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276 - Peter Gorman Interviews Dennis McKenna Part 1

Aug 05, 2011, 59 min read

Program Notes

Guest speakers: Peter Gorman and Dennis McKenna

[NOTE: All quotations are by Dennis McKenna.]

“The idea that you could use these to actually explore other dimensions, real worlds that were outside the cognizance of our ordinary world, is really what I think fascinated me about psychedelics.”

“More than anything else, it [DMT] seemed to be not an experience, not a drug, but a place, an actual other dimension that you were plunged into.”

“In order to understand its limitations, I almost had to become the ‘enemy’. I had to become a scientist in order to understand the limitations of science.”

Peter Gorman
Writer, Explorer, Naturalist
Web Site
Blog
Archive
http://pgorman.com/shop.htm

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Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.

00:00:19 ►

This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

00:00:23 ►

This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

00:00:31 ►

And special greetings to some of our fellow salonners who have sent in donations to help with the expenses associated with these podcasts, either by sending a direct donation or by making a donation for my Pay What You Can audiobook, my novel, The Genesis Generation.

00:00:53 ►

And these generous souls are longtime salon supporter Mark C., Allison S., John B., Neil R., Kenneth M., and John N.

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And I thank you all ever so much.

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Also, I should mention that, yes, I am very aware of the issues associated with PayPal right now.

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And in time, I’ll set up some other ways to donate.

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In fact, I’ve spent quite a bit of time looking into the various other payment setups,

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but it’s going to be quite a while before I can find the time to do all of the back-end work to set up the implementations of them.

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Not that they’re all that burdensome, I guess, but it does take time,

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and to tell the truth, I’ve kind of gotten out of my geek mode for a bit here, and in fact, I haven’t even taken the time to set up a new online bookstore now that Amazon cut off all of us associates

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here in California.

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And also, there’s the issue of using some new tools to reduce the file sizes of these

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podcasts, not to mention several other things

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that need to be done on my websites, but until I kind of get out of these dog days of summer

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where I’m just kicking back and doing a lot of reading, which I’m enjoying immensely by

00:01:56 ►

the way, I’m going to probably continue putting off most of those little projects, at least

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until I finish writing, along with Bruce Dahmer, our presentations for the upcoming workshop Thank you. public consumption because it was recorded only as backup for an interview that Peter Gorman did

00:02:25 ►

with Dennis McKenna in 1994 for a magazine article that Peter was writing. And I’ll tell you the

00:02:33 ►

story of how this interesting recording came into my possession right after we hear the first part

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of this interview. In fact, I’ve got a whole lot of things that I want to tell you, and that’s

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mainly why it’s taken me so long to get today’s program out. I simply didn’t know where to start,

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and it seems like so much stuff to cover that I don’t really know where to end either.

00:02:53 ►

But first, let’s get to the program, and a little more introduction, I guess, is in order

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right now to kind of set the stage for it. If, like me, you recognize the name Peter

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Gorman, but can’t quite place where you heard it,

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that’s probably because Peter is a very prolific writer whose work appears in many publications

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that you’ve no doubt read at one time or another. And I’m going to include some links to Peter’s

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work and his new book in the program notes for this podcast. And in my next podcast, I’ll be

00:03:23 ►

telling you a little bit more about some of the things that he’s involved in. His new book, by the way, is titled, Ayahuasca in My Blood,

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25 Years of Medicine Dreaming, which I personally am looking very forward to reading before long.

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In fact, if we can eventually work it out, I’d love to have Matt Palomary interview Peter for

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a podcast specifically about ayahuasca.

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But I guess those speculations should wait for now while I get back to introducing this program.

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In my case, I first learned of Peter during the years when he worked for High Times Magazine,

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including a stint as its editor.

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And after we hear the first part of this interview,

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then I’ll tell the fascinating story of how this recording reached me.

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But first, let’s join Peter Gorman and Dennis McKenna in a quite candid conversation sometime back in 1994

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that begins with some stories of the early years of the McKenna brothers.

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However, for many of our fellow salonners, the most interesting parts of this interview may be the story of the long

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and winding trail that Dennis took on his road to becoming one of the leading intellectual and

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academic lights in the psychedelic community. In particular, his story may be of help to some of

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our fellow Saloners who are still in the early stages of starting out in life and want to follow

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the psychedelic research path. So let’s get started and learn some McKenna family history from the mouth and mind of

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the McKenna brother who even Terrence admitted was the source of many of his best ideas.

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This is a good time?

00:04:58 ►

Uh, yeah.

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How long do you think it’ll take?

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It’s just 38 pages of questions.

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Oh, jeez.

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I’m kidding. I’m kidding.

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I’m kidding.

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Tell you what, let’s start with your basic background, you know?

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What kind of family, where you grew up, what you wanted to do when you were a kid,

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how many is Terrence your only brother, or are there others, and that sort of thing.

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Right, right. Well, we grew up in a small town in Colorado, in western Colorado.

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And there were only the two of us.

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There was Terrence and myself, much to my parents’ relief, I’m sure.

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And, you know, we had a pretty normal family, really. I mean,

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the town we grew up in is the town that my mother was born in and grew up in. My father

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traveled for an electrical equipment seller, and, you know he was he was a traveling sales representative

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for a company that was based in Denver but we didn’t live in Denver so like

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that I guess we had an early interest in the peculiar. I remember Terrence always had early interest in science. Even

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before he was 10 years old, he had an extensive rock collection and shell collection. And

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he and my father worked on model rocketry. That was a big interest of his. Being four years younger, I was of course influenced by all this.

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To some degree, I found my own interest too.

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My big interest when I was a kid was astronomy and cosmology and that sort of thing.

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But I was always poor in math.

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Although I wanted really to be an astrophysicist more than anything,

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I didn’t think I had the math to handle it.

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So I sort of, as I grew up and began to get my education,

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I sort of shied away from math and physics

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and became more inclined towards humanities,

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things like religious studies and anthropology and that sort of thing.

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And then only later did I really get back into the sciences

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from the standpoint of biological sciences and that sort of thing.

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from the standpoint of biological sciences and that sort of thing.

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But I think an early big influence on both Terrence and myself was that we were both avid science fiction readers.

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And I think my father can be blamed for that

00:08:00 ►

because he was occasionally a science fiction reader

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and used to bring home copies

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of things like Fate magazine and amazing stories and that kind of thing, which influenced us

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when we were much younger. And then we both had an interest in science fiction and liked, I liked to stretch our minds in terms of imagination and that kind of thing.

00:08:31 ►

That was really the motivation or the fascination with my interest in cosmology.

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I was interested in astronomy and I had a telescope, I’d go out and observe the heavens, but I also enjoy reading authors like George Gamow,

00:08:50 ►

who wrote a book, 123 Infinity,

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which talked about cosmologies and the origin of the universe

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and the structure of the universe,

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and all these topics I found extremely exciting

00:09:02 ►

because it seemed like they were the big questions

00:09:05 ►

and I was definitely interested in the big questions. Why are we here?

00:09:10 ►

Why is the world here? What’s it all about? That kind of thing. So I had a kind of

00:09:15 ►

metaphysical inclination that was tied to this link

00:09:20 ►

and linked to this interest in cosmology.

00:09:26 ►

For detail’s sake, although it’s not as interesting as what you’re saying,

00:09:30 ►

give me a year on your birth and a town name, if you can.

00:09:35 ►

The year of my birth?

00:09:36 ►

Yeah.

00:09:37 ►
00:09:38 ►

Okay.

00:09:39 ►

And the town was Paonia, Colorado.

00:09:42 ►

Okay.

00:09:43 ►

P-A-O-N-I-A.

00:09:44 ►

All right. Something for the intro deck to kind of, Colorado. Okay. P-A-O-N-I-A.

00:09:45 ►

All right.

00:09:45 ►

Something for the intro deck to kind of ground us.

00:09:48 ►

Right.

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When your later interest in psychedelics had to begin somewhere,

00:09:56 ►

did it begin like a lot of us who are that same age?

00:10:00 ►

I’m 51.

00:10:02 ►

With smoking marijuana, what was your early drug experimentation?

00:10:05 ►

Well, I really think that the early interest did come out of this interest in the large

00:10:11 ►

questions, in the metaphysical questions to which there may not be answers having to do with who we are and the origins of being in the world and

00:10:29 ►

is there a God and that sort of thing. I think an early strong influence on both of our lives

00:10:37 ►

was the fact that we grew up Catholics and although our parents were not fanatical or

00:10:48 ►

And although our parents were not fanatical or devout Catholics, they took it fairly seriously.

00:10:51 ►

So we had a lot of early influence from the church.

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But when I got to be around 12 or 13, I found a lot of the answers that I was getting from Catholicism were not really very satisfying. I was reading some of the philosophers who kind of questioned

00:11:14 ►

some of the tenets of Catholicism, Bertrand Russell and so on. So I was looking for some answers and also some personal experience. I was interested. Another book that early

00:11:22 ►

influenced me, which I read many times, was H.G. Wells’ novel, The Time Machine.

00:11:29 ►

And I was just fascinated by the idea that you could, you know, of time travel and being able to go to these places.

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So when I, Terrence being four years older than I, when he went to Berkeley, the first year that he

00:11:46 ►

came back from college at Berkeley, we had long discussions about phenomenology and Jungian

00:11:54 ►

psychology and archetypes and the collective unconscious and a study called psychophysics.

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a study called Psychophysics.

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And these were all things that he was discovering at the time as a student in Berkeley,

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and this was about 1960, what would be 1965, I guess.

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And so he was excited by all these things. And when he came back, shared them with me.

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I don’t want to say that all of my intellectual development

00:12:27 ►

was due to him, but certainly the books that we were both reading at the same time and

00:12:32 ►

the ideas we were sharing were a strong influence. And so I became quite fascinated with the

00:12:38 ►

idea that there were other dimensions and that you could explore other dimensions and that the psychedelics were one way to do this.

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You know, it wasn’t just that they weren’t just drugs because I had pretty much swallowed,

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I’d been exposed to the drug education or more drug misinformation that students in school were exposed to at that time.

00:13:10 ►

And, you know, I had a real horror of drugs, so I never thought of myself as being, you know,

00:13:17 ►

someone who would get involved in that because I, you know, I believe the movies like Reef or Madness

00:13:24 ►

and that sort of thing that they used to show in the school.

00:13:27 ►

So that was not of great interest to me,

00:13:31 ►

but the idea that you could use these to actually explore other dimensions,

00:13:39 ►

real worlds that were outside the cognizance of our ordinary world,

00:13:44 ►

is really, I think,

00:13:45 ►

what fascinated me about psychedelics.

00:13:52 ►

About the time that these, actually several years later, but R. Gordon Wasson’s article

00:14:00 ►

in Life Magazine about Seeking the Magic Mushroom that came out in 1957.

00:14:08 ►

I was a little young to appreciate it at that time,

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but a few years later,

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certainly was interested in the publicity that things like LSD were getting in,

00:14:16 ►

for instance, Life magazine.

00:14:19 ►

And the publicity at that time was not entirely negative.

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You know, a lot of people were fascinated.

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There was thought that these things were exploratory tools.

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So I was interested in that.

00:14:34 ►

About the same time that the news about warning glory seeds broke into the national media.

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So this was actually my first encounter with the psychedelic experience

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was through ingestion of morning glory seeds,

00:14:50 ►

which I could just buy at the local seed store.

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And a friend and I bought some packets of Heavenly Blue and ingested them.

00:15:02 ►

Later it turned out that the dose was really much too small to do anything

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and the taste was quite horrible and not a whole lot happened

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or what happened was probably out of suggestion.

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But anyway, that was my first encounter really

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with the psychedelic experience on a personal level.

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Did you go back and do the Morning Glory again?

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Did I do it again?

00:15:28 ►

The Morning Glory, yeah.

00:15:29 ►

Huh?

00:15:30 ►

The Morning Glory.

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Did you do that again?

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Not until years later, actually.

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I did it several years later.

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I actually had the number of encounters or experiences with Wyand Woodrow’s, which is

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a much stronger form of the same thing, as you know.

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But I didn’t really get into it.

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I didn’t really get into it.

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I didn’t really get into it.

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I didn’t really get into it.

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I didn’t really get into it.

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I didn’t really get into it.

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I didn’t really get into it.

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I didn’t really get into it.

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I didn’t really get into it. I didn’t really get into it. I didn’t really get into it. I didn’t really get into it. I didn’t really get into it. encounters or experiences with Hawaiian wood rose, which is a much stronger form of the

00:15:47 ►

same thing as you know. But I didn’t really get into that until I was in college. So that

00:15:54 ►

was several years later. My next encounter was through marijuana. Again, Terrence was

00:16:03 ►

a big influence here because he came back from Berkeley one

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summer with his girlfriend in a lid of what we probably consider pretty inferior grass

00:16:15 ►

these days, but we passed a number of afternoons trying it out in the local public park, which

00:16:25 ►

trying it out in the local public park,

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which we have to live across the street from the city park in the town,

00:16:34 ►

so we just went over there and spread a blanket out under the tree.

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This was 1966, I believe,

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and it was not an age where people were aware of anything,

00:16:46 ►

so you could basically, you know, no one would look twice at you.

00:16:50 ►

We pretty much just did it in plain view.

00:16:54 ►

The first few times I smoked it, not much happened.

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But finally, I think marijuana is one of those things where you have to kind of learn to, you have to learn it.

00:17:04 ►

You have to know what to expect.

00:17:10 ►

But on the third or fourth time, it did have a definite effect. Then I began to see what it was about.

00:17:16 ►

That was really, I guess, my first real encounter with an altered state of consciousness. I actually, well, other than alcohol, and

00:17:27 ►

curiously enough, a couple of weeks before he came home, was the first chance I ever

00:17:35 ►

had to get pretty shit-faced drunk at the local Fourth of July dance. I went to the

00:17:48 ►

At the local, at the Fourth of July dance, I went to the dance with a friend of mine, and I had to be taken home by the police.

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And as a matter of fact, I had to be taken home several times by the police,

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because when I got home, I just walked out again and went to the dance.

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But actually, I didn’t have a very good time.

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I was quite out of control when I drank alcohol, and where alcohol just made me act stupid,

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what I was fascinated by with marijuana was the thoughts,

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the very interesting ideas of thoughts,

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or at least they seemed interesting, possibly they were trivial.

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So I thought it was a much superior kind of intoxicant.

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And I actually, it certainly early on became my drug of choice.

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And as a recreational thing, and to this day, I don’t have much interest in alcohol,

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and I don’t really enjoy the alcohol intoxication.

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I drink an occasional beer or glass of wine, but I certainly don’t

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seek that state of mind.

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When did you move into ethnobotanical work?

00:19:18 ►

Well, it happened, it really happened over a period of time.

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Because of my early fascination with psychedelics and the fact that my earliest encounters were

00:19:32 ►

through morning glories, I became early on interested in the tradition of use of plant

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hallucinogens in other cultures.

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I guess a lot of people’s early experiences with drugs were different

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because they had no, if they grew up in an urban environment,

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they had no context in which to place these substances

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other than the context applied by the mass media of the day.

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the context applied by the mass media of the day.

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So that was basically Timothy Leary and the mass media’s, you know,

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promulgation of these things was not really, didn’t really emphasize the fact that these things had been used for so many

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thousands of years in traditional cultures.

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so many thousands of years in traditional cultures.

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But because of my interest in morning glories and early reading of things like Aldous Huxley’s books,

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The Doors of Perception, and so on,

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I was aware that these plants were out there,

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and I sort of, I guess maybe it was a certain innate good sense that told me that, you know,

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if you wanted to really explore these things, you should explore them through the plants rather than through the substances.

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So early on, I became interested in anthropology and the use of these things in traditional contexts.

00:21:02 ►

of these things in traditional contexts.

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In fact, that was really what led me as an undergraduate in college to study anthropology.

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I started out with a double major in anthropology and astronomy,

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which is kind of a strange combination with a healthy dose of philosophy thrown in. So I was really interested in the big issues, the philosophical issues and metaphysics and that sort of thing.

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So I started out, you know, with this kind of funny major in college.

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And anthropology was part of it, and a lot of it was directed toward the anthropology of religion, because of course in the religious context

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is where these things are used. So I was

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interested in comparative religious studies and actually was a major

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in that for a while. But all my studies really

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in college were linked back to this interest in plant hallucinogens

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and this conviction that these were the tools for exploring other dimensions

00:22:10 ►

where the real action was.

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When I, after Terrence and I, I took off a semester in 1971,

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which was just after my mother had died of cancer. She died in

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October 1970. By that time, I was in college, and the Vietnam War was raging, and I was

00:22:35 ►

definitely in the counterculture. But, you know, Terrence and I had been for a couple of years planning this trip to South America to investigate this oraleocte form of DMT, which we had discovered.

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And again, I have to say DMT has been probably the primary influence in my life in fostering this fascination with psychedelics.

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But after I took off this semester, went to South America,

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and had this experience, which Terrence has written about in Trivialist Nations,

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I came back with the conviction that I needed to become more involved in the sciences.

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I needed to learn more about botany and biology.

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While not giving up anthropology and the religious studies,

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I became more interested in, I guess, the nuts and bolts of it.

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And I think part of that was a feeling that we were up against a, in South America, we were up against a paradigm, we were up against a mystery, which it was very difficult to apply scientific methodologies were and I couldn’t really say that science was inadequate to approach these questions because

00:24:07 ►

I flattered myself that I knew something about science

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but I had very little real scientific training

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so I felt a lack in my education. So I thought

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I wanted to go more in this direction of learning.

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I kind of drifted from an interest in that.

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I’m still interested in the ethnomedical uses of hallucinogens,

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the metaphysical and shamanic uses,

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but I felt I needed to know more about the plants themselves, their chemistry,

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the way they worked in the body, that sort of thing,

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because these were the issues that we were really grappling with down there.

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I’m going to plead embarrassment and say that while I have true hallucinations,

00:24:53 ►

I read about the first 30 pages and have not actually found the time to do it yet.

00:25:01 ►

Well, you have to do it.

00:25:02 ►

I will do it.

00:25:03 ►

Okay.

00:25:03 ►

For the benefit,

00:25:07 ►

I have actually a signed copy from Terrence.

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It definitely

00:25:12 ►

is one, but tell us

00:25:13 ►

me and more, the readers,

00:25:16 ►

your experience. Was it the

00:25:17 ►

mushroom and ayahuasca,

00:25:19 ►

or separate, or…

00:25:22 ►

Well, the story

00:25:24 ►

is chronicled in True Relismation

00:25:25 ►

and it’s kind of a long story, but

00:25:27 ►

basically

00:25:28 ►

the genesis

00:25:31 ►

of all that was that Terrence

00:25:34 ►

and I were

00:25:35 ►

both… I mean, Terrence had introduced

00:25:38 ►

me to DMT and he had

00:25:39 ►

discovered DMT, you know, in

00:25:41 ►

Berkeley in the 60s.

00:25:43 ►

And even at that time, it was a very, very rare thing. I mean, most everyone had known, knew about LSD, and there was STP around and so on. But DMT was rare. It was getting out to a very limited circle of people, even at that time. Because, I mean, partly because I think it’s just not really

00:26:08 ►

a recreational drug. It’s too profound. And we certainly thought that it was, you know,

00:26:15 ►

that compared to any, that DMT compared to anything else was more interesting, more amazing,

00:26:23 ►

kind of the quintessence of the psychedelic experience,

00:26:26 ►

but also a little bit scary, in fact a lot scary, because it was so powerful and so abrupt.

00:26:36 ►

Another thing that we found kind of frustrating about the DMT experience, it didn’t really,

00:26:42 ►

more than anything else, it seemed to be not an experience, not a drug, but a place, an actual other dimension that you were plunged

00:26:52 ►

into. Because we had this sort of metaphysical view that that’s actually what these drugs

00:26:59 ►

were about, they let you access other dimensions, DMT seemed the way to get there.

00:27:16 ►

But one thing that was frustrating about DMT was because the duration of the experience was so short, and it was such an abrupt break from reality, that we couldn’t really make any sense of.

00:27:26 ►

And it was like, you know, about the most intelligent thing you could say after a DMT

00:27:30 ►

experience was, my God, what happened?

00:27:34 ►

You know, so there was no real way to put it in context.

00:27:37 ►

So we thought that if there was some way that the experience could be prolonged or, you know, some, well, prolonged, basically,

00:27:47 ►

that you might have enough time in that place to get your sea legs, as it were,

00:27:53 ►

to kind of poke around and see more what it was about.

00:27:58 ►

So there was, you know, we were looking at the ethnomotanical literature at the same time,

00:28:06 ►

and about that time, an early paper by Schultes emerged from the Harvard Botanical Museum leaflets,

00:28:14 ►

which was called the Varrola as an orally administered hallucinogen.

00:28:19 ►

Well, of course, from our previous reading in the subject, we knew that Varrola was used as a snuff,

00:28:25 ►

from our previous reading in the subject, we knew that Varroa was used as a snuff, and we knew that DMT and other tryptamines had been identified as the active ingredients

00:28:31 ►

in this snuff, but this Varroa, the orally active form of Varroa, which was used by only

00:28:37 ►

a few tribes, the Wetoto, among others, was new, and as Schulte pointed out in that paper,

00:28:47 ►

there were interesting pharmacological questions

00:28:51 ►

because, as you know, TMP is not orally active by itself.

00:28:55 ►

That’s why you have to smoke it.

00:28:57 ►

Or in the case of the snuff, you have to snuff it

00:29:00 ►

because it won’t pass through the intestines

00:29:04 ►

and the liver in the active form.

00:29:06 ►

So we thought, well, this is really new, and nobody seems to know about it,

00:29:12 ►

and maybe this orally active form of EMP is what we’re looking for.

00:29:17 ►

Maybe it is a prolonged, you know, a way to prolong the experience.

00:29:22 ►

So we determined, I mean, on basically fairly flimsy grounds, I suppose,

00:29:29 ►

that we said, you know, we have to go to the Amazon

00:29:33 ►

and collect this orally acting form of DMT.

00:29:37 ►

Well, when we got there and we went to, I mean,

00:29:42 ►

from following Schulte’s references and his work,

00:29:47 ►

we knew that La Charrera in the Colombian Amazon was the center of distribution of this Watoto hallucinogen.

00:29:56 ►

So we determined to go there.

00:29:59 ►

And incidentally, or perhaps not incidentally, I don’t know,

00:30:04 ►

but the route that we followed was exactly the same route

00:30:07 ►

that William Burroughs had followed some 15 years before

00:30:13 ►

when he wrote the Yahé letters.

00:30:15 ►

He went to the same area looking for Yahé.

00:30:19 ►

He chronicled that with Allen Ginsberg and the Yahé letters.

00:30:22 ►

But we traveled essentially the same path

00:30:25 ►

and actually encountered many of the same people that he wrote about.

00:30:30 ►

But when we finally got to La Charrera, after many days’ travel, we encountered there a

00:30:40 ►

Colombian anthropologist whose name we had gotten.

00:30:43 ►

We were expecting to find him.

00:30:45 ►

We heard about him in Bogota, and we were expecting that he would be there.

00:30:50 ►

And he was Dr. Horatio Cartier, who is called, I think, his name is changed to Guzman in the book.

00:30:59 ►

But he was there with his English wife.

00:31:06 ►

He was there with his English wife, and he has a whole story in himself, but he basically told us when we got there, our band of people,

00:31:13 ►

and it wasn’t just Terrence and myself, a bunch of pretty outrageous-looking people,

00:31:18 ►

he told us that, you know, yes, I know about Okuhe,

00:31:23 ►

but you can’t just walk into this village

00:31:25 ►

and start asking about Okuhe.

00:31:28 ►

You’re going to, you know, they’re going to freak out

00:31:30 ►

because this is a big, supposed to be a big secret.

00:31:34 ►

And, in fact, I think he was exaggerating a little bit.

00:31:37 ►

So he said, you know, you have to hang out,

00:31:39 ►

you have to be cool,

00:31:42 ►

you have to establish a relationship with these people,

00:31:44 ►

and then maybe, maybe you

00:31:46 ►

can mention Ukuhe without shocking anybody.

00:31:51 ►

So he was not at La Charrera, he was at the village four days away from La Charrera, which

00:31:57 ►

was kind of our stepping off point from civilization.

00:32:01 ►

So he said, well, okay, you know, we don’t know. We’ll just press

00:32:05 ►

on and take his advice into consideration. We didn’t know. We just said, well, we’ll

00:32:12 ►

hang out and see what happens. So when we finally got to La Charrera, as it turns out,

00:32:19 ►

about, La Charrera is a mission village and about 300 acres in the immediate area of the mission village

00:32:29 ►

had been cleared of jungle, and they’d introduced cattle, the whites, they moved cattle into the area.

00:32:37 ►

So when we got to La Charrera, it turned out that there were xylophec, hew humensis mushrooms growing in the pastures.

00:32:46 ►

Just basically everywhere you looked, literally on the morning after a rain,

00:32:50 ►

you could not walk through a pasture without kicking over these things.

00:32:54 ►

They were that abundant.

00:32:57 ►

And we didn’t know anything about them.

00:32:59 ►

We knew what they were.

00:33:00 ►

We knew they were psilocybe mushrooms.

00:33:02 ►

We had had a previous very brief

00:33:06 ►

encounter with them on our way into the Amazon, into La Charrera, in a town called Porto

00:33:14 ►

Leguizamo. We’d had a light trip, I guess, or our first trip, anyway. So we knew what

00:33:23 ►

they were. And when we got to La Charrera,

00:33:27 ►

we didn’t really take them seriously.

00:33:29 ►

We thought, well, you know, these are here, this is nice,

00:33:32 ►

these will be great recreational psychedelics to play around with

00:33:37 ►

while we’re waiting for the real mystery, the Ukuhe, to reveal itself. Well, as it turns out, of course, the Ukuhe to reveal itself.

00:33:45 ►

Well, as it turns out, of course, the ukuhe quickly got forgotten

00:33:49 ►

as we started eating these mushrooms on a fairly, at first on a fairly regular basis,

00:33:57 ►

maybe two or three times a week, and then finally virtually every day and eating large amounts

00:34:05 ►

and kind of becoming drawn into a world

00:34:11 ►

where it was very hard to tell what was real and what was not,

00:34:15 ►

whether we were stoned or not.

00:34:18 ►

And, of course, many, many peculiar ideas

00:34:21 ►

rising up from the unconscious,

00:34:24 ►

not least of which was the notion that we

00:34:26 ►

could actually perform an experiment that would somehow, it’s basically based on the

00:34:33 ►

alchemical model that we could somehow produce a physical artifact which would be partly made of mind and would actually be, in some sense, the ultimate artifact,

00:34:49 ►

something that you could both see and be at the same time.

00:34:55 ►

I mean, I don’t want to get into details of all that.

00:34:58 ►

People who are curious can read true hallucinations

00:35:02 ►

or they can read the invisible landscape.

00:35:05 ►

Suffice it to say, it was pretty crazy ideation.

00:35:10 ►

And out of that, we did attempt to perform this experiment.

00:35:16 ►

We were fully due, as well as ego, inflation, and a certain expectation

00:35:22 ►

that somehow together we were on the cusp of history,

00:35:27 ►

on the edge of history, and that had our experiment succeeded, history as we know it would have ended.

00:35:32 ►

So there was certainly a lot of, you know, I suppose what you could call delusion or self-fulfilling prophecy going on.

00:35:41 ►

fulfilling prophecy going on.

00:35:44 ►

But when we did perform the experiment,

00:35:54 ►

one of the consequences was that I went completely mad for about two weeks,

00:36:01 ►

two weeks or more, completely mad to an external observer, but completely, what happened to me psychologically and in

00:36:06 ►

terms of my behavior made perfect sense in terms of this experimental paradigm that we

00:36:12 ►

had set up.

00:36:13 ►

We had predicted that this would happen.

00:36:15 ►

And in fact, although to the other people in our group who were not part of this experiment,

00:36:22 ►

I just appeared to be raving and completely out of control.

00:36:27 ►

Terrence also went completely mad, but in an opposite sort of way,

00:36:32 ►

where he became extremely focused on the environment,

00:36:36 ►

extremely focused on me while I was off in hyperspace,

00:36:41 ►

literally traveling through hyperspace.

00:36:46 ►

But he could understand me.

00:36:48 ►

We could communicate to each other,

00:36:50 ►

because we were participating in this fully due, if you will.

00:36:56 ►

Other people around there said, these people

00:36:59 ►

are clearly in serious trouble, and they’ve

00:37:03 ►

gone completely bonkers.

00:37:04 ►

in serious trouble and they’ve gone completely bonkers.

00:37:16 ►

Fortunately, we were able to, there was no easy way to get out of La Charrera. There was a certain people in our group were saying, you know,

00:37:19 ►

we need to get an airlift out of here and get into the hospital.

00:37:24 ►

And we were able to fight that off.

00:37:27 ►

And I’ve been eternally grateful that we were,

00:37:30 ►

because I think the last thing that I needed to have at that time

00:37:35 ►

was the intervention of modern psychiatric medicine.

00:37:40 ►

What was actually going on, and what I still believe at this time,

00:37:46 ►

although it may sound egotistical to say it to some degree,

00:37:50 ►

but what I actually think was going on was there was actually a shamanic initiation,

00:37:55 ►

a shamanic election was taking place.

00:37:59 ►

All the archetypal elements were present.

00:38:06 ►

The idea that you make a journey to the center of the world,

00:38:10 ►

to the center of the universe, that you’re torn apart

00:38:14 ►

and put back together in a transformed manner,

00:38:20 ►

that you’re not the same person you were when you left,

00:38:24 ►

when you come back.

00:38:25 ►

In fact, you never really do come back.

00:38:28 ►

But that is basically what happens.

00:38:31 ►

And I think the paradigm of shamanic election, which you’re familiar with, Peter,

00:38:36 ►

actually fits what happened more than any kind of psychiatric interpretation.

00:38:43 ►

I mean, I really think that that’s what went on.

00:38:47 ►

And, you know, so that happened.

00:38:52 ►

And it was really, there’s no doubt that it was the pivotal turning point of my life.

00:38:59 ►

It basically was a rite of passage for me.

00:39:03 ►

I was 20 at the time.

00:39:04 ►

When I left for the Amazon, I was a boyite of passage for me. I was 20 at the time.

00:39:09 ►

When I left for the Amazon, I was a boy, no doubt about it. When I came back, I was a man and initiated one.

00:39:15 ►

It sort of influenced my whole career direction because, again, I came back with this conviction.

00:39:22 ►

because, again, I came back with this conviction.

00:39:29 ►

I mean, the revelations that I had had during this experience had a lot to do,

00:39:35 ►

what I thought were insights, had a lot to do with an understanding of how nature works and how plants communicate with humans and plants communicate with other organisms and the environment and this whole perception about how the sounds and the chemical,

00:39:50 ►

I don’t know what the term is, tapestry,

00:39:55 ►

or the chemical composition of the jungle really relate

00:39:59 ►

or really regulates the whole biosphere.

00:40:02 ►

I mean, it was a psescientific understanding, admittedly,

00:40:06 ►

but yet within that there were elements of truth.

00:40:09 ►

And, in fact, you know, a lot of our guesses and intuitions about the way things were

00:40:14 ►

have since been confirmed by scientific discoveries.

00:40:19 ►

So in some sense, you know, we weren’t entirely disengaged from reality. I think the psychedelics really

00:40:27 ►

do give one, particularly in the context of an intense natural environment such as the

00:40:34 ►

Amazon, they give you an insight into how nature works and what is really going on.

00:40:40 ►

Because I, you know, remain convinced to this day that plant hallucinogens and plant secondary

00:40:49 ►

chemistry is really a communication, a means of communication and a thing that ties the

00:40:57 ►

biosphere together.

00:40:58 ►

And I think there’s certainly this, that’s a much more current view today than it was 25 years ago

00:41:06 ►

when we were having these revelations.

00:41:10 ►

I mean, I think now there are many scientists who would agree,

00:41:13 ►

and there’s a lot more evidence for it.

00:41:15 ►

But I came back from the Amazon with this understanding

00:41:19 ►

that in order to be able to apply this scientific paradigm

00:41:25 ►

or not really apply it so much as understand its limits

00:41:28 ►

because we realized we were up against the limits

00:41:32 ►

of what science could really elucidate.

00:41:35 ►

So I understood that I needed to,

00:41:39 ►

in order to understand its limitations,

00:41:41 ►

I almost had to become the enemy.

00:41:43 ►

I had to become a scientist in order to understand the limitations, I almost had to become the enemy. I had to become a scientist

00:41:45 ►

in order to understand the limitations of science. So that really kind of influenced

00:41:52 ►

my future academic directions, where I decided I understood I had to study biology, study

00:41:59 ►

chemistry, study botany and taxonomy and all these different things so that I could try

00:42:08 ►

to make sense of these perceptions because I just didn’t have the intellectual tools

00:42:13 ►

to really, what’s the term, appreciate or fully understand these insights that we have at the time.

00:42:26 ►

So that was really what influenced my future directions.

00:42:30 ►

I sort of left, I mean, I maintained an interest in the anthropology,

00:42:34 ►

but I felt I really needed to supplement it with some nuts and bolts,

00:42:39 ►

understanding biology and chemistry and pharmacology and that sort of thing.

00:42:46 ►

You actually ended up, or am I wrong in thinking that your degree is in ethnopharmacology?

00:42:54 ►

Well, technically my degree is in botany.

00:42:57 ►

I mean, that’s what it says on the certificate.

00:43:01 ►

It’s in botany, but it was really ethnopharmacology.

00:43:06 ►

Was there work for you when you got out of school?

00:43:08 ►

Now I think there’s more acceptance of that as a field.

00:43:13 ►

Ethnopharmacology?

00:43:14 ►

Yeah.

00:43:16 ►

Well, yeah, in some sense.

00:43:20 ►

I mean, not as that, but I’ve always, after I finally got my Ph.D.,

00:43:26 ►

I was able, I became kind of the world’s, I became a perpetual post-doc,

00:43:32 ►

which was not that unusual for people who graduated at the time I did.

00:43:36 ►

There were, you know, academic positions were drying up,

00:43:40 ►

and a lot of us were caught in a situation where, you know, we were,

00:43:44 ►

we would do a postdoc

00:43:45 ►

and then go on, do that for two years, and then find another one, and then find another one.

00:43:51 ►

So I paid my dues as far as being a postdoc

00:43:55 ►

and having what was basically a very interdisciplinary type of degree.

00:44:01 ►

It’s not like I had a single specialty that I could take out and market.

00:44:07 ►

I couldn’t say, well, you know, I’m a computer programmer, or I’m a medicinal chemist, or

00:44:12 ►

I’m a, you know, neuropharmacologist, because my interest spans all of these things. But

00:44:19 ►

actually, I don’t regret my postdoc days, because it gave me a chance to continue this interdisciplinary

00:44:31 ►

orientation and work in several labs where I was able to pick up experience, professional

00:44:40 ►

experience, quite outside that that I had been able to obtain as a graduate

00:44:47 ►

student. You know, I mean, it was as a postdoc, really, that I got involved in pharmacology.

00:44:53 ►

I had the opportunity to spend two years at the National Institute of Mental Health on

00:44:58 ►

a pharmacology traineeship fellowship, and it was there that I learned most of what I know about neurobiology,

00:45:08 ►

and I was able to pursue my interest in hallucinogens from that area. Again, all of this came from

00:45:16 ►

this desire to, I guess, to really understand how psychedelics works in terms of current paradigms. I mean, the models that we had evolved kind of independently

00:45:32 ►

in our own independent intellectual space,

00:45:37 ►

in which I think mysticism, magic, and really delusion

00:45:44 ►

played as much of a role as science.

00:45:47 ►

I wanted to get beyond that.

00:45:48 ►

I wanted to understand what was understood about science within the current scientific paradigm.

00:45:55 ►

So my postdoc experience gave me a chance to do that.

00:45:59 ►

I might also say that as an undergraduate or as a graduate student working for my PhD, I was able to

00:46:06 ►

go back to the Amazon and revisit a lot of the issues. I was able to go back 10 years

00:46:12 ►

later in the context of being a doctoral student and actually did collect the information,

00:46:20 ►

collected ayahuasca, and, you know, didn’t go crazy this time,

00:46:25 ►

brought the things back to the lab, you know, investigated them,

00:46:29 ►

carried out the program, and published on these things.

00:46:33 ►

So for me, you know, I was able to actually make a professional contribution

00:46:38 ►

or sort of redeem myself professionally by being able to revisit these issues that originally had brought me there

00:46:47 ►

and actually this time, you know, pull a Ph.D. out of it and pull a bunch of publications out of it.

00:46:54 ►

And on a personal level, this was, I guess, a second rite of passage for me in a certain way.

00:47:02 ►

I had to prove to myself, you know, that I was really

00:47:05 ►

okay, that I recovered from my madness, if you will, and I was able to go back to the

00:47:12 ►

same area on my own this time without my big brother, although he joined me later. But,

00:47:20 ►

you know, it was just a very different kind of experience where, you know,

00:47:25 ►

I was a non-anthropologist and a natural botanist.

00:47:28 ►

I was able to go out, make these collections, bring them back to the lab and investigate them

00:47:34 ►

and kind of demonstrate to myself as well as to the world that, you know, I could do science, basically,

00:47:45 ►

and that I was not completely disabled psychologically or something like that.

00:47:54 ►

I mean, I didn’t feel that I was, but to be able to actually do that

00:47:58 ►

was an affirmation that I was okay.

00:48:04 ►

You mentioned, you know, mentioned Schultes earlier.

00:48:09 ►

A couple of things.

00:48:11 ►

Did you either have contact with Schultes

00:48:13 ►

and discuss with him the idea of entheogens or DMT

00:48:21 ►

actually not being a drug but being a space?

00:48:26 ►

And what did he think about that?

00:48:28 ►

Well, I had contact with Dick Schultes actually in 1974

00:48:35 ►

when I was still a undergraduate student.

00:48:38 ►

I wrote to him and I expressed an interest in coming to work with him as a graduate student

00:48:46 ►

and he wrote back and was very encouraging

00:48:50 ►

and he said, you know, you should come out to Harvard

00:48:53 ►

and we should get together.

00:48:55 ►

And so at the time, I wasn’t in school.

00:48:58 ►

I’d taken a couple semesters leave of that

00:49:00 ►

or actually I guess I had gotten my undergraduate degree at that point

00:49:04 ►

but I hadn’t yet entered any kind of graduate program.

00:49:08 ►

So I was working in a restaurant at the time at a fairly menial job.

00:49:14 ►

So I bought one of those Routley Country Greyhound tickets that you could buy at that time.

00:49:21 ►

I think it was $60 for 60 days of unlimited travel.

00:49:26 ►

And I got on the bus at Berkeley.

00:49:29 ►

I was living at Berkeley at the time, where Terrence was also living.

00:49:33 ►

And at first I went to Louisiana, Hammond, Louisiana, where I had some friends,

00:49:40 ►

and where you could find mushrooms growing.

00:49:45 ►

So I went there and stayed with my friends.

00:49:49 ►

My idea actually was to go collect a lot of mushrooms and sell them

00:49:55 ►

and make some money to finance my trip.

00:49:58 ►

But when I actually got there, it was very dry.

00:50:02 ►

And so there weren’t a lot of mushrooms around in the pastures. But there were enough

00:50:08 ►

that I had plenty for my own purposes, but not enough to actually collect, which was

00:50:15 ►

probably a good thing. But I spent about three weeks there and I was eating mushrooms again

00:50:20 ►

quite regularly. And having a great time, basically basically sort of getting back in, making

00:50:27 ►

contact again with this dimension which I haven’t had any extensive contact with since

00:50:36 ►

La Torera, since I had no access to mushrooms.

00:50:39 ►

So after three weeks there, I continued on my trip. I went to Washington and then eventually ended up at Harvard

00:50:47 ►

and saw Schultes, spent a day with him.

00:50:54 ►

He was very nice to me.

00:50:56 ►

And I told him of my interest in plant hallucinogens.

00:51:00 ►

I didn’t really get into the metaphysics of it.

00:51:03 ►

He doesn’t seem to be a

00:51:05 ►

person, I mean, he claims that these things don’t do anything to him. And I didn’t really

00:51:12 ►

discuss that. We discussed more or less what the program would be. And at the time, it

00:51:18 ►

looked like it would be some kind of taxonomic program to look at the taxonomy of Varroa, because I was very interested in Varroa

00:51:27 ►

as the source of the DMT drugs. So we talked about it, and he said, well, you know, you

00:51:37 ►

really need to get more chemistry and more taxonomy. You know, you’re not, as an undergraduate,

00:51:43 ►

since I’ve had so much liberal arts and so little science, he said, you know, you’re not as an undergraduate, since I’ve had so much liberal arts and so little science.

00:51:47 ►

He said, you know, it’ll look a lot better on your transcripts if you can say you’ve had a lot of taxonomy and more biochemistry.

00:51:55 ►

So I went back to Colorado and went to Fort Collins this time, where Colorado State University is, and I enrolled.

00:52:05 ►

I was already graduated, but I just enrolled in some summer courses.

00:52:11 ►

So I took organic chemistry and statistics and some more botany courses,

00:52:18 ►

more or less to try to bolster my transcripts to get into Harvard.

00:52:22 ►

Well, that was actually one of the best things I could have done

00:52:28 ►

because it turns out that the person who taught introductory organic chemistry,

00:52:34 ►

whom I’ve never seen since, but I’ll always remember,

00:52:37 ►

his name was Dr. Frank Sturmans,

00:52:40 ►

and he was a natural products chemist.

00:52:43 ►

And so I just was fascinated by his lectures.

00:52:47 ►

He was an extremely good teacher.

00:52:49 ►

And he would illustrate all his lectures by talking about all the psychedelics.

00:52:54 ►

And he’d talk about the biosynthesis of lysergic acid and the biosynthesis of mescaline and these things

00:53:00 ►

and how these things were formed in plants.

00:53:04 ►

And I just dated up.

00:53:05 ►

I just loved this stuff.

00:53:07 ►

And so he and I became good friends, or he became, we didn’t become good friends,

00:53:13 ►

but he became, I guess, a valued advisor.

00:53:16 ►

And I also had a couple of advisors from the University of Colorado

00:53:21 ►

where I got my undergraduate degree, a botanist there who I also admired.

00:53:27 ►

So I was in touch with these people,

00:53:29 ►

and I said, you know, I wanted to do graduate work in ethno-botany.

00:53:35 ►

And I was also an occasional, I had applied to Harvard during this time,

00:53:41 ►

I was an occasional touch with Schultes.

00:53:45 ►

But I was getting more and more.

00:53:47 ►

I was working at the same time that I was taking courses at CSU.

00:53:55 ►

I also had a part-time job in a tissue culture lab in the botany department next to the greenhouse. As it turns out, a very good friend of mine was at the time running the botany greenhouses at CFU.

00:54:12 ►

So he made some space available in the lab for me.

00:54:16 ►

What I was working on at the time, trying to figure out how to grow Celeste Cumentus on rye grain in jars.

00:54:26 ►

And it was actually that winter, the winter of 1975, that I made the breakthrough I first got.

00:54:35 ►

I was in correspondence with a friend who we worked on it in Berkeley, but we were unsuccessful.

00:54:43 ►

who we worked on it in Berkeley, but we were unsuccessful.

00:54:49 ►

But he drew my attention to a paper from, I believe, Mycologia,

00:54:54 ►

which gave a method for growing Agaricus campestris,

00:54:57 ►

the meadow mushroom, on sterilized rye grain.

00:55:03 ►

So I tried that in my little lab at the university with philosophy expenses,

00:55:06 ►

not really knowing what I was doing, but it worked. And so now I had, for the first time, an insured supply of very potent psilocybin

00:55:15 ►

mushrooms. So I became quite enthusiastic about that. I was growing these mushrooms

00:55:20 ►

at home and taking them fairly regularly.

00:55:25 ►

So I wrote to Schultes and I said, I don’t want to work on Barola anymore.

00:55:30 ►

I would rather work on mushrooms.

00:55:34 ►

And he wrote back a fairly terse letter.

00:55:38 ►

I don’t know whether he was offended or what, but he wrote back a terse letter and he said,

00:55:42 ►

you know, I’m a taxonomist trained in the taxonomy of higher plants.

00:55:47 ►

If you want to study mushrooms, you should contact Dr. Alexander A. Smith at the University of Michigan.

00:55:55 ►

And that was pretty much it.

00:55:57 ►

So I don’t know whether he was offended or what, but at any rate, as it turned out, I was not accepted to Harvard, and whether

00:56:09 ►

Schultes withdrew his support or I suspected, I really didn’t have the qualifications to

00:56:17 ►

be accepted into Harvard. So the dream of going to Harvard kind of faded at that point, but as later events turned out,

00:56:28 ►

it was the best thing that ever happened to me.

00:56:32 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

00:56:35 ►

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

00:56:40 ►

And wasn’t I lucky to find such a cliffhanger statement as,

00:56:44 ►

it was probably the best thing that ever happened to me, where I cut it off.

00:56:49 ►

And that was almost exactly halfway through this interview.

00:56:53 ►

But now, before I say anything else, let me comment about our old nemesis sound quality.

00:57:00 ►

So, before the emails start coming in, let me say ahead of time that,

00:57:04 ►

yes, I too can hear the hum in the recording that we just listened to.

00:57:08 ►

And, yes, I not only am aware of the noise reduction function in Audacity, believe it or not, I spent several hours cleaning up this recording to the point where it is now, even though it leaves a lot to be desired.

00:57:21 ►

Now, there’s hardly a month that goes by without someone getting in touch with me and offering to help cleaning up these tapes.

00:57:27 ►

And from time to time, I’ve tried to take advantage of those offers, but my lack of organization and planning skills has prevented me from effectively using these wonderful offers of assistance.

00:57:38 ►

In fact, our fellow salonner, Jason P., even went to the trouble of cleaning up a couple of the Planke tapes that I still haven’t gotten around to podcasting.

00:57:47 ►

Not because of his most excellent work, but because once the tapes were made listenable,

00:57:52 ►

I decided that their content really wasn’t something that would hold your interest right now,

00:57:57 ►

and so they’re still sitting there in reserve for some time in the future

00:58:00 ►

when their topics are a little bit more pertinent.

00:58:04 ►

But now I’ve got a situation where, without some help, we’re going to miss some really

00:58:09 ►

important interviews, and in a moment I’ll tell you what I’m thinking about how to fix

00:58:13 ►

this, but first let me tell you the story of the recording that we just heard, and about

00:58:18 ►

the other recordings that came along with it.

00:58:21 ►

A few weeks ago, I heard from our fellow salonner, Hector Glass, who at the present

00:58:26 ►

time is what I would call a traveling artist. And although Hector’s home is in Switzerland,

00:58:32 ►

he’s been on the road for a bit. And when he was in the Amazon researching ayahuasca,

00:58:37 ►

he met Peter Gorman, the writer who conducted the interview that we just heard.

00:58:41 ►

And they struck up a friendship and Hector wound up visiting Peter at

00:58:45 ►

his home in North Texas. And that’s where Hector learned that Peter had made several recordings of

00:58:51 ►

his interviews with some people that you and I are always interested in hearing from. The one with

00:58:56 ►

Dennis McKenna that we’re in the middle of right now was one of them and was about the only one

00:59:02 ►

that I could even come close to cleaning up the audio on.

00:59:05 ►

As you can imagine, a hot Texas garage is probably not the best place in the world to

00:59:10 ►

store audio tapes.

00:59:12 ►

Now here are the names of the other people whose interviews Hector digitized from those

00:59:16 ►

dusty old audio tapes.

00:59:18 ►

Ken Babs of Merry Prankster fame, Timothy Leary, Laura Huxley, Martin Lee, Mark McLeod, Thank you. audio in Peter’s garage that day, but most of the recordings suffered a lot of deterioration and

00:59:46 ►

are really beyond my capability of cleaning up. And so I’m going to post a segment of one of the

00:59:52 ►

worst cases of this tape, along with the program notes for this podcast, which of course you know

00:59:58 ►

you can find via psychedelicsalon.us. And you’ll find this section of audio in MP3 format,

01:00:06 ►

which is what it came in.

01:00:08 ►

And I’ll put it at the bottom of the program notes.

01:00:11 ►

And if you think you can fix it,

01:00:13 ►

then just download it, do your magic,

01:00:15 ►

and send me an email to let me know

01:00:18 ►

where I can download your cleaned up version.

01:00:20 ►

And we’ll see if you and I think it’s going to be clear enough to podcast.

01:00:26 ►

Hopefully, there will be several salonners who take up this challenge

01:00:29 ►

so that I can divide these recordings among you

01:00:32 ►

and not load up one person with a lot of work that may not be heard here in the salon for a while

01:00:37 ►

because, well, I’ve got a lot of other new things coming in also.

01:00:41 ►

As I mentioned in the beginning of this podcast,

01:00:43 ►

I’ve got a lot of other things I’d like to say right now, but I’m going to leave most of them for the next podcast, Thank you. pleasantly surprised, and I think that you will be too, at least if you have secretly wanted to be a little critical of our dearly departed bard, Terrence McKenna, but maybe we’re a little too

01:01:10 ►

timid to speak ill of him. Well, we all have feet of clay, my friends, and I suspect that you’ll

01:01:16 ►

find it quite refreshing to know that even our heroes are not that much different from you and

01:01:21 ►

me in many respects, so stay tuned and I’ll get that out soon.

01:01:26 ►

Now the one thing that I still should say, at least mention briefly before I go,

01:01:31 ►

is the workshop that Bruce Dahmer and I will be leading at the Outlook Inn on Orcas Island,

01:01:36 ►

which is an hour or so ferry ride out of Seattle.

01:01:40 ►

And the dates for the workshop are Friday night, September 30th,

01:01:44 ►

all day Saturday, October 1st, and possibly a morning session on Sunday, October 2nd.

01:01:50 ►

And in my next podcast, I’ll have more to say about that event.

01:01:54 ►

In closing, I’d like to let the people of Norway, and in particular all of our fellow salonners in that wonderful country,

01:02:02 ►

know how deeply saddened I am about the tragedy that

01:02:05 ►

you are living through right now. And while it may seem that way out here on the west coast of

01:02:11 ►

North America we may be far removed from those horrific events, but we really aren’t removed

01:02:17 ►

from them at all. You know, we’re all in this together right now and these are very difficult

01:02:22 ►

times that we’re living through, but great changes of ages are always like that so hang in there dear friends and we are most definitely

01:02:31 ►

with you and send our healing love your way in fact this may be a good time to close a podcast

01:02:38 ►

with a bit of uplifting music that comes to us from our dear friend Andre Nobles, who I featured along with his wife Missy

01:02:46 ►

in podcast number 182, The Spark of Divine Creativity. Now the song I’m going to play

01:02:53 ►

right now is from his new album, Bring the Joy Back, which is one of the new Paradigm free lease

01:02:59 ►

albums. And I’ll link to Andre’s website in the program notes for today’s program so that you can download it if you’d like to.

01:03:06 ►

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

01:03:11 ►

Be well, my friends. Against all the odds

01:03:37 ►

You came alone into this world

01:03:42 ►

From the start and then you open

01:03:46 ►

your eyes

01:03:51 ►

you look into your future

01:03:54 ►

and you try to act surprised

01:03:58 ►

but we’re all counting on you

01:04:01 ►

and this world needs what you’re gonna go through

01:04:06 ►

for us all

01:04:10 ►

guitar solo

01:04:14 ►

You may be tiny

01:04:29 ►

You may be small

01:04:32 ►

But this new life is a love line

01:04:37 ►

For us all

01:04:39 ►

And as you take your first steps

01:04:42 ►

To meet the world,

01:04:46 ►

take it upon yourselves to be heard.

01:04:52 ►

Because we’re all counting on you,

01:04:55 ►

and this world needs what you’re going to go through for us all In due time, you will find the way that shines.

01:05:33 ►

And in time, you’ll know why you are here.

01:05:41 ►

And what is this end goal

01:05:45 ►

and against And against all the odds

01:06:14 ►

You came alone into this world

01:06:18 ►

From the stars

01:06:20 ►

And then you open your eyes

01:06:26 ►

You look into your future and you try to act surprised you

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