Program Notes
Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary
[NOTE: All quotations are by Dr. Timothy Leary.]
“Religion is supposed to be fun and ecstasy, because it’s all a play of energy that we’re involved in.”
“Now the message I have is an old one, the simplest and most classic message that has ever been passed on in world history. It’s those six words: Drop out, turn on, then come back and tune it in. And then drop out again and turn on and tune it back in. It’s a rhythm.”
“Now how do you turn on? Well, I’ll tell you this, you can’t turn on with words, you can’t turn on with thinking. You can’t think your way out of this sticky black checker board of an American education. And good works won’t do it for you either. You can be as virtuous and as good as you want to, but you’re not going to turn on and get the key to the mystery that way. In order to turn on you’ve got to have what the religious metaphor calls a sacrament.”
“Now with all the Russian roulette games I see around me, including Viet Nam and polluted air, I would say that the Russian roulette of LSD is about the best gamble in the house.”
“The educational system, at the present time in the United States does neurological damage to the nervous system and functions as a narcotic, addictive drug.”
“The educational process is a real dangerous drug. Use it carefully because you’re likely to get hooked.”
“You, the younger generation in particular, have got to drop out, and by drop out I mean all the way. You can’t vote, I urge you not to do politics, don’t picket, don’t get involved in any of these menopausal mind games because it doesn’t make any difference.”
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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.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And hopefully you are actually able to download today’s program on the same day I uploaded it.
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The reason I mention that is that last week I uploaded my podcast a full week before notes, I discovered that the podcast hadn’t actually been registered with iTunes and the other aggregators.
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And so you most likely wondered why I began it by saying how proud I was of myself for getting a podcast out so soon after returning from the symbiosis gathering.
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Symbiosis Gathering. Things have gotten a little discombobulated around here lately,
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and so I have to grab my chances to get on the net at odd and somewhat unpredictable hours. And so, in all of the newfound confusion in my life, I completely lost the thread and
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forgot to finish posting the rest of the podcast. But as I settle into a new routine, I most
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definitely will not let something like that slip through the cracks again.
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Now, some of our fellow salonners who haven’t let anything slip through the cracks
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are Salma S., Sean L., Chris T., Carl H., and my longtime and very dear friend, Dick C.
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I do hope that you and our other donors know that there is simply no way I would still be doing these podcasts Dick C. and learn that they are not alone, and that there are quite literally millions upon millions of psychedelic explorers out there
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who are also doing their best to find a few others,
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just like you and I have now found one another.
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So, Salma, Sean, Chris, Carl, and Dick,
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thank you ever so much for your very generous donations.
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I assure you that your hard-earned cash will be put to good use Thank you. to a host of volunteers who digitized the material before sending it to me to podcast.
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The recording I’ve selected to play today is from an event that was held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, in 1967.
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At the time this event was held, it was quite newsworthy,
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mainly because it was a pseudo-debate between Dr. Leary and one Dr. Jerry Letvin,
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who was a very popular professor at MIT at the time.
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This particular evening’s debate achieved a somewhat questionable footnote in history because of a single word.
00:03:15 ►
Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the two talks that we’re about to hear.
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In 1967, Jerry Letvin debated Timothy Leary about the merits of LSD.
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Jerry hurled the timeless epithet bullshit at Leary, who was sitting in the lotus position near a candle.
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This in response to Leary, a licensed psychologist, characterizing the frank assumptions of temporal lobe epilepsy as a religious experience.
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epilepsy as a religious experience.
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The event was later broadcast uncensored by a public television station,
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which may be the first time that such a taboo word was ever spoken on broadcast television.
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Just think of how taboo that was in 67 to say bullshit in public.
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We’ve made a little progress, I guess.
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Actually, I almost didn’t play this talk because of the background music that somebody must have thought was really cool or something.
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In actuality, it’s a horrible distraction.
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I guess that 40 years ago we were all so buttoned down that maybe strange and loud music at a university lecture was what we needed to get people’s attention.
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But it sure does make listening to Dr. Leary quite difficult.
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From what I’ve been able to find out, this talk was given in November of 1967.
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By then, I had already graduated from college,
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and at the time of the talk, I was serving with the U.S. Navy in Vietnam.
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So if I had heard this recording back then, particularly with the weird music,
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I most likely would have found the good doctor too far out for me at the time.
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I guess that this mellowing and perspective
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that comes with old age can sometimes be a good thing.
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Of course, I still don’t feel like I’m old yet,
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so maybe my most grumpy days are still ahead of me.
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Let’s hope not, huh?
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Anyway, what we are about to hear
00:05:03 ►
is the exchange between Dr. Leary and Dr. Letvin,
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who also, according to Wikipedia, is best known as the author of
00:05:10 ►
What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain, written in 1959,
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and is one of the most cited papers in the Science Citation Index.
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And when you hear Letvin begin his talk,
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And when you hear Letvin begin his talk, you’ll understand how amazingly low the level of discourse was in academia back then when it came to psychedelics.
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It seems that Jerome Letvin and his Ph.D. colleagues all thought that a psychedelic experience involved nothing more than staring at one’s navel.
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And, by the way, that may actually be what Dr. Leary thought before he tried psychedelics for the first time.
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The difference, of course, is that Dr. Leary had one characteristic that Jerome Letvin and the other critics of his day lacked,
00:05:55 ►
and that is courage.
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Courage.
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Timothy Leary had the courage to not only experiment on himself,
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he also had the courage to tell the world about it,
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eventually costing him dearly.
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So, bravo to Timothy Leary, Baba Ram Dass,
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Ralph Metzner, Betty Eisner, Gary Fisher,
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Myron Stolaroff, and all of the other early pioneers
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in the resurgence of our sacred medicines.
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We have been very fortunate to have these women
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and men of courage stand up and be counted
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when it was very dangerous for them to do so.
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And I also think we are very fortunate indeed that we have made it as far as we have to be able to meet here in cyberdelic space and talk about these things.
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As you will hear in a few minutes when this poorly informed and highly prejudiced clown Jerome Letvin compares doing LSD and psilocybin to having a lobotomy
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and calling Dr. Leary a tool of the devil,
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well, the 60s were actually much like the Dark Ages.
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And keep in mind that this guy was an MIT professor,
00:06:57 ►
a pillar of mainstream thought in 1967.
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For sure, we still have many miles to go before we sleep,
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but at least we’ve moved away from some of the more provincial and small-minded thinking
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That characterized the 50s and 60s
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I guess I’m going on way too long here
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But wait till you hear this Latvin guy
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He sounds more like a fire-and-brimstone preacher
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Out of a 1930s Steinbeck novel than an MIT professor
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Whoa, where did all this come from? Where was I? Okay, yeah out of a 1930s Steinbeck novel than a MIT professor.
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Whoa, where did all this come from?
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Where was I? Okay, yeah.
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Getting back to introducing today’s program,
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I would first like to play a short soundbite for you.
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It’s from the movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which you can watch for free on Hulu.com, by the way.
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Here it is.
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for free on Hulu.com, by the way.
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Here it is.
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Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas.
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Has it been five years?
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Six?
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It seems like a lifetime.
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The kind of peak that never comes again.
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San Francisco in the middle 60s was a very special time and place to be a part of.
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But no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time in the world.
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Whatever it meant. There was madness in any direction.
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At any hour.
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You could strike sparks anywhere.
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There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right.
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That we were winning.
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And that, I think, was the handle.
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That sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil.
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Not in any mean or military sense.
00:08:59 ►
We didn’t need that.
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Our energy would simply prevail.
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We had all the momentum.
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We were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.
00:09:13 ►
So now, less than five years later,
00:09:17 ►
you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west.
00:09:21 ►
And with the right kind of eyes,
00:09:23 ►
you can almost see the high watermark. That
00:09:27 ►
place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
00:09:39 ►
Ah, Hunter S. Thompson definitely nailed it when he said, San Francisco in the middle 60s was a very special time and place to be a part of.
00:09:49 ►
And do you know what?
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Even if you were on the straight and narrow, married and in the military, as I was at the time,
00:09:57 ►
I’m here to tell you that in the winter of 66 and 67, San Francisco was a happening place for everybody.
00:10:04 ►
1966 and 67, San Francisco was a happening place for everybody.
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And someday I’ll have to tell you the story of the morning my ex-wife and I took our three-year-old son to Golden Gate Park,
00:10:16 ►
as we often did when I had a day off from my duties on the destroyer I was stationed on.
00:10:22 ►
We would go there to stroll through the park and to let our son feed the geese and ducks. But on this one January morning in 1967,
00:10:26 ►
we never made it to the lake because the place was full of hippies.
00:10:30 ►
It was the day of the be-in, and I remember it vividly
00:10:34 ►
because it was on that morning that I finally understood
00:10:37 ►
how seriously I had gone wrong in the life choices that I’d made.
00:10:42 ►
But that’s a story for another day.
00:10:45 ►
So let’s get on with Tim and Jerome, and then I’ll bring us back with another short clip from
00:10:50 ►
Fear and Loathing.
00:11:03 ►
As a way of life, it’s also been used for thousands of years as a sacrament
00:11:08 ►
now you know what a sacrament is a sacrament is a psychedelic technique it’s something that
00:11:16 ►
you use to get high get high yes a cycle is something that gets you high, gets you off the television stage set.
00:11:26 ►
Pretty solid here.
00:11:28 ►
Amazing how solid they make these sets these days.
00:11:34 ►
Gets you off the fake pop television stage set
00:11:38 ►
of MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America,
00:11:42 ►
and reminds you that you’re not just a college student.
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You’re not just 22 or 23 or 24 years old.
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You’re 2 billion years old.
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Had you forgotten that?
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Matter of fact, water, can you remind you where you came from?
00:12:02 ►
Remember, you spent nine months in a watery medium.
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First nine months
00:12:06 ►
this trip
00:12:08 ►
on this planet.
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Remember all that sloshing?
00:12:14 ►
Now could we have
00:12:15 ►
the lights out now please?
00:12:20 ►
I opened our ceremony
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Could I have all the lights out please? I opened our ceremony…
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Can I have all the lights on, please?
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You’re going to see on the screen…
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home movies and slide projections of little travels and trips that we take.
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The slides give you the LSD experience
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from the inside,
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and the movies present
00:13:01 ►
the observer’s view of an LSD trip from the outside.
00:13:08 ►
The movies are unedited film that’s been shot minute after minute, hour after hour, during LSD sessions.
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I lit a candle to open our ceremony tonight, again to remind us who we are and where we came from what it’s all
00:13:25 ►
about because that’s what you hear in MIT to learn
00:13:29 ►
power has been used as a sacrament for thousands of years it reminds us that
00:13:34 ►
we’re all creatures of the Sun that we all have little fires burning inside of us from solar energy. Now fire is dangerous. Fire can kill.
00:13:49 ►
Fire can burn, destroy. As a matter of fact, the first time there was any fire, Prometheus
00:13:54 ►
got in a lot of trouble. The FDA got in a lot of trouble, remember? They said, wait a minute,
00:14:01 ►
we’re going too fast. Maybe we’re not ready for fire.
00:14:08 ►
As a matter of fact, that’s a question that often occurs to many of us these days.
00:14:14 ►
Maybe man isn’t ready for powerful chemicals like LSD and the many new ones that are coming.
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Maybe man’s little mind isn’t ready at this moment in evolution to deal with too much, too fast, in the way of reality.
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Fire is dangerous.
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Maybe we should pass a law against it.
00:14:32 ►
Maybe we should peck out the livers of everybody that uses it.
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Certainly can’t let high school and college children have it.
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What are we going to do about it?
00:14:44 ►
How are we going to do about it?
00:14:48 ►
How are we going to keep people from burning themselves up and hurting themselves and killing themselves with fire?
00:14:54 ►
Well, we’ve got to start training our kids from the time they can listen to us,
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that fire is here, that water is here, that the lot of energy is around that are here that aren’t going to go away,
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and they better learn how to use them from the very earliest moments and know what they can do and what they can’t do and how they destroy.
00:15:06 ►
Because sometimes when I see what fire is doing to the thin layer of topsoil on this planet,
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I wonder maybe they were right about Prometheus
00:15:15 ►
and maybe the human race isn’t ready even now to deal with powers like fire.
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Now, it may seem eccentric to you that I come to an institute of engineering and technology
00:15:27 ►
and start talking about sacraments and earth and air and fire and water and ceremonies,
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but I don’t really think it should be that odd. The uniform I’m wearing may be out of date.
00:15:42 ►
In this particular brief show you have going here, but people
00:15:46 ►
have been sitting barefoot as I am sitting now in front of you for thousands of years
00:15:51 ►
in front of candlelight talking about what I’m talking about. Where are we going? What’s
00:15:55 ►
it all about? What can we do about it? How can we figure it out? How can we tune it back
00:15:59 ►
in? Don’t you know that the real, real goal of a scientist is to flip out? Don’t you know that the real real goal of a scientist is to flip out don’t you know that
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had you forgotten oh you thought that the role of a scientist was to build bigger and bigger
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stage sets for the television show we got going here yeah uh we have a big road running from the
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cops and robbers game here to the cowboy ind Indian show over there and your engineers are
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supposed to build them so that we can go faster and faster and farther and
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farther from television show to television show but if you take science
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seriously and if you take the history of science seriously you realize that every
00:16:41 ►
great scientist wasn’t in it for the TV show
00:16:45 ►
commercial payout.
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He was in it to find out
00:16:49 ►
what it’s all about.
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What’s the nature of energy?
00:16:51 ►
What are the many levels of energy?
00:16:52 ►
What are the levels of consciousness?
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How can we map them out?
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How can we use them?
00:16:56 ►
And as he got to know more and more
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and to penetrate deeper and deeper
00:17:00 ►
into the mysteries of energy around us,
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he began to flip out.
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He began to flip out. He began to flip out.
00:17:06 ►
Look at Einstein.
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E equals mc squared.
00:17:09 ►
Come on, you mean that’s all energy?
00:17:13 ►
Wow! Einstein did it without LSD.
00:17:17 ►
You have been led to believe, most of you,
00:17:20 ►
that religion is something that’s serious,
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it’s something that’s mildly hypocritical and has
00:17:25 ►
really little to do with the basic questions in life which are all of science well uh the facts
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matter are that religion is supposed to be fun and ecstasy because uh you know it’s all a play that
00:17:38 ►
we’re involved in of energy and uh you think that a religious person is one who goes around with a long face reciting the Boy Scout oath.
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Religion starts as science has always started,
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in the pursuit, the quest for the ultimate questions.
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And it’s fun. Science should be fun.
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Science should be pleasure. Science should be flipping out,
00:18:02 ►
going out of your mind,
00:18:07 ►
really stunned by the joy of this incredible energy situation. Now, the message I have is an old one. It’s the simplest and most
00:18:14 ►
classic message ever passed on in world history. It’s those six words, drop out, turn on,
00:18:31 ►
out, turn on, then come back and tune it in. And then drop out again and turn on and tune it back in.
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It’s a rhythm. Now most of us are brain damaged by what Marshall McLuhan would call the Gutenberg Galaxy and most of us think that God and the DNA code made this universe in the nature of subject-object predicates.
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Sentences.
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There’s no level of energy
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and no process in biology or physics
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that operates with subject-predicate sentences.
00:19:00 ►
Turn on tune and drop out, period.
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End the paragraph, turn the page.
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It’s all a rhythm
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it’s all a beat
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Jackie
00:19:08 ►
give us the beat
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you turn on
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you find it inside
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then you have to come back
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you can’t stay high all the time
00:19:19 ►
and you have to start building a better model
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building a better building
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building a better temple
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building a better poem building a better language building a better model, building a better building, building a better temple, building a better poem, building a better language, building a better music.
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It’s always been done that way.
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But don’t get caught.
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Don’t get hooked.
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Don’t get attracted by the thing you’re building because you’ve got to drop out.
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And it’s a cycle.
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Turn on, tune in, drop out.
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Keep it going.
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Keep it going.
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Because the nervous system operates that way.
00:19:43 ►
100,000 million signals a second, right? I’m sorry. 1,000 million signals a second coming in your nervous system operates that way. 100,000 million signals a second, right?
00:19:45 ►
I’m sorry, 1,000 million signals a second
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coming into your nervous system.
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It’s that same beat.
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You’ve got to keep it flowing.
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You’ve got to keep it flowing.
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I want to talk for a minute about the term turn on.
00:20:01 ►
To turn on, you have to have a key
00:20:03 ►
to get in touch with the neurological,
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sensory, and cellular information that you’ve got stored in that two billion
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year old receptacle you call your body. Now how do you turn on? Well I’ll tell
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you this, you can’t turn on with words, you can’t turn on with thinking, you
00:20:23 ►
can’t think your way out the sticky black molasses chessboard of American education. I’m sorry. And good works won’t do it for you either. You can be as virtuous and as good as you want to, but you’re not going to turn on and get the key to calls a sacrament.
00:20:45 ►
What’s a sacrament?
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A sacrament is something that changes your body,
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that changes your nervous system.
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And if a sacrament that you use doesn’t affect your body,
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doesn’t bring about this internal change,
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then it’s not a sacrament.
00:21:02 ►
It’s a television show prop that they’ve given you to keep you nice and quiet in the car or the studio.
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It staggers the imagination to think of the means and the methods that men have used in the past to
00:21:11 ►
turn on, to bring about a change in the sensory neural equipment that we carry around with us.
00:21:17 ►
There’s hardly any activity, physical, sensory, or even television prop studio activity that men
00:21:22 ►
haven’t used in one time or another to get high, to go out of their minds,
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to come to their senses, to take the trip.
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Flagellation.
00:21:33 ►
Solitude.
00:21:35 ►
Cringing together in large temples.
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Silence.
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Music.
00:21:40 ►
The tampura.
00:21:42 ►
The Indian beat.
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The drums in Africa.
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Sexual. the tampura, the Indian beat, the drums in Africa, sexual abstinence,
00:21:54 ►
carefully worked out in systematic routines of tantric sexuality
00:21:59 ►
in which you find the divine with a member of the opposite sex fasting or the ingestion of sacred foods.
00:22:13 ►
Now today, the sacrament is a chemical, or it’s a series of chemicals.
00:22:19 ►
Now, let’s not get upset about LSD. In first place, there are longer, stronger, more powerful chemicals that have the same effect as LSD that are in circulation right now in the United States.
00:22:34 ►
There’ll be many more coming along. I make this flat prediction, as fast as the government passes a law against one of these molecules, a new one will come along.
00:22:42 ►
molecules, a new one will come along because for thousands of years
00:22:44 ►
Caesar’s been trying to stop people
00:22:46 ►
from wandering off the stage set of the
00:22:48 ►
studio game and
00:22:50 ►
getting outside, under the stars,
00:22:53 ►
getting back inside
00:22:54 ►
to
00:22:55 ►
figure out what it’s all about.
00:22:58 ►
So let’s not get too upset about LSD because
00:23:00 ►
even the era of
00:23:02 ►
biochemistry for
00:23:04 ►
bringing about the cellular experience
00:23:05 ►
is almost over.
00:23:07 ►
Within your lifetime,
00:23:08 ►
you will see the new sacrament
00:23:10 ►
or the new key to the internal process developed.
00:23:14 ►
As a matter of fact,
00:23:15 ►
most of you are going to have a terrible time
00:23:17 ►
with your kids in about 25 years
00:23:19 ►
because you’ll be sitting around home
00:23:21 ►
smoking marijuana
00:23:22 ►
and preparing for your next weekly LSD session like good, tidy, conventional people should.
00:23:28 ►
And your kids are going to come and say, hey, Dad and Mom, in Greenwich Village, there’s a new technique called electronic brain stimulation.
00:23:36 ►
And you’re going to say, no implanting electrodes in my children’s heads.
00:23:44 ►
And your kids will be growing pigtails.
00:23:48 ►
And you’re going to get upset and say,
00:23:49 ►
why don’t you use the old tried and true methods
00:23:53 ►
of finding out where it’s at, like LSD.
00:24:00 ►
Now, there’s much confusion about the scientific status and the scientific evidence about LSD.
00:24:11 ►
And I’ll say this quite flatly.
00:24:15 ►
There’s no evidence that I know of, and I read the literature pretty carefully,
00:24:21 ►
that can tell us very much about what LSD does to consciousness or to the nervous system or to the genetic material.
00:24:31 ►
Anytime you hear anyone talking to you about LSD
00:24:34 ►
and pretending to give you scientific facts
00:24:36 ►
whether they’re pro or con LSD
00:24:38 ►
I suggest that you be very skeptical.
00:24:42 ►
I don’t know whether LSD is good or bad.
00:24:44 ►
I don’t know the effects of L good or bad. I don’t know the
00:24:45 ►
effects of LSD on the nervous system, on the brain, or on the genetic material. It’s a gamble. It’s a
00:24:52 ►
risk. The sacrament is always a risk. The new technique for expanding consciousness is always
00:24:58 ►
a risk. Did you really think that it could be guaranteed for you. Hey, wake up.
00:25:06 ►
Have you forgotten who you are and where you came from?
00:25:08 ►
That the whole thing is an adventure?
00:25:09 ►
And that you’re from a long line of adventurers
00:25:11 ►
who got into leaky boats and leaky crafts
00:25:13 ►
and put strange things in their mouths
00:25:15 ►
and put strange things in the ground?
00:25:18 ►
Not quite knowing what they’re doing?
00:25:20 ►
Yeah.
00:25:21 ►
Taking a psychedelic chemical is a risk.
00:25:23 ►
Taking LSD is a risk.
00:25:27 ►
It’s a gamble. it’s Russian roulette but
00:25:30 ►
what isn’t?
00:25:36 ►
can you name anything that you breathe or put in your body
00:25:39 ►
or let filter through the atmosphere
00:25:41 ►
into your nervous system
00:25:43 ►
like television waves
00:25:44 ►
that aren’t an unknown gamble.
00:25:46 ►
And of all the Russian roulette games I see around me, including Vietnam and Polluted Air,
00:25:52 ►
I would say that the Russian roulette at LSD is about the best gamble in the house.
00:26:02 ►
To show you the difficult nature of the scientific study of LSD, I want to tell you a story of
00:26:11 ►
what happened with the scientific study of marijuana in the United States.
00:26:16 ►
You know, marijuana has been around a long time.
00:26:23 ►
Everyone has their mind made up about marijuana.
00:26:26 ►
How many of you have ever read a scientific paper in a scientific journal
00:26:33 ►
following the customary checks and controls and language of science?
00:26:39 ►
How many of you have evidence about marijuana as sound as the evidence that you would expect that you’d have to have
00:26:46 ►
to base your opinions on any other aspect of the energy system around us.
00:26:52 ►
As a matter of fact, do you know it’s impossible in the United States for the last 15 or 20
00:26:55 ►
years to do scientific research on marijuana?
00:26:59 ►
There’s a man named Anslinger back in the 30s who got Congress to pass a law saying that marijuana was bad.
00:27:08 ►
Now, as Judeo-Christians, we just have to have something that’s bad.
00:27:12 ►
It has to be communism, it has to be witches, it has to be devils, it has to be possession, or the infidel, the pagan.
00:27:17 ►
We have to have something that’s bad, and then we pass a law against it.
00:27:31 ►
against it. Now, the facts of the matter are that there were some studies done on marijuana, mainly in England, suggesting that marijuana could be useful as a psychiatric cure for
00:27:37 ►
depression, because it sure makes you feel good. But for the last 15 years
00:27:45 ►
It’s now impossible to do research on marijuana
00:27:47 ►
If a full-fledged
00:27:50 ►
Kosher
00:27:51 ►
Bonafide scientist
00:27:53 ►
At an institute like this wanted to do research on marijuana
00:27:55 ►
He had to apply for a government license
00:27:58 ►
And you know what happens if you apply for a government license?
00:28:00 ►
Government inspectors come around and say
00:28:01 ►
What do you want to do research on marijuana for?
00:28:04 ►
You say, well I want to find out what marijuana is about And they say, what do you mean? We know what marijuana for? You say, well, I want to find out what marijuana is about.
00:28:06 ►
And they say, what do you mean?
00:28:07 ►
We know what it’s all about.
00:28:08 ►
It’s written in the law what it’s all about.
00:28:09 ►
Marijuana is a narcotic, addictive drug,
00:28:10 ►
and it causes rape, violence, aggression.
00:28:14 ►
You’re not certainly going to give MIT students
00:28:16 ►
in your laboratory marijuana.
00:28:19 ►
Because what would the Massachusetts State Legislature
00:28:21 ►
think about that, huh?
00:28:24 ►
It’s been impossible to do research on marijuana.
00:28:27 ►
Now, I’d like to tell you a little research that I’ve done on marijuana.
00:28:31 ►
And I want to tell you, lay my cards right on the table,
00:28:34 ►
that I came into the research biased.
00:28:36 ►
I was very much against LSD.
00:28:39 ►
I happen to be an Irish-American, and I like to drink.
00:28:45 ►
As a middle- class teacher at Harvard
00:28:48 ►
or at the University of California,
00:28:50 ►
I’d heard about marijuana, but I had no occasion
00:28:52 ►
to use it because beatniks used it.
00:28:55 ►
And I didn’t know any beatniks,
00:28:58 ►
and they were people like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Carrick,
00:29:01 ►
because they were having a lot of fun,
00:29:02 ►
much more fun than I was having.
00:29:04 ►
But there was no way I could get marijuana and be interested in it.
00:29:07 ►
Then we got involved up at Harvard doing research in LSD.
00:29:11 ►
And I found out, to my surprise, that enormous numbers of young people were using marijuana,
00:29:16 ►
even Harvard students and graduate students.
00:29:19 ►
Well, I have to laugh when I read about the problems of the dean at Harvard now
00:29:23 ►
when the Crimson announces that 70% of the freshman class smoke marijuana,
00:29:27 ►
and the dean has to announce that they’ll throw people out of Harvard if they use marijuana,
00:29:33 ►
because seven years ago I was saying exactly the same things to the people in our research project,
00:29:37 ►
because I didn’t think we should study marijuana.
00:29:40 ►
Because of my contract with Harvard, we were going to study LSD,
00:29:44 ►
which was legal in those days.
00:29:45 ►
Amazing, you just ride away and get it.
00:29:49 ►
I didn’t think it would be fair to mix marijuana up with LSD in our research.
00:29:52 ►
So I would go around, just like the deans at Harvard,
00:29:54 ►
around our research projects in Newton or in Mexico,
00:29:57 ►
and I’d say, Daddy, don’t allow no pot smoking in here.
00:30:03 ►
It wasn’t, matter of fact until I left Harvard and
00:30:08 ►
left
00:30:10 ►
institutional
00:30:12 ►
commitments that I thought I would do some research on marijuana.
00:30:15 ►
But I actually didn’t get around to doing it seriously until I went to India and about the first week I was in India
00:30:20 ►
I went to a place called a ganja shop
00:30:24 ►
I was in India, I went to a place called a ganja shop,
00:30:26 ►
licensed in the city of Calcutta,
00:30:30 ►
and I bought about four ounces of marijuana for a dime or so.
00:30:35 ►
And I was with a holy man, a guru named Asok Fakir,
00:30:39 ►
and he took me down to the Ganges River,
00:30:41 ►
and we sat there with a group of Shivites
00:30:43 ►
sitting around the burning ghats,
00:30:49 ►
and I really began to learn something about marijuana and I was in India for five months and I smoked marijuana every day trying it out in different contexts in different activities
00:30:59 ►
now there’s something about marijuana you see, I’m sorry to say, my beloved robots of the Menopausal Institute of Technology,
00:31:07 ►
there’s no good and evil in this world.
00:31:09 ►
Marijuana is neither good nor bad.
00:31:11 ►
LSD is neither good nor bad.
00:31:12 ►
As a matter of fact, there’s probably no activity that you engage in
00:31:15 ►
from day to day or week to week that wouldn’t be helped
00:31:17 ►
or hindered by the use of marijuana.
00:31:21 ►
And the scientific question is, which ones would be hindered?
00:31:24 ►
In which case, you don’t
00:31:25 ►
ban marijuana, you just don’t
00:31:27 ►
use the
00:31:30 ►
energy that way.
00:31:31 ►
And find out which activities are helped
00:31:33 ►
by marijuana and go down to
00:31:35 ►
the licensed ganja shore in
00:31:37 ►
Cambridge Square and get it.
00:31:41 ►
Now, I want to
00:31:43 ►
conclude my sermon with some comments about dropping out.
00:31:51 ►
This, at the moment, tends to be the controversial part of the motto, turn on, tune in, drop out.
00:31:58 ►
Everyone nowadays accepts the notion of turning on.
00:32:01 ►
Even Madison Avenue is telling you that Salem cigarettes will turn you on.
00:32:05 ►
Everyone wants to be tuned in.
00:32:07 ►
But drop out.
00:32:09 ►
But you can’t say drop out.
00:32:12 ►
You can’t tell college students
00:32:14 ►
they should drop out of college.
00:32:16 ►
You can’t tell middle-aged people
00:32:17 ►
who have mortgage pay
00:32:18 ►
they should drop out of their jobs.
00:32:19 ►
And I’m sorry.
00:32:20 ►
I mean, I didn’t invent this.
00:32:21 ►
I’m just reading the lines
00:32:22 ►
that were given to me.
00:32:23 ►
You’ve got to drop out.
00:32:27 ►
Now, there’s a lot said about education.
00:32:30 ►
Well, you’ve got to finish your education.
00:32:33 ►
When I hear that said, I shudder and my cells shrink
00:32:38 ►
because, I’m sorry to say this,
00:32:40 ►
and I say this with great love and great affection
00:32:42 ►
because I’m part of this whole institution
00:32:44 ►
that we have going, but the education system at the present time in the United States does
00:32:50 ►
neurological damage to the nervous system and functions as a narcotic addictive drug.
00:32:58 ►
It rather shocks me to think about how we take our children, our children who were born with 13 billion nerve cells,
00:33:07 ►
our children who are Buddhas,
00:33:09 ►
born the final product, up-to-date, last-minute version
00:33:13 ►
of a 2-billion-year-old assembly line back in some DNA Detroit,
00:33:17 ►
checking the new models, consumer research.
00:33:19 ►
Hey, how’s the weather up there?
00:33:21 ►
Ah, yes, the ice age is going back.
00:33:23 ►
All right, take a little more hair off the next model.
00:33:25 ►
Yeah.
00:33:28 ►
What color eyes does she like this millennium?
00:33:31 ►
Oh, blue.
00:33:32 ►
A little more blue on the next model.
00:33:34 ►
We were all born perfect, right up-to-date models.
00:33:37 ►
But what happened at the age of four or five,
00:33:39 ►
our parents, with the best intentions,
00:33:43 ►
turned us over to a bunch of strangers that they didn’t know and probably wouldn’t even have a dinner at their house.
00:33:52 ►
To be trained in the only crucial issue of life, control of consciousness.
00:33:59 ►
The educational process is a real dangerous drug.
00:34:05 ►
Use it carefully, because you’re likely to get hooked.
00:34:11 ►
Now, you, the younger generation in particular,
00:34:15 ►
have got to drop out.
00:34:17 ►
And by drop out, I mean all the way.
00:34:19 ►
You can’t vote, I urge you not to politic, don’t picket,
00:34:22 ►
don’t get involved in any of these menopausal mind games.
00:34:26 ►
Because it doesn’t make any difference.
00:34:31 ►
Remember in 1962, we voted for a peace candidate?
00:34:34 ►
And you think it makes a difference?
00:34:38 ►
Now, you face a problem that has never been faced in this particular magnitude in human history.
00:34:44 ►
that has ever been faced in this particular magnitude in human history.
00:34:48 ►
The speed up, the acceleration of technology and knowledge and means of changing things.
00:34:51 ►
Your generation has grown up in a society
00:34:53 ►
that’s a thousand or ten thousand years beyond
00:34:56 ►
the society of your grandfathers and even of your parents.
00:35:01 ►
And I want to present one scientific hypothesis
00:35:06 ►
and there’s plenty of evidence to back it up
00:35:08 ►
one hypothesis which is so shocking
00:35:11 ►
and so frightening to our sense of
00:35:15 ►
the way it should be
00:35:16 ►
that I suspect that this finding
00:35:19 ►
and its implications
00:35:20 ►
have been really repressed in the Freudian sense
00:35:23 ►
because it’s a staggering set of data and it’s
00:35:32 ►
this after the age of 20 or 25 neurological studies show us that the human nervous system
00:35:40 ►
begins in cells that means you have less cells at 30 and a 35 and 40 and at 45 then you had a 20
00:35:51 ►
You’re losing
00:35:53 ►
Brain cells every year your life after you leave college
00:35:59 ►
Which means that at my age 45 I’m partly brain damaged
00:36:05 ►
It means…
00:36:06 ►
You like that, huh?
00:36:09 ►
You knew that anyway.
00:36:13 ►
Dr. Sidney Cohen in California
00:36:15 ►
has made me promise
00:36:15 ►
that I’ll turn my brain over to a neurologist
00:36:17 ►
after I die.
00:36:20 ►
And he’s going to do the same for me.
00:36:22 ►
Now, what does this mean?
00:36:23 ►
It means that you young people cannot buy the system of a menopausal mentality generation.
00:36:30 ►
You know, the men who are running this world, this country, this state,
00:36:33 ►
had their minds made up around 1910 or 1915.
00:36:37 ►
You remember rat-a-tat-a-tat machine guns in the old World War trenches and prohibition and booze?
00:36:42 ►
You just can’t buy their system.
00:36:45 ►
You just can’t buy their system. You just can’t buy their system.
00:36:48 ►
If you ever get around to running for office,
00:36:52 ►
which I hope none of you will,
00:36:54 ►
if you ever get around to making laws,
00:36:56 ►
I suggest the first law you pass
00:36:58 ►
is based upon this neurological fact
00:37:02 ►
about brain damage.
00:37:03 ►
No one over the age of 50 years old should be allowed to vote
00:37:06 ►
or hold power over young seed-carrying people, should they?
00:37:11 ►
Does that make neurological sense to yourselves?
00:37:14 ►
It doesn’t to mine.
00:37:17 ►
Now, in the next six months, a year, two years,
00:37:22 ►
there’s going to be a lot of tension in this country about the control of consciousness, because, like it or not, believe it or not, we have entered
00:37:28 ►
into a new age, and I would call it the age of consciousness. And the implications of
00:37:33 ►
this revolution in consciousness are much greater than the technological or the atomic
00:37:38 ►
or the electronic age, because this age is focusing inside. And for the first time in
00:37:44 ►
human history, at least in
00:37:45 ►
Western history, because they knew all this 4,000 years ago in India, for the first time in human
00:37:50 ►
Western history, man has finally caught on that it doesn’t make as much difference what goes on
00:37:55 ►
out there as it does how much control and freedom you have in here. The internal trip can be
00:38:03 ►
observed, it can be labeled, it can be labeled, it can be manipulated,
00:38:07 ►
it can be controlled, and it can be replicated just as easily as an
00:38:12 ►
experiment in external science. And you’ve got to turn on your parents. And I
00:38:21 ►
can’t turn on LBJ, but he’s got some young people around, and if they’ve been to good colleges,
00:38:26 ►
the statistics tell us that half of them,
00:38:29 ►
which means either she or her roommate,
00:38:31 ►
is turned on.
00:38:32 ►
So that’s the way we’ve got to do it.
00:38:34 ►
We’ve got to say,
00:38:35 ►
Daddy Bird, you’ve done enough.
00:38:39 ►
Daddy Bird, it was 30 years ago
00:38:41 ►
you ran for the president of the bank,
00:38:43 ►
and you’ve got steel all over the world now, Daddy Bird,
00:38:45 ►
and you’ve done enough.
00:38:46 ►
Come on, drop out and turn around and learn how to make love all over again,
00:38:49 ►
and come to your senses.
00:38:54 ►
I think it’s time to stop.
00:38:56 ►
Drop out.
00:38:59 ►
Thank you. when dr timothy leary the high priest of the league for spiritual discovery finished speaking
00:39:21 ►
dr jerome letvin took the floor dr letvin was senior psychiatrist at the Mantena State Hospital in Illinois.
00:39:29 ►
He is a professor of communications physiology
00:39:32 ►
in the departments of biology and electrical engineering at MIT.
00:39:36 ►
He also lectures in the humanities department.
00:39:40 ►
Dr. Letvin, who has three teenage children,
00:39:42 ►
is known at MIT as a man students can talk to.
00:39:46 ►
Now…
00:39:47 ►
Tim, your argument is exceedingly seductive.
00:39:55 ►
And in the main, I must admit that I find the press of middle age and middle class enormously powerful here in Cambridge.
00:40:10 ►
Irritating as all hell.
00:40:13 ►
The horrid part is that I too sit in front of TV sets, feel myself slumping, pay the taxes.
00:40:22 ►
But the problem is whether the navel really replaces TV. I mean, you sitting in
00:40:29 ►
front of your navel, you sitting in front of your navel strike me as being, in a sense,
00:40:40 ►
very little better off. First, let’s put it this way, no surprises are likely to come about.
00:40:49 ►
And you aren’t even beguiled by good commercials.
00:40:56 ►
Nevertheless, I think that we must take your thesis extremely seriously.
00:41:02 ►
And I will not do you the dishonor of either attacking you on scientific grounds
00:41:08 ►
because the question, as is very obvious,
00:41:11 ►
is not scientific but moral.
00:41:15 ►
Therefore, for this reason,
00:41:16 ►
I would like to confine my remarks
00:41:19 ►
strictly to the…
00:41:21 ►
Turn that damn thing off.
00:41:33 ►
I would like to confine my remarks strictly to the eschatological questions involved.
00:41:38 ►
By that I mean simply questions
00:41:40 ►
of what constitute good and evil.
00:41:43 ►
But I feel somehow or another that this man
00:41:46 ►
is in the hands of the devil.
00:41:49 ►
That is to say, he is in a private hell
00:41:52 ►
of a curious and somewhat Sartrean devising.
00:41:57 ►
That is, having made his pact with the devil,
00:42:01 ►
this is what he asked for and that’s what he gets.
00:42:06 ►
with the devil, this is what he asked for and that’s what he gets. For I suspect that in making these pacts, very much like monkeys paw pacts, that what we get,
00:42:14 ►
we get literally, and what we lose, we lose rather much of. To look at this man sitting there with the smile,
00:42:29 ►
this supernal smile, ecstatic smile,
00:42:30 ►
I feel sick.
00:42:33 ►
I don’t feel that I want to trade.
00:42:35 ►
I feel sick for him.
00:42:40 ►
And I ask of you how many would trade?
00:42:48 ►
He assures you he is in the utmost ecstasy when you can get to him. Otherwise,
00:42:58 ►
he’s in that ecstasy. Why would not any of you trade? Let us take another trade that has been offered in the past. You and I lived through the period of lobotomies.
00:43:07 ►
You walk into the office, I don’t like my mama,
00:43:10 ►
they lift your eyelid up, you know, slash, slash, and you go out, it doesn’t matter.
00:43:13 ►
You see, you have traded, for it doesn’t matter,
00:43:18 ►
a hunk of brain tissue, after all, brain tissue.
00:43:20 ►
As he tells you, you’re losing so much of it, what’s a little bit more?
00:43:24 ►
Does it really matter?
00:43:28 ►
Now, here you trade it.
00:43:31 ►
How many of you would take a lobotomy, giving the guarantee
00:43:35 ►
that thereafter you don’t care?
00:43:39 ►
You come in saying, I don’t want to care. Everything is bothering
00:43:44 ►
the hell out of me. Everything is bothering the hell out of me.
00:43:45 ►
Everything is bothering the hell out of me.
00:43:48 ►
I want to stop caring.
00:43:50 ►
I want to be happy.
00:43:53 ►
And so he takes, you know, bang, bang.
00:43:57 ►
Is this a trade you would make?
00:44:00 ►
Why not?
00:44:04 ►
No, wait a minute.
00:44:06 ►
This is strictly a rhetorical question.
00:44:16 ►
I’m asking the question of myself.
00:44:20 ►
For I found Tim’s presentation extremely compelling.
00:44:24 ►
Sean, if you’ll excuse me of those adornments.
00:44:27 ►
I think you ought to change them.
00:44:29 ►
They’re not beautiful.
00:44:31 ►
They’re symmetrical, but not pretty.
00:44:33 ►
At any rate,
00:44:35 ►
I find Tim’s thesis terribly compelling,
00:44:40 ►
and for this reason I feel that I have to answer it for myself, you see.
00:44:48 ►
You are selling off the noetic functions.
00:44:52 ►
You’re selling off exactly those functions which have set you aside critically in every possible way.
00:45:01 ►
You’re abrogating. You’re dissolving these.
00:45:07 ►
Henceforth, suspended judgment for a while. You take your martini at five o’clock. You come home. You don’t want to remember what
00:45:12 ►
sort of a damn fool you were during the day. You don’t want to remember, you know, being pushed
00:45:18 ►
down by this guy. The compromise you made that was against your grain. You see, all of these things, you’ve got to forget them.
00:45:26 ►
You cop out with the martini.
00:45:28 ►
But with the reassurance that when the alcohol wears off,
00:45:33 ►
you are possibly back to a state where judgment miraculously has been restored.
00:45:40 ►
This is the same, incidentally, with marijuana.
00:45:44 ►
And as an aside, Tim
00:45:46 ►
let me agree with you
00:45:48 ►
I can conceive of no more immoral thing
00:45:51 ►
than has been done by the government
00:45:53 ►
in the wholesale banning of drugs
00:45:56 ►
for I suspect
00:45:57 ►
that since the time of Mellon
00:46:00 ►
this is like the Hearst Papers trying to abolish pornography
00:46:03 ►
the more there is of
00:46:05 ►
it around, the more they thrive.
00:46:14 ►
There’s a fundamentally monstrous thing about forbidding rather than reasoning people out.
00:46:20 ►
If you have a thesis, you advance the thesis. There’s a counter-thesis. One argues.
00:46:26 ►
One does not go with force of the kind that the government has done, spurring the crime
00:46:31 ►
rate as it has been done by the morphine addicts, etc. And I feel very violently about this
00:46:37 ►
because I used to take care of an addict ward when I was back in Mentino. As I say, I’m perfectly willing to admit with you
00:46:48 ►
that the government has done a monstrous thing
00:46:51 ►
in forbidding many of the drugs that are around.
00:46:55 ►
The forbidding of marijuana, I believe,
00:46:58 ►
is pure nonsense in the light of the LaGuardia report.
00:47:02 ►
It is, however, the law of the land,
00:47:04 ►
and therefore i cannot advise
00:47:06 ►
people in conscience to break the law of the land for the very simple reason that i’m not permitted
00:47:12 ►
to all right but when it comes to lsd to psilocybin, to all of these other drugs that you have been handing out, that you have been talking about,
00:47:33 ►
at this point, sir, I look upon you as a tool of the devil.
00:47:39 ►
And I look upon you as a fundamentally vicious tool of the devil.
00:47:43 ►
And I will explain to you why.
00:47:46 ►
In general, when one takes something like a drink, a martini, or a drink of wine, or
00:47:55 ►
gets drunk with one’s friends in the evening and wakes up the next day with a hangover,
00:48:01 ►
there is a reassurance, the miraculous reissuance somehow or another of judgment to yourself.
00:48:09 ►
Question, with LSD and with psilocybin, with mescaline, do we have this reassurance?
00:48:20 ►
You have said, sure, it’s Russian roulette.
00:48:23 ►
Sure, it’s dangerous.
00:48:25 ►
But let us look specifically at the danger.
00:48:29 ►
And I’m not going to talk neurologically because it would only be gobbledygook.
00:48:33 ►
What is the fundamental danger?
00:48:36 ►
Let us say that one person out of 50 will have a reaction like this.
00:48:50 ►
He will take a dose. He will have a reaction like this he will take a dose he will take a trip and three days later he takes a return trip and a week later he takes a return trip
00:48:56 ►
not having taken any more drugs how is it possible for anybody on observing this to say to any person, you take one chance
00:49:08 ►
in a hundred, the return trips, they’re for free?
00:49:12 ►
What is a return trip?
00:49:16 ►
Let me ask you, if there is no cause, how come the return trip?
00:49:22 ►
The flipping in suddenly and the flipping out suddenly.
00:49:27 ►
Suddenly the colors whirl about.
00:49:29 ►
Suddenly smells have color.
00:49:32 ►
Suddenly colors have sounds.
00:49:34 ►
And then you’re back in the normal world.
00:49:36 ►
And what does this smell like?
00:49:38 ►
Clinically, Tim,
00:49:39 ►
what does this smell like to you?
00:49:41 ►
As a clinician, what is this?
00:49:44 ►
If you saw a patient who complained of this,
00:49:47 ►
what is it that he would have, Tim?
00:49:51 ►
What would you diagnose him as?
00:49:54 ►
Visionary mystic.
00:49:55 ►
Yes.
00:50:14 ►
You will diagnose him as a temporal lobe epileptic with an aura.
00:50:16 ►
And you know that goddamn well.
00:50:20 ►
Where else…
00:50:24 ►
He looks this way at me.
00:50:27 ►
Those of you who are… Don’t tell me what I know.
00:50:27 ►
Don’t tell me what I know.
00:50:30 ►
If you read a description of the aura,
00:50:33 ►
either in Penfield and Erickson’s book
00:50:36 ►
called Epilepsy and Cerebral Localization,
00:50:41 ►
written many years ago,
00:50:43 ►
or if you’ll get hold of an exceedingly charming
00:50:46 ►
book by MacDonald Critchley called The Parietal Lobe, where he discusses also these things,
00:50:51 ►
or if you will simply read Dostoevsky, which is far simpler for most of you, you’ll get
00:51:01 ►
an notion of what this aura is, And you can become addicted to an aura.
00:51:07 ►
When a man comes to me and says,
00:51:10 ►
I haven’t had a shot, I haven’t had any LSD for three months,
00:51:17 ►
but I still flip in and flip out,
00:51:21 ►
as a clinician, what do I think about?
00:51:23 ►
What do I worry about? And what I worry about here,
00:51:27 ►
specifically, is that he has a functional lesion. This sounds a joke to you. Functional lesion,
00:51:34 ►
because I can’t show it by cutting him open, but a functional lesion because clinically,
00:51:40 ►
it goes along with other things that have turned out to be like tumors, like
00:51:46 ►
scars, like hits on the head and things of the sort.
00:51:50 ►
Very well, this is one thing.
00:51:54 ►
Temporal lobe, very weird stuff about the temporal lobe, and I will not go into it.
00:52:01 ►
I will simply remark that it is that particular portion of the brain
00:52:05 ►
that is affected in half the axe murderers that we have in this country.
00:52:11 ►
Has it ever occurred to you,
00:52:14 ►
why is it you read about a guy coming home,
00:52:17 ►
and he knocks off his wife, his three kids, you know,
00:52:20 ►
and at the station, he stands there and says,
00:52:23 ►
I don’t remember.
00:52:24 ►
You know, real amnesia now.
00:52:28 ►
But let me assure you, half of these things are in fact temporal lobe syndrome,
00:52:35 ►
what are called psychomotor seizures.
00:52:38 ►
What this fellow had who shot in Texas at the campus, shot the various people,
00:52:44 ►
this is roughly the sort of seizure he had.
00:52:46 ►
In his case, they found a tumor.
00:52:49 ►
What about LSD?
00:52:51 ►
What about psilocybin?
00:52:53 ►
I know a set of physicists who took a while ago in group because they’re curious people.
00:53:01 ►
All physicists are curious people.
00:53:04 ►
I mean, they’re not curious to look at. They are…
00:53:13 ►
They took in a group of about five or six of them,
00:53:17 ►
they took some psilocybin on the recipe gotten from the telephone number here in Cambridge
00:53:22 ►
that you’re supposed to call to get that recipe.
00:53:33 ►
And having taken it, they got violently sick the first day, and every one of them for three months thereafter was incapable of doing any theoretical work. On all behavioral counts, accounts the same, but clearly aberrant in their higher critical functions, as Tim said.
00:53:50 ►
But with a hangover of this, a hangover that lasts not an hour or two hours, but several
00:53:58 ►
days, several months.
00:54:01 ►
Let us give it only several days.
00:54:03 ►
Let’s be conservative, a hangover for
00:54:06 ►
a few days. Something happens and your judgment by which you weigh things goes down. You’re
00:54:14 ►
now in the position of regenerating this by taking, say, one trip every three days, one
00:54:20 ►
trip every four days. And you pay for the vision of yourself by the loss of judgment.
00:54:30 ►
You pay for getting out by the loss of judgment.
00:54:34 ►
You pay for whatever visions you get by this loss in judgment.
00:54:39 ►
And a loss in judgment that stays and stays.
00:54:44 ►
Now, you might say, how do I know this?
00:54:47 ►
Have I ever taken it?
00:54:48 ►
Huh?
00:54:49 ►
No.
00:54:51 ►
And I haven’t taken it for a rather simple reason.
00:54:55 ►
The price seems to be a little bit big, a little steep to pay.
00:55:01 ►
I’m giving the devil my judgment, my soul, my intellect, all of the things I’ve
00:55:07 ►
worked for, for this kick. Like a nymphomaniac. Not like an erotic person, but like a nymphomaniac.
00:55:16 ►
Does anybody here envy the nymphomaniac? After all, there she is, having orgasm after orgasm, wonderful, all day long without a stop. Beautiful, terrific. And anybody envy her? Does anybody envy? Why?
00:55:46 ►
guy who was sitting in the state hospital either. The kick is cheap. The ecstasy is cheap. And you are settling for a second-rate, permanent second-rate world by the complete
00:55:53 ►
abrogation of the intellect. In the old days, if it wasn’t done by lobotomy, it was done
00:55:58 ►
by psychoanalysis. Now it’s done by drugs. I can find in myself no joy in such an outlook. Expecting to fly While I lie
00:56:29 ►
We’re all wired into a survival trip now.
00:56:33 ►
No more of the speed that fueled the 60s.
00:56:36 ►
That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip.
00:56:40 ►
He crashed around America selling consciousness expansion
00:56:42 ►
without ever giving a thought to the grim meat hook realities
00:56:45 ►
that were lying in wait for all those people who took him seriously.
00:56:49 ►
All those pathetically eager acid freaks
00:56:52 ►
who thought they could buy peace and understanding for three bucks a hit.
00:56:55 ►
But their loss and failure is ours too.
00:57:01 ►
What Leary took down with him was the central illusion
00:57:03 ►
of a whole lifestyle that he helped
00:57:05 ►
create a generation of permanent cripples failed seekers who never understood the essential old
00:57:12 ►
mystic fallacy of the acid culture the desperate assumption that somebody or at least some force
00:57:19 ►
is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.
00:57:29 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:57:33 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:57:38 ►
Well, before I say anything else,
00:57:42 ►
I want to be sure that you know that my personal opinion is that the raving lunatic we just heard,
00:57:45 ►
that Jerome Letvin fellow, was completely wrong about almost everything he said.
00:57:51 ►
His facts were wrong, and his religious sensibilities quite obviously short-circuited his reason
00:57:56 ►
whenever he thought that maybe someone somewhere might actually be enjoying themselves.
00:58:02 ►
But I wanted you to hear how idiotic some highly respectable
00:58:06 ►
and influential people were back in the
00:58:08 ►
60s. And now that I think
00:58:10 ►
about it, maybe we haven’t actually
00:58:12 ►
moved very far from that mindset after
00:58:14 ►
all. Oh well,
00:58:16 ►
at least you and I understand what’s
00:58:18 ►
really going on, even if
00:58:19 ►
these goons who think they are running things
00:58:22 ►
actually still believe reefer madness.
00:58:24 ►
Which, by the way, you can also watch for free on Hulu.com.
00:58:30 ►
And you know, as I was listening with you just now to that little Hunter S. Thompson soundbite
00:58:35 ►
about where he thought Tim Leary went wrong,
00:58:38 ►
I thought, no, Tim Leary didn’t go wrong.
00:58:42 ►
This country’s so-called leaders went wrong when they became frightened by the demented antics of the unsophisticated group that called themselves the Merry Pranksters.
00:58:53 ►
Those guys may have felt merry themselves, but they sure left a trail of sadness and destruction in their wake.
00:58:59 ►
In my opinion, had the Pranksters not lost control of themselves, perhaps things might have turned
00:59:05 ►
out differently. But what is, is. Not always an easy thing to accept. However, after listening
00:59:13 ►
to many of Dr. Leary’s lectures and reading some of his writing, I have to disagree with
00:59:19 ►
Hunter Thompson and say that it seems to me that Tim Leary actually did do everything
00:59:24 ►
in his power to help the people who followed his lead.
00:59:27 ►
And I’ll be playing more of those talks in the months and years ahead,
00:59:30 ►
so you can come to your own conclusions about the history of the 60s.
00:59:36 ►
And didn’t you find it interesting that when Dr. Leary was talking about cannabis studies just now,
00:59:42 ►
he said that most of the scientific papers were coming out of Europe at the time.
00:59:47 ►
At least I think that’s what I heard.
00:59:48 ►
I’ll have to go back and listen again to be sure.
00:59:51 ►
But as I understand it,
00:59:53 ►
today there are hundreds and hundreds of studies
00:59:55 ►
about cannabis that have been published
00:59:57 ►
all over the world in just the past few years.
01:00:01 ►
At least that logjam of information
01:00:03 ►
seems to have been broken.
01:00:06 ►
Of course, those papers are all appearing in scholarly journals. And from my experience, I’ve never actually encountered a
01:00:12 ►
highly intelligent person who hasn’t also used cannabis at one time or another. So the scholarly
01:00:18 ►
journals are mainly preaching to the choir. It’s the mainstream press of the empire that isn’t
01:00:23 ►
going to allow the truth about our sacred medicines
01:00:25 ►
to leak out. I guess that’s why
01:00:28 ►
God invented podcasting, huh?
01:00:31 ►
So it’s
01:00:32 ►
up to you and me to let the
01:00:33 ►
unwashed masses know that their leaders
01:00:35 ►
have been consistently and systematically
01:00:38 ►
lying to them about cannabis
01:00:39 ►
and our other sacred medicines,
01:00:42 ►
which seems all the more reason to
01:00:44 ►
do just what Dr. Leary advised over 40 years ago,
01:00:47 ►
and that is to drop out, turn on, and then drop back in again with your eyes wide open.
01:00:53 ►
What you do after that is up to you,
01:00:55 ►
but at least you can break the shackles of ignorance
01:00:58 ►
that the public school system has been locking your mind with.
01:01:02 ►
And if you are just now escaping from the public propaganda system and haven’t yet indentured
01:01:07 ►
yourself by getting into debt, you may want to consider a non-career move and avoid the
01:01:13 ►
world of the artificial corporate beasts altogether.
01:01:17 ►
At the very least, don’t go to work for any corporation that does drug testing.
01:01:22 ►
Once you have given in and agreed to turn over your private bodily fluids
01:01:25 ►
to a corporation
01:01:26 ►
that is screening you,
01:01:28 ►
a big piece of your humanity
01:01:30 ►
is lost.
01:01:31 ►
And I know this
01:01:32 ►
from personal experience.
01:01:34 ►
I had to piss in a cup
01:01:35 ►
more than once
01:01:35 ►
in order to get my last child
01:01:37 ►
through college.
01:01:38 ►
It was a degrading,
01:01:39 ►
humiliating experience.
01:01:41 ►
An inhuman experience it is.
01:01:43 ►
And my recommendation
01:01:44 ►
is to avoid it at all
01:01:46 ►
costs if you want to have any chance at all of living as a human being and not just some
01:01:51 ►
replaceable part for a cubicle or burger flipping job. One other thing I want to mention here has
01:01:58 ►
to do with Dr. Leary just now saying that he originally had a negative opinion about LSD,
01:02:04 ►
before he took it for the first time, of course.
01:02:06 ►
And it’s that first time that I want to mention.
01:02:09 ►
This most likely has been written about before,
01:02:12 ►
but my dear friend Gary Fisher is the person who actually took Tim on his first acid trip.
01:02:18 ►
And in a couple days, I’ll be heading up north and spending some time with Gary
01:02:22 ►
and hope to convince him to let me record this story this time to share with you.
01:02:28 ►
Now, there’s nothing especially revealing or exciting about the trip,
01:02:31 ►
but I find it fascinating to be able to hear about what seems to have been an earth-changing psychedelic voyage from someone who was actually there.
01:02:40 ►
So, wish me luck.
01:02:42 ►
Now, for a little news from the tribe.
01:02:45 ►
First of all, I would like to pass along some information about two rare pieces of art that have recently come on the market.
01:02:52 ►
And they are the number one prints of Dean Chamberlain’s portraits of Dr. Albert Hoffman and of Anne and Sasha Shulgin.
01:02:59 ►
Since these are the number one copies, they were printed on aluminum at the request of the person who actually commissioned them in the first place.
01:03:08 ►
And that’s my friend Bruce Pavitt.
01:03:11 ►
Now, as you know, some of the Hoffman paper prints were sold for up to $5,000 through maps.
01:03:17 ►
And so the number one copy should at least be worth a similar amount to a collector.
01:03:23 ►
Now, Bruce is selling these number one copies for 7,000 for the set.
01:03:30 ►
And if you’re wondering why, for the first time, I’m promoting a sale like this through the salon,
01:03:35 ►
well, it’s because should the sale be made as a result of this announcement,
01:03:40 ►
Bruce is going to donate either 2,000 to Arrowhead, depending on the nature of the sale.
01:03:47 ►
Obviously, there aren’t many of our fellow salonners who can afford something like this,
01:03:51 ►
but if you do happen to be a collector of psychedelic art,
01:03:54 ►
these are two very widely known works that I hope will go somewhere
01:03:58 ►
that they can maybe be put on exhibit for the public to enjoy as well.
01:04:02 ►
So, if you are that collector collector or if you know of someone
01:04:05 ►
who may be interested, please ask them to send an email to bruce at matrixmasters.com. That’s
01:04:12 ►
m-a-t-r-i-x-m-a-s-t-e-r-s, all one word, bruce at matrixmasters.com. Now if you’re hearing this
01:04:20 ►
podcast sometime in 2013 or something like that, that email address will no longer be working as it’s just a temporary address for this one purpose.
01:04:30 ►
And hopefully we can use this email for a couple of months before the spammers find it and I have to take it back down.
01:04:37 ►
Now, as much as I would like to read all of the email I get with offers to help,
01:04:41 ►
I’ve pulled one at random to read as a way to maybe thank everybody who’s offered to help
01:04:46 ►
with various aspects of the salon’s work.
01:04:49 ►
This one comes from Ryan P., who said in part,
01:04:52 ►
I’d also like to further extend my resources to you
01:04:55 ►
and let you know that I’d be more than happy
01:04:57 ►
to share my skills and knowledge of social networking,
01:04:59 ►
graphic and web design with you
01:05:01 ►
if you are ever in need.
01:05:03 ►
I also happen to have a pretty heavy library of a couple terabytes of audio, video, and music of all sorts,
01:05:08 ►
including some content which you may be interested in checking out or sharing in the salon.
01:05:13 ►
I know I’ve got a few handfuls of rare gems from a few of the founding fathers of creativity and innovation
01:05:19 ►
and, synonymously, psychedelia.
01:05:22 ►
Thank you for all that you’ve been and done,
01:05:27 ►
including sitting through my tangent, Ryan P.
01:05:30 ►
Well, thank you so much.
01:05:32 ►
Didn’t think of it as a tangent,
01:05:34 ►
but thank you so much for your offer, Ryan.
01:05:37 ►
And as anyone can see when they visit one of my websites,
01:05:39 ►
I obviously can use some help.
01:05:43 ►
The problem lies in the allocation of my time.
01:05:46 ►
It’s a chicken and egg problem, actually.
01:05:49 ►
If you’ve ever been involved in an IT project,
01:05:52 ►
you already know that a significant amount of the work on any project is spent on getting people up to speed.
01:05:55 ►
Well, I’ve got several websites that I’ve been building for over 10 years now.
01:05:59 ►
My matrixmasters.com site has over a million words on several thousand pages
01:06:04 ►
that are spread across more than a dozen blogs.
01:06:07 ►
And on top of that, I’ve now got the salon site going, too.
01:06:11 ►
And none of these websites were built with any kind of a long-range design or planning involved.
01:06:17 ►
They are most definitely kludges, and it would take weeks, if not months, to get someone up to speed on the little nooks and crannies that I’ve tucked
01:06:25 ►
code into. In short, I’d have to give up working on everything else, including my reading,
01:06:31 ►
in order to hand off the maintenance and revisions to these sites. Now, one day for sure, I’m going
01:06:36 ►
to have to do just that, hand over control of these websites to someone younger who will keep
01:06:41 ►
them going once I fold up my tent, but hopefully that’s a decade or more away.
01:06:47 ►
In any event, the day will come when I put out a call for help,
01:06:51 ►
and hopefully Ryan and the other salonners who have volunteered to help
01:06:55 ►
will still be around and hear my call, and I’m sure that’ll be the case.
01:06:59 ►
So until then, I’ll do my best to remember to post my RSS feed and program notes
01:07:04 ►
as we continue to press on.
01:07:07 ►
And I will also remain eternally grateful for all of your offers to help.
01:07:13 ►
Now, I was planning to say something right now about the importance of festivals like the Oracle and Symbiosis gatherings,
01:07:20 ►
and why I feel the psychedelic community should support events like this.
01:07:24 ►
But I’ve already gone on a bit longer than I normally do, gatherings, and why I feel the psychedelic community should support events like this.
01:07:30 ►
But I’ve already gone on a bit longer than I normally do, and on top of that, I no longer have unfettered access to my computer and the net, so like KMO, I’ve got to squeeze
01:07:36 ►
these podcasts in whenever I get a chance.
01:07:38 ►
Of course, KMO is very meticulous and gets a Sea Realm program out each and every week,
01:07:43 ►
even under the difficult conditions he has to put up with.
01:07:47 ►
And while my situation is considerably better than KMO’s,
01:07:50 ►
that doesn’t mean that I’m going to be as reliable as he is
01:07:53 ►
in getting a podcast out on the same day each week.
01:07:56 ►
Right now, the best I can shoot for is to at least average one podcast a week.
01:08:01 ►
It might come out on different days, but hopefully one a week.
01:08:04 ►
And I’ll get back
01:08:05 ►
to that track soon. So thanks again for putting up with my somewhat irregular schedule, and I hope to
01:08:12 ►
see you back here in the Psychedelic Salon next week for my 200th podcast in this series.
01:08:18 ►
And for now, I’ll close today’s podcast by reminding you that this and all of the podcasts
01:08:24 ►
from the Psychedelic Salon, or at least all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon,
01:08:25 ►
or at least most of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon,
01:08:28 ►
are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects
01:08:31 ►
under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 license.
01:08:36 ►
And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link
01:08:40 ►
at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org. And if you are interested in the philosophy behind the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
01:08:45 ►
And if you are interested in the philosophy behind the Psychedelic Salon,
01:08:49 ►
you can hear all about it in my novel, The Genesis Generation,
01:08:54 ►
which is available as an audiobook that you can download at genesisgeneration.us.
01:09:00 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:09:05 ►
Be well, my friends.