Program Notes
Guest speakers: Dennis McKenna and Peter Gorman
ROBERT VENOSA
January 21, 1936 - August 9, 2011
Dear Friends and Community,
A great soul has completed his earthly journey and graduated to the next level.
The great Venosa left his body on Tuesday August 9, 2011 at 6:56 PM.
His transition was graceful and accomplished in the same composed and calm manner that he exuded throughout his life.
I feel honored to have been able to accompany him to the gate, having walked 30 beautiful years together in this life.
Robert had a long and brave healing journey with cancer and showed incredible strength on this path as well as tremendous courage in facing this great dragon.
He believed in the natural healing ability of the human body and proved the doctors wrong time and again, who only gave him a few month’s to live upon his diagnosis over eight years ago.
He was a powerful human being. Together he and I, held the piece of his physical struggle safely tucked away from the eyes of the world like a precious pearl.
It is with great sadness that I’m sharing this news today but also with
deep gratitude, for his magical and special life; fully lived.
Even in death he gave those surrounding him a powerful initiation into the scared mysteries of the unknown.
We will carry him in our hearts forever, remembering the light he shone on so many. He so appreciated the light that others shone upon him.
In loving memory of my great love, compañero, best friend and artistic accomplice.
Martina Hoffmann and family
[NOTE: All quotations are by Dennis McKenna.]
“I think that ayahuasca is actually much more controllable than mushrooms… . I think that it is quite an amazing tool for self-understanding and for exploration. I think that it’s good for you, actually physically and psychologically good for you.”
“It’s no different than it ever was. When the Jesuits and the missionaries came to meso-America the first things to go, the first things to be stamped out was the knowledge of the sacred plants and the practice of using the sacred plants.”
“I think that Christianity linked with Calvinism has a hard time dealing with what you might call facts of biology, which in another phrase is sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. In some ways, life is about sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. Biology is about those things.”
“All experience is a drug experience. Whether it’s mediated by our own [endogenous] drugs, or whether it’s mediated by substances that we ingest that are found in plants, cognition, consciousness, the working of the brain, it’s all a chemically mediated process. Life itself is a drug experience.”
“He [Terence McKenna] will never let a fact get in the way of making a provocative statement. He’s a good story teller, but I think it’s important to remember that they are stories, and that he often makes mistakes in his lectures.”
“In that position, a guy who can pack the houses every time, I feel has a larger responsibility to the psychedelic community to refrain from making these completely off-the-wall comments, and to actually tell it like it is, not how he imagines it to be.”
“I’m sure that Terence views it as theater. I can’t believe that he takes what he says seriously. I mean, I can tell you that he doesn’t. Much of what he says he says it because it’s going to get a rise out of somebody. He’s always been that way.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:22 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:27 ►
And I begin today with a heavy heart as the great artist and even greater spirit, Roberto Venosa, left this life last night.
00:00:38 ►
It’s really hard for me to find the words to express the grief and shock that comes with the loss of somebody who still
00:00:45 ►
had so much to give to the world.
00:00:48 ►
And I’ll have more to say about Roberto in a future program, but for now, you can go
00:00:53 ►
back to podcast number 51 and hear the talk that he gave for the 2006 Planque Norte lectures
00:01:00 ►
at the Burning Man Festival.
00:01:03 ►
And perhaps, just as you lay down to go to sleep tonight, maybe you can send some of Thank you. To be honest, I’m having to kind of force myself to record this podcast right now because Roberto’s death has really taken me by surprise.
00:01:29 ►
And I guess that I should mention that although I am aware that for the most part he was known as Robert Venosa,
00:01:36 ►
well, when we were at Burning Man together in 2006, I thought I heard Martina call him Roberto.
00:01:42 ►
And so I asked him if he wanted me to introduce him as Robert or Roberto.
00:01:47 ►
And he smiled and said, go ahead and call me Roberto.
00:01:51 ►
And that’s how I’ve thought of him ever since.
00:01:54 ►
Roberto with that great big smile.
00:01:57 ►
And so I guess I should get on with this program,
00:02:00 ►
which I suspect is going to put a great big smile on a lot of saloners’ faces,
00:02:05 ►
including yours, I even suspect. And some people who have put a big smile on my face
00:02:11 ►
are some fellow saloners who either made a donation directly to the salon or who bought
00:02:16 ►
a copy of my Pay What You Can audiobook, my novel, The Genesis Generation. And these kind souls are Graham W., Daniel S.,
00:02:27 ►
David N., and his friends involved in the Evolve Fest,
00:02:31 ►
which I’m told is a moister, greener, cheaper Burning Man of the East.
00:02:35 ►
And also thank you to Lightning Hawk,
00:02:38 ►
Kyle K., Chaz A.,
00:02:41 ►
and also a big thank you goes out to fellow salonner
00:02:44 ►
who I’m looking forward to meeting at the workshop on Orcus.
00:02:47 ►
And that’s our fellow salonner, Jeremy S.
00:02:51 ►
And of course, I’ll give you some more information about that workshop that Bruce Dahmer and I are doing on Orcus Island on the 1st of October this year.
00:03:06 ►
this year, but first I want to hear today’s program, which is a continuation of the Dennis McKenna interview that we heard the first half of in my previous podcast.
00:03:12 ►
As you know, if you did hear that program, this interview took place in 1994 and was
00:03:18 ►
orchestrated by Peter Gorman, who very kindly furnished copies of this recording for us
00:03:23 ►
to use here in the salon.
00:03:24 ►
who very kindly furnished copies of this recording for us to use here in the salon.
00:03:30 ►
And thanks to the digitizing efforts of fellow salonner Hector Glass also, I should say.
00:03:34 ►
And right after we hear the conclusion of this interview,
00:03:36 ►
I’ll give you some more information about Peter and the important work that he’s doing these days,
00:03:39 ►
particularly in the area of ayahuasca, about which he has a new book just out.
00:03:44 ►
in the area of ayahuasca, about which he has a new book just out.
00:03:51 ►
But first, let’s return to the second half of this very interesting interview with Dennis McKenna,
00:03:57 ►
whose professional life has been not only one of academic achievement, but also of high adventure.
00:04:02 ►
And I’ll warn you ahead of time that there isn’t anything wrong with your MP3 player,
00:04:05 ►
but there are two or three instances where one tape ended and the other began and where a few words were missed but it shouldn’t distract you very
00:04:10 ►
much. Now when we left off last week Dennis had just reached the point in his narrative at which
00:04:16 ►
he said that not being accepted by the Harvard Graduate School was the best thing that ever
00:04:21 ►
happened to him and that’s where we’re going to pick up right now.
00:04:27 ►
I really didn’t have the qualifications to be accepted into Harvard, so the dream of
00:04:33 ►
going to Harvard kind of faded at that point, but as later events turned out, it was the
00:04:41 ►
best thing that ever happened to me, because while I was going to school at
00:04:47 ►
CSU, I talked to Dr. Sturmets and a couple of my advisors about that I wanted to go into
00:04:53 ►
ethnobotany.
00:04:54 ►
One of my advisors at CSU said, well, if you want to study ethnobotany, you should go to
00:05:01 ►
graduate school at a university in a tropical environment or semi-tropical environment.
00:05:09 ►
So I put in an application to the University of Hawaii, and I was accepted there.
00:05:18 ►
And it wasn’t clear what I was going to study, but when I got to the University of Hawaii a year later, this was 1976,
00:05:29 ►
I went up to the department, and I was still interested, of course, in cosmology and astronomy and all these big questions,
00:05:36 ►
still interested in science fiction.
00:05:38 ►
It turned out there was a person on the faculty of the botany department who listed one of his interests as exobiology,
00:05:47 ►
which is the study of extraterrestrial life.
00:05:50 ►
And I thought, gee, who’s this guy?
00:05:54 ►
So I went up to the botany department and I was wandering around the halls,
00:05:58 ►
and I said, you know, I wandered up to this funny-looking guy in the hall,
00:06:06 ►
wandered up to this funny-looking guy in the hall, big, thick glasses, huge, obese person,
00:06:13 ►
not a particularly physically attractive person, but I went up and I said, I’m looking for Dr. Siegel.
00:06:16 ►
And he said, well, I’m Dr. Siegel.
00:06:20 ►
So we went and I said, I’m Dennis McKenna.
00:06:22 ►
I’m a new graduate student here.
00:06:26 ►
And we went into his office and talked for a few minutes,
00:06:30 ►
and it was clear that we were kindred spirits. This man had such broad interests and knew so much that it just completely blew me away.
00:06:40 ►
He wasn’t interested in psychedelics particularly, but I told him about them.
00:06:44 ►
He understood what it was all about.
00:06:47 ►
We talked about his interest in exobiology and my interest in ethnobotany and so on.
00:06:53 ►
And at the end of the interview, he said, well, you know, when you applied here,
00:06:57 ►
they asked me if I wanted to be your supervisor, and I told them I didn’t
00:07:01 ►
because I really didn’t have much interest in ethnobotany and I didn’t
00:07:07 ►
know what you were all about.
00:07:08 ►
But he said after our conversation, I’ve changed my mind.
00:07:13 ►
And so he said I’d be very happy to be your supervisor.
00:07:17 ►
So he was my supervisor for my master’s degree.
00:07:22 ►
And he turned out to be just a really important intellectual influence
00:07:27 ►
on me. He had a very interdisciplinary view of things. He had had grants from NASA for
00:07:35 ►
many years to study what he called extreme environments. And he was studying, you know,
00:07:41 ►
basically, you know, under what parameters could life exist.
00:07:46 ►
So he would stimulate conditions thought to exist at the surface of Mars or thought to exist on Jupiter.
00:07:53 ►
And then he would put ordinary Earth organisms like onions, seedlings, and cacti and tarantulas into these extreme environments
00:08:03 ►
and see whether they could survive
00:08:05 ►
and how they did survive and what kind of biochemical changes took place in their physiology.
00:08:11 ►
As it turned out, many of these things adapted extremely well to Earth environments,
00:08:16 ►
to extreme environments, and, you know, could get along quite fine in environments
00:08:21 ►
where the UV flux, for example, was equivalent to that of the
00:08:26 ►
Martian surface, or he grew cacti underwater, and they did just fine for many years.
00:08:33 ►
He was just an extremely creative person, and he could always see the relationships
00:08:39 ►
between different disciplines and different fields.
00:08:47 ►
different disciplines and different fields. And he was very encouraging in, when I expressed
00:08:53 ►
a desire to study, you know, the ergot alkaloids in Hawaiian wood rose seeds, for example, and that sort of thing. He said, fine, go to it. You know, here’s the lab, teach yourself
00:08:58 ►
phytochemistry. And so he really was a major influence, I have to say, in my intellectual development.
00:09:07 ►
He died a few years ago, and quite frankly, it hit me like it was as though my own father had died.
00:09:14 ►
In a lot of ways, he was my intellectual father and scientific father.
00:09:20 ►
And so I spent a wonderful two years under his tutelage,
00:09:25 ►
just learning everything he had to offer and just soaking it up.
00:09:30 ►
Living in Hawaii, you know, nice place to live.
00:09:33 ►
I knew how to grow mushrooms, and I was growing mushrooms,
00:09:38 ►
so I was better off than most graduate students.
00:09:43 ►
I was, you know, it was actually a great time of my life,
00:09:49 ►
at least on the intellectual level.
00:09:51 ►
I was having some personal problems with having to do with various women
00:09:56 ►
that were not responsive to my advances and so on.
00:10:01 ►
But basically, I was very happy.
00:10:04 ►
advances and so on, but basically I was very happy. At that time, another friend of Dr. Siegel’s came out to visit, Neil Towers from the University
00:10:14 ►
of British Columbia.
00:10:15 ►
Dr. Siegel and Neil had known each other for many years, and Dr. Siegel being the kind
00:10:21 ►
of person that he did, whenever someone would come out that would be interesting.
00:10:28 ►
He’d invite all the graduate students from his lab up to his house and we’d have dinner.
00:10:33 ►
He was that kind of person. He really liked to socialize with his graduate students.
00:10:38 ►
We loved to socialize with him.
00:10:41 ►
So when Neil was in town, he invited us all up for a big dinner. And Neil
00:10:45 ►
and I got to talking and he said, you know, I’ve really been interested in this thing,
00:10:50 ►
this psilocybin, this psilocybin something. Oh, you mean psilocybin. Right, that’s it.
00:10:58 ►
Yes.
00:10:59 ►
And so Neil and I discovered this mutual interest.
00:11:08 ►
He was interested in psilocybin as a plant biochemist. He was interested in its biosynthesis and how its biosynthesis was genetically regulated
00:11:14 ►
and what the biochemical pathway of its synthesis was and so on.
00:11:20 ►
So he had a master’s degree student working on this, a Chinese woman,
00:11:26 ►
who really, it was just a project that he gave her.
00:11:30 ►
She knew nothing about psychoactive properties.
00:11:34 ►
She took no interest in this.
00:11:35 ►
And I said, well, you know, I’m quite interested in all this,
00:11:39 ►
and so why don’t you think about letting me come to work for my Ph.D. in your lab?
00:11:46 ►
And Neil said, sure, why not?
00:11:50 ►
So I was about a year and a half away from getting my master’s at that time,
00:11:56 ►
but Neil and I kept in touch.
00:11:58 ►
And when I got my master’s, he was as good as his word.
00:12:03 ►
And when the time came, he found support for me.
00:12:06 ►
I got a fellowship to the University of British Columbia, and I was all set. I left Hawaii,
00:12:11 ►
and I went to Vancouver, and I started in the program there. And originally, my dissertation
00:12:19 ►
project was defined to be to investigate the genetics and the genetic regulation of psilocybin
00:12:27 ►
biosynthesis and the entomology of psilocybin biosynthesis in using Psilocybin Cubensis
00:12:34 ►
as a test organism. And the fact that I already knew how to grow mushrooms and I was quite
00:12:40 ►
good at it certainly was part of my qualifications. So actually for the first year of my studies, I was working on that,
00:12:50 ►
developing methods for chemical analysis of psilocybin and working on some of the entomology.
00:12:57 ►
And I actually had a growth chamber down in the basement of the botany building
00:13:02 ►
that was full of fruiting for fairy incubants. So it was
00:13:07 ►
quite interesting. Other people were throwing… I’m jealous.
00:13:12 ►
Huh? I’m jealous. Yeah, a lot of people were
00:13:15 ►
actually, because up in British Columbia, you know, mushrooms were quite
00:13:19 ►
popular. In fact, the president of the
00:13:23 ►
Graduate Students Association in the Botany Department, who
00:13:29 ►
was quite a character, and we’ve become, we’re still our fast friends, but he was quite a
00:13:36 ►
character.
00:13:37 ►
He told me when I first introduced myself in the Graduate Students Meeting, said what
00:13:41 ►
I was working on, he said, well, I guess we know what you’ll be bringing to the fall picnic.
00:13:47 ►
It turns out I didn’t, but it was quite fun.
00:13:53 ►
So I worked on that for about the first year that I was a graduate student in Neil Tower’s lab.
00:14:03 ►
And then he called me in one day and he said,
00:14:05 ►
you want to go to South America?
00:14:08 ►
I’ve got some extra money,
00:14:10 ►
and I’d like to send a couple of you graduate students down
00:14:14 ►
to collect some plants and do some ethnobotanical work.
00:14:18 ►
So, of course, I said, you know,
00:14:19 ►
yup, my bags are packed, when do we leave?
00:14:22 ►
And so I changed directions at that point. I rewrote
00:14:29 ►
my scope. The other graduate student and myself went to South America in January of
00:14:40 ►
81, and we were there about six months collecting plants and making contact
00:14:47 ►
collecting okuhei and ayahuasca both and Don did his graduate work on another
00:14:55 ►
group of plants he wasn’t particularly interested in psychedelics he was
00:15:00 ►
interested more in ethnomedicine but But we got along quite well, so that’s when I had my
00:15:07 ►
first introduction to real ethnobotanical field work. It was really not in 71 but 81
00:15:15 ►
when I went back to revisit all these issues that had really been raised in 71, but this
00:15:21 ►
time I had the tools, the scientific tools, to do something about it.
00:15:29 ►
So that’s about it. I’m drifting off again. I’m not sure what the question was.
00:15:36 ►
You’re doing fine. Let’s move into botanical dimensions. Am I right in guessing that botanical dimensions in Hawaii
00:15:48 ►
grows out of your interest, Terrence’s interest, Kate’s interest,
00:15:51 ►
or Kat’s interest in psychedelics,
00:15:56 ►
and from your experience in Hawaii that you had some connections?
00:16:01 ►
How did you end up there and tell us something about it?
00:16:03 ►
With botanical dimensions?
00:16:04 ►
Yeah.
00:16:05 ►
Well, it all really goes back to my undergraduate work in Hawaii
00:16:10 ►
when I was there for three years during one of those periods
00:16:15 ►
with Terrence and Kat.
00:16:19 ►
I started my undergraduate work in Hawaii in 1976,
00:16:28 ►
and Terrence and Kat actually got married that year.
00:16:34 ►
So the next year, they came out to Hawaii just for a vacation.
00:16:40 ►
But through some contacts in Hawaii, some real estate, people in the real estate business,
00:16:43 ►
I knew about this land over on the big island.
00:16:47 ►
So they were going over there, so I said, you know, you ought to look at this.
00:16:48 ►
Maybe it’s a good deal.
00:16:50 ►
So they did.
00:16:56 ►
They went over and they contacted the guy, and they decided to buy this plot of land.
00:17:02 ►
It was really part of what in Hawaii they call a hui, a group of people who go together.
00:17:05 ►
So it wasn’t an individual thing.
00:17:07 ►
It’s like you’re part of a buyer’s club.
00:17:12 ►
And the Hui owned this 50-acre parcel collectively.
00:17:19 ►
So they bought this land, and they decided to build a house on it.
00:17:20 ►
So they started that.
00:17:26 ►
So that kept them coming back and forth to Hawaii fairly regularly while I was there.
00:17:30 ►
Well, at the same time, I was getting specimens.
00:17:36 ►
I was in contact with Tim Plowman at the time, who was at the Field Museum,
00:17:41 ►
and I actually obtained a specimen of Banisteriopsis from him.
00:17:51 ►
And we were growing it in aquarium tanks and so on on the mainland and it didn’t do so well under those circumstances.
00:17:55 ►
So I brought a cutting out to Hawaii and got it established in this land that they bought.
00:18:05 ►
So that was really the first plant that was introduced into the botanical dimensions land,
00:18:12 ►
long before it was botanical dimensions.
00:18:17 ►
And in fact, that original specimen is still there.
00:18:20 ►
It’s got a main trunk now as big as your waist,
00:18:27 ►
and it’s actually on that particular plot of land, I guess you could say it’s the mother of all ayahuascos. But
00:18:33 ►
over the next 10 years, we continue to, you know, we would go to South America and continue
00:18:39 ►
to drag things out of the jungle and bring them to this land. When I went to South America in 1981 to do my graduate field work,
00:18:50 ►
I brought back live specimens, and some of those ended up in Hawaii.
00:18:55 ►
Terrence and Kat also went a couple of times and brought things back.
00:18:59 ►
And this process just continued over the next 10 years.
00:19:02 ►
Well, finally in 1985, they decided, I really didn’t have that
00:19:08 ►
much to do with it, but they decided that
00:19:10 ►
it made sense if we were going to do this and start introducing all these
00:19:15 ►
species to try to establish a non-profit
00:19:19 ►
entity to foster the, you know, to make
00:19:23 ►
something out of this land rather than have it just
00:19:26 ►
be an informal thing.
00:19:28 ►
So they incorporated botanical dimensions.
00:19:31 ►
And at the time, I was listed as an advisor, but I was not on the board of directors, the
00:19:38 ►
reason being that I was in the process of trying to establish, I was in the more entrepreneurial mode,
00:19:46 ►
and I was trying to establish a business, a natural products business that would be related to drug development,
00:19:54 ►
sort of along the lines of Shaman Pharmaceuticals.
00:19:57 ►
But, you know, I was five years ahead of Shaman with trying to do this,
00:20:03 ►
which is probably why I never was able to
00:20:06 ►
obtain sufficient funding to get it off the ground.
00:20:09 ►
But I didn’t, because I was involved in Xenobiotics, that was the name of the company I was setting
00:20:15 ►
up, I decided it might look like a conflict of interest if I was on the board of Botanical
00:20:21 ►
Dimensions.
00:20:21 ►
So I remained an advisor.
00:20:21 ►
on the board of Botanical Dimensions.
00:20:24 ►
So I remained an advisor.
00:20:28 ►
And they set it up and started generating publicity and continued to introduce collections in there.
00:20:32 ►
And then later, when the antibiotics was more or less dead,
00:20:38 ►
I actually joined the board and became their research advisor.
00:20:42 ►
You’ve got to get ahead of yourself now.
00:20:44 ►
Or you’re going to get ahead of me.
00:20:45 ►
Yeah.
00:20:46 ►
Let me just stop and say, okay, so 81 was your first experience with ayahuasca.
00:20:51 ►
With whom did you do it initially?
00:20:54 ►
Was it a Cordero, or was it a shaman from a tribe?
00:20:58 ►
No, 81 wasn’t actually my first experience.
00:21:01 ►
My first experience was 71, but actually I think the ayahuasca
00:21:07 ►
that we took was probably, I mean it certainly served to synergize the mushrooms, but I don’t
00:21:13 ►
think by itself it would have been active. My first experience with an active ayahuasca It was actually in 1976, or no, 77, I believe, in Hawaii,
00:21:27 ►
when I took some ayahuasca that Terrence brought back from Peru.
00:21:33 ►
They had gone to Peru that summer, and they had made contact with an ayahuasca girl,
00:21:38 ►
and they had brought some back.
00:21:40 ►
So I actually took it in Hawaii, and it was active.
00:21:45 ►
It was definitely active.
00:21:46 ►
I mean, it certainly made me grow up, and I had a transient kind of psychedelic experience.
00:21:53 ►
My second encounter with ayahuasca was actually in Peru in 81
00:21:59 ►
when I went to see the same ayahuasquero that Terrence and Kat had contacted four years previously,
00:22:07 ►
that was kind of my in at the time.
00:22:09 ►
That’s how I was able to reach, you know, to contact a real ayahuasquero.
00:22:16 ►
Don Fidel was his name and lived outside Cucalpa.
00:22:21 ►
So my second encounter was really in 81 with his ayahuasca. And I have been
00:22:27 ►
back many, many times to see him, as well as subsequently I’ve met other ayahuasca girls
00:22:36 ►
largely through my friend Luis Eduardo Luna, who you probably know about. And he has introduced me to other Iowa girls both in Peru,
00:22:50 ►
or both in Iquitos and Pucallpa.
00:22:53 ►
And we’ve been back there.
00:22:55 ►
In 1985, I went back to Peru with Eduardo.
00:23:00 ►
And we were traveling there for about eight weeks,
00:23:04 ►
making collections and making videos
00:23:08 ►
and basically making the tour from ayahuasquero to ayahuasquero.
00:23:15 ►
What was, what’s your feeling about ayahuasca?
00:23:19 ►
What is my feeling about ayahuasca?
00:23:20 ►
Yeah, which I mean, which is going to lead to getting involved in the medical…
00:23:25 ►
I think ayahuasca is probably one of the most interesting plant hallucinogens on the planet.
00:23:34 ►
In a lot of respects, I think that it’s very safe.
00:23:41 ►
It’s very safe.
00:23:45 ►
I think that if… I’ve often had the feeling
00:23:46 ►
the contrast between the encounter with DMT
00:23:50 ►
when you smoke it
00:23:52 ►
and the encounter with psilocybin
00:23:56 ►
is another orally active form of DMT.
00:23:59 ►
That’s really all it is,
00:24:00 ►
is an orally active form of DMT.
00:24:03 ►
But I think ayahuasca is actually much more controllable
00:24:07 ►
than mushrooms. I think it doesn’t exact a physiological toll, which mushrooms may, although
00:24:15 ►
I’m not convinced that they do if used reasonably. I think it’s quite an amazing tool for self-understanding
00:24:30 ►
reasonably. I think it’s quite an amazing tool for self-understanding and for exploration. I think that it’s good for you, actually physically and psychologically good for you.
00:24:39 ►
And I think it’s interesting that the sociological phenomenon that goes with it
00:24:46 ►
is almost as interesting as the pharmacology.
00:24:49 ►
I mean, here, you know, it started out originally as a very obscure,
00:24:56 ►
aboriginal hallucinogen, which almost no one had heard of.
00:25:00 ►
I mean, if you were in the Amazon, you knew about it.
00:25:02 ►
But outside the context context practically unknown. And slowly, and then
00:25:08 ►
it diffused into mestizo society and it’s really
00:25:11 ►
there it has had a role for some time. It plays an important
00:25:15 ►
role in ethnomedical traditions of the mestizo
00:25:19 ►
people and it’s kind of the central plant in this whole
00:25:23 ►
plant complex, this whole pharmacopoeia
00:25:28 ►
of medicinal plants.
00:25:31 ►
Basically, I’ll go back to ayahuasca.
00:25:34 ►
Ayahuasca is kind of the linchpin of the whole thing.
00:25:37 ►
Yeah, it seems to be the plant that generates the interest.
00:25:40 ►
It’s the plant that generates the interest and that’s the way that the practitioners find out about the properties of the other plants.
00:25:48 ►
So it is the teacher, it’s the plant teacher par excellence
00:25:52 ►
because it is the means that gives them the way to contact
00:25:56 ►
the other plants and find out how they work.
00:25:59 ►
But that’s more or less the context in mestizo society.
00:26:03 ►
Then more recently in Brazil, you’re seeing it begin to diffuse into larger society,
00:26:10 ►
into the lower middle class and upper middle class socioeconomic strata
00:26:16 ►
through organizations like the Daime Church and the Uniao de Vegetal.
00:26:22 ►
These are syncretic religious movements
00:26:25 ►
that are basically bringing ayahuasca out of the jungle
00:26:28 ►
and into the hands of ordinary people.
00:26:32 ►
And then, of course, through their influence,
00:26:35 ►
it’s beginning to diffuse into the states.
00:26:38 ►
I mean, there’s even an extended movement to establish a chapter
00:26:42 ►
of the Uñaoegetal in the States
00:26:45 ►
and get it recognized as a legitimate religion
00:26:49 ►
with the right to use ayahuasca tea,
00:26:51 ►
which it certainly is by all criteria that I can imagine.
00:26:59 ►
It certainly is a legitimate religion,
00:27:01 ►
and its practice should be allowed.
00:27:05 ►
But what’s interesting in a kind of larger context is that, you know,
00:27:10 ►
as our planet faces this ecological crisis,
00:27:14 ►
and as we confront the fact that the rainforests are disappearing,
00:27:18 ►
and that along with that, the plants, the species,
00:27:22 ►
that we haven’t, you know, that we haven’t, you know,
00:27:25 ►
that we don’t appreciate what we’re giving up, and the indigenous knowledge is disappearing,
00:27:30 ►
and yet out of, you know, this, from within this context of ecological crisis,
00:27:38 ►
you know, comes this plant spirit literally out of the Amazon,
00:27:44 ►
and brings the message to the world at large.
00:27:47 ►
I mean, I’m not…
00:27:49 ►
Well, I suppose this relates to a mystical idea.
00:27:53 ►
I mean, I’m not really a…
00:27:56 ►
It’s just funny.
00:27:57 ►
I think in some ways it’s the planet
00:28:00 ►
responding to the spiritual and ecological crisis
00:28:04 ►
that threatens the entire biosphere,
00:28:07 ►
that threatens not only our own survival, but the survival of the biosphere. And I think
00:28:13 ►
that ayahuasca is kind of the messenger of the rest of the biosphere to humans to say, you know, look at what’s happening. Get your act together
00:28:27 ►
and, you know, get straightened out. I mean, I really do
00:28:32 ►
believe that. I think it’s interesting. You could probably make
00:28:36 ►
the case that ayahuasca, a few years ago,
00:28:40 ►
maybe 10 or 20, maybe 20 years ago,
00:28:43 ►
its use was pretty much restricted to the Amazon basin.
00:28:47 ►
And now I think you could make a pretty strong case
00:28:51 ►
that it is the most widely used plant hallucinogen in the world.
00:28:57 ►
What’s your take on…
00:29:00 ►
I get invited occasionally, you know, to drink ayahuasca here.
00:29:08 ►
Probably it’s ego, but I feel that’s something that when I make the effort to go get it,
00:29:15 ►
it seems to be what I need to get.
00:29:19 ►
It seems to serve my purpose.
00:29:21 ►
I don’t know.
00:29:25 ►
seems to serve my purpose. I just feel, I don’t know, I think of it as personally as something that I prefer to do in a more initial context. Now, if I had never been to the jungle,
00:29:34 ►
I might feel differently. Well, I’m sure I would. But as somebody who’s been and whose
00:29:38 ►
experiences, not your first with Terrence, but certainly subsequent experiences, have
00:29:43 ►
frequently been in the jungle with contact with ayahuasca.
00:29:46 ►
Right.
00:29:47 ►
Do you find there’s a difference?
00:29:49 ►
Do you do it in town with these crews,
00:29:53 ►
the ayahuasqueros that occasionally come through,
00:29:58 ►
or do you prefer to do it in a more original context?
00:30:04 ►
Well, yes.
00:30:05 ►
Actually, I do.
00:30:06 ►
I do prefer to do it in a more traditional context.
00:30:10 ►
I would much rather do it in the Amazon in Peru or Brazil
00:30:15 ►
than I would like to do it here.
00:30:17 ►
I don’t seek out the people who come to town, you know,
00:30:23 ►
to basically have workshops, which are ayahuasca sessions.
00:30:27 ►
I mean, I think that’s kind of a new age thing.
00:30:31 ►
I’m not sure it’s a bad thing.
00:30:34 ►
I just don’t really feel the need to seek it out because I think I’ve had a more genuine experience
00:30:41 ►
or have had more genuine experiences in Peru.
00:30:44 ►
genuine experience or have had more genuine experiences in Peru.
00:30:48 ►
I do take it.
00:30:55 ►
I have gone to sessions held by the Uñado de Vegetal in this country,
00:30:59 ►
and I think, you know, I have great respect for that group.
00:31:06 ►
And I think that they are trying to be very responsible in the way that they bring it to the world.
00:31:11 ►
I feel very concerned for them.
00:31:13 ►
I feel that they’re quite naive,
00:31:19 ►
and that’s my main worry, actually, about this business of trying to bring ayahuasca out of its traditional context
00:31:24 ►
and introduce it in the context of this country.
00:31:28 ►
I’m worried that, you know, as long as, I mean, in Brazil right now,
00:31:34 ►
ayahuasca is legal, and the government has recognized it’s a legitimate religion,
00:31:40 ►
and they’ve said it’s okay, and it is not a drug problem.
00:31:44 ►
They’ve looked at it, and because it’s used in a traditional context,
00:31:49 ►
basically people don’t get into trouble with it.
00:31:52 ►
And the Brazilian government has taken a very reasonable attitude
00:31:56 ►
and basically saying, well, it’s not out of control, this is not a drug problem,
00:32:02 ►
and so we are not going to make it into a
00:32:05 ►
drug problem by making it illegal or by trying to restrict its use. These people are quite
00:32:12 ►
capable of policing themselves. And they have, you know, much stronger strictures against
00:32:19 ►
misuse or inappropriate use than any. So there’s really no need to impose a legal superstructure on this.
00:32:29 ►
But I do worry that if ayahuasca becomes widely distributed in the states
00:32:37 ►
or widely known, if it becomes popular, if you will,
00:32:41 ►
then there are going to be repercussions down to South America.
00:32:46 ►
In other words, our government is able to put pressure on other governments,
00:32:51 ►
the Brazilian government, for example, to make this illegal.
00:32:55 ►
And I think that would be a shame.
00:32:57 ►
But I think it would be very hard for these governments to resist that kind of pressure.
00:33:02 ►
I think you can always say, well, you know, we’ll not give you a break on the foreign debt.
00:33:09 ►
There’s many, many ways that they can bring pressure against the government of Brazil
00:33:14 ►
to in turn bring pressure against legitimate religious organizations like the UDV.
00:33:21 ►
Now, having said that, it’s possible that actually the UDV or some similar organization could
00:33:28 ►
be a test case in this country.
00:33:35 ►
You know, the Religious Freedom Act that’s recently been passed is a blow for all people
00:33:44 ►
who believe in religious freedom.
00:33:46 ►
And it basically says that the government cannot interfere with the religious practice
00:33:50 ►
unless they have a compelling interest to do so.
00:33:54 ►
And I think it would be very hard to show that restricting the use of ayahuasca
00:33:59 ►
in the context of legitimate religion is a compelling interest.
00:34:05 ►
So, you know, I have mixed feelings about it.
00:34:09 ►
I mean, I feel that they’re very naive.
00:34:11 ►
They have to be very careful in the way that they do this.
00:34:16 ►
It worries me that certain groups or certain individuals
00:34:22 ►
who are basically selling shamanism, selling
00:34:28 ►
shamanism for commercial purposes and making a lot of money
00:34:32 ►
off it, but they have no
00:34:34 ►
you know, they apparently feel no responsibility to the
00:34:40 ►
larger issues. It’s just, you know, let’s hold the sessions and make
00:34:44 ►
the money.
00:34:50 ►
And the problem with that is that it’s going to become more and more widely known.
00:34:52 ►
It’s already become widely known,
00:34:58 ►
and it’ll become without some kind of responsible approach to it. It’ll just become another drug that is the focus of regression,
00:35:04 ►
and the potential benefits of it will be lost.
00:35:09 ►
So yes, I am concerned about this commercialization of it and the commercialization of shamanism
00:35:16 ►
in general.
00:35:17 ►
I mean, I think people are deluded if they think that they can go to an ayahuasca session in Marin County and get any idea of what it is really like to take it in a shamanic context.
00:35:32 ►
In the same time, that is not to say that they may not benefit
00:35:37 ►
from going to an ayahuasca session in Marin County.
00:35:40 ►
I mean, I know many people have and many people do,
00:35:44 ►
but there’s a need for discretion and there’s a need to, I don’t know, not popularize it.
00:35:53 ►
The mass media in a lot of ways does a disservice to these things.
00:35:57 ►
These are very delicate and cultural-bound kinds of practices,
00:36:02 ►
and when suddenly they’re broadcast all over the world
00:36:06 ►
and hyped through the mass media,
00:36:10 ►
these cultural-bound practices are very vulnerable
00:36:14 ►
to basically being destroyed,
00:36:17 ►
and particularly when the use of the sacred substance is involved.
00:36:23 ►
I mean, it’s no different than it ever was.
00:36:26 ►
I mean, when the Jesuits and the missionaries came to Mesoamerica,
00:36:31 ►
you know, the first things to go, the first things to be stamped out,
00:36:36 ►
were the knowledge of the sacred plants and the practice of using the sacred plants.
00:36:40 ►
Of course, they didn’t succeed in stamping them out.
00:36:44 ►
the sacred plants, of course, they didn’t succeed in stamping them out.
00:36:47 ►
They went underground and they continued to survive.
00:36:50 ►
And they still do survive.
00:36:55 ►
But it, you know, it led to a very unfortunate period of repression.
00:37:05 ►
You know, and a lot of it has to do with, I suppose, the, what would you call it,
00:37:07 ►
the repressive nature of Christianity.
00:37:10 ►
I mean, I think that Christianity… Well, the marriage of Christianity to Calvinist beliefs.
00:37:12 ►
The marriage of Christianity to Calvinist beliefs, exactly.
00:37:16 ►
I couldn’t have put it better.
00:37:17 ►
I mean, the idea that, you know, if it feels good, it’s bad.
00:37:22 ►
And a lot of it has to do with the… I mean, I think that Christianity linked to Calvinism
00:37:29 ►
has a hard time dealing with what you might call facts of biology,
00:37:36 ►
you know, which in another phrase is sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
00:37:42 ►
I mean, in some ways, life is about sex, drugs, and rock and roll. I mean, in some ways, life is about sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
00:37:48 ►
Biology is about those things.
00:37:50 ►
I mean, sex is obvious.
00:37:52 ►
You know, the strategy of most biological systems
00:37:56 ►
is to get reproduced.
00:37:58 ►
You know, whether we think it’s important or not,
00:38:00 ►
that’s what sex is all about, really.
00:38:03 ►
And from the standpoint of biology, it’s to reproduce and pass the genes on to the next generation.
00:38:10 ►
As far as drugs are concerned, you know, we are bags of drugs.
00:38:16 ►
We are, you know, sacks of neurotransmitters and hormones, which are basically drugs.
00:38:21 ►
I mean, people can say, well, you know, I don’t like to take drugs because I don’t like artificial experience. I don’t like, I like to have real
00:38:29 ►
experience. Well, maybe, you know, all experience is a drug experience. You know, I mean, whether
00:38:38 ►
it’s mediated by our own drugs or whether it’s mediated by substances that we ingest that are found in plants,
00:38:45 ►
you know, cognition, consciousness, the working of the brain,
00:38:50 ►
it’s all a chemically mediated process.
00:38:55 ►
So, you know, life itself is a drug experience.
00:39:00 ►
And finally, rock and roll, you know, if you relate that to rhythm,
00:39:04 ►
you know, rhythm is what it’s about.
00:39:07 ►
Oscillation is a fact of biology.
00:39:12 ►
That’s what metabolism is.
00:39:14 ►
It’s a regular clock-like turning over of neurotransmitters, enzymes, and hormone systems.
00:39:22 ►
So when you say, you know, life is all about sex, drugs, and rock and roll,
00:39:28 ►
you know, you can say it flippantly,
00:39:29 ►
but I actually believe there’s a profound truth behind that observation.
00:39:36 ►
At least that’s how I interpret it from the standpoint of a biologist.
00:39:42 ►
Yeah.
00:39:43 ►
Quickly, let me just get them out of the way. Are you currently working with Terence
00:39:47 ►
on anything?
00:39:49 ►
Not really. Terence is, we’re going, you know, we each have our own careers, and he more
00:39:58 ►
or less, you know, has chosen to be a spokesman for all this and very much in the public eye, and I have chosen
00:40:08 ►
not to, I guess. I mean, I don’t really seek out publicity. I prefer to work in the background.
00:40:17 ►
We’re on good terms. We appear, well, actually, we don’t make appearances that often together.
00:40:27 ►
I mean, like we did at the Seeds of Change conference,
00:40:30 ►
and I believe we’re scheduled to have a conference or online forum in June.
00:40:40 ►
But he really is more or less the public one.
00:40:45 ►
I mean, he’s kind of the spokesman and the philosopher and the metaphysician.
00:40:49 ►
And I prefer to be less publicly visible.
00:40:56 ►
And I guess if I had to put a label on myself in this context, you know, I’m the scientist.
00:41:03 ►
I’m the nuts and bolts person, you know, he
00:41:06 ►
gets all his good ideas from me, by the way. Does he? I would say so. Would he say so?
00:41:13 ►
Yes, I think if he’s honest with himself, he’d have to acknowledge that. Okay. Which
00:41:20 ►
cuts out the, where are your points of disagreement with him?
00:41:25 ►
Huh?
00:41:26 ►
Which eliminates the question of, where are your points of disagreement with some of his primary lectures?
00:41:32 ►
Where are my points of disagreement?
00:41:33 ►
Well, I mean, if the ideas are coming from you, I don’t imagine there are.
00:41:38 ►
Ah, the ideas are coming from me, but the interpretations are coming from you.
00:41:43 ►
Okay.
00:41:43 ►
But the interpretations are coming from him.
00:41:44 ►
Okay.
00:41:51 ►
Well, one point of disagreement that we have, I think he’s loose with the facts.
00:41:59 ►
I think that, you know, he will never let a fact get in the way of making a provocative statement.
00:42:01 ►
No, and he’s a good storyteller.
00:42:06 ►
He’s a good storyteller, but I think it’s important to remember that they are stories.
00:42:10 ►
And that, you know, I mean, he often makes mistakes in his lectures, and he often, even in his books, says things.
00:42:14 ►
Again, I have to say this, because he didn’t check with me first.
00:42:20 ►
You know, he didn’t check his facts.
00:42:22 ►
And so there are a lot of often, well, in Food of the Gods, for example, many things are said which are just not correct.
00:42:33 ►
You know, I mean, issues on which there’s no dispute.
00:42:36 ►
These are not philosophical issues.
00:42:40 ►
These are just, you know, misstatements of fact. So I think, you know, one criticism I have of him is that he’s, you know,
00:42:49 ►
I mean, if he doesn’t know something, he’ll just make something up, you know,
00:42:55 ►
so as to appear not to be completely ignorant on a subject.
00:42:59 ►
And as a scientist, that rankles.
00:43:02 ►
You know, it’s okay to say, I don’t know.
00:43:05 ►
You know, we don’t know almost everything.
00:43:08 ►
What we do know is very little.
00:43:11 ►
So that’s an area where we, you know, disagree.
00:43:15 ►
I guess another area where we disagree is another place that you could say we disagree have to do with the interpretation of all the events that came out of Lodger era
00:43:32 ►
and the invisible landscape and true hallucinations,
00:43:35 ►
which you kind of have to be familiar with, at least have read true hallucinations to know what I’m talking about, but I think one place that we differ is that I don’t necessarily buy all of
00:43:48 ►
the ideas that
00:43:49 ►
came out of that experience and which were set forth in the Invisible Landscape.
00:43:56 ►
I mean, now the Invisible Landscape has been
00:43:59 ►
republished. It’s been nearly 20 years ago that it was written.
00:44:04 ►
It was published first in 1975,
00:44:08 ►
so it’s been nearly 20 years since it was
00:44:11 ►
published first. And it was written before that.
00:44:16 ►
I mean, it was essentially finished in 1972,
00:44:21 ►
I guess. So it’s been over 20, it’s been
00:44:24 ►
23 years since the thing was written.
00:44:27 ►
I would like to think that in that time
00:44:30 ►
I’ve learned a thing or two
00:44:31 ►
and I’m able to revise my ideas.
00:44:35 ►
And I have done so.
00:44:36 ►
I don’t dismiss everything that’s in the Invisible Landscape,
00:44:40 ►
but I think a lot of them were fairly naive ideas, kind of silly ideas, really,
00:44:48 ►
which were, which were, could be attributed to the fact that, you know, I was young, we,
00:44:54 ►
Terrence was young, neither one of us had very much scientific background, and essentially
00:44:58 ►
we had no scientific training at the time, and that, so it didn’t get in the way of this
00:45:04 ►
kind of freewheeling metaphysical speculation. Since that time, I’ve learned a great deal, or maybe
00:45:12 ►
not a great deal, but at least something, so that I don’t completely accept the premises
00:45:18 ►
of some of our major ideas that were set forth in the invisiblevisible Landscape. And in fact, I say pretty much this in the foreword to the new edition of the Invisible Landscape,
00:45:30 ►
so I ask people to at least read that.
00:45:33 ►
It’s kind of a disclaimer on my part.
00:45:37 ►
I’m not sure Terrence feels that way.
00:45:40 ►
I think he may feel that the ideas are just as valid now. I mean, I think he even has told me that, you know, he has found a reason to change a thing
00:45:50 ►
in the way that he feels about some of these metaphysical ideas.
00:45:56 ►
And in a way, I think that’s a shame because, you know, it’s like saying,
00:46:02 ►
well, you know, I haven’t learned anything in 25 years.
00:46:05 ►
I have not found any new information which will make me alter my opinions one iota.
00:46:11 ►
I don’t think that that’s a very, you know, that’s not healthy intellectually.
00:46:18 ►
Also, I’m not sure how much is true.
00:46:22 ►
He may just say that to irritate me. But to some degree, I think it’s true. He may just say that to irritate me,
00:46:26 ►
but to some degree I think it’s true.
00:46:28 ►
I mean, I think he really does have
00:46:30 ►
a basic underlying belief
00:46:32 ►
that somehow at the base of it all,
00:46:35 ►
all of this is true.
00:46:36 ►
And I think, you know,
00:46:38 ►
it’s hard for me to go along with that.
00:46:40 ►
I mean, I think that, you know,
00:46:42 ►
he can hold to that belief
00:46:44 ►
because these ideas have been unexamined for a long time. They’ve become incorporated into a kind of public litany, and for him to, you know, abandon that now a radical set of ideas, and if you subsequently say,
00:47:07 ►
well, no, I was wrong, this isn’t completely, this isn’t correct, then it looks bad.
00:47:14 ►
So I think he’s chosen to not really examine the ideas carefully, because that would force
00:47:22 ►
him to have to go back and perhaps repudiate some of them.
00:47:29 ►
Does that answer the question?
00:47:30 ►
Yes, and I find, I mean, my own experience limited, you know, with ayahuasca over the years
00:47:35 ►
is some of the things it generates in me,
00:47:38 ►
I look now and find myself blushing at a couple of early pieces saying,
00:47:44 ►
you know, I could have phrased that softer, a little less sure of myself.
00:47:49 ►
That’s the other thing.
00:47:50 ►
That’s another aspect of Terrence’s public gig, if you will,
00:47:55 ►
which I find somewhat disturbing.
00:47:59 ►
In some ways, I think it’s great, because he’s a great storyteller.
00:48:03 ►
There’s no doubt about it.
00:48:05 ►
He’s fascinating to listen to.
00:48:08 ►
And he has, through the years, kept this alive.
00:48:15 ►
If you want to give him credit, I give him credit for keeping the issue of psychedelics alive
00:48:21 ►
and before the public, perhaps more than any other person.
00:48:26 ►
I mean, because he just keeps talking about it,
00:48:29 ►
and he was talking about it all through the late 70s and early 80s
00:48:34 ►
when the war on drugs was at its height.
00:48:36 ►
So that takes a certain amount of courage to keep bringing that up
00:48:41 ►
and throwing it in people’s face.
00:48:44 ►
Having set that goal, I think that maybe because he attaches it to a lot of ideas
00:48:52 ►
that are fairly radical, fairly radical and hard to support,
00:48:59 ►
in some ways he’s done the scientific investigation,
00:49:04 ►
the scientific community that really wants to look at psychedelics
00:49:08 ►
in a more serious, or I don’t know if serious is the word,
00:49:12 ►
a more objective kind of context, a kind of a disservice,
00:49:17 ►
because he links them to ideas which are pretty off the wall,
00:49:23 ►
this notion that they are,
00:49:26 ►
you know, somehow linked to extraterrestrials and this kind of thing. I mean, it may well be true,
00:49:32 ►
we don’t know, but I don’t think, I think the important thing, the thing to say, if you’re
00:49:37 ►
honest, is we don’t know, rather than asserting that this is so. I mean, I think you could say,
00:49:42 ►
rather than asserting that this is so.
00:49:47 ►
I mean, I think you could say, I think you could certainly make the case, for example,
00:49:59 ►
that, you know, Timothy Leary was a man, I mean, I feel, I have great admiration for Tim in some ways, but I think that he was a man kind of caught on a historical wave.
00:50:05 ►
I mean, if it had to have been him, maybe it would have been someone else, But I think that he was a man kind of caught on a historical wave.
00:50:08 ►
I mean, if it had to have been him, maybe it would have been someone else. But on one hand, you can say, well, Timothy Leary, you know,
00:50:12 ►
did more than any other single person to destroy psychedelic research in this country.
00:50:20 ►
I mean, it’s largely because of his inflammatory statements and his radical stance that, you know, America at large, Middle America, became hysterical, they became frightened, and they decided basically just to shut down the whole thing, to repress it as much as they could, largely because of the statements that this very flamboyant person was out there and people were concerned
00:50:45 ►
that, you know, concerned for their children and this kind of thing.
00:50:49 ►
Rightly or wrongly, obviously, but, you know, so they decided, you know, we’re not going
00:50:53 ►
to, we’re just going to shove this whole thing under the rug.
00:50:57 ►
And they managed to do so, including scientific research, which was going on, you know, steadily
00:51:03 ►
at that time.
00:51:04 ►
They just, basically, it all stopped.
00:51:06 ►
Yeah.
00:51:06 ►
20 years.
00:51:08 ►
I think so.
00:51:08 ►
And I’m concerned that parents may be doing a similar disservice at this time.
00:51:16 ►
You know, I mean, with people making radical statements, there’s a chance that, again,
00:51:21 ►
you know, we could revisit this.
00:51:23 ►
Hopefully, we’re a little wiser this time around.
00:51:27 ►
Difficult position, though, to be the front man, whether it’s a rock and roll band or, you know,
00:51:33 ►
the spokesman for any group or movement.
00:51:38 ►
Listen to really ardent followers who really want you to take the next step.
00:51:44 ►
Right.
00:51:44 ►
And then, you know, unfortunately there’s going to be that journalist there who says,
00:51:49 ►
that’s the comment that will make the headline.
00:51:52 ►
You know, which may or may not be your headline comment.
00:51:55 ►
Right, right.
00:51:57 ►
But…
00:51:57 ►
Yeah, but the thing is, I mean, Cherith, I don’t think, Cherith’s message, his rap is so idiosyncratic
00:52:03 ►
that I don’t think he’s the spokesman for any psychedelic movement.
00:52:08 ►
I think most of the, I mean, many people in the psychedelic movement,
00:52:13 ►
including myself, would disagree strongly with a great deal of what he says.
00:52:18 ►
So he’s kind of taken this very idiosyncratic approach,
00:52:21 ►
and so people shouldn’t, you know, particularly the mass media should
00:52:27 ►
not get the idea that this guy speaks for the whole movement. He doesn’t.
00:52:33 ►
Right. Unfortunately, the mass media is not going to take the time to seek out the next
00:52:37 ►
guy. They’re going to go to, hey, you know, 20 people are speaking on it over at the Open
00:52:42 ►
Center, but only one gets the Open Center at Cooper Union.
00:52:46 ►
So let’s go.
00:52:47 ►
I did see you there a couple of years ago.
00:52:49 ►
Yeah.
00:52:50 ►
But, you know, Terrence got it and fills the place,
00:52:53 ►
and you say, you know what I mean?
00:52:54 ►
And that’s the one that generates the interest.
00:52:57 ►
I know.
00:52:57 ►
I know, in fact.
00:52:58 ►
So I do understand the good and bad of it all.
00:53:02 ►
Huh?
00:53:02 ►
I do understand the good and bad of it all,
00:53:07 ►
of Timothy Leary and then the other side. In that position, you know, a guy who can pack the houses every time,
00:53:12 ►
I feel has a larger responsibility to the psychedelic community
00:53:16 ►
to refrain from making these completely off-the-wall comments, you know,
00:53:21 ►
and to actually tell it like it is, not how he imagines it to be.
00:53:27 ►
And, you know, of course, the other side of it is people go to hear
00:53:33 ►
the off-the-wall comments.
00:53:34 ►
That’s what they’re there to hear.
00:53:36 ►
I think people should view it as theater and not as, you know,
00:53:42 ►
someone pronouncing truth necessarily.
00:53:44 ►
I mean, I’m sure that Terrence views it as theater.
00:53:48 ►
I can’t believe that he takes what he says seriously.
00:53:51 ►
I can tell you that he doesn’t.
00:53:54 ►
Much of what he says, he says it because it’s going to get a rise out of somebody.
00:53:59 ►
He’s always been that way.
00:54:01 ►
Never let the fact get in the way of a provocative statement.
00:54:08 ►
You know, I mean, the provocative statement is the
00:54:10 ►
important thing. If the facts happen to disagree with it, well, then
00:54:15 ►
you know, we’ll just ignore those. It’s kind of like
00:54:19 ►
Murphy’s Law, you know, or not Murphy’s Law, but
00:54:23 ►
one of those similar laws of science, you know, I think, or not Murphy’s Law, but one of those similar laws of science,
00:54:27 ►
you know, that people say jokingly, if the facts fail to agree with the theory, they
00:54:32 ►
must be disposed of. And that’s sort of Terence’s approach to these things. Which I think is
00:54:39 ►
unfortunate, actually, because the story itself is far out enough. You don’t really have to distort
00:54:47 ►
the facts or invoke elf machines from Dimension X to make it far out.
00:54:53 ►
I don’t know if it’s a concern. There are people like me in the audience who don’t always take him at his word,
00:55:07 ►
who actually think, okay, he’s Irish, I’m Irish,
00:55:12 ►
he sounds like my big brother talking,
00:55:16 ►
and my big brother never hit two sewer home runs if I didn’t see them.
00:55:21 ►
He always hit four sewer home runs.
00:55:23 ►
I just never got to see those.
00:55:25 ►
Right.
00:55:26 ►
You know what I mean?
00:55:27 ►
So in a sense, there’s a certain sum of that.
00:55:33 ►
And so not everybody is, you know, taking him at his utmost.
00:55:39 ►
Right.
00:55:39 ►
Let me get back to…
00:55:40 ►
A lot of it, I mean, now he’s real big in the Generation X,
00:55:44 ►
in the 20 to 30 age group,
00:55:48 ►
you know, which I think that’s fine.
00:55:49 ►
I mean, I think it’s good that they’re getting, you know,
00:55:54 ►
that there is a resurgence of interest in psych selling.
00:55:58 ►
I mean, I think that’s all to the good.
00:56:00 ►
But at the same time, you have to say, well, you know, these people are young, they’re
00:56:07 ►
naive, they haven’t been around the block very much, so they’re more gullible, they’re
00:56:14 ►
more open to this stuff.
00:56:16 ►
And I don’t know that that’s good necessarily.
00:56:22 ►
Well everybody’s got to learn. I think every generation has to learn for itself
00:56:26 ►
certain universal truths, I guess.
00:56:31 ►
You can’t just…
00:56:33 ►
You cannot impose this on people.
00:56:36 ►
There are certain things that must be learned through experience. You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:56:47 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:56:54 ►
Ah, yes, as Dennis just said,
00:56:57 ►
there are certain things that must be learned through experience.
00:57:01 ►
Of course, what was left unsaid is the fact that
00:57:04 ►
it is quite often a bad
00:57:05 ►
experience through which learning takes place. Actually, come to think of it, right at this
00:57:11 ►
moment, I can’t think of a single important thing that I’ve ever learned through a really good
00:57:16 ►
experience. Other than the fact that I’d like to do it again, of course. I’ve had some of those
00:57:22 ►
good experiences. Now, I know that this is off-topic,
00:57:26 ►
but I’ve just got to get this off my chest. You know, if you think back to where this interview
00:57:31 ►
began today, it started with Dennis talking about a grad school rejection by Harvard turning out to
00:57:37 ►
be one of the best things that had ever happened to him. And if you’re like me, you’re probably
00:57:42 ►
getting tired of hearing stories that begin that way.
00:57:45 ►
In my case, when I was younger, I figured that they were just rationalizations to make people feel better about a bad situation.
00:57:53 ►
But now that I’ve just now today actually finished my 69th lap around the sun,
00:57:59 ►
well, what gets to me about those statements is that, well, I’ve had five or six of those instances in my own life that I thought were real tragedies beyond measure at the time,
00:58:10 ►
but eventually they morphed into some of the best things that ever happened to me.
00:58:15 ►
So now, ironically, those stories kind of scare me into thinking that if I ever wanted life to be better than it now is,
00:58:22 ►
then I first got to endure another one of those great tragedies.
00:58:27 ►
And so I’ve solved the dilemma of my own life by realizing that right here and now is fantastic.
00:58:34 ►
And if it got any better, I’d probably pop.
00:58:38 ►
And so I don’t let that phrase upset me anymore.
00:58:41 ►
But I can’t blame you for maybe being a little cynical about that way
00:58:45 ►
of seeing things if you haven’t had it happen to you at least once so far. It definitely is
00:58:51 ►
counterintuitive. Now, getting back to the interview that we just heard, I hope that if
00:58:58 ►
you’re one of the young students who has contacted me in the past about how you could go about
00:59:03 ►
becoming more involved in psychedelic research as a profession, that you give some thought to where the major turning
00:59:10 ►
points were in Dennis’ professional life, the ones that led him to a position of prominence
00:59:14 ►
in the academic realm, as well as in the realm of explorations of many kinds.
00:59:20 ►
And if you think about it for a while, you may come to the same conclusion as I have
00:59:25 ►
that it was Dennis’ ability to pay attention to the little details,
00:59:30 ►
the chance statements and the synchronistic events that showed up like little kernels of corn
00:59:35 ►
pointing the way down the trail that, as it turns out, he was not just following,
00:59:40 ►
he was actually blazing it as he went along.
00:59:44 ►
And that’s the way life is, at least if you
00:59:46 ►
give it a chance, and trust your gut feelings, you know, your instincts. Trust them over the rational
00:59:52 ►
and often fearful processes of your brain, and you might be surprised at how wonderful your life can
00:59:59 ►
turn out. Now there is one thing in this interview that I have to take a little issue with,
01:00:06 ►
and I hope that sometime in the next year or so that Dennis and I have a chance to talk about this in person.
01:00:12 ►
And that is his statement that as much as he admired Timothy Leary,
01:00:16 ►
that he nonetheless felt that it was Leary who was mainly responsible for causing an end to the psychedelic research,
01:00:22 ►
at least until very recently.
01:00:25 ►
And while I don’t want to take your time with this right now, since I’ve talked about this in past podcasts,
01:00:31 ►
I would suggest that maybe you do a little research on your own.
01:00:36 ►
Read some of the news articles from back in those days,
01:00:38 ►
and then compare what Leary was doing when he was tripping with a dozen or so spiritually inclined followers,
01:00:45 ►
with what Ken Kesey was doing when he and his friends were dosing thousands of people at a time,
01:00:51 ►
many of them unsuspecting.
01:00:53 ►
Granted, Leary eventually came under the influence of Kesey
01:00:57 ►
and made a public spectacle of himself for a while,
01:00:59 ►
but in my opinion, I put the majority of blame for ruining a good thing
01:01:04 ►
squarely on the shoulders of Ken Kesey. But hey, that’s just my opinion, I put the majority of blame for ruining a good thing squarely on the shoulders of Ken Kesey.
01:01:06 ►
But hey, that’s just my opinion, and ultimately it’s only your opinion that is going to be of any matter to you.
01:01:14 ►
So if you’re interested in this topic, read a few books and a few websites about those interesting times,
01:01:21 ►
and then come to your own conclusions.
01:01:23 ►
And the fact of the matter is that
01:01:25 ►
your opinion is every bit as valid as mine, and probably more so now that I think about it.
01:01:32 ►
Now, back to today’s program, and it was what I consider to be the very best and fairest critique
01:01:39 ►
of the work of Terence McKenna that I’ve yet heard. Well, the main thing I want to say is that
01:01:45 ►
I hope that you’ll now be inspired to question
01:01:48 ►
everyone you hear speak in these podcasts,
01:01:50 ►
and especially me,
01:01:52 ►
because what psychedelic thinking is all about
01:01:55 ►
is about you taking charge of your own mind
01:01:57 ►
and thinking for yourself and questioning authority.
01:02:01 ►
Any and all authorities, you know,
01:02:03 ►
role models, mentors, teachers, friends, and family
01:02:05 ►
members, just to mention a few. Inform yourself and then form your own opinions about this world.
01:02:11 ►
And then act accordingly. Okay, that’s enough of the soapbox for today, particularly because I
01:02:19 ►
still have a bunch of other things I want to tell you. First of all, I want to be sure to once again
01:02:24 ►
thank Hector Glass,
01:02:25 ►
who digitized the tape that this recording was made on, made by Peter Gorman, who also conducted
01:02:31 ►
the interview, as you already know. And Peter has been kind enough to furnish some other talks that
01:02:37 ►
we’ll be hearing in future podcasts. Also, he’s somebody to know if you’re interested in exploring
01:02:42 ►
the plant mixture known as ayahuasca.
01:02:46 ►
And a good place to begin would be by reading his new book, Ayahuasca in My Blood, 25 Years of Medicine Dreaming.
01:02:55 ►
And I’ll put a link to that along with the program notes for this podcast and a link to Peter’s main website.
01:03:04 ►
Peter’s main website. Now, I was going to end my remarks today by saying a few words about what’s going on
01:03:08 ►
in the UK and the rest of the world right now, and about an idea
01:03:12 ►
that goes by the name of anonymous. But to tell the truth,
01:03:16 ►
I’ve had enough heavy stuff for one day, and so I’m going to end on a
01:03:20 ►
lighter note by reading two comments that were recently posted on our
01:03:23 ►
Notes from the Psychedelic Salon website.
01:03:27 ►
And by the way, that’s really about the only sure way for me to see any messages from you.
01:03:32 ►
If you’re like me, you’re having problems keeping up with email, Facebook mail, Twitter
01:03:37 ►
mail, and all those other sources of messages.
01:03:41 ►
But the one thing that I never miss are the comments that you post on the Salon Notes blog.
01:03:46 ►
You see, a huge amount of spam is posted there each day, and so the comments are not automatically
01:03:52 ►
posted to the website once you click the post button. What happens is that each day I have to
01:03:57 ►
go out and delete the posts in the spam folder and then individually approve the valid comments.
01:04:03 ►
So a couple of days ago, I checked the comments folder and found a comment that read,
01:04:08 ►
Lorenzo, I love the goofiness. I love the fact that you are actually doing this for grandchildren.
01:04:14 ►
Anyway, I think you are on to something when you mention those coincidences.
01:04:18 ►
After all, they are a key to what’s being talked about.
01:04:21 ►
In one way, being connections between more dots in the universe.
01:04:26 ►
Please mention as many of those that you experience as you can.
01:04:30 ►
And I started to think about, oh, what could I say?
01:04:34 ►
But at the very next instant, almost, I went to the next comment to approve,
01:04:38 ►
and it was for a completely different podcast,
01:04:42 ►
and it turns out it came in about six hours after the one I just read to you.
01:04:46 ►
Now, this one read, Hector.
01:04:48 ►
So there I was, about to click on my bookmark to the psychedelic salon to check if there was a new episode,
01:04:54 ►
when, for some reason, I thought back to the time I was in Peru,
01:04:58 ►
where I met someone who also was a regular listener of this wonderful podcast.
01:05:02 ►
That person’s face was in my mind when I clicked the link, Thank you. I want to let Lefty know that I really enjoyed his podcast number 112 from Lefty’s Lounge,
01:05:27 ►
which, by the way, you can find on the most excellent cannabis podcast network at dopefiend.co.uk.
01:05:34 ►
So, Lefty, there I was a couple of nights ago, cooking dinner and listening to your podcast,
01:05:40 ►
when I stopped and took a little sip of wine, just as you got to the punchline in that Mr. Roach clip segment.
01:05:48 ►
And, well, as a kid I can remember having milk come out of my nose
01:05:52 ►
when an unexpected laugh came on,
01:05:54 ►
but this is the first time that it ever happened with wine.
01:05:57 ►
And in case you’re wondering, I definitely do not recommend snorting wine.
01:06:02 ►
But I most certainly do recommend listening to Lefty’s Lounge
01:06:05 ►
whenever you’re in the mood for good music and good comedy.
01:06:09 ►
And hey, thanks for the laugh, Lefty. I really needed it.
01:06:14 ►
Well, I guess that’s about…
01:06:15 ►
Oh, wait. One thing. I almost forgot to mention the workshop
01:06:18 ►
that Bruce Dahmer and I are going to be leading at the Outlook Inn
01:06:21 ►
on Orcas Island, Washington on October 1st. It’s actually going
01:06:26 ►
to take place on September 30th, that evening, October 1st all day, and Sunday morning, October
01:06:32 ►
2nd, but it’s easier just to think of it as October 1st. And you can find out more about it
01:06:38 ►
on a website that should be going live any minute now, and you can find that at www.SomaticRevolution.com.
01:06:46 ►
That’s S-O-M-A-T-I-C-R-E-V-O-L-U-T-I-O-N, SomaticRevolution.com.
01:06:54 ►
And tickets for the three-day event are only $45, and neither Bruce nor I are getting a speaking fee from this, just expenses.
01:07:02 ►
And once all of the expenses are covered,
01:07:05 ►
anything that’s left over is going to be donated to the Shulgins
01:07:07 ►
to help with Sasha’s care.
01:07:10 ►
Now, I should mention that if you’re planning on attending,
01:07:13 ►
then you should probably make your reservation early
01:07:16 ►
as we’re planning on keeping this a rather small gathering
01:07:19 ►
so that we can all get to know one another a little better.
01:07:23 ►
And so there should be plenty of time for you to add your voice and thoughts
01:07:27 ►
to what we are calling a conversation on consciousness, culture, and the future.
01:07:32 ►
And if this podcast wasn’t already so long, I’d go into more details about it.
01:07:36 ►
But I’m going to have to save that for the next program,
01:07:39 ►
as we’re already way over what I consider a reasonable length for me to talk in one of these podcasts.
01:07:45 ►
And so I’ll close today by reminding you once again that this and most of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
01:07:51 ►
are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike 3.0 license.
01:08:00 ►
And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage
01:08:07 ►
which you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us
01:08:11 ►
and if you are interested in some of the stories
01:08:15 ►
that may or may not have led you and me
01:08:18 ►
to where we are sharing this moment together right now
01:08:21 ►
you can read a few of them in my novel
01:08:24 ►
The Genesis Generation,
01:08:26 ►
which is available in Kindle and other e-book formats, as well as a pay-what-you-can audiobook
01:08:31 ►
read by me. And you can find out more about that at genesisgeneration.us. And for now,
01:08:39 ►
this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends.