210 - From the Shaman’s Circle to the Ivory Tower

Program Notes

Guest speakers: Anna Waldstein, Ivan Casselman, and Cameron Adams

Three lecturers are featured in this session from the 3rd International Conference for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture (ISSRNC) held at the University of Amsterdam 23-26 July 2009. Their presentation is titled “From the Shaman’s Circle to the Ivory Tower: Progress, Spirituality and Psychedelic Thinking.”

“The suppression of mysticism, psychedelic experience, psychedelic thinking, began roughly two thousand years ago. And you get more intense socio-economic and socio-spiritual hierarchies … until you get to where we are today where there is state control of consciousness as well as state control of production and many other aspects of life.” -Anna Waldstein

“They’re incredibly good at convincing us that we need a new car, and that new shirt, and the toys for our kids, or whatever, but very good at also convincing us that we don’t need this type of thing any more, this psychedelic thinking. But despite the Powers’ attempts to eradicate this, it bubbles up. … The power elite doesn’t want us to think like this because it disengages us from consumerism, it connects us with the environment, and makes us question what’s going on.” -Ivan Casselman

“Whether you are thinking inside or outside the box, you are still letting the box dictate your thoughts, are you not? What you are not acknowledging is the honest fact the box itself is figmentary and illusory . And as long as one continues to act in reaction to this perceived set of dictates one cannot be truly original in thought. So once we are stuck in those grooves, even if we want to walk on top of the groove or the bottom of the groove, its still going down that same path.” -Cameron Adams

Transcript

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Greetings from cyberdelic space.

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

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space. This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. And if you’ve been wondering why this podcast is several days late in coming out this week, well, I think I’m going

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to blame it on Neil Kramer. You see, last week my wife and I attended one of Neil and KMO’s

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couch surfing salons, I guess they call them, and I heard Neil say that every so often he takes what he calls a technology break.

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No computer, no internet, no MP3 player, no TV, nothing electronic.

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So I tried that this week and found it to be a wonderful way to relax.

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You see, we’ve been having some rainy weather here all week.

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And in fact, I just heard that our county has now received

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almost one half of our annual rainfall, which is about what Tampa, Florida gets during an

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average summer week of afternoon thunderstorms.

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But rain is really rare here in Southern California, and so I enjoyed curling up with a good book

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in front of our electric heater and listening to the rain as I read.

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And now I’m looking forward to doing this some more.

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Without the rain, of course.

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The only problem I’ve discovered with disconnecting from the net

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was that after two or three days offline,

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it’s really difficult to come back to sitting in front of a computer.

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It’s as hard as it was for me after returning from a week’s vacation in Mexico or somewhere.

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So that’s why I’m blaming Neil for my newfound sloth.

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But Neil, you’re also to be thanked for slowing me down a bit.

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However, in the interim, some of our fellow slauners didn’t slow down.

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Instead, they sent donations to help offset some of the expenses here.

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Instead, they sent donations to help offset some of the expenses here, and these fine salonners are Michael R., Craig A., Colin F., Sam S., Adrian D., Eric C., who, by the way, very thoughtfully sent a donation to Haitian Relief in the name of us all here in the salon.

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So thank you for including the salon in your generosity, Eric.

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And we also received a very generous donation from Jeff M., who said,

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Should have done this a long time ago.

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You said you were established and solid, so I donated elsewhere.

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But I’m sure every little bit helps, and for what you have given, I’d like to try to reciprocate.

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Thank you seems inadequate, but thank you, Jeff. Well, Jeff, Eric, Michael, Craig, Colin,

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Sam, and Adrian, well, hey, thank you for your help and support, both now and in the past, because

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I know some of those wonderful donors have been making contributions for several years now,

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and although we’ve never met in person, I feel like we’re old friends every time I see your

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names. So, hey, thanks for being here. And guess what? Our program today is also a gift from some

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of our fellow salonners. And I first learned about this event through a Facebook email, which read in

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part, I have been a three-year listener to the podcast and can say that they have truly changed the course of my life.

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I’m an anthropologist, and because of your podcast and some of the others that it has led me to,

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I have shifted my focus from basic medical anthropology to the anthropology of psychedelic culture.

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I am now an anthropologist of the tribe, so to speak.

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And let me just put in a little aside here

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to say that, to my knowledge,

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Dr. Cameron Adams is now the first anthropologist

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who is focusing on what we all call the tribe.

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And I wish you the greatest success possible, Cameron.

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And his email goes on.

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My first public and professional foray

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into this new endeavor

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was a session my wife and I convened

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at the Third International Conference for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture

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at the University of Amsterdam, 23 to 26 July 2009.

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The conference was called Religion, Nature, and Progress,

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and our session on Friday, 24 July, was called

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From the Shaman’s Circle to the Ivory Tower

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Progress, Spirituality, and Psychedelic Thinking.

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We recorded the session, and I wondered if you’d be interested in checking it out for a possible podcast.

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Also, I thought you may be interested because we are academics working in the field of psychedelics,

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have given lectures or lecture series on psychedelics and cannabis in university classes, Thank you. for opening up a good road and for doing the good work, Cameron. And Cameron’s full title is Dr. Cameron Adams,

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School of Anthropology and Conservation, University of Kent, Canterbury, England.

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And the three speakers that we are about to hear,

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in order of their presentations, are Anna Waldstein,

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and Anna is a lecturer in medical anthropology and ethnobotany,

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and convener of the BSC in medical anthropology, School of Anthropology and Conservation, University of Kent, Canterbury.

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Ivan Kasselman, and at the time Ivan was a master’s student in the SAC UKC.

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And Cameron Adams, of course, who is an honorary research fellow in the School of Anthropology and Conservation

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at the University of Kent.

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Also, I would like to give special thanks to Nexus 112, who helped edit and improve

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the sound of the recording.

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So now let’s join Anna, Ivan, and Cameron as they take us from the Shaman’s Circle to

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the Ivory Tower.

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So when we were coming up with this,

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we were trying to decide what to call it,

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and we all sort of agreed

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that we liked the term psychedelic thinking

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and just refreshing everyone’s memory.

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It means mind manifesting,

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and that it’s very similar to shamanic practices

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and shamanic thinking techniques

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of having psychedelic

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experiences, as we saw from the video, are very, very old and evolutionary ideas.

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We obviously have no direct evidence, but through careful work, it’s determined that these techniques are very, very old,

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particularly the use of plants.

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And so the psychedelic experience, which is very similar to mystical experiences,

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religious experiences, are sort of just the beginning of what we think about as psychedelic thinking. And so the thinking really comes in with taking these experiences

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and reintegrating them into our lives and into our work.

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And it’s basically very creative, holistic, ecosystems thinking.

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It’s related to things such as deep ecology and things like that.

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As far as people have been able to piece together,

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humans have evolved in environments

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where we have lots of access and exposure to psychedelic substances.

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And also given the nature of pre-human and

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early human society, would also have access to seasonal fasting and seasonal fluctuations

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in diet, and experiences of living outdoors, observing the heavens, sitting around fires at night and staring into flames

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and basically bringing on these meditative techniques.

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It’s been hypothesized that they induce hypnotic states

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and that certain people who are susceptible to going into tr-hypnotic states perhaps provided an advantage

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in that these states

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by certain skilled

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or observant individuals could be

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used to affect healing

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or could be used to come up with solutions

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to other crises

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in the lives of early

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humans. And so

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shamanism is argued to be

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the oldest form of religion and so shamanism is argued to be the oldest form of religion, and by shamanism

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the definition I’m using is basically, you know, the sort of animistic religions where

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you have sort of semi, I don’t want to say semi-professional, but sort of individuals

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in societies who were perhaps a bit more tuned in

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to psychedelic experiences or

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were just more interested

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or more observant or more thoughtful

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about these things than in

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small-scale societies which

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arise as shamanic practitioners

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in whatever sort of flavor

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of shamanism they take on.

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Now these techniques

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continued as human evolution went on and human populations started to grow

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and people started to settle down and grow crops.

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Cities grow into larger societies.

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These techniques continued, although of course the forms changed and social hierarchies,

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you would get likely, there would likely have been more specialization, people specializing

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in these techniques, similar to what we see in some shamanic societies today.

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So things, even state societies like ancient Maya, Aztec

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that’s sort of my area of expertise

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so I’ll talk about them

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continue to use shamanic practices

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there’s evidence of things like mushroom stones

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and other things that look like paraphernalia

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and traces of using psychedelic substances

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from the classic Maya period, which was 700-900 AD.

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And then again, later, Aztec society as well,

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but we have some ethno-historical evidence that it was even more hierarchical

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and perhaps more restricted, those techniques were more restricted to the sort of priestly kind of class.

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And then eventually, in the West, things really started to change.

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Social stratification became more intense, and you have the development of sort of the

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church state, and early Christianity sort of gave way to the more formal church. I don’t

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necessarily name any names. But the suppression of mysticism, psychedelic experience, psychedelic

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thinking began roughly 2,000 years ago in the West. And you get more intense socioeconomic and socio-spiritual hierarchies.

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And access to these techniques of community becomes more and more restricted

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until you get society like today where there’s state control of consciousness

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as well as state control of production and many other aspects of life.

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And of course, throughout the history of Western civilization, as we’re all familiar,

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it’s not necessarily a pretty history.

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There’s conquest, there’s colonization, there’s slavery, and much of that is still continuing

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on today.

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However, one thing changed, and that the state became secularized.

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And more recently, you get the rise of corporations,

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and you get globalization, a sort of huge world economic system,

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industrialization, basically cocoonment in the built environment,

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being cut off, not spending as much time outdoors,

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not spending time much time outdoors, not spending

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time in nature. And then more recently, you get things like overconsumption and affluenza.

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And so the long-term outcomes of this is, as we’re all more and more aware, global climate

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change, global financial crises, pollution, toxicity, disease, violence,

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and what’s looking more and more like an inevitable collapse.

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All civilizations rise and fall,

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and it looks like this one that’s been going on for several thousand years

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is coming to an end.

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But what that end will look like and what will take its place remains to be seen.

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And it could be a very catastrophic

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Malthusian collapse, or

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it could be something a bit less

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devastating.

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And so

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I’m going to now turn it over

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to Ivan, who’s going to talk about

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contemporary

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psychedelic practices

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and that sort of thing, and then Cameron will talk a bit

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more about literature and philosophy and psychedelic practices and that sort of thing. And then Cameron will talk a bit more about literature and philosophy

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and psychedelic things.

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And then we’ll have a discussion.

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My name is Ivan.

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I’m an athlete and student

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at the University of Kent.

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I’m studying a plant called

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Salida binorm. It’s a short-acting

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hallucinogenic plant from Mexico.

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It gets mixed in

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with the Mayan, well they’ve got three, they’ve got

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morning glory and mushrooms and salvia as well. Salvia has moved into the west and is

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used in a very different way. I’m going to show you a video quickly just because this

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is what I studied and so it’ll sort of wrap everything in context. So this is what I study and so sort of wrap everything in context so this is just

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like a two-minute clip this is posted on YouTube this person has just consumed

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well about two minutes ago consumed salvia and so then these are sort of

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some of the some of his ramblings as they come up I don’t know man it’s like it’s a trip it was so beautiful I was

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I was scared

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but it

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it makes me

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understand things

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like it guides me

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to places

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far away

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that are not here

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or don’t exist

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or existed before

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or will exist

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and I’m just

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walking through it

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being part of it

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witnessing

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what’s being

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what’s taking place

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an event

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there you go now taking place, an event.

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There you go. Now you’re understanding.

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An event always takes place somewhere else.

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We just got to be looking.

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We got to be sitting down and just enjoy what the villagers are doing or the Hawaiians are doing or the Indians from Mexico are doing

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or the people, the Indians from North America are doing.

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Indigenous people of all kinds of the world, even blacks.

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I just feel like there’s one unity of all these indigenous people,

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living a simple life, telling us that we should live like they do.

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Like, they have simpleness to the earth, that’s what earth wants.

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Earth wants that, us to be their children again.

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And now we just ruin it with gasoline and oil.

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So, on, on YouTube there’s, um’s 900 videos. If you Google Salvi Devinorum, there’s 900 of these videos.

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And they vary from this, which is a very open-minded, expanded consciousness kind of thing,

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all the way through to kids that don’t know what they’re doing in the break windows and stuff like that. And a whole range in between. I’ve watched about a hundred of these videos.

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And it’s sort of part of ongoing research.

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But what I want to talk about today is how, like Anne has talked about the, how traditional shamanic practices,

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they’re still alive and well today but the power elite

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have definitely started to

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well they’ve essentially eroded

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a lot of the power out of those

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experiences but

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part of the human neural architecture

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something in there

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makes us seek this

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experience

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and redefine it and recreate it

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and then re-ritualize it.

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I’m sort of at the preliminary stage of data analysis and stuff like that, but what I’d

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like to hypothesize is that this sort of small phenomenon on YouTube is a type of re-virtualization.

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So Anna talked about the power elite,

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and during that pass off of power from the church to the monarchy,

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the monarchy to the state, and now from the state to the corporation,

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we’ve seen this incredible erosion of psychedelic practices,

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consciousness expansion, all that kind of thought.

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And as far as this conference goes and progress and all that kind of stuff,

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if we’re really to sort of

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re-engage in the creative

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and innovative power

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that the human mind is capable of,

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we’re going to have to start

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looking at traditional practices

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and how they relate to modern practices, but also to start to study these new ideas, these

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new practices that are emerging basically right under our noses.

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So the power elite continue to try to erode this kind of stuff.

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And it goes right from killing the shaman

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to convincing populations,

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especially the new media right now,

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they’re very good at convincing people

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that they don’t need this anymore.

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They’re incredibly good at convincing us

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that we need a new car and that new shirt

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and the toys for our kids or whatever,

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but very good

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at also convincing us that we don’t need

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this type of thinking anymore, this psychedelic

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thinking. But despite

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the power leads attempt to eradicate

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this, it keeps, it

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bubbles up. We saw an example

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of this in the 60s.

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The 60s kind of peaked and

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fell off.

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I have some ideas about that, which I’ll talk about at the end.

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But the power elite doesn’t want us to think like this,

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because it disengages us from consumerism.

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It connects us with the environment and makes us start to question

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what’s going on with pollution, overconsumption, etc., etc., etc.

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And it also makes us question the status quo.

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And the Power League really, it’s important for them, for us to accept the status quo.

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We want to vote and we want to work and we want to have a beer after work and go to bed and do it all over again.

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And that’s really what they try to, they try to get us in cycle, and they really want us to keep us there. So if we’re thinking differently, if we’re engaging in creative thought, this isn’t such a good thing for the power lead.

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Now, as I mentioned before, the power lead has tried to erode these kind of practices.

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And a lot of modern religious practices have their basis in these early shamanic practices.

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But what’s happened is they’ve kind of hollowed out the core of the ritual, and so on the

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surface it looks the same, but the meaning and the power of the rituals has been taken

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away to maintain that color.

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Now, I had talked about the more traditional practices, and these traditional practices

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have sort of morphed into and moved into a modern day manifestation in Brazil at the Santo Daime Church, which

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is an Ayahuasca, a new Ayahuasca practice. In 1930, it started to rise at the Native

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American Church, which is a Native American, it’s based in Hale. And then in Africa, you’ve got the Iboga cults as well. And these are

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all traditional practices practiced in a modern time. And so you have this trajectory from

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the traditional to the modern. And whether by consciously or unconsciously,

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humans seek this psychedelic thinking.

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In the West, we’ve seen a rise of things like yoga and meditation.

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And then, Salvi did an Arangajai study,

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is a sort of fast-growing trend as well.

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And whether people know it or not,

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they’re seeking out those because nobody

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forces you to go to yoga

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or you don’t

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walk out of the store and somebody hands you

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salvia to burn or to smoke

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you have to seek out those

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those type of experiences

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and we seek them out

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from the very beginning

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early childhood experiences of rolling down the hill experiences. And we seek them out from the very beginning.

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Early childhood experiences of rolling down the hill,

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experiences of dizziness,

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one of the very first consciousness

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expanding practices

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that we experiment

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with. And then,

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like I mentioned, the yoga

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and the Salvi Divinorum.

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The Salvi Divinorum

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is different because the practice and the Salvi Divinorum. The Salvi Divinorum is different because

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the practice,

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the traditional practice and the modern practice

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are totally separate.

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There’s no similarity

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between the two.

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And so this

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is really interesting for us to write

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these new rituals that

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humans create in order

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to make sense of their psychedelic practices.

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So, Salving de Venorum, short-acting glucegen from Mexico.

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Mazatecs have had Yuzip from contact until now.

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It entered into Western academic interest in the 60s when Wassily Hoffman brought back

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a botanical specimen and it was successfully identified.

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And then it was this kind of mythical third plant in the Mazatecs for quite a number of

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years.

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In the mid-80s, two groups found the active ingredient, the active psychedelic ingredient in it,

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salvinor and Abe.

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And so from there, it took another five or six years

00:23:31 ►

for them to say that, yes, this was the psychoactive property in this plant.

00:23:37 ►

And they also figured out at the same time that you can smoke this.

00:23:41 ►

So we’re into the early 90s right now.

00:23:47 ►

And so we’ve got the early 90s, people are starting to discover salvia, and at the same time we’ve got the rise of the internet.

00:23:51 ►

So this salvia-debenorin phenomenon, it’s not out of the question that there’s a whole

00:24:00 ►

bunch of videos on YouTube because this phenomenon actually has risen with the popularity of the Internet.

00:24:07 ►

And again, I’m just at the preliminary part of my data, trying to turn it through, but

00:24:12 ►

what I’m seeing right now is that people posting on YouTube, they’re posting outside of a

00:24:18 ►

ritualized context, but in posting on YouTube, they’ve started to create their own rituals

00:24:24 ►

and the Internet is very integrated into that.

00:24:29 ►

So the differences between the Western practices,

00:24:33 ►

the modern practices of Salve de Norma, and the Mexican ones,

00:24:36 ►

in the West it’s smoked, in Mexico it’s chewed,

00:24:40 ►

and in the West it’s mainly self-administered,

00:24:44 ►

normally maybe with the help of a friend, but in

00:24:47 ►

Mexico it’s almost always administered by a shamanic, so it’s part of the shamanic practices.

00:24:53 ►

In the West it’s an experiential practice, so people are using it just to experience

00:24:58 ►

it, whereas in Mexico they use it for ritual.

00:25:01 ►

They use it for shamanic training. They use it for divination.

00:25:08 ►

And they also use it for some Shuri ceremonies.

00:25:13 ►

And then, of course, the geographical differences are large, due to the fact that it’s only in the Oaxaca Valley that Salvi Divinor is found.

00:25:19 ►

So you’ve gone from this very specific state in Mexico to a global phenomenon.

00:25:25 ►

So YouTube is a really interesting part of ethnographic and, well, I mean, anybody studying people right now,

00:25:32 ►

YouTube is a huge array of cultural information.

00:25:36 ►

It takes up about 20% of all the HTTP traffic on the World Wide Web,

00:25:41 ►

which factors down into about 10% of all internet traffic.

00:25:47 ►

Think about

00:25:48 ►

having something that’s 10%

00:25:49 ►

of all internet traffic. It’s a pretty

00:25:51 ►

large and dominant cultural

00:25:53 ►

force right now.

00:25:57 ►

Just a little stat. Every 10 minutes,

00:26:00 ►

or sorry, every minute,

00:26:01 ►

10 hours of video

00:26:03 ►

is uploaded on YouTube.

00:26:11 ►

And this footage on YouTube, it’s largely amateur.

00:26:16 ►

There’s some of the big news corporations and stuff like that,

00:26:19 ►

and governments have YouTube sites,

00:26:23 ►

but it’s largely people like us with a video camera.

00:26:24 ►

There’s something to say.

00:26:29 ►

So as I go through all of this YouTube data,

00:26:31 ►

I’ve spent weeks and weeks and weeks watching YouTube videos.

00:26:32 ►

There’s about 900 hits for Salvia.

00:26:36 ►

So when I started and I typed in Salvia,

00:26:38 ►

there’s 300 hits.

00:26:39 ►

This was in January.

00:26:41 ►

And now I actually did it today

00:26:42 ►

and it was 10,500.

00:26:45 ►

So just in that short time.

00:26:47 ►

Now, these are not only unique videos, but these are the hits that YouTube is bringing

00:26:50 ►

up on their internal search engine.

00:26:52 ►

So that’s quite a change from 300 to 10,500 in seven months.

00:27:02 ►

So we’re seeing a large growth in this

00:27:05 ►

phenomenon.

00:27:09 ►

The videos

00:27:10 ►

on YouTube, highly criticized

00:27:12 ►

by the media, of course,

00:27:14 ►

and politicians.

00:27:16 ►

A lot of congressmen in the states

00:27:18 ►

quoted, well, I’ve seen it on YouTube,

00:27:20 ►

and they dig up these, like,

00:27:22 ►

one or two of the worst videos

00:27:24 ►

they possibly can. I classify one or two of the worst videos that possibly can.

00:27:25 ►

I classify about 85% of the videos that I watch on YouTube as a positive experience,

00:27:31 ►

as in that there was no physical appearance of distress

00:27:36 ►

and no verbal help or anything like that.

00:27:41 ►

There are a few videos that definitely display people not

00:27:47 ►

having a very good time, but the majority of them are positive and it’s really hard

00:27:51 ►

to tell whether or not the… I don’t know where the… people at Fox and stuff like

00:27:58 ►

that of course cruise through all these videos and put up the very worst ones, but it’s a

00:28:03 ►

very small percentage.

00:28:13 ►

So the top four videos, YouTube, again, talking about this growing phenomenon,

00:28:14 ►

there’s 6 million views between the top four videos

00:28:17 ►

on YouTube, Sally DeNorme videos on YouTube.

00:28:19 ►

So 6 million views is quite a substantial amount of attention.

00:28:28 ►

Not to warn, at least a small part of this research.

00:28:36 ►

So there’s a few reasons why salivative norm and YouTube have found a match together.

00:28:43 ►

Salivative norm is short-acting,

00:28:45 ►

so if you smoke it, the better part of your experience

00:28:51 ►

is going to be maybe 15 minutes maximum.

00:28:55 ►

Normally it lasts about four to seven minutes.

00:28:57 ►

So the YouTube time limit of 10 minutes

00:29:01 ►

fits in really nicely with that.

00:29:04 ►

Largely in the West, it’s legal to sell,

00:29:08 ►

possess, grow, smoke. You can eat. You can basically do whatever you want with it. Some

00:29:13 ►

U.S. states are slowly starting to make it illegal. And Australia has also made it illegal.

00:29:25 ►

Australia is also made illegal, and I think Spain has said no.

00:29:31 ►

But largely, it’s readily available in shops, but also online as well,

00:29:36 ►

which adds to its Internet focus.

00:29:40 ►

So now we have the confluence of psychedelic thinking and the World Wide Web.

00:29:46 ►

The World Wide Web, I don’t think itself is a mode of psychedelic thinking but I really do believe that it has

00:29:49 ►

it will factor in more and more into this

00:29:52 ►

into both the spread of new ways of psychedelic thinking

00:29:56 ►

but also to sort of facilitate the virtualization

00:30:00 ►

of new ways of psychedelic thinking

00:30:04 ►

so we have this loss on one side of new ways of psychedelic thinking.

00:30:10 ►

So we have this loss on one side of traditional psychedelic thinking,

00:30:14 ►

but on the same side we have to make sure that we’re exploring the new ways that we are displaying this and ritualizing it.

00:30:23 ►

and ritualizing it.

00:30:25 ►

And I started,

00:30:28 ►

I was trying to find sort of a title for this

00:30:29 ►

and all that kind of stuff

00:30:30 ►

and never actually

00:30:32 ►

ended up finding one.

00:30:33 ►

But sort of,

00:30:34 ►

it’s almost like the internet

00:30:35 ►

is like the new oracle.

00:30:37 ►

And an oracle is kind of

00:30:39 ►

something you have to

00:30:39 ►

give and take, right?

00:30:40 ►

You can’t just ask it

00:30:41 ►

and expect to receive.

00:30:42 ►

You have to sort of

00:30:44 ►

give to the oracle as well as receive.

00:30:47 ►

So, more on that later.

00:30:50 ►

But the Internet’s a really dominant force too, because everybody gets their say.

00:30:55 ►

It’s this new way of talking to the world without having as much subversive force placed on you.

00:31:09 ►

So print media, video, all that kind of stuff,

00:31:11 ►

it’s all been filtered through the corporations.

00:31:14 ►

Whereas the Internet, you’ve got a computer, no problem, you’ve got a voice.

00:31:18 ►

And your voice can be as loud as the corporations or the governments, if you so choose.

00:31:24 ►

So what do I want to take from all of this?

00:31:27 ►

Humans are adaptable.

00:31:29 ►

And although we see this loss of traditional shamanic practice,

00:31:35 ►

this traditional psychedelic thinking,

00:31:37 ►

at the same time we have the rise of other types of practices.

00:31:41 ►

Now if you talk to a lot of people and you watch a lot of these videos,

00:31:45 ►

you can easily make the assumption that, oh, these are just a bunch of kids, they’re smoking

00:31:49 ►

something new, they’re getting out of their mind, you can devalue their experience all

00:31:56 ►

you want. But if you look and you search, there’s something in here. And again, at the

00:32:02 ►

preliminary part of my data, I don’t exactly have solid conclusions,

00:32:06 ►

but I know that there’s more in here

00:32:08 ►

than just a bunch of kids getting out.

00:32:13 ►

So as humans face this crisis

00:32:18 ►

that we’re coming up to shortly,

00:32:21 ►

a hundred years from now, who knows,

00:32:24 ►

the power for our minds shortly, a hundred years from now, who knows,

00:32:31 ►

where the power for our minds to create new ways of dealing with these things,

00:32:35 ►

we’re going to be forced to do this more and more and more.

00:32:42 ►

So whether it be a small phenomenon like people posting videos on YouTube and slowly creating those rituals,

00:32:43 ►

like people posting videos on YouTube and slowly creating those rituals,

00:32:50 ►

or if it’s a massive psychedelic revolution that everybody in the world turns on,

00:32:59 ►

it’s one of the many possibilities that might help us pass through this next hurdle in humanity.

00:33:05 ►

So I think that really what I want to sum up with this

00:33:07 ►

whole thing is that

00:33:09 ►

there’s

00:33:11 ►

traditional shamanic practices

00:33:13 ►

there’s spiritual practices

00:33:15 ►

that are old as time itself

00:33:18 ►

but at the same time

00:33:19 ►

as humans adapt and humans

00:33:21 ►

create new rituals

00:33:23 ►

we place these, sorry, we embed these new

00:33:31 ►

ways of thinking into various types of texts.

00:33:34 ►

This is one of them.

00:33:35 ►

And then the other one, Cameron’s going to talk to you.

00:33:39 ►

So that’s about it.

00:33:41 ►

Thank you.

00:33:44 ►

All right.

00:33:44 ►

I’m Cameron Adams.

00:33:46 ►

I am, by training, a medical anthropologist, so I’m walking out on a limb here.

00:33:50 ►

Something totally new and a little bit more fun for me.

00:33:53 ►

Though it does have some stuff that is related, and I’ll talk about that at one point.

00:34:00 ►

These are some of the other systems.

00:34:01 ►

These are some guesses.

00:34:10 ►

I, like Ivan, have become fascinated with the Internet as a place to study people,

00:34:15 ►

except for I’m a little bit more old-fashioned, a little bit stodgier in my ways,

00:34:17 ►

and infinitely older than Ivan.

00:34:20 ►

And so, a whole seven years, I believe.

00:34:27 ►

And I’ve been looking at podcasts, which have been supported by the internet. These are people who put up talks, lectures, music programs, whatnot.

00:34:32 ►

It’s like a radio program that you can subscribe to it, pull it down, listen to it when you want.

00:34:36 ►

There have been a whole bunch of them on psychedelic topics.

00:34:40 ►

And you can get hour-long, two-hour-long lectures on these topics,

00:34:44 ►

which, for some reason reason turned it on.

00:34:46 ►

I can sit there and listen to a talking head for a few hours.

00:34:50 ►

But also forums, where you can discuss this stuff

00:34:52 ►

in the very old-fashioned method of print media

00:34:56 ►

in much more of a discursive way.

00:34:57 ►

But I do not want to discount the discursive nature

00:34:59 ►

of YouTube.

00:35:01 ►

And I could talk about this a little bit more.

00:35:03 ►

There is a dialogue there.

00:35:04 ►

It’s not just posting a video.

00:35:06 ►

Now, I’ve got a whole list of psychedelic podcasts of various sorts, from very rational

00:35:14 ►

to very freaky, if anybody wants those.

00:35:17 ►

But what I’m going to focus on mostly is the history of modern psychedelic philosophy, sort of a trajectory, as opposed

00:35:32 ►

to some pretty old stuff.

00:35:34 ►

And we could go all the way back to Plato, who very many of his ideas and stylistic points

00:35:41 ►

could be treated to the Lusinian mysteries and kikion,

00:35:45 ►

which may or may not be an ergot-based beverage, which would be similar to LSD.

00:35:52 ►

Somebody has come up with a very simple way of making it non-toxic using ash,

00:35:57 ►

so it would have been easy to do.

00:35:59 ►

So Plato is a little bit earlier than what I want to talk about.

00:36:02 ►

Also, I’m missing some of those old guys, Thomas De Quincey, classic opiometer literature.

00:36:08 ►

William Blake is a visionary poet.

00:36:11 ►

And Samuel Taylor Coolidge, another visionary poet.

00:36:14 ►

I don’t want to go as far back as that.

00:36:16 ►

I mentioned this is a very old tradition in the West.

00:36:20 ►

But I want to start with stuff specifically related to psychedelic drugs and what came in in the West.

00:36:32 ►

And I’m going to start arbitrarily in the 30s with Alan Watts, a studied comparative religion, Oxford, and did a lot of very straightforward

00:36:48 ►

religious analysis until he had taken LSD and found, wow, this stuff gets me to the

00:36:57 ►

same place meditation and these deep methods do, and started writing about these issues and speaking about them. And this began

00:37:08 ►

a mixing of science and spirituality at that time. It started becoming this analytic approach

00:37:15 ►

to the spiritual experience and trying to understand it analytically and the psychedelic

00:37:22 ►

experience. Now this was taken up much more strongly by the ever-famous Aldous Huxley,

00:37:29 ►

who we all know, Doors of Perception,

00:37:32 ►

his personal favorite novel, The Island,

00:37:37 ►

which has a psychedelic vision, a utopian vision of possibility.

00:37:43 ►

And so with these guys, you start getting in,

00:37:46 ►

especially with Aldous Huxley,

00:37:48 ►

this very science-driven idea of the psychedelic experience.

00:37:54 ►

And so we can take this, we can look at it,

00:37:57 ►

we see what it does, we get these ideas

00:37:58 ►

about how society should be,

00:38:00 ►

how we should treat the raising of children

00:38:03 ►

in a very sort of analytic way.

00:38:07 ►

Now, Aldous Huxley also felt that psychedelics should only be reserved for the elite,

00:38:12 ►

the intellectual, the Illuminati, basically.

00:38:15 ►

I don’t think we can call them such a name quite to use today.

00:38:19 ►

As opposed to a sort of democratized thing. Now, much more recently, this mix of science and spirituality,

00:38:27 ►

or the psychedelic influence,

00:38:31 ►

has been sort of culminated in the work of Dale Pendle,

00:38:35 ►

who’s written three books,

00:38:37 ►

Pharmacopoeia, Pharmacognosis, Pharmacodynamics,

00:38:44 ►

based on very pharmacologically driven terms from the field of pharmacology.

00:38:51 ►

And basically they take a series of mind-altering plants and discuss them in a very complex mix of history, chemistry, botany, poetry, experience reports, etc.

00:39:13 ►

He mixes them all up, and you get a very rich sense of what this plant is

00:39:19 ►

that neither science nor pure poetry can give you.

00:39:23 ►

It gives you this really complex insight into them.

00:39:28 ►

It’s particularly good for people who’ve never done them

00:39:31 ►

and trying to get an idea of what they’re like.

00:39:33 ►

Though he covers, he’s not just psychedelic plants, pharmacognosis,

00:39:36 ►

pharmacodynamicists, stimulus.

00:39:38 ►

He just goes through a whole variety.

00:39:41 ►

And if he’s taken everything he’s written about,

00:39:44 ►

he’s somebody who can do things

00:39:45 ►

that most humans can’t.

00:39:48 ►

But that’s where you’re getting this

00:39:49 ►

mixing of science and spirituality.

00:39:53 ►

This starts in the 60s.

00:39:58 ►

Going into philosophers,

00:40:00 ►

scientist philosophers like Timothy Leary,

00:40:02 ►

who sort of went from psychology,

00:40:04 ►

got into the psychedelic thing,

00:40:05 ►

sort of denied psychology to some degree,

00:40:08 ►

came back to it.

00:40:10 ►

Starting with him in his later work,

00:40:14 ►

but also Robert Anton Wilson,

00:40:16 ►

who was a very stringent Leary supporter,

00:40:21 ►

you start getting teleology

00:40:24 ►

in this scientific thinking.

00:40:28 ►

Now, those of us who are embedded in science understand teleology is a dirty word,

00:40:34 ►

or a letter word, especially if you’re thinking evolution.

00:40:38 ►

There is no goal to evolution, it just happens to be teleology,

00:40:41 ►

but there’s a goal orientation to it.

00:40:43 ►

These psychedelic thinkers start bringing teleology into it,

00:40:47 ►

and this culminates in Timothy Leary’s ideas of SMILE,

00:40:51 ►

which is S-M-I squared, L-E.

00:40:56 ►

Space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension.

00:41:02 ►

We are on a path towards these things.

00:41:07 ►

And these are evidence in what he calls

00:41:09 ►

our eight-circuit psychedelic or psychological model.

00:41:12 ►

And there’s various aspects of the brain,

00:41:15 ►

four of which are currently activated,

00:41:17 ►

and then the left-hand side of the brain,

00:41:20 ►

and then there’s all the right-hand side of the brain.

00:41:22 ►

There’s four other circuits that can be activated

00:41:24 ►

through psychedelic plants, but there are future

00:41:26 ►

evolutions. We’re moving into them.

00:41:29 ►

So there’s a teleological view

00:41:30 ►

where eventually we’ll be

00:41:32 ►

space-floating cognitive

00:41:34 ►

entities that escape our bodies

00:41:36 ►

and some pretty wild stuff

00:41:38 ►

added to it. But that’s the teleology

00:41:40 ►

between the eight-circuit model

00:41:42 ►

and the smile. Now,

00:41:44 ►

he says we’re at stage four, halfway through.

00:41:47 ►

Now, Robert Anton Wilson works with Timothy Leary, or works on his ideas.

00:41:52 ►

I don’t think they necessarily ever met, but he started in the 70s.

00:41:56 ►

And came up with ideas such as reality tunnels.

00:42:00 ►

I think this is a very useful thing to think about in terms of psychedelic thinking.

00:42:04 ►

I think this is a very useful thing to think about in terms of psychedelic thinking.

00:42:10 ►

Reality is a very complex thing, a multifaceted thing.

00:42:17 ►

However, our experience is traveling in a tunnel or a track through this broader reality.

00:42:24 ►

And those of us who are called anthropologists use a nice technical word for that, ethnocentrism.

00:42:27 ►

We have our cultural models that we think are right, and we go through them.

00:42:31 ►

And so this reality plays into this.

00:42:39 ►

And he starts having sort of a fight back against the scientific dominance,

00:42:43 ►

the dominance of scientific thinking, by coming up, Robert Anton Wilson says, with irrational

00:42:45 ►

rationalism, or as a lot of people are starting to talk about, scientism as opposed to science.

00:42:51 ►

The flat-out belief that science is the only way that is worthwhile of knowing the world.

00:42:57 ►

He’s not denying science as a very, very useful way of knowing certain things about the world,

00:43:03 ►

but he has a problem with people thinking it’s the only way.

00:43:07 ►

And he came up with the fantastic statement that the world is stranger than we imagine,

00:43:14 ►

so we shouldn’t believe in it.

00:43:18 ►

Belief is when you deny the input of data, evidence.

00:43:25 ►

If you start believing you don’t need the evidence,

00:43:27 ►

then it’s something different than science.

00:43:32 ►

Now, this brings us essentially to a turning point

00:43:37 ►

in psychedelic thinking.

00:43:40 ►

I’d like to think of it as BT and AT.

00:43:45 ►

And that T is Terence McKenna, the ever famous Terrence McKenna.

00:43:50 ►

This guy was so powerful of a speaker

00:43:56 ►

that while you’re listening to him it is very hard to think there’s anything wrong with what he’s saying.

00:44:01 ►

I’ve listened to, I believe, 30 hours

00:44:06 ►

of lectures of this guy, and every time I’ve said, yeah, yeah, yeah, about a week later,

00:44:11 ►

that idea was a little bit weird. Doesn’t hold. But he’s very charismatic, and he can

00:44:17 ►

draw you in. And he is the foundation of much of psychedelic thinking that has come since.

00:44:27 ►

And basically everybody wants to be Terence McKenzie.

00:44:29 ►

He’s died in the bikini.

00:44:33 ►

But he took Robert Anton Wilson’s The World is Stranger Than We Imagine

00:44:37 ►

and amplified it a bit.

00:44:40 ►

The world is stranger than we can imagine, even more.

00:44:44 ►

And so psychedelic drugs, in his idea, are the only way to get beyond that. find it a bit, the world is stranger than we can imagine, even more.

00:44:49 ►

And so psychedelic drugs, in his idea, are the only way to get beyond that.

00:44:55 ►

Now, what I see as this tying into the Robert Anton Wilson stuff is reality tunnels.

00:44:58 ►

I like to think of them more as trenches or tracks.

00:45:20 ►

The psychedelic experience, be it induced through meditation, be it induced through fasting, trauma, or using plants, lifts you out of that trench, out of that groove, in such a way that you have a better holistic view of what’s going on.

00:45:28 ►

Now, that experience in and of itself can be quite mind-blowing and very difficult to bring back. I think a very good way to do it is spend more than a few weeks on vacation

00:45:35 ►

in another culture. The anthropological experience is often designed around experiencing another

00:45:41 ►

culture, finally getting it, so that you can understand how arbitrary your own is,

00:45:47 ►

and you can come up with a better analysis,

00:45:49 ►

social analysis of what’s going on.

00:45:51 ►

Break down these ideas about ethnocentrism.

00:45:53 ►

This is a fast way, the psychedelic experience is a fast way

00:45:56 ►

to get up out of those groups.

00:45:59 ►

Now, another sort of interesting thing Terence McKenna said

00:46:04 ►

that I quite like is when we

00:46:06 ►

get out there, we’re like fishermen in a sea of consciousness.

00:46:11 ►

And the goal is not to cast your net and catch the Leviathan that will rip your net and maybe

00:46:18 ►

drag you into the sea and never hear from you again.

00:46:22 ►

That’s happened.

00:46:21 ►

You’ll never hear from him again.

00:46:22 ►

What’s happened?

00:46:27 ►

And the goal is not to catch the tiny minnows of consciousness that make you realize,

00:46:29 ►

now isn’t that the most amazing thing,

00:46:33 ►

that your pinky finger fits right in your nostril?

00:46:36 ►

That’s the middle-sized fish of consciousness,

00:46:38 ►

this job to work towards bringing material back

00:46:44 ►

that is significant,

00:46:46 ►

but you can’t get the stuff that we simply can’t handle.

00:46:50 ►

And from his point of view, it is a role in society

00:46:54 ►

that someone or individuals need to become engaged with.

00:47:00 ►

And he worked often enough with a biologist, Rupert Sheldrake, who I believe some of you

00:47:06 ►

probably heard of, who’s still doing quite interesting work, and Ralph Abraham, one of

00:47:11 ►

the guys of chaos mathematics in what they call trial laws, which they have various discussions

00:47:15 ►

with each other and people would come and listen to them.

00:47:19 ►

And I’ll get to Rupert Sheldrake when I get to the sort of culmination here.

00:47:24 ►

Rupert Sheldrake when I get to the sort of culmination here.

00:47:29 ►

Now, from these ideas at this point, I’m going to give a quote that I have.

00:47:31 ►

And it’s a real quote.

00:47:32 ►

It’s a fictitious quote.

00:47:36 ►

It’s a quote of a fictitious person, a fictitious book that’s in a magazine.

00:47:38 ►

It’s kind of psychedelic in and of itself.

00:47:44 ►

But it says, it is too constricting to say that you must always think outside the box, which is what we currently

00:47:46 ►

count as psychedelic thinking to some degree, corporate psychedelic thinking.

00:47:49 ►

Whether you are thinking inside or outside the box, you are still letting the box dictate

00:47:55 ►

your thoughts, are you not?

00:47:58 ►

What you are not acknowledging is the honest fact that the box itself is figmentary and illusory.

00:48:07 ►

And as long as one continues to act in reaction to this perceived set of dictates, one cannot

00:48:12 ►

be truly original in thought.

00:48:15 ►

So once we’re stuck in those grooves, even if we want to walk on the top of the groove

00:48:20 ►

or the bottom of the groove, it’s still going down that same path.

00:48:22 ►

or the bottom of the groove, it’s still going down that same path.

00:48:27 ►

This is attributed to Erica Amelia Smith in an address to the nature of proper uses of technology

00:48:31 ►

in Steampunk magazine, so it’s a literature magazine.

00:48:37 ►

And I think this is, again, this idea that getting out of any kind of groove

00:48:43 ►

that you find yourself in

00:48:45 ►

is the best way to find solutions to the current problems.

00:48:50 ►

Now, Terence McKenna started bringing in this teleology much more.

00:48:57 ►

They would come out of these grooves,

00:48:59 ►

and they would see patterns and attribute significance to them. I think this is quite related to…

00:49:09 ►

I hope I haven’t been here.

00:49:11 ►

Yeah.

00:49:12 ►

Some research actually done here at the University of Amsterdam,

00:49:15 ►

quite serendipitously, by…

00:49:19 ►

You’re here, but I don’t think you are.

00:49:21 ►

If I mispronounce your name, please forgive me.

00:49:23 ►

Ah, Deichnerhaus did a study of

00:49:27 ►

decision making.

00:49:31 ►

And

00:49:31 ►

they basically said, here’s a

00:49:33 ►

variety of things to make the right decision,

00:49:35 ►

the best decision out of them. And they had half the group

00:49:37 ►

sat and thought about

00:49:40 ►

10 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever

00:49:41 ►

it was. The other half

00:49:43 ►

played chess. And at the end of the time said, okay, it was. The other half played chess.

00:49:46 ►

And at the end of the time said, okay, which one?

00:49:48 ►

The ones who played chess

00:49:50 ►

made, as a group,

00:49:52 ►

better decisions than the ones who

00:49:54 ►

cogitated on it. And the interpretation

00:49:56 ►

given, of course this is interpretation,

00:49:58 ►

we don’t know if this is what’s going on,

00:50:00 ►

is that when you consciously

00:50:02 ►

approach a problem,

00:50:04 ►

you go down well-worn paths.

00:50:07 ►

The project of choice was deciding on what kind of car,

00:50:10 ►

which is the best car out of this group.

00:50:12 ►

Well, when you’re deciding what kind of car to get,

00:50:14 ►

what do you think?

00:50:16 ►

Hewley car?

00:50:17 ►

Is that more important than the comfort of the captain’s chair?

00:50:22 ►

Is that more important than the power of the horsepower?

00:50:25 ►

But you make choices.

00:50:26 ►

You immediately make choices before assessing everything, because you’re trying to solve

00:50:31 ►

the problem.

00:50:33 ►

Whereas he suggests that the subconscious mind takes all the factors equally. And therefore, the color of the interior,

00:50:49 ►

the space of the boot or trunk,

00:50:52 ►

are equally assessed with fuel economy, et cetera,

00:50:58 ►

and then relatively graded after the fact,

00:51:02 ►

as opposed to pre.

00:51:05 ►

And so therefore, a more rational choice,

00:51:09 ►

more holistic decision can be made.

00:51:11 ►

Again, this ties into what’s happening

00:51:14 ►

with the psychedelic experience

00:51:16 ►

with looking at things outside of your groove

00:51:18 ►

more holistically.

00:51:19 ►

You can see, okay, that’s an arbitrary path.

00:51:22 ►

It might be of interest.

00:51:24 ►

That might be of interest, too.

00:51:25 ►

And you get a very sort of everything is equal.

00:51:28 ►

Now, unfortunately, this can also lead to the over-assessment of the value of unimportant

00:51:35 ►

aspects.

00:51:37 ►

And this is why we say the psychedelic experience is not enough.

00:51:41 ►

You’ve got to bring it back and use it on the ground.

00:51:47 ►

experience is not enough. You’ve got to bring it back and use it on the ground. Now, Terence McKenna talked about the eschaton. 2012. Rick back there knows all about this.

00:51:56 ►

He’s lived amongst the Mayans himself. In 2012, the Mayan calendar apparently, according

00:52:01 ►

to some people, will end. And it’s the end of the world, according to some people.

00:52:07 ►

But something’s going on.

00:52:08 ►

And Terence McKenna came up with a chaos sort of graphing of chaos patterns

00:52:14 ►

in the King Wan version of the Qing,

00:52:21 ►

and took this and mapped it against history,

00:52:23 ►

found peaks and troughs, compared what he called novelty

00:52:25 ►

and lack of novelty, and the whole thing collapses at 2012.

00:52:30 ►

You map it to historical events.

00:52:32 ►

Maybe, maybe not.

00:52:33 ►

Of course, there’s a lot of ways to do this.

00:52:36 ►

And so this has become a major theme

00:52:39 ►

in a lot of the teleological thinking

00:52:41 ►

among the psychedelic community.

00:52:45 ►

The idea is something will happen in 2012.

00:52:50 ►

What will happen?

00:52:52 ►

The vast majority of these folk,

00:52:54 ►

and I think idealized by Daniel Pinchbeck,

00:52:57 ►

is that this will be a good thing.

00:53:00 ►

2012, something good is happening.

00:53:03 ►

The world will change.

00:53:06 ►

Society will change in such a way

00:53:08 ►

that

00:53:09 ►

we’ll all be better for it.

00:53:12 ►

And this

00:53:13 ►

basically ties into Timothy Leary’s

00:53:15 ►

smile. Space migration,

00:53:18 ►

becoming beings of light,

00:53:20 ►

going into these higher realms

00:53:22 ►

of mental

00:53:22 ►

functioning.

00:53:27 ►

And, you know,

00:53:28 ►

there we go. Perfect.

00:53:30 ►

Bruce Dahmer

00:53:31 ►

talks about this as if the universe

00:53:34 ►

itself

00:53:35 ►

is becoming a conscious being, and we’re only

00:53:38 ►

part of it. And this ties into the

00:53:40 ►

Gaia hypothesis,

00:53:42 ►

but that

00:53:44 ►

as the universe is becoming more conscious,

00:53:46 ►

2012 is when we go into a higher stage

00:53:48 ►

of the universal consciousness.

00:53:50 ►

And again, we’re just part of it,

00:53:52 ►

so things will be quite nice.

00:53:55 ►

And this seems to be a nice thread through.

00:53:59 ►

Eric Davis takes this in a slightly different way.

00:54:05 ►

He says, yes, in 2012 things can be

00:54:07 ►

pretty good. They can also be pretty bad.

00:54:12 ►

He doesn’t really talk about 2012 so much, but this future

00:54:15 ►

point. And he makes the very important statement

00:54:19 ►

that imagination is the key to what will occur to us in the future.

00:54:24 ►

Imagination.

00:54:24 ►

imagination is the key to what will occur to us in the future.

00:54:24 ►

Imagination.

00:54:33 ►

And the imagination is also that interface between humans and the natural world.

00:54:37 ►

Now, as a quote here,

00:54:41 ►

any kind of restorative, sustainable renewal of our power,

00:54:42 ►

of our planet, rather, has to exist on the imaginal realm as well as the realm of the technical

00:54:46 ►

solutions, political developments, and technological fixes.

00:54:50 ►

It’s a multidimensional problem.

00:54:53 ►

And by implication, that multidimensional problem requires us to be able to see outside

00:54:59 ►

of our two, three-dimensional realm.

00:55:03 ►

Four dimensions.

00:55:04 ►

Those of us lucky enough to be able to

00:55:06 ►

think in the long term have four dimensions.

00:55:09 ►

And he takes

00:55:10 ►

the stance that

00:55:11 ►

from the psychedelic experience you get

00:55:14 ►

visionary art,

00:55:17 ►

but that needs to be

00:55:18 ►

worked with and become visionary

00:55:20 ►

design.

00:55:22 ►

And so we can use these

00:55:24 ►

visionary ideas, these new ways of thinking,

00:55:27 ►

but apply them to society. So we can’t just sit around and wait for the eschaton of 2012

00:55:32 ►

and things will be great. We’ve got to do it. And we’ve got to do it creatively, because

00:55:37 ►

the way we’re doing things right now, it didn’t help it. It’s where the problems are coming from. And he sort of goes and hassles these other sort of guys

00:55:50 ►

that see that 2012 is going to be a really good thing

00:55:53 ►

by saying, dream of a better time ahead.

00:55:56 ►

Dreaming of a better time ahead is natural

00:55:58 ►

to the psychedelic experience.

00:56:00 ►

However, it’s dangerous, a temptress that keeps us

00:56:02 ►

from being active in the change itself

00:56:05 ►

so again we need to take this psychedelic experience

00:56:08 ►

we can’t just look at it

00:56:10 ►

assess things equally and say okay things are going to go

00:56:12 ►

in a certain way, can go in a certain way

00:56:13 ►

but we’ve got to take that information back

00:56:15 ►

instead we need to bring it back

00:56:17 ►

bring back the insights piece by piece

00:56:20 ►

to build a new world

00:56:21 ►

and so this is where I’m going to stop my particular

00:56:24 ►

bit of this talk

00:56:26 ►

and

00:56:27 ►

leave it up to you guys.

00:56:29 ►

And see what you guys have to say.

00:56:32 ►

Questions?

00:56:33 ►

Anything?

00:56:35 ►

I would actually even sort of continue

00:56:37 ►

what Calvin’s saying by saying that

00:56:39 ►

each

00:56:40 ►

psychedelic experience is different, period.

00:56:44 ►

per person or the individual will have a variety of different types of experiences,

00:56:51 ►

and then you’ll have a different experience than the person sitting beside you.

00:56:54 ►

I’ve gone through a number of rituals as well as just sort of the experiential stuff as well,

00:57:03 ►

and every time it’s different, every time things come out.

00:57:05 ►

And I think the most important part of those experiences

00:57:08 ►

is that it’s not the experience itself,

00:57:11 ►

but what you bring back from the experience

00:57:13 ►

and integrate it to your daily life.

00:57:15 ►

And I think that’s…

00:57:17 ►

So I would definitely not consider myself a lumper at all,

00:57:20 ►

more of a splitter, but yeah, it’s infinite possibilities.

00:57:27 ►

But it’s taking those infinite possibilities using them creatively

00:57:29 ►

bringing them back

00:57:30 ►

because we can’t spend our entire

00:57:33 ►

existence in this psychedelic realm

00:57:35 ►

because it’s very

00:57:37 ►

difficult to

00:57:39 ►

function on a daily basis

00:57:41 ►

it’s a place that we go

00:57:43 ►

and we bring it back

00:57:44 ►

and by integrating those experiences

00:57:48 ►

into our daily life,

00:57:50 ►

that creativity and that innovation

00:57:52 ►

is going to help, hopefully.

00:57:59 ►

Okay.

00:58:00 ►

Do you see a difference?

00:58:01 ►

I’m just interested in surprising you.

00:58:03 ►

Okay.

00:58:10 ►

Do you see a difference between the effect of doing the psychedelic drugs as opposed to people doing the psychedelic experience of state meditation

00:58:13 ►

in terms of how the experience is brought back and expressed within the community?

00:58:24 ►

Yes. within the community? Hmm, I… Yes, I mean, the short answer would be yes,

00:58:28 ►

there certainly would be certain differences.

00:58:33 ►

Having psychedelic experiences with the help of drugs

00:58:36 ►

is very, what’s the word, ergonomic?

00:58:41 ►

You will, if you take the correct dosage,

00:58:46 ►

you will achieve a psychedelic experience.

00:58:48 ►

Whereas other practices, you have to work at them for a long time,

00:58:51 ►

and part of that working at it for a long time

00:58:53 ►

often involves living a lifestyle

00:58:58 ►

that is more dedicated to those practices,

00:59:04 ►

so perhaps living a more monastic lifestyle

00:59:07 ►

or a more sort of lifestyle that incorporates those things.

00:59:14 ►

And so certainly the experience you get with taking psychedelic drugs

00:59:19 ►

can be more disorienting,

00:59:20 ►

and you have perhaps a more difficult time for many people reintegrating.

00:59:25 ►

Whereas if you’re achieving them through other means

00:59:28 ►

and you’re sort of living that lifestyle anyway,

00:59:32 ►

of course it’s going to have an effect on how you interpret it

00:59:35 ►

and what you bring back and how you share it with other people.

00:59:37 ►

If you’re living in a community of meditative, contemplative thinkers,

00:59:45 ►

then the way you communicate with other people

00:59:47 ►

in that community is going to be different.

00:59:50 ►

But also, you also prepare yourself for the experience.

00:59:52 ►

Nobody reaches enlightenment meditating in two weeks.

00:59:57 ►

You engage with yourself and you work towards it.

01:00:01 ►

And so whatever the experience, it builds up very slowly.

01:00:04 ►

And you essentially,

01:00:05 ►

as a lot of the talk in the Kundalini community is,

01:00:09 ►

is you prepare your nervous system for that.

01:00:11 ►

And if you get there too fast,

01:00:12 ►

it can be harmful.

01:00:13 ►

And in a lot of ways,

01:00:14 ►

the thing that goes,

01:00:15 ►

you can’t quite often be that lightning bolt

01:00:18 ►

a little bit too fast

01:00:19 ►

for anybody to integrate.

01:00:22 ►

But also,

01:00:22 ►

by living in a community

01:00:24 ►

or at least being aware of a meditative community,

01:00:26 ►

contemplative community,

01:00:28 ►

you have a structure with which to interpret your experience,

01:00:32 ►

which is in a lot of ways missing

01:00:34 ►

in the psychedelic drug community,

01:00:38 ►

the drugs in particular.

01:00:39 ►

I mean, a lot of people,

01:00:40 ►

there’s some guy on the street,

01:00:41 ►

he won’t try to answer the answer,

01:00:42 ►

and there may be some thinking about doing it before doing it, of people who are just some guy on the street who won’t try to answer the answer.

01:00:45 ►

There may be some thinking about doing it before doing it, but there’s not that sort

01:00:49 ►

of matrix or milieu in which to interpret the experience.

01:00:55 ►

This is some of the discussion about the difference between our emerging urban shamanism, as some

01:01:01 ►

people like to talk about it, versus traditional shamanism where there’s a community. Little kids see people on ebene and the young mo, they know the experience, they know what

01:01:10 ►

to expect, and are able to sort of surf the waves of experience that come with it because

01:01:15 ►

they know what to expect, they know what people come out of it. Whereas a lot of people, the

01:01:18 ►

first time they take these things, it might be the first time they’ve even seen it. And

01:01:22 ►

so there is a vast difference there. And Alan Watts talked about this

01:01:25 ►

with having achieved

01:01:27 ►

what he thought was an illuminated

01:01:30 ►

state to some degree through meditating,

01:01:31 ►

and the same state through LSD.

01:01:33 ►

So they’re very similar.

01:01:35 ►

And that they are

01:01:37 ►

of a kind to some degree.

01:01:41 ►

And

01:01:41 ►

01:01:43 ►

suggested the use of both techniques with each other as a way of making that a more robust and useful experience.

01:01:53 ►

But then there’s been ever since quite an argument between the, no, you’ve got to work at it and do the contemplation and meditate.

01:02:01 ►

No, no, that never gets you there. You’ve got to take the drugs and blah, blah, blah. There’s this big argument between those communities

01:02:05 ►

with some people saying, well, they actually

01:02:07 ►

can’t integrate with each other.

01:02:10 ►

Do you know the magazine, it used to

01:02:11 ►

be called Enlightenment, now it’s called EnlightenX?

01:02:14 ►

No.

01:02:16 ►

You know, you buy health and stories and stuff

01:02:18 ►

in America. But there’s an article

01:02:19 ►

about that very issue in the last

01:02:22 ►

issue.

01:02:23 ►

I really enjoy it. But if a man is trying to take a particular drug. I think you might really enjoy it.

01:02:26 ►

But if you’re a man,

01:02:27 ►

you’re taking a particular drug,

01:02:28 ►

I don’t know which one versus enlightenment.

01:02:30 ►

Which one do you think is going to have,

01:02:32 ►

if you’re talking about this

01:02:34 ►

in terms of changing world consciousness

01:02:37 ►

to deal with the looming crisis,

01:02:40 ►

which one’s going to have more power,

01:02:42 ►

the one that’s being within a structure,

01:02:44 ►

within a community or

01:02:45 ►

the people I know that have done

01:02:47 ►

do it individually

01:02:49 ►

they do it on a Saturday night

01:02:52 ►

at a party

01:02:52 ►

I don’t know what you mean by ritual

01:02:55 ►

but there’s no ritual besides

01:02:57 ►

bringing out the bomb and stuff

01:02:59 ►

and I’m not against

01:03:02 ►

in any way

01:03:03 ►

so I don’t mean to be

01:03:05 ►

fraudulent in any way

01:03:06 ►

but which is going to

01:03:08 ►

and then I think what you’re saying

01:03:11 ►

about the six million views

01:03:12 ►

so I guess it is getting out

01:03:14 ►

to a very large community

01:03:15 ►

but is that community

01:03:17 ►

going to be able to bring it together

01:03:19 ►

in a cohesive way

01:03:20 ►

like a shaman would do

01:03:21 ►

in a community?

01:03:24 ►

As far as which one’s better,

01:03:28 ►

I’m a yoga instructor

01:03:29 ►

or teacher as well as have

01:03:31 ►

plenty of experience with

01:03:33 ►

various psychoactive plants

01:03:35 ►

and different traditions and stuff like that.

01:03:38 ►

And they all,

01:03:40 ►

the door to perception

01:03:42 ►

is the same door, but there’s just

01:03:43 ►

a lot of different keys that open that door.

01:03:46 ►

And it’s not necessarily like if all of us did one thing in this room,

01:03:51 ►

it’s not necessarily going to be the best or the worst.

01:03:54 ►

It’s really up to the individual because it’s a very individual experience,

01:03:59 ►

so it’s up to the individual to find what works best for them.

01:04:02 ►

The woman that taught me how to be a yoga instructor

01:04:05 ►

had maybe touched a drop of wine twice in her life,

01:04:10 ►

but other than that, no caffeine,

01:04:12 ►

no Tylenol, no nothing for her entire life.

01:04:17 ►

She eats fruits and vegetables,

01:04:19 ►

and that’s it, well, and some other things.

01:04:22 ►

And she’s very much against the whole psychedelic

01:04:25 ►

but very

01:04:26 ►

she’s an enlightened lady

01:04:27 ►

and she definitely

01:04:28 ►

thinks

01:04:28 ►

in a psychedelic way

01:04:30 ►

and again

01:04:32 ►

like I’ve worked

01:04:32 ►

with shamans

01:04:33 ►

from Peru

01:04:35 ►

and

01:04:35 ►

they

01:04:36 ►

do ayahuasca

01:04:37 ►

on a regular basis

01:04:39 ►

and that works for them

01:04:40 ►

they have the same

01:04:41 ►

like it’s incredible

01:04:42 ►

because

01:04:43 ►

these two experiences

01:04:44 ►

were were separated

01:04:46 ►

by time and space

01:04:47 ►

and very, very similar

01:04:49 ►

conversations that are created

01:04:51 ►

with the same people.

01:04:54 ►

One that has never done psychedelic drugs

01:04:56 ►

and one that has done a lot.

01:04:58 ►

So it’s really up to the individual

01:04:59 ►

to pick what works best

01:05:01 ►

for them.

01:05:04 ►

Having the experience both kind of living in an ashram

01:05:07 ►

and as well as psychedelic experiences,

01:05:11 ►

I know the key that works better for me are things like salvia

01:05:16 ►

because I find that in a meditative community

01:05:19 ►

or in those sort of groups and stuff like that,

01:05:22 ►

you don’t end up with any contrast.

01:05:25 ►

So you’re having all these great experiences,

01:05:28 ►

but everybody else is having all these great experiences,

01:05:30 ►

and there’s no contrast.

01:05:31 ►

So I find it harder to sort of interpret and integrate my experiences.

01:05:37 ►

And also in those same communities,

01:05:40 ►

you have this very structured way of integrating.

01:05:44 ►

So it’s not allowing you to develop and form your own way.

01:05:50 ►

It’s a very cultured way of integrating.

01:05:53 ►

So sometimes I’ve hit walls a lot in both my meditative and my yogic practice.

01:06:01 ►

I’ve hit walls and I’ve tried to push these walls and push them

01:06:04 ►

and I can’t do it because it’s a very structured

01:06:06 ►

way so

01:06:07 ►

it’s all about finding

01:06:10 ►

your own special key. Then there’s people like

01:06:13 ►

me who find that the quick way

01:06:15 ►

doesn’t really

01:06:16 ►

do it because

01:06:18 ►

I feel it’s not the real thing

01:06:20 ►

it doesn’t work deep deep down inside

01:06:23 ►

and so 20 years of meditation

01:06:25 ►

will be a much more rewarding

01:06:27 ►

experience. I haven’t worked

01:06:30 ►

that, but I have that reward for effort

01:06:32 ►

type of experience

01:06:34 ►

that makes it the real one.

01:06:35 ►

There’s a lot of people just like that.

01:06:37 ►

You don’t necessarily want to

01:06:40 ►

just have one experience either.

01:06:41 ►

The more you can

01:06:43 ►

put into your into your

01:06:45 ►

experience the better personally for me um the main thing is anthropology like i grew up among

01:06:52 ►

anthropologists and psychedelic thinkers who used a lot of psychedelic drugs and um experiment a

01:06:59 ►

little bit myself but it was really just sort of growing up within the mainstream american culture but

01:07:06 ►

outside of it as well and um really through i mean the way i do it mostly is i teach anthropology to

01:07:13 ►

students and like try to get them to think outside of their groove or reality tunnel or whatever and

01:07:19 ►

basically cracking open their minds through through teaching anthropology and encouraging

01:07:24 ►

to go out and live with

01:07:25 ►

other people and things like that.

01:07:26 ►

So, I mean, it really, the forms are almost infinite.

01:07:33 ►

But I think the main thing is to step out of the reality tunnels that we’re on, particularly

01:07:38 ►

as an American coming from this whole corporate overconsumption, uncontrolled growth, manifest destiny.

01:07:48 ►

We’re going to the moon and all of that, I think, keeps me up at night.

01:07:55 ►

Yeah, but some of these guys keep going to the moon.

01:07:57 ►

Yeah, I know, but it’s different.

01:07:58 ►

It’s different.

01:07:58 ►

Going to the moon without rocket ships, whatever.

01:08:01 ►

But basically taking all the resources of the earth to build big rocket ships.

01:08:08 ►

Did you?

01:08:09 ►

Yeah, I just wanted to, I was talking about

01:08:12 ►

with

01:08:14 ►

someone on a PhD

01:08:16 ►

who said, well, I’m doing a part-time PhD at the

01:08:18 ►

university, and I’m a second school teacher, so

01:08:20 ►

I’ve come into contact

01:08:22 ►

with people who use Excel here in lots of different

01:08:23 ►

ways. Do you not think that I’ve come into contact with people who use Excalibur in lots of different ways, including

01:08:27 ►

with myself. Do you not think that, I mean, I think part of what I picked up from all

01:08:34 ►

the presentations was that psychedelic thinking is like an answer to, or a possible answer

01:08:39 ►

to, things like commodification and consumption, but do you not see that it might not be possible to argue that the

01:08:48 ►

current research, the current

01:08:49 ►

widespread use of salvia

01:08:51 ►

and its appearance on the internet and the fact that you can just

01:08:54 ►

go online and buy it

01:08:56 ►

represents the fact that it tends to commodify

01:08:58 ►

some of those experiences.

01:09:00 ►

Absolutely.

01:09:01 ►

Yeah, we’re

01:09:04 ►

talking about drug tourism

01:09:05 ►

just like

01:09:06 ►

going to see the shamans and stuff like that

01:09:08 ►

and there’s always a

01:09:10 ►

there’s always that part of it

01:09:13 ►

for sure

01:09:13 ►

but the interesting part about

01:09:16 ►

Selby is that you buy it

01:09:18 ►

and it’s commodified and all that kind of stuff

01:09:21 ►

and then you take it

01:09:22 ►

and even though you’re participating in a,

01:09:25 ►

and it’s much the same way with drug tourism,

01:09:27 ►

you engage in that consumer behavior,

01:09:32 ►

but then as a result, you end up with the possibility

01:09:37 ►

of having sort of a new mode of thought at the end.

01:09:40 ►

I can tell you that after watching a hundred of these videos

01:09:43 ►

and talking to people and all this kind of stuff,

01:09:46 ►

that video that I showed you was a very special video.

01:09:52 ►

That was like, and it sort of encompasses everything that I hadn’t expected to find, but was glad to.

01:10:00 ►

But, I mean, there’s a lot of kids that buy it and and because their friends didn’t they saw that on YouTube they

01:10:05 ►

Just want to try it out and all that kind of stuff and whether that those experiences become

01:10:11 ►

Useful at the end of the day or if they’re just they’re just a drop in the bucket in the whole

01:10:16 ►

Whole realm of their existence and they never they never think about it again

01:10:20 ►

But I mean the potential to spark

01:10:25 ►

But the potential to spark a new wave.

01:10:33 ►

But the commodification of smart drugs is a whole other subject.

01:10:34 ►

Fascinating.

01:10:40 ►

But at the moment, it’s outside of what I’m researching.

01:10:41 ►

But I do agree with you.

01:10:42 ►

I actually agree with both.

01:10:47 ►

Both the drug tourism and the commodification of all these things are a problem.

01:10:53 ►

Yeah, so, I mean, it’s, but the answer is never really, it’s not a black and white kind of thing.

01:10:55 ►

Interesting.

01:11:09 ►

The, I was going to mention, just sort of in passing, that this commodification of going into this stuff and what can happen,

01:11:13 ►

they can be used in very specific ways.

01:11:25 ►

And I think, you know, if you approach something with a particular goal, you’re going to probably find a way to achieve that goal. cool. So if somebody evil, take the world over type of control

01:11:27 ►

person, it’s not going to suddenly become an ecologist

01:11:29 ►

after some sort of heavy experience.

01:11:32 ►

They might find a way to screw people over.

01:11:34 ►

Yeah.

01:11:36 ►

And so it’s a matter of the way

01:11:37 ►

you apply these things. And I was talking about these reality

01:11:40 ►

tunnels. You know, popping

01:11:42 ►

up and seeing things holistically doesn’t make it

01:11:43 ►

nice.

01:11:45 ►

But they’ve applied in certain ways.

01:11:47 ►

Now Myron Stolaroff in the 60s and James Fadiman used mesquite as well, roughly at the same

01:11:58 ►

time, to study goal-oriented use of these things.

01:12:02 ►

And one of the fellowsSE was about creativity,

01:12:05 ►

increased creativity, which everybody agreed, yeah, sure,

01:12:08 ►

OK, all this, they’re taking it, blah, blah, blah.

01:12:10 ►

The Mesklin one was a lot more interesting,

01:12:12 ►

because they said, OK, try to solve a problem.

01:12:16 ►

And they had a physicist, an architect,

01:12:19 ►

a bunch of other people said, solve a problem.

01:12:21 ►

And it was used, basically, to make money.

01:12:24 ►

And so this can be done as well.

01:12:26 ►

The insights can be commodified as well as the experience.

01:12:30 ►

And so one of the physicists apparently was one of the guys

01:12:33 ►

who figured out how to get particles to go around a curve

01:12:36 ►

in one of these particle accelerators.

01:12:38 ►

There’s a must-go thing now we have CERN.

01:12:40 ►

40 years, 50 years later.

01:12:43 ►

What’s that?

01:12:43 ►

Crick.

01:12:44 ►

No, that wasn’t Crick.

01:12:45 ►

Well, Crick also apparently figured out DNA

01:12:48 ►

while he was taking LSD.

01:12:51 ►

He’s admitted it eventually.

01:12:53 ►

And the architect just saw the building in his mind

01:12:57 ►

completely with all the bolts and everything,

01:12:59 ►

the type of bolts, and drew it up and built it.

01:13:01 ►

So that’s…

01:13:02 ►

So this can be used for that type of stuff as well.

01:13:05 ►

It’s not simply the psychedelic experience,

01:13:08 ►

but that type of being able to come up above

01:13:10 ►

gives you

01:13:12 ►

infinite amount of

01:13:14 ►

options where you only have, say,

01:13:16 ►

50 or whatever.

01:13:18 ►

It’s a way to get out of the same

01:13:20 ►

sorts of…

01:13:21 ►

The technologies that we use

01:13:24 ►

that got us to this point

01:13:25 ►

aren’t going to get us back out of it.

01:13:27 ►

And so people who apply it to that task

01:13:29 ►

are the ones who will be able to use psychedelic thinking

01:13:32 ►

in such a way to get us out of it.

01:13:35 ►

Bill Gates will just figure out how to make a better computer system.

01:13:38 ►

That’s what he knows.

01:13:39 ►

That’s what he lives.

01:13:40 ►

And if he has a transcendent experience,

01:13:42 ►

it’s all going to come in from his experience, computerized.

01:13:46 ►

And a lot of these computer guys did

01:13:48 ►

apparently take Steve Jobs,

01:13:50 ►

Bill Gates, all of them. I don’t know if Bill Gates

01:13:51 ►

is a Bill Gates now. But, you know,

01:13:53 ►

all the Macintosh guys in there did it.

01:13:57 ►

But you get sort of…

01:13:58 ►

And they have far superior products.

01:13:59 ►

Yeah, I was going to say that.

01:14:00 ►

But there’s also little evidence of

01:14:03 ►

psychedelic thinking out there. I don’t know if any of you know about FreeCycle,

01:14:06 ►

which is an anti-capitalist or sort of pseudo-anti-capitalist.

01:14:10 ►

If you don’t want something anymore and you tell them,

01:14:13 ►

and somebody else says, yeah, I’ll take it, I’ll repair it.

01:14:14 ►

They come and they take it away.

01:14:16 ►

They come and take your stuff away, but it’s being used.

01:14:18 ►

It’s not just going in the landfill.

01:14:20 ►

And it’s a really quite radical idea.

01:14:24 ►

Give away your stuff. And somebody else might give you something. They don’t want it any longer. And it becomes a really quite radical idea. Give away your stuff.

01:14:25 ►

And somebody else might give you something they don’t want any longer.

01:14:28 ►

And it becomes this network.

01:14:29 ►

And we participate in quite a bit.

01:14:30 ►

We’ve gotten a few things that I wanted,

01:14:33 ►

and I’ve gotten rid of far more things than I want.

01:14:35 ►

Stuff you think don’t belong.

01:14:36 ►

American-outdated appliances in the UK.

01:14:40 ►

They’re useless.

01:14:41 ►

I mean, you have to go in and completely rewire them.

01:14:43 ►

People want them.

01:14:45 ►

But I find that a very psychedelic

01:14:47 ►

thing, whether or not it was involved in any kind

01:14:49 ►

of drug use.

01:14:51 ►

I don’t want to, and I don’t think

01:14:54 ►

any of us want to actually make it

01:14:56 ►

sound like we are advocating

01:14:57 ►

particularly going out

01:15:00 ►

and finding salvia, going out and finding mushrooms

01:15:01 ►

and taking it. There are different routes

01:15:04 ►

to a psychedelic perspective.

01:15:06 ►

And again, it’s taking back these weird

01:15:08 ►

ideas we have dreams, you know,

01:15:09 ►

our ways of bringing this stuff back.

01:15:12 ►

I think, you know, personally,

01:15:13 ►

my, again, not to

01:15:15 ►

advocate these things, but just to take them

01:15:17 ►

seriously. And, you know,

01:15:20 ►

as academics or whatever our careers

01:15:21 ►

are and whatever our work is,

01:15:23 ►

is to take it seriously and to really listen and to think about it

01:15:27 ►

and tell people about it, write about it, and things like that.

01:15:33 ►

I’ve certainly seen a lot of evidence of 15, 16-year-old kids

01:15:37 ►

that shouldn’t be doing this at that particular time.

01:15:41 ►

And in a traditional context when the sali is used,

01:15:45 ►

the shaman acts to put people through the ritual,

01:15:49 ►

but the most important part is

01:15:51 ►

that they help interpret the ritual.

01:15:53 ►

So they bring them out,

01:15:55 ►

and I think that’s what the real lack

01:15:58 ►

of knowledge base that we’re missing

01:16:02 ►

is because people are seeking out

01:16:03 ►

these psychedelic experiences

01:16:06 ►

just as part of our natural human sort of inquiry. But then we don’t have the sanctioned

01:16:12 ►

teachers anymore to help us do something like it.

01:16:16 ►

As the guy who started our video said, he wrote a book called The Genesis Generation.

01:16:21 ►

He said basically, we are the Genesis Generation, We’re the beginning. These kids screwing up

01:16:26 ►

on YouTube, doing even the dumbest things,

01:16:27 ►

are possibly the shamans of the next

01:16:29 ►

generation. And they’re going through and

01:16:31 ►

making mistakes so that others don’t have to.

01:16:34 ►

This may be something

01:16:35 ►

that’s emerging urban

01:16:37 ►

modern shamanism. It may be happening

01:16:39 ►

through these phenomena. Especially, I think,

01:16:42 ►

Salvi is very important, being short-acting

01:16:43 ►

as well. Who these days has 12 hours to give up

01:16:47 ►

to self-exploration?

01:16:49 ►

15 minutes is sure attractive.

01:16:51 ►

And it may be an issue

01:16:53 ►

with the timing

01:16:54 ►

of how these things are coming in

01:16:56 ►

that that actually fits our culture

01:16:58 ►

much better than LSD does now.

01:17:00 ►

And not just that it fits on the YouTube video.

01:17:03 ►

The YouTube videos are also 10 minutes long because that’s something about the way

01:17:07 ►

we think about things.

01:17:08 ►

People don’t want to put up with more than 10 minutes of stuff.

01:17:11 ►

Well, I think it’s great that you guys are doing this research because I think a lot

01:17:14 ►

of us who are experimenting with these things feel very isolated.

01:17:17 ►

And the more it becomes like academically legitimized or whatever, the more people will be willing to talk

01:17:26 ►

about it and not hear it.

01:17:27 ►

I hope so.

01:17:29 ►

I don’t talk about it.

01:17:33 ►

Yeah.

01:17:34 ►

Exactly what you were saying earlier.

01:17:35 ►

People just think you’re wacky.

01:17:36 ►

So you keep things very hidden and then you feel very isolated

01:17:39 ►

and it’s kind of a really

01:17:41 ►

fine thing.

01:17:43 ►

There is a thread of the psychedelic community

01:17:45 ►

that we’ve over-psychotized it and ruined it.

01:17:48 ►

By making it public.

01:17:48 ►

There’s a solid, yeah.

01:17:50 ►

Okay, thank you.

01:17:51 ►

Thank you for wondering.

01:17:52 ►

Thank you very much.

01:17:53 ►

Thank you so much for coming.

01:17:56 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:17:58 ►

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

01:18:04 ►

Well, first of all, let me say that I sure hope Cameron’s terminology catches on among

01:18:09 ►

anthropologists, where he classifies events as BT and AT, before Terrence and after Terrence.

01:18:17 ►

Thank you for that, Cameron.

01:18:19 ►

You and your associates, by the way, have restored my faith in academia, and may your shining examples encourage more young professionals

01:18:27 ►

to become involved in studying the extremely broad field

01:18:31 ►

that the word psychedelics encompasses.

01:18:34 ►

Near the end there, I think it was Cameron who said,

01:18:38 ►

there are different routes to a psychedelic perspective.

01:18:41 ►

And that, I think, hits the nail on the head.

01:18:44 ►

You might be surprised at how many of

01:18:46 ►

our fellow salonners have never taken a psychedelic and who have no intention of ever doing so.

01:18:52 ►

Their interest is mainly in hearing about these great ideas that often arise out of the psychedelic

01:18:58 ►

experience. And I’m sure that these new thoughts, in fact, even cause a form of psychedelic experience when first heard by many people. For me, psychedelic thinking is about even forgetting that there

01:19:10 ►

is a box to think out of. And don’t you think that this young group of psychedelic thinkers

01:19:15 ►

did an excellent job of getting their audience out of their academic grooves and push us

01:19:20 ►

all a little further along in our experience of this life. Like you, I suspect, I sure would have liked to have been there

01:19:28 ►

and to have added my comments at the end when the discussion began.

01:19:32 ►

There was a whole range of issues raised there that I’m sure we could have talked about well into the night.

01:19:38 ►

In particular, I’m fascinated by their investigations into the current evolution of psychedelic practices,

01:19:51 ►

or rituals, if you will, that have little or no connection to the more ancient rituals involving these plants.

01:19:52 ►

And I’m in agreement with the general idea that while the ancient forms are being recognized

01:19:57 ►

and honored, they all had evolved long before the world’s human population was anywhere

01:20:02 ►

near the size it is today, and before we were all

01:20:05 ►

so interconnected by this thing we call the internet. Even just 50 years ago, news of our

01:20:11 ►

sacred medicines and how to use them was almost impossible to find. Yet today we see people using

01:20:18 ►

psychoactive substances on YouTube. There simply is no precedent for the times we’re living in,

01:20:24 ►

so you’d better strap yourself in and get ready for even more acceleration

01:20:28 ►

at least in our level of discourse for sure

01:20:31 ►

and speaking about a high level of discourse

01:20:34 ►

that is exactly what I found at the salon or couch surfing tour

01:20:39 ►

or whatever you want to call it

01:20:40 ►

that KMO and Neil Kramer have been conducting up and down the West Coast here.

01:20:46 ►

And once I get back up to speed again, I’ll try to organize my thinking a little better

01:20:50 ►

about what Neil and KMO have begun, and how maybe we can all begin participating in these

01:20:57 ►

live gatherings without leaving our own hometowns.

01:21:01 ►

So stay tuned, and if you’ve got some ideas of your own on this, I’d love to hear about

01:21:06 ►

them.

01:21:07 ►

But before I forget it, in this presentation, we just heard Cameron Adams speaking about

01:21:12 ►

the importance of Aldous Huxley’s later work as regards the topic of psychedelics, and

01:21:18 ►

I completely agree with him on this.

01:21:20 ►

What I would like to comment on, however, is the fact that, just like you and me, Aldous didn’t come to his first psychedelic experience in a vacuum. Thank you. or the very early 20th century mindset about the use of psychedelics,

01:21:49 ►

I highly recommend Sybil Bedford’s brilliant biography of Aldous.

01:21:51 ►

It’s just not to be missed, in my opinion.

01:21:55 ►

And one last comment about the talk we just heard is that the recording that Cameron sent me,

01:21:58 ►

on it there was also another half hour or so of Q&A

01:22:02 ►

that included some rather critical comments that I decided to delete.

01:22:06 ►

And not because they didn’t pose interesting questions,

01:22:09 ►

but because the people making some long-winded comments,

01:22:13 ►

at least to me, seemed quite ill-informed.

01:22:16 ►

For example, one person,

01:22:18 ►

an older anthropologist, it sounded like,

01:22:21 ►

was so out of date about indigenous Amazonian people

01:22:24 ►

that she equated ayahuasca shamanism with witchcraft.

01:22:28 ►

Need I say more?

01:22:32 ►

Well, once again, I find myself with more notes, emails, and things to say than I have time for,

01:22:38 ►

since today’s podcast is already overly long, I’m afraid.

01:22:43 ►

So I’ll once again move these notes to next week’s program

01:22:47 ►

and get to the post-production processes and get this online before the weekend.

01:22:52 ►

So again, I’ll close this podcast by reminding you that this and most of the podcasts

01:22:58 ►

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

01:23:02 ►

under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 license. And if you have any questions about that, just click the

01:23:09 ►

Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can find at

01:23:14 ►

psychedelicsalon.org. And if you are interested in the philosophy behind the Psychedelic Salon,

01:23:20 ►

you can listen to my novel, The Genesis Generation, which is available as an audiobook that is downloadable at genesisgeneration.us.

01:23:29 ►

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

01:23:34 ►

Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

210 - From the Shaman’s Circle to the Ivory Tower

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