Program Notes
Guest speakers: Myron Stolaroff, Humphry Osmond, & Al Hubbard
On October 30, 1964, Dr. Humphry Osmond, Myron Stolaroff, Willis Harman, and Al Hubbard took LSD together. The next day they discussed what was learned. This is a recording of that gathering, and it is the first of the recovered recordings from The Stolaroff Collection, hosted at Erowid.org.
“There’s a central power system, and here’s the source. And the guidance system simply involves getting the person as close as possible to that source. The closer he gets the more aware he is, the more he sees who he is, the more he sees that everything he does is really of his own making and his own creation, and the more he sees his total responsibility. Now it’s inconceivable to me that you could move toward that source without increasing responsibility. And to me, Leary has found a way of moving in that direction but not going toward it, because he’s obviously missed his responsibility level.” -Myron Stolaroff
“From our crowd I think very, very few people get off the beam the way I would consider Leary and Alpert are off the beam, for example.” -Myron Stolaroff
“[We should use these substances] in a way which will not simply allow us to become aware of what any decent mystical saints have been aware of for a long, long time, but to become aware of how to produce a rise in the social level of communication, which will, indeed, transform the species from a biological animal to a communicating animal, which is what Teilhard had in view.” -Humphry Osmond
“[The map of the noosphere] is not to be created by mucking up bits of the Book of the Dead and saying how smart chaps were. This is a fraud.” -Humphry Osmond
“When you most need help is when you least want it.” -Myron Stolaroff
“This is the life that I’ve seen: Live or die. Be intelligent enough to get along. Don’t walk in two places without knowing where you’re going.” -Al Hubbard
“The ten year delay in our work brought about through our struggle with NIH in Washington and through being unable to cope with a large and powerful power-system there has produced, it’s resulted in probably several million people being quite unnecessarily damaged.” -Humphry Osmond (November 1, 1964)
“You have to understand the specific risks that [using psychedelics] involves. Now the specific risk is that every person involved will be altered whether they like it or not. And that the result of this will, in a sense, alter every other relationship they have whether they like it or not.”
Please Support the Archival Efforts
for
The Stolaroff Collection
Previous Episode
Next Episode
Similar Episodes
- 321 - A Discussion About Psychedelics - score: 0.76636
- 338 - A Tribute to Myron Stolaroff - score: 0.75694
- 278 - Oscar Janiger Interviewed by Peter Gorman - score: 0.75221
- 200 - A Few Words From Our Elders - score: 0.75009
- 151 - Posthumous Glory - score: 0.74755
- 092 - Lone Pine Stories (Part 3) - score: 0.74527
- 600 - Elders from the Sixties Discuss LSD - score: 0.74183
- 084 - Lone Pine Stories (Part 2) - score: 0.74027
- 213 - The Alchemy of LSD - score: 0.73066
- 302 - The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide - score: 0.72905
Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:30 ►
And today I would like to begin by thanking fellow salonners Travis F. and Marco R., who joins us, by the way, each week from the Netherlands,
00:00:33 ►
and both of whom have sent us some of their hard-earned cash to help offset the expenses here in the salon.
00:00:40 ►
And Marco, I too hope that we meet at Burning Man one day.
00:00:44 ►
However, I have to let you know that I’m not going to be able to make it this year.
00:00:48 ►
Actually, I hadn’t thought of it until just now, but I may skip next year, too, in order to save up and not miss the 2012 Burning Man Festival.
00:00:57 ►
Now, that’s a freak show that I not only don’t want to miss, it’s one that I want to be a part of.
00:01:05 ►
not only don’t want to miss, it’s one that I want to be a part of. So, Travis and Marco,
00:01:11 ►
by the way, you’ve joined me as virtual hosts today for what to me is the most exciting podcast that I’ve done so far. I have to tell you that as a somewhat geeky historical junkie of psychedelic
00:01:18 ►
culture, this recording is the top of the mountain for me. Of course, had I heard it just ten years ago,
00:01:25 ►
before I really had a good grasp of who these people were
00:01:29 ►
and what a profound effect they have had on all of us,
00:01:32 ►
well, it may have not seemed so earth-shaking for me.
00:01:36 ►
But to be able to listen in on what was essentially a private conversation
00:01:39 ►
between several of the key figures of the newly re-emerging psychedelic culture
00:01:44 ►
as they tried to come to a better understanding of where their work was leading,
00:01:49 ►
and then to hear them comment on what we now look back on as the beginning of the 60s,
00:01:55 ►
but with their comments coming right as those events were taking place,
00:01:59 ►
well, for me, that’s the single highest peak experience I’ve yet had here in podcasting land.
00:02:04 ►
For me, that’s the single highest peak experience I’ve yet had here in podcasting land.
00:02:11 ►
Now, this recording begins with them picking up on what was obviously an earlier conversation,
00:02:18 ►
but my guess is that at some point Myron must have convinced them that it would be a good idea to record their conversation.
00:02:23 ►
The two people you’ll hear the most from here are Myron Stolaroff and Humphrey Osmond. However, for what was a first time for me to hear his voice,
00:02:28 ►
another contributor to the talk that day was none other than Al Hubbard.
00:02:33 ►
Also, there’s one brief comment by a person that Myron calls Bill.
00:02:38 ►
And to be sure that my guess was correct, I contacted Jim Fadiman,
00:02:41 ►
who was also on the staff of the Institute where this recording was made,
00:02:45 ►
and he said that he was sure that that person was Willis Harmon.
00:02:49 ►
Now, I have a piece of stationery from the Institute that Myron gave me,
00:02:53 ►
and all four of them are listed as directors.
00:02:56 ►
However, as you will soon hear, this wasn’t your normal board meeting.
00:03:00 ►
So, now think back to where you were on November 1, 1964.
00:03:05 ►
For the majority of our fellow slaughters, that means thinking about some past life,
00:03:09 ►
because they weren’t even born yet.
00:03:13 ►
At the time, I was in my first semester of law school at the University of Houston,
00:03:17 ►
just working like crazy in order to become a full-fledged member of the establishment.
00:03:22 ►
Fortunately, I found the tribe before going completely astray,
00:03:26 ►
and so here we are today.
00:03:28 ►
But back in 1964, these four guys,
00:03:32 ►
while seeming to be deeply embedded in the establishment,
00:03:35 ►
were actually as far removed from mainstream thinking
00:03:38 ►
as was possible at the time.
00:03:40 ►
In other words, they were what I call psychedelic thinkers,
00:03:44 ►
which, of course, isn’t all that surprising when you remember that it was actually Humphrey Osmond himself who first coined the word psychedelic in a letter to Aldous Huxley.
00:03:54 ►
And now we get to hear directly from the great Dr. Humphrey Osmond as he talks with our friend and frequent guest here in the salon, Myron Stolaroff.
00:04:25 ►
Myron Stolaroff anywhere at the time. So what we’re going to get to hear is what these early pioneers in the field were just beginning to figure out about psychedelic voyaging as they inched ahead with their work.
00:04:32 ►
And I hope you aren’t put off in the beginning by their comparing our human trajectories through
00:04:37 ►
life in terms of a ballistic missile. Just keep in mind that the so-called Cuban Missile Crisis
00:04:43 ►
wasn’t all that far behind us at the time,
00:04:45 ►
and kids were still doing duck-and-cover drills in some schools.
00:04:49 ►
It was the rare child at the time who didn’t have nightmares of nuclear war coming in the form of a missile strike.
00:04:56 ►
But enough of my chatter.
00:04:58 ►
Now here’s Myron Stolaroff and Humphrey Osmond,
00:05:01 ►
who, at about the halfway point, will be joined by the legendary Johnny Appleseed of LSD,
00:05:07 ►
Al Hubbard himself.
00:05:13 ►
Let’s do that.
00:05:14 ►
So now we’re on the air.
00:05:16 ►
I think we’ll all have to speak up rather loudly
00:05:18 ►
because this microphone pickup in order to get us all is not too good.
00:05:23 ►
microphone pickup in order to get us all is not too good.
00:05:31 ►
So, as I see where we left off,
00:05:40 ►
you were pointing out the fact that we have a guidance system,
00:05:42 ►
but that missiles vary,
00:05:45 ►
and that we need to perfect a guidance system for various kinds of missiles and this is the thing i’d like to explore more with you because there are some
00:05:51 ►
things i think about our guidance system that are pretty good and that what we need to do is refine
00:05:57 ►
it for specific missiles but my own feeling is that basically the guidance system is quite sound.
00:06:06 ►
And in fact, maybe it pays to pause for a moment to go into that,
00:06:11 ►
because as I see it, and maybe I’ve oversimplified the thing,
00:06:16 ►
but I tend to look at things in oversimplified ways, perhaps.
00:06:20 ►
Well, sure.
00:06:21 ►
But as I see it, you can conceptualize it on the basis that it’s kind of
00:06:28 ►
convenient in my thinking to conceptualize it on a spatial basis, although
00:06:31 ►
it may have nothing to do with space whatsoever, that somewhere in space and time
00:06:36 ►
there’s a central power source.
00:06:39 ►
And here’s the source. And the guidance system
00:06:44 ►
simply involves getting the person as close as possible to that source.
00:06:48 ►
And the closer he gets, the more aware he is, the more he sees who he is,
00:06:56 ►
the more he sees that everything he does is really of his own making and his own creation,
00:07:02 ►
and the more he sees his total responsibility.
00:07:01 ►
in his own creation,
00:07:04 ►
and the more he sees his total responsibility.
00:07:07 ►
Now, it’s inconceivable to me that you can move toward that source
00:07:09 ►
without increasing responsibility,
00:07:12 ►
and to me, Larry has found a way
00:07:15 ►
of moving in that direction,
00:07:17 ►
but not going toward it,
00:07:18 ►
because he’s obviously missed this responsibility level.
00:07:22 ►
But I do feel that the guidance system
00:07:24 ►
that Al has set up for us, in which we use, although
00:07:27 ►
we don’t even know consciously what we’re doing, but we just have intuitively feel what
00:07:33 ►
we’re doing, is that somehow, through a phrase that Al has often used that I like, and that
00:07:42 ►
I feel it subjectively, although I’m not sure what I’m doing.
00:07:49 ►
He says, you hold reality steady, but somehow or other,
00:07:53 ►
you do create a field which gives a person freedom,
00:07:57 ►
and yet at the same time, it’s not just freedom,
00:08:00 ►
because somehow I think he’s impelled toward that source. I’m not sure just how this works, but somehow through this system,
00:08:06 ►
the person moves closer and closer to that so that his awareness and understanding raises. And it seems to me that
00:08:15 ►
this part of the system works with anybody, whether he’s sick, regardless of what kind of
00:08:20 ►
missile he is. The problem is that a lot of people don’t want to move in that direction
00:08:27 ►
or are going to perceive in their own framework
00:08:30 ►
or have particular problems and hang-ups,
00:08:33 ►
and that where we have to become very sensitive and understanding
00:08:37 ►
and be able to understand other people’s worlds
00:08:39 ►
is that in these situations we can be of more assistance
00:08:44 ►
to these particular people
00:08:46 ►
in understanding their world and what they really want to do and what they don’t want to do
00:08:51 ►
so as to assist them in accomplishing what they want.
00:08:56 ►
And at the same time, in a way, sort of steering them out of areas of difficulty, such as psychosis, or such as this kind of nirvanic state where
00:09:08 ►
people sit around and drink some of the rest of their lives without ever doing much more.
00:09:20 ►
So that’s my concept of the guidance system we’re employing in very general terms.
00:09:29 ►
Well, as I see the guidance system, there’s certain bits of it.
00:09:34 ►
One is that at the moment, except within a fairly rough and ready way, the nature of the missile is quite unspecified.
00:09:43 ►
The nature of the propellant is quite a good deal better than it was.
00:09:46 ►
It’s much more controlled.
00:09:49 ►
But, however,
00:09:51 ►
obviously the best way
00:09:52 ►
to get the person towards reality
00:09:55 ►
would be to shoot them up
00:09:56 ►
and leave them up.
00:09:57 ►
But we’re left with the real problem
00:09:59 ►
of bringing them back to base.
00:10:01 ►
Now, this is, in a sense,
00:10:04 ►
the actual effects of… goal of the enterprise is not, in fact,
00:10:11 ►
to get them up there, but to get them up and bring them back, which is two quite different
00:10:15 ►
things.
00:10:16 ►
And then for the people concerned to use the experience to benefit in some way or other
00:10:26 ►
something that’s happening back at base.
00:10:29 ►
Very definitely.
00:10:30 ►
Now, when you leave this bit out of the thing,
00:10:32 ►
this is the proposition that, in fact,
00:10:36 ►
because, to some extent,
00:10:38 ►
because of the way in which we started on this,
00:10:41 ►
with many of the, particularly our early alcoholics,
00:10:45 ►
their base was in such bad shape
00:10:47 ►
that to get back at all,
00:10:48 ►
they were exceptionally grateful,
00:10:50 ►
and any improvements they could make
00:10:52 ►
on this basis were seen as absolute improvements,
00:10:57 ►
and they were much rejoiced.
00:10:59 ►
And the difference between,
00:11:01 ►
for those who still had some wives left,
00:11:04 ►
and there were not so many of them, but for those who did, some wives left and there were not so many of those who did
00:11:06 ►
their wives often quite rejoiced
00:11:08 ►
because this was
00:11:09 ►
indeed a happy event
00:11:11 ►
but
00:11:13 ►
when you begin to deal with
00:11:15 ►
people
00:11:18 ►
who are not absolutely on their uppers
00:11:20 ►
then you begin to run
00:11:22 ►
into things that you may not in fact
00:11:24 ►
get them back to base
00:11:26 ►
indeed the very fact that you have been
00:11:28 ►
started off on the assumption
00:11:30 ►
that if you don’t do something about these people
00:11:33 ►
they’ll probably be dead in a year or two
00:11:34 ►
allows you to be extraordinarily happy
00:11:38 ►
with any change
00:11:41 ►
and it’s nearly always for the better
00:11:43 ►
so here you end up with,
00:11:45 ►
this is a very substantial advantage.
00:11:48 ►
But when you begin to bring people back
00:11:52 ►
with a much more refined operation,
00:11:55 ►
then you want to be able to do two things.
00:11:57 ►
The first is you want to be sure that,
00:12:00 ►
in fact, in coming back to base,
00:12:01 ►
that this information is indeed
00:12:04 ►
transmitted in a meaningful way that in fact in coming back to base that this information is indeed transmitted
00:12:05 ►
in a meaningful way to those who ought to have access to it.
00:12:11 ►
And these have to be worked out who these ought to be.
00:12:14 ►
And then, of course, that good use is made of this.
00:12:18 ►
And that, it seems to me,
00:12:20 ►
is going to be quite difficult to do until we know what the missiles actually like and
00:12:29 ►
what their bases actually like, because we may be more than happy at their return, but
00:12:35 ►
suppose we just don’t fit them in properly, and they have in fact as a result of this
00:12:40 ►
incorporated in them a lot of fresh information.
00:12:45 ►
We need to be able to predict what this will happen on the effect of the relationships
00:12:51 ►
of the people concerned.
00:12:52 ►
Well, this is very, very true.
00:12:54 ►
And of course, we need this.
00:12:55 ►
We need to know more about all the time.
00:12:57 ►
At the same time, in the last few years, we’ve been learning a great deal about this.
00:13:01 ►
Just as an example, when we started off,
00:13:05 ►
if we found somebody wanted to go through the clinic and take LSD very badly,
00:13:11 ►
and he had a marital problem, we would treat this person.
00:13:15 ►
Now, after a few of these cases, the antenna went up all over the place,
00:13:19 ►
and now a person comes in with a marital problem, we won’t treat him at all.
00:13:23 ►
We want to see the spouse.
00:13:25 ►
We want to know how the spouse feels.
00:13:27 ►
We prefer to treat them both.
00:13:29 ►
And we will actually refuse, we did refuse to treat the one unless we felt that the spouse would provide an accepting and understanding atmosphere for the person to come back to.
00:13:42 ►
So, of course, a lot of this you learn by experience
00:13:46 ►
you find people you find people come back and and some people regress and why do they regress
00:13:53 ►
and we’ve learned about these things and we’ve uh we’ve learned for example uh that for a minister
00:14:00 ►
to take lsd and then give a sermon to his congregation. It’s just pure, well, it’s just asinine.
00:14:10 ►
And we’ve had a minister to do it.
00:14:13 ►
Now, whenever ministers are inclined to preach to their congregations,
00:14:19 ►
well, we apply a lot of cold water and spend a lot of time, you know,
00:14:24 ►
getting them to understand that although he now feels great
00:14:27 ►
and has had this marvelous awakening,
00:14:29 ►
and some of the things he’s been talking about are really true,
00:14:33 ►
his congregation may not be so convinced,
00:14:35 ►
and they may need to be shown this a lot more slowly and delicately.
00:14:50 ►
So, of course, all I’m saying is really to kind of assess where we are at this.
00:14:52 ►
I think we’ve learned a great deal about this.
00:15:04 ►
I think, in fact, our focus here, one of the focuses that’s made us successful is the fact that we’ve had this basic attitude that the experience per se doesn’t mean anything. It’s what are you going to do with
00:15:06 ►
it? And getting more and more understanding of what the person is doing and his relationships
00:15:12 ►
and how he’s utilizing the information that he’s obtained. So we’re gradually learning. I think in
00:15:20 ►
the last two or three years, we’ve learned a great deal about this. On the other hand, as you saw yesterday, we still have a great deal to learn.
00:15:29 ►
But I would say this. The more mature people, you really need to do less in helping them integrate the experience than with some of the disturbed ones or with those who are in difficult environmental situations.
00:16:04 ►
if the family is opposed or there’s some family problem and the environment that they have to deal with is tough,
00:16:07 ►
they need support, they need to be helped to understand.
00:16:12 ►
But the more mature ones seem to become sort of self-actualizing
00:16:17 ►
and self-generating and pretty much take care of themselves.
00:16:20 ►
And those who’ve had good experiences, we’ve seen from our crowd, I think very little,
00:16:26 ►
very, very few people get off the beam the way I would consider Lurie and Alpert are
00:16:31 ►
off the beam, for example.
00:16:33 ►
What’s your feeling about this, Bill?
00:16:36 ►
I think that’s right.
00:16:38 ►
And that’s why I think you encounter this enthusiasm in us is that we feel that somehow, as I say, I’m not sure what we’re doing, but we have a confidence that these people are contacting something that is a source of wisdom and understanding for them that seems to allow them to become more individualistic, more realistic, and to actually function more
00:17:06 ►
satisfactorily on their own and to need less help. And the less pathology is present, the more this
00:17:13 ►
seems to be true. Oh, I think this is certainly true. But I think that never in spite of that,
00:17:18 ►
if you wish to get communication between these people who have less pathology,
00:17:25 ►
then it is still extremely important to realize
00:17:28 ►
that they are starting from very different positions.
00:17:32 ►
Now you bring up a very significant point,
00:17:35 ►
because our approach up to now has been to sort of let people become exposed,
00:17:42 ►
gather information which is very beneficial and rewarding to them individually,
00:17:47 ►
and do with it as they please.
00:17:49 ►
But we’ve made no attempt, or very little attempt, except among ourselves,
00:17:54 ►
to try to gather this information and examine it and explore it
00:18:01 ►
and try and develop some kind of comprehensive or integrated view.
00:18:06 ►
This we’ve really done very little about.
00:18:10 ►
Because, you see, to make a group who can really use it,
00:18:15 ►
remember what I have in mind is this,
00:18:17 ►
is that you would start not, or you might start initially,
00:18:22 ►
by simply getting the person used to the substances.
00:18:25 ►
This is quite important so that they discover that you can, as it were,
00:18:30 ►
be shot up into the stratosphere and that from that particular position
00:18:35 ►
there are many expected or unexpected differences,
00:18:41 ►
which have been now recorded in great detail.
00:18:42 ►
or unexpected differences, which have been now recorded in great detail.
00:18:44 ►
However,
00:18:45 ►
from the point of view of
00:18:47 ►
usefulness
00:18:51 ►
or demonstrable usefulness, there are several
00:18:54 ►
things that might happen. You might, for instance,
00:18:56 ►
get, say, a hundred thousand
00:18:58 ►
people, all of whom shot up
00:19:00 ►
in this direction and start a new religion
00:19:02 ►
on the basis of this. Well,
00:19:04 ►
our experience with
00:19:05 ►
religion so far has been that uh the the most likely effect would be that an elite would then
00:19:11 ►
be formed who would then start off on the on the same old game and we’d end up by a kind of
00:19:16 ►
competition to discover who’d seen god most closely and this might end up with even worse
00:19:22 ►
religion than the previous ones in which case in most of which most of the people were really least aware that they hadn’t seen much, which was perhaps odd.
00:19:31 ►
No, my experience with LSD is that if you keep using it and there’s any degree of honesty, this gets very uncomfortable when you try to get structures like that going, because you become very aware of what you’re doing.
00:19:47 ►
Sometimes it hits very painfully.
00:19:49 ►
Well, indeed, yes, but nevertheless,
00:19:51 ►
with 100,000 people or very large numbers of people,
00:19:55 ►
this would tend on the whole to be got down
00:19:59 ►
into some kind of ritual, which all would accept,
00:20:02 ►
and very soon some rules and regulations would grow up and I think it would fairly
00:20:06 ►
soon become an orthodoxy stance over
00:20:08 ►
Timothy actually. Yes, we don’t have any
00:20:10 ►
indication that Leary and Alpert feel
00:20:11 ►
uncomfortable in their operations
00:20:14 ►
under LSD. Well no, I was aware
00:20:16 ►
of that. They don’t, I’m sure.
00:20:17 ►
They don’t. It is possible
00:20:19 ►
to focus in such a way that you don’t see these
00:20:22 ►
things. That’s why I said with a degree
00:20:24 ►
of honesty, but maybe the honest may be…
00:20:26 ►
I don’t think it’s their honesty that’s at fault.
00:20:30 ►
It’s perceptual taste.
00:20:33 ►
And setting oneself up as a near-shamer mystic religion
00:20:37 ►
in the United States at this time
00:20:40 ►
as a tactic is a matter of taste,
00:20:46 ►
as to whether you think this is the way to do it at this time and this place.
00:20:51 ►
So here then you see that this,
00:20:54 ►
but when you get down to manifesting
00:20:59 ►
the values of these things in everyday life,
00:21:05 ►
it is much, much tougher.
00:21:08 ►
I mean, it’s quite easy to fly up in an aeroplane over the Rockies
00:21:11 ►
and see the interesting configuration in the land.
00:21:15 ►
Walking across them is rather tough.
00:21:18 ►
And yet, the knowledge of their general configuration
00:21:21 ►
is very useful to the walker
00:21:23 ►
and may make him walk more sensibly and carefully and very useful to the walker, and they make him
00:21:25 ►
walk more sensibly and carefully, and pay attention to the terrain.
00:21:29 ►
So here then, when you get down to the techniques of walking in this case, and particularly
00:21:36 ►
with a small group of people each who have different things to do in it, this in a way
00:21:44 ►
is much more difficult
00:21:45 ►
you have to know the length of each person’s legs
00:21:48 ►
and how long they can walk each day
00:21:50 ►
and how they feel the changes in the barometer
00:21:55 ►
and whether they can swim
00:21:57 ►
and all these kinds of things are necessary to know
00:21:59 ►
now the great difficulty about having it flown over the rock
00:22:03 ►
is that unless you take this into account you’ll say, that’s the path and that’s the way we go.
00:22:09 ►
It isn’t exactly that way at all.
00:22:11 ►
When you’re on the ground, it’s quite different.
00:22:15 ►
And on the ground, quarrels may develop in the journey because although all may agree from 20,000 foot when they’re sitting there, it were taking cocktails on the journey when they
00:22:25 ►
actually allow them to fall over the edge of the precipice the degree of agreement may get rather
00:22:30 ►
less who should fall first you know and and in fact these sort of things actually happen and
00:22:37 ►
therefore if you suppose that each person from his view over the Rockies, which will have a lot in common,
00:22:48 ►
is going to experience the journey on the earth,
00:22:49 ►
as it were,
00:22:51 ►
on just walking through them the same way,
00:22:55 ►
you have a very good reason to think they won’t.
00:22:58 ►
The geologist will see it in one term and he will wish to be frigging around
00:23:01 ►
picking up fossils and things like this.
00:23:03 ►
The botanist would see it in another.
00:23:04 ►
The person who just liked walking would see it in another.
00:23:07 ►
The person who just liked walking would see it in another.
00:23:09 ►
The mountain climber in another.
00:23:12 ►
The mountain climber might endanger everyone’s life simply because he likes going up a funnel
00:23:16 ►
and finds this good sport.
00:23:20 ►
So this knowledge at this level is of absolutely vital importance.
00:23:27 ►
It’s of much more importance, actually, than it is at that level,
00:23:31 ►
which would paradoxically not necessarily seem to be so.
00:23:35 ►
And not only that, the effect of the knowledge got from this level.
00:23:41 ►
On this level is going to be much, much less
00:23:45 ►
the
00:23:46 ►
the poorer
00:23:48 ►
the communication at this level
00:23:51 ►
and not
00:23:53 ►
only that, the communication at this
00:23:55 ►
level can easily
00:23:57 ►
be
00:23:58 ►
dehanced rather than
00:24:00 ►
enhanced by
00:24:02 ►
this global view which people
00:24:04 ►
share because after a time people get very irritated with each other, they say after all rather than enhanced by this global view which people share,
00:24:05 ►
because after a time people get very irritated with each other.
00:24:07 ►
They say, after all, if he knows what I know,
00:24:11 ►
why doesn’t he do what I’d like him to do?
00:24:14 ►
And this leads to, if not extreme irritation,
00:24:21 ►
it leads to some irritation,
00:24:30 ►
extreme irritation, it leads to some irritation, and it prevents the use of these substances in a way which will in fact not simply allow us to become aware of what any decent mystic
00:24:40 ►
or saint has been aware of for a long, long time, but to become aware of how to produce a rise in the social level of communication,
00:24:50 ►
which will indeed transform the species from a biological animal
00:24:56 ►
to a communicating animal, which is what Teilhard had in view.
00:25:01 ►
The instrument I wrote some time back,
00:25:04 ►
these things are the
00:25:05 ►
mind craft of the noosphere.
00:25:08 ►
But the noosphere,
00:25:10 ►
the sphere of
00:25:11 ►
feeling and meaning
00:25:13 ►
and thinking as
00:25:15 ►
applied to action, this has to be created
00:25:17 ►
in the same way that
00:25:19 ►
the world in which we live was in one
00:25:21 ►
way created by
00:25:23 ►
geographers, explorers and others.
00:25:26 ►
It is not
00:25:27 ►
for free and it is
00:25:30 ►
not to be
00:25:31 ►
created by mugging up
00:25:33 ►
bits of the Book of the Dead and
00:25:35 ►
saying how smart chaps were.
00:25:37 ►
This is a fraud.
00:25:39 ►
It is not to be
00:25:41 ►
created by
00:25:43 ►
saying, oh well, this poor kid from Harvard just did himself in because he really wanted to go somewhere else.
00:25:51 ►
Well, obviously, well, this is perfectly clear.
00:25:55 ►
And so obviously the way to do this is to see if a few of us, as are gathered here, can do this ourselves.
00:26:03 ►
Then if we can do this ourselves, if we can do this ourselves then we should
00:26:05 ►
be able to extend this on to others you know as we do it ourselves the people involved have got to
00:26:12 ►
have a growing system of rules so that we can know which ones seem to work and we can know the range
00:26:18 ►
of the uh experiences involved you’ve seen setting up groups this sort, you’ve got to know how much trust
00:26:26 ►
you’ve got to have at the beginning
00:26:27 ►
for how much move.
00:26:30 ►
You see, I’ve got to know,
00:26:32 ►
and Al has to know,
00:26:34 ►
and I have to know you
00:26:35 ►
and to know that I can trust you
00:26:37 ►
before I’m likely to give
00:26:39 ►
even a jocular discussion,
00:26:43 ►
which wasn’t jocular at all,
00:26:45 ►
of one of the ways of dealing with a particular kind of problem
00:26:48 ►
that has arisen in our work,
00:26:50 ►
and that is by removing a particular person.
00:26:55 ►
And unless you feel and understand
00:26:59 ►
the differences of Al and my viewpoints on this,
00:27:07 ►
and yet the possible synthesis,
00:27:09 ►
and why that would be possible,
00:27:12 ►
then the group will not communicate,
00:27:15 ►
for the very good reason that you will think this is a joke.
00:27:18 ►
Now, if this is not a joke…
00:27:22 ►
It’s a pretty grim joke, I’m afraid.
00:27:20 ►
a joke it’s a pretty grim joke
00:27:23 ►
well it is a kind of
00:27:25 ►
people have had
00:27:27 ►
men murdered in jest before now
00:27:30 ►
and it is a kind
00:27:32 ►
of joke the book of your friend
00:27:33 ►
Frederick Hohenstaufen up there
00:27:35 ►
he did this quite often
00:27:36 ►
you know his book on hockey
00:27:38 ►
I mean Frederick Hohenstaufen
00:27:41 ►
you’ve seen with his cold blue eyes
00:27:43 ►
have you
00:27:43 ►
in your book in the room where I was sleeping I mean, Frederick Hohenstaufen, you’ve seen with his cold blue eyes, have you?
00:27:49 ►
In your book, I’ll show you, in the room where I was sleeping.
00:27:53 ►
Well, Frederick Hohenstaufen quite regularly did this.
00:27:58 ►
He did an experiment by which babies were brought up who were not mothered at all,
00:28:00 ►
and all of them died.
00:28:09 ►
He had two men threatened with execution in order to see what their bowel movements would be like, and he really was a truly scientific man in many ways ahead
00:28:13 ►
of his time. But the important point about it is that these things actually happen, and
00:28:20 ►
they actually happen now as at any other time. And when they happen, the kind of transaction that occurs between Al and me develops.
00:28:29 ►
Because people like Al and me are certain types of creatures who are around,
00:28:34 ►
who see the world differently.
00:28:36 ►
But when we agree on certain things, we produce a kind of synthesis in action.
00:28:42 ►
And it’s terribly important to understand, for the group
00:28:46 ►
to understand, when you get a larger group,
00:28:47 ►
a synthesis of four people, that this
00:28:50 ►
is the kind of thing that we’re looking for.
00:28:52 ►
This is the kind of thing where you
00:28:53 ►
quadruplicate the effectiveness
00:28:56 ►
of the people, but you have also
00:28:58 ►
got to quadruplicate
00:29:00 ►
their ethical nicety.
00:29:02 ►
Because if you don’t,
00:29:04 ►
you’re going to produce
00:29:05 ►
an abomination
00:29:06 ►
this thing is like
00:29:09 ►
atom fusion
00:29:13 ►
if you hold the thing right
00:29:14 ►
it will be extremely beneficial
00:29:16 ►
if you hold it wrong
00:29:18 ►
it’ll be hell
00:29:20 ►
so you don’t try these
00:29:24 ►
experiments until you know them very well and as Al it’ll be hell. So you don’t try these experiments
00:29:25 ►
until you know them very well.
00:29:28 ►
And as Al said,
00:29:30 ►
the first two that we did
00:29:32 ►
shook us up both greatly
00:29:34 ►
because they required a great deal of digestion.
00:29:38 ►
You see, Al’s formulation of this,
00:29:41 ►
which is a very good one for some purposes,
00:29:44 ►
has been very useful to many
00:29:45 ►
people, and very useful particularly to alcoholics and to a number of neurotic people, is the
00:29:51 ►
formulation is that we are really all part of a whole, and therefore the behavior that you
00:29:59 ►
undertake now can be reorganized in terms of the larger whole. It’s an extremely good formulation
00:30:06 ►
in those terms, and it’s been empirically very useful. Now, what I’m saying is, however,
00:30:12 ►
that for what we are going to have to try and do to produce this into a social instrument,
00:30:18 ►
we cannot use that same formulation all the time.
00:30:26 ►
same formulation all the time. Well one formulation which we’ve had just a bare bit of experience with is you take a group of people and as you say you don’t
00:30:34 ►
know how far you can go you don’t know you have to establish the level of trust
00:30:38 ►
and so on now one of the things you do is to start off with very low dosage
00:30:43 ►
which is what we did, where
00:30:45 ►
not enough, where anybody is really threatened, and yet it does allow you to communicate quite
00:30:52 ►
a bit on certain levels and get to know each other, and you gradually build up.
00:30:57 ►
Now, we experimented with a group, and actually it was a very large group, and turned out
00:31:01 ►
to be completely unwieldy, and we abandoned the thing, and yet we learned a great deal from it.
00:31:06 ►
But we did prove that these experiences for the group with very low doses were extremely integrative.
00:31:15 ►
We did establish communication, and in some individuals produced significant growth.
00:31:21 ►
We did it again with more dosage, and it was a continuously improving thing. Now, if we
00:31:28 ►
continued, what we would do, we got to know the people well enough and know ourselves well enough
00:31:35 ►
that if we were to continue that same experiment, we would choose out of this group maybe four or
00:31:41 ►
five individuals who now we know we could probably take a hundred gamma
00:31:46 ►
together and go further.
00:31:48 ►
So that is
00:31:50 ►
one of the approaches to the thing.
00:31:52 ►
Now you’re talking about
00:31:53 ►
procedural approaches
00:31:55 ►
and conceptual
00:31:58 ►
formulations sort of side by side
00:32:00 ►
but somewhat different.
00:32:02 ►
Well, I thought that
00:32:02 ►
it was really the same thing,
00:32:05 ►
because this is really, it seemed to me,
00:32:07 ►
what Humphrey’s talking about is how do you establish the rules,
00:32:11 ►
how do you discover the bond of trust,
00:32:14 ►
which will allow you to know how far you can go.
00:32:19 ►
Now, see, the thing that impressed me tremendously about Humphrey yesterday,
00:32:23 ►
he was very keenly perceptive of just how far he
00:32:26 ►
could go in any situation. And I think each of us have learned something about this in our
00:32:33 ►
individual work with patients. After your intuitive knowledge grows, as you learn more of yourself and
00:32:40 ►
learn more of other people’s worlds, you get a kind of a sense of what you can confront a person with
00:32:46 ►
and what you can’t.
00:32:47 ►
But these are the kinds of things
00:32:49 ►
that in a group you need to learn of each other
00:32:52 ►
so that the more you can accept each other,
00:32:57 ►
then the more unified the thing becomes
00:33:00 ►
and the more you can work as a whole.
00:33:02 ►
But you see, at the same time,
00:33:04 ►
as you do that, the group also has to explore the bits that
00:33:10 ►
cannot be shared or cannot at the moment be shared.
00:33:14 ►
So you get a wider, whereas you also get a sort of deeper understanding, you also get
00:33:19 ►
a wider understanding.
00:33:21 ►
Because the extent to which people actually do overlap
00:33:26 ►
is very little known
00:33:28 ►
and we know that
00:33:30 ►
there are people who must overlap
00:33:32 ►
to a great extent these identical
00:33:34 ►
twins at one end
00:33:35 ►
and we know there are people who are
00:33:38 ►
temperamentally, physically
00:33:40 ►
and culturally extremely far apart
00:33:42 ►
and maybe they only
00:33:44 ►
overlap a tiny bit like this.
00:33:47 ►
And therefore, you want to know
00:33:48 ►
some of the things to look out for,
00:33:50 ►
because it would seem at least wise
00:33:52 ►
to start with groups
00:33:55 ►
which will be relatively easy to come with.
00:33:58 ►
Because I certainly found with my great,
00:34:02 ►
when I made this considerable blunder,
00:34:05 ►
from which I learned a lot,
00:34:07 ►
that here I thought it would be an extremely good idea
00:34:11 ►
to have an extremely, a group loaded
00:34:14 ►
with extremely intelligent people
00:34:16 ►
with extremely intelligent backgrounds.
00:34:19 ►
But in fact, this was far from being a good idea at that time
00:34:22 ►
because this is like starting off
00:34:26 ►
putting
00:34:28 ►
in your old
00:34:29 ►
aeroplane or old kite a
00:34:31 ►
tremendously powerful engine
00:34:33 ►
so
00:34:35 ►
it went woomph
00:34:37 ►
and then luckily the
00:34:39 ►
strings that were holding it
00:34:41 ►
just held but it was a very
00:34:43 ►
shaky do
00:34:44 ►
and you see the thing is this what Al actually that the strings that were holding it just held. But it was a very shaky do.
00:34:46 ►
And you see, the thing is,
00:34:49 ►
it’s what Al actually set up in this thing.
00:34:52 ►
He picked people somewhere out of the back of his thick old head.
00:34:54 ►
He picked people he reckoned no great harm would come.
00:34:59 ►
Now, these are the sort of things
00:35:00 ►
that actually Al does intuitively.
00:35:02 ►
I don’t think he actually really in a sense
00:35:05 ►
thinks these things out
00:35:07 ►
as concepts. He feels
00:35:10 ►
around and
00:35:11 ►
muddles about and then he does something
00:35:13 ►
this way. You see Al
00:35:15 ►
one of the very interesting things is
00:35:17 ►
for about four or five
00:35:20 ►
years Al was very unwilling
00:35:21 ►
to take LSD
00:35:23 ►
to get there again.
00:35:25 ►
This is deeply interesting. And this was at times very unwilling to take LSD to get there again, weren’t you?
00:35:26 ►
This is deeply interesting.
00:35:29 ►
And this was at times very annoying to me because I wanted to press on with this thing.
00:35:32 ►
But as far as I can make out, he was
00:35:33 ►
digesting
00:35:34 ►
certain things that he didn’t
00:35:37 ►
like. What were they, Al?
00:35:40 ►
You mean…
00:35:41 ►
Well, one of the things is you’re a secret man
00:35:43 ►
and you really don’t like the idea that someone might gain access.
00:35:48 ►
Well, no.
00:35:49 ►
I think, Dr. Humphrey, I think that my emotions probably control me a great deal more
00:36:00 ►
than they do most people.
00:36:02 ►
In other words, while I probably negate the feeling part of it,
00:36:08 ►
but nevertheless,
00:36:09 ►
I’m operated by these emotions.
00:36:12 ►
Now, I found yesterday with great ease
00:36:15 ►
that if you’d have asked me prior to yesterday,
00:36:19 ►
why did you behave as you did with Dr. Hoffer
00:36:23 ►
when he was obviously your good friend.
00:36:27 ►
I would
00:36:27 ►
say, well, I had a few drinks with
00:36:29 ►
Duncan. I was told I’m not
00:36:31 ►
telling more than what
00:36:33 ►
I did tell him.
00:36:35 ►
And when he seemed unable to accept
00:36:37 ►
them, I then thought
00:36:39 ►
that this proved what I’d been said, that he
00:36:41 ►
really was only a selfish person and
00:36:43 ►
only himself, and that he was rapidly slipping down the political scale anyway.
00:36:50 ►
And wasn’t really getting so far.
00:36:56 ►
And I would have had a whole bunch of rationalizations on the thing.
00:36:59 ►
As a matter of fact, I found yesterday under examination the amount of alcohol I had.
00:37:06 ►
Since Byron knew how much I’d had to drink, I wouldn’t say that it exceeded somewhere two or three drinks, maybe four drinks.
00:37:16 ►
Yeah, but alcohol affects you very differently at different times according to how you use it.
00:37:20 ►
Sometimes you get very sloppy with only two or three drinks, and sometimes you’re sharp as a tack
00:37:26 ►
after half a dozen.
00:37:27 ►
And this was one time when you were kind of sloppy.
00:37:30 ►
I was looking for an excuse, because I was still
00:37:31 ►
I was still
00:37:33 ►
I didn’t realize I was doing
00:37:36 ►
this, but emotionally I felt
00:37:37 ►
here is a person
00:37:39 ►
whom I have
00:37:41 ►
trusted wholly, and who has trusted me wholly,
00:37:44 ►
and yet, once more, out goes a letter
00:37:47 ►
criticizing a system that I had of raising money,
00:37:52 ►
which he himself and Mrs. Garrett certainly instituted,
00:37:56 ►
when Bluett and I was presidents one time.
00:37:59 ►
Yet here he is saying, well, I wouldn’t touch any money from anyone
00:38:02 ►
for a certain length of, for at least a month.
00:38:06 ►
Well, I know that this has not been appeared to.
00:38:08 ►
So I felt actually aggravated by this.
00:38:15 ►
And I used the alcohol and I used the fact that I had been told that he would probably be quite insensitive to the suggestions so that I made everything possible for him to be in sense of what
00:38:30 ►
he should have if I’d have used another method such as Myron would have used or
00:38:34 ►
you would have used he probably might not have acted that way at all
00:38:38 ►
but since since he is acting compounded in my field mm- feelings, I only acted the worst.
00:38:46 ►
Well, I was not aware
00:38:47 ►
that this was my motivation until yesterday.
00:38:50 ►
Now, this is a hard thing
00:38:51 ►
to believe
00:38:52 ►
that you will act
00:38:55 ►
in this manner.
00:38:56 ►
Well,
00:38:57 ►
now,
00:39:01 ►
towards you,
00:39:03 ►
as I said yesterday,
00:39:04 ►
long after my reluctance, I said, as I said yesterday, we had said long after, I was reluctant.
00:39:07 ►
I said, well, let’s take this and let’s take that.
00:39:09 ►
It wasn’t concealing anything from you, because I had nothing to conceal from you,
00:39:13 ►
but that I felt annoyed at the fact that many things that we’d shared together,
00:39:20 ►
that you could write this stupid old idiot down here
00:39:25 ►
with no real qualifications of any kind,
00:39:28 ►
except this silly paper that he had,
00:39:32 ►
anything at all without asking me about it.
00:39:35 ►
Well, I could tell myself I’d forgotten it.
00:39:38 ►
I knew I was not angry with you because I couldn’t be angry with you.
00:39:43 ►
But underneath, I must have been put out
00:39:45 ►
over the situation so being
00:39:47 ►
put out I didn’t want to
00:39:50 ►
spoil our relationship by having an
00:39:51 ►
LSD session and allowing
00:39:53 ►
these emotions to come to the top and you
00:39:56 ►
to see them because I was trying
00:39:58 ►
to forget them. But no but that
00:40:00 ►
would have been all for the better
00:40:01 ►
but I didn’t see it that way. Yes but I mean
00:40:03 ►
in fact it would have been all for the better. But I didn’t see it that way. Yes, but in fact, it would have been all for the better
00:40:05 ►
because we would then have been able to have got into this question
00:40:09 ►
as to the first was that we both communicated badly on this.
00:40:13 ►
And the other thing is that what I let Sue see,
00:40:17 ►
as I saw, I thought, here’s O’Leary.
00:40:19 ►
He’s blundering about in this jungle among these fellows.
00:40:23 ►
If I don’t move quickly
00:40:25 ►
they’ll fix him
00:40:26 ►
which is the least likely thing
00:40:29 ►
for them to do harm and the least
00:40:31 ►
likely thing was to suggest
00:40:33 ►
as I saw it and I may be quite that this was
00:40:35 ►
an innocent error by someone
00:40:38 ►
who was not knowledgeable about
00:40:39 ►
academic ways
00:40:40 ►
and that this was
00:40:44 ►
a thing who had done great good to the cause, and they
00:40:48 ►
were very well advised to take the good and to allow the error.
00:40:52 ►
And as I pointed out in the letter, that this, to my knowledge, was perfectly legal, so in
00:40:57 ►
actual fact, the error was of a special kind inside a university, that outside the university
00:41:05 ►
they’d have to swallow it,
00:41:06 ►
whether they liked it or not.
00:41:08 ►
And there’s nothing they could do about it.
00:41:10 ►
The danger, of course, of this position
00:41:11 ►
is the very fact that they can’t do anything about it
00:41:14 ►
would make them more annoyed.
00:41:16 ►
And the only way around this,
00:41:18 ►
as I saw it,
00:41:19 ►
and it obviously didn’t work,
00:41:20 ►
but the only way around it
00:41:22 ►
was to rather draw the arrow,
00:41:23 ►
to some extent, at any rate, by saying, well, of course, I don’t believe that this is genuine in your terms,
00:41:31 ►
but I think this is a genuine person. Now, unfortunately, of course, this doesn’t
00:41:35 ►
necessarily communicate that, and nor does a person necessarily use this well. But again,
00:41:41 ►
when you’re, as it were, shooting from the hip and you don’t know how long there is, and I thought this was quite urgent, I thought I better move quick.
00:41:51 ►
I have long since, Dr. Humphrey, understood this completely. system existed within these communities that certainly render a great deal of good to
00:42:08 ►
mankind in general. Without education, we wouldn’t have anything.
00:42:12 ►
And it was impossible at that time for me to differentiate between men like
00:42:16 ►
Dr. Harmon and
00:42:20 ►
Dr. Blewett and other people who I’d met that were alright.
00:42:24 ►
And I use the old comparison of the puppy that played in the backyard with garter snakes.
00:42:29 ►
One day he picked up a rattlesnake.
00:42:31 ►
Well, it wasn’t a snake.
00:42:32 ►
It was not always a snake.
00:42:34 ►
And this was not the same kind of a snake.
00:42:36 ►
Well, all that I did was to misunderstand the thing.
00:42:42 ►
And it was a misunderstanding.
00:42:43 ►
And it was an honest misunderstanding.
00:42:44 ►
And your understanding was an honest misunderstanding. But that didn’t take away from the fact. And it was a misunderstanding, and it was an honest misunderstanding, and your understanding
00:42:46 ►
was an honest misunderstanding.
00:42:47 ►
But that didn’t take away from the fact
00:42:49 ►
that I felt this way.
00:42:52 ►
And when Rita said,
00:42:53 ►
Humphrey has long since
00:42:56 ►
forgotten it, but you have not
00:42:58 ►
forgotten it, because I’ve known you
00:42:59 ►
for a long time.
00:43:02 ►
And so I waited
00:43:04 ►
until I could finally process and digest it. And so I waited until I could finally,
00:43:05 ►
Brock says, digest it.
00:43:07 ►
That’s true.
00:43:07 ►
And it’s true meaning.
00:43:09 ►
Then when I did, it all passed away.
00:43:11 ►
But until you do Brock admire it,
00:43:13 ►
it never passes away.
00:43:14 ►
No, but Humphrey’s raised a very good point, Al.
00:43:17 ►
And it’s a therapeutic fact
00:43:20 ►
that when you most need help
00:43:22 ►
is when you least want it.
00:43:24 ►
And when you’re hurting is when you like to go off by yourself
00:43:27 ►
and straighten these things out.
00:43:30 ►
And this is really a measure of the bond of trust that exists in the group.
00:43:34 ►
And if there is real trust, then when you’re hurting or at odds
00:43:38 ►
or disgusted or whatever, that’s the time you come to the group
00:43:43 ►
and really confront these things and iron them out.
00:43:47 ►
And if we have a real bond of trust and acceptance,
00:43:51 ►
it will do, as Humphrey says, it will resolve itself quickly.
00:43:54 ►
Whereas by yourself, you can carry these things for a long time,
00:43:57 ►
and it’s true you will iron it out.
00:43:59 ►
You will, and I will, because I’m very much like this.
00:44:02 ►
I like, you know, very often my solution is to go for a walk in the hills and think about these things.
00:44:10 ►
And I usually get the thing pretty well factored out.
00:44:12 ►
But it might be a hell of a lot quicker to go right to the person involved.
00:44:18 ►
Well, it is quicker and better.
00:44:19 ►
And I’ve learned this too.
00:44:21 ►
If you can go right to the person involved and straighten the thing out.
00:44:24 ►
Well, of course,
00:44:26 ►
again, I would remind you of
00:44:27 ►
what Dr. Humphrey
00:44:30 ►
said, we are not all alike.
00:44:32 ►
Your condition,
00:44:33 ►
Pavlovian-wise, is altogether different than
00:44:36 ►
mine. You’ve always had
00:44:37 ►
someone to turn to. Humphrey’s
00:44:40 ►
always, he was raised where
00:44:42 ►
he had someone to turn to.
00:44:43 ►
Now, this is not an apology for anything because I have no, nothing to apologize
00:44:47 ►
for. I left home at 13 years old
00:44:50 ►
because I was dissatisfied with the situation. I never turned
00:44:55 ►
to home for any solution of any problem.
00:45:01 ►
Since I’m quite conscious, if you turn to God
00:45:04 ►
as it’s constituted by the religious structures for assistance,
00:45:08 ►
you may be, as old Gerald says, quote him of some things you do find that he says are right,
00:45:14 ►
you may be talking to yourself, you may be talking to the devil, and you might be talking to God.
00:45:18 ►
Not being able to differentiate there, you can’t turn there for help very, that is, I can’t very well.
00:45:26 ►
Now, same as I told Charlie sitting here.
00:45:30 ►
He was a great psychiatrist.
00:45:32 ►
He was a wise man.
00:45:33 ►
I only met Charlie twice since I’ve known him.
00:45:37 ►
He did little kindnesses that I really felt.
00:45:41 ►
Otherwise, I felt that he was far, far away.
00:45:46 ►
Well, now, when you take a person like this,
00:45:47 ►
and they know they have
00:45:49 ►
certain friends, they know
00:45:51 ►
they can do certain things,
00:45:53 ►
and this is a production of
00:45:56 ►
a degree of uncomfortableness
00:45:58 ►
that the person who’s caused you
00:46:00 ►
trouble can only abide
00:46:02 ►
with so long, because you keep increasing
00:46:03 ►
the pressure until they can’t stand it any longer.
00:46:06 ►
Then it becomes very hard to differentiate, and you must remember when you start turning
00:46:11 ►
these things on, because you have nothing else.
00:46:14 ►
This is the only training you have.
00:46:16 ►
A cat that walks through the jungle, you mustn’t expect it to bite you and apologize.
00:46:21 ►
This is all it knows.
00:46:24 ►
And this is the life that I’ve seen.
00:46:27 ►
Live or die,
00:46:29 ►
be intelligent enough to get along.
00:46:33 ►
Don’t walk into places
00:46:35 ►
without knowing where you’re going.
00:46:38 ►
Now,
00:46:39 ►
when you startle a person like this,
00:46:42 ►
it’s not much different
00:46:43 ►
than stepping on a guy’s tail. He may bite
00:46:46 ►
you. He may not intend to
00:46:48 ►
bite you. He may not feel like biting you.
00:46:50 ►
But he may just bite you instinctively.
00:46:52 ►
Now, once you realize
00:46:53 ►
that a person operates like this,
00:46:56 ►
you have to be careful.
00:46:59 ►
Sometimes,
00:47:00 ►
I like to come to all of you and say,
00:47:01 ►
gosh, I heard like hell from and and.
00:47:03 ►
But I won’t do it.
00:47:08 ►
Because I’ve never had any place to turn.
00:47:11 ►
I take action instead.
00:47:13 ►
Albert, the virtue, you see, of this.
00:47:14 ►
This is sometimes not good.
00:47:23 ►
No, no, but the virtue to a group of people in doing this, not in that you’re extremely skillful in this type of action, but it enlarges each of their experiences. They become aware of
00:47:25 ►
a world which is shaped in different terms, with different rules from them, and they become
00:47:32 ►
able to understand the validity of this world. Now, the other thing is that you become aware
00:47:37 ►
of the fact that on this here and now plane, other people’s worlds will overlap with yours
00:47:44 ►
in some directions, which you may not expect’s worlds will overlap with yours in some directions
00:47:46 ►
which you may not expect, but may differ from yours in other sense.
00:47:49 ►
To take these things, your world and Rita’s differs in certain very important respects
00:47:54 ►
which are not at all beyond your capacity to find out, not very quickly either, I mean
00:48:00 ►
not very slowly you could find this out.
00:48:02 ►
You’re not in fact going to find this out in the stratosphere.
00:48:06 ►
You’re going to find it out here.
00:48:07 ►
Because when you’re up in the stratosphere, peering down,
00:48:10 ►
everything down here looks much the same.
00:48:14 ►
I don’t think that’s right, Humphrey.
00:48:17 ►
In a way, what you’re saying is true.
00:48:20 ►
But, friends, I was thinking about this just comparing yesterday
00:48:24 ►
with some previous experiences.
00:48:25 ►
Now, when you’re up in the stratosphere, you know, as we were talking about, you can become a rock and a tree.
00:48:34 ►
Well, I can’t say I’m very proficient at this.
00:48:36 ►
It’s happened on very, very rare occasions.
00:48:39 ►
And you can also become another person and see his world.
00:48:42 ►
And a lot of this is extraordinarily sharp and clear.
00:48:47 ►
And in some ways, I think that there have been experiences on the desert
00:48:51 ►
when I’ve done this far more effectively and deeply than I was able to do yesterday.
00:48:57 ►
But you’ve got to make jolly well sure that you do become their world
00:49:01 ►
and you have ways of actually knowing it,
00:49:03 ►
because then you may be a hell of a lot worse off.
00:49:06 ►
You may have actually picked their world
00:49:08 ►
but three. In other
00:49:10 ►
words, you may have got three
00:49:11 ►
whatever
00:49:14 ►
incarnation means, or
00:49:16 ►
somethings, beforehand.
00:49:18 ►
Therefore, all you may, as Al was
00:49:20 ►
saying yesterday, going through the records,
00:49:22 ►
when I deliberately slipped this
00:49:24 ►
thing a generation
00:49:26 ►
or two. I’ve got to put that down as a dirty
00:49:28 ►
track.
00:49:30 ►
That’s very true
00:49:32 ►
and that’s why after these
00:49:33 ►
experiences you have to come back and deal with
00:49:36 ►
the situation. But this is bloody important
00:49:38 ►
you see. Immediately Al
00:49:40 ►
goes through on
00:49:41 ►
the current records. He says it’s
00:49:44 ►
inconceivable to him that I might want
00:49:50 ►
to ship for the various purposes he thought about. But however, this also makes it absolutely
00:49:55 ►
impervious for him in a way to understand that we can both discuss matters which he
00:50:01 ►
may or may not do at times in a perfectly straightforward way and that i actually
00:50:08 ►
know what he’s talking about you see al feels with with a sort of academic person if i say well
00:50:14 ►
how interesting it is when i say read a spy story and you learn about it i’m not saying that what
00:50:20 ►
i’m saying is you learn the coordinates of a system into which you can pour the feeling that occurs in any administration.
00:50:30 ►
And then all you then put into the system is this.
00:50:33 ►
This system is not producing bicycles.
00:50:35 ►
It’s producing information from another country.
00:50:39 ►
Now, this to me is a relatively simple thing.
00:50:42 ►
I can’t get this down on paper necessarily.
00:50:44 ►
If I wanted to get it on paper, I’d write a relatively simple thing. I can’t get this down on paper necessarily. If I wanted to get it down on paper,
00:50:46 ►
I’d write a novel about it.
00:50:47 ►
I don’t like novel writing very
00:50:50 ►
much, or write a play.
00:50:52 ►
But the important thing is this
00:50:53 ►
to me is a system of coordinates
00:50:56 ►
of feeling which you would run together
00:50:58 ►
and into this only certain
00:50:59 ►
people could feel fit, you see.
00:51:02 ►
Now when
00:51:03 ►
until Al knows that I am discussing his world in
00:51:09 ►
a different language from an off-centre point of view from him, but from a point of view
00:51:14 ►
that would be perfectly understandable, suppose that I was running a secret service.
00:51:26 ►
It would be perfectly possible to do this. But I would not concern myself at all
00:51:30 ►
with the techniques of how one removed undesirable people.
00:51:33 ►
There would be specialists to do this.
00:51:36 ►
And I would clearly, in those circumstances,
00:51:39 ►
I would find this very distasteful
00:51:40 ►
because I would not be able, nor would I,
00:51:44 ►
concern myself with the misery and misfortune
00:51:47 ►
that the necessary actions would produce,
00:51:50 ►
any more than I would concern myself at the moment
00:51:52 ►
with the misery and misfortune which the ten-year delay in our work
00:51:57 ►
brought about through our struggle with NIH in Washington
00:52:00 ►
and through being unable to cope with a large and powerful power system there,
00:52:06 ►
has produced.
00:52:07 ►
It’s resulted in probably several million people being quite unnecessarily damaged.
00:52:12 ►
But if you were a more sensitive person,
00:52:17 ►
you would say, my God, all these people killed and go mad.
00:52:21 ►
You would write letters to the press or put up
00:52:25 ►
posters or have a crusade
00:52:28 ►
done. But the actual fact
00:52:30 ►
is none of these things will work.
00:52:32 ►
It would defeat the end.
00:52:34 ►
It would…
00:52:35 ►
The history of medicine
00:52:37 ►
is such, and we know
00:52:39 ►
perfectly well that
00:52:41 ►
people have tried this.
00:52:43 ►
Semmelweis devoted the end of his life, many years,
00:52:48 ►
to upbraiding the medical profession for murdering mothers,
00:52:51 ►
which they were doing.
00:52:52 ►
It had no effect, whatever.
00:52:54 ►
Therefore, knowing that those moves are shut,
00:52:59 ►
knowing that Fleming spent ten years
00:53:02 ►
writing excellent papers and publishing them,
00:53:08 ►
you know what has to be done.
00:53:10 ►
You have to get the relevant hard data,
00:53:13 ►
which has to be scraped up with every cent you can get home of,
00:53:18 ►
often in the face of an extremely sceptical public.
00:53:21 ►
Not public, actually, you’re rather well dispersed,
00:53:24 ►
but an extremely sceptical public, not public, actually, you’re rather well dispersed, but extremely sceptical scientific public
00:53:26 ►
who naturally every year
00:53:29 ►
that this particular enterprise survives
00:53:32 ►
are more irritated,
00:53:34 ►
and the more data comes out,
00:53:36 ►
are more irritated too,
00:53:38 ►
because people don’t like swallowing their words.
00:53:42 ►
The idea that scientists are immensely open-minded
00:53:45 ►
and take a
00:53:47 ►
you know, a rejoiced think
00:53:50 ►
that our views have been refuted
00:53:52 ►
is only held by those who don’t
00:53:54 ►
know scientists, the actual fact
00:53:56 ►
is as Max Planck said when he was
00:53:58 ►
congratulated, he said
00:54:00 ►
someone said to him, think Dr. Planck
00:54:02 ►
that you have convinced the scientific
00:54:04 ►
world of your views, and he said oh, he said, someone said to him, think, Dr. Planck, that you have convinced the scientific world of your views.
00:54:06 ►
And he said, oh, he said, I think that I have survived those who disagreed with me.
00:54:12 ►
And didn’t he also say that for a new scientific idea to be born, you wait until the present generation dies off and the new one comes along. So therefore, you don’t allow
00:54:28 ►
your feelings about the disastrous consequences
00:54:32 ►
of human behavior
00:54:35 ►
to interfere with your estimation
00:54:38 ►
of the situation.
00:54:40 ►
Now I think certainly,
00:54:42 ►
I would think up to perhaps a year ago,
00:54:44 ►
I think that you felt
00:54:46 ►
this was so. Isn’t it
00:54:48 ►
so? That they would be
00:54:49 ►
glad to receive this, yes. No, no, but
00:54:51 ►
no, no, no, but I mean, you thought that
00:54:53 ►
I would allow my
00:54:55 ►
feelings to interfere
00:54:57 ►
with my assessment of what
00:54:59 ►
actually was.
00:55:03 ►
No, I always thought you were exceedingly honest
00:55:06 ►
about that. The only thing, I mean,
00:55:07 ►
things like yesterday
00:55:09 ►
sometimes make me wonder what
00:55:11 ►
classification in this computer I should
00:55:13 ►
put. When you hide
00:55:15 ►
something from me and you’re looking and you
00:55:18 ►
plant it on the end of my nose, we’re going to
00:55:19 ►
hide something from Al. Plant it on the end of his nose
00:55:22 ►
and he’ll never find it.
00:55:23 ►
And run me to a point of distraction. And all the time you’re looking at the thing you plant on the end of the stove and he’ll never find it. And run me to a point of distraction.
00:55:26 ►
And all the time you’re looking at this thing
00:55:28 ►
you plant it on the end of my nose.
00:55:30 ►
I don’t know whether this is sadistic,
00:55:32 ►
amusing to you,
00:55:34 ►
professional or what.
00:55:35 ►
It’s good for you.
00:55:37 ►
I don’t know where to put it.
00:55:38 ►
I can say this, watching Humphrey, I think he’s having a hell of a lot of fun
00:55:42 ►
doing it.
00:55:42 ►
I think it’s a sadistic proposition.
00:55:47 ►
Yeah, it’s
00:55:48 ►
sport with you. It would hurt
00:55:49 ►
someone else. You’re quite tough
00:55:52 ►
enough to take rough games.
00:55:54 ►
But if it were someone else,
00:55:56 ►
it would be bloody brutal. You couldn’t have convinced
00:55:58 ►
me any other way in the world because you
00:55:59 ►
put anything anywhere, planted it any place, and I would
00:56:01 ►
find it. That’s right. But you had it on the end of my nose.
00:56:04 ►
That probably goes through my life. I’ve been accused of this. I’ll find it. That’s right. But you had it on the end of my nose, that probably goes through my life.
00:56:05 ►
I’ve been accused of this, myron, sedentary,
00:56:07 ►
that’s no harm, a lot of it.
00:56:10 ►
So,
00:56:10 ►
it was an excellent lesson.
00:56:13 ►
But you see, you can…
00:56:14 ►
But from now on, I’ll always
00:56:15 ►
push the thing away.
00:56:20 ►
But,
00:56:20 ►
you see, you can’t communicate
00:56:23 ►
with a person, except in the specialized language which they use.
00:56:30 ►
And therefore, this is, of course,
00:56:32 ►
what the Zen people was writing about.
00:56:34 ►
The only thing is their specialized language
00:56:36 ►
gets so ritualized,
00:56:38 ►
and you’ve spent a hell of a time learning it,
00:56:40 ►
and it’s so ungeneralizable
00:56:41 ►
that you don’t get any distance with it.
00:56:45 ►
But you’ve got to do this.
00:56:48 ►
And in a group, you really have to know, preferably in actually specific situations.
00:56:54 ►
You see, the thing about role-playing, the mistake about it is
00:56:58 ►
that you don’t get the right quality of feeling, really.
00:57:04 ►
You get the right quality. Well, you can if you really get into it, can’t you?
00:57:08 ►
If you have the ability to really enter into the role. You know, you’re by far the best role you
00:57:17 ►
can play, because you’re most used to it and you do it best and you can evoke in that
00:57:25 ►
the quality of feeling
00:57:27 ►
that is most absolutely appropriate for you
00:57:29 ►
and therefore if you want to make a group
00:57:33 ►
who will explore best
00:57:35 ►
the best role is you
00:57:36 ►
I mean it’s much nicer to think
00:57:40 ►
that one could have some other roles
00:57:43 ►
but you’re not going to get
00:57:44 ►
the quality of communication the quality of communication.
00:57:47 ►
The quality of communication
00:57:48 ►
that I and Al can get
00:57:53 ►
depends immensely upon the fact
00:57:55 ►
that we know exactly
00:57:57 ►
how rough we can get with each other.
00:58:01 ►
Because this enlarges our knowledge.
00:58:04 ►
because this enlarges our knowledge.
00:58:11 ►
You see, the great danger in a group of this sort is that at its most effective,
00:58:15 ►
everyone else would know how to do everyone else in.
00:58:19 ►
The only thing is that everyone else has to,
00:58:23 ►
because allowing for the fact we are biological creatures
00:58:26 ►
with a long history of distrust,
00:58:29 ►
unless this occurs, there will be no group.
00:58:32 ►
The level of trust will not go up,
00:58:34 ►
and the actual level of performance won’t go up.
00:58:38 ►
Now, for very limited things,
00:58:40 ►
you can certainly produce trust in all kinds of ways
00:58:45 ►
but if you want to
00:58:47 ►
do it in
00:58:49 ►
a greater way
00:58:52 ►
than can be done any other way
00:58:53 ►
you have to understand the specific
00:58:55 ►
risks
00:58:56 ►
that this involves
00:58:58 ►
and the specific risks is that every person
00:59:02 ►
involved will be altered
00:59:03 ►
whether they like it or not.
00:59:08 ►
And that the result of this will, in a sense,
00:59:11 ►
alter every other relationship they have,
00:59:15 ►
whether they like it or not.
00:59:19 ►
And that it will be filled with a series,
00:59:23 ►
every advance in understanding
00:59:28 ►
will be also
00:59:29 ►
accompanied by
00:59:36 ►
certain kinds of disillusionment
00:59:40 ►
about the illusions that you have
00:59:42 ►
of the natures of relationships.
00:59:50 ►
And therefore you pay for this.
00:59:54 ►
And it’s as well for people in the heart to know whether they want to pay or not.
00:59:58 ►
Because they’re going to pay.
01:00:02 ►
You pay anyway.
01:00:04 ►
But in this particular
01:00:06 ►
way,
01:00:07 ►
the ante
01:00:09 ►
goes up
01:00:10 ►
with every round.
01:00:19 ►
And that’s how I see
01:00:22 ►
the score.
01:00:23 ►
Now the specific thing then is,
01:00:26 ►
what techniques will do this most efficiently?
01:00:29 ►
What conditions are less likely to produce harm?
01:00:33 ►
How do you teach people
01:00:39 ►
what actually particular tricks are there
01:00:44 ►
for picking up when you’re…
01:00:47 ►
You see, what you actually want to go
01:00:49 ►
is to go to the feeling limit that a person has
01:00:54 ►
that they will agree to genuinely employ
01:01:00 ►
in this situation.
01:01:03 ►
That is, suppose you had an extremely happy,
01:01:07 ►
unhappy childhood, suppose,
01:01:09 ►
and that this meant a great deal to you,
01:01:11 ►
and this had in fact changed your whole,
01:01:14 ►
your feeling and thinking about the world.
01:01:17 ►
And in a group of this kind,
01:01:20 ►
one doesn’t want to produce such an explosion of feeling in you
01:01:26 ►
that this will set off reverberating in the other people.
01:01:30 ►
Pity or sorrow at your condition.
01:01:34 ►
Disgust or hatred of whatever happened in this condition.
01:01:39 ►
A feeling of superiority over you because of this.
01:01:44 ►
It has to be done in a way
01:01:46 ►
that each person involved in his own terms
01:01:49 ►
can see how it overlaps him,
01:01:52 ►
how it doesn’t,
01:01:55 ►
and what moves they would have to make emotionally, perceptually,
01:02:00 ►
to have got into this kind of position,
01:02:03 ►
and then finally how it would affect the relationship of the group now.
01:02:07 ►
So it’s a complicated business,
01:02:09 ►
and it does have to be abstracted
01:02:12 ►
so that the drill can begin to be learned in the simplest of ways first.
01:02:20 ►
What happens, Humphrey, that let’s say you have a group
01:02:24 ►
and one person has some traumatic childhood thing that’s pretty well shaped his personality.
01:02:32 ►
Suppose he has individually looked at this and dealt with it.
01:02:36 ►
How necessary is it to deal with this in the group?
01:02:40 ►
If he can accept this, is it possible for the group to move on and other explorations?
01:02:48 ►
Or is this something that’s got to be dealt with in the group?
01:02:52 ►
It is.
01:02:53 ►
What is necessary is only insofar as this prevents the group from developing.
01:02:59 ►
I mean, insofar as, as Al points out, he is a man who is developed as a secret and individual
01:03:06 ►
man that’s a man
01:03:08 ►
who in a sense
01:03:10 ►
is both closed and open
01:03:12 ►
to experience because in fact Al
01:03:14 ►
is extraordinarily open to experience
01:03:16 ►
in one way but on the other hand
01:03:18 ►
he
01:03:20 ►
is not
01:03:22 ►
I think one would say a man without
01:03:24 ►
a mask he’s a man who say, a man without a mask.
01:03:28 ►
He’s a man who wears a mask which is a mask of hell.
01:03:34 ►
This is an extraordinarily skillful double take.
01:03:36 ►
But that’s not good enough.
01:03:39 ►
In a group, you have to know this.
01:03:41 ►
And you have to know how you do this. But you also have to know what this would mean to you if you did it,
01:03:45 ►
and how it would be done, and how it would change you.
01:03:54 ►
And not just how it would be if you felt somewhat like Al.
01:03:59 ►
This, again, is not nearly enough, because this doesn’t allow you,
01:04:03 ►
this allows you to make an expedition to hell but it doesn’t
01:04:06 ►
see what this means in terms
01:04:08 ►
of you and you will only take back really
01:04:10 ►
what is really real to you
01:04:12 ►
and as I was saying last night
01:04:14 ►
and I think you said too that
01:04:16 ►
if Charlene would something or other
01:04:18 ►
but why the hell should she
01:04:20 ►
until you know
01:04:21 ►
where she
01:04:24 ►
stands and know you know and she knows you know where she stands
01:04:25 ►
and know you know and she knows you know,
01:04:28 ►
all the if-ing in the world won’t get you anywhere.
01:04:31 ►
Now, when you know and she knows you know,
01:04:34 ►
it probably won’t matter.
01:04:36 ►
But in this thing, it’s going to matter
01:04:38 ►
because as you push up the level of experience,
01:04:44 ►
it’ll get tough on the whole because it’ll also be more productive. As you push up the level of experience,
01:04:46 ►
it’ll get tough on the hell because it’ll also be more productive.
01:04:48 ►
It’ll be harder to maintain the group effort.
01:04:54 ►
It’ll require more skill and more energy.
01:05:04 ►
Again, I think, I may be wrong again, I think
01:05:06 ►
I may be wrong, but I think that the outcome
01:05:08 ►
of it will be a
01:05:10 ►
greatly
01:05:11 ►
increased capacity
01:05:14 ►
for people to deal with
01:05:16 ►
themselves, to deal with other people,
01:05:18 ►
then to begin to
01:05:19 ►
devise means of, to some
01:05:22 ►
extent, short-cutting some of this
01:05:24 ►
in terms of the purposes.
01:05:25 ►
I mean, it’s quite clear.
01:05:26 ►
For instance, you do not really wish
01:05:28 ►
a group of businessmen
01:05:30 ►
to be involved in each other in this way.
01:05:33 ►
It isn’t particularly relevant to their affairs.
01:05:35 ►
You may very well need
01:05:37 ►
a group of cybernetic engineers,
01:05:41 ►
and they’re calling, I think it was Al
01:05:43 ►
who was telling me,
01:05:44 ►
that in fact this is exactly what you do.
01:05:46 ►
You allow them to beat hell out of the particular town they’re in
01:05:51 ►
on the basis that if this is the only way you know,
01:05:54 ►
you will get them integrated this way.
01:05:57 ►
You have them really, because you say,
01:05:59 ►
well, this gives them a common goal and purpose
01:06:03 ►
as a kind of group of buccaneers
01:06:05 ►
who are going around taking other people’s wives and beating the town up,
01:06:09 ►
but are maintained on the ground that this is the best way we know at the moment of keeping their skills going.
01:06:15 ►
Wasn’t that what you were saying?
01:06:16 ►
Yeah, I think that’s it.
01:06:18 ►
You were saying?
01:06:18 ►
I think I should have gone on to Humphrey after the discussion this morning.
01:06:21 ►
after the discussion this morning,
01:06:27 ►
during my several years of work,
01:06:31 ►
when it was my work as an agent of the government,
01:06:35 ►
I had many occasions, not a few occasions,
01:06:38 ►
but many occasions where if I had wished to harm anyone,
01:06:41 ►
I had all the excuse necessary. Sure.
01:06:41 ►
Resisting means to overcome resistance.
01:06:46 ►
And I think I should say I’ve never
01:06:47 ►
harmed them. I’ve shot over people’s heads
01:06:49 ►
close enough to them, even through their
01:06:51 ►
clothes.
01:06:54 ►
But never have I
01:06:55 ►
ever hurt them. Never have I inside
01:06:57 ►
ever had any desire. But
01:06:59 ►
should the need arise,
01:07:02 ►
the capabilities are there
01:07:03 ►
without any…
01:07:04 ►
But I’ve never indulged in this sort of thing. Should the need arise, the capabilities are there without any… No, what I mean is I’m not…
01:07:06 ►
I mean, but I never…
01:07:07 ►
I know.
01:07:07 ►
I’ve never indulged in this sort of thing.
01:07:09 ►
No, but what I mean…
01:07:10 ►
I have no feelings against it.
01:07:11 ►
No, Albert, your development, the complex of feeling and intelligence and action which you are,
01:07:23 ►
the world which, in a sense, you develop, this kind of thing,
01:07:26 ►
or whatever it means.
01:07:28 ►
This thing is a different world from my world.
01:07:34 ►
And it’s a world in which this kind of action
01:07:37 ►
is not merely imaginable, as it is with me.
01:07:43 ►
The fact that you have not done these things
01:07:46 ►
is because you are a very skillful performer in this life
01:07:49 ►
and because also you’re a good man who persuades bad men
01:07:53 ►
that you will certainly kill them in such a thing,
01:07:58 ►
in such an affair,
01:07:59 ►
and many bad men are sensible enough to see that they,
01:08:03 ►
or very, very few men,
01:08:05 ►
and particularly very few bad men, sensible enough to see that they, or very, very few men, particularly very few bad men,
01:08:08 ►
caught certain death.
01:08:10 ►
Now the fact, all we’re saying
01:08:12 ►
now, if you don’t mind my saying,
01:08:14 ►
is that you’re a killer who understands
01:08:16 ►
the rules of the game and therefore
01:08:18 ►
doesn’t have to kill very often,
01:08:20 ►
like an absolutely first-rate
01:08:22 ►
game warden, a hunter,
01:08:24 ►
who doesn’t in fact go around slaughtering all the animals for fun.
01:08:28 ►
He merely shoots animals if they charge at him wild,
01:08:32 ►
if they have rabies, or if they’re in pain.
01:08:39 ►
But he is a quite different person in a sense
01:08:43 ►
from the conventional animal lover.
01:08:49 ►
Though he may have a much deeper understanding of such animals.
01:08:55 ►
And so he, I mean the great value of Al’s world is that he can make it open to us
01:09:07 ►
if we urge him strongly enough,
01:09:10 ►
and that we can make our worlds open to him.
01:09:14 ►
But I think it’s very important to understand that in this sort of world,
01:09:19 ►
once the action is set,
01:09:23 ►
those who live in it do not see any
01:09:26 ►
occasion to draw back
01:09:27 ►
and nor do they see any special occasion to
01:09:30 ►
hesitate
01:09:30 ►
it doesn’t work that way
01:09:34 ►
I mean they are not like
01:09:36 ►
you see Macbeth
01:09:37 ►
was really not like Al at all
01:09:40 ►
I mean Macbeth
01:09:42 ►
you remember had long
01:09:43 ►
soliloquies as to whether
01:09:45 ►
he should or he shouldn’t.
01:09:48 ►
He was much
01:09:49 ►
more like Hamilton this way.
01:09:52 ►
But that is not
01:09:53 ►
this kind of world.
01:10:01 ►
You’re listening
01:10:01 ►
to the Psychedelic Salon, where
01:10:03 ►
people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:10:09 ►
Okay, now I didn’t say this in the beginning because I wanted you to hear it first.
01:10:15 ►
But to me, this sounded like they recorded what I would call a trip report after they took LSD together the day before.
01:10:22 ►
Now, there’s a scene for a movie I’d like to see.
01:10:21 ►
together the day before.
01:10:24 ►
Now, there’s a scene for a movie I’d like to see.
01:10:30 ►
Humphrey Osmond, Myron Stolaroff, Willis Harmon, and Al Hubbard all doing acid together.
01:10:36 ►
In fact, I’d not only like to see a serious version of that scene, I’d also like to write a Saturday Night Live version.
01:10:38 ►
And for our non-U.S. slotners, that simply means a humorous version.
01:10:44 ►
I think that a lot of creative work could be done with a scene like that,
01:10:47 ►
sort of a psychedelic version of my dinner with Andre.
01:10:51 ►
Now, I don’t know about you, but I found it extremely fascinating to hear them
01:10:55 ►
talking about Tim Leary and Ram Dass as they saw them during the time that
01:11:00 ►
Leary and team were making waves in the history pond.
01:11:04 ►
But at the time of this conversation, the acid tests and hippies hadn’t even arrived
01:11:08 ►
on the scene yet.
01:11:10 ►
In fact, that whole psychedelic scene was just coming down the birth canal, getting
01:11:14 ►
ready to bring a new spirit into the land.
01:11:17 ►
But it did sound to me as if Myron and Dr. Osmond were already sensing that everything
01:11:23 ►
was about to change in their world of professional psychedelic research.
01:11:27 ►
As we listened to their conversation just now,
01:11:30 ►
I’m sure that you also picked up on the fact that this recording was done
01:11:34 ►
at Myron’s Research Center in Menlo Park, California,
01:11:37 ►
which was named the International Foundation for Advanced Study.
01:11:41 ►
And for what it’s worth, one day Myron and I were talking about his Menlo Park days,
01:11:46 ►
and he came out with a great big laugh and said something to the effect that, in hindsight,
01:11:51 ►
he thought the name they picked was really rather presumptuous, but he still liked it.
01:11:57 ►
Well, I could go on for hours about some of the things that were discussed just now, but
01:12:01 ►
I think a better use of my time will be to prepare the program notes and start on part two of this recording. Yep, that’s right, there’s still about
01:12:10 ►
30 minutes more of the recording that I haven’t yet listened to, but my guess is that it’ll
01:12:14 ►
probably be in next week’s podcast. Now before I go, I’d like to tell you a little bit about the
01:12:21 ►
circuitous trail that this recording took to make it to
01:12:25 ►
your ears just now. As we know, the recording was made on November 1st, 1964. After that,
01:12:32 ►
its path is really unknown until a little over a year ago. And what happened was that over the
01:12:38 ►
years, as I spent a lot of time with Myron and Gene, I heard many of their stories. And one of
01:12:44 ►
them was the fact that sometime in the 1980s, Myron’s Jean, I heard many of their stories. And one of them was the fact that sometime
01:12:45 ►
in the 1980s, Myron’s former administrative assistant at the Institute called and asked if
01:12:51 ►
he still wanted her to continue storing all of the files that they had. This was right as the
01:12:57 ►
drug war goons were really pushing people around, and Myron had become a little despondent about the
01:13:03 ►
psychedelic movement ever gaining strength again.
01:13:05 ►
So he told her to go ahead and destroy him, and that’s where we left it for several years.
01:13:11 ►
Now, Myron had also told me that when he thought that the DEA might be after anyone and everyone,
01:13:17 ►
he hid all of his original research reports that provided the basis for a lot of the writing that you’ve seen coming out from Ann and Sasha.
01:13:27 ►
So another few years passed, and poor Myron had by then slipped into the world of dementia
01:13:32 ►
when I stopped by for a few days to see him and Gene.
01:13:36 ►
Well, Gene and I got talking about those files, and so she went and recovered them.
01:13:41 ►
And the next several days and nights, the two of us spent having a great time
01:13:45 ►
poring through some amazing, amazing records. And there was one other thing that I had let pass all
01:13:51 ►
those years, and that was the fact that down in a dilapidated old storage shed on their property
01:13:56 ►
was what I suspected was a gold mine of information. You see, the files that Myron’s
01:14:03 ►
assistant destroyed were the personal files of the 350 or so people who had had sessions at the Institute.
01:14:10 ►
And it was a valuable store of research information that will now tragically never be seen.
01:14:17 ►
But all of the other records from the Institute, some 20 cases of them in fact, were down in that little shed.
01:14:24 ►
Some 20 cases of them, in fact, were down in that little shed.
01:14:27 ►
And so the day after recovering the box of research reports,
01:14:32 ►
Jean went down to the old shed and began bringing up files filled with gems like handwritten letters to Myron from Albert Hoffman and other psychedelic celebrities.
01:14:38 ►
Obviously, we had found the motherlode of Myron’s papers,
01:14:42 ►
and Jean asked me to help her find a way, first of all, to sort them out,
01:14:46 ►
and then to preserve them.
01:14:48 ►
Well, that was a project way out of my capabilities,
01:14:52 ►
so when I got home, I called John Hanna and told him what we’d found.
01:14:56 ►
John then helped organize an expedition to recover and preserve those valuable records,
01:15:01 ►
and he somehow managed to get them all to the Arrowood Center so they could be sent out to be digitized and made public
01:15:08 ►
before the family places them in a university archive somewhere.
01:15:13 ►
And among all of those boxes were some reel-to-reel tapes, one of which we just listened to.
01:15:19 ►
Now, if you’ve ever dealt with old audio tape, just picture this.
01:15:23 ►
For about 30 years, in the summer, those tapes were in 100 plus degree heat.
01:15:28 ►
And in the winter, they spent much of their time frozen.
01:15:31 ►
So the Arrowwood team had to hire a professional tape restorer just to get them to digital.
01:15:36 ►
However, the quality was still not very listenable.
01:15:40 ►
So that was when they enlisted the volunteer services of Jason Rizos,
01:15:45 ►
who I think has really done a marvelous job of cleaning up the sound.
01:15:50 ►
So, John, Jason, and the entire Arrowwood team, on behalf of the psychedelic community,
01:15:55 ►
I want to thank you for what has been not an easy or inexpensive job,
01:16:00 ►
but on that note, I should also probably add that the majority of the expenses for this preservation work,
01:16:06 ►
both of the audio and paper documents, has been borne primarily by Arrowwood.org.
01:16:12 ►
And so if you have a little extra money that you could donate to the Stolaroff Collection at Arrowwood.org,
01:16:18 ►
well, you’ll be doing us all a great service.
01:16:21 ►
And I’ll put a link to that donation page along with the program notes for this podcast.
01:16:26 ►
Well, that’s going to do it for now. And so I’ll close today’s podcast again by reminding you that
01:16:31 ►
this and most of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are freely available for you to use in your
01:16:36 ►
own audio projects under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareLike 3.0 license.
01:16:42 ►
And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link
01:16:46 ►
at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon web page,
01:16:48 ►
which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
01:16:51 ►
And if you’re interested in the philosophy behind the salon,
01:16:54 ►
well, you can hear all about it in my novel,
01:16:57 ►
The Genesis Generation,
01:16:58 ►
which is available as an audiobook
01:17:00 ►
that you can download at genesisgeneration.us.
01:17:04 ►
And for now,
01:17:06 ►
this is Lorenzo signing off from
01:17:08 ►
Cyberdelic Space.
01:17:09 ►
Be well, my friends.