:41:28 ►
My name is Walter Clark, and I’m an old friend of Tim’s, which explains why apparently it
00:41:37 ►
wasn’t enough for me to lead people astray in the last session, but he wants me to do
00:41:43 ►
the same thing in this session.
00:41:49 ►
Whenever I’m connected with Tim in any way,
00:41:53 ►
I’m reminded of the story about Lincoln and his generals.
00:41:59 ►
As most of you know,
00:42:02 ►
at the first part of the Civil War, he had a very conservative general by the name of McClellan.
00:42:10 ►
And one day, McClellan was giving Lincoln a tour of the defenses of Washington.
00:42:30 ►
And they got around behind Washington, and there was a beautifully placed cannon aimed up north.
00:42:34 ►
And Lincoln said, well, what was that doing?
00:42:41 ►
And McClellan thought for a little bit, and he said, well, he agreed.
00:42:46 ►
It was very unlikely that the Southerners would attack Washington from the north.
00:42:53 ►
But in case they did, they’d be prepared with what was necessary to defend Washington.
00:43:00 ►
And Lincoln said it reminded him of a debating society that he used to belong to when he was a struggling attorney on the prairie.
00:43:04 ►
to when he was a struggling attorney on the prairie.
00:43:11 ►
And they had this group of people, and they’d get together about once a month and hone their minds and their legal skills by having arguments with one another.
00:43:24 ►
And they argued about almost anything. And
00:43:26 ►
one time, the thing that they were going to have as the basis for the discussion was the
00:43:38 ►
question, why do men have breasts? And Lincoln said that they argued that back and forth,
00:43:48 ►
and arguments pro and con were given,
00:43:52 ►
and after about three hours of that,
00:43:55 ►
they came to the solemn conclusion
00:43:58 ►
that it was extremely unlikely
00:44:02 ►
that a man would ever have a baby,
00:44:04 ►
but just in case he did, they would have the means to take care of it.
00:44:12 ►
Well, whenever I’m on the platform with Tim, I have to be prepared for practically anything.
00:44:23 ►
I have to be prepared for practically anything.
00:44:36 ►
And I would like to tell you just a little bit about a subject that I started to talk about last time and tell you about some of his work with convicts.
00:44:51 ►
his work with convicts. Naturally, when he first told me that he was giving psilocybin to convicts, and he had the convicts talking like medieval mystics, I didn’t believe him.
00:44:59 ►
But he persuaded me, let him introduce to me one of these convicts and our group of them.
00:45:09 ►
And sure enough, Tim was right.
00:45:14 ►
He did have these convicts, and some of them were the most dangerous convicts that Massachusetts had.
00:45:23 ►
dangerous convicts that Massachusetts had.
00:45:31 ►
And Tim had them talking like medieval mystics, and not only that, but they were acting that way.
00:45:40 ►
I told you the story of the man who had a vision of Jesus Christ and had helped Christ carry his cross towards Calvary.
00:45:47 ►
And then afterward, he told me that when the vision faded,
00:45:55 ►
he said, I looked out of the window and all my life came before my eyes.
00:46:01 ►
And I said, what a waste.
00:46:04 ►
Well, of course, this was the turning point in this
00:46:08 ►
particular convict’s life. They’d been able to do nothing with him. The worse they treated him,
00:46:16 ►
the more they disciplined him, the more he affected escapes and difficulties and all the rest until Tim came along.
00:46:30 ►
And he said, he told me that, he said, well, Tim Leary was the first man that he had ever known
00:46:42 ►
where he thought this fellow was absolutely on his side. And, well, this was the turnaround for this man. And then he went on and influenced his friend, who was another of the bad boys.
00:47:08 ►
And he had a religious experience.
00:47:12 ►
And pretty soon this group had an organization they call the self-defense group, self-help group, within the walls of the prison.
00:47:35 ►
And not only were they doing therapy to themselves, but I sat in on some of these sessions, and I was amazed at how effective
00:47:47 ►
these convicts were with one another. Now, if I’d been ahead of one of these sessions,
00:47:54 ►
of course, they would have been able to con me like nobody’s business, but they couldn’t con
00:48:00 ►
one another. And when they determined that they were going to go straight, they really met it.
00:48:10 ►
Well, now, after Tim got into a little trouble with Harvard
00:48:17 ►
and was dismissed from Harvard without a hearing.
00:48:28 ►
Whenever my blood pressure gets too low and I want to get it up,
00:48:35 ►
I think of that injustice that was perpetrated by the Harvard faculty.
00:48:49 ►
And when a meeting was called of people on the faculty to protest this outrage,
00:49:01 ►
there wasn’t more than five or ten members of that great faculty who were willing to
00:49:09 ►
go out on a limb for Tim.
00:49:12 ►
And Richard.
00:49:13 ►
And, yeah, and Richard Alpert.
00:49:18 ►
And, well, soon after that, as soon after that, I brooded about that.
00:49:29 ►
And then Tim and I had a mutual friend whose name was Walter Pankey.
00:49:37 ►
Walter Pankey had a degree from Harvard Medical School and also from Harvard Divinity School,
00:49:45 ►
and I persuaded Pankey that Tim’s work deserved to be studied
00:49:56 ►
more systematically and thoroughly
00:50:01 ►
in order to demonstrate what could be done using Tim’s method.
00:50:08 ►
Well, Walter finally had to leave the environments of Harvard,
00:50:14 ►
and he went down to Baltimore where he worked at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center.
00:50:23 ►
the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center.
00:50:29 ►
And he invited me to come down there as a consultant.
00:50:34 ►
And we worked together for four or five months.
00:50:47 ►
And I designed a – I got – I prepared the research design for this work with convicts, and we got permission from the people at the prisons in Maryland,
00:51:12 ►
And we were all ready to do this work when Panky died in a very tragic accident, and that was the end of that. Oh, yes, and I should say that I also had permission to do work with the Massachusetts penal system.
00:51:24 ►
work with the Massachusetts penal system.
00:51:28 ►
And we were ordered to take off with that. And then the chromosome hoax came along.
00:51:33 ►
You know that the LSD was supposed to knock your chromosomes for a loop.
00:51:42 ►
So that was why that particular piece of research
00:51:47 ►
never got off the ground.
00:51:50 ►
And at any rate,
00:51:54 ►
what I was leading up to
00:51:56 ►
was that here I have this
00:51:58 ►
beautiful research design
00:51:59 ►
gathering dust in my files.
00:52:03 ►
I don’t know how many times
00:52:05 ►
I’ve tried to get somebody interested
00:52:07 ►
in doing something about this.
00:52:09 ►
But I must admit
00:52:10 ►
that Tim has not been of any help to me
00:52:14 ►
for the reason
00:52:16 ►
I understand that he’s writing his autobiography,
00:52:22 ►
but I know how he’s writing it.
00:52:24 ►
He’s writing with all kinds of wit
00:52:27 ►
and humor. And what we need is an autobiography that is going to move the bureaucrats down in
00:52:38 ►
Washington. And they don’t understand wit and humor. And therefore they don’t understand Timothy. And I’ve been trying to
00:52:48 ►
persuade him just to tell the facts of his life, you know, no humor, just one after another.
00:52:56 ►
And I’m sure that this would be a great success, and even some of the bureaucrats in Washington would do something about it.
00:53:05 ►
Well, those are a few of my random comments on Tim and his work.
00:53:24 ►
I think I’ve OD’d on cosmic consciousness.
00:53:28 ►
Where is Carl Sagan now that we need him?
00:53:31 ►
The Barry Manilow of science.
00:53:39 ►
Well, I suppose I should mention that I’ve changed my image a little.
00:53:44 ►
Well, I suppose I should mention that I’ve changed my image a little.
00:53:50 ►
I’m now the psychedelic punk branch of the Hare Krishna.
00:53:54 ►
And I joined a gang.
00:53:58 ►
This is a group of artists and writers and performers who were always too chicken shit to join a gang but went to jackets.
00:54:02 ►
So we all got these great jackets with this dragon on the back.
00:54:07 ►
And it’s good.
00:54:08 ►
It cures paranoia
00:54:09 ►
because you used to walk along thinking,
00:54:10 ►
what are they looking at?
00:54:11 ►
Now you know, at least.
00:54:17 ►
And we have a tough Latin-sounding name,
00:54:19 ►
the Artista,
00:54:20 ►
and every gang member has their own gang name on it.
00:54:23 ►
Mine is Rumpel Foreskin.
00:54:28 ►
I tried to get listed in the San Francisco phone book as Rumpel Foreskin,
00:54:31 ►
and they gave me a very difficult time.
00:54:34 ►
Went all the way up the hierarchy and got an executive who said,
00:54:37 ►
we can list you as Foreskin Rumpel.
00:54:41 ►
But I refused to compromise.
00:54:46 ►
It wasn’t the same.
00:54:46 ►
That would be like, how would you list Liberace as Achi Liber?
00:54:49 ►
It’s not the same.
00:54:54 ►
Well, we’re supposed to talk here about why we’re hopeful and optimistic.
00:55:00 ►
The main reason I am is because of severely damaged chromosomes.
00:55:14 ►
I realize Walt Stewart says it’s a myth,
00:55:17 ►
but Andy Wiles says any placebo works.
00:55:21 ►
What can you expect from a movement that started with hanky-panky?
00:55:29 ►
Well, look, you have to see what the valleys are in order to appreciate the peaks,
00:55:31 ►
in case there are any.
00:55:34 ►
Well, Colloquium II has been going on since yesterday.
00:55:37 ►
I thought I would fill you in on a few details
00:55:39 ►
that you may have missed.
00:55:42 ►
There’s a lot, because I’ve been roaming around
00:55:43 ►
watching this.
00:55:44 ►
One guy, I see, with pretty ladies on his lap, different pretty lady every half hour. And he’s developed this lower
00:55:49 ►
back massage. And he pinpoints, just like some kind of acupuncture, and just really pinpoints.
00:55:55 ►
But whenever a good statement is, he’s willing to lose the pinpoint in order to applaud. So
00:56:00 ►
that’s one of the things that gives me hope, is that you can divide your
00:56:05 ►
attention between the sensory and the eternal. In fact, Tim once made a statement, which
00:56:14 ►
I’ve wondered about a long time, that smoking marijuana makes you dumb but sensual. Is that a fair quote, Tim? I don’t know. I’ve been smoking about that.
00:56:30 ►
Well, one of the things I had, last night they had a researcher who was trying to test this out.
00:56:36 ►
They did this with Canadian mice.
00:56:39 ►
Half of them were given marijuana to smoke and half of them weren’t.
00:56:43 ►
Then all of them were injected with cancer.
00:56:47 ►
Now, the half that were still intelligent because they hadn’t smoked grass volunteered
00:56:54 ►
for the laetrile experiments. And the other half went out and got laid. And both groups got cured.
00:57:12 ►
Except all the researchers got warts.
00:57:17 ►
They always say there’s a happy ending
00:57:18 ►
and something pops in there.
00:57:22 ►
Last night there was a discussion of how you could be conscious with everything and still have Kundalini.
00:57:31 ►
And Kundalini always has seemed to me like a very male-oriented sexual practice where the man holds back the ejaculation and reverses into a backstroke.
00:57:43 ►
and reverses into a backstroke,
00:57:46 ►
and the spermatozoa go back the penis,
00:57:49 ►
up the spine, into the cranial cavity to cure baldness from the inside.
00:57:55 ►
There was one group here,
00:57:58 ►
it’s a new cult,
00:57:59 ►
they derived their entire theology
00:58:02 ►
from Celestial Seasonings tea bag boxes.
00:58:21 ►
One of the things that gives me more hope than anything is if we were the weirdos, it’s the children of the weirdos that give me hope. I was in Minneapolis a couple of weeks ago, and I met a woman who had a 10-year-old daughter who noticed sexism in a TV commercial
00:58:29 ►
that the mother hadn’t noticed. A 10-year-old girl said it was a beer commercial for Rondo Beer,
00:58:34 ►
and it had a man athlete come in, and he drinks his beer, and he crushes his beer can.
00:58:39 ►
A woman comes in, drinks her beer, and doesn’t crush the can. And a 10-year-old girl was
00:58:44 ►
perceptive enough to notice that and know the implications the can. And a 10-year-old girl was perceptive
00:58:45 ►
enough to notice that and know the implications of it. So that’s one of the things that gives
00:58:50 ►
me hope, you know, that kind of consciousness. I also met a six-year-old hash dealer. This
00:58:58 ►
wasn’t in America, though. It was in Woodstock.
00:59:07 ►
What they knew,
00:59:10 ►
Reagan now wants to spell Woodstock with two Cs in order to make up for those people
00:59:11 ►
who spelled America with a K.
00:59:13 ►
It’s sort of an FCC equal time thing.
00:59:17 ►
My own daughter, Holly, who is now 17,
00:59:19 ►
has given me a lot of reason for hope.
00:59:21 ►
When I was her age,
00:59:23 ►
I couldn’t talk to my parents about sex when she
00:59:26 ►
was 16 she called me up and she played carly simon’s record of daddy i’m no virgin you know
00:59:31 ►
i mean i was just i was proud of her uh there was i have to admit a touch of resentment because i
00:59:38 ►
wasn’t getting any when i was 16 you know and you try not to have sour grapes, but you think, oh, these kids today, they don’t appreciate the joy of yearning.
00:59:53 ►
I mean, they’ve missed the learning experience of blue balls.
00:59:57 ►
Is blue balls still cup or is it our blue balls?
00:59:59 ►
Is blue balls a collective noun?
01:00:01 ►
Are blue balls a collective noun?
01:00:06 ►
I know when Buckminster Fuller gets blue balls, they’re verbs.
01:00:17 ►
Where was I?
01:00:18 ►
Oh, okay.
01:00:23 ►
So my daughter Holly just graduated high school,
01:00:27 ►
and they had a drug rehabilitation crew come to her class
01:00:27 ►
to try and warn the kids about dangers.
01:00:30 ►
And the kids are very sophisticated,
01:00:32 ►
but the people from drug rehab
01:00:33 ►
have to be very gung-ho
01:00:34 ►
so they can stay out of jail.
01:00:36 ►
And the kids know that,
01:00:37 ►
so they kind of play along with them.
01:00:39 ►
They hear about these tests that not only…
01:00:42 ►
I guess that’s the second step
01:00:43 ►
after what Walt Stewart said.
01:00:44 ►
If males have breasts
01:00:46 ►
in case they’re going to have a baby
01:00:47 ►
and smoking marijuana
01:00:48 ►
can give a male a breast,
01:00:50 ►
maybe this is another portent,
01:00:52 ►
you know,
01:00:53 ►
or else it could cut down
01:00:55 ►
on sexual harassment in the office.
01:00:58 ►
Just, you know,
01:00:58 ►
take a letter
01:00:59 ►
while I just fondle myself.
01:01:02 ►
And I keep forgetting,
01:01:03 ►
is it the right brain
01:01:04 ►
that makes the left nipple erect?
01:01:06 ►
I always get a headache when I try to
01:01:07 ►
remember that shit.
01:01:10 ►
Do you know what the mounds of Montgomery
01:01:14 ►
are? This is an intelligent
01:01:16 ►
audience. Where is higher intelligence?
01:01:17 ►
Do you know what the mounds of Montgomery are?
01:01:19 ►
It’s not a situation comedy, you know, the mounds
01:01:22 ►
of Montgomery. It’s, you know
01:01:24 ►
your nipples?
01:01:26 ►
That’s a rhetorical question.
01:01:27 ►
Don’t introduce yourselves.
01:01:32 ►
And around the nipples is the aureola, the shady part.
01:01:34 ►
Those little bumps are the mounds of Montgomery.
01:01:36 ►
I mean, you should know them.
01:01:37 ►
Talk to them.
01:01:38 ►
They have personality. You should have mounds of Montgomery consciousness.
01:01:42 ►
I’ll bet you know what Bartholin’s glands are.
01:01:48 ►
That’s amazing. Something, it’s, you know, the female love lubricant. There was a pre-med student named Pete Bartholin,
01:01:55 ►
who was in the movies with his girlfriend. He said, boy, you’re juicy. And then he thought,
01:01:59 ►
I could get this named after me. What better scientific recognition could you get do you know
01:02:05 ►
what temesis is temesis how is it pronounced you know it’s a medical term
01:02:10 ►
for when you’ve just shed but you still think you have to shit some more there’s
01:02:15 ►
an actual term for that okay I’ll just am i practicing practicing chemists up here?
01:02:26 ►
Oh, okay.
01:02:29 ►
Alright, so
01:02:30 ►
these drug rehabilitation
01:02:32 ►
people come and they warn
01:02:34 ►
the kids, they say, you know, if you
01:02:36 ►
go home, your parents know you’ve been smoking dope.
01:02:38 ►
They can tell. Your pupils are dilated.
01:02:41 ►
Your speech is slurred.
01:02:42 ►
You have short-term memory loss.
01:02:44 ►
And the kids say, what about if you go home and your parents’ aren’t out? You know, your speech is slurred, you have short-term memory loss, and the kids say, what about if you go home and your parents aren’t out?
01:02:47 ►
You know, your father is speaking slurred and giggling a lot, and you say, hey, mom,
01:02:52 ►
and she says, huh?
01:02:54 ►
She’s forgotten her name as well as her role.
01:02:58 ►
And they admit this is a problem.
01:03:00 ►
They warn, they try to give the kids warnings.
01:03:02 ►
How many of you kids here take Quaaludes?
01:03:08 ►
About six or seven kids have, but they can’t raise their hands. So he says, if you smoke a joint, three days after you’ve taken Quaalude, you’ll get the
01:03:16 ►
effects of the Quaalude again.
01:03:18 ►
So you know, it’s like 1984, it was meant as a warning and people take it as a blueprint.
01:03:24 ►
So these kids
01:03:25 ►
write it down, okay, like a homework assignment, three days, so a Quaalude, try it, day one,
01:03:29 ►
and they just test it out. There was one kid there who asked if silver rectangles was good
01:03:38 ►
acid. Now, the drug rehab people had heard of orange sunshine, which was a tab, and green
01:03:43 ►
pyramid, which was a jellied substance where the acid injected. They had not heard of orange sunshine, which was a tab and green pyramid, which was a jellied substance with the acid injected
01:03:45 ►
They had not heard of silver rectangles until one kid confessed that it was from the you know
01:03:51 ►
Library books to have this little metal strip sort of which has been electronically treated so that if you go through a metal detector
01:03:56 ►
It beeps to show that you’ve been shoplifting and so a kid but he had been given those out and that’s what it was
01:04:01 ►
Except he was tripping from the placebo effect
01:04:04 ►
had been given those out and that’s what it was except it was tripping from the placebo effect and so the kids took them down to the library after when the bell rang and he kept pretending
01:04:12 ►
he was stealing books and then going through and it would beep and they was they finally got
01:04:15 ►
completely undressed and they walked through and it beeped so they called in a repair people to
01:04:20 ►
take care of the machine okay let me tell you you my favorite story about the reason to be optimistic, and then I will
01:04:30 ►
turn the proceedings back to Larry.
01:04:33 ►
This happened a few years ago at the University of Kansas.
01:04:35 ►
There was a panel discussion, and on it, the panel were Ken Kesey, myself, Max Lerner,
01:04:43 ►
who they got from Rent-A-Liberal.
01:04:44 ►
Ken Kesey, myself, Max Lerner, who they got from Rent-A-Liberal.
01:04:55 ►
And probably when he tells it, he says they got up from Rent-A-Weirdo, so it balances out.
01:05:01 ►
And there was also a Chicano professor from the university on the panel.
01:05:03 ►
Now, at the end of the panel, there were questions.
01:05:09 ►
There was a microphone, and people would come up to ask questions, and people would answer them. About halfway through that proceeding, a dwarf who was crippled came up on crutches to the microphone, and
01:05:16 ►
everybody kind of remained a little bit tense and silent. This was before the Disabled Liberation
01:05:22 ►
Movement, and people were kind of a little bit shocked to see somebody coming forward,
01:05:26 ►
a dwarf on crutches
01:05:27 ►
to the microphone.
01:05:28 ►
And he started lambasting the panel
01:05:30 ►
and saying,
01:05:30 ►
I, for one,
01:05:33 ►
resent the pessimism
01:05:35 ►
that I’ve heard
01:05:35 ►
coming from this panel.
01:05:36 ►
I don’t like that negativity.
01:05:38 ►
I read a lot of papers
01:05:40 ►
in the underground
01:05:40 ►
and the overground.
01:05:41 ►
I speak to a lot of people
01:05:41 ►
on the phone.
01:05:43 ►
I know that bartering
01:05:44 ►
is beginning to become popular even in the middle class. I see food co-ops developing. I speak to a lot of people on the phone. I know that bartering is beginning to become popular
01:05:45 ►
even in the middle class.
01:05:47 ►
I see food co-ops developing.
01:05:48 ►
I see people fighting city hall
01:05:49 ►
on every possible imaginative level.
01:05:52 ►
He says, I see…
01:05:54 ►
And he just went on with a delineation
01:05:57 ►
of all the things that he felt
01:05:59 ►
there were to be optimistic about.
01:06:01 ►
And nobody on the panel wanted to answer him
01:06:03 ►
except the Chicano professor got up and he said, well, that’s easy for you to say. You’re white. So I always try
01:06:13 ►
to remember that, moments of optimism. I’ll leave you now with the good news and the bad
01:06:19 ►
news. The bad news is if you see the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, they have this clock
01:06:24 ►
that they put on
01:06:25 ►
the cover periodically which uh the doomsday clock which tells you uh how many minutes we have to go
01:06:30 ►
according to some time scale that only they know represents uh and um the um last time they did it
01:06:39 ►
a few months ago they updated the clock so it’s three minutes to midnight which means nuclear devastation.
01:06:45 ►
That’s the bad news.
01:06:47 ►
The good news is that scientists, just like the rest of us,
01:06:50 ►
they always set their clocks ten minutes ahead.
01:06:52 ►
So we have that grace period.
01:06:54 ►
Thank you.
01:07:02 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon
01:07:04 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:07:10 ►
As much as I want to hear the rest of this panel discussion right now,
01:07:14 ►
I’m afraid that we’re going to have to wait for the next podcast to hear it,
01:07:18 ►
as we’re already over time for today’s program.
01:07:21 ►
But since I want to hear the rest of it myself as much as you do,
01:07:24 ►
I’ll get my next podcast out in the next few days.
01:07:28 ►
At least that’s my intention.
01:07:29 ►
I have to warn you, however,
01:07:31 ►
that I work in a place that’s called
01:07:33 ►
Hagerty’s Fancy.
01:07:35 ►
And that means that I more or less wind up
01:07:37 ►
doing whatever strikes my fancy on any given day.
01:07:41 ►
Not a bad place to work, all things considered.
01:07:44 ►
So I’m going to bring this to an early end today
01:07:47 ►
and save my comments for the conclusion of the panel discussion that we’ve been listening to.
01:07:51 ►
But there are a couple of quick announcements that I want to pass along first.
01:07:56 ►
One is about Earth Dance.
01:07:58 ►
And as you no doubt know, on this coming September 26th,
01:08:02 ►
Earth Dance will be held at over 300 locations
01:08:05 ►
in more than 60 countries.
01:08:07 ►
It’s an important event in the tribe’s annual calendar,
01:08:10 ►
and there’s most likely one that will be close to where you live.
01:08:15 ►
So if you can, surf on over to earthdance.org
01:08:18 ►
and find a location near you.
01:08:21 ►
Who knows, you may even find some of the others there.
01:08:25 ►
And the other event where you may even find some of the others there. And the other event where you’ll definitely
01:08:27 ►
find some of the others is one I want to mention, and that is the Symbiosis
01:08:32 ►
Gathering, which will take place from the 17th through the 21st
01:08:36 ►
of September near Yosemite National Park in California.
01:08:40 ►
And their website is at symbiosisgathering.com
01:08:43 ►
That’s S-Y-M-B-I-O-S-I-S-G-A-T-H-E-R-I-N-G, symbiosisgathering.com.
01:08:51 ►
And on their musicians portal page, I counted over 100 musical acts that are going to be there.
01:08:57 ►
And on the hot air front, or I guess I should say on the intellectual front,
01:09:02 ►
you’re going to be able to hear from people like Allison and Alex Gray,
01:09:07 ►
Starhawk, the physicist Freehoff Copra, Daniel Pinchbeck,
01:09:12 ►
and you’ll even get a few words from yours truly, because I’ll be there as well.
01:09:16 ►
So it looks to be a fantastic event, and I hope that I see you there.
01:09:22 ►
Now, one last thing I want to mention is to thank our fellow Saloners
01:09:26 ►
for their very kind and loving messages of support and good wishes
01:09:30 ►
that have come in in the past couple of months.
01:09:33 ►
I really appreciate your comments about my new novel, The Genesis Generation,
01:09:37 ►
and I want you to know that I’m keeping your thoughts in mind
01:09:40 ►
as I work on the next volume in the series.
01:09:42 ►
So, thanks again for all of your good ideas. Thank you. this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are freely available for you to use in your
01:10:05 ►
own audio projects under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 license.
01:10:11 ►
And if you have any questions about that, just click on the Creative Commons link at the
01:10:15 ►
bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
01:10:20 ►
And if you’re interested in hearing what I have to say about the Genesis Generation,
01:10:25 ►
you can go to genesisgeneration.us
01:10:27 ►
and find a link to a free download of the first chapter if you’re interested.
01:10:33 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:10:38 ►
Be well, my friends. I’m an alien
01:10:47 ►
Alien
01:10:52 ►
Alien
01:10:57 ►
I’m an alien