271 - Weaving Modern Ritual from Traditional Roots

Program Notes

Guest speaker: Kathleen “Kat” Harrison
Big Island, Little Planet
March 17–28, 2012
A Travel Intensive in Polynesia on the Big Island of Hawaii
Ethnobotanist Kathleen Harrison and Hawaiian cultural teacher Momi Subiono will lead this travel intensive, open to all who have a desire to immerse themselves in the story of plants, nature, and a deep cultural awareness of place.

PODCAST [NOTE: All quotations are by Kat Harrison.]
“The role of conscious, intentional behavior that is described by culture or subcultural rules of behavior with reflected meaning is sort of a way of describing ritual generally, and we draw these forms out of a number of traditions.”

“I think when we go into thinking about how to do psychoactive medicines it’s very valuable to look deeply, to look seriously, at the traditions that have attended these medicines through time.”

“Repeated behavior in the same mode over a long time generates a kind of an etheric possibility of it recurring and being potentized by its ongoing, indefinite repetition.”

“I feel that it’s really valuable to look into the ritual history of the place where you live or the place where you’re working.”

“Pay homage to the history of ritual that is coming through the place.”

“Why one [psychedelic medicine] may be your best friend’s ally and not your ally is a mystery. And maybe you can solve that mystery and maybe not. But you should honor the fact that some things work for you and some things are not your medicine, even though everyone around you appears to be having a good time.”

“You don’t lead with your head. You let your heart and your body tell you what to do in these [introspective psychedelic] moments. Then if you think it’s time to get up and bolt out into the street, you let your head come in and tell you, ‘Don’t! Sit down. You’re not going anywhere.’ ”

Thank you to The Turtles for “Eve of Destruction”

Transcript

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Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic

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salon.

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Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

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And even though it’s now summertime, at least here in the northern hemisphere of this beautiful little planet,

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there are a lot of out-of-the-ordinary financial requirements brought about by vacations and other summer activities.

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And yet, still some of our fellow slaughters have nonetheless decided to share their bounty and help us by

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paying some of the expenses associated with these podcasts. And these wonderful people are

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Lawrence C., Joshua M., Nigel B., Nathan S., Jonathan R., Derek H., Walks Between Worlds,

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Walks Between Worlds,

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Nicholas K., and Gwani, or is it Joni?

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Gwani H.?

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I hope I pronounced that close to properly,

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but if not, please forgive me,

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because, as you know, I’m the product of the American school system,

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which leaves much to be desired,

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especially in the area of languages.

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And, like me, I’m sure that most of our fellow salonners by now recognize the names

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of several of these generous souls as longtime supporters of the salon, and I thank them all

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from the bottom of my heart. As I mentioned before, I’ve started setting aside part of the

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donations that come into the salon each week for what I’ve come to think of as my last hurrah,

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which will be the 2012 Burning Man Festival. I’m not going this year, but I’ll make it in 2012.

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And along with Bruce Dahmer and a group of very creative and energetic younger people from the

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Pacific Northwest, we’re planning a theme camp for that event that is not only going to have

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some great parties at night,

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but will also feature a renewal of the Planque Norte pliologues during several afternoons.

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As I’ve learned the hard way, it’s never too early to start planning your trip to Burning Man,

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and so I hope that you’ll give some serious thought to attending in 2012 yourself,

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and if so, that you’ll drop by for an afternoon chat.

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And I wouldn’t even be able to dream about that if it wasn’t for the great support from our fellow salonners.

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So thank you once again. Thank you all for being a part of this little experiment in a distributed online community.

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And unless I’m mistaken, some members of our salon community are wondering if I’m ever going to get around to introducing today’s talk, which is actually one that I’ve been meaning to play for quite some time now. In fact, I can still

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remember being there when Matt Palomary recorded this talk. And hey, thank you, Mateo. I appreciate

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it. And I remember thinking at the time how valuable this information is and that it should

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be reaching a much wider audience than the hundred

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or so people that were in the room at the Palenque and Theobotany Conference of 2001

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where it was given.

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As you already know, today we’re going to hear from one of our most important women

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elders.

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And by elder, I don’t mean someone who is old, because I’m a good bit older than today’s

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guest speaker, who is Kathleen, or Kat, Kat Harrison. And I think it was at the 1999 Ayahuasca Conference

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in San Francisco where I first heard Kat speak and was completely mesmerized by her quiet wisdom.

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But it wasn’t until January of 2001 at the Palenque Conference that I got to experience her as a person and not just as a featured speaker.

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You see, the way the Palenque Conferences were organized, everyone, speakers and attendees, all ate our meals together

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and we all had our rooms in little cabins that were kind of scattered throughout a small jungle setting with a little stream running through it.

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And at night we’d usually sit on our porches, telling stories and passing the pipe around.

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And one balmy night, as a few of us were sitting on a porch near the little stream,

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what I remember was a wonderful gossamer vision of a beautiful lady floating into view

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and asking if she could join us.

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It was Cat, and while she demurred when we offered a toke from our pipe,

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she in no way made us feel like we were misbehaving children,

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even though her motherly influence could clearly be felt.

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I think about that night quite often these days,

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because on the little altar that I’ve set up next to my desk

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is a polished and lacquered slice of an ayahuasca vine that I bought from her that week.

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And on it is a little pipe that was made for me out of clay

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from the little stream that flowed in front of our cabin that year.

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So every once in a while I like to pick them up and hold them

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just so as to bring back the vibe from those magical nights in Palenque.

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Well, so much for reminiscences.

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Instead, why don’t I just play one of the talks that Cat gave back then.

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And again, I should let you know that at about the 44 minute mark,

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there’s a short gap in the recording where Matt had to turn the cassette tape over.

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And during that short time, we missed a sentence or two, I guess.

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But isn’t it nice that now we can record directly in digital

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and not be limited to tape length for recording time?

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You see, the world is getting better, you know,

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and in more ways than just improved tech.

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But anyhow, let’s journey back in time to a lovely January morning in 2001

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on a hilltop near the Mayan ruins at Palenque, Mexico,

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and hear a few of Kat Harrison’s thoughts about the importance

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of ritual.

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So the talk I gave last night with my slides is material I’m really familiar with presenting

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and familiar with from my experience, and the slides, as I mentioned, act as my guide

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for the related ideas that come up from those images.

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for the related ideas that come up from those images.

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The talk I want to broach today is, for me, a novel condensation

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of a lot of different observations and experiences

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that I think hopefully will be of interest to you

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and to me, to put them together this way.

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I find that after talks that I give on various topics

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and not all proactive,

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that people ask me a lot of questions about technique

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and form and method.

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Not exactly like doses, like so many questions have been here

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naturally but but more the what the panel will be about later this morning to set and setting and

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and the formalities that create the ambience that we have these experiences within. And I’ve answered so many questions like that after talks

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that I decided to try to pull them together

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into a talk about form and ritual

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in regard to psychoactive plants, medicine experiences.

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You know, I do have, I mean, I guess each of us has our vernacular

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that we are comfortable with,

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and I’m part of an extended and ever-shifting community of ceremonials, basically,

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I guess we would call ourselves, mostly women but not entirely, in the United States.

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And I’ll talk somewhat about what I have learned working with these people.

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But some of it is terminology,

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and we refer to psychoactive drugs and plants and mushrooms as medicine.

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And that works for us because it comes in under the radar, first of all, you can even talk about it on the telephone

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and also because so much of psychoactivity

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is about healing and balancing

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and even the joyful and celebratory aspects of that too

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definitely that too

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so that’s my terminology and there are other terms hard for me to see celebratory aspects of that too. Definitely that too.

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So that’s my terminology. And there are other terms hard for me to see, perhaps, but you’ll hear them in my language.

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I hear them in your language. And I think it’s really interesting to look at how we talk about these

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things. And the way we look at folk names of plants too, you know, and what

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do those folk names mean? And as I was saying last night, how many plants

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honor Mary or honor a mother goddess in their folk name,

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including marijuana, as a matter of fact.

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So, let’s see.

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The title, the formal title that I gave to Ken for this talk

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was Weaving Modern Ritual from Traditional Roots.

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And I wanted to talk about that

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from several different kinds of roots, levels of roots

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and I’m going to meander

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I made one page of notes here but I know I’m going to meander a lot

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so I’m just sort of thinking out loud, I hope that’s okay

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the word ritual, which I now am very comfortable with using,

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still, I know, gives some people, even the more open-minded people,

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you know, the creeps.

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And certainly others who are less open-minded,

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it reeks of something, you know, scary and musty and hidden.

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But actually, it’s really interesting to look at any culture,

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including our own,

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meaning Anglo-American, European, in terms of ritual. You know, we just all went through

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the coffee ritual down here. We have lots of rituals that have to do with what we put

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into our bodies and exactly how we like our rituals. And we’re usually very fussy about that they have to be just right

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or else we are out of balance, right?

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And so if you begin to see that the way we form our behavior,

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the choices that we make in daily life and on those holy days,

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whatever religion or sacred tradition or nature worship or whatever it is we

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come from or wend our way into, that there are rituals small and large. There’s form, intricate

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and loose, but it is still form that holds our behavior and that is actually modeling our belief

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systems, our worldview, in the same way that I was talking about

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with the Mazatecs last night.

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And if an anthropologist was studying us,

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they could read a lot about what we believe

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and how we stratify the cosmos in our experience

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by the way that we ritualize.

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I recently got a letter

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from a very sophisticated, worldly, Mexican-brand woman artist,

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and she just made some allusion to how when she was in,

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she went back to visit her village and she met this American man there,

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and he was videotaping because that’s what foreigners do.

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It’s just we, you know, drink coffee and videotape.

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It’s like we, you know, drink coffee and make videotapes.

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It’s like our character.

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And I just thought, oh, you know, just that little slight twist in perspective. So the role of ritual, the role of conscious, intentional behavior

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that is described by culture or subcultural rules of behavior

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with reflected meaning is sort of a way of describing ritual generally.

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And we draw these forms out of a number of traditions.

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these forms out of a number of traditions. I think when we go into thinking about how to do psychoactive medicines, it’s very valuable to look deeply, to look seriously at the traditions

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that have attended these medicines through time. Now I’m also going to include or to

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some degree address those that are not traditional plants

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that are contemporary chemical derivatives or discoveries.

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And I think that a lot of these guidelines can apply to those as well.

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But we do have a lot of information

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about how many of the plant and mushroom allies

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have been used over time.

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And so knowing about that and incorporating that into our own behavior,

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not necessarily mimicking it, but incorporating it,

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and so we’re kind of drawing inspiration from what we know of as this field,

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the idea of the morphogenetic field that Sheldrake proposed,

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of repeated behavior in the same mode over a long time

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generates a kind of an etheric possibility of it recurring

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and being potentized by its ongoing indefinite uh repetition ramifications of of it

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and um like a like a pebble in water and the ripples going out and they just keep going out

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and then if you come to those if you recognize a historic stream of ritual and you tap it a little bit even or acknowledge it then you gain the the power of

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that cultural habit or multicultural habit and it comes into the ceremony that you’re doing

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ceremony can be you by yourself sitting in a meadow having an experience. It can also be you alone in your hideaway with all your accoutrements,

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and I’ll talk a bit about that.

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Or it can be complex and multi-personed.

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But I think looking back into who has done these

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and how with what belief systems is really valuable

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to at least have in your pocket

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as you go through this.

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There are many universals about ritual,

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about sacred form that we can see in cultures around the world

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whether we think of them as psychedelic cultures or not.

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And they have a lot to do with, well, sacred time, working.

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There is this concept of time that is different

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than the normal daily life that we wake up to

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and work in and raise our children in.

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It’s this time that we go into in order to talk to the gods,

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in order to receive messages from the earth,

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in order to heal, in order to receive messages from the earth, in order to heal, in order to conceive,

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give birth, die, be married,

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recognize transitional stages like initiation rites,

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you know, all of these kinds of times.

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And, you know, this is very basic anthropological recognition

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of these categories of social behavior,

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but there’s, generally speaking,

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this idea that this is sacred time.

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I go for ceremony happening,

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psychedelic ceremony happening within sacred time.

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And so I’ve learned a lot also from the pagan tradition,

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which is blooming again in the United States and Europe.

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And that’s really, I think, the people of European ancestry

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looking for our indigenous roots and our traditional magical behavior.

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What works?

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What works to make us not feel like we are simply material beings

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in a mechanistic world, you

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know, thinking that maybe we’re crazy because nobody else thinks like us, sort of. What

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works to actually make it feel like we’re in that exalted state, which can be achieved,

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you know, without psychedelics as well, but when you put them together, it’s truly remarkable.

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I have found over the years

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that I have some sort of guidelines

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that I follow for achieving that kind of state.

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And one is that I look to my own cultural genetic roots.

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I look to my own, the history in my blood of what my people,

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and probably like most of you, I’m a mix of different European,

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you know, some of us have a touch of Native American way back there,

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but mostly European cultures, for me, mostly Celtic.

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And so I educated myself many years ago now

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as to Celtic traditions,

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some beliefs about the hierarchy of deities,

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about distant time and present time,

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concepts that could be brought into my dream world,

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that could be brought into my ritual life.

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And I think that looking back into your own

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genetic history is one component. And then I feel that it’s really valuable to look into

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the ritual history of the place where you live or the place where you’re working. Because

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that’s in the earth. It’s coming up through that place. It’s accessible. You can miss

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it, but you can also find it. And, you know,

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I’ve lived in Northern California now for 25 years or so. And the Northern California

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Indians have, they’re still alive, they’re still there, they’re still doing healing rituals and

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ceremony and song and making beautiful things. And so I educated myself, and I met a few of them,

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and I’ve asked them what they do.

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You know, what is their relationship to tobacco and ceremony,

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since I know tobacco is the ceremonial boundary marker.

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And other plants, what do they use for protection, you know?

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And then I learn the native plants and go find that one

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and keep a bit of it in my pocket.

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Pay homage to the history of ritual that is coming through the place.

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And then if you’re adding a psychoactive plant to your ceremonial moment,

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then again the history of that plant and how it has worked.

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So you’ve got three components there.

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You’ve got your own blood history, you’ve got your place history,

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and you’ve got three components there. You’ve got your own blood history, you’ve got your place history, and you’ve got the substance history.

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And all of them have kind of magical structures within them,

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and they’re pretty universal.

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I mean, you know, it’s so great to look at anthropology

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because every place, every culture is fascinatingly unique,

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every culture is fascinatingly unique,

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but there are these universal behaviors and methods of categorization

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that just do come through over and over,

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especially in nature-based culture,

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before they become so much about

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the big, more hierarchical civilizations.

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And so you might not be, as a scholar, correct to generalize,

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but as a ceremonialist, you might be quite, it’s all right to do that, because you’re

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just drawing from sort of the whole palette. And what humans, you know, are so remarkable

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at is taking information and adapting it, changing, changing information, changing behavior,

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drawing from one thing to another.

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We have incredible memories.

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We have creativity and opposable thumbs and hands to make things with,

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and we have this hunger for inspiration and the beyond.

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And all of these things come together in these ceremonies.

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I like to think of the form that I create as a vessel,

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so that then it is a container.

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And that means I take the elements that I want to assist me

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or that I think I just might need

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or that are mysterious to me but I would like to

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know more about. And I put them in the vessel of the time that is set aside to do this medicine.

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And it’s a way of thinking, again, that just delineates the form. And I know I said last

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night and I want to reiterate this idea of protection

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of creating a safe place protection like the word ritual can ring some bells because sometimes

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people think it means you know you only need protection when you’re under attack well not

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necessarily um it doesn’t a lot of of indigenous shamans do get into a kind of an offense-defense way of thinking.

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And, in fact, there are healers, really fine native healers,

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who have put so much of their energy toward defense to do the work they do

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that they really can’t do the work anymore.

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Sometimes they become so good, and in these economies of incredible scarcity

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as exist in the Americas, especially in Native communities,

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there is so much envy.

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Every Native person I’ve spoken to in the Americas can acknowledge

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that the envy of someone else’s good fortune,

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of the neighbor who has one thing they don’t have, of whatever,

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is really a shadow that they live with,

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and a lot of their energy goes toward resentment

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because there’s just too little of everything to spread around,

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and because they’re so good at working in the magical realms.

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So those concepts that you’ve probably heard

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from the ayahuasca world, for instance,

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of darts, of virotes, these magical disease darts

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that go shooting out from the

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perpetrating shaman to the, you know, so-called white shaman or to the hapless non-shaman who

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then becomes ill because they’re carrying this bad energy. There’s lots and lots about that,

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and it’s very good to know about it, I think. But it’s not the only reason for protection.

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You know, when we, the problem for us, this was exhibited slightly yesterday,

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in our culture is there are several dangers, but one of them is the law,

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and it’s visibility, and it’s blowing it in public, you know, or being apprehended in some way and so we need

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protection from that we need to be cool but we also need to feel safe within these ceremonies

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so that you’re not spending your time in the state you know working on that all the time you

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need to be to have the feeling that you are um surrounded and you can do work,

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which I think of really as vertical.

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There’s, you know, again, from the pagan tradition,

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this idea of raising above you, individual or group,

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as you work, a cone of light. This idea that a circle raises a cone of energy, of light,

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and that in the beginning of the sacred time

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that you go into,

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the delineated beginning of any one of these journeys,

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that you consciously draw this line of protection

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and you consciously generate light around you.

00:23:37 ►

So you’re able to access messages, visions, energy from all directions.

00:23:56 ►

And then to generate light out into the world.

00:24:02 ►

I feel like, I mean, I take, I think it was Anne who talked about

00:24:05 ►

people taking psychedelics for fun and entertainment and taking them for spiritual work.

00:24:13 ►

And I do tend toward the spiritual work. I mean, I call this life the work, you know,

00:24:17 ►

what is the work? And yet the work has a lot of joy in it too. And so I’m, you know, I’m not like

00:24:28 ►

the work has a lot of joy in it too and so i’m you know i’m not like dour uh and um and and in fact i’m an old deadhead and i you know learned a lot of what i know by going to grateful dead

00:24:32 ►

concerts those are the biggest prayer ceremonies i’ve ever been in i i really learned a lot and i

00:24:38 ►

totally honor that tradition i want to talk in, I’m really jumping around. Is this okay? Yeah. A bit about

00:24:47 ►

how when we came into psychedelics in the 60s, most of us in the 60s, maybe a few of you were

00:24:54 ►

in the 50s, I don’t know, that, you know, it broke everything open. It broke the windows out and we

00:25:02 ►

got to see what we hadn’t seen before but what we experienced was

00:25:05 ►

a kind of beautiful chaos and the chaos in itself was so such a relief was so exciting so

00:25:13 ►

creative incipient creative creativity just you know an ocean of it that it was absolutely

00:25:22 ►

thrilling and that’s why many of us believed for a while

00:25:25 ►

we can change the world this is our chance you know we’re changing the world now well i think

00:25:30 ►

we have changed the world but we haven’t changed it as dramatically as we thought at the time maybe

00:25:35 ►

we could maybe we haven’t just we’re not so patient but um but that chaos was wonderful to be in i’m so glad that i was you know a hippie with lsd in my pocket

00:25:50 ►

in 1966 and 67 and i mean that was a really really special time and i had my sense of self-preservation

00:25:58 ►

which not everybody did so within a two or three years we began to see the casualty factor

00:26:03 ►

you know and that was very serious

00:26:05 ►

and it became seedier and then the other not so clear uh substances started to come into it and

00:26:11 ►

then we began to see other we saw addiction and we saw and you know and then the the vietnam war

00:26:18 ►

sort of rose up and we went into you know we went from like the celebration of consciousness into

00:26:23 ►

a kind of combat and uh but with that consciousness and you know much we went from like the celebration of consciousness into a kind of combat. But

00:26:26 ►

with that consciousness, and you know, much history that is so interesting to talk about

00:26:30 ►

has come down affected by that. But what I saw was that people kind of retreated. I mean,

00:26:39 ►

the Grateful Dead shows kept going on. And there was great shamanism happening there. And if you never did experience that, don’t doubt it.

00:26:47 ►

It really was a remarkable phenomenon.

00:26:51 ►

And there was like a second wave of the freaks, you know, hippie travelers, that kind of thing.

00:26:57 ►

But it seems to me that people kind of went more into their private lives with their medicine then.

00:27:02 ►

Some people left them behind altogether.

00:27:04 ►

People kind of just clustered in their homes with it,

00:27:07 ►

went on their own private experiences.

00:27:09 ►

And then in the 80s,

00:27:13 ►

the concept of mixing serious form with medicine began to arise.

00:27:19 ►

And I really started to see it become very strong in the late 80s.

00:27:22 ►

I started to see it become very strong in the late 80s. And then I began to regularly participate in medicine groups, circles, in the early 90s.

00:27:33 ►

And so in this last decade, I’ve seen, and I’ve seen that spread out and touch other people,

00:27:40 ►

I’ve seen form be taken much more seriously.

00:27:43 ►

And that something different happens. It’s not a better or worse equation more seriously and that something different happens it’s not a

00:27:46 ►

better worse equation it’s something different happens and so uh putting these creative

00:27:53 ►

chaotic matrices like a psychedelic into um a conscious form and getting other people in

00:28:03 ►

to this form together,

00:28:07 ►

having it, I shouldn’t say getting people,

00:28:09 ►

because it sounds like somebody’s generating it,

00:28:12 ►

but I think it’s welled up in groups of people.

00:28:16 ►

And so groups together making this happen that are egalitarian. You know, these are not, like I think that a lot of psychedelic work

00:28:23 ►

can be divided into one model or the other.

00:28:26 ►

The therapeutic model, where you are generally led through by someone

00:28:31 ►

or guided or sat with while you’re doing this work.

00:28:34 ►

And the shamanic model, which, although they’re not absolutely separate,

00:28:40 ►

because certainly shamanism comes into the therapeutic model too, but where more based on the idea of the ayahuasca circle

00:28:49 ►

or the peyote circle.

00:28:50 ►

Have any of you ever experienced the Native American church,

00:28:53 ►

for instance, ceremony?

00:28:55 ►

Well, it’s the only legal psychedelic practice in the United States,

00:29:04 ►

and it’s a recognized religion and the Native Americans

00:29:09 ►

have been doing it they had to accept a certain level of Christianity on it in the 30s when it was

00:29:13 ►

made legitimate in order to maintain a religion in which peyote was the sacrament

00:29:19 ►

and not all of them still do that some Some still have a pretty strong Christian overlay,

00:29:31 ►

but some don’t and have just returned to this very intense form.

00:29:35 ►

And they had this idea, circling back to sacred time,

00:29:39 ►

they have this very clear notion that when you gather, it takes a long time, like a couple of months it can take,

00:29:41 ►

to get together all the elements for a ceremony

00:29:43 ►

and the proper teepee or dwelling for it and the proper kind of wood for the fire and the proper foods for ritual

00:29:51 ►

moments uh during and after um the ceremony designated people with designated roles men and

00:29:58 ►

women and medicine of course and um and then they have this notion that they go into sacred time

00:30:05 ►

when they call the circle.

00:30:08 ►

And they stay in that throughout.

00:30:11 ►

And then, this is traditional

00:30:12 ►

in all these practices too.

00:30:14 ►

Pagans, lots of people.

00:30:16 ►

And it’s only over

00:30:18 ►

when you actually allowed,

00:30:20 ►

consciously break that sacred time.

00:30:21 ►

And you say, now I am outside it.

00:30:24 ►

So during that time,

00:30:26 ►

one of their signifiers

00:30:28 ►

of how that is, in fact,

00:30:30 ►

a whole different kind of reality

00:30:32 ►

that you’re in,

00:30:33 ►

is that they build a drum in that time.

00:30:36 ►

They build a water drum.

00:30:37 ►

They bring the elements of the drum,

00:30:39 ►

the vessel, the skin, the lacings,

00:30:41 ►

the water,

00:30:43 ►

but it never exists outside of

00:30:46 ►

sacred time, after the circle has been

00:30:48 ►

called, after this miraculous fire

00:30:49 ►

that they build and maintain

00:30:51 ►

in perfect shape of a crescent moon

00:30:54 ►

all through the night

00:30:55 ►

after everyone has

00:30:57 ►

begun

00:31:00 ►

the ceremony, the drum

00:31:01 ►

maker makes the drum in front of everyone

00:31:04 ►

fills it with water before sealing the top,

00:31:07 ►

plays the drum all night long,

00:31:08 ►

and then before sacred time is broken,

00:31:11 ►

it is opened and the water is poured out

00:31:13 ►

and the drum is undone again.

00:31:16 ►

And so that way of marking

00:31:18 ►

that certain things can only exist in this other kind of time,

00:31:25 ►

is symbolic.

00:31:26 ►

There are things that we can do in our own ceremonies the same way.

00:31:28 ►

Tobacco pipes, among some people,

00:31:30 ►

only come together in already delineated sacred time.

00:31:34 ►

The stem to the bowl, they never meet other than during that time

00:31:38 ►

and they’re taken apart before it’s finished.

00:31:40 ►

And that’s part of the special pipes that are just for praying in high ceremony.

00:31:46 ►

That’s among the Northern Plains Indians. I’m going to talk about some of the basics

00:31:51 ►

of doing ceremony that can be applied to either solo or group psychoactive ceremony. But,

00:32:11 ►

active ceremony. But, you know, I think that the main tenets that I should point out are in, let’s see now, I’m going to try to stick mostly to neo-traditional meaning, you know,

00:32:22 ►

what I’m experiencing among people like us. Because there’s so

00:32:26 ►

much that could be said about traditional cultures and maybe can

00:32:29 ►

illustrate with that, but I just think it’s so interesting what we’re

00:32:32 ►

forming right now. Ten years, twenty years from now, if we’re all still on this

00:32:37 ►

troubled planet, somebody could look back and see what’s happening in our cultural level in terms of evolving

00:32:49 ►

forms of spiritual tradition. They’re always evolving in every culture, but they’re definitely

00:32:56 ►

in a richly evolving mode right now among people like us. And one of the the basic beginnings is it’s part of the

00:33:08 ►

invocation and this is true I think when you’re just alone in your bedroom or

00:33:12 ►

anywhere is to ask what we say is we ask the spirit of the medicine to be with us

00:33:19 ►

we I ask the spirit of the medicine to be with me. It could be 2C-B, it could be LSD, it could be peyote, it could be mushrooms.

00:33:29 ►

It could be cannabis if you have some work to do, and that’s one of your allies.

00:33:33 ►

And, of course, allies is a concept that is primary in one of those words

00:33:39 ►

in this cognitive vernacular that I was referring to,

00:33:43 ►

but the idea that these are all,

00:33:47 ►

speaking for the plants,

00:33:48 ►

that these are species which are here

00:33:51 ►

as potential allies for us.

00:33:53 ►

Allies, friends, assistants, confidants.

00:33:58 ►

And there are those of us who feel

00:34:00 ►

that there are chemical allies for us too.

00:34:03 ►

So it’s not an absolute nature

00:34:07 ►

human boundary there. And there are others that are not allies for you. They may be,

00:34:15 ►

generally speaking, in the category of human allies, but they’re not your allies. And a

00:34:20 ►

really important job for every individual is to figure out which ones are and which

00:34:24 ►

are not.

00:34:25 ►

Why one may be your best friend’s ally

00:34:27 ►

and not your ally is a mystery

00:34:29 ►

and maybe you can solve that mystery or maybe not

00:34:31 ►

but you should honor the fact

00:34:33 ►

that some things work for you

00:34:36 ►

and some things are not your medicine

00:34:40 ►

even though everyone around you

00:34:42 ►

appears to be having a good time.

00:34:44 ►

Don’t think you have to stretch to good time don’t think you have to

00:34:45 ►

stretch to it don’t think you have to feel inadequate um there it’s kind of like people

00:34:51 ►

you know we meet people that we really spark with and that we feel like we’ve known a long time or

00:34:56 ►

that we know we could you know do some great piece of work with or whatever we need we meet others

00:35:01 ►

and if we’re respectful we know okay she’s just not my type, or I don’t get him, but that’s okay.

00:35:07 ►

It seems to work in the group.

00:35:08 ►

And so we protect ourselves, and we ally in that way.

00:35:12 ►

So ally with the psychedelics in the same way.

00:35:16 ►

And peer pressure is still a very powerful thing, no matter how old you are.

00:35:20 ►

It’s not just a juvenile problem.

00:35:24 ►

So we ask the spirit of the medicine and i think

00:35:27 ►

it’s okay to talk about that i mean i know some people get itchy at the word spirit too but um

00:35:32 ►

it just means spirit means breath that’s where the word comes from and inspiration spirit all

00:35:40 ►

of these come out of the word for just breath. And since breath is the primary shamanic technique,

00:35:46 ►

the primary technique of the living organism,

00:35:49 ►

and the primary grounding technique in these sessions,

00:35:54 ►

if you don’t do anything else,

00:35:55 ►

if you just remember to breathe

00:35:57 ►

and you think about your breath,

00:35:58 ►

the old meditation technique,

00:36:00 ►

you will have the first tool of wise survival of troubled waters

00:36:07 ►

so asking the spirit of the medicine no matter what kind of medicine it is

00:36:13 ►

I think is a way of focusing

00:36:16 ►

you’re not just saying I’m here and I want something amazing to happen to me

00:36:20 ►

or I want to have a good time, you’re saying who are you medicine

00:36:23 ►

this is me. Will you come

00:36:25 ►

in and be with me to help me see what I haven’t seen yet, you know, to help me do the thing that

00:36:31 ►

I’m trying to do? So there’s so much respect that is required in dealing with these incredibly

00:36:39 ►

powerful medicines. And I have learned from Native people to voice that respect, to honor each other,

00:36:47 ►

to honor the medicine. That means for me, I bring offerings. I create a space. Even if I’m

00:36:56 ►

off in nature somewhere, you know, what sort of, it’s what I, it’s a category I call windfall.

00:37:03 ►

You know, windfall is what the wind comes along

00:37:06 ►

and knocks from the trees to the ground.

00:37:08 ►

Windfall is something lucky that falls in your path.

00:37:12 ►

We use it that way in common language.

00:37:15 ►

And so the things that just appear before your eyes,

00:37:19 ►

when you’re paying attention,

00:37:22 ►

many of them seem to have a heightened meaning or an enhanced

00:37:27 ►

beauty, even before you’ve taken the medicine, certainly afterwards, you know. And you can

00:37:33 ►

bring some of those together wherever you are. What bloomed in the garden that day,

00:37:38 ►

put it on the altar, make an altar, however simple it is, you know, just a rock on the ground with a leaf, with a blossom and an acorn on top of it.

00:37:48 ►

The intention, the aesthetic,

00:37:50 ►

these things go together to make the space

00:37:54 ►

become a different kind of space

00:37:55 ►

and the time a different kind of time.

00:37:58 ►

And that’s what we’re asking for, I think.

00:38:01 ►

Some of my friends and I

00:38:04 ►

who are used to doing

00:38:05 ►

medicine circles

00:38:06 ►

do what we also call medicine walks

00:38:09 ►

and it’s just, I mean you’ve probably done this

00:38:11 ►

but

00:38:11 ►

maybe formally, maybe casually

00:38:14 ►

but it’s

00:38:16 ►

a whole different thing than the

00:38:19 ►

all night focused ceremony

00:38:21 ►

which I’m getting to

00:38:22 ►

which is very intense

00:38:24 ►

it’s just agreeing to go, usually taking one medicine,

00:38:29 ►

so we’re all in the same state of mind, but not necessarily,

00:38:34 ►

but going to the beginning of a really good hike somewhere

00:38:37 ►

where we’re not going to encounter many people and the path is well marked,

00:38:41 ►

and meeting at 9 in the the morning bringing our medicine maybe

00:38:46 ►

bringing some some sage for smudge sitting in a circle for 15 minutes um saying asking for the

00:38:55 ►

spirit of the medicine to to be with us saying our intention one sentence just little you know it’s

00:38:59 ►

light taking the medicine and then walking for six hours together you know in a psychedelic state

00:39:05 ►

slowly some of us down on our knees oohing and awing over things some of them spouting philosophy

00:39:11 ►

and walking on a head you know we have the we found that the verbal people are in front and

00:39:14 ►

and the perceptual people are in the back you know the slow and and um and until and we’ve

00:39:21 ►

timed it so that there’s you know a designated driver or two who knows that by 5pm

00:39:26 ►

they’re going to be able to drive us to a really

00:39:28 ►

fine restaurant and then we’re going to finish it up

00:39:30 ►

and we close that circle before we get in the

00:39:32 ►

car, you know, but it’s a wonderful

00:39:34 ►

way to be together in a kind of

00:39:36 ►

when people walk together they shift position

00:39:38 ►

all the time and the unexpected

00:39:40 ►

keeps bubbling up all the way

00:39:42 ►

along but you’re also in

00:39:44 ►

a form that you have created.

00:39:48 ►

And so just that addition of formality to it is a really, it’s just a wondrous thing.

00:39:56 ►

The elements that I wanted to cite are invocation, as I’ve mentioned, invoking the name of the

00:40:05 ►

invocation, as I’ve mentioned, invoking the name of the medicine, the name of the plant, and asking it to join you in your work,

00:40:12 ►

giving it offerings, giving the place, acknowledging the place that you’re in,

00:40:18 ►

acknowledging the directions I find is a very good idea

00:40:20 ►

because these things are very disorienting.

00:40:23 ►

So everything you can do to place yourself

00:40:25 ►

in time and space is

00:40:27 ►

clarifying, empowering.

00:40:30 ►

So knowing,

00:40:31 ►

where is north, south, east, and west?

00:40:34 ►

If you know anything about the qualities

00:40:36 ►

of those directions which we learn from

00:40:37 ►

Native people, if we don’t know them from our own

00:40:39 ►

experience and intuition, just even

00:40:41 ►

what you know about the light from each of those directions,

00:40:44 ►

the season, then acknowledge it, turn to each direction and just say, you know, thank you

00:40:49 ►

to the East for bringing the dawn.

00:40:52 ►

Please, you know, watch over us in the passage of this experience.

00:40:57 ►

Thank you to the South for the fire and the warmth and the passion, that kind of thing,

00:41:01 ►

you know, and you can get much more elaborate than that.

00:41:03 ►

And with ceremony, elaboration is definitely something that happens.

00:41:08 ►

And so, you know, what we have to be aware of is how much of that elaboration do you want

00:41:12 ►

and how much sort of blowing in the state of mind do you want.

00:41:17 ►

But I really encourage you to use some of these techniques and see what happens.

00:41:22 ►

to use some of these techniques and see what happens.

00:41:26 ►

Acknowledging the spirits of the place

00:41:28 ►

that are actually living in the earth there,

00:41:31 ►

asking to be not only the four directions

00:41:34 ►

but the directions above and below.

00:41:37 ►

I like to think of myself as rooted,

00:41:40 ►

my feet rooted,

00:41:41 ►

so that I can return to that when I’m wobbly,

00:41:47 ►

when you begin to really shake or some thought complex has come in that’s like one of the real big hard ones you know or stuff gets

00:41:54 ►

chaotic and shadowy then if you remember your feet are in the ground you can root right down

00:42:01 ►

into this big earth that’s holding us you breathe the the air in and out, and your head is in the trees.

00:42:08 ►

Your head is the crown of light and spirit.

00:42:12 ►

And you can feel 100 feet tall then, and you come back to yourself.

00:42:17 ►

And you come back to the beauty of the moment, the strength of it.

00:42:23 ►

The vulnerability is okay.

00:42:26 ►

Your vulnerability is okay if you’re grounded it’s when i find when you lose that that you start to scramble you know

00:42:32 ►

um breath as i said is the um i’m kind of going back and forth between elements of form and

00:42:38 ►

technique here breath is the thing to remember always And the flowering of breath is song. And this is in all of these traditions too, you know.

00:42:47 ►

But even if you think you’re not a singer

00:42:51 ►

or even if you only know the lullabies

00:42:53 ►

that someone sang to you when you were a little child

00:42:55 ►

and you, you know, don’t think of yourself

00:42:59 ►

as a shamanic chanter or something,

00:43:02 ►

sing those songs.

00:43:04 ►

A childhood lullaby

00:43:05 ►

that you sing to yourself even

00:43:08 ►

is the most comforting, rich,

00:43:11 ►

memory-laden piece

00:43:14 ►

of almost tangible information

00:43:18 ►

that you can use in a state like that.

00:43:20 ►

You can certainly do that for other people too.

00:43:24 ►

And then just generating, I mean,

00:43:26 ►

the tradition, the shamanic tradition is to allow songs to come through you, to be sung, as they say.

00:43:33 ►

I seek to be sung, and the song sings itself through you. And this is what you see in these

00:43:40 ►

shamanic traditions where people are really comfortable with this concept,

00:43:47 ►

what they’re looking for are the songs

00:43:49 ►

that will be given to them as gifts.

00:43:51 ►

In the ayahuasca tradition,

00:43:53 ►

if a song comes to you that has not been sung before,

00:43:56 ►

that you’ve not heard before,

00:43:57 ►

and it’s coming through your relationship

00:43:59 ►

with a particular plant or a place

00:44:02 ►

or a spirit animal that has come into you,

00:44:06 ►

then you regard that as one of the precious gifts in your life, that song.

00:44:11 ►

And you do all you can to let it be sung and remember it,

00:44:15 ►

which is really hard, and remember it so you can sing it again.

00:44:19 ►

And in that tradition, if you know the song of a plant really well,

00:44:24 ►

you can do medicine with that song.

00:44:26 ►

You don’t have to have the plant.

00:44:27 ►

You don’t have to take the plant.

00:44:29 ►

That song is now the signature of the medicine,

00:44:33 ►

and the song will work as well as the medicine.

00:44:36 ►

So it’s a way of thinking about those songs that come to you in whatever state

00:44:40 ►

and sometimes even taking an old song that you know an old standard of some sort where

00:44:47 ►

the melody works for you or the quality of the meaning and you give it your own words that

00:44:53 ►

can be one of your ally songs and so you have like you know

00:44:58 ►

um the the northern native american tradition is to always have your medicine bag

00:45:05 ►

that has your power objects in it,

00:45:07 ►

your pipe, your roots that are protective,

00:45:11 ►

your feathers for cleansing,

00:45:14 ►

the different kinds of objects that are used in different tribes and traditions.

00:45:20 ►

And then to have these intangibles also in your medicine bag.

00:45:24 ►

So just think, you have an invisible medicine bag.

00:45:26 ►

It has invisible tools in it.

00:45:28 ►

It has invisible objects of beauty in it,

00:45:31 ►

which you can take out and array around you.

00:45:33 ►

And these songs are one category of that.

00:45:36 ►

These are shamanic tools that we all have the capacity to generate

00:45:42 ►

or to allow to be generated in us

00:45:45 ►

and then to use in our work.

00:45:49 ►

Draw a circle, as I was saying, around you.

00:45:51 ►

Maybe a circle drawn in the dirt

00:45:53 ►

around three of you that are out in the world

00:45:57 ►

going to have a nature experience together.

00:45:59 ►

Maybe the form of the tipi.

00:46:01 ►

Maybe, I often use tobacco and go out

00:46:08 ►

with a pipe of tobacco to the, I mean I don’t often use

00:46:12 ►

tobacco in my daily life but I do in these situations and go out and

00:46:16 ►

blow tobacco to the edges of where

00:46:20 ►

I want this work to be safe, to create this

00:46:23 ►

tent, this tent of possibility,

00:46:28 ►

safe possibility, rich for our intentions.

00:46:36 ►

And sometimes, just in terms of thinking about protection,

00:46:40 ►

sometimes during a ceremony,

00:46:42 ►

something from the outside or something inside will come up,

00:46:46 ►

like the bats that come at you, the equivalent of bats that can come at you in a state,

00:46:54 ►

out of your memory, out of, who knows, out of all sorts of places.

00:47:00 ►

Or sounds from a distance or a feeling, you know, like, it’s a wonderful phrase in Star Wars, a tremor in the field.

00:47:08 ►

Is that what it was?

00:47:09 ►

Tremor in the force, yes.

00:47:12 ►

Obi-Wan Kenobi, I feel a tremor in the force.

00:47:15 ►

Yes, you feel that, you know.

00:47:17 ►

And so that’s a time to use tobacco or smudge of some sort that,

00:47:24 ►

or even just motions

00:47:26 ►

if you have nothing else, motions with your hands

00:47:28 ►

just whisking and cleaning

00:47:30 ►

and getting stuff away, you know, of a person

00:47:32 ►

who’s like overcome by fear

00:47:34 ►

from that, of a space where you

00:47:36 ►

feel it encroaching and you want to

00:47:38 ►

just shoot, you know, shoot

00:47:40 ►

we don’t need you here, we’re doing something else

00:47:42 ►

now, and I’ve seen this done

00:47:44 ►

in a fierce manner in South America

00:47:49 ►

where something really strange and spooky can come along in the air.

00:47:55 ►

And there are many ways of defining that.

00:47:58 ►

But a shamanic person would jump to his feet and tremble and blow and um and shoo it off and so that we can

00:48:07 ►

then all return to the singing of of beautiful songs and meditations on on those kind of wonders

00:48:16 ►

so allow yourself to react in the moment you know I just think we undervalue intuition. And an old woman that I worked

00:48:25 ►

with in the Amazon, not a curandera, just a woman who, you know, experienced, an Indian

00:48:34 ►

woman who had experienced 70-some years of life in this world that is very much magical and very many forces interpenetrated

00:48:47 ►

she said that

00:48:50 ►

the most important information

00:48:52 ►

out there is the information you don’t ask

00:48:54 ►

for, it’s the unbidden information

00:48:56 ►

so when you’re walking

00:48:58 ►

along a trail in the forest for instance

00:49:00 ►

and you think you’re looking for something

00:49:01 ►

first of all you’re looking for snakes because you don’t want to run into

00:49:04 ►

one, so we’ve always got that up.

00:49:05 ►

But, you know, fear is a great teacher of perception.

00:49:08 ►

I mean, I really appreciate snakes for that.

00:49:10 ►

I’ve noticed a lot more things in a tropical forest

00:49:13 ►

because I know there are snakes there

00:49:14 ►

than I would if it were totally safe.

00:49:17 ►

It makes you pay attention.

00:49:18 ►

But that’s a different direction.

00:49:21 ►

But she’s saying, you know,

00:49:22 ►

so that if something falls in your path suddenly

00:49:24 ►

or something crosses

00:49:25 ►

or you hear a sound that you’ve never heard before

00:49:27 ►

you stop

00:49:29 ►

you give it your full attention

00:49:31 ►

and I think we’re so being more matter oriented

00:49:34 ►

we’re so focused on our project

00:49:37 ►

that we often dismiss

00:49:39 ►

what we don’t think is relevant

00:49:40 ►

to the moment we’re living in

00:49:42 ►

so we’re not paying this kind of wide-open attention

00:49:45 ►

to the unbidden information.

00:49:47 ►

And that’s really what she taught me,

00:49:48 ►

was the unbidden is the most valuable.

00:49:51 ►

That’s where we should stop.

00:49:52 ►

That’s where they’re speaking to us,

00:49:54 ►

and we should stop and pay attention.

00:49:58 ►

You know, maybe I…

00:50:00 ►

You know, sometimes what you need to do is smoke another joint,

00:50:02 ►

but that’s not always the answer.

00:50:06 ►

And, oh, that reminds me that within allies, you know,

00:50:09 ►

I mean, I do feel like there are plants that are allies with other plants.

00:50:13 ►

And I, you know, am quite willing to admit that my oldest teacher,

00:50:20 ►

whom I very much respect, is LSD.

00:50:22 ►

And I, you know, got years of experience with that

00:50:26 ►

before I really encountered anything else as powerful.

00:50:29 ►

And I love, not only because of the history and all of that,

00:50:35 ►

but I just love the clean, clear window of it.

00:50:37 ►

I’m really into all this animism,

00:50:40 ►

but once in a while it’s just nice to look through a window

00:50:43 ►

and not exactly deal with a whole complicated being of another sort

00:50:47 ►

and I appreciate that about it

00:50:49 ►

but I don’t see, personally

00:50:52 ►

I don’t see how a person can do LSD without cannabis

00:50:55 ►

to me they are wedded

00:50:57 ►

and so there’s a way of setting up

00:51:02 ►

your environment

00:51:05 ►

where you gather your allies.

00:51:08 ►

And I do always make sure I have a full pipe

00:51:12 ►

of the very best cannabis I can find

00:51:14 ►

when I go into certain kinds of ceremonies.

00:51:19 ►

Now, that wouldn’t be true with ayahuasca.

00:51:20 ►

It probably would be true with mushrooms.

00:51:23 ►

But cannabis is my ally.

00:51:24 ►

I’m not an ab ally. I’m not

00:51:25 ►

an abuser. I’m an aficionado, and I have the good fortune to be that. So recognizing allies

00:51:35 ►

and being prepared. I was a Girl Scout. Be prepared was our motto. I have appreciated

00:51:41 ►

it all my life. You always had to have the jackknife in your backpack.

00:51:45 ►

You always had to have enough water.

00:51:47 ►

And I get teased still for telling people,

00:51:49 ►

do you have all your supplies?

00:51:52 ►

But it works.

00:51:54 ►

There are a couple of people in this audience

00:51:57 ►

who have thanked me very gratefully

00:51:58 ►

for teaching them how to go to huge psychedelic concerts,

00:52:02 ►

how to be prepared,

00:52:04 ►

and how to set up your little station

00:52:05 ►

and how to get through it without mishap,

00:52:08 ►

because there’s a way to do these things.

00:52:14 ►

The power objects in terms of talking about ceremony

00:52:19 ►

and that besides,

00:52:22 ►

that another thing for generating an altered state,

00:52:24 ►

because a lot of this is

00:52:25 ►

about trans generation as well the medicine doesn’t do it all you guide the experience of

00:52:29 ►

the medicine with the things that you do um and you know in the new newer rave culture i know

00:52:36 ►

seeking trance and seeking group mind um is really seems to be a major goal of those kinds of ceremonies which they really are too

00:52:47 ►

the kind of music the kind of drugs i don’t know i just recently a couple of weeks ago learned the

00:52:52 ►

term maybe you all know it poly drug the verb poly drugging uh taking many things at once and uh i

00:53:00 ►

you know i’m conservative I’m a traditionalist.

00:53:06 ►

And I don’t want to judge people,

00:53:10 ►

but I do feel that there is a lot of danger there.

00:53:16 ►

And I just love clarity, clarity of mind.

00:53:19 ►

And murkiness, I don’t get it.

00:53:21 ►

I don’t get what’s so appealing about that.

00:53:23 ►

And I think that when you start layering things on, all of these, you know, physical sensations, the dancing,

00:53:31 ►

this strange thing, lots of people, you know, exhaustion, and then multiple drugs, some uppers,

00:53:38 ►

some downers, some sideways, all that kind of stuff. I just encourage any of you who either do that or have children who do that because

00:53:49 ►

really a lot of our young people do um to to offer to pass on guidance about uh form and clarity and

00:53:58 ►

choice and not to go you know it’s okay of course to go to these events but be careful of your body

00:54:03 ►

because the body is the limitation.

00:54:06 ►

The liver is a limitation.

00:54:12 ►

That term polydrugging, I just went, oh no, now it’s really out there.

00:54:19 ►

Back to doing this, a rattle is a very, very valuable thing to have with you.

00:54:21 ►

A subtle rattle, I would say.

00:54:23 ►

The sound, subtle and in the South American

00:54:27 ►

ayahuasca tradition I don’t see rattles but they use dried leaves these leaves

00:54:32 ►

that are bunched or chocopi it depends on where you are which which word is

00:54:37 ►

used for them and which species in fact but generally it’s a kind of Palmetto

00:54:41 ►

species that the leaves dry and you put a number of branches of them together

00:54:45 ►

and when you shake them they make this slight rustling

00:54:49 ►

and it is so calming, integrating, wonderful

00:54:54 ►

and they use it to raise and lower the visionary state as well.

00:55:00 ►

A person who is the ayahuasquero, manipulating this trembling wand of dried leaves,

00:55:08 ►

will raise a state in a person who’s too leaden

00:55:12 ►

by coming up with the sound,

00:55:15 ►

brushing the energy up the spine,

00:55:17 ►

up toward the crown of the head.

00:55:19 ►

If somebody’s like,

00:55:19 ►

whoa, I don’t know what’s happening to me,

00:55:21 ►

usually an outsider, not usually an insider,

00:55:24 ►

but sometimes they’ll bring it back down, whoa, I don’t know what’s happening to me, you know, usually an outsider, not usually an insider,

00:55:28 ►

but sometimes they’ll bring it back down,

00:55:34 ►

bring the energy back down into the body and down, you know, following the energy down to the base

00:55:38 ►

to root you again.

00:55:39 ►

And the sound itself is, it’s very,

00:55:48 ►

I think it kind of makes, it weaves everything into a fabric

00:55:49 ►

so you don’t feel so much like you’re

00:55:52 ►

a lost element in a wild

00:55:54 ►

swirling

00:55:56 ►

tidal wave which is what

00:55:58 ►

these things can feel like you know

00:55:59 ►

and the same with a very subtle

00:56:02 ►

rattle if you’ve got your own rattle

00:56:03 ►

if you’re wobbly or you are also you’re wobbly or if you’re bored

00:56:07 ►

if you’re like seeking the vision

00:56:08 ►

and sometimes these things are hard to get to

00:56:10 ►

and your mind is wandering off

00:56:12 ►

to your bank account

00:56:14 ►

or you wish you had a good cup of coffee

00:56:16 ►

or whatever it is

00:56:16 ►

they can happen

00:56:17 ►

the seedy side of your mind

00:56:19 ►

when you’ve gotten used to psychedelics

00:56:21 ►

and you’re not getting what you were hoping for

00:56:24 ►

or paranoia you’ve gotten used to psychedelics and you’re not getting what you were hoping for.

00:56:25 ►

Or paranoia.

00:56:26 ►

Pardon?

00:56:27 ►

Paranoia.

00:56:29 ►

Or paranoia, definitely.

00:56:30 ►

The fearful aspects, yes.

00:56:32 ►

Then pick up your rattle.

00:56:35 ►

And like I say, subtle, small rattle, little sound.

00:56:37 ►

But just, you’re shaking it.

00:56:39 ►

So you’re empowered right there.

00:56:40 ►

You’re making that sound.

00:56:42 ►

You’re weaving the fabric. And you become embedded in the fabric.

00:56:44 ►

The other people do too. You can do it subtly. You can begin to sing with it. Often it can bring your voice.

00:56:50 ►

So these are just things to have with you, but to have the courage to use. And I think there’s

00:56:56 ►

something, it’s kind of hard to describe, but there’s something to talk about, which is our

00:57:03 ►

hesitancy and our embarrassment often to act like this as though

00:57:08 ►

we’re acting like indians or something we have this uh attraction and uh and self-consciousness

00:57:16 ►

about um imitation so then remember go back to you know they were using rattles 20,000 years ago in the caves of Europe

00:57:28 ►

and Asia. I mean, the Neanderthals did ceremony. Did you know that? And they were another species.

00:57:34 ►

They died out, you know, in the face of the Cro-Magnons coming up. They know that they were

00:57:38 ►

burying people with ritual, that they were putting herbs in their burial sites, that there were artifacts.

00:57:45 ►

If another species on this planet

00:57:47 ►

can develop ritual and the artifacts to go with it

00:57:51 ►

and recognition of the power of certain plants,

00:57:56 ►

then it’s way deep in everybody.

00:57:58 ►

And just go back to it and don’t worry,

00:58:00 ►

don’t judge yourself while you do these things.

00:58:03 ►

The power of the action speaks for itself if you allow it to happen.

00:58:07 ►

You don’t lead with your head.

00:58:08 ►

You just let your heart and your body tell you what to do in these moments.

00:58:13 ►

Then if you think it’s time to get up and bolt out on the street,

00:58:15 ►

you let your head come in and tell you, no, sit down.

00:58:18 ►

You’re not going anywhere.

00:58:20 ►

I don’t know how many of you do solo voyaging.

00:58:24 ►

Oh, well, a good sample. Great. So I hope some of these things will be useful to you. I don’t know how many of you do solo voyaging.

00:58:26 ►

Oh, well, a good sample. Great.

00:58:30 ►

So I hope some of these things will be useful to you solo-wise.

00:58:36 ►

But so I want to… Of course, drumming has another aspect like rattling.

00:58:41 ►

I just carry a very small rattle with me.

00:58:43 ►

I carry smudge. I haven’t really talked about

00:58:45 ►

that. That’s a tradition that happens in many places too of dried plant material,

00:58:50 ►

resin or leaves that you burn in order to, again, shape, cleanse the energy. There are certain herbal scents that take away baggage, darkness, fear.

00:59:10 ►

And there are others that invite peace, harmony, beauty.

00:59:15 ►

There are ones that empty a space of anything else

00:59:18 ►

and leave it clean and clear to do something else in.

00:59:21 ►

So, you know, you learn to use these things.

00:59:24 ►

And it doesn’t take very much to have a medicine bag clear to do something else in. So, you know, you learn to use these things and have just,

00:59:25 ►

it doesn’t take very much to have a medicine bag that you have, you have the respect for

00:59:30 ►

these tools that you actually keep them together. Even if you don’t do this very often, you

00:59:33 ►

have them ready in some kind of, in a place, in a container where there are the tools of

00:59:39 ►

your most powerful work, you know. Let’s see. one more thing about solo solo traveling is that uh

00:59:47 ►

and this could happen also in other situations is uh ideas of leaving your body i had an experience

00:59:56 ►

at the last salvia conference just a month ago of um sitting with a group of people who wanted to

01:00:02 ►

eat the leaves late at night in a very um in a very respectful way um they invited me to join them and chew the leaves with them and i

01:00:11 ►

said um no thank you i just i’m hesitant about getting into leadership roles with medicine it’s

01:00:19 ►

a you know big territory but i said i will come sit with you while you chew them in the dark in a circle with an invocation, and when everybody

01:00:28 ►

I’m sure everybody will be just fine and cool, and when you’re all into the state, I’ll just

01:00:32 ►

slip out. It was late at night, and it’s intense being

01:00:36 ►

at a conference and being a presenter, so I’ll just slip out.

01:00:39 ►

So I agreed to do that with seven people. Thirteen people showed up.

01:00:44 ►

That was okay.

01:00:48 ►

The room was an octagon,

01:00:51 ►

and the entrance side of it had a little hallway to put your boots and things in.

01:00:52 ►

It was snow outside.

01:00:55 ►

I sat at the open side.

01:00:56 ►

Everybody else could lean against something.

01:00:58 ►

I wasn’t going to be there so long,

01:00:59 ►

and I thought, then I’m kind of the guardian

01:01:01 ►

just while they get going.

01:01:02 ►

I assured everybody they would just be in kind of the dream state soon.

01:01:08 ►

And all of that happened.

01:01:11 ►

And I should tell you, by the way,

01:01:13 ►

I experimented there with an idea that I think is very useful,

01:01:17 ►

which people, this word prayer is another word

01:01:21 ►

that people have either associations from childhood religions

01:01:24 ►

or that you have to be a different kind of person than you are to do something you call prayer.

01:01:29 ►

But prayer is really, as I said last night, interspecies communication.

01:01:32 ►

I mean, it really is just talking to what’s there, individual or general, out loud,

01:01:38 ►

and really putting your heart, talking from here, you know.

01:01:42 ►

So you have to get your head out of the way.

01:01:44 ►

You have to get your head out of the way. You have to get your critic out of the way.

01:01:46 ►

The critic, I think, should go out of the way

01:01:48 ►

a lot of the time, as a matter of fact.

01:01:50 ►

I teach perception and drawing and art in nature, too,

01:01:53 ►

and definitely the critic is the biggest problem.

01:01:55 ►

It’s not about dexterity or anything, you know.

01:01:58 ►

So the same in prayer,

01:02:00 ►

but people are self-conscious in front of each other

01:02:04 ►

to speak in a culture

01:02:06 ►

like ours where we’re not used to doing this together. And so the way that we invoke that

01:02:10 ►

night, you know, 13 people who didn’t know each other, I really learned from the Mazatecs,

01:02:15 ►

which is that everybody prays out loud at the same time in a soft murmuring voice. And

01:02:22 ►

you have many words, you go on praying for a couple of minutes

01:02:26 ►

or in their case, many, many minutes.

01:02:28 ►

But what happens is this weave of voices

01:02:32 ►

where you don’t have to be self-conscious

01:02:34 ►

because no one’s listening to you.

01:02:35 ►

They’re all praying.

01:02:37 ►

No one voice is louder than any other one.

01:02:39 ►

The words are not the same, not synchronized at all.

01:02:41 ►

But you get this sound, this tapestry of sound rolling,

01:02:46 ►

which is just wonderful, and I think is a really nice kind of group invocation, so I

01:02:51 ►

suggest trying that.

01:02:53 ►

The Salvia ceremony was the first time that I’ve tried that with people in our culture

01:02:59 ►

at length, simultaneously.

01:03:02 ►

And then they ate the leaves, and then one person had that occasional experience,

01:03:09 ►

that thing you hear of with usually the stronger

01:03:11 ►

Salvinoran kind of doses of suddenly wanting to bolt.

01:03:17 ►

He just said, you know, he was just like across the room,

01:03:20 ►

past me, going out the door into the snow

01:03:22 ►

at 10 o’clock at night, barefooted in his T-shirt,

01:03:29 ►

you know, and everybody else was sitting in the quiet we had agreed on absolute silence and so began this began 40 minutes of me um trying to subdue a very strong little dude you know who

01:03:40 ►

was really intent on getting outside and uh and to do it silently as much as possible.

01:03:46 ►

And I learned a lot.

01:03:48 ►

I learned a lot about containing energy, about soothing, about cajoling, whispering.

01:03:57 ►

And at some point, and it worked, and he was very sweet.

01:04:03 ►

He would say, I’m not going to make a problem

01:04:05 ►

I’m just leaving now

01:04:07 ►

you know I’m going to get half way literally foot out in the snow

01:04:12 ►

and then part of him at one point said

01:04:14 ►

he was like having a discussion with himself

01:04:16 ►

don’t you think I should have shoes on

01:04:19 ►

yes let’s get shoes on you

01:04:22 ►

but I gradually got his center of gravity down low, down to the ground,

01:04:28 ►

because he was so strong, suddenly he kept bolting up.

01:04:31 ►

So when I got him down and I had a shawl and I had brushed him with that a lot,

01:04:35 ►

brushed his energy a lot, and he eventually identified with my shawl.

01:04:38 ►

That was helpful, and he laid down on it.

01:04:42 ►

And later he described our energy as uh he said he couldn’t

01:04:46 ►

see me but he could feel as though you know when you put two magnets face to face near that

01:04:51 ►

he could feel my energy not quite touching him but i was you know and so these are things that

01:04:57 ►

you learn techniques that you learn for dealing with those you experience with but um at one

01:05:03 ►

point way into it, I said,

01:05:06 ►

what did you ask for?

01:05:08 ►

Because everybody was asking for something in this experience.

01:05:10 ►

And he said, to leave my body.

01:05:15 ►

So one piece of advice is,

01:05:17 ►

be really careful what you ask for.

01:05:19 ►

And if you ask to leave your body,

01:05:22 ►

be sure to ask to come back to your body.

01:05:24 ►

And that made me think of this thing that the aboriginals

01:05:26 ►

do in Australia. They do a substance called pitchery, which is a nicotine and other alkaloid

01:05:32 ►

containing plant, and go into trances with it. I mean, many different things happen around

01:05:37 ►

this plant, but one piece of information I picked up there was, in reading about this,

01:05:42 ►

I have not been there, was uh when going into a trance

01:05:47 ►

chewing this substance they’ll sit you know fairly bare you have the australian outback image you

01:05:53 ►

know fairly bare but they’ll sit within proximity of a tree i don’t know if they use just a certain

01:05:58 ►

species of tree but i would guess they probably do and they spin from their mind in the beginning

01:06:04 ►

of the trance as they’re going into the sacred state they spin from their mind in the beginning of the trance as they’re going into the sacred

01:06:06 ►

state they spin from their mind to the tree a silk thread like a spider does when they’re starting to

01:06:14 ►

going to another place to do a web you know the beginning of a web so this silken thread to the

01:06:19 ►

tree and they anchor themselves to that tree in their mind. And then they stay in that trance state. They can travel and they can come back

01:06:26 ►

and they know that this solid, planted being is going to be,

01:06:30 ►

they’re tethered to it, you know.

01:06:32 ►

These kind of techniques where you call on the world

01:06:37 ►

as multiple allies to do these things with you

01:06:40 ►

and you don’t feel your boundary as being so separate from them

01:06:44 ►

as we

01:06:45 ►

tend to do you know are really really helpful well i want to just uh talk about a few things

01:06:52 ►

that happen in the uh let’s see in the form with other people um i’ve um had the pleasure of being in this evolving circle of people. About three

01:07:10 ►

quarters of the time it’s all women and about one quarter of the time we let in men. And

01:07:16 ►

they’re both great and they are different. Some of the men I know do just men’s circles together,

01:07:25 ►

but they do seem to like it better with women.

01:07:29 ►

I just do think that the feminine really has

01:07:32 ►

a more natural capacity for drawing

01:07:37 ►

and holding this kind of energy

01:07:39 ►

and really relaxing into using it in a creative way,

01:07:42 ►

generally speaking.

01:07:43 ►

really relaxing into using it in a creative way, generally speaking.

01:07:52 ►

And the beginning is an example of this, how you might do this.

01:07:57 ►

We really learned from the Native American church how much form they use.

01:08:00 ►

They are a very formalized ceremony and very tight rules. You only walk one way around the fire all the time.

01:08:03 ►

You never walk between the fire and the medicine.

01:08:08 ►

You have a living peyote out there as your guide.

01:08:12 ►

You ask that living peyote plant to be your guide in the ceremony.

01:08:15 ►

We don’t all necessarily do peyote every time.

01:08:18 ►

It’s hard to get, and sometimes that has been it.

01:08:21 ►

But peyote is the guide because the peyote loves this form. That’s the sense

01:08:26 ►

of it. Yeah?

01:08:27 ►

They say that you’re actually in

01:08:30 ►

ceremonies for four days.

01:08:32 ►

From the time you walk into the teepee

01:08:34 ►

to four days after that.

01:08:36 ►

While you integrate it.

01:08:38 ►

And that’s the time in which there are certain

01:08:40 ►

rules that you abide by

01:08:42 ►

during those four days. I asked

01:08:44 ►

before who had done Native American church ceremonies,

01:08:46 ►

but you have, haven’t you?

01:08:47 ►

Yeah.

01:08:47 ►

Yeah, I know that Bill knows a lot about peyote.

01:08:52 ►

So thank you.

01:08:54 ►

Maybe you’d like to add other things,

01:08:57 ►

because I have thought of you,

01:08:59 ►

and I know that you have a lot of experience.

01:09:02 ►

So we follow that in terms of, but with variations because that’s what we are we’re

01:09:07 ►

you know adapting ritual to the present and we make these teas then uh lsdt or a mescaline tea

01:09:15 ►

um something that we ask to follow in the path in the footsteps of the peyote as the guide, but it may be a contemporary medicine.

01:09:27 ►

And as I said, we dress beautifully for each other

01:09:31 ►

because beauty is medicine. We hang beautiful cloths on the walls of the tipi.

01:09:36 ►

The fire is beautiful. We bring lots of really good wood

01:09:39 ►

to be right there at the door. There is one person

01:09:44 ►

who is a fireperson.

01:09:45 ►

These follow some of the rules of the native ceremony.

01:09:49 ►

There’s a fireperson, there’s a water person,

01:09:51 ►

there’s a medicine woman.

01:09:52 ►

She’s measured it out.

01:09:54 ►

She decides when a new pitcher should go around.

01:09:56 ►

She decides when the, you know,

01:10:00 ►

there’s a tradition of midnight water, which is offered,

01:10:04 ►

and you don’t drink anything other than

01:10:05 ►

tea until the midnight water

01:10:07 ►

and yet we offer these things

01:10:09 ►

in beautiful

01:10:11 ►

English teapots

01:10:13 ►

and tiny teacups, I mean we’ve just made it our

01:10:15 ►

own, you know

01:10:16 ►

and then after midnight when you’re going

01:10:19 ►

into the dark part of the

01:10:21 ►

journey, I mean it’s hard to stay awake

01:10:23 ►

sitting up, this is everybody sitting up, singing, passing the rattle, passing the staff all night long, singing songs that

01:10:32 ►

come to us, medicine songs. And you do this until dawn. And so the hard hours in there,

01:10:39 ►

two, three, four, are very tricky. We pass a pipe at a certain point, a cannabis pipe.

01:10:49 ►

And the intention is, in these group circles,

01:10:53 ►

is to share what we learn, what we have learned.

01:10:57 ►

By our singing and by our energy,

01:10:59 ►

share what we’ve learned since the last time we did this.

01:11:02 ►

And to send out healing energy to the world,

01:11:04 ►

to recognize what’s out there,

01:11:06 ►

to be to some degree, you know,

01:11:10 ►

to emulate the sorrowing goddesses.

01:11:13 ►

I went a few months ago to Ecuador

01:11:16 ►

and, you know, saw something

01:11:20 ►

that I had talked a lot about recently,

01:11:21 ►

but I’m not going to now,

01:11:22 ►

but I saw, you know, a picture of the end of the world,

01:11:25 ►

the end of the world for many people, the end of the world for nature.

01:11:30 ►

Destruction was the most shocking that I’ve ever witnessed.

01:11:33 ►

I’ve been there before, and I saw the changes.

01:11:36 ►

And I just came back weeping daily, multiple times daily, for six weeks or so.

01:11:45 ►

And I’ve come out of it some, which is good,

01:11:47 ►

because I couldn’t figure out how I was going to do this conference

01:11:49 ►

in the state of mind I was in.

01:11:51 ►

But I just had to get into the idea that there are,

01:11:57 ►

that many of the deities that the icons are made of in the world, especially the feminine ones, are weeping.

01:12:08 ►

And it’s a kind of a beautiful sorrowing. It’s just a sorrowing for the constant

01:12:12 ►

loss. I thought, gee, I got so into it I could write

01:12:16 ►

one of those by the cash register bestsellers called Living with Entropy.

01:12:21 ►

I’m really trying to find out what’s great about entropy.

01:12:29 ►

But that’s part of what comes up is sorrowing and celebrating

01:12:31 ►

and I have learned from native people

01:12:34 ►

and from native women particularly

01:12:36 ►

to honor each other

01:12:38 ►

and so part of what comes up is honoring

01:12:40 ►

is singing about the beautiful people,

01:12:46 ►

the beautiful qualities in people that we see,

01:12:49 ►

the unseen strengths in the world.

01:12:55 ►

You know, it’s a very personal thing,

01:12:57 ►

but maybe it’s a good illustration.

01:13:00 ►

In one of these events last summer,

01:13:04 ►

I sang about a spirit I had really gotten in

01:13:09 ►

touch with in the past year, and that was, you know, Terrence was my husband once upon a time,

01:13:15 ►

and we had a very troubled relationship for the last decade. But in the time that he was dying,

01:13:22 ►

I was really aware of his mother, who died before I ever met her, died 20, 30 years ago.

01:13:28 ►

And I was really aware of the spirit of Terrence’s mother visiting her dying child.

01:13:35 ►

And how mothers tend their children, no matter what, and spirit mothers tend their spirit children and i just there were a few weeks in

01:13:46 ►

there where i just woke up every morning feeling her hovering around her taking care of things her

01:13:51 ►

holding his hand and crossing over and so you know i sang a song about um terence’s mother

01:13:59 ►

and and about that that quality of motherhood and And it touches everybody. Everybody has some relationship to these kind of archetypal presences.

01:14:09 ►

So it’s the kind of thing that can come up in a very intricate,

01:14:14 ►

heartfelt, courageous psychedelic ceremony.

01:14:22 ►

And another possibility I’d like to mention

01:14:25 ►

is that of distance viewing

01:14:27 ►

as we’ve heard about here

01:14:29 ►

taking something and looking far away

01:14:31 ►

and I’m getting cut off

01:14:32 ►

and distant healing

01:14:34 ►

and I just want to say that that’s possible too

01:14:36 ►

going to people who you know are in trouble far away

01:14:39 ►

in these states of mind

01:14:40 ►

and sending them healing energy

01:14:43 ►

going into the illness

01:14:44 ►

and visualizing it

01:14:47 ►

and bringing golden i find golden pink light to be very useful in in that kind of thing it’s

01:14:54 ►

possible so set up these this vessel around you go into the vessel and then and then and have a

01:15:02 ►

list of possibilities of things you might do in there

01:15:05 ►

and then allow them to happen.

01:15:07 ►

And that’s really what you have to get back to

01:15:09 ►

is just allow these things to well up.

01:15:12 ►

And I would love to hear,

01:15:14 ►

and now I’ve talked the entire time and have no chance to ask questions,

01:15:17 ►

but I would love to hear techniques or forms that people have discovered

01:15:22 ►

that really work for you in psychedelic ceremonies,

01:15:25 ►

solo or in groups.

01:15:27 ►

And if you’d like to talk with me in another context,

01:15:31 ►

I’d appreciate it.

01:15:32 ►

Thank you very much.

01:15:41 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:15:43 ►

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

01:15:48 ►

To tell the truth, although I have a very clear memory of Kat giving this talk,

01:15:54 ►

I really didn’t remember her comments near the end about Terrence’s mother.

01:15:58 ►

In fact, I hadn’t even planned on mentioning Terrence at all in this podcast,

01:16:02 ►

because the work that Kat has done and

01:16:05 ►

is doing is vast and extremely important, and in many ways her work has actually overshadowed what

01:16:11 ►

Terrence did. But I have to admit that tears came to my eyes when she told the story of her

01:16:17 ►

vision of Terrence’s mother coming to him as he was dying. Now, I’m not planning on dying anytime

01:16:22 ►

soon myself, but I do have to admit that if I knew that my mother would return for that event, that I’d really be looking forward to it.

01:16:32 ►

An interesting little synchronicity that occurred just as I was in the middle of previewing this talk was when the phone rang.

01:16:39 ►

And it was Bruce Dahmer telling me about the webinar that Dennis McKenna is currently giving over at evolver.com. And the first thing he told me about it, without having any idea of what I was just

01:16:50 ►

doing, is that Dennis had just been singing Kat’s praises for having been able to live with Terrence

01:16:56 ►

for 17 years, which was no small feat. So I guess that fact should be mentioned, although it is the

01:17:02 ►

content of what Kat had to say just now that I hope is the thing that stays with you.

01:17:09 ►

After returning from that Palenque conference where Cat gave the talk that we just heard,

01:17:13 ►

one of the first things I did was to put together a little medicine kit for myself.

01:17:18 ►

And since then, I have actually created a couple of rituals that I now use on my solo flights.

01:17:24 ►

And I highly recommend that you do the same if you are really serious about this great work.

01:17:29 ►

Like every other kind of work, you need both a tool kit and an outline of what’s to be done.

01:17:35 ►

You know, with good tools and good plans, there’s really no limit to what you can do.

01:17:40 ►

Also, I hope that you caught the part when Kat was talking about singing during a psychedelic experience,

01:17:47 ►

and she mentioned the fact that you don’t have to be a shaman and know the old Icaros or other songs,

01:17:53 ►

but that even singing a favorite childhood lullaby is also good practice.

01:17:58 ►

And while I’m sure that many of our female slaughters have done that,

01:18:02 ►

I also recommend it to you men.

01:18:02 ►

or female slaughters have done that.

01:18:04 ►

I also recommend it to you men.

01:18:06 ►

And the more macho you are,

01:18:09 ►

the more important it may be to sing yourself a lullaby once in a while during your journeys.

01:18:11 ►

I know that I’ve done so on a few occasions,

01:18:13 ►

and I was amazed at all the things that I dredged up by doing it.

01:18:17 ►

All in all, the times that I’ve done that

01:18:19 ►

turned into quite fantastic experiences.

01:18:22 ►

So give it a try sometime and see what you think.

01:18:26 ►

Now before I go, there is one more thing that I’d like to cover,

01:18:30 ►

and that is to mention the fact that at long last

01:18:33 ►

the Timothy Leary Archive has found a permanent home.

01:18:37 ►

And where might that be, you ask?

01:18:39 ►

Well, it is now safely ensconced in a place

01:18:42 ►

where scholars will easily be able to find it,

01:18:45 ►

the New York City Public Library.

01:18:47 ►

I’ve posted an article about this on my personal blog,

01:18:51 ►

and already there are news stories about it all over the place,

01:18:54 ►

but here’s the gist of what they say, and I’m quoting here.

01:18:59 ►

There are 335 boxes of papers, videotapes, photographs, and more

01:19:04 ►

that the New York Public Library

01:19:05 ►

is planning to announce that it has purchased from the Leary Estate. The material documents

01:19:11 ►

the evolution of the Tweety middle-aged academic into a drug guru, international outlaw, gubernatorial

01:19:19 ►

candidate, computer software designer, and progenitor of the me-decade’s self-absorbed

01:19:24 ►

interest in self-help.

01:19:26 ►

The archive will not be available to the public or scholars for 18 to 24 months as the library organizes the papers.

01:19:32 ►

It is a unique, first-hand archive of the 1960s.

01:19:36 ►

Leary was at the epicenter of what was going on back then, and some of the stuff in there is extraordinary.

01:19:44 ►

And that, too, is quite an understatement.

01:19:47 ►

As I’ve mentioned in previous podcasts,

01:19:50 ►

the task of keeping this valuable collection together fell to Dennis Berry,

01:19:54 ►

and she went way above and beyond the call of duty to keep it safe all these years.

01:19:59 ►

And that was no small task, because when Bruce Dahmer took me to see it,

01:20:04 ►

at the time it filled, and I mean filled to the top, two self-storage units.

01:20:09 ►

So I can see why it will take the library so long to organize these papers.

01:20:13 ►

You see, Tim Leary was, among other things, a major pack rat.

01:20:18 ►

And during my time poking through the boxes in the archive,

01:20:22 ►

I came across things like his mother’s notation

01:20:25 ►

about the time and day that baby Timothy made his first splash in the bathtub. The first of many

01:20:32 ►

splashes, I should add. He even kept his laundry receipts from when he was in prison. It’s a truly

01:20:39 ►

amazing archive, and I hope that one day you get a chance to prowl through it yourself. And I’ll have more to say about the Leary Archive and future podcasts with Bruce Dahmer,

01:20:48 ►

but that’s going to have to wait for a while.

01:20:51 ►

There is one more thing on my mind, however,

01:20:54 ►

and I guess it was thinking about Leary in the 60s

01:20:57 ►

and then just now hearing Kat talk about her experiences during that era

01:21:01 ►

that took me back in time for a bit and has caused me to compare then and now.

01:21:07 ►

First of all, I definitely think that now is better, so let’s get that out of the way.

01:21:12 ►

However, that by no means applies that those chaotic days back then weren’t good in many ways.

01:21:18 ►

Every once in a while, you know, I hear people from my generation put down on themselves because, well, in many ways, we’ve become the people who are causing the problems rather than solving them.

01:21:29 ►

In effect, we have become the generation who is now propping up a dying empire and an unsustainable civilization.

01:21:38 ►

But that we is meant collectively and generally because the people who say this are often still quite engaged

01:21:45 ►

in various forms of social change movements, some like the currently booming home gardening

01:21:50 ►

movement.

01:21:52 ►

What doesn’t seem very much changed is the world of commerce and politics.

01:21:56 ►

But let me take you back for just a moment and point out a few things that the 60s generation

01:22:01 ►

did accomplish.

01:22:03 ►

For one thing, the legal structure of apartheid

01:22:07 ►

in the southern states has been abolished. Do we still have a long way to go in the realm of race

01:22:12 ►

relations? Of course. But I have some pictures that I took in New Orleans during the early 60s

01:22:18 ►

where there are signs all over the place pointing out that most facilities were for whites only.

01:22:24 ►

Then there was this little

01:22:25 ►

thing called the American War in Vietnam, and that was a human travesty of the first order,

01:22:30 ►

a crime against humanity in my book, and I know that firsthand because I was there.

01:22:36 ►

But back then there was a military draft, and that more than anything else I think was the

01:22:41 ►

rallying point for the high school and college students to focus on, and their disruptive and ongoing protest eventually had a major impact on ending that insane war.

01:22:51 ►

Now, bringing about the beginning of the end of apartheid in this country, and ending what was

01:22:57 ►

at the time the nation’s longest war, and eventually ending the military draft seems like a few accomplishments that the 60s generation can point to with pride.

01:23:07 ►

But what happened next?

01:23:09 ►

Well, we had children and responsibilities, and we were getting older and had less energy to go out and man the barricades.

01:23:16 ►

So we redirected our energy and built something to leave behind.

01:23:21 ►

It’s called the Internet.

01:23:22 ►

And yes, having myself worked deep in the

01:23:26 ►

bowels of the net for many years, I realized that a significant amount of the actual code

01:23:31 ►

running the world’s largest machine was cut by kids much younger than us. But it was the

01:23:36 ►

women and men from the 60s generation who by then had moved into middle and upper management

01:23:41 ►

and were the ones who recklessly approved huge budgets to develop

01:23:45 ►

technology that, at the time, showed no promise of bringing the corporate behemoths we were

01:23:50 ►

working for the profits that they were lusting after.

01:23:53 ►

In fact, there were countless managers who lost their jobs for approving some of those

01:23:57 ►

projects.

01:23:58 ►

And guess what else?

01:24:00 ►

Who did we hire to do this groundbreaking work?

01:24:03 ►

Acid heads, for the most part.

01:24:05 ►

In case you didn’t already know this, the Internet was designed, built, and is currently being operated largely by women and men who think of themselves as members of the tribe.

01:24:15 ►

So, I for one am proud to be a member of that generation.

01:24:24 ►

though I didn’t do drugs until many years later, and even though the first anti-war demonstration that I attended was one where hundreds of us Vietnam vets threw our military

01:24:29 ►

medals on the steps of the Federal Building in Houston, Texas, just a year or so before

01:24:34 ►

the Paris Peace Accords were signed.

01:24:36 ►

So I wasn’t at the leading edge of the 60s consciousness back then, but it’s never too

01:24:41 ►

late, I decided, and so today I like to think of myself as a flower

01:24:45 ►

child who slept through the 60s, but now that I’m awake, I’m going to do whatever I can to

01:24:50 ►

wake up the rest of the sleepers from back then, along with their children and grandchildren,

01:24:55 ►

and now we’ve got this great big stick called the internet with which to keep the screwheads

01:25:01 ►

on the run. I guess that the only thing that seems missing to me right now,

01:25:05 ►

and it’s most likely here but I’m just not aware of it, is the kind of protest music that so

01:25:11 ►

inspired us back then. I can still remember songs like The Eve of Destruction, which was one of the

01:25:17 ►

ultimate protest songs from back then. It had lines like, you don’t believe in war, but what’s that

01:25:23 ►

gun you’re toting?

01:25:28 ►

And words like that had a profound effect on us back then,

01:25:32 ►

particularly those of us who had been forced into the military by the draft.

01:25:37 ►

But today’s corporate rock seems to keep songs like that out of their catalogs.

01:25:41 ►

Heck, even Springsteen and U2 seem to me to have sold out and are making a lot of those sappy lovesick songs that fill

01:25:45 ►

the airwaves these days.

01:25:47 ►

But now that I’m thinking about it, why don’t I just play the Turtles version of the Eve

01:25:52 ►

of Destruction right now, just to give you a little better idea of what I’m trying to

01:25:56 ►

say.

01:25:57 ►

So, if you’ll please indulge me, here it is. The Eastern World

01:26:11 ►

It is exploding

01:26:13 ►

Violence flaring

01:26:15 ►

Bullets loading

01:26:17 ►

You’re old enough to kill

01:26:19 ►

But not for voting

01:26:22 ►

You don’t believe in war

01:26:23 ►

But what’s that gun you’re toting

01:26:26 ►

And even the Jordan River

01:26:28 ►

Has bodies floating

01:26:30 ►

But you tell me

01:26:32 ►

Over and over and over again

01:26:35 ►

My friend

01:26:37 ►

Oh, you don’t believe

01:26:39 ►

We’re on the eve of destruction

01:26:42 ►

We’re on the eve of destruction.

01:26:53 ►

Don’t you understand what I’m trying to say?

01:26:57 ►

And can’t you feel the fears that I’m feeling today?

01:27:01 ►

If the button is pushed, there’s no running away.

01:27:05 ►

There’ll be no one to save with the world in a grave take a look around you boy

01:27:07 ►

it’s bound to scare you boy

01:27:09 ►

and you tell me

01:27:12 ►

over and over

01:27:13 ►

and over again

01:27:15 ►

my friend

01:27:16 ►

how you don’t believe

01:27:19 ►

we’re on the eve of

01:27:21 ►

destruction We’re on the eve of destruction.

01:27:33 ►

Think of all the hate there is in red China.

01:27:37 ►

Then take a look around to Selma, Alabama.

01:27:41 ►

You may leave here for four days in space.

01:27:47 ►

But when you return, it’s the same old place the pounding of the drums the pride and disgrace you can bury your dead but don’t leave a trace hate your next door neighbor

01:27:55 ►

but don’t forget to say grace and tell me over and over and over and over again, my friend

01:28:05 ►

You don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction

01:28:10 ►

Oh no, no

01:28:13 ►

You don’t believe we are on the eve of destruction.

01:28:46 ►

of destruction. It may look like that from time to time, but the way I see it is that the chaos that is all around us today is just what comes from any construction project when at the very

01:28:51 ►

beginning the ground must first be cleared and the trash hauled away before something new can be

01:28:56 ►

built. It’s that way with buildings, and it’s that way with new societies that will one day lead us to a new civilization,

01:29:10 ►

a peaceful, cooperative, sustainable, truly human civilization.

01:29:16 ►

So why not take a little time today and create a ritual for yourself and your family that will help you to remain focused on building a world to which you would like to return one day.

01:29:24 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:29:29 ►

Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

271 - Weaving Modern Ritual from Traditional Roots

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Program Notes

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