200 - A Few Words From Our Elders

Program Notes

Guest speakers: Gary Fisher, Sasha Shulgin, Ann Shulgin, Myron Stolaroff, Baba Ram Das, Timothy Leary, and Terence McKenna

SASHA SHULGIN:
“So I looked upon these materials as being catalytic, not productive, they do not do what occurs, they allow you to express what is in you that you had not had the ability to get into and express yourself without the help of the material.”

“My main argument for continuing to use the term [psychedelic] is that people may not approve of what you’re working in or what you’re saying, but at least they know what you’re talking about.”

ANN SHULGIN:
“My interest in these compounds is that they let you open up the doors inside your own psyche. They allow things to be more obvious, more apparent than the conscious mind usually lets them be.”

“The psychedelics, the visionary plants, allow you to do deeper looking and a different kind of learning, because what comes to you is a different sort of knowledge.”

“The ’shadow work’ is, perhaps, the most important use of these materials, as far as I’m concerned, that there is. Because it’s in opening up the shadow and discovering it’s not a monster, that it’s not a terrible, horrible beast, that it is the uncultivated, the unsophisticated and slightly, sometimes, unlawful part of ourselves, which can be one of our greatest allies as long as we can find the courage to do the work necessary to discover it and become one with it and to negotiate with it.”

“I consider them [psychedelics] basically spiritual tools.”

BABA RAM DAS:
“The place we share is that place that stands nowhere, not the place that’s caught in these spirals that involve intellectual advance, or ‘Now we know it!’, and so on. That’s all like little ripples on the ocean.”

“The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised.”

TIMOTHY LEARY:
“…neuro-geography that tells us that where you are determines who you are, habitat determines species.”

“We are literally at a position where collectively, working in harmony, we can do most of the things, and take the responsibilities, which in the past have been attributed to the great deities of the past. I think the Golden Age is ahead. It’s the age of humanist science, humanist technology, pagan science, pagan technology, high tech, high touch.”

“I think it’s our duty as explorers and as frontier scouts for our species to invent new terminology. … I really feel that words are tremendously important… . We’ve got to develop a new terminology. We simply can’t use the language that has been around for three or four thousand years because more people have been killed in the name of god that any other word around.”

TERENCE MCKENNA:
“Well somebody once asked me, you know, “Is it dangerous?” And the answer is, only if you fear death by astonishment.”

“Do not give way to astonishment! Do not abandon yourself to wonder! Get a grip! Try to get a grip, and notice what we’re doing! Pay attention!” – this is the mantra: “Pay attention! Pay attention!”

“On DMT, these entities – these machine-like, diminutive, shape-shifting, faceted machine elf type creatures that come bounding out of the state – they come bounding out of my stereo speakers, if I have my eyes open – they are like, you know, they are elfin embodiments of syntactical intent.

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

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

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And while I never thought I would say welcome to my 200th podcast,

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I also didn’t expect to begin it with an announcement about a dangerous drug that’s on the street today.

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Hopefully you’ve already heard about this, but in case you missed it,

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the word is that you should avoid any 2C-B fly at all costs, because it may kill you.

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Here are the details, as I know them at least.

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Hopwood RC, and that’s H-A-U-P-U-T dash R-C.

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Hopwood RC added 2CB fly as a product to their line on Monday, September 28th,

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and the operator of the company died from consuming only 18 milligrams of it on Saturday, October 3rd.

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Between those dates, Hoppet RC filled an unknown number of orders around the world.

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Even though 2CB Fly has led to deaths before,

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it is not logical that a dose of 18 milligrams would have a fatal consequence.

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It’s possible that the 2CB Fly that Hoppet RC sold was tainted or mislabeled.

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They’ve been selling 2CB fly as a research chemical over the net,

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so if you purchase this, or in my opinion, any product from this vendor,

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then whatever you do, do not consume it or let others consume it.

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It’s possible that Hoppet RC has sold 2CB fly to other vendors too,

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so it’s advised just to stay away from that substance altogether.

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Unconfirmed sources have stated that this 2CB Fly

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was possibly sourced from a Chinese producer,

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and this Chinese producer may be selling to other research chemical vendors as well.

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So please take this warning to heart.

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There are countless other ways to alter your consciousness.

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It won’t

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hurt you to pass on some 2CB fly, even if it’s cheap or free. I’ve already lost too many friends

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to careless drug use, and I don’t want to lose any more. But this should be a reminder to the

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entire psychedelic community to know the source of whatever it is you put in your mouth. And that’s

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even true for food, more so, I think. You know, unless you’re involved in a local farming group, you probably don’t even know where

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your vegetables are coming from or how they’re grown. Now, in a couple of minutes, we’ll

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be hearing from seven of our elders, and my hope is that one day you will be one of our

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elders, too. So, be careful out there. There are a lot of pitfalls, and running afoul of

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the Empire’s drug enforcement goons

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can sometimes be the least of your worries.

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And now, how about we put on our party hats and happy faces

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and get this 200th show on the road.

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To begin with, I would like to thank some people

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who have made donations to the salon in the past couple of weeks.

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And these fine people are Stephen B., Windsor F., and Roger B.

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And since this is somewhat of a milestone today, let me also include my hearty thanks

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to all of the donors who have contributed some of their hard-earned cash over the last

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four and a half years.

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To give you an idea of where your money goes, well, it obviously goes to paying

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for web hosting and bandwidth fees, as well as allowing me to buy some better equipment,

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like the microphone I now use, and gas to go interview people like Gary Fisher and Myron

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Stolaroff. But one way or another, I try to use the salon’s donations to enhance and support

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these podcasts. Now on my other little project,

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my new novel, The Genesis Generation, I’m using those funds for my long-term dream of building a

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little cottage that will be close to a new conference center that may be opening in another

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year or so. And it’s there, hopefully, that I can spend my remaining years in a place where I can

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simply walk over and join you in some exciting conversations and workshops.

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And so far, a little over 200 people have already purchased a copy,

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and so if you do the math, you know that I’ve already got a good start on my down payment.

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So thank you one and all for all of the love and support you’ve given me over these past few years.

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I dearly appreciate it.

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And for the content of today’s program,

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I also want to thank Dennis Berry and Bruce Dahmer

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for the Timothy Leary portion of the talk,

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and also my thanks go out to someone who prefers to remain anonymous,

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but to whom Terrence McKenna entrusted his box of the cassette tapes of his talks.

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And that is where some of the McKenna material comes from today.

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The Sasha Shulgin material, and maybe a soundbite or two from Terrence,

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comes from fellow salonner Alex Wall,

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who has a whole bunch of psychedelic talks on his website,

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alexwallmusic.com.

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And I’ll put a link to his site along with the program notes for this podcast.

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There’s a world of interesting McKenna and Shulgin material there,

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along with some other goodies that you may want to check out if you have a chance.

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Now, before I introduce today’s speakers,

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I’m going to do something that I rarely do,

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and that is to dedicate today’s program to someone.

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To four someones, actually.

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You see, when I began doing these podcasts in June of 2005,

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I didn’t have any expectations about them at all.

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And for sure, I never thought I’d one day be recording my 200th podcast from the salon.

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But here we are.

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And believe me, it is in no small measure due to the support and encouragement of four of my fellow podcasters.

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to the support and encouragement of four of my fellow podcasters.

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In the beginning, I hadn’t been paying much attention to whether many people were downloading the episodes or not.

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In fact, I think that after my first four programs,

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when I discovered that there hadn’t been more than 100 or so total downloads,

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that I decided that if I was going to keep on doing this,

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then I’d better just do it for the fun of it

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and not pay any attention to whether or not anyone was listening. Then, I guess it was about a year later that I got a call from

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KMO, who I’m sure you already know as the host of the Sea Realm podcast, which in my humble opinion

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is the best interview show around on podcasts or in the corporate media. And it was KMO who first let me know

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that there were actually a lot of listeners out there.

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That’s when I checked my logs again

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and discovered that the numbers were really getting big.

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And about that time is when my hosting company

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also let me know that I’d soon need my own server.

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But it was KMO who opened up the world of podcasting to me

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because until he called, I’d only been

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producing them and hadn’t had the time to search out some that I might be interested

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in myself.

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And so it was also KMO who introduced me to the Dope Fiend and his wonderful cannabis

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podcast network at dopetheme.co.uk.

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I’ve already said a lot about my high regard for the quality of information

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and just plain old fun that the Dope Fiends podcast brings each and every Monday,

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just like clockwork.

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In fact, even in retirement, Mondays are a drag for me.

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And now I don’t know how I would get through them without a new Dopecast.

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But here is another thing you should know about the Dope Fiend.

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He’s also a very generous man.

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When I lost my own MP3 player and mentioned it on a podcast,

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well, about a week later, a package comes to me from the UK,

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and in it is a brand new MP3 player, a gift from the Dope Fiend.

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And in fact, in the past, I even recorded a couple of podcasts on it,

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as well as some of my interviews with Myron Stolaroff and Gary Fisher.

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Now, the Dope Fiends Network carries quite a few podcasts, all of which I’m a big fan of.

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In fact, hey, welcome back, Lefty.

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Lefty’s Lounge is back on the podcast airwaves again, and I just listened to number 63 this morning,

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and it sounds like you and I are sharing some headspace, Lefty, so hey, welcome back.

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However, in addition to all of the other podcasts and the Dope Fiends podcast, there are two of them on that network that I really want to mention in particular.

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One is BB’s Bungalow, and it’s Black Beauty, the bungalow’s host, whose silken Australian accented voice you hear after each of the talks I play here

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in the salon. And if I’m not mistaken, today is actually Black Beauty’s birthday. So happy

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birthday, Bebe, and tell your parents thanks a lot for bringing you into this world. And it’s also

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Black Beauty who introduced each of the chapters in my audiobook, The Genesis Generation. She has

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taken her time to help me whenever I’ve asked, and more importantly, her podcast has extended my The Genesis Generation begin to pick up an Aussie accent myself. And then there’s the one and only queer ninja.

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I could go on for hours about how much help he has meant to me in my dark hours.

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Like you, I have my difficult moments every once in a while.

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But as strange as it would seem from the outside

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for a 68-year-old straight white guy from California

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and a much younger queer ninja from Scotland to be close

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friends, it doesn’t seem that way to us at all. Although we’ve never met in person, we have come

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to share a deep bond that transcends all cultural conventions. Ours is a human-to-human connection

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free of any external baggage. And my desire is that before long all humans on this planet can

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do the same and put aside our differences so we can revel in our common experience of life as human beings.

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And so this 200th podcast from the Psychedelic Salon is dedicated to the four saints of podcasting, KMO, the Dope Fiend, Black Beauty, and Queer Ninja.

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And to honor the four of you today,

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I’m going to play a few words from some of my favorite elders.

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Because, at least to me, the four of you are my elders as well.

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As they say, age alone does not an elder make.

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But the elders we’re going to hear from right now,

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in order of appearance, are

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Gary Fisher, Sasha Shulgin, Anne Shulgin, Myron Stolaroff, Terrence McKenna, Baba Ramdas, and Timothy Leary.

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And I’ll finish off by returning to the bard McKenna for a few closing words.

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Oh, and I guess I should say that the only reason that Robert Anton Wilson, Alan Watts, and a dozen other psychedelic

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luminaries aren’t included is purely due to time constraints and, I guess, my own lethargy.

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Now, one final word of explanation before we begin, and that is about the first sound

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bite we’re about to hear.

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I’m beginning this little survey of some of the elders with a clip from a podcast I did with Gary Fisher a couple of years ago,

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in which he spoke of the legendary Al Hubbard.

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As you know, Al Hubbard has been called the Johnny Appleseed of LSD,

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and he was more instrumental than anyone in bringing acid to North America.

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He took Huxley, Osman, Blewett, Chalulis, Fisher, and Stolaroff, among others, on their first acid trips.

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And as you will hear, he is also the person who perhaps did as much as anyone

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in turning psychedelic research away from its initial focus of trying to mimic mental disease

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and to focus instead on better ways to use these critically important medicines to heal people.

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Also, it was Al Hubbard who became Myron Stolaroff’s mentor,

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eventually leading Myron to walk away from a potential fortune

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as one of the founding employees of Ampex

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in order to spend the rest of his life doing psychedelic research,

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foregoing a conventional career.

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And I guess as a little side note for any of our fellow salonners

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who are history buffs,

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I should pass along a little fact that may otherwise go unnoticed.

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And that is that the executor of Al Hubbard’s estate told me one night when we were both visiting the Stoleroffs

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that after Al died, his ashes were scattered right where we were at the time,

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on Myron’s property in the High Desert,

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a place that also held a lot of significance for him and Myron together.

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So now we’ll begin in the middle of a conversation that I had with Gary Fisher a couple of years ago

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when he was saying a few words about Al Hubbard.

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And if you want to hear this entire conversation, it’s in my podcast number 97 and 98.

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Yeah, Hubbard is not recognized in the literature.

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He never wrote anything, of course.

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And he was a charlatan as well.

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He built airplanes.

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Yeah, I knew he had airplanes.

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He had this alleged OSSCIA connection.

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Oh, yes.

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He had a boat that ran without gasoline.

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Oh, yeah, right.

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And Myron told me one time that Hubbard,

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he lent Hubbard money,

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and then Hubbard came back and wanted more money.

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And he said, well, you haven’t paid me back what I’ve got.

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And so he talked Myron into giving him money.

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And he said, Myron’s so sweet.

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He says, what’s wrong with me?

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And I said, well, you’re stupid and Hubbard’s smart.

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What else?

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He laughed and laughed.

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But, you know, Myron is so seducible.

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Oh, he’s such a gentle person.

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He’s almost an innocent of kind.

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Yes, he is, he is.

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And so Hubbard was just the opposite.

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This paper of Myron’s I brought up this morning,

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it starts out with a meeting Oscar Janager had in February of 79,

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which is like 20 years after LSD started being researched.

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And he describes Hubbard’s presence there.

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He said Hubbard was there in a marshal’s uniform

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complete with badge, gun, and ammunition belt.

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He must have been something else. to uniform complete with badge, gun, and ammunition belt. Right.

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He must have been something else. Yeah, because Hubbard, you know, all of our model was from Hubbard

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because Hubbard was the guy who taught my brother-in-law,

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and Duncan blew it.

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And that would explain why St. Veronica’s Veil, that painting,

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is used to make.

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And a single red rose, the Rose of Sharon. I didn’t know that. explain why St. Veronica’s Veil, that painting, is used throughout your life.

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And a single red rose, the Rose of Sharon.

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I didn’t know that.

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We used a single red rose all the time.

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And I always had that picture there,

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and then I always had a picture of the Buddha, too, because a guy painted one for me after a session that he had.

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Gorgeous.

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It’s up with my daughter now in Washington

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but

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you know Hubbard, although he didn’t

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write anything, didn’t

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record anything, he’s very difficult

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to find any documentation on it

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he had a really profound

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profound, profound

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he was the father of all of this stuff

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he was the one, you know the

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Saskatchewan group that was on schizophrenia

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was mimicking psychosis.

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That’s what LSD did, it mimicked psychosis.

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So they thought, well, if they made people psychotic,

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they could figure out, you know, how to cure psychosis.

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And Hubbard said to them, it’s easy to make people crazy,

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but you want to make them sane.

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And this is how you do it if you want to make them sane.

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So he was the one who introduced Hoffman and Hoffer to this whole approach.

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My interest in the area, actually this is a nice opportunity.

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I spent a couple of years of my life upriver some 60 or so years ago, more than that, at Harvard,

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where I had the unfortunate pleasure of having a national scholarship, which got me in there free.

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And I found that everyone else had parents who had enough money to get them in there

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and paid their way.

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And I could find very little rapport with the masses of freshmen that were around me.

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So I found it much more pleasurable to go in the Navy

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and spend three years in the Atlantic in the anti-submarine patrol,

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which actually gave me a very nice beginning on chemistry

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in that one of the books I had with me was a book by Paul Carr,

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a Swiss chemist, written about 1938 or 1940.

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And it was a complete statement of the subtleties and the complexities of organic chemistry.

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And when you’re spending three years in the Atlantic waiting for submarines, you have a lot of time spare.

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And I not only read the book, but substantially understood it.

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And it was a very, very great pleasure to get out of the Navy

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and back into the university at Berkeley, where I took organic chemistry as my major.

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And the greatest compliment I had was from a fellow named Kaysan,

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who was a lecturer there, a professor at chemistry.

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And he said, by the way, he met him in the hall during, I guess, the second year of organic chemistry.

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We’re having a midterm this coming Tuesday, and you can take it if you want to,

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which I thought was quite a compliment because the average on the first midterm was something like 62 points out of 100,

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and I had 100 percent.

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And he didn’t know exactly why.

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I mean, I could answer the questions without any problem because they were all in Paul Carr’s book,

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and I had memorized the book.

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That’s, I think, honest.

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Anyway, after that, I got into my A.B. in chemistry at Berkeley,

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a Ph.D. in biochemistry at Berkeley, got involved in a little laboratory.

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There are five of us called BioRad Laboratory.

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That’s now a multimillion-dollar operation.

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Had I stayed with them, I would have been a very, very rich millionaire with ulcers at this point.

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And I’m very glad I split the scene when there’s still only five of us present.

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Did a little radioactive synthesis in their name.

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Did some post-doctorate work at Berkeley.

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Went to Dow Chemical Company, the Dow Chemical Company,

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a branch of it there in Pittsburgh near the Bay Area in California.

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And it’s there that I really got initiated into what turned out to be a very important change in my life.

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I had my first experience with mescaline about 1960, 1950, 1960, about 45 years ago.

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400 milligrams of the sulfate and had a good babysitter. And I had explored a great

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deal around various psychoactive drugs. This was supposed to be an erotic

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thing. That was supposed to be an amnesia thing. Each of these had their own name.

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I had heard about meslin. I had never tried it. And that one

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day, that 8 or 10 hour experience, really changed

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my life for the next half century. I was totally fascinated

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with a drug that could get in there, allow you to

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see things you would not normally see, and yet you knew to be valid.

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I have a reasonably limited knowledge of colors.

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Suddenly I saw colors that I had never really appreciated before.

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I could look at a flower and observe the beauty of the flower.

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I could not open the flower.

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I could not touch it.

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But I observed the beauty of the flower.

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I had memories from childhood that I knew were valid, but I had not thought of them for years.

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It was a very, very delightful experience.

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But mainly what impressed me most thoroughly is that that experience was clearly not due,

00:20:06 ►

the contents of that experience were not in that 400 milligrams of the drug.

00:20:12 ►

The drug, what it did, it catalyzed my mind.

00:20:15 ►

It got my mind back into that particular area.

00:20:18 ►

So I looked upon these materials as being catalytic, not productive.

00:20:22 ►

They do not do what occurs.

00:20:22 ►

as being catalytic, not productive.

00:20:24 ►

They do not do what occurs.

00:20:27 ►

They allow you to express what is in you that you had not had the ability to get to

00:20:29 ►

and express yourself without the help of a material.

00:20:34 ►

So this really caught my fancy,

00:20:35 ►

and I said if this little 400 milligrams of something

00:20:38 ►

could be an effective catalyst to reveal back to me

00:20:43 ►

what I had done, what I had seen,

00:20:46 ►

and such there is a great potential here for medical use.

00:20:51 ►

And that caught me with my little knowledge of chemistry

00:20:53 ►

and my intense curiosity as to what was going on upstairs in my head.

00:20:57 ►

And as it was revealed by this masculine experience,

00:21:01 ►

I really went into a true new direction of chemistry.

00:21:04 ►

and experience, I really went into a true new direction of chemistry.

00:21:13 ►

We’re talking a lot today already about experiments with mice and with rats and with various animals.

00:21:17 ►

In my own case, the only animal I used was the human animal.

00:21:28 ►

I presume this is now a little awkward because of the various national and federal regulations that have come in. But I find that still the human animal is the only one that is really effective in evaluating and comparing these various psychedelic materials.

00:21:33 ►

And the work I do is still involved in that direction.

00:21:37 ►

But the real charming thing, and the really, to me, exciting thing,

00:21:41 ►

was the fact each thing you came up with was a new material.

00:21:46 ►

It had never been made before.

00:21:48 ►

So you’re looking at a white crystalline solid in the little beaker there,

00:21:52 ►

and you’ve never seen it before.

00:21:55 ►

No one in the world has seen this before, as far as you know.

00:21:57 ►

No one in the universe has seen this before.

00:21:59 ►

It’s a new thing you’ve just made.

00:22:01 ►

And it’s never seen you before, so you have no dialogue at all, how

00:22:06 ►

much do you start with?

00:22:07 ►

How much material do you use as a first experiment on a new chemical that’s never been tried

00:22:12 ►

before by anyone?

00:22:13 ►

Well, obviously an amount that’s small enough that it will not have any effect.

00:22:17 ►

But how small an amount is that?

00:22:19 ►

There’s a very interesting additional nuance in this relationship that I developed over

00:22:24 ►

a period of time.

00:22:25 ►

You go with great caution, decide what is an amount that would have no effect,

00:22:29 ►

and take one thousandth of that amount.

00:22:31 ►

It takes time, but it doesn’t take much more chemicals,

00:22:35 ►

because you use a thousand up to where you were, you’d use another milligram perhaps.

00:22:39 ►

And so each of these materials had to be learned as an individual, new meeting,

00:22:44 ►

and one of the outgrowths that I discovered is that the beauty of

00:22:48 ►

your final results of finding out what the effects are,

00:22:51 ►

you really can’t be wrong. Because you’ll say, I found that this material

00:22:55 ►

caused a visual enhancement of that and a recall of memories of this and this and yonder.

00:23:00 ►

Anyone else who tries it, who finds the same results, will say he is right.

00:23:05 ►

Anyone who tries it and doesn’t get the results is, what did I do wrong?

00:23:08 ►

So in essence, you come up with a winner very nicely.

00:23:14 ►

So the thought occurred to me, if you have an alkyl group, that’s DOB and DOI.

00:23:22 ►

DOM is the one that got off into San Francisco under the name of STP

00:23:26 ►

if any of you are young enough to know San Francisco in the 60s

00:23:30 ►

but there was a STP

00:23:33 ►

STP I should say

00:23:35 ►

was very active at that time

00:23:37 ►

and it turned out that I found out that it was indeed DOM under another name

00:23:41 ►

STP

00:23:43 ►

they said serenity, tranquility Placidity was the name for it.

00:23:49 ►

And no one knew what Placidity was, so it became Serenity, Tranquility, and Peace,

00:23:54 ►

which was a little bit more understood, to the police authorities who did not like this idea of this going around.

00:24:00 ►

They didn’t know what it was.

00:24:01 ►

They called it Too Stupid to Puke, which was their counterpart to the, these are the

00:24:07 ►

Haight-Ashbury Clinic.

00:24:10 ►

And at this time, I was up in the hill in the medical school, and this was going out

00:24:13 ►

there, and I had no idea what STP was.

00:24:15 ►

One of my compounds, I talked to the media at a conference back in the East Coast, here

00:24:20 ►

in the East Coast, about a week or two earlier, and I talked about the material and gave it

00:24:24 ►

structure, and I suspect it the material and gave its structure,

00:24:25 ►

and I suspect it was just synthesized from this seminar I gave.

00:24:29 ►

Anyway, the bromo, the…

00:24:31 ►

Funny world.

00:24:35 ►

The bromo compound, iodo compound,

00:24:38 ►

it occurred to me, maybe it is because this alkyl group was active,

00:24:42 ►

and you have what’s called a lipophilicity or hydrophobicness,

00:24:47 ►

where something likes something that’s fatty.

00:24:49 ►

And maybe if I put something on there that was water-loving like a nitro group,

00:24:53 ►

it would not be active when it goes into the neurotransmitter receptor site.

00:24:58 ►

I put a nitro group active.

00:25:00 ►

Well, maybe it likes both putting its tail into this receptor site going to the right right, it’s lipophilic, and to the left, it’s hydrophilic.

00:25:08 ►

What about putting a group on that is not philic at all, namely fluorine?

00:25:12 ►

So I put on, I think it was a trifluoroethyl oxyanalog, so I felt this would probably not be active at all, also active.

00:25:21 ►

So just getting the tail of the four- that molecule into the receptor site produced activity.

00:25:26 ►

So from that, the obvious steps were to go and take off the methyl group, get away from the amphetamine chain.

00:25:31 ►

So I took the methyl group off, and that gave 2C-B, then 2C-I, a host of other materials in the same ilk

00:25:38 ►

that was just a beautifully rich collection of compounds,

00:25:43 ►

many of them not as potent as the amphetamines,

00:25:46 ►

but shorter-lived and much more benign and much more friendly than the corresponding amphetamines.

00:25:52 ►

So this is another thing that somewhere along the line occurred to me.

00:25:55 ►

If oxygen does a good job, put a sulfur on there, and you get them now in the 2CT family,

00:26:00 ►

2CT2 up to about 2CT25 or so, of which about half of them are active.

00:26:05 ►

So this is kind of the hand-waving world of synthetic chemistry.

00:26:11 ►

I could go on for another 10, 15 minutes and get into tryptamines.

00:26:13 ►

It goes through the same complexities, but you have this as the active position.

00:26:17 ►

That is not as active.

00:26:18 ►

This is less active.

00:26:19 ►

Alkyl groups on tryptamines are much enhancing in nature and complexity of action.

00:26:25 ►

Alkyl groups, with the exception of MDMA and a couple of others,

00:26:28 ►

on the phenethylamines destroys the activity of the phenethylamines.

00:26:31 ►

So there are differences between these two families of compounds,

00:26:35 ►

but those differences are not negative, they are just informative.

00:26:41 ►

Anyway, that’s kind of the picture of where I’ve been going for a while.

00:26:44 ►

I don’t want to take too long here.

00:26:48 ►

I think a question that’s often come up is how is this all going to work out?

00:26:54 ►

What are the goods and the bads of this entire area of psychedelic chemistry?

00:27:10 ►

The negatives are the terms of many people, from law writers to people in the street,

00:27:17 ►

feel that this is an area of neurotoxicity, an area of these materials cause neurological damage, cause people to lose control, commit crimes, and eventually collapse after 20 years of brain decomposition,

00:27:27 ►

which is, to a large measure nonsense.

00:27:29 ►

However, I can’t say completely excluded.

00:27:34 ►

I’ve been into it for 45 years, and I’m having my usual expected amount of brain deterioration.

00:27:40 ►

But I don’t think it’s that serious yet, so I hope to have another decade or two of reasonable responses.

00:27:47 ►

And you have the increasing urge to put laws against these things because the psychology, the propaganda that they are negative, that they do damage

00:27:51 ►

is very real and very much believed by many people. I’ve been often asked

00:27:55 ►

why use the word psychedelic itself as a majority term. I mean, there are empathogens,

00:28:00 ►

entheogens, hallucinogens, psychotomimetics, other

00:28:03 ►

terms that are used widely in medicine

00:28:05 ►

that carry other messages but do not carry the intrinsic negativeness of the term psychedelic.

00:28:13 ►

Well, my main argument for people continuing to use the term is that people may not approve of what you’re working in

00:28:19 ►

or what you’re saying, but at least they know what you’re talking about.

00:28:23 ►

You stop nine people on Market Street, out of ten people, nine people, you say

00:28:27 ►

I work with empathogens when they ask you what you do, they have no idea what you’re talking about.

00:28:32 ►

Nine people out of ten, when you tell that you’re working with psychedelics,

00:28:36 ►

would not, maybe not approve, but at least they know what you’re working with. So the idea

00:28:39 ►

of using a term that is improper usage, I consider to be

00:28:43 ►

quite positive. What are popular usage, I consider to be quite positive.

00:28:46 ►

What are the positives?

00:28:52 ►

I consider the positives to be my main incentive for doing the work I’ve done for the last half century and continuing to do it now, is I believe in this collection of materials,

00:28:57 ►

you’re going to develop tools that are going to answer many of the questions that have been brought up today.

00:29:02 ►

They mean, how can you find out how the brain works, you can use a rat. How does the mind work?

00:29:07 ►

What kind of a probe can you make to look

00:29:12 ►

at the function of the mind? To me, it’s going to be a psychedelic material

00:29:15 ►

that has very little action in experimental animals

00:29:19 ►

to look into actions in man that are not seen

00:29:24 ►

in experimental animals.

00:29:26 ►

Maybe the idea of using these materials as eventual research tools I consider to be extremely, extremely valuable.

00:29:33 ►

And this is some years ago, back in the good old days before there were many inhibitory actions on human studies,

00:29:47 ►

Observatory actions on human studies, FDA approval, disapproval, get clearance from the DEA,

00:29:49 ►

clearance from everything like that before you do any human experiments.

00:29:53 ►

Your board of your university has to see the research and approve of it.

00:30:00 ►

A lot of this experimental work was done back in the halcyon days when there were no such things as research approval boards.

00:30:03 ►

I mean, in Berkeley, we had the run of the place. We could fire up a cyclotron and make an isotope and use it.

00:30:08 ►

Their argument at Donner Labs, that was at Donner, then it went up to the

00:30:12 ►

up on the hill in Lawrence Lab, was stay if you want and do whatever

00:30:16 ►

you want. The tools are here. Here’s a cyclotron. Here’s your PET scanner.

00:30:20 ►

Do whatever you want, but just remember, when you leave, turn off the lights and lock the

00:30:24 ►

door.

00:30:29 ►

And we could work through the night there, doing experiments, all kinds of beautiful things.

00:30:33 ►

I remember one time, let me use this as sort of a wind-up.

00:30:38 ►

This was some, maybe three or four decades ago.

00:30:43 ►

It’s quite popular opinion that methionine was involved with schizophrenia,

00:30:48 ►

because some experiments had been done in which people who were schizophrenic were given methionine-rich diets and their symptoms became worse, and yet those people who were not diagnosed as schizophrenics

00:30:54 ►

with the methionine-rich diet had no changes at all.

00:30:58 ►

So we talked about this, pros and cons, and it was a neat experiment.

00:31:03 ►

What I did, I took, I remember it was S-adenosine methionine or some

00:31:07 ►

compound in that area. And I tucked on a fluorine-18,

00:31:11 ►

which makes it a positron emitter,

00:31:15 ►

which means you can go into a PET scanner and put this into a person

00:31:19 ►

and put the head of the person, the person attached to the head,

00:31:23 ►

no, that didn’t sound good.

00:31:25 ►

You have the person lie down on a little cot

00:31:27 ►

with the head going into a positron camera,

00:31:31 ►

and you have a section of the brain just above the earlobes

00:31:34 ►

that tells you where that chemical went.

00:31:36 ►

Being a positron emitter, it didn’t have to have any reaction in the body,

00:31:40 ►

it just went where it went.

00:31:42 ►

And what we did, this was work done with Tony some, oh God, years, a few decades ago.

00:31:48 ►

I made this material. In fact, I made ten batches over a period of time.

00:31:51 ►

The half-life of fluorine is a little less than two hours, so you can’t make a lot of it and keep it for

00:31:56 ►

a while. And he had good friends up at Mendocino

00:31:59 ►

Laboratory, Mendocino Hospital, and he came back with five

00:32:04 ►

names of five schizophrenic patients

00:32:05 ►

who were up at the hospital, and we had their names and the backgrounds of them.

00:32:11 ►

And in Lawrence Lab, I managed to find five normal controls.

00:32:14 ►

That was a bit more tricky, but we did.

00:32:19 ►

And ten batches of this, and we did ten experiments.

00:32:23 ►

We put the material into the

00:32:26 ►

these ten people about a week

00:32:27 ►

apart, and in each case

00:32:29 ►

put them into the

00:32:31 ►

PET scanner.

00:32:34 ►

I remember one of the schizophrenics

00:32:36 ►

Tony had a lot of problems with because he did not

00:32:38 ►

like radioactivity. And he said

00:32:40 ►

radioactivity is bad, so we had down at

00:32:42 ►

Donner a great big

00:32:43 ►

sort of background counter.

00:32:45 ►

It’s a big room with a big iron crystal of 30-some-odd inches in diameter

00:32:49 ►

and walls with three-inch thick lead overhead and side.

00:32:54 ►

And Tony very nicely told him,

00:32:56 ►

if you go in here and spend a half an hour and give you a magazine, turn the leaves light on.

00:33:00 ►

If you go in here and spend a half an hour in here,

00:33:02 ►

your body will be so depleted of radiation

00:33:05 ►

that when we take you up in the hill and put you in a positive camera, it will bring you back to normal.

00:33:09 ►

You’ll be okay.

00:33:10 ►

You believe it.

00:33:12 ►

Anyway, to wrap up with the result of the experiment, it was a fascinating thing.

00:33:16 ►

We ran ten studies.

00:33:19 ►

We had ten photographs of the fluorine-18 disposition in the brain,

00:33:25 ►

and the ten photographs were absolutely different from one another.

00:33:29 ►

There was no consistency through this group at all.

00:33:32 ►

And so we put them on the wall of the medical radiation thing up in the hill,

00:33:38 ►

and across the back of the wall, every time someone would come in from Washington to give a seminar

00:33:42 ►

or come in from somewhere of any importance,

00:33:45 ►

we’d say, by the way, here are ten photographs of the fluorine 18 labeled material we gave.

00:33:50 ►

Five of these are schizophrenic patients and five of them are normals.

00:33:53 ►

What do you think are normals?

00:33:54 ►

What do you think are schizophrenics?

00:33:56 ►

And we got absolutely random answers.

00:33:59 ►

No pattern could be found at all.

00:34:03 ►

Then about two months, three months later, one of the schizophrenic patients who liked Tony very much came down to visit and see how everything was going on.

00:34:13 ►

Very nice visit.

00:34:14 ►

And they were talking for a while.

00:34:17 ►

And he saw these ten photographs on the wall.

00:34:21 ►

And he said, are those the ten pictures you took of us? Tony said, yeah. And he looked at one

00:34:28 ►

and said, oh, I know, I reckon that’s me. And he pointed to number seven or one of them over there.

00:34:33 ►

And he’s absolutely right. He identified his own photograph from the PET scan of the distribution

00:34:39 ►

of that 3 and 18 thing. And Tony very mildly casually said, oh, you know, you’re right, absolutely right, how’d you know? Oh, he said

00:34:48 ►

that, you see that little sort of star-shaped shiny thing

00:34:51 ►

in the bottom right corner, that little star-shaped thing? Yeah, I see

00:34:56 ►

it all the time.

00:35:00 ►

So, you know, we have a long way to go

00:35:02 ►

before we really can understand how the mind works.

00:35:07 ►

But this is a start.

00:35:09 ►

Thank you very much.

00:35:34 ►

in these compounds is that they let you open up the doors inside your own psyche.

00:35:46 ►

They allow things to be more obvious, more apparent than the conscious mind usually lets them be.

00:35:49 ►

I mean, the function of the conscious mind, I suppose, is to allow us to function during the day and to get food

00:35:55 ►

and maintain our jobs and take care of our kids.

00:36:01 ►

But what goes on in the unconscious usually is available only during dreams

00:36:08 ►

and dreams can tell you a tremendous lot if you think of them as uh sort of status quo reports

00:36:19 ►

with some exceptions i mean there is lucid dreaming, and there are what Jung called big dreams,

00:36:27 ►

and these are exceptions to the rule.

00:36:30 ►

But the psychedelics, the visionary plants,

00:36:37 ►

allow you to do deeper looking and a different kind of learning,

00:36:44 ►

deeper looking, and a different kind of learning,

00:36:50 ►

because what comes to you is a different sort of knowledge,

00:36:53 ►

as I’m sure you’re all pretty much aware.

00:37:00 ►

And so I feel that not all psychedelics can be used in psychotherapy, but a lot of them can.

00:37:01 ►

but a lot of them can.

00:37:14 ►

And, of course, the greatest introductory medicine for self-searching and for insight,

00:37:18 ►

as I think we all are aware, was MDMA.

00:37:30 ►

MDMA is not a psychedelic in any real way, but it’s a great opener,

00:37:50 ►

especially for people who really can’t tolerate the harder-hitting LSD or materials like that. Anyway, that’s my basic interest is to try and find out what I’m made of and therefore what everybody else is made of, what humans are about. The best, most exciting

00:37:58 ►

and fascinating work I ever did, I did only three years of sort of new kind of psychotherapy

00:38:08 ►

with mostly MDMA and also 2C-B

00:38:12 ►

and a few other materials.

00:38:15 ►

And also hypnosis was a part of your therapy.

00:38:17 ►

Yeah, hypnosis is a very, very good tool.

00:38:23 ►

I think that the most rewarding work I did was in dealing with the shadow.

00:38:33 ►

I’m sure that most of you have some idea of what the shadow is. It’s the dark side. We

00:38:38 ►

call it the dark side. Actually, there’s nothing dark about it except that it’s the part of us that we have been taught to repress, the non-acceptable parts of ourselves.

00:38:51 ►

And this is often confused with a part of us which I call the survivor, which is there, you know, just to take care of us.

00:39:02 ►

but just to take care of us.

00:39:10 ►

It’s the part of us that is concerned only with us and with our own safety and things going well for us.

00:39:18 ►

The shadow work is perhaps the most important use of these materials as far as I’m concerned that there is

00:39:27 ►

because it’s in opening up the shadow and discovering it is not a monster

00:39:35 ►

uh that it’s it’s not a a terrible horrible beast that it is uh uh it’s the uncultivated, unsophisticated

00:39:48 ►

and slightly

00:39:52 ►

sometimes unlawful part of ourselves which

00:39:56 ►

can be one of our greatest allies as long as we

00:39:59 ►

can find the courage to do the work necessary

00:40:03 ►

to discover it

00:40:05 ►

and to become one with it and to negotiate with it.

00:40:11 ►

Anyway, that’s my biggest interest in psychedelics.

00:40:18 ►

I consider them basically spiritual tools.

00:40:23 ►

Input from Myron, please.

00:40:26 ►

Yeah.

00:40:28 ►

I’d like to say a few words about the title of the subject that was printed in the paper that announced this.

00:40:38 ►

How can you get the most out of psychedelics?

00:40:41 ►

And I’m here to tell you that I’ve gotten an awful lot out of psychedelics, a tremendous

00:40:47 ►

amount.

00:40:48 ►

But, you know, there’s kind of a dilemma here because you’re all out there and I don’t know,

00:40:54 ►

I know very few of you and I don’t know what your experience is or how far you’ve gone,

00:40:59 ►

just where you would be.

00:41:01 ►

And for all I know, you all know more about this than I do.

00:41:01 ►

where you would be.

00:41:03 ►

And for all I know, you all know more about this than I do.

00:41:12 ►

But what I will do, I’ll just spend a few minutes to focus on some of the things I think you need to be careful about.

00:41:18 ►

And first, let’s sort of imagine that you’re starting as a novice.

00:41:23 ►

I think it’s extremely important to have a very knowledgeable person to be present because it depends, of course,

00:41:27 ►

on the chemical you’re using.

00:41:29 ►

But if you’re using something like LSD, and let us not forget that it’s illegal now,

00:41:34 ►

and I’m not encouraging anybody to break the law, but it is the law.

00:41:40 ►

But there are places you can go outside of the country and so forth where you might be able to have an LSD experience.

00:41:48 ►

And LSD is a fantastic opener.

00:41:51 ►

But, you know, if you take a large dose, you may not know what’s going to be open and what direction you’re really going in.

00:42:03 ►

And you might open up this dark side that ann was talking about and i’m

00:42:07 ►

glad you brought that up because i think that’s a very important issue because i think we all do

00:42:12 ►

have this shadow and uh the shadow is unconscious and since it is unconscious it controls our actions

00:42:21 ►

and our feelings without our knowing it and uh the only way you can get free of that is to reach down deep enough into the shadow

00:42:30 ►

and actually experience the event or whatever it is that’s happened that’s caused the difficulty.

00:42:37 ►

Because once you do that, then you’re free.

00:42:40 ►

You can make a choice.

00:42:41 ►

I can either forget this or I can get rid of it. But as long as you

00:42:46 ►

don’t really experience it, it’s unconscious and will continue to control you until you do find a

00:42:54 ►

way to get down there and clear it up. But getting back to what I was saying. Thank you.

00:43:03 ►

Thank you.

00:43:09 ►

So it’s very helpful to have someone.

00:43:12 ►

And I’ve learned more about this.

00:43:19 ►

I have to say that when I first got into this, I was really, really uptight and repressed in a lot of ways. And I never really could feel other people.

00:43:27 ►

And, gee, just in the last couple of years or so, and, well, I’ll add something to that in a minute.

00:43:36 ►

But in the last couple of years or so now, I get where I can feel people’s energy.

00:43:41 ►

And then I began to find out, if you’re having a hard time,

00:43:45 ►

if there’s a person sitting with you and they’re a good person and a knowledgeable person,

00:43:51 ►

that’s an enormous support and it makes it a lot easier to work through these things.

00:43:56 ►

But also it’s easier to get into this dark material

00:44:00 ►

because at the same time these chemicals are opening to your deep inner self and if you

00:44:07 ►

ever reach your deep inner self that’s pure euphoria that’s pure beauty and wonder in fact

00:44:14 ►

if you really get in there it’s beauty and wonder beyond any way of describing so that is there and

00:44:22 ►

and so that’s your friend waiting to help you if you begin to clear the junk out of the way so that is there and so that’s your friend waiting to help you

00:44:25 ►

if you begin to clear the junk out of the way

00:44:27 ►

so that it can reach deeper and deeper

00:44:29 ►

and begin to contact that material

00:44:32 ►

well somebody once asked me

00:44:36 ►

is it dangerous

00:44:37 ►

and the answer is only if you fear death by astonishment

00:44:41 ►

do not give way to astonishment. Do not abandon yourself to wonder. Get a grip.

00:44:52 ►

Try to get a grip and notice what we’re doing. Pay attention. This is the mantra. Pay attention. On DMT, these entities, these machine-like, diminutive, shape-shifting, faceted, machine-elf-type creatures that come bounding out of the state, they come bounding out of my stereo speakers if I have my eyes open. They are

00:45:27 ►

like, you know, they’re elfin embodiments of syntactical intent. Somehow syntax, which

00:45:37 ►

is normally the invisible architecture behind language, has moved into the foreground. And

00:45:43 ►

you can see it. I mean, it’s doing calisthenics and

00:45:47 ►

acrobatics in front of you it’s crawling all over you and and what’s happened is that your categories

00:45:54 ►

have been scrambled or something and this thing which is normally supposed to be invisible and

00:46:01 ►

in the background and an abstraction,

00:46:10 ►

has come forward and is doing handsprings right in front of you.

00:46:15 ►

And the thing makes linguistic objects. It sheds syntactical objectification so that it comes toward you.

00:46:22 ►

They come toward you.

00:46:23 ►

They divide.

00:46:24 ►

They merge. They’re bounding. they’re screaming, they’re squeaking,

00:46:28 ►

and they hold out objects which they sing into existence or which they pull out of some other place.

00:46:36 ►

And these things are like jewels and lights, but also like consomme and old farts and yesterday and high speed.

00:46:49 ►

In other words, they are made of juxtapositions of qualities that are impossible in three-dimensional space.

00:46:59 ►

What they’re like is, and in fact this is probably what they are,

00:47:07 ►

is, and in fact this is probably what they are, what they’re like is they’re like three and four and five dimensional puns. And you know how the pleasure of a pun lies in the

00:47:15 ►

fact that it’s not that the meaning flickers from A to B, it’s that it’s simultaneously A and B.

00:47:25 ►

And when the pun is really funny, it’s an A, B, C, D pun,

00:47:29 ►

and it’s simultaneously all these things.

00:47:32 ►

Well, that quality, which in our experience can only occur to an acoustical output

00:47:40 ►

or a glyph, which stands for an acoustical output,

00:47:45 ►

in other words, a printed pun,

00:47:47 ►

in the DMT world, objects can do this.

00:47:52 ►

Objects can simultaneously manifest more than one nature at once.

00:47:58 ►

And like a pun, the result is always funny.

00:48:03 ►

It’s amusing.

00:48:08 ►

You cannot help but be delighted by this thing doing this thing.

00:48:13 ►

There was a question earlier

00:48:15 ►

about where do we go from here.

00:48:18 ►

And my feeling is that

00:48:22 ►

we see through scenarios and myths so much that all we can do from here is be true to ourself from moment to moment.

00:48:32 ►

Because every time we say, well, where we go from here is up, we are already sending a whole structural thing forward.

00:48:40 ►

Well, I’m very willing to do that.

00:48:42 ►

Yeah, I understand, as long as you don’t get trapped in them.

00:48:44 ►

Yeah.

00:48:43 ►

well I’m very willing to do that yeah I understand as long as you don’t get trapped in them yeah and at 10 30 11 at 12 on a Sunday morning it probably not

00:48:55 ►

the best time to be strobing and strafing you with hundreds of new ideas

00:48:59 ►

which I’d be very like to do under different circumstances. I have a meter.

00:49:06 ►

It’s called RPM, Revelations Per Minute.

00:49:10 ►

I have many thoughts about where to go in the future,

00:49:13 ►

what you have to do with new breakthroughs in nuclear physics.

00:49:18 ►

Fifteen minutes.

00:49:18 ►

Fifteen minutes.

00:49:19 ►

Go ahead.

00:49:19 ►

Oh, no, just for one minute.

00:49:21 ►

The new breakthroughs in nuclear physics,

00:49:24 ►

the new breakthroughs in Prigogene’s understanding of how evolution works.

00:49:29 ►

We’ve repealed the second law of thermodynamics.

00:49:32 ►

The first, Sheldrake’s new theories of morphogenic resonance.

00:49:38 ►

Everywhere you look in science, there are new breakthroughs that are leading us to,

00:49:49 ►

There are new breakthroughs that are leading us to, pulling us, escalating us to a new level of understanding,

00:49:52 ►

which change our opinions of human nature.

00:49:57 ►

The genetics, where we can now, through recombinant techniques,

00:50:07 ►

literally take over wisely and virtuously the role of creating and recreating life,

00:50:13 ►

the new brain research, the personal computers of Job and Wozniak,

00:50:17 ►

which are, I think, as important as the introduction, certainly, of the printing press,

00:50:21 ►

the new brain chemistry, the new concepts of sociobiology,

00:50:24 ►

the new understanding of social demographics,

00:50:29 ►

neurogeography that tells us where you are determines who you are,

00:50:31 ►

habitat determines species.

00:50:36 ►

I could go on listing dozens and dozens of breakthroughs and experiments in science,

00:50:41 ►

the new astronomy, all of which seem to center on this one issue that our species has come to a position where we can intelligently and

00:50:47 ►

virtuously determine what’s happening with our own brain or their own dna code we can move our

00:50:54 ►

bodies move our equipment move our brain we are literally at a position where collectively working

00:51:01 ►

in harmony we can do most of the things and take the responsibilities

00:51:06 ►

which in the past have been attributed

00:51:08 ►

to the great deities of the past.

00:51:12 ►

I think the golden age is ahead.

00:51:14 ►

It’s the golden age of humanist science,

00:51:17 ►

humanist technology,

00:51:19 ►

pagan science, pagan technology,

00:51:21 ►

high-tech, high-touch.

00:51:23 ►

In every field, there’s a breakthrough.

00:51:27 ►

I think you could float through all those impressive lists of places

00:51:34 ►

in which there are breakthroughs, one after another,

00:51:36 ►

and flip planes that fast because you rest nowhere.

00:51:43 ►

And so from that place,

00:51:45 ►

it all is this incredibly creative act

00:51:48 ►

and you can do anything

00:51:49 ►

and you can play any way you want to.

00:51:51 ►

But the place we share

00:51:52 ►

is the place that stands nowhere.

00:51:55 ►

Not the place that’s caught in the spirals

00:51:58 ►

that involve intellectual advance

00:52:00 ►

or now we know it, so on.

00:52:03 ►

That’s all like little ripples on the ocean.

00:52:07 ►

Or another way to put it…

00:52:17 ►

We’re moving from one star system or one galaxy

00:52:21 ►

or one spatial resting place from another.

00:52:23 ►

It’s the old particle wave theory

00:52:26 ►

We jump the void and when we’re in that void we’re together and we let may land on different planets different

00:52:33 ►

lobes of the brain

00:52:35 ►

There’s no getting away from the fact that it’s all on off on off

00:52:38 ►

Void structure void structure form structure atomic physics tells us that

00:52:46 ►

The brain works that way so that

00:52:48 ►

am I more interested

00:52:50 ►

in the many landing places

00:52:52 ►

and you more in the void

00:52:53 ►

I don’t think so

00:52:55 ►

I don’t think so

00:52:56 ►

I think we’re just

00:52:56 ►

sharing an ecstatic delight

00:52:59 ►

in the uniquenesses

00:53:01 ►

of the way the form manifests

00:53:03 ►

I mean I’m really an appreciator of the way you are manifesting this lifetime

00:53:07 ►

and you of me.

00:53:10 ►

And in a way, it’s because we rest in the place behind that.

00:53:14 ►

If we’re busy being you and me, it gets a little, it’s exciting.

00:53:18 ►

And I don’t want to be not you and me, but I don’t want to be only you and me.

00:53:22 ►

That’s all.

00:53:23 ►

I think we’ve escaped that trap.

00:53:25 ►

I think we do most of the time.

00:53:28 ►

I know nothing about the future.

00:53:31 ►

On the other hand,

00:53:32 ►

there are very fascinating differences between us.

00:53:36 ►

And to say this is not to make invidious.

00:53:39 ►

That’s the glory and the wonder of it.

00:53:41 ►

And we mustn’t just go away feeling

00:53:43 ►

that it’s all wonderful

00:53:45 ►

and mellow here on Sunday.

00:53:47 ►

It is mellow,

00:53:49 ►

but there are also

00:53:49 ►

a long list of exciting

00:53:54 ►

contextual differences

00:53:56 ►

that are kind of fun to bring up.

00:53:57 ►

Why don’t you list them?

00:53:59 ►

Well, I listed some of them.

00:54:03 ►

I’ll tell you, for example.

00:54:04 ►

Give me a whole list.

00:54:05 ►

I’ll tell you, for example me a whole list I’ll tell you for example when Richard uses words like God

00:54:09 ►

or spiritual

00:54:15 ►

and occasionally

00:54:18 ►

you call upon the name of Christ

00:54:19 ►

wow

00:54:21 ►

that’s

00:54:21 ►

the great way is not difficult

00:54:24 ►

that’s far out.

00:54:25 ►

The great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.

00:54:34 ►

When love and hate are both absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised.

00:54:40 ►

But make the slightest distinction, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.

00:54:49 ►

They have the form and the formless.

00:54:52 ►

But yet the words do have semantic meaning.

00:54:55 ►

The fact that you’re reacting to those is your problem.

00:54:59 ►

It’s your attachment.

00:55:00 ►

I use God the way I use him.

00:55:01 ►

Why should that upset you?

00:55:03 ►

It’s none of your business what words I use to talk about what model.

00:55:07 ►

They’re just scenarios.

00:55:08 ►

It’s like Walter Cronkite saying that’s the way it is tonight.

00:55:11 ►

That’s just the way Walter Cronkite thinks it is tonight.

00:55:14 ►

But I also think of the semantic meaning to other people.

00:55:20 ►

Yeah.

00:55:20 ►

What the word God would mean or the word Christ would mean.

00:55:23 ►

I think it means a mystery, a doorway to an unknown, an unnameless Yahweh.

00:55:33 ►

The 99 names, none of which say what it is.

00:55:38 ►

And don’t you want to keep everybody right at the edge of the form and the formless?

00:55:43 ►

Because that’s where the ultimate act of creation is.

00:55:55 ►

For some people, God is a total drag.

00:55:57 ►

And for other people, it’s a doorway.

00:55:59 ►

And I just send out as many doorways as I can.

00:56:02 ►

Because all the doorways lead to the same place as far as I’m concerned

00:56:06 ►

Somebody’s used every one of them

00:56:14 ►

I think that it’s our duty as explorers and as

00:56:20 ►

frontier scouts for our species

00:56:24 ►

To invent frontier scouts for our species to invent new terminologies.

00:56:28 ►

We don’t say, well,

00:56:30 ►

I went out in the spaceship

00:56:33 ►

and I climbed the mountain

00:56:35 ►

and I went over the hill

00:56:36 ►

and I found this incredibly new terrain

00:56:40 ►

and I’m going to call it God.

00:56:43 ►

You know, let’s call it, you know, New Jersey.

00:56:55 ►

I really feel that words are tremendously important. And when I give college lectures

00:57:00 ►

to young people, I say, you’ve got to develop, we’ve got to develop a new terminology. We simply

00:57:04 ►

can’t use the language that has been around for three or four thousand years

00:57:08 ►

because more people have been killed in the name of God than any other word around.

00:57:14 ►

And how many have been about to be killed by science?

00:57:32 ►

Well, I never use the word science unless I use the adjective pagan science or humanist science. It’s like a symphony orchestra out here. Images. Ron.

00:57:47 ►

It’s like a symphony orchestra out here.

00:57:48 ►

Images.

00:57:52 ►

Did you finish that?

00:57:53 ►

I didn’t hear that one.

00:57:54 ►

Question over here.

00:57:54 ►

Yes.

00:57:57 ►

I was wondering, it’s addressed to both of you,

00:58:01 ►

would you care to make any specific predictions?

00:58:05 ►

There seems to be a regrouping that took place in the late 70s,

00:58:07 ►

and there are many similarities to me, at least, between, let’s say,

00:58:09 ►

1963 and 1983.

00:58:11 ►

Would you care to make any predictions

00:58:13 ►

on the remainder of the 80s?

00:58:18 ►

Which groupings do you have in mind?

00:58:21 ►

Anyone.

00:58:34 ►

than mine anyone uh i’m very uninterested in the way in which shared awareness manifests whether it gets groupie or not i mean i really what i experience is what i just call a martian takeover

00:58:41 ►

of um a shared awareness that when you meet somebody, you can look them

00:58:47 ►

in the eye for a second and you know, they know, you know, they know, and there we are.

00:58:51 ►

And I don’t need that I have to wear badges or join clubs for that.

00:58:56 ►

So I’m not sure whether mass movement in the sense that the, I don’t think numbers is necessarily

00:59:01 ►

the only, that’s power, is the only, power, is the only way social change comes about.

00:59:08 ►

I mean, I really feel it’s much more interesting than that, much more so.

00:59:12 ►

So, you know, he’s talking about the 80s.

00:59:17 ►

Do you vote?

00:59:18 ►

Yes.

00:59:19 ►

You do?

00:59:27 ►

I would love to vote I would love to vote

00:59:30 ►

you can’t, you’re an ex-criminal aren’t you

00:59:31 ►

no I think I can vote

00:59:33 ►

well I haven’t been excited about the choices

00:59:40 ►

no I haven’t either

00:59:41 ►

and I felt that not voting

00:59:43 ►

I don’t think the political arena is where social change occurs

00:59:46 ►

it follows, it always comes later

00:59:49 ►

they’re just reactive, they’ve got pollsters in the White House

00:59:52 ►

I mean there’s the sole man in the Oval Office

00:59:55 ►

reading his polls to decide how to think

00:59:57 ►

which is great from our point of view

01:00:00 ►

we do have an actor, we have just what we wanted

01:00:02 ►

all we have to do is

01:00:05 ►

all we have to do is accept the responsibility for the programming

01:00:10 ►

and that happens out of the individual human hearts that don’t feel good and

01:00:13 ►

they say to him hey baby you’re not

01:00:15 ►

playing my act you know you’re not my lead anymore

01:00:19 ►

and it moves

01:00:21 ►

i think

01:00:22 ►

i think ronnie listens to Nancy, and Nancy listens to Ronnie, and sometimes through them they listen to some human heart that beats in there.

01:00:33 ►

Yes.

01:00:34 ►

And that’s the channel through as far as I’m concerned.

01:00:50 ►

I generally, in lectures, I think am much more assertive and aggressive.

01:00:51 ►

I make fun of Reagan.

01:00:57 ►

And I don’t, you know, make love to Casper Weinberger. I feel that it’s my function, rightly or wrongly, as an Irish storyteller,

01:01:12 ►

function, rightly or wrongly, as an Irish storyteller, to play that role of making fun.

01:01:14 ►

A storyteller lives in the world of good and evil.

01:01:16 ►

Yeah, of good and evil. Yeah, but you and I both can play in the world of good and evil without getting caught in righteousness.

01:01:22 ►

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:01:21 ►

getting caught in righteousness.

01:01:23 ►

Yeah.

01:01:24 ►

Yeah, yeah.

01:01:24 ►

I… So I tend to be

01:01:30 ►

probably much more abrasive than you

01:01:33 ►

and I stir up more…

01:01:34 ►

But I see that as just a different form.

01:01:36 ►

I don’t see it as better or worse.

01:01:37 ►

But I…

01:01:39 ►

I stir up.

01:01:40 ►

I connect people

01:01:41 ►

who have seen each other as opponents

01:01:43 ►

and say,

01:01:44 ►

I’m going to say no to you, Casper.

01:01:46 ►

I’m going to stop you if I possibly can, but I’m not going to put you out of my heart.

01:01:51 ►

And that means something.

01:01:52 ►

That’s opening a gate that’s been closed for too damn long.

01:01:56 ►

I agree with that.

01:01:59 ►

I spent about four years in prison and two years in exile.

01:02:03 ►

I spent about four years in prison and two years in exile.

01:02:10 ►

And I have papers, you know, freedom of information stuff on what the government was doing.

01:02:12 ►

They were really following all of us around.

01:02:31 ►

They were really doing rather dirty tricks to us during that period. I am always prepared when I meet a guard or a prison official or an ex-sheriff or anyone from the past.

01:02:36 ►

The first time I meet them and they walk in and I look them in their eyes, I’m ready to start right over again.

01:02:37 ►

Great. Beautiful. As an example of that, I spend quite a bit of time these days debating with my absolute worst enemy, G. Gordon Liddy.

01:02:49 ►

And I find this extremely interesting that I’m wearing him down.

01:02:58 ►

Really?

01:02:59 ►

Yeah.

01:02:59 ►

Really?

01:03:02 ►

I’m mellowing that mother out.

01:03:08 ►

That is guts ball, I’ll tell you.

01:03:10 ►

He sometimes complains both privately and even publicly that if this goes on,

01:03:14 ►

he’s going to be out of a job because his job is being a bad guy.

01:03:19 ►

I understand.

01:03:19 ►

But you see, the way you’re not opponents is you both work for the same lecture agent.

01:03:25 ►

See, you’re collaborating to compete.

01:03:29 ►

And you’re both conscious at both levels.

01:03:32 ►

So you’re good sports in that sense.

01:03:33 ►

Because if he was just busy being the bad guy, he wouldn’t play with you.

01:03:40 ►

I totally agree with you.

01:03:42 ►

Okay, go ahead.

01:03:43 ►

And to support your position, which is a very radical love position,

01:03:48 ►

tossing love bombs in public,

01:03:54 ►

I’ve had three interesting experiences just this week.

01:03:59 ►

One is to come to Harvard and to have David McClellan, who fired us, lovingly reintroduce us.

01:04:11 ►

Then last week, the publicist from my book said, listen, it would be wonderful if we could get a review of your book from the Prison Wardens magazine.

01:04:23 ►

And I said, is there such a thing?

01:04:28 ►

So I called Sacramento,

01:04:31 ►

state capital,

01:04:32 ►

and said,

01:04:33 ►

where’s Ray Procunier now,

01:04:35 ►

who is the director of corrections

01:04:37 ►

for the state of California?

01:04:38 ►

He ran 20 prisons,

01:04:40 ►

18 of which I was fortunate enough

01:04:42 ►

to inhabit.

01:04:45 ►

I finally tracked him down. He’s now the

01:04:47 ►

Commissioner of Corrections for the state of Virginia.

01:04:50 ►

So I called him. When he got on the phone

01:04:52 ►

he said,

01:04:53 ►

Timmy, my boy!

01:04:59 ►

What’s the matter?

01:05:01 ►

Are you in trouble again? You need some help?

01:05:00 ►

What’s the matter?

01:05:02 ►

Are you in trouble again?

01:05:03 ►

You need some help?

01:05:10 ►

You’re the favorite prisoner that ever escaped from my prison.

01:05:13 ►

I said, well, look, Ray,

01:05:15 ►

I need a blurb for my book.

01:05:22 ►

And then,

01:05:27 ►

day after tomorrow, I’m going to be debating

01:05:28 ►

G. Gordon Liddy

01:05:30 ►

who started his career

01:05:31 ►

by walking into my bedroom

01:05:33 ►

on an April midnight

01:05:35 ►

and busting me and my wife

01:05:37 ►

for the possession of peat moss

01:05:39 ►

01:05:41 ►

these reunions of people that used to be on other sides of teams,

01:05:50 ►

I think something is happening right now, not just in my life or in your life,

01:05:55 ►

but I think we all are getting that feeling that it’s time to get it together and move on.

01:06:01 ►

I hear that.

01:06:03 ►

In the Hellenistic period, the Logos was an informing voice,

01:06:09 ►

and all the great thinkers of Hellenistic times,

01:06:14 ►

Plato, Socrates, Xenophon, Thucydides,

01:06:19 ►

all of these people were in contact with the Logos.

01:06:23 ►

It was the sine qua non of Hellenistic religion.

01:06:26 ►

And it was a speaking and informing voice that tells you the right way to live.

01:06:32 ►

Well, we don’t know what to make of this.

01:06:34 ►

And at a certain point in the evolution of the Western mind,

01:06:39 ►

judging by the writings of people who were contemporaneous with those times,

01:06:46 ►

the logos fell silent.

01:06:49 ►

There was actually a date.

01:06:51 ►

Some of you may know the story of the fishermen pulling their nets off the Isle of Rhodes

01:06:58 ►

and they heard a voice from the sky say that great Pan is dead.

01:07:05 ►

And this was at the change of the eon, the beginning of the age of Aquarius.

01:07:10 ►

It was almost as though there was something in the ancient world that has gone latent,

01:07:16 ►

that we can no longer touch or imagine.

01:07:21 ►

Gordon Wasson, who discovered with his wife Valentina the mushrooms,

01:07:27 ►

told a very interesting story in one of his books about how in Mazatecan,

01:07:37 ►

the people who are speakers of Mazatecan, when they chant what the mushroom says,

01:07:48 ►

speakers of Mazatecan, when they chant what the mushroom says, they have created a special form for this, took mushrooms the second time. And in my head,

01:08:11 ►

I heard the mushroom speaking in English, but adding the word says to the end of the sentence.

01:08:19 ►

So it was almost like, you know, this thing could speak in Mazatec, it could speak in English, but it always kept its cadence and its structure.

01:08:28 ►

The other thing about psilocybin and the DMT thing

01:08:31 ►

is that it not only is something not real unless it can be said,

01:08:38 ►

but the contrapositive of that is that once something can be said,

01:08:44 ►

it becomes almost too real.

01:08:47 ►

It displaces other possibilities.

01:08:51 ►

I mean, so we’re living in a set of constructs, some architectural, some ideological,

01:08:58 ►

and they can be very oppressive.

01:09:02 ►

I mean, how do you get rid of the notion of linear time and space very easily?

01:09:09 ►

It’s the slow work of consensus.

01:09:12 ►

One of the things that I feel I’m doing very consciously in these kinds of meetings

01:09:18 ►

is we’re trying to launch and replicate memes.

01:09:23 ►

You all know this concept? A meme is the smallest unit of an idea

01:09:28 ►

in the same way that a gene is the smallest unit of organism. And so these things, DMTLs,

01:09:39 ►

transcendental object at the end of history, so forth, These are memes. And in the same way that genes are copied

01:09:47 ►

and spread around and that fidelity of copying is the key to genetic success, fidelity of meme

01:09:56 ►

replication is the key to communication. I mean, if I give a speech on something and then you hear

01:10:03 ►

it and then you go out and somebody says, so what did he say?

01:10:07 ►

And you give a completely cockeyed account of what has been said, well, then the meme has been betrayed.

01:10:14 ►

But if you can actually transfer the meme to somebody else’s mind and then they can copy it and pass it on,

01:10:22 ►

then the meme, it’s almost as though the ideological environment were like a rainforest or a coral reef.

01:10:32 ►

Evolution is taking place.

01:10:34 ►

Stupid memes, dumb memes have short lifetimes and they disappear, you know.

01:10:55 ►

And they disappear, you know, and memes of great power are able to thrive in many intellectual and ideological niches and to make many marriages of convenience with other memes.

01:11:05 ►

And so they are stabilized and passed along. Somehow we have to become hip to the power of language. And instead of just willy-nilly creating linguistic structures sort of ad hoc,

01:11:12 ►

we need to begin to consciously engineer our linguistic intent.

01:11:20 ►

And then, you know, so far in the 20th century,

01:11:23 ►

this has not been a program with a very happy history

01:11:27 ►

because only jerks have gotten a hold of it.

01:11:30 ►

Nazis and people with narrow social programs.

01:11:34 ►

They say, you know, we’re not going to call each other Mr. and Mrs. or Hey, you.

01:11:40 ►

We’re going to call, everybody’s going to call each other comrade.

01:11:43 ►

we’re going to call, everybody’s going to call each other comrade.

01:11:51 ►

And then this will create the notion of comradeship, which to a certain degree it does.

01:11:57 ►

But, you know, manipulating these things for political ends, I mean, you know, the Jews,

01:12:07 ►

it was okay to put Jews in ovens because the official language for talking about Jews was that they were untermensch,

01:12:13 ►

subhuman, not like us, whoever we are.

01:12:18 ►

So once the definition had been changed, people said, well, it’s okay to mistreat Jews.

01:12:20 ►

You know, they’re not even really people.

01:12:33 ►

And this kind of thinking goes on all the time. It’s called stereotyping, and it always is an easier substitute. It’s a cheap substitute for clear thinking. It was somewhat of a sidebar. The Buddhists at the folk level in India do say you cannot attain enlightenment unless your mother is dead,

01:12:53 ►

which is a kind of an odd notion, seeming to imply that she had to precede you into hyperspace.

01:12:59 ►

When you die, what you do is you literally, as appears to happen, you dissolve.

01:13:09 ►

And where you go is forward and backward into time, not like a gas released into time,

01:13:19 ►

but along the tracks and trails of the genetic machinery.

01:13:24 ►

but along the tracks and trails of the genetic machinery.

01:13:30 ►

In other words, you flow into your children and you become,

01:13:33 ►

well, let’s make a very simple model and say at the moment of death,

01:13:36 ►

you become your children and your parents.

01:13:40 ►

A few moments later, you become your grandchildren and your grandparents.

01:13:42 ►

You’re spreading down. It’s almost as though the thing which you were, which was this

01:13:46 ►

focus of ego and individuality, then it dies. And it’s almost as though the mountain begins to slump

01:13:54 ►

back into the generalized pool of consciousness and being. That’s why I have somewhat less patience maybe than I should have with the idea of channeling and come-as-you-were parties and that sort of thing.

01:14:13 ►

Because it seems to me the key to understanding the idea of reincarnation and past lives is that you were everybody.

01:14:23 ►

Of course, that’s who you are.

01:14:25 ►

Here comes everybody.

01:14:27 ►

You know, you weren’t just that shepherd girl

01:14:30 ►

or that Roman Empire emperor or that Greek fellow.

01:14:35 ►

You’re everybody, and you can find your way

01:14:38 ►

into the great genetic telephone system

01:14:41 ►

and ring anybody’s bell in history.

01:14:44 ►

Well, then it would be absurd

01:14:45 ►

to claim you were that person. That would be as absurd as claiming that anybody

01:14:50 ►

you could call on the telephone is who you are. No, it’s that we are everyone. And

01:14:56 ►

you know the great turning object in hyperspace that is the genetic, I don’t know, trans-dimensional object casts off glinting

01:15:10 ►

reflections of this personality, that personality. And astrology has a role to play here and other

01:15:17 ►

things. But the bottom line is we are all drawn of the same stuff. I think one of the most profound insights you can have on psychedelics,

01:15:29 ►

and I certainly have it, is that we are all interchangeable.

01:15:35 ►

Anybody could do my job, and I’m pretty confident I could do almost anybody’s job.

01:15:42 ►

We define ourselves otherwise.

01:15:45 ►

But, you know, in watching the rise of my own career,

01:15:51 ►

it’s a kind of being deputized, chosen for the job.

01:15:57 ►

It’s just they said, well, him, he can do it.

01:15:59 ►

He has the gift of gab, so give him the credit line.

01:16:03 ►

But it could have been anybody.

01:16:06 ►

Our uniqueness is real on one level,

01:16:12 ►

but on another level, it’s fairly illusory.

01:16:16 ►

It’s sort of a coincidencia positorum.

01:16:19 ►

You have to hold these two antithetical things

01:16:22 ►

in your mind at once in order to correctly perceive the proper level of ambiguity that’s resident in reality.

01:16:30 ►

It ain’t simple, folks.

01:16:35 ►

I don’t think we have to go back as far as the worm-like stage.

01:16:39 ►

I think what we have to do is we have to get out of history. History is a con game run by frightened men and their

01:16:49 ►

obedient stooges. We had a moment of happiness. There was a moment of completion. I guess

01:16:57 ►

I should explain my position on this. You see, there have always been dominance hierarchies in primates.

01:17:08 ►

As far back as you go, clear back to squirrel monkeys,

01:17:12 ►

there are what are called male dominance hierarchies. Well, so then in us, this was interrupted by psilocybin use

01:17:21 ►

over a period of probably a couple of hundred thousand years.

01:17:24 ►

The psilocybin, forget that it’s psychedelic for a moment, just think of it as an inoculation

01:17:31 ►

against ego.

01:17:33 ►

And so for 200,000 years or so, it was a dietary item which suppressed this normal monkey behavior.

01:17:42 ►

This normal monkey behavior.

01:17:47 ►

And so then females were shared.

01:17:49 ►

The sexual style was orgiastic.

01:17:56 ►

There were no awareness of lines of male paternity, and the children belonged to the group. This was not quote-unquote natural.

01:18:00 ►

The natural way is for the men to dominate, to control the females, to the old tooth and claw.

01:18:08 ►

But for a couple of hundred thousand years, it was artificially interrupted by the presence of mushroom in the paleolithic human diet.

01:18:17 ►

Well, then when, because of climatological factors and other factors that we can discuss in another meeting, the mushroom became unavailable.

01:18:27 ►

The old monkey behaviors reemerged only about 12,000 years ago. But in the previous 200,000

01:18:38 ►

years, language had been discovered, fire, tool making, song, a whole bunch of forward leaps had been made.

01:18:50 ►

Well then, when the psilocybin was withdrawn and the patterns of male dominance reasserted

01:18:57 ►

themselves in an environment where fire and language had been achieved, it exacerbated it. It made it much more nightmarish.

01:19:07 ►

It made it much more difficult to step away from. And all of history is the unhappy story of our,

01:19:17 ►

essentially our withdrawal and our agony over being unable to reach this connection back into the Gaian mind,

01:19:26 ►

which when we had it, we lived in Eden.

01:19:29 ►

We were balanced.

01:19:31 ►

But it faded and history was the consequence.

01:19:34 ►

Now in the last 50 years, information has arrived on our plate.

01:19:40 ►

Lo and behold, in the final ticking of the final hour of our dilemma,

01:19:44 ►

that actually shows us the way back.

01:19:47 ►

If we but have the wisdom to understand this and then the fortitude to apply what we know.

01:19:56 ►

You mean motivation to take psychedelics?

01:19:59 ►

To take action.

01:20:01 ►

Well, I think, you know, that the psychedelic community is not yet recognized or named itself as a community.

01:20:09 ►

We’re well behind gays and black people and all these other minds.

01:20:14 ►

We’re still trying to figure out if we are a community.

01:20:18 ►

And if we are a community and we have a domain of action, I think where it lies, it’s not that we’re

01:20:25 ►

all supposed to become dope dealers, it’s that we’re all supposed to become artists.

01:20:31 ►

That the transformation of culture through art is the proper understanding of what you

01:20:38 ►

can do with psychedelics besides blow your own mind. And I really think, you know, what we need to do is put the art pedal to the floor

01:20:47 ►

and understand that this is art.

01:20:50 ►

We are involved in some kind of enormous piece of performance art

01:20:54 ►

called Western Civilization.

01:20:57 ►

And, you know, it’s been a C-minus performance so far,

01:21:02 ►

and they’re just about to reach out with the hook and drag us

01:21:06 ►

off stage unless we begin pulling rabbits out of the hat pretty furiously. Art is poised for this,

01:21:14 ►

but art is ambivalent because the society is ambivalent. That’s why meetings like this,

01:21:20 ►

where you actually hear it said, the sooner the better. The clock is ticking. This is not a

01:21:26 ►

test. There will not be a retry. You know, this is the window of opportunity between the unknown

01:21:34 ►

and eternity. If not taken, then the entire enterprise could be lost. The whole thing from

01:21:41 ►

the cave paintings at Lascaux to Whitney Houston, it could all go down the drain if we don’t, you know, act to preserve it through an act of human cognition plus courage.

01:21:55 ►

To the future.

01:21:57 ►

Without fear.

01:22:00 ►

Without fear.

01:22:01 ►

Without fear.

01:22:11 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:22:14 ►

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

01:22:20 ►

To the future, without fear, without fear.

01:22:24 ►

Which is, of course, much easier said than done.

01:22:30 ►

But I’m going to have to leave my comments about fear for another day,

01:22:33 ►

because I have something else on my mind right now.

01:22:37 ►

It’s something that I’ve been thinking quite a lot about for these past several months,

01:22:39 ►

so let me set the scene.

01:22:45 ►

There’s a documentary film titled War Dance that I rented from Netflix a while back.

01:22:52 ►

It’s set in civil war ravaged northern Uganda and focuses on three young people in a refugee camp.

01:22:59 ►

I would try to describe their lives for you now, but whenever I think about them, I’m brought to the verge of tears.

01:23:04 ►

And not because of their, at least to me, almost unbearable situations,

01:23:09 ►

but because of the incredible courage and force of will that these young people exhibited.

01:23:16 ►

What essentially has given them a small semblance of a decent few moments on this earth is music.

01:23:22 ►

And in the documentary, we see them overcome difficulties that for sure would have stopped me in my tracks,

01:23:27 ►

and yet they made it to the top level of competition in their National Music Festival.

01:23:34 ►

This is a documentary that I wish everybody could see, and while I was watching it, almost in parallel in my mind, I was also watching the people dance at the recent Oracle and

01:23:39 ►

Symbiosis gatherings.

01:23:41 ►

I can’t quite put it into words right now, but the overarching importance of music and dance in the lives of us humans, I think, cannot be overemphasized.

01:23:52 ►

There’s something beyond even magic that takes place in us when we’re enveloped in the music and dancing without another thought in our minds, just ecstatically dancing and being the music.

01:24:04 ►

As you can tell, I have very strong feelings about the worldwide dance community.

01:24:09 ►

And if you haven’t already found a way to participate in person in a gathering or a rave or whatever you want to call it,

01:24:16 ►

at least once every year or so,

01:24:18 ►

then I highly recommend that you start looking around to find one that you can get to.

01:24:23 ►

Hell, move to the coast if you have to,

01:24:24 ►

but no matter what your age,

01:24:26 ►

I think you owe it to yourself to at least give it a try.

01:24:29 ►

Check it out.

01:24:31 ►

The dance scene is where you’ll find the energy,

01:24:33 ►

the love, and the vibe of the 60s,

01:24:36 ►

but pumped up big time on steroids.

01:24:39 ►

And this idea of a static dance isn’t something new, by the way.

01:24:43 ►

I first learned about it when I read Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, which he wrote in 1934.

01:24:49 ►

And that is the tone I wanted to set in the Genesis generation by beginning the story with this quote from Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.

01:24:57 ►

He said,

01:24:58 ►

I believe that today, more than ever, a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it.

01:25:03 ►

More than ever, a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it.

01:25:08 ►

We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it,

01:25:12 ►

anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and soul.

01:25:17 ►

It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us.

01:25:22 ►

But if that is so, let us set up a last agonizing, blood-curling howl, a screech of defiance, a war-hoop, away with lamentation,

01:25:27 ►

away with eulogies and dirges, away with biographies and histories and libraries and museums.

01:25:34 ►

Let the dead eat the dead.

01:25:36 ►

Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance, but a dance.

01:25:43 ►

Now, it’s my personal opinion that every heartbeat and every breath and every step on a dance floor

01:25:49 ►

pumps some very much-needed love into the human holon, into the noosphere.

01:25:55 ►

Right now, somewhere on this planet we all share, there are people dancing.

01:26:00 ►

And to me, they are dancing to keep our human spirit alive.

01:26:04 ►

They’re dancing for you and me.

01:26:07 ►

In my last podcast, I mentioned how great it was to have been in San Francisco in 1967 and 68.

01:26:15 ►

And commenting on that, one of our fellow slaunters wrote and said,

01:26:19 ►

or maybe it was posted as a comment on our notes from the Psychedelic Slaun blog,

01:26:23 ►

but she or he said,

01:26:25 ►

In 1968, I was still liquid.

01:26:28 ►

Hmm, how I wish I had lived there, just for a few months,

01:26:32 ►

feeling all the flower power of the music,

01:26:34 ►

the medicines, together with thousands of friends.

01:26:38 ►

Well, guess what?

01:26:40 ►

If we play our roles the way we know we should,

01:26:43 ►

the next ten years are going to make the 60s look like the 50s.

01:26:47 ►

As Terrence just said,

01:26:49 ►

we must all become artists now

01:26:51 ►

and turn our lives into works of great performance art,

01:26:54 ►

because the clock is ticking.

01:26:56 ►

This is not a test.

01:26:57 ►

There will not be a retry.

01:26:59 ►

This is the window of opportunity between the unknown and eternity.

01:27:03 ►

If not taken, then the entire enterprise could be lost.

01:27:08 ►

Those are strong words, my friend.

01:27:11 ►

And while we may, from time to time, want to throw in the towel

01:27:14 ►

and let future generations take up the cause,

01:27:17 ►

you know as well as I do that you and I came here

01:27:20 ►

at this particular and intense moment in time

01:27:23 ►

for a very specific reason.

01:27:25 ►

Maybe a reason that we still haven’t quite figured out yet.

01:27:29 ►

But the fact that you and I are here together right now in cyberspace tells me that we’re on to something.

01:27:35 ►

The signs are all pointing to some difficult times that may lie before us,

01:27:39 ►

so be sure to rest up a little.

01:27:42 ►

Stop watching the news for a while.

01:27:44 ►

Build yourself up for the long haul.

01:27:46 ►

And remember, fatigue can make cowards of us all.

01:27:50 ►

So be sure to set aside some time each day to play, to sing, and to dance,

01:27:54 ►

even if only for a few minutes.

01:27:57 ►

It will for sure help you make it through the great jump,

01:27:59 ►

and that may be here and gone before we know it.

01:28:03 ►

And then the real fun is going to begin.

01:28:02 ►

and that may be here and gone before we know it.

01:28:04 ►

And then the real fun is going to begin.

01:28:07 ►

In his latest podcast,

01:28:10 ►

Queer Ninja played a song that really caught me.

01:28:13 ►

It’s called Rainbow Veins,

01:28:16 ►

and I must have played it a dozen or more times now,

01:28:18 ►

mainly to hear the line that goes,

01:28:20 ►

Because your heart has a lack of color,

01:28:22 ►

and we should have known that we’d grow up sooner or later

01:28:24 ►

because we wasted all our free time alone. Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m still not ready

01:28:30 ►

to grow up yet, at least if it means being like these sad sacks I see driving to work

01:28:35 ►

each day. Aldous Huxley once said, a childlike man is not a man whose development has been

01:28:41 ►

arrested. On the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a

01:28:45 ►

chance of continuing to develop, long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of

01:28:51 ►

middle-aged habit and convention. So let’s hear it for us childlike women and men. And please

01:28:58 ►

notice that I said childlike, not childish. If you want to be a child of the 60s, well, be one.

01:29:00 ►

not childish.

01:29:04 ►

If you want to be a child of the 60s, well, be one.

01:29:06 ►

It isn’t about the decade you live in,

01:29:08 ►

it’s about your state of mind.

01:29:11 ►

I sometimes tell people that I’m a flower child who slept through the 60s.

01:29:13 ►

Well, guess what?

01:29:14 ►

I’m wide awake now, and as far as I’m concerned,

01:29:17 ►

the 60s are here and now.

01:29:19 ►

Of course, the fact that I’m also now in my 68th year

01:29:24 ►

may have something to do with that feeling.

01:29:26 ►

As the good Dr. Leary just said, sometimes these words are slippery concepts.

01:29:32 ►

So, after all that, why is it, you ask, that I feel we are better off today than we were in the 1960s?

01:29:38 ►

Well, for one thing, you and I are together here in cyberspace right now.

01:29:43 ►

Back in the 60s, the word cyberspace didn’t even exist.

01:29:46 ►

So we have the net, and that is a very big thing.

01:29:50 ►

But even more importantly, we have you.

01:29:53 ►

We have our fellow Saloners.

01:29:55 ►

And we have the tribe, which is what I call the worldwide psychedelic community

01:30:00 ►

that has now spread into every little nook and cranny on the planet.

01:30:04 ►

We are everywhere, and one day I have a hunch that we’ll be the mainstream.

01:30:09 ►

Of course, that’s probably the worst thing that can happen to us,

01:30:12 ►

at least until we steer the culture in a new direction.

01:30:16 ►

Throughout the past few years, as my wife and I have traveled to various conferences, workshops, and festivals,

01:30:23 ►

we’ve met a wonderful variety of highly intelligent, creative, and beautiful people,

01:30:28 ►

both inside and out, most of whom are half our ages or less.

01:30:33 ►

It may be hard to believe if you weren’t there back then,

01:30:37 ►

but even in San Francisco there probably weren’t more than a handful of truly aware, enlightened people,

01:30:42 ►

and I certainly wasn’t one of them.

01:30:42 ►

more than a handful of truly aware, enlightened people.

01:30:44 ►

And I certainly wasn’t one of them.

01:30:48 ►

Back then, I knew of nobody who could even come close to the levels of intelligence and sophistication

01:30:51 ►

that is found among today’s average young member of the global dance community.

01:30:55 ►

We weren’t even close back then to the leading-edge thinking

01:30:58 ►

that’s going on among young people today.

01:31:01 ►

I realize that it’s sometimes dicey being a young person today

01:31:04 ►

because it’s so easy

01:31:06 ►

to look at the shitty condition of the world and give up all hope. And I can certainly understand

01:31:11 ►

that feeling because I too have given up all hope on our current institutions, everything from

01:31:16 ►

governments to churches, being able to come up with solutions that will make human existence

01:31:21 ►

better. But when I go to Burning Man or to an oracle or symbiosis gathering,

01:31:27 ►

my spirit is renewed because of the incredible people I meet there.

01:31:31 ►

Some meetings are only fleeting.

01:31:33 ►

I can still remember the face of a tall man who came up to me after my talk last month,

01:31:38 ►

introduced himself as a fellow salonner,

01:31:40 ►

and told me that he had also listened to the Genesis Generation.

01:31:43 ►

Well, I didn’t have any

01:31:45 ►

time to visit with him just then, and we never had a chance to reconnect. But I can still see his eyes,

01:31:50 ►

and I remember his face. That may not seem like much, but to a fellow psychonaut, just making eye

01:31:57 ►

contact is enough to exchange a lifetime of information. We psychonauts do know what we know.

01:32:04 ►

We have been to the edge and

01:32:06 ►

returned to join together in ways

01:32:08 ►

we can’t yet imagine.

01:32:09 ►

But we are most definitely on a path with heart.

01:32:13 ►

So take heart.

01:32:14 ►

Gather up your courage and

01:32:15 ►

let’s press on

01:32:17 ►

with the great work that we’ve all

01:32:20 ►

taken it upon ourselves to do.

01:32:23 ►

Well,

01:32:24 ►

I guess that little bit of melodrama should do it for today.

01:32:27 ►

And so I’ll close today’s podcast by reminding you that this and most of the podcasts from

01:32:33 ►

the Psychedelic Salon are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects

01:32:37 ►

under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 3.0 license.

01:32:42 ►

And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the Thank you. which is available as an audio book that you can download at genesisgeneration.us.

01:33:06 ►

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

01:33:11 ►

Be well, my friends.

01:33:20 ►

What is happening here is not the death of a species or the death of a planetary ecosystem.

01:33:27 ►

What is happening here is the birth of a new cosmic order.

01:33:36 ►

All that we can see of it at this point in time is the rosy glow of its promise.

01:33:55 ►

Where we really want to be is naked, singing in the rainforest,

01:33:59 ►

stoned and exalted,

01:34:02 ►

one with the souls of the ancestors,

01:34:05 ►

one with the Gaian spirit of the planet.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

200 - A Few Words From Our Elders

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Program Notes

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Transcript

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