Program Notes
Guest speakers: Ram Dass, Timothy Leary, Paul Krassner, and Tom Van Sant
Ram Dass & Lorenzocirca: 2001
“LSD produces religions experiences, but it’s less evident that it can produce a religious life.” -Houston Smith
[NOTE: The following quotations are by Timothy Leary.]
“The origins of most great religions go back to groups of people who made this discovery that you don’t look for god, you don’t look for power in the Caesars or in the temples or in the churches and all that. You look within.”
“The fun has hardly begun.”
[NOTE: The following quotations are by Ram Dass.]
“But inside myself, as you all understand, that what you see [during a psychedelic experience] to turn it into what you be is a really subtle and sensitive trip.”
“And that’s part of the integrity of this experience, of growing into seeing the relative nature of reality and the paper mache quality of social institutions and the way in which personalities turn into style rather than substance.”
“And it’s interesting that it’s taken many years to grow into the kinds of visions that [Leary] was having in those days and to appreciate how much what happened to me through psychedelics transformed my consciousness in such a way that death meant something different to me that allowed me to be in the presence of somebody that was dying in a way that honored the drama of the process without getting lost in it.”
“What I have experienced in the past twenty five years, if I were to look at what the essence of the matter is, is that having touched the unconditioned and having seen the relative nature of reality and the way the mind creates the dream, that has given me a faith in the possibility of who we are.”
“And it feels to me that as long as I live I will still be growing into what happened to me on the first psychedelic experience.”
“And allow my heart to be open, like keeping your heart open in hell, keeping your heart open in the presence of suffering, because even at the moment when the suffering is most intense, right behind it inside you is an incredible equanimity, because one of the things that I touched through acid was an extreme appreciation of the perfection of the laws of form, the perfection of the unfolding of the law.”
“But I can feel, when I look at what our spiritual journeys are on this plain, it feels so obvious to me, that the stuff we are handed is the grist for the mill of awakening out of the illusion until we can be in the form without being entrapped by it so that we can play lightly. We can dance sweetly. We can have joy in the presence of the hell-realms and do what we can do to relieve the suffering without getting burned out and lost and bitter and cynical and frustrated. And we have the tolerance to deal with chaos and uncertainty.”
“What has happened is that the Sixties unleashed something extraordinarily powerful that is still reverberating and echoing in this culture, and actually in the world. And what that released was a recognition in people that they were free to change, institutions and themselves.”
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And first of all, I’d like to thank some of our fellow salonners who have made donations to help with the expenses associated with these podcasts.
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And these fine people include longtime supporter Mark C., Lauren N., Chris T., and Scott M., who also sent a note that read,
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Hey, Lorenzo, met you very briefly at Burning Man 2006.
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I was going by the moniker Trevor at the time,
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and was likely the only one-legged wanderer you ran across at the burn.
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Wink.
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Recently been listening to the salon and just wanted to pitch in.
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Hope all is well.
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Well, yes Trevor, all is well, and thank you for that overly generous donation.
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And after receiving your note, I got a little nostalgic about Burning Man and decided to take another look at my pictures from 2006,
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which was the last year that I produced the Planque Norte lectures there.
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Unfortunately, I’m not going to make it to the burn again this year,
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and so after getting started with the Burning Man pictures,
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I thought, hey, what the heck, since I’m not going to lose several weeks involved with the burn this year, and so after getting started with the Burning Man pictures, I thought, hey, what the heck, since I’m not going to lose several weeks involved with the burn
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this year, I can at least maybe afford to spend a little time just poking around the
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web and seeing how the lead up to the burn is going this year.
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And, well, one thing led to another, and I wound up surfing Burning Man sites for the
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better part of two days, which is why this podcast is a little late coming
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out this week. And I have to admit that after reading about a whiteout that the DPW and art
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installation crews went through a couple of days ago, I was glad that I’m not there right now.
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Apparently the storm that they had was so strong that tents were being shredded.
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And when I read about that, an old saying came to
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mind from my days as a hot air balloon pilot. You probably didn’t know that about me, did you?
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Well, back in my flying days, whenever the weather was questionable, our pat saying was,
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I’d rather be down here wishing I was up there than up there wishing I was down here.
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And so for this year, I’ll be down here wishing I was on the playa there wishing I was down here. And so for this year I’ll be down
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here wishing I was on the playa with the rest of the tribe. But never fear, I plan on returning
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for the burn in 2012 when I’ll be celebrating my 70th birthday. And I hope you can make it too
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to that one. Actually, I hope I can make it. But at least that’s my present intention.
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And lest I forget, I wouldn’t even be able to dream about going back to the playa
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if it wasn’t for all of our wonderful supporters like Trevor, Mark, Lauren, Chris, and Scott,
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as well as those fine souls who recently bought a copy of my novel through my new Pay What You Can site,
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which I’ll mention at the end of this program.
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But for now, let’s get on with the show today.
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I’m going to play another recording that was sent to me by fellow salonner Gary Eisenberg,
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and it’s from another fundraising event for the Albert Hoffman Foundation.
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This one, I think, was actually held before the event that I featured in podcasts 237
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and 238.
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The CD that Gary sent is labeled Beyond the Doors of Perception, Part 2 Only, and shows
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a date of July 24th, 1988.
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And from what I gather, Paul Krasner was the emcee for the event, and Laura Huxley must
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have been the first speaker.
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We’ll pick up right now in the middle of Timothy Leary’s talk,
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where he gets a little overly optimistic in thinking that by 1998,
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the U.S. Congress would be overwhelmingly Bob Dylan fans and would have changed everything.
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And I guess we know how far off the mark that prediction was.
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Now, following Dr. Leary’s short part of the
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talk, the first voice we hear is, I think, that of Paul Krasner. And if you aren’t familiar with
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Paul, you’re missing a huge part of the history of the 60s. He’s most definitely one of my heroes,
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and he’s also one heck of a nice person. Paul then introduces Tom Van Sant, who I’m sure you
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know is a major artist whose work
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may be found in public spaces all over the planet. Tom only makes a brief appearance,
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but he does make mention of his participation in Oscar Janager’s research several years before.
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Then comes Ram Dass, whose talk makes up most of this podcast and is one that I think you’ll
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really enjoy. While he does briefly tell a story or two that we may have heard before,
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I think that overall you are going to find a few new little Ram Dass gems in this talk.
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So let’s time travel back now to July of 1988 and join the good Dr. Timothy Leary.
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the good Dr. Timothy Leary.
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And I say that in the best sense of the word of a man who’s, yeah,
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and I’m proud to be your friend, Richard,
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and look forward to many years ahead,
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better and better.
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Now, Ralph Metzler is another hero.
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When Ralph, when I first met Ralph, he came into our office at Harvard
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and said he wanted to volunteer for this drug research.
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Ralph had come from England where he was a top student in the English public school system
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and he was smarter than most of the American-trained graduate students.
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But he was so precise and he’s so British and I thought oh my god
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can I take this
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young man into the maximum
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security prison and like that
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well I want to tell you that
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again when you talk about courage
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and risk taking and the ability to
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put yourself on the front line
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and your body and your reputation
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and your mind and even your soul
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I’ve watched the saga.
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Now, Ralph just told you tonight that there’s this very, very experimental psychologist
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who in ten years is the leading top exponents of psychedelic experience,
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and then he stopped for nine years.
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Now, that’s interesting.
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And then in the last, I guess, eight or nine years,
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Ralph has moved ahead
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and has done something
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that’s very valuable and necessary.
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He’s our historian.
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You heard him in action tonight.
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He’s also made us acquainted
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with the history
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of where we all came from,
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the shamanic tradition,
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the voodoo tradition,
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the Celtic, the German traditions.
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And again, did you notice, I was saying to Richard as we were watching Ralph on the podium here tonight,
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you know, he could be a movie star, you know.
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He’s got the Redford mustache and all that.
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I mean, yeah, so I’m proud to be part of this trio.
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It was not a trio trio I apologize for that
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there were many of us there
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overall there must have been 50 people
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in our project at Harvard
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and I want to tell you
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I’d put us up against the 1927 New York Yankees
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or Plato Aristotle
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I’d meet in fair context
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that was a hell of a group of thinkers.
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Down the street, down Mass Avenue,
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there was a college called MIT.
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And the chairman of the philosophy department at MIT
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was a man named Houston Smith,
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who was hanging out.
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Actually, he brought Aldous Huxley there too.
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Remember, Laura, when Aldous was the visiting professor there and he
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came over to Harvard said the Richard
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Ralph and I listen I’d like to have some
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psilocybin you know well man what do you
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mean coming in here you want to score
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what’s going what do you want to do with
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it
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I teach the the graduate course on
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mysticism at MIT and I’d like to have
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some laboratory demonstrations.
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And in due course
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he worked with us
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we trained him and he went back to MIT
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and believe it or not, I know
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in 1988 it sounds
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as though I’m hallucinating when I say this
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but he was giving psychedelic drugs
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as part of a required course
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at MIT.
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Is it a dream? Is it a dream?
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Our Walter Houston Clark, who was an emeritus professor in his 60s,
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came into our office and he wanted to take a trip.
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Oh, my God.
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It turned out that for the next 20 years, he’s now in his 80s,
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he’s been the most gung-ho, acrobatic, psychedelic.
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He became the president of the American Psychological Association, religious, so forth.
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He’s, I mean, the heroism and the courage of these men to take this position and stick by it year after year.
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You know, take this position and stick by it year after year.
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George Litwin and Gunther Weil.
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I could go down the list of the people that were there with us at Harvard.
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I’m very proud, and I know Richard shares this pride with me.
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Ralph doesn’t because he was a graduate student. But as faculty members, I think Richard and I can say that of the 20 or 25 students that were working with us,
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maybe only one of them ever got tenure.
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Not one of them went on the old assembly line and got on that thing of assistant professor and associate professor.
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I mean, I’m so proud of each in their own way.
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One of our graduate students, matter of fact,
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has become Nancy Reagan’s number one advisor on the war on drugs.
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Do your thing, man.
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The interesting thing was, at that time, between 55 and 70, and certainly between 60 and 68,
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when we were busy doing our work, there were at least 50 other research projects and small groups that were working together in this frontier.
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Now, I can’t speak for all of them but I can speak for a group
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at Harvard. There were at least two things that we knew right from the
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beginning. Number one was that we didn’t know what we were doing. There was
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simply nothing in American psychology or American science or American philosophy
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that could prepare the American in 1960s for a full-blown, full-tilt boogie of psychedelic experience.
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It was hallucination or a psychotomimetic or a schizophrenic, and literally most of the
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academics thought we were out of our minds, encouraging people or allowing them to go
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out of their minds.
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There was no language, there was no tradition.
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there was no language, there was no tradition and that’s where people like Aldous Huxley and Gerald Hurd
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and Humphrey Osmond and Alan Watts came in
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they sat down with us very quietly
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they took us into the drawing room like fathers and uncles with young kids
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and they said, listen boys, this has been going on for thousands of years
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as a matter of fact, if you trace the philosophic history of the human race,
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you’ll find that in every culture,
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and particularly any culture that has lasted
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or that gave our species a message or a cargo of interesting philosophy,
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you will always find this tradition of the transcendental experience
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or the mystery cult.
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Ralph, of course, knows much more about this than I will tell you about Eleusis.
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And the origins of most of the great religions go back to groups of people
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who made this discovery that you don’t look for God
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or you don’t look for power in the Caesars or in the temples
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or in the churches and all that.
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You look within.
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They fired Emerson from Harvard, by the way,
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for saying that in around 1838. He said,
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self-reliance, which of course means drop out. They wouldn’t let Emerson back to Harvard
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for 38 years, and after all, Richard and I came back after 20 years, so it shows that
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something’s loosening up.
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We didn’t know what we were doing.
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We knew, number two, that we were onto something that was bigger than both of us,
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bigger than all of us.
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And we felt, as I know most of you
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in this wonderful scene tonight feel,
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that we have been and we are
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and we shall continue to be part of one of the
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glorious missions of human spirit we’re homo sapiens sapiens it’s our job we’re the animals
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or the entities that are wired fired and inspired and given this hundred billion neuron brain to
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think and to explore the um the fun has hardly begun the fun has hardly begun.
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The fun has hardly begun.
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See, we knew by the mid-60s, all of us, by the way,
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were taken totally by surprise with the baby boom.
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You know, we didn’t realize that what Dr. Spock told kids
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that demand feeding, that they’d want demand breeding,
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and they’d want to have some say of their education
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and their sex lives,
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and they’d want something better than alcohol.
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So by the mid-60s, we realized
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it was going to take at least 20, maybe 25 years
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before the seeds that we were planting
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or the work we were starting would become cohesive as an intellectual, as a scientific, a linguistic entity,
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and above all as a sociocultural situation.
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I have a lot of fun these days talking.
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It’s an election year.
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People ask about what’s going on and so forth,
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and I look in the camera or I look at the reporter, and I say,
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well, I have very simple and obvious common sense statistical fact
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that I think is going to change a lot of things.
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Ten years from now in the year 1998,
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over 75%
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of the House of Representatives
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and probably 66%
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of the high court
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will have been Bob Dylan fans
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30 years before.
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I know we’re all here
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to listen to Richard.
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Oz, one more time, I want to thank you for making this possible.
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Count on all of our support in the future.
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And I know we’re going to look forward to Richard.
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Thank you and good night.
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Thank you, Tim.
00:15:15 ►
For a moment there when you were describing how handsome Ram Dass and Ralph Metzner were,
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I thought you were coming out of the closet.
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I thought you were coming out of the closet.
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Tim is appearing as a stand-up philosopher at a club called Carlos and Charlie’s,
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starting next Sunday for nine weeks. And now I’m going to introduce somebody who’s not on the program, Tom Van Sant, who was
00:15:53 ►
in the original experiments that Oz was doing and is an incredibly imaginative artist.
00:16:00 ►
Among his achievements is he’s constructed the largest kite in the world.
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And he’ll now share with us what he learned from flying it.
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It’s Tom Van Sant.
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Thank you very much.
00:16:21 ►
I was quite disappointed that Judge Kennedy was withdrawn from nomination.
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I thought he would make an excellent joint commissioner on the high court.
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I had the pleasure of meeting Oz Janiger in 1957 through an interview I did of Gerald Hurd for a small magazine.
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through an interview I did of Gerald Hurd for a small magazine,
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and this remarkable man spoke about this extraordinary experience.
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And I went down to the Oz Janager program after sort of being assured that it wouldn’t turn me totally crazy and participated in this in this program where
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the genius of oz’s program was that he selected artists to paint a particular subject which was
00:17:15 ►
a cochineal doll before during and after the lsd experience so he not only had written commentary, but he had this visual representation of the change of consciousness.
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I asked him what it was going to be like, and all he could do was chuckle.
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When it was over, I called Gerald Hurd and asked him what it was I’d seen.
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He told me it was absolutely true
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everything I’d seen
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and then I made the mistake of
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since there was only maybe a couple of dozen people that knew about this
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certainly on this code
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I made the mistake of talking to somebody who didn’t know about it
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and describing it as access to God
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through the top buttonhole of my shirt.
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And the communication wasn’t complete.
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I made a mistake last Wednesday night when they asked, well, who will stand up and give
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the pitch for donations to the Albert Hoffman Museum?
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After about a minute of silence, I said, hell, I will.
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And so that’s what I would like to do.
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I would like to reinforce Oz Janiger and Tim’s support of the Albert Hoffman Museum gallery and library,
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Albert Hoffman Museum gallery and library, the repository for LSD and other mind-expanding drugs and experiences, and a repository for those subjects.
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And I urge everyone to respond to the back portion of their invitation, which invites donations,
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and there will be ushers at the doors at the exits,
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and you can’t get out unless you donate.
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And thank you very much.
00:19:17 ►
Thank you.
00:19:30 ►
I hardly know how to introduce our next speaker because he’s kept changing his name.
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I remember they used to, at the beginning, they would say,
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and now we have Richard Alpert.
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Then they had to say, now we have Baba Ram Dass, formerly Richard Alpert.
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And then he was going to go back to Richard Alpert.
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So we’re going to say, now let’s introduce Richard Alpert, formerly Baba Ram Dass.
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Or we could just skip the middle and say, here’s Richard Alpert, formerly Richard Alpert.
00:20:02 ►
but I just know that meeting these people at Millbrook for me
00:20:06 ►
made me realize that even if there was brain damage
00:20:09 ►
it was worth the risk
00:20:10 ►
and one time I asked Ram Dass
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if we exchanged our philosophies
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that if I believed in reincarnation and he didn’t believe
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in reincarnation how would that change our behavior and he thought for a split second and said well
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if you believed in reincarnation you wouldn’t ask a question like that
00:20:36 ►
and it was sort of like a zen cohen
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but it was Laura Huxley who persuaded him to to drop the robes and just to wear a casual sweater
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and to drop the baba.
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So I’m honored and delighted to introduce Just Plain Ram Dass. Good evening.
00:21:21 ►
And it is a good evening.
00:21:24 ►
It’s a very precious evening. And it is a good evening. This is a very precious evening.
00:21:26 ►
Just the way in which we are out front in honoring something that’s played such an important part in our lives.
00:21:36 ►
And it’s interesting, so often people say to me,
00:21:41 ►
well, you have stopped using drugs, haven’t you?
00:21:44 ►
Often people say to me, well, you have stopped using drugs, haven’t you?
00:21:51 ►
And I always say, no, I haven’t.
00:21:56 ►
In fact, I take acid every couple of years to find out what I’ve forgotten. When Paul was talking about being in court on acid,
00:22:14 ►
it brought to mind a moment when, for many years,
00:22:21 ►
I was plagued with the problem of coming down all the time.
00:22:27 ►
And since I was Mr. LSD Jr.
00:22:38 ►
behind the master,
00:22:48 ►
he saved me from middle-class neurosis.
00:22:50 ►
Timothy did.
00:22:59 ►
At any rate, I always wanted to offer an audience consciousness as clear as I could get it.
00:23:06 ►
And so I was always in the bathroom or somewhere preparing to go on stage in a psychedelic way
00:23:09 ►
and I was appearing at the committee in San Francisco
00:23:14 ►
which is a club
00:23:15 ►
and I had been out to Half Moon Bay to prepare
00:23:19 ►
and had taken some LSD but I mistimed it
00:23:22 ►
so it peaked as people dressed me and put me out on stage and
00:23:27 ►
and I sat on the stool and I looked out at the audience and I saw ocean waves and
00:23:38 ►
I didn’t really know what I was doing there and
00:23:42 ►
sort of as Paul was pointing out, which level to come in on.
00:23:48 ►
So I said, are there any questions?
00:23:58 ►
And this large fish stood up.
00:24:14 ►
He had a tie and a jacket on.
00:24:23 ►
And he said, could you comment on the relative merits of serotonin,
00:24:28 ►
the synaptic theories of the hypothalamus. And it was this fish opening his mouth and
00:24:30 ►
what he was
00:24:36 ►
saying was, do you love me?
00:24:43 ►
So
00:24:44 ►
he sat down and I said to him, yes, I love you.
00:24:47 ►
And he said, that doesn’t satisfy me at all. After I thought about all these anniversaries,
00:25:20 ►
and this is actually the 30th year anniversary of when I was first, when somebody extended compassion to me.
00:25:29 ►
I was a psychologist, psychotherapist, psychologist at Stanford and a real tight-ass person.
00:25:38 ►
And I was, my first therapy patient saw my predicament,
00:25:45 ►
and he turned me on to grass, which was a…
00:25:55 ►
His name was Vic Lovell, and Ken Kesey dedicated
00:25:58 ►
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to Vic, by the way,
00:26:01 ►
and that was a nice time for all of us.
00:26:03 ►
to Vic, by the way, and that was a nice time for all of us.
00:26:13 ►
But then in 61, the major transformation of direction in my life occurred through really the compassion of Timothy, who introduced me to psilocybin.
00:26:23 ►
introduced me to psilocybin.
00:26:31 ►
And it’s interesting that since that time,
00:26:33 ►
whatever that experience was, when I touched the unconditioned mind,
00:26:38 ►
when I touched awareness behind my thoughts,
00:26:41 ►
when I realized I wasn’t who I thought I was,
00:26:44 ►
and I breathed a tremendous sigh of relief.
00:26:51 ►
I mean, I had been so busy
00:26:53 ►
carrying that model of who I thought I was and projecting it
00:26:58 ►
outward and getting a conspiracy to make believe I was that, that
00:27:01 ►
it was incredibly refreshing to find this very ancient place in myself
00:27:06 ►
where I am, and I always was, and always will be.
00:27:09 ►
It had nothing to do with life or death.
00:27:12 ►
It just is.
00:27:13 ►
And I was in ecstasy, and I was rolling in the snow outside Timothy’s home.
00:27:20 ►
And many of you probably know the story that I then climbed through the snow to go back.
00:27:26 ►
I was spending the weekend at my parents’ home, and it was around four in the morning,
00:27:30 ►
and there had been a big snowstorm, so I decided to shovel their walk.
00:27:35 ►
And I felt very much like the young member of the tribe, you know, doing his work,
00:27:40 ►
and my parents’ faces appeared in the upstairs window.
00:27:47 ►
With the look of, you damn damn fool what are you drunk it’s the middle of the night what are you doing shoveling snow and
00:27:51 ►
i realized that that was the voice that had guided me to my phd
00:27:57 ►
and that was the one that always told me who I was supposed to be.
00:28:05 ►
And I looked inside with this new place and I realized it was all right to shovel snow.
00:28:11 ►
And I waved at them and laughed.
00:28:16 ►
And that was like the first act of trying to integrate what had happened to me.
00:28:23 ►
I wasn’t trying. I just integrated what had happened to me into my new social relationship.
00:28:29 ►
Well, for the past 25 years, I have done everything I could think of
00:28:36 ►
to integrate what happened to me in that moment under Timothy’s guidance.
00:28:43 ►
what happened to me in that moment under Timothy’s guidance.
00:28:50 ►
And several years ago, I was with David McClellan,
00:28:52 ►
who was Tim’s and my boss at Harvard.
00:28:56 ►
And David said to me,
00:29:00 ►
You know, Dick, you haven’t changed a bit. And I thought after all this work it was a complete delusion. But inside myself as you all understand that what you see to turn it into what you be is a really
00:29:31 ►
subtle and sensitive trip that after the first moment of awakening to try to integrate that
00:29:40 ►
into your life to integrate the bad trips and the good trips the horrible beauty of the
00:29:45 ►
universe the to integrate the level of awareness that exists behind form and play as christ said
00:29:54 ►
in the world but not of the world is uh it’s such an incredibly subtle process
00:30:02 ►
because if you go too far one way you kind of lose it and if you go too far one way, you kind of lose it.
00:30:08 ►
And if you go too far the other way, you lose it.
00:30:11 ►
I was looking back over a book in preparation for coming here tonight
00:30:18 ►
that I did with Sidney Cohen back in 1966.
00:30:23 ►
It was a book called LSD.
00:30:27 ►
And I came across a picture in that book there were a set of pictures that we picked
00:30:31 ►
and Sidney was the good guy and I was the bad guy
00:30:34 ►
in the book
00:30:35 ►
I was the guy that was advocating the use of psychedelics
00:30:39 ►
and Sidney was the guy that was saying dangerous and stop
00:30:42 ►
Tim was too bad so I was the next baddest guy they could use.
00:30:53 ►
And Sidney picked all the pictures that showed people going…
00:30:58 ►
And I picked all the pictures of people playing flutes and making love
00:31:07 ►
and playing in fields with flowers.
00:31:11 ►
And there was only one picture both of us picked, of all the pictures.
00:31:17 ►
And it was a picture of a fellow lying on the kitchen floor
00:31:21 ►
looking at some spilled Coca-Cola.
00:31:35 ►
Now, Sidney picked it because it showed the trivial nature of the mind when it’s drugged.
00:31:43 ►
trivial nature of the mind when it’s drugged.
00:31:52 ►
But I knew that that fellow was seeing the entire universe in that bit of spilled Coca-Cola.
00:32:13 ►
I’ve noticed, because I’m a psychologist somewhere back in there, one incarnation back,
00:32:21 ►
that in all the years that I went through psychoanalysis, became a therapist, took drugs, went to India, had a guru, have
00:32:32 ►
done Buddhist meditation, Hindu meditation, etc. In all that time, I haven’t gotten rid of one neurosis. Isn’t that interesting? I mean we thought, I know Tim and I
00:32:52 ►
really thought that the minute you saw it you’d be, it would all be, you just be a liberated being.
00:32:59 ►
Not one neurosis have I gotten rid of. But I notice that there’s something that has changed.
00:33:07 ►
That the neuroses used to be these huge monsters.
00:33:12 ►
Like, no, don’t do that.
00:33:14 ►
I mean, that sexual perversity.
00:33:16 ►
You know, don’t take me over.
00:33:21 ►
And now they’re sort of like little schmooze.
00:33:24 ►
And I kind of invite them for tea.
00:33:29 ►
Oh, sexual perversity, come on in, I haven’t seen you in months, you know, come on in.
00:33:50 ►
And that’s part of the integrity of this experience,
00:33:55 ►
of growing into seeing the relative nature of reality and the papier-mâché quality of social institutions
00:34:03 ►
and the way in which
00:34:06 ►
personalities turns into
00:34:07 ►
style rather than substance.
00:34:11 ►
It’s interesting that
00:34:12 ►
I’ve ended up working so much
00:34:16 ►
with dying because it was really
00:34:18 ►
through Aldous and Alan and Tim
00:34:20 ►
and Ralph
00:34:22 ►
that I even got
00:34:24 ►
involved in that.
00:34:25 ►
You’ve got to understand that the image that’s been developed
00:34:29 ►
is that Timothy and I were really playing a heavy role at Harvard in visionary stuff.
00:34:38 ►
In fact, Timothy had the vision.
00:34:42 ►
I was like, I didn’t understand what the hell he was doing, to tell you the truth.
00:34:50 ►
I was the one that constantly said, Timothy, you’re going too fast.
00:34:54 ►
Timothy, slow down.
00:34:56 ►
And he did this psychedelic experience based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
00:35:01 ►
And the whole thing seemed absolutely nonsensical to me when he and Ralph did that.
00:35:04 ►
of the dead and the whole thing seemed absolutely nonsensical to me when he and ralph did that
00:35:11 ►
and it’s interesting that it’s taken me many years to grow into the kinds of visions that he was having in those days and to appreciate how much what happened to me through psychedelics
00:35:20 ►
transformed my consciousness in such a way that death meant something different to me
00:35:26 ►
that allowed me to be in the presence of somebody that was dying
00:35:30 ►
in a way that honored the drama of the process without getting lost in it.
00:35:56 ►
There was a study done, as most of you know, by Dr. Walter Pankey at Harvard for his doctorate in divinity.
00:36:00 ►
He was an M.D., which was known as the Good Friday Study. It was an extraordinary study in which 20 theological students from the Andover Newton Theological
00:36:08 ►
Seminary participated in the double-blind placebo
00:36:12 ►
study on Good Friday in the Boston University Chapel
00:36:16 ►
as a Harvard research project. We took three
00:36:19 ►
institutions down with us on that one.
00:36:27 ►
And half of the ministers in training were given psilocybin
00:36:32 ►
and half were given a placebo.
00:36:36 ►
As if we had to make believe that it was nothing.
00:36:39 ►
That’s the null hypothesis.
00:36:42 ►
And afterwards they reported what had happened to them.
00:36:46 ►
And Walter had taken all of the criteria in the Bible of mystical experience.
00:36:53 ►
He had found there were nine criteria of a genuine mystical revelatory experience.
00:37:00 ►
And then he took these protocols from these 20 subjects
00:37:03 ►
and he typed them up taking all references to drugs out of them,
00:37:06 ►
and he sent them to major theologians around the country.
00:37:11 ►
And he asked them to judge these protocols in terms of these nine criteria.
00:37:18 ►
Of the control group, one of the ten had one of the nine criteria.
00:37:26 ►
Of the experimental group that took the psilocybin,
00:37:30 ►
nine of the ten had four or more of the criteria of a genuine religious mystical experience.
00:37:40 ►
It was snidely reported in Time magazine under the title Instant Mysticism.
00:37:49 ►
But it turned out that that touched me very deeply.
00:37:55 ►
Because what had happened to me was that I had touched something that I couldn’t find metaphors that I was comfortable with for dealing with it. And it’s interesting that over the years,
00:38:05 ►
Timothy and Ralph and I have all gone in different directions
00:38:09 ►
finding metaphors that were uniquely suitable to our karmic predicament
00:38:14 ►
to understand what the hell happened to us at that moment.
00:38:19 ►
And what happened to me was that it definitely,
00:38:22 ►
I experienced that as a link to all of the spiritual traditions.
00:38:28 ►
And it led me to India and to my guru and into Buddhism and so on,
00:38:34 ►
where I found these wonderful cartographers giving maps of just the processes that my mind was going through and my heart was going through.
00:38:42 ►
that my mind was going through and my heart was going through.
00:38:50 ►
And many of you know that when I met my guru,
00:38:52 ►
he said, you use that medicine?
00:38:55 ►
I said, what medicine?
00:38:57 ►
He said, that medicine.
00:38:59 ►
And somebody said, maybe he means LSD. And I said, LSD?
00:39:00 ►
And he says, yeah.
00:39:01 ►
Acha.
00:39:03 ►
Here’s this old man sitting up on the mountains on a table.
00:39:08 ►
He says, you got any of it?
00:39:15 ►
Yeah.
00:39:17 ►
So I brought out the bottle,
00:39:20 ►
because I carried a little traveling case with me
00:39:22 ►
for moments when meditation wasn’t enough.
00:39:30 ►
And I handed him one of Owsley’s best.
00:39:36 ►
It was 300 micrograms.
00:39:39 ►
And he held out his hand for more.
00:39:42 ►
So I put a second one. That was 600 microns.
00:39:46 ►
He asked for another one.
00:39:48 ►
So I put 900 microns.
00:39:51 ►
And then he went like that.
00:39:56 ►
And the scientist in me.
00:40:02 ►
Thought this is going to be very interesting.
00:40:04 ►
Because. And so I kept watching.
00:40:08 ►
And he had a lot of body weight, so I was computing how long the onset with the body weight and so on.
00:40:15 ►
And after an hour, nothing had happened.
00:40:18 ►
Well, it blew my mind.
00:40:20 ►
I mean, I had never met anybody that could take 900 micrograms and nothing happened.
00:40:23 ►
I mean, I had never met anybody that could take 900 micrograms and nothing happened.
00:40:30 ►
Because the implication of that was that he was in a place where,
00:40:34 ►
see, we took acid to go from point A to point B,
00:40:37 ►
but if you’re already at point B, it’s like drinking water.
00:40:41 ►
So I came home and I told everybody about it,
00:40:44 ►
but in my mind was this little gnawing feeling that maybe he just clouded my mind and threw it over his shoulder.
00:40:48 ►
Because I didn’t actually see it go into the mouth, you see.
00:40:54 ►
So I came back to India in 1971 and he called me up to him one day.
00:41:02 ►
He said, did you give me some medicine when you were here last time?
00:41:06 ►
I said, yes. He said, did I take it? I said, I think so. He said, what happened? I said,
00:41:17 ►
nothing. He says, go away. Then he called me up the next day. He says, you got any more? I said, yeah. So I brought it
00:41:29 ►
out and I had five pills, one of which was broken. So he took four of them. This was 1200 micrograms.
00:41:36 ►
And he took each one and he, that guy hung.
00:41:44 ►
The next one, next one, next one
00:41:45 ►
the next one
00:41:46 ►
because he knew
00:41:51 ►
and then he said can I take water
00:41:56 ►
and I said sure
00:41:57 ►
I said whatever you want
00:42:00 ►
he called for water and drank a glass of water
00:42:02 ►
he said will it make me crazy
00:42:04 ►
I said, probably.
00:42:09 ►
And after a while, he said, how long will it take? So I said, maybe an hour. So he called a man over
00:42:17 ►
with a big watch and he was holding the watch, looking at it. And a little while he went under his blanket and he
00:42:26 ►
came up looking
00:42:27 ►
absolutely mad.
00:42:29 ►
You know?
00:42:33 ►
And I thought
00:42:33 ►
what have I done? This old man is
00:42:36 ►
80 years old and I’ve given him
00:42:38 ►
acid and he didn’t realize how
00:42:40 ►
strong our medicines are and he
00:42:41 ►
took it and oh my god what have
00:42:44 ►
I done? I’ll never live with my ethical breach.
00:42:47 ►
And then he just laughed at me.
00:42:54 ►
And he said,
00:42:55 ►
these were known about thousands of years ago.
00:42:59 ►
Yogis use these.
00:43:01 ►
But he says,
00:43:02 ►
they don’t now do the purification,
00:43:25 ►
so it doesn’t work the same way. He said it’s useful. I said, should I take it anymore? He said, if you’re in a cool place and you’re feeling much peace and your mind is turned towards God, he said it could be useful. He said it would allow you to come in and have the darshan
00:43:28 ►
of the spirit. Come in and be
00:43:29 ►
in the presence of the spirit.
00:43:32 ►
But he says you can only stay two hours.
00:43:35 ►
He said it would be better to become
00:43:37 ►
the spirit than just visit it.
00:43:40 ►
But he said your medicine won’t
00:43:41 ►
do that.
00:43:46 ►
And I appreciate that.
00:43:49 ►
I really appreciate the message of that.
00:43:53 ►
Like Houston Smith, who Tim referred to,
00:43:58 ►
he said, LSD produces religious experiences, but it’s less evident whether it can produce a religious life.
00:44:10 ►
And what I have experienced in the past 25 years is if I were to look at what the essence
00:44:18 ►
of the matter is, is that having touched the unconditioned and having seen the relative nature of reality
00:44:27 ►
and the way the mind creates the dream, that has given me a faith in the possibility of
00:44:38 ►
who we are.
00:44:46 ►
And that faith has been what has guided me from method to method.
00:44:53 ►
And allowed me to use the methods because I understood the possibility,
00:44:57 ►
even though often it was just a memory of something that had happened to me.
00:45:05 ►
And it feels to me that as long as I live, I will still be growing into what happened to me and the first psychedelic experience that it’s just a process we go through
00:45:11 ►
of slowly tuning and tuning and
00:45:17 ►
for the first 10 years I understood that the game was to get high. And what it involved fit in very clearly
00:45:33 ►
with my own neurosis, which was a rejection of my own humanity. I mean, I really fit into
00:45:40 ►
a renunciate path. And so what I was was a horny celibate for years.
00:45:47 ►
I won’t think about sex.
00:45:48 ►
I won’t think about sex.
00:45:50 ►
It’s obsessed with it.
00:45:55 ►
And I pushed everything, all the human stuff away because I just wanted to get out there
00:46:00 ►
and stay there for the good of everybody in my mind.
00:46:07 ►
there and stay there for the good of everybody in my mind and somewhere along the way I began to see that what that wisdom showed me was that if you push
00:46:13 ►
away anything it’s gotcha that pushing away my humanity was as much attachment
00:46:20 ►
I remember being with Alan Watts once at a Benedictine monastery we were working at.
00:46:28 ►
We were in his room partaking of the altar wine
00:46:32 ►
at around two in the morning.
00:46:35 ►
And he said to me,
00:46:37 ►
Dick, your problem is
00:46:41 ►
you’re too attached to emptiness.
00:46:51 ►
And he was right on.
00:46:53 ►
He was right on.
00:46:58 ►
As the third patriarch says, even to be attached to the idea of enlightenment is to go astray.
00:47:07 ►
And what’s happened to me from the past 10, 12, 14 years is a coming back into my humanity. It’s as if once I rooted myself in the awareness that exists behind form, even a little bit, and I’m just a little way along the path,
00:47:18 ►
that faith allowed me then to come and dip back into the world of forms and allow my heart to be open,
00:47:28 ►
like keeping your heart open in hell,
00:47:31 ►
keeping your heart open in the presence of suffering,
00:47:34 ►
because even at the moment when the suffering is most intense,
00:47:40 ►
right behind it inside you is an incredible equanimity.
00:47:45 ►
Because one of the things that I touched through acid was an extreme appreciation of the perfection of the laws of form.
00:47:56 ►
The perfection of the unfolding of the law.
00:48:00 ►
And it sounds like it’s too hard to lay on the world that suffering is grave.
00:48:08 ►
But I can feel, when I look at what our spiritual journeys are on this plane,
00:48:14 ►
it feels so obvious to me that the stuff we are handed is the grist for the mill
00:48:20 ►
of awakening out of the illusion until we can be in the form without being
00:48:26 ►
entrapped by it so that we can play lightly, we can dance sweetly, we can have joy in the
00:48:32 ►
presence of the hell realms and do what we can do to relieve the suffering without getting
00:48:37 ►
burned out and lost and bitter and cynical and frustrated.
00:48:43 ►
And we can…
00:48:42 ►
and cynical and frustrated.
00:48:45 ►
And we can…
00:48:57 ►
And we have the tolerance to deal with chaos and uncertainty.
00:49:04 ►
And what has happened is that the 60s unleashed something extraordinarily powerful that is still reverberating and echoing in this culture
00:49:08 ►
and actually in the world.
00:49:12 ►
And what that released was a recognition in people
00:49:17 ►
that they were free to change, institutions and themselves.
00:49:23 ►
And each of us is figuring out how to do that.
00:49:27 ►
But social institutions which have power structures
00:49:30 ►
are very threatened by that kind of change.
00:49:37 ►
And what we are coming to appreciate is the way in which we can go about changing in such a way that the transformations are gentle, that they aren’t necessarily violent.
00:50:01 ►
When Gandhi said, I want the British to leave, but I want them to leave as friends.
00:50:08 ►
It was our, once we saw the vision,
00:50:11 ►
we so wanted to manifest the vision in form,
00:50:15 ►
and there was so much confusion between the evolutionary process
00:50:19 ►
and the revolutionary process,
00:50:22 ►
that a lot of what we did in setting up alternative structures in the way
00:50:27 ►
in which we protested created more and more polarity in this culture and in an interesting
00:50:34 ►
way Ronald Reagan has been in power because of what we did in the 60s we gave that power to him. That’s a very interesting phenomenon.
00:50:50 ►
And it’s only as we get to see behind the pendulum swings of revolution and really acknowledge the fact there has been true evolution,
00:50:56 ►
can we learn how to just transform the social institutions
00:51:00 ►
by understanding that the same institutions can work very differently when
00:51:07 ►
they’re motivated by love rather than motivated by fear.
00:51:20 ►
So this was just a progress report of what’s happened to me 30 years down the road.
00:51:25 ►
I’ll be back in 10 more years to give you another one.
00:51:28 ►
Thank you. You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:51:55 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:52:02 ►
Well, I guess we’ve kind of missed that 10-year status report,
00:52:05 ►
as it’s now been over 20 years since Ram Dass gave the talk we just heard.
00:52:10 ►
Yet, I found that a lot of what he said was still very much relevant to the times we are now in.
00:52:16 ►
You know, sometimes I think we all forget to take into account how rapidly our culture is actually evolving.
00:52:22 ►
I realize that if you watch the television news programs
00:52:26 ►
you have come to the conclusion that
00:52:28 ►
we are actually devolving.
00:52:30 ►
But when you consider the fact
00:52:32 ►
that in the U.S. women have
00:52:34 ►
only had the right to vote for less than
00:52:35 ►
100 years, then you can see that
00:52:38 ►
over the entire course of Western history
00:52:40 ►
that these last
00:52:41 ►
50 years or so have been highly accelerated
00:52:44 ►
in terms of us humans waking up and beginning to see ourselves in a much larger and Thank you. and just getting around a little bit, it’s easy to see that, at least compared to the 1950s,
00:53:06 ►
we are in a completely different world.
00:53:09 ►
And my guess is that no more than ten years from now,
00:53:12 ►
we’ll be in yet another completely different world than we are today.
00:53:16 ►
Events are simply coming at us much faster these days.
00:53:20 ►
And I do believe that what Ram Dass said about the 60s is correct.
00:53:24 ►
What has happened is that the 60s unleashed something extraordinarily powerful
00:53:29 ►
that is still reverberating and echoing in this culture, and actually in the world.
00:53:34 ►
And what that release was, was a recognition in people that they were free to change.
00:53:40 ►
And I think that’s what we’re all about here in the psychedelic community,
00:53:44 ►
consciously changing ourselves into ever more human beings.
00:53:49 ►
Well, that’s going to have to do it for today.
00:53:52 ►
And so I’ll close the podcast again by reminding you that this and most of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike 3.0 license.
00:54:05 ►
And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the
00:54:09 ►
bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can find through psychedelicsalon.org.
00:54:15 ►
And if you’re interested in the philosophy behind the salon, you can hear all about it
00:54:20 ►
in my novel, The Genesis Generation, which is now available as a pay-what-you-can
00:54:25 ►
audiobook that you can download at genesisgeneration.us.
00:54:30 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:54:34 ►
Be well, my friends. and extraterrestrial it is the impossible
00:54:49 ►
become possible
00:54:50 ►
and yet remaining impossible