Program Notes
Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Stanley Krippner, and Andrew Weil
The Albert Hofmann Papers
at Erowid.org
The Albert Hofmann Foundation (online)
[NOTE: The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“What is the psychedelic experience? What promise does it hold for a sane future for our planet and our children? And what is it about it that kindles the kind of loyalty that I feel coming from the people in this room this evening? And I submit to you that it is nothing less than the rebirth of a voice that has been silent for at least a thousand years, the still small voice of the Logos of the planet.”
“So I submit to you that what we represent is a Fifth Column, a Fifth Column that represents the best aspirations that human community is capable of, a Fifth Column that is willing to look at the structure of the psyche in contrast to the mess of society, and willing to dream.”
“We have the tools, the intellect, the will to create a caring global culture. It isn’t going to come without a recognition of the power of the psychedelic experience. The psychedelic experience is the birth right of every human being on the planet. It is as much a basic part of each and every one of us as our sexuality, our national identity, our consciousness of self. And any society which attempts to hold back or impede this dimension of self-expression, when the history of that society is written, it will be called barbarous.”
“In the future it will be unimaginable that governments once regulated the substances that people use to explore personal growth. It is the mark of a barbarous culture.”
“One doesn’t ‘just say no’ to truth.”
[NOTE: The following quotations are by Andrew Weil.]
“I have to tell you that the majority of human beings that I encounter operate mostly out of fear, guilt, and that when people operate from those emotions they are dangerous to themselves and to others.”
“We [the psychedelic community] are a very small minority, a very small minority, and have no illusions about that. And whether our minority will grow fast enough, and be able to influence humanity fast enough to avoid the catastrophe that is certain to come if we persist in the ways that we now persist, I don’t know?”
“If it may be as it appears that our ability to manipulate the environment, our technological ability, is so disparate with our ability to control our own emotions, that may be a fatal flaw of our species. It may be.”
“Deep down everything is all right, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. And there may be a lot of drama in between [now and the extinction of our species], but it’s all all right. … It’s OK with me if something else gets a chance, if the life-force experiments with another form, that’s fine, that’s OK too.”
“And here it seems to me is the fundamental absurdity of the way our science has developed: The most obvious fact of our existence is that we are conscious. That is the most obvious, most important aspect of our existence. How can you construct a world view, how can you construct a system that tries to explain the universe and leave that out? And yet that is what our science tries to do.”
“Often I find, in my experience, that changes in the realm of consciousness must accompany physical treatments if the physical treatments are to work.”
PCs – Right click,
Previous Episode
Next Episode
238 - A Tribute to Albert Hofmann Part 2
Similar Episodes
- 687 - Psychedelic Summit – Santa Cruz 1992 Part 2 - score: 0.84790
- 100 - Psychedelics and Spirituality Conference – 1983″ (Part 1) - score: 0.82342
- 500 - 500 Memories - score: 0.81640
- 545 - Current Research and Future Trends of Psychedelics, Stanford 2_3_91 - score: 0.80684
- 159 - Shulgin & Forte at Horizons 2008″ - score: 0.80404
- 238 - A Tribute to Albert Hofmann Part 2 - score: 0.80300
- 172 - The State of LSD in 2003″ - score: 0.79865
- 023 - Mind States IV (2003) Sound Bites - score: 0.79504
- 079 - Feilding and Pesce at Burning Man - score: 0.79313
- 403 - Sasha Shulgin_ In His Own Words - score: 0.78988
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 ►
And today I’ve got what I consider to be a real treat,
00:00:27 ►
some new mind candy that was sent to me by our fellow salonner, Gary Eisenberg.
00:00:33 ►
In fact, Gary sent me several interesting recordings that you’ll be hearing this week and next.
00:00:38 ►
And here’s a description of the event where this recording was made.
00:00:41 ►
And by the way, Gary, what a thrill it must have been to be there in person.
00:00:46 ►
Maybe some of our other fellow salonners who were there will also let us know about it.
00:00:51 ►
Anyway, this is the description that I found on the subgenius.com website,
00:00:56 ►
which actually was a repost from the old Usenet News Group,
00:01:00 ►
which was one of the tribe’s first stops on the net before the World Wide Web made its appearance,
00:01:05 ►
I’m sure you remember it. You know the one, alt.drugs.
00:01:10 ►
And as a little aside, if I’m not mistaken, it was John Gilmore,
00:01:14 ►
who has been with us here in the salon a couple of times,
00:01:17 ►
who is the person who actually originated, or invented, I guess you’d say,
00:01:21 ►
the alt.newsgroups in the early years of the net.
00:01:25 ►
And if you were already on the net back in the 80s, I’m sure that you remember well how exciting it was
00:01:30 ►
to watch the words tumble onto your screen through that wonderful little 300 baud dial-up modem.
00:01:36 ►
Anyway, here’s what one person who attended the event had to say about it in a Usenet posting.
00:01:42 ►
I attended the Albert Hoffman in America Celebrating 50 Years of
00:01:46 ►
Consciousness Research event in Los Angeles, and I’m forwarding some of the information because I
00:01:51 ►
know some of you would want to hear it. The event featured lectures by Terrence McKenna, Stanley
00:01:57 ►
Krippner, Andrew Weil, John C. Lilly, and Albert Hoffman himself. Unfortunately, Laura Huxley could not attend. There was also live music.
00:02:06 ►
A staggering 2,000 or so people filled the hall
00:02:09 ►
at the Scottish Rite Temple in Los Angeles.
00:02:12 ►
It was also the inauguration of the Albert Hoffman Foundation,
00:02:16 ►
an archive and information center
00:02:18 ►
dedicated to the scientific study of human consciousness.
00:02:22 ►
And now, thanks to fellow salononer artist and all-about Renaissance
00:02:27 ►
man, Gary Eisenberg, we are going to revisit that historic occasion. And Gary, I can’t thank you
00:02:33 ►
enough for these recordings. I’ve really enjoyed previewing them, and I’m looking forward to
00:02:38 ►
listening again right now. As you’ll hear in just a moment, the recording begins with an introduction
00:02:44 ►
by Robert Zanger,
00:02:45 ►
who I think was the first president of the newly formed Albert Hoffman Foundation.
00:02:50 ►
Sadly, although there have been many generous donors over the years,
00:02:55 ►
the Albert Hoffman Foundation has now fallen fallow and exists primarily as an old text-based website.
00:03:01 ►
However, if you’re interested in all things psychedelic, particularly from the
00:03:05 ►
scientific point of view, I think you’ll find a visit to www.hoffman.org, and he spells his name
00:03:12 ►
H-O-F-M-A-N-N, one F, two M’s, in case you’re wondering. I think you’ll find the visit there
00:03:19 ►
quite worthwhile. And should you go there, I recommend that you begin with the What’s New link, as it now serves more or less as a table of contents.
00:03:28 ►
But I should also note that all of those boxes containing thousands of papers that you’ll hear talked about have now been scanned and are available for you to read at arrowid.org.
00:03:38 ►
E-R-O-W-I-D, arrowid.org.
00:03:42 ►
It’s an amazingly valuable resource for psychedelic researchers,
00:03:46 ►
and there’s a link to that collection at the beginning of the program notes for this podcast,
00:03:51 ►
which you can get to via psychedelicsalon.org.
00:03:55 ►
But right now, let’s join Robert Zanger as he introduces the evening’s Master of Ceremonies,
00:04:01 ►
a fellow you may have heard of before.
00:04:03 ►
His name is Terrence McKenna.
00:04:03 ►
of Ceremonies, a fellow you may have heard of before.
00:04:04 ►
His name is Terence McKenna.
00:04:12 ►
My name is Robert Zanger, and I’m president of the new Albert Hoffman Foundation.
00:04:19 ►
This is indeed a historic occasion for modern consciousness research for a number of reasons.
00:04:28 ►
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the first synthesis of LSD by Dr. Hoffman in 1938.
00:04:43 ►
It also marks the inauguration of the new Albert Hoffman Foundation which will be dedicated to preserving the psychedelic research that’s been done over the last
00:04:49 ►
50 years and for a third reason because just a few weeks ago LSD has been
00:04:57 ►
legalized in Switzerland for use in psychotherapy.
00:05:17 ►
This is something that Dr. Hoffman will be telling you more about himself later in the program when he gives his presentation.
00:05:20 ►
At this time, I’d like to introduce our first speaker of the evening and our emcee for the rest of the program.
00:05:31 ►
He’s a lecturer, an extremely articulate and poetic speaker, as many of you know.
00:05:38 ►
A shamanologist, an expert on psychoactive plants and medicinal plants from around the world,
00:05:45 ►
director of the Botanical Dimensions Foundation in Hawaii. Please welcome
00:05:52 ►
Terence McKenna. Well, it’s very heartening to see so many people here tonight
00:06:24 ►
to celebrate an event like this. Talking about
00:06:30 ►
50 years of consciousness research in America reminds me a little bit of the story that’s
00:06:37 ►
told of Mahatma Gandhi when he was asked, what did he think of Western civilization?
00:06:44 ►
when he was asked what did he think of Western civilization? And he said, it sounds like a good idea.
00:06:52 ►
Because as a matter of fact,
00:06:55 ►
consciousness research in America
00:06:58 ►
has been severely stifled over the last 35, 40 years.
00:07:05 ►
Science is invited to look deeply over the last 35, 40 years.
00:07:11 ►
Science is invited to look deeply into all aspects of nature except the nature of the self.
00:07:16 ►
And yet clearly a crowd like this, an event like this,
00:07:21 ►
indicates that this issue will not die this issue is not going to go away
00:07:29 ►
and so it’s wonderfully fitting I think that we bring dr. Hoffman from his his bastion in neutral Switzerland to the city of lost angels to celebrate what was
00:07:50 ►
one of the great seminal events in the history of the 20th century.
00:07:56 ►
You know, Newton was asked of his theory of gravitation, how could he ever have made this leap of imagination? And Newton said, it was
00:08:11 ►
very easy. I stood on the shoulders of giants. And everyone who has done psychedelic research, research on consciousness in America has stood on the shoulders of giants.
00:08:29 ►
People like Robert Gordon Wasson, the discoverer of the magic mushrooms in Mexico,
00:08:39 ►
the man who propounded and founded the field of ethnobotany.
00:08:44 ►
People like Richard Evans Schultes,
00:08:46 ►
who is an advisor to the Hoffman Library, and the great ethnobotanist of the 20th century.
00:08:54 ►
And without doubt, people like Albert Hoffman, people who, laboring in the confines of their laboratories, have thrown open the doorway to new worlds of possibility for the human spirit.
00:09:11 ►
Tonight, as Dr. Hoffman was receiving the accolades of the crowd for the invention of LSD,
00:09:18 ►
I couldn’t help but think to myself that he probably never dreamed
00:09:23 ►
that the search for a better vaginal constrictor
00:09:26 ►
would carry him so far.
00:09:38 ►
So I’m going to keep my remarks brief this evening. I think a visit by Albert Hoffman to America, the foundation of a library that bears his name,
00:09:52 ►
that will serve as an archive for the research that has been locked away in filing cabinets and packing boxes for 30 years,
00:10:02 ►
and in concert with the political situation in the society, the larger society
00:10:08 ►
around us, is a sufficient reason for pausing for a moment and actually considering what
00:10:18 ►
is the psychedelic experience, what promise does it hold for a sane future for our planet and our children?
00:10:28 ►
And what is it about it that kindles the kind of loyalty that I feel coming from the people
00:10:38 ►
in this room this evening? And I submit to you that it is nothing less than the rebirth of a voice that has been
00:10:48 ►
silent for at least a thousand years. The still small voice of the logos of the planet.
00:10:59 ►
You know, the Old Testament says you don’t have to study the difference between good and evil. You know it. The still
00:11:06 ►
small voice in your heart elucids the correct way to live. And in Western culture, this still
00:11:16 ►
small voice has been stilled for over a millennia. And we have operated in a world that is reductionist, objectivist, materialistic,
00:11:29 ►
secular, male-dominated, stressing stasis, stressing the minute particulars in favor
00:11:39 ►
of the great overarching picture. And in some way, we have lost our way and it remained for
00:11:49 ►
giants of 20th century thought like Freud and Jung to announce the
00:11:55 ►
startling fact that there was a human unconscious and then it took still a different generation of researchers
00:12:06 ►
with a different set of analytical skills
00:12:10 ►
to take the concepts of the unconscious
00:12:13 ►
and turn it in to a frontier full of challenge
00:12:17 ►
to a topological manifold that courageous minds could sail out into
00:12:23 ►
to map and to explore.
00:12:27 ►
And squarely then, in the path of the materialist, reductionist,
00:12:32 ►
crypto-fascist dreams of high-tech industrialism,
00:12:36 ►
there emerged…
00:12:38 ►
There emerged a mystery, the last thing you would expect, a true mystery.
00:12:56 ►
Now, Dr. Hoffman has been lauded here this evening for his invention of LSD.
00:13:02 ►
Certainly, this is what he will be remembered for
00:13:05 ►
over the long centuries ahead.
00:13:08 ►
But as a matter of fact,
00:13:09 ►
he is a thinker of extreme breadth and depth.
00:13:13 ►
It was he, working with Karl Ruck and Gordon Wasson,
00:13:17 ►
who proposed that it was actually
00:13:19 ►
psychoactive ergot alkaloids
00:13:22 ►
that lay behind the Eleusinian mysteries and thereby rub the nose of classical scholarship in the fact that the foundation and the rooted in a psychedelic experience.
00:13:46 ►
That when we leave these things behind, we leave behind our cultural birthright, no less
00:13:53 ►
than when the Amazonian Indian deserts his home village for the sawmills.
00:13:59 ►
We too were once tribal people who lived in the light of mysteries that came to us mediated by shamans
00:14:09 ►
and created out of the magic of the natural world. It was Albert Hoffman who synthesized psilocybin
00:14:18 ►
for the first time and described its absolute structural characteristics. This is a man who is astride both the synthetic and natural product chemistry of the 20th century like no one else.
00:14:34 ►
His research has revealed the unexpected fact that there are biodynamic alkaloids in our environment, in our food chain, indeed in our history,
00:14:47 ►
that argue that we are the bearers of a great promise, that the future of consciousness
00:14:56 ►
can be endlessly bright. In any age, this message would have tremendous impact, but it is particularly poignant in our own age because we live in an age of global crisis.
00:15:15 ►
And the crisis is not that there is not enough food. There is.
00:15:19 ►
The crisis is not that we are victims of warfare and propaganda.
00:15:28 ►
We are, but the crisis is rooted in our own minds.
00:15:35 ►
It’s a crisis of point of view, a crisis of psychology,
00:15:40 ►
a crisis that requires a new look at the human enterprise.
00:15:47 ►
And I submit to you that there is no faster, clearer, and cleaner way
00:15:53 ►
to get a new look at the human enterprise
00:15:56 ►
than by availing yourself of the tools and the compounds
00:16:02 ►
which men like John Lilly, Albert Hoffman, Richard Schultes,
00:16:08 ►
Gordon Wasson, Oscar Janager have placed before us. Don’t let anyone tell you that we’re not
00:16:15 ►
living in an age of heroes, because we are. These people have set a standard that will be difficult to follow. These people, when it was, for God’s sake,
00:16:28 ►
controversial to be a communist, dared to give people LSD, dared to suggest that a new world of
00:16:36 ►
the mind might lay right ahead of us. And so I think it’s very fitting that the Albert Hoffman Library be an ongoing project,
00:16:48 ►
a project that the community can rally around and see itself reflected in.
00:16:57 ►
We’re living in an age where people who have an interest in these things are marked as escapists, pariahs, cultural anarchists,
00:17:07 ►
ne’er-do-wells, hedonists. Look at the people around you.
00:17:14 ►
Did any of you watch the Republican convention?
00:17:31 ►
So I submit to you that what we represent is a fifth column.
00:17:47 ►
A fifth column that represents the best look at the structure of the psyche in contrast to the mess of society and willing to dream.
00:17:53 ►
I’m reminded of William Faulkner in his Nobel address.
00:17:57 ►
He said, man will not simply endure, man will prevail.
00:18:03 ►
Now, of course, he should have said humanity
00:18:05 ►
but this was years ago
00:18:07 ►
but the thought is there
00:18:09 ►
we have the tools, the intellect, the will
00:18:13 ►
to create a caring global culture
00:18:16 ►
it isn’t going to come without a recognition
00:18:21 ►
of the power of the psychedelic experience
00:18:24 ►
the psychedelic experience. The psychedelic experience is the birthright of every human being on the planet.
00:18:33 ►
It is as much a basic part of each and every one of us as our sexuality, our national identity,
00:18:43 ►
our consciousness of self.
00:18:45 ►
And any society which attempts to hold back or impede this dimension of self-expression,
00:18:55 ►
when the history of that society is written, it will be called barbarous.
00:19:08 ►
be called barbarous. The movement toward legitimizing psychedelics I see as part of the broader movement throughout human history that gave us the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, women’s
00:19:15 ►
suffrage. In the future, it will be unimaginable that governments once regulated the substances that people use to explore personal growth.
00:19:28 ►
It is the mark of a barbarous culture,
00:19:31 ►
and we are here to raise a light,
00:19:34 ►
to say truth is not so easily swept aside.
00:19:39 ►
One doesn’t just say no to truth.
00:19:43 ►
Truth…
00:20:05 ►
It doesn’t just say no to truth. Truth requires engagement. It requires courage. It requires a sense of where we have been and of where we are going.
00:20:14 ►
And what is preached all around us is the quick fix, the fast buck, the temporary solution, the throwaway and disposable culture that ends up throwing away and disposing of human
00:20:22 ►
lives.
00:20:30 ►
away and disposing of human lives. And what we place against that is a humanism that does not rise out of theory. It’s a humanism that rises out of experience. The experience that informed
00:20:39 ►
the great mystics of every religion is not something that we strain for throughout a life
00:20:47 ►
of self-discipline and self-subjugation. That isn’t it. It is our birthright. Each of us,
00:20:56 ►
Dr. Hoffman and his discoveries place this dimension within the reach of all of us. Dr. Hoffman and his discoveries place
00:21:06 ►
this dimension on a social agenda that cannot be denied, that will not wait. If
00:21:14 ►
not now, when? If not us, who? It’s that simple. We are moving now, I think
00:21:23 ►
unfortunately, into yet a darker political night in terms of the larger society around us.
00:21:31 ►
And I make an analogy to the coming of the Dark Ages.
00:22:00 ►
Our favorite were monastic gatherings of like-minded people who preserved information through the time of darkness and social ignorance toward a new day when it could be utilized to mitigate the suffering of men and women everywhere. LSD is to my mind first and foremost the greatest medical discovery of the 20th century
00:22:10 ►
and I use it in the sense of ameliorating pain, creating caring, promoting unity, healing not so
00:22:23 ►
much of the individual psyche,
00:22:25 ►
although certainly its impact in that dimension is tremendous,
00:22:28 ►
but ultimately as a deconditioning agent,
00:22:32 ►
allowing us to move beyond the confines of historical society
00:22:37 ►
to see what we could be, what we have been,
00:22:43 ►
and what in fact we have the energy to be in the future.
00:22:48 ►
Thank you very much.
00:22:54 ►
Okay.
00:22:59 ►
So I’m doing double duty up here tonight as MC as well,
00:23:07 ►
and I want to introduce the next speaker. He’s an extremely eminent psychologist, researcher long on the scene.
00:23:15 ►
There at the beginning, his work with dreams at Maimonides Hospital
00:23:22 ►
set him on a lifelong course of the study of consciousness.
00:23:27 ►
He has published extensively on shamanism.
00:23:31 ►
He is a teacher, lecturer, mentor,
00:23:36 ►
and all-around great guy.
00:23:38 ►
Please welcome to the podium Dr. Stanley Krippner.
00:23:57 ►
Thank you very much, Terrance, and thank you very much for such a brilliant introductory talk.
00:24:01 ►
Well, some of you remember that when Albert Hoffman wrote his autobiography, he called it LSD, My Problem Child.
00:24:10 ►
I have news for you, Albert. LSD was not your only problem child. Many of your problem children are here tonight.
00:24:20 ►
And I think you will be very proud of us before the night is over.
00:24:23 ►
And I think you will be very proud of us before the night is over.
00:24:31 ►
Now, I’m going to discuss the way that Albert Hoffman and his work have influenced the whole field of consciousness studies.
00:24:41 ►
And I’m going to use the term consciousness to refer to a person or other organisms’ pattern of perceptual, cognitive, affective functioning,
00:24:45 ►
either on an everyday, ordinary basis or in so-called altered or alternative states.
00:24:49 ►
The field of consciousness studies includes descriptive, experimental,
00:24:53 ►
and theoretical approaches to the investigation of these patterns of functioning.
00:24:58 ►
Emphasis also is placed on relating phenomenological techniques
00:25:02 ►
to the measurement of externally observable behavior
00:25:05 ►
as well as to abstract model building.
00:25:09 ►
At Saybrook Institute Graduate School, where I teach,
00:25:11 ►
we have one of the few carefully thought-out sequences
00:25:15 ►
of courses in consciousness studies
00:25:17 ►
at any accredited university in the United States.
00:25:20 ►
And, Albert, you’ll be happy to know
00:25:23 ►
that at Saybrook we don’t keep interest in psychedelics
00:25:27 ►
in the closet.
00:25:28 ►
Students write dissertations on the topic, they write papers on the topic, they contribute
00:25:34 ►
articles and chapters to monographs and books, and you are certainly, to us at Saybrook,
00:25:41 ►
a great cultural and scientific hero. Now, consciousness studies were neglected by most psychologists for several decades,
00:25:49 ►
but they began to emerge under the impact of developments in psychopharmacology,
00:25:55 ►
such as the discovery of LSD and related compounds,
00:25:58 ►
but also developments in neuropsychology, engineering psychology, sensory deprivation studies, and the discovery that rapid eye movements during sleep were quantitatively related to dream reports.
00:26:11 ►
The latter investigations demonstrated that objective and subjective methods could be combined in consciousness studies.
00:26:18 ►
Research in hypnosis, meditation, and mind-altering drugs
00:26:23 ►
suggested ways in which changes in
00:26:25 ►
sensory processing and cognition could be investigated in laboratory settings.
00:26:30 ►
Biofeedback terminology and technology demonstrated that many internal states
00:26:35 ►
could be monitored and could be regulated voluntarily. Transpersonal
00:26:40 ►
approaches to psychology have brought Eastern models of consciousness to the
00:26:44 ►
attention of Western investigators.
00:26:47 ►
As a result of these wide-ranging developments, a new introspectionism emerged in the study of spontaneous fantasy, daydreaming, imagery, and creativity.
00:26:57 ►
Data from studies of memory, attention, learning, and cognitive styles indicated the need to determine how awareness influences sensory
00:27:05 ►
input and motor output. Neuropsychological research produced data concerning the functioning of the
00:27:11 ►
two cortical hemispheres, as well as the role played by neurotransmitters in regulating behavior.
00:27:17 ►
As the scientific study of behavior experience and intentionality, humanistic psychology has
00:27:23 ►
assisted in the rediscovery of what William James called the stream of consciousness as a proper area of investigation.
00:27:31 ►
The groundwork was prepared for the advent of the scientific exploration of consciousness
00:27:35 ►
five decades ago when Albert Hoffman synthesized a lysergic acid compound known as LSD-25.
00:27:43 ►
Initial trials were disappointing. It did not seem to have any medical
00:27:47 ►
use and did not appear to have psychoactive properties with animals. But there was something
00:27:53 ►
puzzling and curious about LSD-25, and in 1943 Hoffman investigated again. He accidentally
00:28:01 ►
absorbed some of it through his skin and had what he later called a dreamlike but not disagreeable experience.
00:28:08 ►
Albert always has the talent for understatement.
00:28:14 ►
Three days later, Hoffman arranged to take what he believed to be a very weak dose.
00:28:20 ►
He tried to take notes in his laboratory journal, but after a few pages, found out that he could not write anymore.
00:28:27 ►
So he headed for home on a bicycle.
00:28:33 ►
Why? Because automobile use was restricted in Switzerland during the Second World War,
00:28:38 ►
which was then raging through most of the rest of Europe.
00:28:41 ►
Even though aspects of his bicycle ride were terrifying,
00:28:46 ►
Albert realized that he had made an important discovery because no known substance in the world would have any effect at all in such
00:28:52 ►
a small dosage, one quarter of a milligram. Hoffman called a physician, but by the time the good doctor
00:28:58 ►
arrived, he had began to enjoy the experience. The endless variety of colors, the happiness, the rapture, and the feeling that he had come back to life. Eventually, Albert Hoffman decided to explore the new drug in a setting outside the conventional laboratory, and had what he considered to be the first psychedelic LSD experience in 1951.
00:29:23 ►
joining him were the pharmacologist Herbert Nazet and the novelist Ernst Jünger
00:29:25 ►
again he took a low dose of the substance
00:29:28 ►
but found himself transported to North Africa
00:29:31 ►
among the Berber tribes
00:29:32 ►
enjoying beautiful landscapes and exotic oases
00:29:35 ►
while a Mozart record played music from above
00:29:38 ►
and sometime later
00:29:41 ►
Albert had his first religious LSD experience
00:29:44 ►
having a confrontation with death and feeling that he had left the ordinary world forever And some time later, Albert had his first religious LSD experience,
00:29:49 ►
having a confrontation with death and feeling that he had left the ordinary world forever.
00:29:51 ►
Fortunately for us, he came back.
00:29:56 ►
Hoffman became convinced that LSD could be important for psychotherapy,
00:30:01 ►
for treating the terminally ill, for brain research, and as an adjunct to meditation.
00:30:06 ►
But he also concluded that it should only be given to people who were prepared for it,
00:30:09 ►
to people who had strong psychological structures.
00:30:12 ►
He once commented, and I agree with him,
00:30:15 ►
I thought of LSD as being appropriate for an elite,
00:30:17 ►
for artists, writers, and philosophers.
00:30:21 ►
Hoffman’s work with LSD was responsible for an invitation to investigate
00:30:22 ►
the pharmacological properties of the Mexican mushrooms used in sacred rituals before the arrival of the Europeans.
00:30:29 ►
By this time, Hoffman was director of research for the Sandoz Pharmaceuticals Department of Natural Products.
00:30:36 ►
Chemical studies of the mushroom by French and American firms had ended inconclusively, so Hoffman was eager to accept the challenge. And this and other stories come through in his book,
00:30:46 ►
Plant of the Gods, Origins of Hallucinogenic Use,
00:30:50 ►
co-authored with Richard Evans Schroedt.
00:30:53 ►
Well, Hoffman was later to note
00:30:59 ►
that the earlier investigations had used animals as subjects,
00:31:03 ►
but Hoffman, having learned that humans have a
00:31:05 ►
greater sensitivity to psychedelic substances, ate the mushrooms himself. See, this was very radical
00:31:11 ►
at this time, to try something out on yourself. Who would have thought of that? Who would have
00:31:16 ►
thought that that would be science? In 1958, he reported the results of his studies, having
00:31:23 ►
isolated the active ingredients of the sacred mushrooms to new substances, which he named psilocybin and psilocin.
00:31:47 ►
years of her life and saw firsthand the setting in which some of the early explorers like Wasson and Hoffman had observed firsthand the workings of the sacred mushrooms.
00:31:53 ►
Well, Hoffman was later to synthesize the active ingredients of rye ergot, squill, psychoactive
00:31:59 ►
morning glory seeds, and rewolfia.
00:32:02 ►
These investigations led to the production of several important
00:32:06 ►
medicines. He also
00:32:08 ►
made a retrospective study of the
00:32:10 ►
Eleusinian mysteries of ancient Greece,
00:32:12 ►
producing compelling evidence
00:32:14 ►
that a psychoactive substance,
00:32:16 ►
probably rye ergot, was used
00:32:18 ►
at the climax of the initiation,
00:32:20 ►
and this is described in his book
00:32:21 ►
The Road to Elysius,
00:32:23 ►
a thrilling detective story on how this discovery was made,
00:32:28 ►
which had eluded humankind for thousands of years.
00:32:32 ►
Albert Hoffman has had an important effect upon consciousness research in several ways.
00:32:37 ►
His synthesis of LSD-25 provided humankind with an incisive tool
00:32:41 ►
for the investigation of perception, cognition, affect, creativity, imagery, and imagination.
00:32:47 ►
The difficulties that science, medicine, and society at large have had in making full use of this gift
00:32:53 ►
suggest that, alas, LSD was probably a premature discovery, at least in industrialized countries.
00:33:01 ►
In native societies, they have known for thousands of years how to use wisely these
00:33:06 ►
compounds. And I’ve seen Albert over the years on both sides of the Atlantic. One of our meetings
00:33:12 ►
was in the Austrian Alps. We were there for a conference of shamans. And we both gave our talks,
00:33:19 ►
but the real stars were the traditional healers from North America, South America, from Asia.
00:33:24 ►
Ours were the traditional healers from North America, South America, from Asia.
00:33:27 ►
One of them, Don Jose Rios, also known as Matsua,
00:33:33 ►
a Huichol shaman who at that time was 107 years of age and who was still going strong,
00:33:35 ►
was flown to Europe for this trip,
00:33:40 ►
and we were all worried about how he would take that transatlantic crossing.
00:33:45 ►
And at the airport, we’re saying, Don Jose, Don Jose, how did you do it?
00:33:51 ►
How do you feel? At your age, were you able to make that crossing? He said, well, I just took a little peyote before I got on the airplane. I’m still flying. Well, we can learn a lot from
00:34:01 ►
these native practitioners. I’ve certainly learned a lot in my day, Albert as well.
00:34:09 ►
Hoffman has contributed to the development of methodological advances in consciousness research.
00:34:15 ►
Obviously, he is a first-rate chemist who has been awarded honorary doctorates
00:34:19 ►
from the University of Zurich and the Stockholm Pharmaceutical Trust.
00:34:25 ►
of Zurich and the Stockholm Pharmaceutical Trust. But he has also pioneered in the study of participant
00:34:29 ►
observation techniques, using himself
00:34:32 ►
as a human laboratory for the study of drug effects.
00:34:35 ►
In addition, he is engaged in field research,
00:34:38 ►
visiting remote parts of the world
00:34:39 ►
to observe the use of psychoactive plants
00:34:41 ►
in native settings.
00:34:42 ►
All of these research approaches are approaches
00:34:44 ►
that we endorse and use at Saybrook,
00:34:46 ►
and this is why Hoffman is such an important figure to our graduate students.
00:34:50 ►
Also, incidentally, a few weeks ago, some of us, including Andy Weil, who are here in the audience,
00:34:56 ►
were in the Soviet Union for a conference on hidden reserves of the human psyche in Moscow.
00:35:01 ►
And one of the discoveries that I made was that in the 1930s and 1940s, Soviet researchers
00:35:07 ►
were using mescaline and other psychedelic substances for self-experimentation. Now, they
00:35:13 ►
didn’t dare write this up because this was in the days of the Stalinist terror, but they kept
00:35:18 ►
journals, and now finally those journals are being carefully collected and hopefully will be
00:35:24 ►
published. And let me tell
00:35:25 ►
you, this is an important piece of data that I hope we can get here for the Albert Hoffman
00:35:30 ►
Library, these journals from Moscow.
00:35:39 ►
Finally, Albert Hoffman has never hesitated to consider the ethical implications of his
00:35:43 ►
discoveries. He has made known his opposition consider the ethical implications of his discoveries.
00:35:49 ►
He has made known his opposition to the casual use of LSD and similar substances,
00:35:54 ►
but he has also been open in discussing the philosophical implications of his work.
00:35:56 ►
He has spent time with numerous visitors,
00:36:00 ►
discussing their LSD-induced mystical and religious experiences.
00:36:04 ►
He has written and lectured on such topics as appearance and reality the connections between humans and the environment
00:36:07 ►
and the presence of a creative force in all living things
00:36:10 ►
in his autobiography, Albert Hoffman wrote
00:36:13 ►
what is needed today is a fundamental re-experience
00:36:17 ►
of the openness of all living things
00:36:19 ►
a comprehensive reality consciousness
00:36:21 ►
that will ever more infrequently develop spontaneously
00:36:25 ►
the more the primordial flora and fauna of our Mother Earth must yield to a dead technological environment.
00:36:32 ►
That’s something that my shaman friends would say, and Albert said it just as eloquently.
00:36:37 ►
When the history of consciousness research is fully written,
00:36:41 ►
the stature of Albert Hoffman will be obvious to the historians.
00:36:45 ►
They will write that here was a man
00:36:47 ►
who was a brilliant scientist and an innovative researcher,
00:36:50 ►
but more important, one who accepted the responsibilities
00:36:54 ►
accompanying his discoveries.
00:36:57 ►
Unlike many other scientists of the 20th century,
00:37:00 ►
he did not separate science from ethics.
00:37:03 ►
He behaved responsibly, with commitment,
00:37:06 ►
accepting the burdens as well as the joys of his mission.
00:37:10 ►
Our tributes to him tonight only foreshadow the accolades
00:37:14 ►
that will accumulate in time from a new psychology,
00:37:17 ►
a new medicine, and a new science of consciousness
00:37:20 ►
that will freely acknowledge that they will always be in Albert Hoffman’s debt.
00:37:25 ►
Thank you.
00:37:41 ►
Before I introduce this next speaker, I should say it’s a great honor for me to be asked to make these introductions.
00:37:51 ►
I am definitely the new kid on the block and quite in awe of these characters, let me tell you.
00:38:01 ►
Let me tell you.
00:38:07 ►
Our next speaker, a figure known to many of you.
00:38:14 ►
I think I first became aware of him, I don’t know exactly, probably it was fall of 65 or 66.
00:38:21 ►
There was a magazine called Ramparts, which has been defunct now for many years. But they printed an extract from the natural mind.
00:38:26 ►
And my friends and I, who were just beginning to smoke marijuana and use LSD, avidly studied
00:38:34 ►
the pages of this Ramparts article, for it purported to represent different drug states
00:38:41 ►
on each page of illustration.
00:38:44 ►
drug states on each page of illustration.
00:38:52 ►
And I think the natural mind, which was later superseded by chocolate to morphine, which had, to my mind, indubitable honor of being banned in Florida.
00:39:01 ►
These publications, which I’m sure are familiar to all of you, countless publications in ethnomycology, a man with a great enthusiasm for the mushroom foray, the long conversation, scholar, physician, social theorist, your friend and mine, Andy Weil.
00:39:36 ►
Hi. It’s good to be here. It’s always good to be among friends. I have to do a lot of work in the
00:39:44 ►
course of an average year, and a lot of that is going out into the cold and to be among friends. I have to do a lot of work in the course of an average year,
00:39:46 ►
and a lot of that is going out into the cold and not being among friends
00:39:49 ►
and trying to talk the message.
00:39:52 ►
In this past year, for example, I had to go and give a number of all-day workshops
00:39:56 ►
on consciousness and drug policy in the Iron Range of Minnesota
00:40:01 ►
at a number of community colleges that keep asking me to come back and do that. I had to talk to a number of audiences of psychiatrists in
00:40:11 ►
medical schools and hospitals, giving grand rounds on such subjects as the nature of the
00:40:17 ►
placebo response. It’s hard. It’s nice to be among friends.
00:40:23 ►
It’s hard. It’s nice to be among friends.
00:40:34 ►
Now, I wish I could tell you, I wish I could join in all the warmth of this occasion to tell you that the revolution in consciousness is moving right ahead
00:40:37 ►
and that we are about to transform government and external reality as a result of that.
00:40:45 ►
But, you know, it ain’t so.
00:40:47 ►
And I say that as somebody who goes through the Iron Range of Minnesota
00:40:50 ►
and passes through airports and looks around me.
00:40:53 ►
And I have to tell you that I feel that the majority of human beings that I encounter
00:40:58 ►
operate mostly out of fear, guilt.
00:41:09 ►
mostly out of fear, guilt. And when people operate from those emotions, they are dangerous to themselves and to others. We are a very small minority, a very small minority, and
00:41:16 ►
have no illusions about that. And whether our minority will grow fast enough and be able to influence humanity fast enough
00:41:26 ►
to avoid the catastrophe that is certain to come
00:41:30 ►
if we persist in the ways that we now persist.
00:41:33 ►
I don’t know.
00:41:34 ►
And if we can’t, if it may be as it appears
00:41:39 ►
that our ability to manipulate the environment,
00:41:42 ►
our technological ability,
00:41:44 ►
is so disparate with our ability to control the environment, our technological ability, is so disparate with
00:41:46 ►
our ability to control our own emotions. That may be a fatal flaw of our species. It may
00:41:52 ►
be. If it is, that has to be alright too, because I feel, and this is based on a lot
00:41:58 ►
of my experiences with substances that we all know and love, that deep down everything
00:42:04 ►
is alright and it’s the way it’s supposed to be.
00:42:06 ►
And there may be a lot of drama in between, but it’s all all right.
00:42:16 ►
I upset people a lot when I say, but this is true, that I am not a human chauvinist.
00:42:23 ►
If our species destroys itself, which is a possibility,
00:42:28 ►
I don’t think there’s any way that we can destroy life,
00:42:30 ►
by the way, or the life process, or consciousness, which
00:42:33 ►
I think preceded life and preceded the human organism
00:42:37 ►
and the human brain.
00:42:42 ►
If that happens, it’s OK with me if something else gets a chance.
00:42:46 ►
If the life force experiments with another form, that’s fine.
00:42:50 ►
That’s okay, too.
00:42:52 ►
I mean, I hope that doesn’t happen.
00:42:53 ►
I will work to try to keep it from happening, but either way, it’s all right.
00:42:56 ►
Now, if there’s any hope of keeping that from happening,
00:43:01 ►
it has to involve basic change at the level of consciousness.
00:43:07 ►
And particularly it has to involve basic change in the nature of science and technology,
00:43:12 ►
which has become the religion of our society.
00:43:16 ►
Medicine, which is an arm of that, really I think has taken the function of religion in traditional societies,
00:43:22 ►
and physicians fulfill the roles, although not very well,
00:43:26 ►
that priests have in traditional societies.
00:43:29 ►
When something happens
00:43:31 ►
that’s never happened before in a traditional society,
00:43:33 ►
you go to the shaman for an interpretation
00:43:35 ►
of whether it’s good or evil.
00:43:38 ►
In our society, we go to doctors,
00:43:40 ►
and we ask whether it’s good or bad for our health.
00:43:42 ►
That is our modern version of all this.
00:43:45 ►
But medicine and science do not fulfill this magical religious role well.
00:43:51 ►
There has to be a change in that area.
00:43:54 ►
And some of what I’d like to say to you tonight is about the nature of science,
00:43:59 ►
the problem of studying consciousness,
00:44:02 ►
and some of the lessons that I have learned from having the
00:44:05 ►
privilege of knowing Albert Hofmann and having seen him, although infrequently, at gatherings
00:44:11 ►
of this sort.
00:44:14 ►
There are some inherent problems in studying consciousness, and they should not be belittled,
00:44:19 ►
because you can’t make them go away.
00:44:22 ►
The first is that consciousness is not material.
00:44:26 ►
Our science is materialistic. How do you study, by methods looking at the material world, something which
00:44:33 ►
is fundamentally not material? This is why research on hypnosis is so awful. It’s why
00:44:40 ►
hypnosis, for however many years it’s been around, remains something, has an unsavory scent about it
00:44:47 ►
to scientists and medical doctors.
00:44:49 ►
Why it has always had an uneasy relationship to medical science.
00:44:54 ►
And even though the effects are dramatic and obvious,
00:44:57 ►
I once saw a woman have a baby by cesarean section
00:45:00 ►
under hypnosis anesthesia.
00:45:02 ►
She was fully conscious and was asked to look up and watch when the baby was delivered and so forth.
00:45:07 ►
I mean, what more could you ask of in the way of a dramatic example of how consciousness can change physical reactions?
00:45:14 ►
And yet despite this, research in this area is just awful. The reason is simply that when someone is in hypnosis,
00:45:21 ►
there is no objective way that you can document that fact. There is no
00:45:26 ►
objective reproducible change in the physical sphere that is a marker of that altered state
00:45:31 ►
of consciousness. And if your science is totally materialistic, how can you make sense of that?
00:45:36 ►
And if you can’t make sense of things as a scientist, what are you going to do about that?
00:45:41 ►
The first thing you can do is try to ignore it because it’s a threat to your worldview if there’s something out there that you can’t explain. And if people
00:45:48 ►
won’t let you ignore it, then you can make fun of it or belittle it or treat it as if
00:45:53 ►
it’s a joke or something irrelevant. And if you can’t do that and somebody continues to
00:45:58 ►
force you to look at it, you can get mad at the person and punch them out. And you see
00:46:02 ►
all these range of responses in this field of consciousness research.
00:46:07 ►
And the second problem is that consciousness
00:46:10 ►
is rooted in experience.
00:46:13 ►
And here, it seems to me, is the fundamental absurdity
00:46:16 ►
of the way that our science has developed.
00:46:18 ►
The most obvious fact of our existence
00:46:21 ►
is that we are conscious.
00:46:23 ►
That is the most obvious, most important aspect of our existence is that we are conscious. That is the most obvious, most important aspect
00:46:26 ►
of our existence. How can you construct a worldview? How can you construct a system
00:46:34 ►
that tries to explain the universe and leave that out? And yet that is what our science
00:46:41 ►
tries to do. It tries to act as if consciousness doesn’t exist
00:46:45 ►
and to construct mechanistic explanations of phenomena
00:46:49 ►
without reference to that.
00:46:51 ►
And that gets us in a lot of trouble.
00:46:53 ►
It leads us to come up with some very implausible mechanisms
00:46:57 ►
and explanations for phenomena.
00:46:59 ►
And it also leaves us unable to explain a lot of things out there,
00:47:03 ►
like hypnosis that may
00:47:05 ►
be very important to us. Now I am particularly conscious of this because I
00:47:08 ►
work as a physician. I practice general medicine and I practice medicine based
00:47:13 ►
on the assumption that consciousness is central to any theory of health and
00:47:17 ►
healing and illness and that when anybody comes to me whether they’re well
00:47:20 ►
or sick I am always paying attention to their state of consciousness as well as to their state of the body.
00:47:27 ►
And often I find in my experience that changes in the realm of consciousness must accompany
00:47:35 ►
physical treatments if the physical treatments are to work.
00:47:40 ►
That is my experience.
00:47:42 ►
And I go by my experience.
00:47:44 ►
I see all the time, one of the saddest things that I see in my practice
00:47:48 ►
is vast numbers of people who come to me who have been inadvertently hexed
00:47:53 ►
by their encounters with medical doctors.
00:47:55 ►
You know, there’s a very well-known phenomenon of hexing
00:47:58 ►
that has been described by anthropologists and psychologists.
00:48:01 ►
There’s a little bit of medical literature on this as well.
00:48:04 ►
There was an article in the AMA journal in this past year
00:48:07 ►
reported without comment of a woman here in Southern California who had an advanced case of lupus, systemic lupus, a major and serious autoimmune disease.
00:48:17 ►
She was examined in a university hospital here, put on massive doses of steroids and immunosuppressive drugs, did not respond.
00:48:25 ►
put on massive doses of steroids and immunosuppressive drugs, did not respond. She was Filipino. And after a period of time, she told her doctor that she was certain
00:48:30 ►
that the disease was the result of a curse that had been placed on her by a witch doctor in the Philippines,
00:48:35 ►
and that she could not be helped unless she went back there and had that lifted.
00:48:38 ►
So she went back there and had a good witch doctor lift the curse, and she came back cured.
00:48:43 ►
She was off all medication at that point. And this was reported in the AMA Journal without comment as an example of hexing in
00:48:48 ►
medicine. So they can see that kind of thing, but don’t know what to make of it. But what
00:48:53 ►
I see is the creation of disease by doctors, or the perpetuation of disease by doctors.
00:49:00 ►
And this is done with verbal magic. If I were king, I would require in medical schools a course in the power of words.
00:49:10 ►
And the importance in being very…
00:49:13 ►
The importance of being extremely careful about the words you choose in speaking to a sick patient
00:49:25 ►
and a patient who has come to you.
00:49:27 ►
Most medical doctors
00:49:28 ►
have no sense of their power as priests.
00:49:31 ►
They have no sense of their power
00:49:33 ►
to create expectation
00:49:34 ►
in somebody who comes to them in that role.
00:49:37 ►
And they abuse that all the time.
00:49:38 ►
Occasionally this happens consciously.
00:49:40 ►
Sometimes I see cases
00:49:41 ►
where doctors dislike patients
00:49:43 ►
and say nasty things to them in anger, but that’s quite rare.
00:49:46 ►
Much more often, these things are said unconsciously and unthinkingly.
00:49:50 ►
A doctor makes some idle remark, and years later, this remark burns like a red-hot coal in that person’s memory
00:49:59 ►
and is a principal obstacle to healing or any change in their physical condition.
00:50:03 ►
Let me give you a very gross example. A patient came to me this past year from Finland, a woman from
00:50:08 ►
Helsinki, who was in her mid-30s and had had multiple sclerosis for the past five years.
00:50:15 ►
She was on large doses of toxic drugs, steroids and immunosuppressive drugs, which she did
00:50:19 ►
not need and were doing her only harm. She was very depressed. The thing that most alarmed me about
00:50:25 ►
her was that her emotional reaction to her illness was completely wooden. She talked about it as if
00:50:31 ►
it were happening to someone else. I thought that was a very alarming state of consciousness to be
00:50:36 ►
in about having a devastating disease. I worked with her over the period of a month and got her
00:50:42 ►
connected up with, I put her on a good diet and I gave her some herbal medicines to take and I got her connected up with a visualization
00:50:49 ►
therapist and with some good exercise physiology people and a lot of people who had very positive
00:50:54 ►
attitudes. And over the space of a month, she changed completely. She became a happy person
00:51:01 ►
who was able to laugh. And for the first time, she saw the possibility that she could affect the course of this disease, that she was not simply a
00:51:08 ►
passive victim of some outside force operating on her.
00:51:12 ►
And the day before she was to go back to Finland, we were sitting together, and she was laughing
00:51:16 ►
and joking, and she said to me, you know you wouldn’t believe what those doctors did to
00:51:19 ►
me in Helsinki.
00:51:21 ►
She said that the neurologist at this hospital, that it had taken a while
00:51:25 ►
to make the diagnosis. Her main symptom was dizzy spells, and there had been endless testing,
00:51:29 ►
and finally they had made the diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. And when they did, the
00:51:33 ►
chief neurologist called her into his office and told her she had this disease. And then
00:51:37 ►
he said, wait here a minute, and he went out and brought in a wheelchair, and asked her
00:51:41 ►
to sit in the wheelchair, and said that he suggested that she sit in
00:51:45 ►
a wheelchair for one to two hours a day to practice. Wheelchair practice. I say that’s
00:51:55 ►
a gross example, but I see many, many, many examples of this kind of thing. And it comes
00:52:00 ►
from ignorance. It comes from not seeing the importance of states of consciousness, of the non-physical realm of medicine and treatment and interaction of people, of thinking that everything is material.
00:52:13 ►
And I must also tell you that in my time in medicine, I got my medical degree in 1968, 20 years, this has gotten worse, not better.
00:52:20 ►
For example, when I was in medical school, ulcerative colitis was considered one of
00:52:27 ►
the classic four psychosomatic diseases, one of the four diseases that all doctors recognized
00:52:33 ►
had a mental-emotional component. Medical students today are not taught that. They’re now taught all
00:52:39 ►
about elaborate mechanisms in the colon and interactions with bacteria and biochemical
00:52:44 ►
things in the colon, and I bacteria and biochemical things in the
00:52:45 ►
colon.
00:52:46 ►
And I presented them a case.
00:52:47 ►
The way I discovered this, I had a fascinating case of a man who was a heavy smoker in good
00:52:52 ►
health in his 50s who quit smoking.
00:52:56 ►
And three months later, out of the blue, developed the symptoms of ulcerative colitis.
00:52:59 ►
He went to a chief of gastroenterology at a university hospital, was put on a lot of
00:53:04 ►
drugs that did him no good.
00:53:05 ►
They did not tell him not to drink coffee.
00:53:07 ►
He was drinking three cups of coffee in the morning,
00:53:09 ►
which is poison for anyone with colitis.
00:53:12 ►
After several months of getting in worse and worse relations with the gastroenterologist,
00:53:16 ►
he had an intuition that if he started smoking again, his colitis would go away.
00:53:21 ►
So he did, and it did, very rapidly.
00:53:24 ►
And when he came to see me,
00:53:25 ►
he had been through this cycle two more times
00:53:27 ►
with the same results,
00:53:29 ►
except that each time the colitis had appeared faster
00:53:32 ►
after he stopped smoking
00:53:34 ►
and it took longer to go away after he started.
00:53:36 ►
And when I saw him, he was terrified
00:53:38 ►
that he was going to wind up both being an addicted smoker
00:53:40 ►
and have ulcerative colitis.
00:53:43 ►
This year, at the beginning of, in the middle of last year,
00:53:48 ►
an article appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine
00:53:51 ►
reporting an increased incidence of ulcerative colitis
00:53:54 ►
in ex-smokers, not in current smokers.
00:53:56 ►
And the article went through all this biochemistry
00:53:59 ►
about nicotine and so forth, and the conclusion was,
00:54:02 ►
we can think of no possible mechanism by which cessation
00:54:06 ►
of smoking could result in an increased incidence of ulcerative colitis.
00:54:09 ►
I mean, how dense do you have to be to see that mechanism?
00:54:14 ►
Smoking literally burns up nervous energy.
00:54:16 ►
That’s one reason why people get sucked into it.
00:54:18 ►
And if you shut that door, that energy is going to go somewhere.
00:54:22 ►
Why in one person it goes down and causes this problem in the colon, and why in another
00:54:26 ►
person it may do something else, I don’t know.
00:54:28 ►
And I have no problem saying I don’t
00:54:30 ►
know about things either.
00:54:34 ►
The reason that’s not
00:54:36 ►
Anyway, I presented this case to a group of
00:54:38 ►
second year medical students at the University of Arizona.
00:54:40 ►
They had not been taught
00:54:42 ►
that ulcerative colitis was a psychosomatic
00:54:44 ►
disease. They had not heard that that ulcerative colitis was a psychosomatic disease.
00:54:45 ►
They had not heard that. The most important single fact about ulcerative colitis,
00:54:49 ►
because that’s the sphere through which you can influence it most, not mentioned.
00:54:54 ►
So in 20 years, I don’t see progress. I see things going in the other direction.
00:54:59 ►
Now, one of the most obnoxious traits of modern science is its tendency to negate our experience.
00:55:08 ►
I mean, there is nothing more obnoxious
00:55:10 ►
than to tell a scientist that you have experienced something
00:55:13 ►
and the scientist tells you that no, you haven’t
00:55:16 ►
because he can demonstrate objectively that that didn’t happen.
00:55:21 ►
And science does this all the time.
00:55:23 ►
Science does it very frequently in the area of psychoactive drug research
00:55:26 ►
there are an awful lot of researchers
00:55:28 ►
who have never taken a psychoactive drug
00:55:30 ►
and are studying things like marijuana
00:55:32 ►
or LSD and have not tried it themselves
00:55:35 ►
how can you
00:55:36 ►
how can you do that?
00:55:53 ►
there was a period when I got asked a lot to testify as an expert witness in various drug cases.
00:56:00 ►
And when these would go to juries, in front of judges, the prosecutors are usually reasonably well behaved.
00:56:02 ►
But when you get in front of a jury, it’s no holds barred. And so they start right in with, well, Dr. Weil, have you ever taken this drug yourself?
00:56:07 ►
And I did this recently in a peyote case in Arizona, in a Mormon area of Arizona, which didn’t look great.
00:56:14 ►
And the chief of pharmacology, who is a hardcore scientific materialist at my medical school,
00:56:20 ►
and we don’t get along very well, we nod to each other in the hall, but we think very differently,
00:56:28 ►
was the chief witness for the prosecution who tested about talked about giving mescaline to cats grinding up their brains and looking at degenerative changes
00:56:32 ►
i said what i knew about peyote and the prosecutor a woman then lit into me and started with you know
00:56:39 ►
well dr why have you ever taken peyote i said of course i had taken peyote that i wouldn’t consider
00:56:43 ►
myself an expert on peyote if, in addition to whatever else I did,
00:56:46 ►
I hadn’t taken it myself.
00:56:48 ►
And she said, urgh.
00:56:51 ►
And what other, have you taken this,
00:56:53 ►
and have you taken that?
00:56:53 ►
And I said, look, I can save you time.
00:56:55 ►
I have taken every drug I have ever written about.
00:56:59 ►
And I wouldn’t do it otherwise.
00:57:02 ►
And she said, well, have you gotten
00:57:04 ►
legal permission to do this? I said, well, I don’t know it otherwise. And she said, well, have you gotten legal permission to do this?
00:57:07 ►
I said, well, I don’t know who you apply to for a permit to take nutmeg, for example.
00:57:14 ►
Anyway, the jury acquitted the man.
00:57:17 ►
They said this was an unwarranted invasion of freedom of religion by the state of Arizona.
00:57:22 ►
Great. Good.
00:57:32 ►
of Freedom of Religion by the state of Arizona. Great. And when talked to afterwards by lawyers,
00:57:36 ►
they said a major reason was the contrast between this pharmacologist who testified at great length and talked down to them and made them feel as if they didn’t know anything
00:57:40 ►
and couldn’t understand science, and somebody who talked from their own experience.
00:57:46 ►
Now, this is a real problem because science and its products today are very toxic in our world.
00:57:52 ►
A lot of the problem that we have is the way that science and technology are going.
00:57:58 ►
Albert Hofmann is, to me, a model for what science can be.
00:58:04 ►
He has operated from intuition. He has operated
00:58:07 ►
from his own experience. He is a good scientist. He combines the best of experience of intuition
00:58:13 ►
and intellect. That to me is a model for what science should be. And he’s come up with very
00:58:18 ►
good things. And I want to make one other comment about him
00:58:25 ►
that I find another area in which I am very impressed by him.
00:58:29 ►
And this I say as a medical doctor.
00:58:32 ►
He ages terrifically well.
00:58:39 ►
When I first met him years ago,
00:58:42 ►
he presented himself as a very formal Swiss chemist.
00:58:48 ►
But I noticed that he twinkled.
00:58:51 ►
And I still see that twinkle about him.
00:58:54 ►
And his presence is much younger than his chronological age.
00:58:59 ►
That, to me, is very interesting.
00:59:00 ►
I have a lot of old people in my medical practice, a lot of people in their 70s and 80s.
00:59:09 ►
And a lot of people ask me, what is the secret of growing old well? Well, the materialistic scientist says it’s to choose your parents right. You know, that it’s all genes. Well, I don’t
00:59:14 ►
believe that because that’s not my prejudice. I look at the other side of things. And I think
00:59:18 ►
that mental state and mental attitude are the key to that. And there is something to me that I connect that fact of
00:59:26 ►
twinkling and youthfulness not equivalent to chronological age. So I think in both of
00:59:33 ►
those areas, he is a teacher for me and an inspiration for all of us. And I’m delighted
00:59:37 ►
to have been asked here to talk about him. Thank you. Thank you.
01:00:08 ►
Well, Andy will be a tough act to follow, but we have just the man.
01:00:17 ►
But before I introduce him, some of you may wonder why Laura Huxley is not here tonight.
01:00:25 ►
She had a crisis in her family that arose rather close to this date,
01:00:28 ►
and so she was unable to be here tonight. It’s a great pity because she was to represent femininity and the goddess,
01:00:35 ►
which is certainly a central concern for anyone
01:00:39 ►
who is sensitive to the psychedelic issue.
01:00:48 ►
In fact, one way of looking at what psychedelics do
01:00:52 ►
is they simply dissolve the male ego
01:00:55 ►
and allow a more natural constellation of the psyche to show through.
01:01:09 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:01:18 ►
And who is this just the man to follow Andy Weil, you may ask?
01:01:22 ►
Well, my guess is that it’s John Lilly.
01:01:25 ►
But I actually haven’t had a chance to listen to the next part of this conference yet,
01:01:29 ►
and so can’t say for absolute certainty that that’s who it is.
01:01:32 ►
What I can say for sure is that you’ll find out in my next podcast.
01:01:36 ►
And also, I think we’ll be hearing directly from Dr. Hoffman himself.
01:01:41 ►
Now, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out something that you already know,
01:01:44 ►
but maybe you didn’t think about when you heard Dr. Andrew Weil just now say
01:01:48 ►
We, meaning the psychedelic community
01:01:51 ►
We are a very small minority
01:01:53 ►
A very small minority
01:01:55 ►
And have no illusions about that
01:01:56 ►
As you know, he made that statement in 1988
01:02:00 ►
And I guess in the context of 6. a half billion people on earth, that may
01:02:06 ►
be so.
01:02:07 ►
But I can promise you that there must be many millions of us today, because just for this
01:02:12 ►
podcast alone, there have been downloads from over a million unique IP addresses, which
01:02:17 ►
may only translate into a few hundred thousand people, but this is only one of many, many
01:02:22 ►
podcasts that focus on the worldwide psychedelic community.
01:02:25 ►
What wasn’t expected in 1988 is this thing we call the Internet.
01:02:30 ►
It’s brought about more rapid change in this world over the past 20 years
01:02:34 ►
than the entire amount of change our species has experienced in hundreds of generations.
01:02:39 ►
At least, that’s my humble opinion.
01:02:42 ►
This is it. In case you missed the memo, by the way, this is the big one,
01:02:45 ►
the quantum change that Terence sometimes called the end of history,
01:02:49 ►
but what I think may be more accurately called the beginning of the history
01:02:54 ►
of a global species of constantly interconnected, communicating beings.
01:02:59 ►
Maybe it’s even the awakening of the noosphere, as Teilhard once proposed.
01:03:04 ►
Or, of course, we can still blow it,
01:03:06 ►
and the tipper of the last tipping point may just be you.
01:03:10 ►
So I’m going to be really nice to you
01:03:12 ►
and encourage you to stay calm and keep on an even keel
01:03:15 ►
so that you can tip us in the right direction.
01:03:19 ►
Right now, every single woman, child, and man on the planet
01:03:22 ►
stands to be a pivotal figure in their immediate surroundings.
01:03:26 ►
Which means that you and I had better take a little break right now.
01:03:30 ►
Maybe have a bag of vape, turn on some good music, and get up and dance.
01:03:34 ►
For life is ultimately a dance, you know.
01:03:37 ►
The point isn’t to get somewhere, it is simply to dance, to enjoy the dance of life.
01:03:41 ►
Who knows, this could be your last life, so why not make it enjoyable?
01:03:47 ►
Well, that’s a little more philosophic
01:03:49 ►
than this old carnival barker should be waxing,
01:03:51 ►
and so I’d better close today’s podcast
01:03:53 ►
by reminding you once again
01:03:55 ►
that this and most of the podcasts
01:03:56 ►
from The Psychedelic Salon
01:03:58 ►
are freely available for you to use
01:03:59 ►
in your own audio projects
01:04:01 ►
under the Creative Commons Attribution
01:04:02 ►
Non-Commercial ShareLike 3.0 license.
01:04:05 ►
And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the
01:04:08 ►
bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
01:04:13 ►
And if you’re interested in the philosophy behind the salon, well, you can hear all about
01:04:18 ►
it in my novel, The Genesis Generation, which is available as an audiobook that you can
01:04:23 ►
download at genesisgeneration.us.
01:04:26 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends.