Program Notes
Guest speakers: Sasha Shulgin and Alan Watts
[NOTE: The following quotations are by Sasha Shulgin.]
“So I look upon these materials [psychedelics] as being catalytic, not productive, they do not DO what occurs. The allow YOU to express what is in you that you had not had the ability to get to and express yourself without the help of a material.”
“I find that still the human animal is the only one that is really effective in evaluating and comparing these various psychedelic materials.”
[In testing a new substance] “You go with great caution. Decide what is the amount is that would have no effect and take one thousandths of that amount.”
“How does the mind work? What kind of a probe can you make to look at the function of the mind? To me, it’s going to be a psychedelic material, that has very little action in experimental animals, to look into actions in man that are not seen in experimental animals.”
[NOTE: The following quotations are by Alan Watts.]
“Nature has mercifully arranged the principle of ‘forgettery’ as well as the principle of memory. … And you begin again. You see, it doesn’t matter in what form you begin. Whether you begin again as a human being, or as a fruit fly, butterfly, or a beetle, or a bird, it feels the same way that you feel now. So we’re really all in the same place.”
“So the possibility, even the imagination that there could be such an experience [of the end of the world] in the back of our heads, is the background which gives intensity to the sense that we call feeling good, feeling that it’s all right.”
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And your virtual host, that is, there were some fellow salonners who made donations this past week to help offset some of the expenses associated with these podcasts.
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And so I like to think of them as our virtual hosts this week.
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And those good people are Yoshi N., Ewan M., and I hope I pronounced that right,
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Zach M., and Vladimir L., whose generosity is such that, Vladimir, you should consider yourself all donated up for life.
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And that also goes for Evan H. from last week as well.
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And all of you donors, including our fellow salonners who are donating their time to help promote these podcasts Thank you. want to forget to mention all of the other podcasts that are so interrelated to the salon. There are quite a few
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of them now, but right from the very
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beginning, KMO of the Sea Realm
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podcast and the Dope Fiend
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and his affiliated podcasters
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over at the Cannabis Podcast
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Network at dopefiend.co.uk
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Well,
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they’ve all been a part of this
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ever-growing interconnected network of
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the worldwide psychedelic community that’s connecting more of us every day now.
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So, a big thank you to our donors and to you for helping us find the others.
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Now, let’s get on with the show, huh?
00:01:58 ►
Well, since we’ve kind of had a lot of the Bard McKenna lately, I thought that I would mix things up a little bit today
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and play two shorter talks by two of our favorites here in the salon,
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Alan Watts and Sasha Shulgin.
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Now, what do those two have in common, you might ask?
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One being a philosopher and the other being a scientist.
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Well, the answer, of course, is in what Terence McKenna said in a recent podcast
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about the glue that holds our community together being an experience, the psychedelic experience,
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which means, in essence, that we all share a fascination with the investigation of the human
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experience through the aid of these catalysts of consciousness, generally called psychedelics.
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And if you’ve been with us since the beginning of these podcastss of consciousness, generally called psychedelics.
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And if you’ve been with us since the beginning of these podcasts here in the salon,
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you have already heard some fascinating stories about both of these luminaries of the psychedelic community.
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And so I figured it’s about time to shine a little more light on them.
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And we’ll begin with Sasha.
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And what I’m about to play right now is actually available in video format on the MIT website,
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as well as on EROCX1’s blog, which is where I came across it myself.
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So thank you again, EROCX1.
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And you can find his site, by the way, at erocx1, the number one,.blogspot.com.
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Now, I realize that we have maybe heard a part of some of these stories from Sasha before,
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but in my feeble attempt to preserve a few bits and pieces of the oral history of our tribe,
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I felt that this talk is something that should be preserved in thousands of other places besides that one server,
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places like your computer or your MP3 player, and not just trust it to be saved at one spot on the net.
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Now, as we listen to the introduction of Sasha in just a moment, when the person doing the
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introducing is reading a piece about Sasha from the New York Times, pay close attention
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to the fact that this so-called paper of record was wrong in attributing the invention of the drug ecstasy to him. Thank you. So let’s travel back in time to December 1st of 2005 and join Sasha as he speaks at a conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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that was titled, Expand Your Mind, Getting a Grasp on Consciousness.
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Our first speaker studies consciousness by altering it.
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Dr. Alexander Shulgin is a chemist and an author.
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He’s also known as it. Dr. Alexander Shulgin is a chemist and an author. He’s also known as
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Dr. X. The New York Times calls Dr. Shulgin a one-man psychopharmacological research sector.
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Timothy Leary called him one of the century’s most important scientists. By Shulgin’s own
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account, he has created nearly 200 psychedelic compounds,
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among them stimulants, depressants, aphrodisiacs, empathogens, convulsants,
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drugs that alter hearing, drugs that slow one’s sense of time,
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I’m reading from the New York Times article,
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drugs that speed it up, drugs that trigger violent outbursts,
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drugs that deaden emotion, in short, a veritable lexicon of tactile and emotional experience.
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Many of these drugs, perhaps all of them, he has tested out on himself and his wife,
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with a few friends included at times.
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And in addition to inventing the drug ecstasy, Dr. Shulgin is a consultant,
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and very much in demand, by an eclectic group of
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clients that include NASA, Bristol Laboratories, NIH, University of California. For his view
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on how to experience consciousness and what consciousness is, please welcome Dr. Alexander
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Shulgin. Don’t tell him I used the name Alexander.
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It was a great pleasure to be here and a great honor to be here. I’m not a great lover of micro, was it micro point, magic PowerPoint, PowerPoint. Had I known that we were going
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to have a PowerPoint availability here, I probably
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would not have used it anyway
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because every time I’ve tried using it,
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about 30% of the time at least, it fails,
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it falls apart somehow,
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it never quite gets to where I want to go.
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So rather than
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put a lot of chemical structures,
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which would be boring to about 80%
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of the audience and fascinating to the other
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20%, I suspect.
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I’ll just use my hands and wave my hands as is appropriate.
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I mean, molecules obviously are rings and chains and nitrogens, and there’s no problem about that at all.
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My interest in the area, actually, this is a nice opportunity. I spent a couple of years of my life upriver some 60 or so years ago, more than that, at Harvard,
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where I had the unfortunate pleasure of having a national scholarship, which got me in there free.
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And I found that everyone else had parents who had enough money to get them in there having paid their way and I could find very little rapport with the masses of freshmen that were around me
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so I found it much more pleasurable to go in the Navy and spend three years in the Atlantic
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in the anti-submarine patrol which actually gave me a very nice beginning on chemistry
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in that one of the books I had with me
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was a book by Paul Carr,
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a Swiss chemist,
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written about 1938 or 1940.
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And it was a complete statement
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of the subtleties and the complexities
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of organic chemistry.
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And when you’re spending three years
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in the Atlantic waiting for submarines,
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you have a lot of time spare.
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And I not only read the book, but substantially understood it. And it was a very, very great
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pleasure to get out of the Navy and back into the university at Berkeley, where I took organic
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chemistry as my major. And the greatest compliment I had was from a fellow named Kason, who was a
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lecturer there, or professor at chemistry.
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And he said, by the way, he met him in the hall during, I guess, the second year of organic chemistry,
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we’re having a midterm this coming Tuesday, and you can take it if you want to,
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which I thought was quite a compliment, because the average on the first midterm was something like 62 points out of 100 and I had 100%.
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And he didn’t know exactly why. I mean, I could
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answer the questions without any problem because they were all in Paul Carr’s book and I had memorized
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the book. That’s, I think, honest.
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Anyway, after that I got into
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my A.B. in chemistry at
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Berkeley, a Ph.D. in biochemistry at Berkeley. Got involved
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in a little laboratory. There are five of us called BioRad Laboratory. It’s now a multi-million
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dollar operation. Had I stayed with them, I would have been a very, very rich
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millionaire with ulcers at this point. And I’m very glad I split the
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scene when there’s still only five of us present. Did a little radioactive synthesis in their name. Did some post-doctorate
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work at Berkeley. Went to Dow Chemical Company, the Dow Chemical Company, a branch of it there
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in Pittsburgh near the Bay Area in California. And it’s there that I really got initiated into what turned out to be a
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very important change in my life. I had my first experience with mescaline about 1960.
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-
- About 45 years ago. 400 milligrams of the sulfate and had a good babysitter.
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400 milligrams of the sulfate and had a good babysitter
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and I had explored a great deal
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around various psychoactive drugs
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this was supposed to be an erotic thing
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that was supposed to be an amnesia thing
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each of these had their own little name
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I had heard about meslin, had never tried it
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and that one day
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that 8 or 10 hour experience
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really changed
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my life for the next half century. I was totally
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fascinated with a drug that could get in there, allow you to see things you would not normally see
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and yet you knew to be valid. I have a reasonably limited knowledge of colors. Suddenly I saw colors
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that I had never really appreciated before. I could look at a flower and observe the beauty of the flower,
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could not open the flower, could not touch it,
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but I observed the beauty of the flower.
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I had memories from childhood that I knew were valid,
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but I had not thought of them for years.
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It was a very, very delightful experience,
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but mainly what impressed me most thoroughly
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is that that experience was clearly not due, the contents
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of that experience were not in that 400 milligrams of the drug. The drug, what it did, it catalyzed
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my mind. It got my mind back into that particular area. So I looked upon these materials as
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being catalytic, not productive. They do not do what occurs. They allow you to express what is in you
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that you had not had the ability to get to and express yourself without the help of a material.
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So this really caught my fancy. And I said, if this little 400 milligrams of something
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could be an effective catalyst to reveal back to me what I had done, what I had seen,
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to reveal back to me what I had done, what I had seen, and such.
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There is a great potential here for medical use.
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And that caught me with my little knowledge of chemistry and my intense curiosity as to what was going on upstairs in my head.
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As it was revealed by this masculine experience, I really went into a true new direction of chemistry.
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And here is where I guess I kind of have to wave hands.
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Mesplen is a ring with three methoxy groups out here.
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Don’t worry what a methoxy group is.
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Someone near you will probably explain it later.
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A carbon, carbon, and a nitrogen.
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A very simple molecule.
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And I said, you know, if this molecule can be this effective, what other kind of effects could be gotten by similar materials?
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So the first thing I did was stick a methyl groupon down here.
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So now I now have an amphetamine compound.
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And took it very cautiously.
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We’re talking a lot today already about experiments with mice and with rats and with various animals.
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In my own case, the only animal I used was a human animal.
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I presume this is now a little awkward because of the various national and federal regulations that have come in,
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but I find that still the human animal is the only one that is really effective in evaluating
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and comparing these various psychedelic materials, and the work I do is still involved in evaluating and comparing these various psychedelic materials.
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And the work I do is still involved in that direction.
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Here’s a material that is identical with mescaline.
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I call it trimethoxyamphetamine, DMA.
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And my golly, it was about twice as potent and totally different in its action.
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With the mescaline, I had this love and sensitivity to a flower that was on my coffee table where I was living.
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And under the TMA experience, I got very curious about it and tore it apart as he was inside.
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Complete change of attitude toward something of precious beauty.
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One was an absolute sort of a
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reverence
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and the other was one of
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dissecting curiosity.
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And the activity was
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twice so I went ahead and
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did that. I put on ethyl, propyl, butyl,
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amyl, put all kinds of different groups on that
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position. That’s one of the
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beauty things about having a little bit of fun
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with the art of chemistry is you can put things on and know where they’re going and have ways of determining that
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your chemistry is going correctly. But the real charming thing, and the really, to me, exciting
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thing, was the fact each thing you came up with was a new material. It had never been made before.
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So you’re looking at a white crystalline solid in a little beaker there.
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And you’ve never seen it before.
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No one in the world has seen this before.
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As far as you know, no one in the universe has seen this before.
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It’s a new thing you’ve just made.
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And it’s never seen you before, so you in essence have no dialogue at all.
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How much do you start with?
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How much material do you use as a first experiment on a new chemical that’s never been tried before by anyone?
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Well, obviously an amount that’s small enough that will not have any effect. But how small an amount
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is that? There’s a very interesting additional nuance
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in this relationship that I developed over a period of time that you
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go with great caution, decide what is an amount that would have no effect, and take
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one thousandth of that amount.
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It takes time, but it doesn’t take much more chemicals because you use a thousand up to where you were.
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You’d use another milligram perhaps.
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And so each of these materials had to be learned as an individual new meeting.
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And one of the outgrowths that I discovered is that the beauty of your final results of finding out what the effects are, you really can’t be wrong.
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Because you’ll say, I found that this material caused a visual enhancement of that
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and a recall of memories of this and this and yonder.
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Anyone else who tries it, who finds the same results, will say he is right.
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Anyone who tries it and doesn’t get the results is, what did I do wrong?
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So in essence, you come up with a winner very nicely.
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Anyway, what I did, put these on there.
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The methyl group was twice as active.
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I put a profile with no activity at all, the alpha-ethyl-methylene.
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And by that time, I had made materials up to the, oh, 9 or 10 carbon chains,
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so I didn’t bother trying them.
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I went back, put stuff on the nitrogen up here the nitrogen atom I know it lost activity
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entirely a couple of methyl groups out there you can go almost a gram and not
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get any effects then you have the ring system without here here you got a
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really exciting have these three methoxy groups sticking out in the ring if you
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can imagine a hexagon being held by a two carbon chain you have the hexagon
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out here you have what two three, you have the hexagon out here.
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You have five positions.
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Three of them are occupied methoxys.
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So here’s your quiz of the day.
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How many ways can you put three methoxy groups on this six-membered ring?
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There are different compounds.
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The answer is six.
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You can have 3, 4, 5, 2, 4, 5, 2, 3, 4, 2, 3, 5, 2, 3, 6, 2, 4, 6.
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If I had a slide, this would be obvious.
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Anyway, so I synthesized the other five compounds.
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And by golly, the 245 was ten times as active.
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246 was also very active and very interesting.
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The other three were absolute duds, nothing at all.
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So here, suddenly I now know that you can get much more potency and complexity, more stimulation, more eye dilation, but also psychedelic effects, we’ll say 2, 4, 5.
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So now you have a new material, TMA, I call it TMA2.
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You have three methoxy groups out here in those positions, trade each of them into an ethoxy.
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Give you three more compounds, and only the four position was sensitive.
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So suddenly you have a position out there that gives you more potency.
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So I put other groups going out that way and began realizing that this is a structure.
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These are all called phenethylamines, by the way.
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This structure is amenable to amplification, complexity increasing,
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if you substitute here but not there.
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So that’s where I go.
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We were talking earlier, some talk about neurotransmitters.
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It occurs to me that that position with the methoxy group,
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the methoxy group can metabolize off easily.
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What about putting a group out there that won’t metabolize off?
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Instead of methoxy, put a methyl group out there
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so I made the compound 2,5-dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine
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and I said it’s either going to be much more active
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because it can’t come off and be metabolized easily
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and hence I’ll have a more active compound
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or it will not be active at all
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but it will go into the neurotransmitter site
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that psychedelics go into
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and if there’s anything to the argument that these are neurologically activating sites and may be activated by people
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who are with mental illness, you may have a therapy for mental illness. You can’t lose.
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So I made the compound, tried it, and it turned out to be quite a bit more potent yet. This
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is a material called DOM, which that, of course, led to a whole new direction.
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If you have DOM out there, methyl, what about ethyl?
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Active compound.
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Propyl, active compound.
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And it’s methyls and the propyls and so forth, active.
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Put a bromine out there, active compound.
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Put an iodine out there, active compound.
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So the thought occurred to me, if you have an alkyl group,
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that’s DOB and DOI. DOM was the one that got off into San Francisco under the name of STP. If any of you are young enough to have known San Francisco in the 60s, but there
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was a STP. STP, I should say, was very active at that time, and it turned out that I found out that it was indeed DOM under another name, STP.
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They said Serenity, Tranquility, and Placidity was the name for it, and no one knew what placidity was,
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so it became Serenity, Tranquility, and Peace, which was a little bit more understood,
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to the police authorities who did not like
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this idea of this going around.
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They didn’t know what it was.
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They called it too stupid to puke, which was their counterpart to the, this is the days
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of the Haight-Ashbury Clinic.
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And at this time, I was up in the hill in the medical school.
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And this was going out there and I had no idea what STP was.
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One of my compounds, I talked at a conference
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back in the East Coast, here in the East Coast, about a week or two earlier, and I talked
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about the material and gave it structure, and I suspect it was just synthesized from
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this seminar I gave. Anyway, the bromo, the, funny world, the bromo compound, Ido compound,
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funny world. The bromocompound,
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iodocompound, it occurred to me, maybe it is because this alkyl group was active, and you have what’s called lipophilicity
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or hydrophobicness, where something likes something
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that’s fatty, and maybe if I put something on there that was water-loving, like
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a nitro group, it would not be active when it goes into the neurotransmitter
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receptor site. I put a nitro group active would not be active when it goes into the into the neurotransmitter receptor site
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I put in the actual group active well maybe it likes both it was putting his tail into this
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receptor site going to the right that’s lipophilic into the left is hydrophilic what if I’m putting a
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group on that is not philic at all namely flaring so I put on I think it was a trifluoroethyl oxy
00:21:23 ►
analog so I felt this would probably not be active at all, also active.
00:21:28 ►
So just getting the tail of the four-position molecule into the receptor site produced activity.
00:21:33 ►
So from that, the obvious step for it to go and take off the methyl group, get away from the amphetamine chain.
00:21:38 ►
So I took the methyl group off, and that gave 2Cb, thenC-I, a host of other materials in the same ilk that was
00:21:46 ►
just a beautifully rich collection of compounds, many of them not as potent as the amphetamines,
00:21:53 ►
but shorter-lived and much more benign and much more friendly than the corresponding
00:21:57 ►
amphetamines.
00:21:59 ►
So this is another thing.
00:22:01 ►
Somewhere along the line, it occurred to me, if oxygen does a good job, put a sulfur on there.
00:22:12 ►
And you get them now in the 2CT family, 2CT2 up to about 2CT25 or so, of which about half of them are active.
00:22:17 ►
So this is kind of the hand-waving world of synthetic chemistry.
00:22:20 ►
I could go on for another 10, 15 minutes and get into tryptamines.
00:22:24 ►
It goes through the same complexities, but you have this as the active position.
00:22:25 ►
That is not as active.
00:22:26 ►
This is less active.
00:22:32 ►
Alkyl groups on tryptamines are much enhancing in nature and complexity of action.
00:22:35 ►
Alkyl groups, with the exception of MDMA and a couple of others,
00:22:38 ►
on the phenethylamines destroys the activity of the phenethylamines. So there are differences between these two families of compounds,
00:22:42 ►
but those differences are not negative, they are just informative.
00:22:48 ►
Anyway, that’s kind of the picture of where I’ve been going for a while.
00:22:51 ►
I don’t want to take too long here.
00:22:55 ►
I think a question that’s often come up is how is this all going to work out?
00:23:01 ►
What are the goods and the bads of this entire area of psychedelic chemistry.
00:23:06 ►
Basically, the negatives are the terms of many people, from law writers to people in
00:23:17 ►
the street, feel that this is an area of neurotoxicity, an area these materials cause
00:23:22 ►
neurological damage, cause people to lose control, commit
00:23:26 ►
crime, and eventually collapse after 20 years of brain decomposition, which is to a large
00:23:33 ►
measure nonsense.
00:23:34 ►
However, I can’t say completely excluded.
00:23:37 ►
I’ve been into it for 45 years, and I’m having my usual expected amount of brain deterioration.
00:23:42 ►
But I don’t think it’s that serious yet, so I hope to have another decade or two of reasonable responses.
00:23:49 ►
And you have the increasing urge to put laws against these things, because the psychology,
00:23:56 ►
the propaganda that they are negative, that they do damage, is very real and very much
00:24:00 ►
believed by many people. I’ve been often asked why use the word psychedelic itself as a majority term.
00:24:06 ►
I mean, there are empathogens, entheogens, hallucinogens, psychotomimetics,
00:24:11 ►
other terms that are used widely in medicine that carry other messages
00:24:15 ►
but do not carry the intrinsic negativeness of the term psychedelic.
00:24:20 ►
Well, my main argument for people continuing to use the term
00:24:23 ►
is that people may not approve of what you’re working in or what you’re saying, but at least they know what you’re talking about.
00:24:30 ►
You stop nine people on Market Street, out of ten people, nine people, you say, I work with pathogens when they ask you what you do.
00:24:37 ►
They have no idea what you’re talking about.
00:24:39 ►
Nine people out of ten, when you tell them you’re working with psychedelics, would maybe not approve, but at least they know what you’re working with.
00:24:46 ►
So the idea of using a term that is in popular usage I consider to be quite positive.
00:24:52 ►
Well, my clock is still going.
00:24:54 ►
The clock is supposed to go flash three minutes from stopping, and the clock has stopped.
00:24:59 ►
So I don’t know where I am.
00:25:01 ►
Let me wrap things up a little bit.
00:25:05 ►
What are the positives?
00:25:07 ►
I consider the positives to be my main incentive for doing the work I’ve done for the last half century
00:25:12 ►
and continuing to do it now,
00:25:14 ►
is I believe in this collection of materials,
00:25:17 ►
you’re going to develop tools that are going to answer many of the questions that have been brought up today.
00:25:22 ►
Namely, how can you find out how the brain works?
00:25:25 ►
You can use a rat.
00:25:26 ►
How does the mind work?
00:25:28 ►
What kind of a probe can you make to look at the function of the mind?
00:25:33 ►
To me, it’s going to be a psychedelic material that has very little action in experimental animals
00:25:40 ►
to look into actions in man that are not seen in experimental animals.
00:25:46 ►
Maybe the idea of using these materials as eventual research tools
00:25:50 ►
I consider to be extremely, extremely valuable.
00:25:55 ►
I think what I’ll do, a point came up during lunch today,
00:25:59 ►
it brought up an interesting story that I think pretty well puts this into perspective about the need of tools for exploring research,
00:26:07 ►
research tools for exploring this area of understanding the function of the mind.
00:26:13 ►
It was Eric this morning who was talking about animals being invested with the properties of schizophrenia.
00:26:22 ►
And this was some years ago, back in the good old days before there were many inhibitory
00:26:29 ►
actions on human studies, FDA
00:26:32 ►
approval, disapproval, get clearance from the DEA, clearance from everything
00:26:37 ►
like that before you do any human experiments. Your board of your university has to see
00:26:41 ►
the research and approve of it. A lot of this experimental work was done back in the halcyon days when there were no such things as research
00:26:48 ►
approval boards. In Berkeley, we had the run
00:26:52 ►
of the place. We could fire up a cyclotron and make an isotope and use it
00:26:56 ►
and try it. Their argument at Donner Labs, that was at Donner,
00:27:00 ►
then it went up on the hill in Lawrence Lab, was stay if
00:27:04 ►
you want and do whatever you want.
00:27:05 ►
The tools are here.
00:27:06 ►
Here’s a cyclotron.
00:27:06 ►
Here’s your PET scanner.
00:27:09 ►
Do whatever you want, but just remember, when you leave, turn off the lights and lock the door.
00:27:14 ►
And we could work through the night there, doing experiments, all kinds of beautiful things.
00:27:19 ►
I remember one time, let me use this as sort of a wind-up.
00:27:24 ►
This was some maybe three or four decades ago.
00:27:27 ►
It’s quite popular opinion that methionine was involved with schizophrenia
00:27:32 ►
because some experiments had been done in which people who were schizophrenic
00:27:36 ►
were given methionine-rich diets and their symptoms became worse,
00:27:40 ►
and yet those people who were not diagnosed as schizophrenics with the methionine-rich diet had no changes at all.
00:27:47 ►
So we talked about this, pros and cons, and it was a neat experiment.
00:27:53 ►
What I did, I took, I remember it was S-adenosine methionine or some compound in that area,
00:27:57 ►
and I tucked on a fluorine-18, which makes it a positron emitter,
00:28:04 ►
which makes it a positron emitter which means you can go into a PET scanner
00:28:06 ►
and put this into a person
00:28:08 ►
and put the head of the person
00:28:11 ►
the person attached to the head
00:28:12 ►
no, that doesn’t sound good
00:28:14 ►
you have the person lie down on a little cot
00:28:17 ►
with the head going into a positron camera
00:28:20 ►
and you have a section of the brain
00:28:22 ►
just above the ear lobes
00:28:23 ►
that tells you where that chemical
00:28:25 ►
went being a positron emitter it didn’t have to have any reaction in the body it just went where
00:28:30 ►
it went and what we did this was work done with Tony some oh god years few decades ago I made
00:28:38 ►
this material in fact I made ten batches over a period of time the half-life of fluorine is a
00:28:42 ►
little less than two hours so you can’t make a lot of it and keep it for a while.
00:28:46 ►
And he had good friends up at Mendocino Hospital,
00:28:51 ►
and he came back with names of five schizophrenic patients who were up at the hospital,
00:28:56 ►
and we had their names and the backgrounds of them.
00:29:00 ►
And in Lawrence Lab, I managed to find five normal controls.
00:29:03 ►
That was a bit more tricky.
00:29:06 ►
But we did.
00:29:08 ►
And ten batches of this, and we did ten experiments.
00:29:12 ►
We put the material into these ten people about a week apart.
00:29:18 ►
And in each case, put them into the PET scanner.
00:29:23 ►
I remember one of the schizophrenics Tony had a lot of problems with
00:29:26 ►
because he did not like radioactivity.
00:29:29 ►
And he said radioactivity is bad.
00:29:30 ►
So we had down at Donner a great big sort of background counter.
00:29:35 ►
It’s a big room with a big iodine crystal of 30-some-odd inches in diameter
00:29:39 ►
and walls, three-inch thick lead overhead and side.
00:29:44 ►
And Tony very nicely told him, if you go in here and spend a half an hour, he’ll give you a magazine, turn the light on.
00:29:49 ►
If you go in here and spend a half an hour in here, your body will be so depleted of radiation
00:29:54 ►
that when we take you up on the hill and put you in a positive camera, it will bring you back to normal.
00:29:58 ►
You’ll be okay.
00:29:59 ►
He believed it.
00:30:01 ►
Anyway, to wrap up with the result of the experiment it was a fascinating thing
00:30:05 ►
we ran 10 studies
00:30:07 ►
we had 10 photographs of the
00:30:10 ►
fluorine 18
00:30:12 ►
disposition in the brain
00:30:14 ►
and the 10 photographs
00:30:16 ►
were absolutely different from one another
00:30:18 ►
there was no consistency through this group
00:30:20 ►
at all
00:30:21 ►
and so we put them on the wall of the
00:30:24 ►
medical radiation thing up in the hill.
00:30:27 ►
And across the back of the wall, every time someone would come in from Washington
00:30:31 ►
to give a seminar or come in from somewhere of any importance, we’d say,
00:30:34 ►
by the way, here are 10 photographs of the fluorine 18 labeled material we gave.
00:30:39 ►
Five of these are schizophrenic patients, and five of them are normals.
00:30:42 ►
What do you think are normals?
00:30:44 ►
What do you think are schizophrenics? And we got absolutely random answers. No pattern could be
00:30:50 ►
found at all. Then about two months, three months later, one of the schizophrenic patients who liked
00:30:57 ►
Tony very much came down to visit and see how everything was going on. Very nice visit. And they were talking for a while.
00:31:06 ►
And he saw these
00:31:07 ►
ten photographs on the wall.
00:31:10 ►
And he said,
00:31:12 ►
are those the ten pictures you took
00:31:14 ►
of us? Tony said, yeah.
00:31:16 ►
And he looked at one and said,
00:31:17 ►
I reckon that’s me.
00:31:20 ►
And he pointed to number seven
00:31:22 ►
or one of them over there. And he’s absolutely
00:31:24 ►
right. He identified his own photograph
00:31:27 ►
from the PET scan of the distribution
00:31:28 ►
of that serine 18 thing
00:31:30 ►
and Tony very mildly casually
00:31:33 ►
said oh you know you’re right
00:31:34 ►
absolutely right how’d you know
00:31:35 ►
oh he said that you see that little
00:31:38 ►
sort of star shaped
00:31:40 ►
shiny thing in the bottom right corner
00:31:42 ►
a little star shaped thing
00:31:44 ►
I see it
00:31:45 ►
all the time. So, you know, we have a long way to go before we really can understand
00:31:56 ►
how the mind works. But this is a start. Thank you very much. There has been a very recent, quite a bit of increase of use of psychedelics in various therapeutic applications.
00:32:18 ►
The study of, studies are going on in Los Angeles and one other area, I forget where,
00:32:23 ►
Studies are going on in Los Angeles and one other area, I forget where,
00:32:32 ►
of the use of something like psilocybin or MDMA in administering to people who have terminal cancer to alleviate the anxiety of that.
00:32:35 ►
These have been quite successful.
00:32:37 ►
There have been studies in the post-traumatic syndrome, again, to relieve anxiety.
00:32:44 ►
post-traumatic syndrome, again, to relieve anxiety.
00:32:53 ►
There are probably half a dozen such studies either underway now or in the machinery of approval to be done.
00:33:01 ►
The primary negative of this entire area is the public opinion, the legal status, the general attitude of the authorities that any work with these
00:33:06 ►
materials is probably basically evil, makes getting permission from the authorities, be
00:33:13 ►
it health, be it drug authorities, virtually impossible to get.
00:33:18 ►
And hence, it will be a long struggle for any of these studies to become real.
00:33:23 ►
The funding is no question.
00:33:24 ►
Funding is available from many sources.
00:33:26 ►
It’s the machinery of the permission-getting that has been difficult.
00:33:31 ►
This, I don’t see being softened at all until the, as has happened in Europe to some extent,
00:33:41 ►
and more and more, this entire area of research moves from legal control to medical control.
00:33:47 ►
And I think that transformation will probably allow many of these studies to be done.
00:33:55 ►
And the good news is that here, less than five years since Sasha gave this talk, the
00:34:01 ►
amount of research in this field is at long last heating up.
00:34:04 ►
gave this talk, the amount of research in this field is at long last eating up.
00:34:10 ►
Now, after I play this next talk, I’ll return to this topic and the good news coming from the recent Psychedelic Science Conference, at which the focus of much of the event was
00:34:14 ►
the work of none other than Sasha Shulgin.
00:34:17 ►
But first I wanted you to hear this Alan Watts talk that was sent to me by Michael H., who
00:34:23 ►
also provided the recording of Alan Watts that I played in my podcast.
00:34:27 ►
I think it was number 213.
00:34:28 ►
So thank you again, Michael.
00:34:31 ►
Now, the only information I have on this recording is that the file was named
00:34:35 ►
themoreitchanges.mp3.
00:34:38 ►
And since we know that Alan Watts died in 1973,
00:34:42 ►
we know that this talk was given over 35 years ago.
00:34:46 ►
So when you hear his predictions about the future of technology,
00:34:51 ►
well, keep in mind that even if he’d given this talk last night,
00:34:55 ►
the conclusion he comes to in about seven minutes from now will blow you away,
00:35:00 ►
even if you’ve heard it before.
00:35:02 ►
So when he begins talking about the evolution of technology
00:35:05 ►
from painting up through virtual reality,
00:35:09 ►
don’t latch on to the details so much,
00:35:11 ►
but keep your mind open to hear his conclusion.
00:35:15 ►
Well, that should be enough for me,
00:35:16 ►
so let’s join Alan Watts and hear what he has in store for us today.
00:35:24 ►
We use the word reproduction
00:35:26 ►
in two principal ways.
00:35:28 ►
When we talk about
00:35:30 ►
the biological reproduction
00:35:31 ►
of the species
00:35:32 ►
and when we talk about
00:35:35 ►
making a good reproduction
00:35:37 ►
of something
00:35:37 ►
in terms of a painting,
00:35:40 ►
a photograph,
00:35:41 ►
or a recording,
00:35:43 ►
or a videotape.
00:35:46 ►
And what is all this about reproduction in that direction?
00:35:51 ►
Hundreds of years ago, kings of Europe,
00:35:56 ►
who wanted to form feudal alliances by marrying the princesses of far-off states,
00:36:03 ►
would have painters send portraits of the lady in question
00:36:06 ►
to see if His Majesty approved of her before he got her.
00:36:11 ►
And there’s a famous story in which Henry VIII of England
00:36:14 ►
was badly cheated in this respect
00:36:16 ►
by a too flattering portrait of Anne of Cleves.
00:36:21 ►
And therefore there grew up a kind of morale among artists
00:36:24 ►
in the European tradition
00:36:26 ►
to make faithful reproductions of people
00:36:29 ►
and they perfected their technique
00:36:31 ►
beginning with the marvelous work of the Renaissance painters
00:36:34 ►
and the Flemish painters
00:36:36 ►
and going on finally to what was called
00:36:40 ►
Art Officiel in the 19th century
00:36:43 ►
we got what we now call photographic realism.
00:36:47 ►
Isn’t there some more scientific way of doing this?
00:36:51 ►
And so they discovered the camera.
00:36:55 ►
And first of all, there were, you know, remember those brownish daguerreotypes?
00:36:59 ►
And people said, well, that is pretty, it really looks like grandpa, doesn’t it?
00:37:04 ►
And then they said but uh something’s
00:37:07 ►
there are several things missing it isn’t colored so first of all they tinted them
00:37:12 ►
and then they said well it’s real lifelike
00:37:16 ►
but then they went on to say but you know there are some people whose whole style of life, whose personality is in the way they move.
00:37:27 ►
And if you just take a static shot like that,
00:37:32 ►
the personality isn’t there.
00:37:35 ►
It’s the way they go.
00:37:36 ►
So they said, we’ve got to have some way of making people move.
00:37:42 ►
So they invented the movies.
00:37:48 ►
And I remember when the first movies came out they were all going everybody was going you know in a jerky way then they smoothed it out and they said oh that’s real
00:37:55 ►
lifelike but they said then but there’s another thing about reproducing people which is that um
00:38:02 ►
they talk and a whole lot of their personality is in the
00:38:06 ►
voice so can’t we have them talking at the same time that they move so they
00:38:13 ►
invented the talkies and then to get it more lifelike still they colored them
00:38:19 ►
they said wow now we’re really getting somewhere.
00:38:26 ►
Then to make it even more real, they put it in 3D.
00:38:31 ►
And you had to wear sort of spectacles over your face to see it that way.
00:38:37 ►
But then they went on to say, why is it that every time we want to see one of these things,
00:38:40 ►
we have to go down to the center of town?
00:38:44 ►
Can’t we have it all at home and so
00:38:45 ►
television came on and in television they first of all started out with black and white and it was
00:38:52 ►
kind of uh like robert benchley once described the cuts in french newspapers as all looking
00:38:57 ►
as if they’d been made on bread well that was television at a certain period and then
00:39:02 ►
they improved it and then they colored it and that’s where we are now.
00:39:07 ►
Not quite.
00:39:09 ►
Because somebody has come out with the thing that we shall all be seeing soon which is the hologram.
00:39:15 ►
A television image produced by laser beams where you see a three dimensional figure out in the air in front of you.
00:39:27 ►
I say isn’t that marvelous? And then, but of course when you go up to it and you put your hand on
00:39:35 ►
it, your hand goes right through it. You can’t touch it. And you see that was
00:39:41 ►
always the trouble with television. Because you look at whatever you’re seeing behind a screen.
00:39:47 ►
It’s intangible.
00:39:48 ►
It doesn’t smell.
00:39:51 ►
And it won’t relate to you.
00:39:53 ►
So these are further problems to be solved in the techniques of electronic reproduction.
00:39:59 ►
And they’ll do it.
00:40:01 ►
They’ll first of all manage a way in which the electronic emission sources
00:40:07 ►
can solidify and make the air vibrate so that you go up and you’ll touch the
00:40:13 ►
figure and you won’t be able to push your hand through it because the air
00:40:18 ►
will be going faster than your hand
00:40:24 ►
imagine that you can actually if there’s a beautiful dancer on the television you’ll be able
00:40:30 ►
to go up and embrace her but she won’t know you’re there and she won’t respond to you and you’ll say
00:40:36 ►
well that’s not very lifelike just as they once said if the photograph doesn’t move it’s not very
00:40:41 ►
lifelike if it doesn’t talk it’s not very lifelike they’ll next say if the reproduction in three dimensions solid doesn’t respond
00:40:48 ►
it’s not very lifelike so they’ll have to figure out a technique for doing that
00:40:52 ►
what will they do well I tell you sitting in your home where you’re
00:40:59 ►
watching the scene on the kind of stage now, not on a screen, there’ll be a TV camera observing you.
00:41:07 ►
And that TV camera will report back everything you do into a computer.
00:41:12 ►
And the computer will so manage each bit of information, that’s to say, each tiny little
00:41:20 ►
granule unit of information going into the image that you’re looking at, that it
00:41:27 ►
will immediately decide what is the appropriate response to the approach that you are making
00:41:33 ►
to the image.
00:41:35 ►
Won’t that be crazy?
00:41:38 ►
You know, she may slap you in the face and she may kiss you.
00:41:43 ►
You never know.
00:41:45 ►
But then, you say, now, this is still not really the kind of reproduction we wanted.
00:41:50 ►
What we wanted when we looked at this scene is to be able to identify with one of the characters.
00:41:56 ►
We wanted to not just watch the drama that’s being performed on the stage in front of us,
00:42:01 ►
but actually get into it.
00:42:04 ►
And so we want to be wired in with electrodes on the stage in front of us but actually get into it and so we want to be wired in with a electro electrodes on the brain so that we will actually
00:42:10 ►
feel the emotions of the people acting on the stage and so eventually we will
00:42:17 ►
get absolutely perfect reproduction and we will be able to see that image so vividly that we shall become it.
00:42:28 ►
And so the question arises.
00:42:32 ►
Could that be where we are already?
00:42:37 ►
Are we a reproduction?
00:42:40 ►
Which over the centuries of evolution has worked out to be a replica of something else that was going on,
00:42:47 ►
and we are where we always were.
00:42:52 ►
Now the next fantasy concerns the idea that every living being thinks it’s human.
00:43:11 ►
idea that every living being thinks it’s human and that means a plant a worm a virus a bacterium a fruit fly a hippopotamus a giraffe a rabbit that all
00:43:21 ►
these beings wherever they feel out from,
00:43:25 ►
as we feel out from our bodies,
00:43:28 ►
feel that they’re in the middle.
00:43:31 ►
That is to say, wherever you look, you turn your head around,
00:43:35 ►
and you feel you’re in the middle of the world.
00:43:36 ►
You feel you’re the center.
00:43:39 ►
And a rabbit or a fruit fly feels that it is a center.
00:43:44 ►
And it has around it a company of associates who look like it.
00:43:49 ►
And therefore, this creature knows that these are the right people,
00:43:53 ►
just as we know when we look at human beings.
00:43:56 ►
They’re the right people. They are one of us.
00:43:59 ►
Only, of course, we have to make distinctions,
00:44:01 ►
because you never really know that you are you and that you are
00:44:06 ►
really in the right place unless you can contrast yourself with some other people who are after all
00:44:11 ►
not quite in the right place and some other people who are very much in the wrong place
00:44:15 ►
and then through having this succession of comparisons you know that you’re okay well
00:44:21 ►
the insect has exactly the same arrangement well Well, you say, well, insects and
00:44:26 ►
things like fishes, they don’t have any culture. What do you mean, fishes being civilized and
00:44:33 ►
being entitled to consider themselves as humans? Well, let me put the argument from the fish’s
00:44:38 ►
point of view. Fishes say, human beings are a mess. Look what they do.
00:44:48 ►
They can’t exist without cluttering themselves and carrying around all kinds of things outside their bodies.
00:44:52 ►
They have to have houses and automobiles
00:44:56 ►
and books, books, and records,
00:45:00 ►
and television, and hi-fi equipment,
00:45:03 ►
and stuff, endless stuff. And they litter the earth with rubbish.
00:45:08 ►
Think of a dolphin. He isn’t really a fish because a dolphin’s a mammal, but a dolphin’s point of view towards the human race.
00:45:15 ►
Dolphins spend most of their time playing. They don’t work because the grocery is right there in the ocean, whatever they need. And so a dolphin will catch up with a seagoing liner
00:45:27 ►
and it’ll get on the wake of the liner
00:45:31 ►
and put its tail at an exact angle of 26 degrees.
00:45:35 ►
And in so doing, the liner will carry the dolphin along.
00:45:39 ►
The dolphin will make circles around the liner just for fun,
00:45:42 ►
playing all its life in the water.
00:45:46 ►
And we know that a dolphin’s brain is as big if not bigger than ours but it’s incredibly
00:45:51 ►
intelligent that it has a language which we can’t decipher and the person who
00:45:55 ►
knows most about dolphins in the United States dr. John Lilly has a friend of
00:45:59 ►
mine and he said he came to the conclusion that dolphins were too smart to tell us their language.
00:46:09 ►
So he abandoned this project.
00:46:12 ►
He said he would no longer keep such a highly civilized being in the concentration camp of the zoo
00:46:16 ►
and that it should go back to the ocean.
00:46:20 ►
So the point is, though, that every, not only dolphins,
00:46:24 ►
but every organism that has any sensitivity in it whatsoever considers itself to be the center of the universe.
00:46:33 ►
Now it has its problems.
00:46:37 ►
There’s a Zen poem which says,
00:46:41 ►
The morning glory which blooms for an hour differs not at heart from a giant pine
00:46:46 ►
that lives for a thousand years.
00:46:52 ►
In other words
00:46:53 ►
an hour is a long life
00:46:56 ►
to a morning glory.
00:47:00 ►
A thousand years is a long life to a pine.
00:47:04 ►
And our four score years and ten, or as the insurance company’s actuarial tables put it, somewhere between 65 and 70 years is an average human life, seems about the right length of life.
00:47:17 ►
I mean, there are people who want to go on and on and are in quest of immortality and have their bodies frozen
00:47:25 ►
in case there should develop in the future some technique by which they could be revived.
00:47:30 ►
But I really don’t go for that idea.
00:47:37 ►
Because nature has mercifully arranged the principle of forgettery as well as the principle of memory.
00:47:44 ►
the principle of forgettery as well as the principle of memory.
00:47:50 ►
If you always and always and always remembered everything,
00:47:52 ►
you see, you would be like a piece of paper which had been painted over and painted over and painted over
00:47:55 ►
until there was no space left
00:47:57 ►
and you wouldn’t be able to distinguish between one thing and another.
00:48:00 ►
It’s like when a whole bunch of people start to scream and make noises
00:48:03 ►
and out-scream each other and soon you can hear nobody.
00:48:08 ►
So in that way one’s memories become screams and nature mercifully arranges that the whole thing be erased and you begin again.
00:48:26 ►
in what form you begin, whether you begin again as a human being or as a fruit fly,
00:48:33 ►
a butterfly or a beetle or a bird, it feels the same way that you feel now.
00:48:38 ►
So we’re really all in the same place.
00:48:43 ►
And we all have above us things much higher than ourselves.
00:48:46 ►
And we all have below us things that we feel are much lower than ourselves
00:48:48 ►
just as there are things out there on the left
00:48:50 ►
and things out there on the right
00:48:51 ►
and things in front and things behind
00:48:53 ►
because you’re the middle
00:48:55 ►
you’re the middle everywhere, always
00:48:57 ►
and now my third fantasy. Nobody has, it seems to me, really seriously asked the question,
00:49:12 ►
how do stars begin? Why? How out of space do these enormous radioactive centers arise?
00:49:32 ►
Well, I’m going to solve this problem on the principle of the egg and the hen.
00:49:38 ►
Because it is said, a chicken is one egg’s way of becoming other eggs.
00:49:45 ►
And if you’ve understood my second fantasy,
00:49:46 ►
you will see how that could be true.
00:49:49 ►
Now let’s suppose then that a planet
00:49:51 ►
is one star’s way of becoming another star.
00:49:58 ►
You know, stars, when they explode,
00:50:00 ►
they send a lot of goo out into space,
00:50:04 ►
and some of this goo solidifies into balls which
00:50:07 ►
get in orbit and spin around the star and in one chance in a thousand maybe one of those balls will
00:50:15 ►
become like the planet earth and slowly upon it will arise what some people might call a disease called the bacteria of intelligent life.
00:50:28 ►
And they haven’t notion these things
00:50:31 ►
that we call alive
00:50:32 ►
that they ought to go on.
00:50:34 ►
They have a fixed idea in their heads
00:50:37 ►
that they should keep on doing
00:50:40 ►
whatever it is they’re doing
00:50:41 ►
and they should always be doing it better.
00:50:44 ►
So they divide themselves into different species and these species compete with
00:50:49 ►
each other in order to as it were flex their muscles and get better and better
00:50:53 ►
at whatever it is they are and they go on doing this until one species really
00:50:59 ►
establishes itself as top species in the particular area on the particular planet. As we
00:51:05 ►
human beings, Homo sapiens, have established ourselves as top species on
00:51:11 ►
Earth, whatever top means. Well then, when we have a little leisure and don’t have
00:51:17 ►
to spend all our time finding food to put into our mouths, we start asking
00:51:22 ►
questions. And we look around at each other and everything and say
00:51:26 ►
what is this i mean what’s going on here well some people say that’s a stupid question to ask
00:51:34 ►
why don’t you just go on doing your work go hunting go farming go doing your business
00:51:39 ►
they say no there are higher things so they create a special class of people who are in India called Brahmins.
00:51:47 ►
Among us, philosophers, scientists, theologians, thinkers.
00:51:53 ►
And they go into this question.
00:51:56 ►
And they’re allowed to stop farming,
00:51:59 ►
to stop hunting, to stop mining,
00:52:01 ►
to stop scrubbing floors,
00:52:04 ►
and to go to very special places
00:52:06 ►
called universities where they can sit around and think about what is going on
00:52:11 ►
now they think about this first of all they do what they call philosophy which
00:52:17 ►
is they try to say what it means with what does the word be what does the word
00:52:24 ►
exist mean what do we
00:52:25 ►
mean when we say we’re here or they find they can’t discuss that very far because
00:52:35 ►
the word stops meaning anything it sort of becomes a noise they say now we’re
00:52:40 ►
not really getting to the point what we’ve got to do is instead of thinking
00:52:44 ►
all the time
00:52:45 ►
and just theorizing and talking words about what’s going on,
00:52:48 ►
we’ve got to investigate it experimentally.
00:52:51 ►
We’ve somehow got to look into this stuff
00:52:53 ►
that we call reality, a material world,
00:52:57 ►
and find out what it is.
00:52:59 ►
So they start chopping it up.
00:53:01 ►
See?
00:53:02 ►
They go into flowers and they chop up the seeds
00:53:05 ►
and they look into the middle of the seeds.
00:53:07 ►
They find something there
00:53:07 ►
and then they have to get a magnifying glass
00:53:09 ►
and look in on that.
00:53:10 ►
It gets smaller and smaller and smaller.
00:53:12 ►
They reason they must eventually come to some particle
00:53:15 ►
called an atom.
00:53:17 ►
In Greek, atom means
00:53:19 ►
atomos, non-cuttable.
00:53:23 ►
What you can’t split any further.
00:53:25 ►
So they come down to the Atomos, that than which there is no witcher, they thought.
00:53:32 ►
But then they found they could split that atom.
00:53:34 ►
They could find the electron, the positron, the meson, etc., etc., etc., forever.
00:53:43 ►
And so they said, well, this is, I said well this is
00:53:45 ►
I mean this is a real science
00:53:47 ►
because we’ve now found out
00:53:49 ►
that every atom of matter
00:53:54 ►
contains immense energy
00:53:56 ►
and that we could come to the point where
00:53:59 ►
we could release the energy in the atom
00:54:03 ►
and the trouble with intellectual people is
00:54:06 ►
that anything that can be done must be done.
00:54:11 ►
And so eventually, in the necessary course of the development of nature,
00:54:15 ►
they found out how to blow the earth to pieces and turn it into a star.
00:54:22 ►
So, that may be, you see see how stars originate they have planets like uh chickens have eggs
00:54:31 ►
and the eggs burst and turn into chickens and planets burst through the agency of intelligent
00:54:39 ►
life and turn into stars which throw out other mud balls which are some of which stand a reasonable chance about as reasonable a
00:54:47 ►
chance to say any male spermatozoa
00:54:50 ►
stands when it enters the female womb of becoming a baby
00:54:54 ►
one in a million
00:54:57 ►
and those spermatozoa are in exactly the same position
00:55:01 ►
as the planets in the stars now I tell you this is a fantasy but you may ask me isn’t it a rather unpleasant fantasy? Aren’t things going
00:55:12 ►
the wrong way, the wrong direction? In other words if the whole point of life, I
00:55:21 ►
mean this tender biological substance with all its tubes and filaments and nerves
00:55:30 ►
which is so very sensitive, if all this is to end up in fire, into an absolute blaze don’t we say oh what a shame you don’t is that the way it ends but so many
00:55:54 ►
people say that they want to see the light they want to be enlightened they
00:55:59 ►
want to dissolve into the light of God
00:56:09 ►
into the light of God then when they’ve done that all over again the process goes on and it blows out those mud balls and here are planets and here once again
00:56:19 ►
you’re a baby you’re a child the flowers are brilliantly colored, the stars are gorgeous,
00:56:29 ►
the smell of the earth, the sound of the rain, everything is marvelous once again.
00:56:35 ►
Once again you see the other, the man, the woman that you love.
00:56:47 ►
As if it had never happened before.
00:56:49 ►
It all starts over again.
00:56:53 ►
And as it goes on, it gets more and more intense.
00:56:55 ►
All the problems get more and more problematic.
00:57:01 ►
You find you’re wrestling with something you can’t control.
00:57:04 ►
You’ve got to control it, but you absolutely can’t control it like all the problems
00:57:05 ►
of the world at the present time is the whole scene is completely out of hand and we feel we’re
00:57:11 ►
going to our doom because we’re going once again towards the birth of a star which is the most
00:57:18 ►
creative thing there is now if you think about this for a while
00:57:25 ►
you see I’ve put forward
00:57:26 ►
three fantasies
00:57:29 ►
all of which have a cyclic quality
00:57:32 ►
we reproduce
00:57:34 ►
not only biologically
00:57:36 ►
but we reproduce artistically
00:57:41 ►
technically
00:57:42 ►
just for a moment I want to put in an aside about biological reproduction artistically, technically.
00:57:49 ►
Just for a moment, I want to put in an aside about biological reproduction.
00:57:57 ►
See, when I think back to my grandfather, whom I knew fairly well,
00:58:03 ►
he was, when I was a little boy, he was something extraordinarily impressive.
00:58:05 ►
He looked like King Edward VII. He was a very boy, he was something extraordinarily impressive. He looked like King Edward the Seventh. He was
00:58:08 ►
a very, very elegant man.
00:58:11 ►
With a little goatee beard, he didn’t have
00:58:13 ►
sideburns like this, and he had shorter hair.
00:58:16 ►
But he was a very elegant fellow,
00:58:18 ►
dressed beautifully. And I thought, you know,
00:58:20 ►
he was the very image of God.
00:58:23 ►
And now
00:58:24 ►
here I am, the same age as he was when I first knew him.
00:58:30 ►
And I have five grandchildren.
00:58:33 ►
And I’m no longer impressed by grandfathers.
00:58:42 ►
Here I am.
00:58:45 ►
I’m one of them too.
00:58:48 ►
And this is the same idea, you see, of the round.
00:58:52 ►
That we are almost perpetually in the same place,
00:59:00 ►
as the French proverb says,
00:59:02 ►
plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
00:59:04 ►
The more it changes, the more it’s the same place as the French proverb says plus a charge plus a la name shows the more it changes the more it’s the same thing well that means then you see
00:59:16 ►
that existence the feeling of being is a sort of spectrum. Just as light is at one end red and at the other end violet.
00:59:30 ►
And you have to have these extremes in order to have color at all, in order to know light.
00:59:37 ►
So you see, likewise, we have to have the experience that there is somebody else,
00:59:46 ►
something else going on altogether out of our control
00:59:49 ►
in order to have the experience of being me.
00:59:55 ►
And so in order to feel good,
00:59:59 ►
to feel that life is worthwhile,
01:00:02 ►
that existence is worth going on with,
01:00:04 ►
in order to bring out that feeling,
01:00:06 ►
just as the red brings out the violet,
01:00:08 ►
there has to be in the back of our minds,
01:00:10 ►
maybe very far away, the
01:00:12 ►
comprehension that there is something
01:00:14 ►
that could happen that absolutely
01:00:16 ►
mustn’t happen.
01:00:18 ►
That is the horrors, that is the screaming
01:00:20 ►
memes at the end of the line.
01:00:23 ►
We have to know that’s there.
01:00:25 ►
And every so often, that has to happen.
01:00:28 ►
Because if there isn’t the experience that we go through
01:00:32 ►
called the screaming memes at the end of the line,
01:00:35 ►
where everything has gone wrong,
01:00:38 ►
like just before he died,
01:00:39 ►
the British novelist Arnold Bennett said,
01:00:42 ►
I feel somehow that everything’s absolutely wrong.
01:00:45 ►
You know? So the possibility, even the imagination that there could be such an
01:00:55 ►
experience in the back of our heads is the background which gives intensity to the sense that we call feeling good feeling that it’s it’s all
01:01:05 ►
right it’s all right now I’m only bleeding
01:01:11 ►
so if you understand that you see that really and truly you’re always in the
01:01:20 ►
same place just as every creature thinks it’s a human being and as just every
01:01:27 ►
being turns out to be a reproduction by some interesting technology whether it’s
01:01:32 ►
electronic or biological makes very little difference and just as it may be
01:01:39 ►
I don’t know planets are stars ways of becoming other stars, and so on, and so on, and so on.
01:01:46 ►
But the moral is, you’re always in the same place.
01:01:52 ►
And what is that place?
01:01:58 ►
You can ask yourself very, very, I won’t say seriously, because this isn’t really serious it’s sincere
01:02:05 ►
ask yourself very sincerely
01:02:07 ►
if that is so
01:02:09 ►
if in other words
01:02:12 ►
the place in which you are now
01:02:15 ►
is the place where
01:02:16 ►
everything and everybody else
01:02:17 ►
really is
01:02:18 ►
only there’s an arrangement
01:02:20 ►
to pretend
01:02:21 ►
that you ought to be
01:02:22 ►
somewhere else
01:02:23 ►
so the place where you
01:02:28 ►
are is the place where you’re always pretending you want to be somewhere else
01:02:31 ►
and this is the nature of life this is the pulse I ought to be somewhere else
01:02:38 ►
so it’s a kind of a dozen like that see when if you discover that that’s the
01:02:44 ►
trick that you’re playing on yourself kind of a gazoom like that, see? And if you discover that that’s the trick
01:02:45 ►
that you’re playing on yourself,
01:02:50 ►
you become serene.
01:02:56 ►
And you don’t entirely give up the game
01:03:01 ►
because you’ve seen through it,
01:03:03 ►
but you say, hmm, it really might be fun to go on playing.
01:03:09 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:03:12 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:03:18 ►
Well, to tell you the truth,
01:03:20 ►
I’m not really sure what to say after listening to that Alan Watts piece just now.
01:03:25 ►
I guess I’m going to have to hear it one more time to really grok that ending. I have to admit that
01:03:30 ►
even though I probably couldn’t accurately repeat what he said just now, it sure did sound good to
01:03:35 ►
me. So instead of any comments about Alan Watts, instead I’d like to say a word or two about the
01:03:42 ►
lady behind that beautiful silken voice you hear after each week’s talk here in the salon.
01:03:47 ►
And unless you are new here, you know that that is the one and only Black Beauty,
01:03:52 ►
who is also the host of the BB’s Bungalow podcast over on the Cannabis Podcast Network at dopefiend.co.uk.
01:04:00 ►
And it comes to you from down under and is definitely a podcast I look to.
01:04:05 ►
It comes out once a month, and I can’t recommend it enough.
01:04:08 ►
And it was in her latest program, number 32, I think it is,
01:04:12 ►
that I heard her read an email that she received from someone who is also a fellow salonner.
01:04:17 ►
I think he calls himself the Traveling Hippie.
01:04:21 ►
And what he had to say touched me very deeply.
01:04:24 ►
So I want you to know, Traveling Hippie, that I’m with you 100%.
01:04:29 ►
The decision you made, I’m sure, was not very easy for you to come to.
01:04:34 ►
But I, for one, not only applaud your action,
01:04:37 ►
I think it was in the realm that I personally regard as heroic.
01:04:41 ►
It’s good to know that you’re out there,
01:04:42 ►
traveling around and spreading a positive vibe
01:04:45 ►
about life. And while you may sometimes feel a little lonely out there, I want you to know that
01:04:51 ►
you have tens of thousands of friends here in cyberdelic space, and we’re all on your side.
01:04:57 ►
So travel on, brave soul, travel on. Now there is one more thing I need to cover, but I’m not exactly sure what to say.
01:05:06 ►
You see, a few days ago my email client crashed,
01:05:09 ►
and I lost all of the to-be-answered emails in my inbox.
01:05:14 ►
I think there were around 84 of them.
01:05:16 ►
And quite a few had files attached, like the ayahuasca talks that Francis sent me from Peru
01:05:23 ►
after returning home from the Psychedelic Science
01:05:25 ►
Conference a couple weeks ago. Well, Francis and all of our other salonners whose email was eaten
01:05:31 ►
by my PC, I’m afraid that if I haven’t responded to you in the past several months, it means that
01:05:37 ►
your message was also one that was lost. But here’s why I don’t know exactly what to say about it.
01:05:43 ►
You know, a few years ago, I would have been really depressed with a crash like that,
01:05:48 ►
where I had no way of recording or recovering even the names of those whose email disappeared on me.
01:05:54 ►
But this time, it didn’t seem to upset me very much at all.
01:05:58 ►
In fact, and I’m not proud to admit this, but it felt like a big weight was lifted off me
01:06:04 ►
because I no longer feel guilty about not answering all of those wonderful messages.
01:06:10 ►
It isn’t that I don’t love you and want to stay in touch,
01:06:12 ►
but right now my new book is more or less taking over all my time,
01:06:17 ►
and even though I wasn’t getting around to even answering those emails very quickly,
01:06:21 ►
now there’s no pressure on me from them at all,
01:06:25 ►
and I feel as if I’ve got more time to work on my book.
01:06:29 ►
Of course, now I’ve got to overcome my concern
01:06:32 ►
about the dozens of messages waiting for me on Facebook
01:06:35 ►
and over at thegrowreport.com,
01:06:38 ►
where, by the way, you’ll find one of the greatest collections of tribe members that there is.
01:06:43 ►
In fact, one of my main incentives for finishing this new book quickly Thank you. once in a while, and don’t just lurk there like I’ve been doing lately. Get involved with this interesting and fun-loving community.
01:07:07 ►
It’s a great place to start if you find yourself way out on the far edge with no one nearby
01:07:12 ►
to talk to.
01:07:14 ►
Now, once again, I find myself wearing out before I’ve talked about the Psychedelic Science
01:07:20 ►
Conference that Rick Doblin produced in San Jose last month.
01:07:24 ►
And as you know, if you’ve
01:07:26 ►
been here a while, I have had my differences with maps, but it was only one difference, to be honest,
01:07:31 ►
and so I thought that it was about time for me to grow up a bit and acknowledge the important work
01:07:37 ►
that Rick Doblin has done over an exceptionally long and often lonely time, I’m sure. We’re coming
01:07:43 ►
up on the 20th anniversary of the founding of MAPS,
01:07:46 ►
but Rick and I go back even before then.
01:07:49 ►
And when I first became aware of him,
01:07:51 ►
it was through the publicity he was raising about the importance of MDMA,
01:07:55 ►
and he was one of the lone voices in the wilderness back then.
01:07:59 ►
Now, as we just heard Sasha Shulgin say at a talk he gave in 2005,
01:08:06 ►
he remained hopeful that one day psychedelic research would begin again in earnest.
01:08:11 ►
And while this is not quite yet the case,
01:08:13 ►
the conference that Rick just produced did a great deal to move that dream significantly closer to reality,
01:08:20 ►
mainly by moving the discussion of this work squarely back into the mainstream.
01:08:26 ►
Now when I was complimenting Rick the other night
01:08:28 ►
on the impressive number of researchers and scholars
01:08:30 ►
that he brought together for the conference
01:08:32 ►
he also told me that he’s planning to podcast
01:08:35 ►
all of the talks from the conference
01:08:37 ►
and after meeting with the young man
01:08:39 ►
who will be responsible for doing all that podcasting work
01:08:42 ►
I feel confident that over time we’ll get to hear most
01:08:46 ►
everything that was said in the lectures.
01:08:48 ►
Also, and I think I mentioned this
01:08:50 ►
before, I saw Jan Ervin there
01:08:52 ►
doing some recording for his Gnostic
01:08:53 ►
Media podcast, and
01:08:56 ►
Mad Dog was there doing some recording
01:08:58 ►
for Pothead’s Coffee Shop over
01:09:00 ►
on the dopefiend.co.uk
01:09:02 ►
network. So
01:09:03 ►
check out some of those other podcasts
01:09:05 ►
to get a full picture of the presentations
01:09:08 ►
that were given at that conference.
01:09:10 ►
For me, though, the highlight of the conference
01:09:12 ►
was seeing old friends and meeting new ones.
01:09:16 ►
I simply can’t thank the Arrowhead crew enough
01:09:18 ►
for making me feel at home,
01:09:20 ►
and while I thought about just reading off a list
01:09:23 ►
of the names of all the old friends
01:09:24 ►
and new fellow salonners that I met there, I realized that the list is too long.
01:09:29 ►
And on top of that, quite a few fellow salonners just came by and waved
01:09:33 ►
without me getting a chance to catch their names.
01:09:36 ►
So I’ll restrict myself to just one short story about some old friends who were there.
01:09:43 ►
About, oh, this must have been about eight years ago,
01:09:47 ►
thanks to Bruce Dahmer,
01:09:49 ►
I had access to some secure voice software
01:09:51 ►
that worked over the net.
01:09:53 ►
And this was before Skype came to life.
01:09:56 ►
So I set up a little website
01:09:58 ►
that I called the Psychedelic Salon.
01:10:00 ►
And once a week for several years,
01:10:02 ►
five of us would meet online in Talkspace and carry on a long conversation that we began in Palenque several years before.
01:10:10 ►
Eventually, our circumstances changed and our weekly meetings online died, but then podcasting came along, and so I revived the psychedelic salon, and here we are today.
01:10:21 ►
and here we are today.
01:10:26 ►
Now, the reason I’m telling you this story is because until the recent Psychedelic Science Conference,
01:10:32 ►
the five of us had never all been together in the same physical location since 1999.
01:10:36 ►
Unfortunately, one of our core group couldn’t make it to the conference,
01:10:40 ►
but four of us were there, together again in one sense, but together as the founders of the Psychedelic Salon for the very first time.
01:10:44 ►
since, but together as the founders of the Psychedelic Salon for the very first time.
01:10:50 ►
My point being that even though you and I and the rest of our fellow salonners are scattered all over the place, it doesn’t mean that we don’t remain deeply connected here in
01:10:54 ►
cyberdelic space in some kind of a strange way that our non-tribe friends really can’t
01:11:00 ►
understand.
01:11:01 ►
So, Don, we missed you, and Tom, Steve, and Bill, wow, it sure was good being
01:11:07 ►
together with you once again. And for creating that opportunity for us, I want to again thank
01:11:12 ►
Rick Doblin for that and for his tireless work, particularly in the face of sometimes grumpy old
01:11:19 ►
friends like me. Well, that should do it for now, and so I’ll close today’s podcast by reminding you that this and most of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike 3.0 license.
01:11:37 ►
And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon page, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
01:11:45 ►
And if you’re interested in the philosophy behind the Psychedelic Salon, you can hear
01:11:50 ►
all about it in my novel, The Genesis Generation, which is available as an audiobook that you
01:11:55 ►
can download at genesisgeneration.us.
01:11:59 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:12:04 ►
Be well, my friends.