302 - The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide

Program Notes

We are saddened to report that long time friend of the salon and psychedelic research pioneer extraordinaire, Gary Fisher has gone on to his next adventure.
Archive of podcasts featuring Gary Fisher
The Gary Fisher Page

“There is so much more psychedelic use in this country than any of us, even those of us who think we know a lot, are aware of… . According to [the government], 23 million Americans have used LSD since it became illegal. And that figure, because I’ve been tracking it, goes up 600,000 a year, pretty much rain or shine. So there’s 600,000 people this year who are going to be taking, and that just deals with LSD, that doesn’t deal with ecstasy or ayahuasca or anything else. But there’s this growing, continual large number of people, and they tend to be better educated and brighter, and we do have research on that. So what I’m doing a lot with this book is say, ‘Hey, it’s OK to admit what is true, which is the person next to you at your work probably had some acid in their background just as you did.” -James Fadiman

JamesFadiman.com

The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys By James Fadiman

The Other Side of Haight: A Novel

http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/1594774021/182-9091865-6120045 http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0890879842/191-0575174-7085454

ENTHEOGUIDE.NET
Meeting the Divine Within
A Manual for Voyagers and Guides and Supplemental Information

EROWID.ORG
Documenting the Complex Relationship Between Humans and Psychoactives
BOOKS By Matt Pallamary
http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0912880090 http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/143431801X/177-1800448-2861621
Myron Stolaroff and Gary Fisher talk about the legendary Al Hubbard

Transcript

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

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Salon, and today is day 177 of Occupy Wall Street.

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And I’m sorry that I have to begin with some sad news, but early years of this psychedelic resurgence,

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Gary’s, I think, was probably the most far-reaching and most promising.

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And unfortunately, it will most likely never be repeated.

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As you know, Gary achieved some really amazing breakthroughs with autistic and schizophrenic children.

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and schizophrenic children. Breakthroughs that had his research been allowed to continue might well have resulted in cures for these terrible diseases.

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Although Gary and I had quite a few conversations over the years, he generally didn’t want me to

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record them. Fortunately, of course, I was able to convince him a few times, and so I think we

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have about six podcasts here in the salon that feature Gary and some of his stories.

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But just to give you a very brief idea of his involvement

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with the early resurgence of psychedelics,

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in addition to his pioneering research work,

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it was Gary Fisher who guided Timothy Leary on his very first LSD trip.

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And it was Gary who, well, along with his wife and three small children,

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accompanied Leary and his group to their Mexican retreat

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and then on through their romp through the Caribbean

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and finally to Millbrook during the early days there.

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And I’ll put a link to the Gary Fisher archive

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along with the notes for today’s podcast.

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And if you get a chance, you may want to revisit a few of those podcasts to the Gary Fisher archive along with the notes for today’s podcast.

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And if you get a chance, you may want to revisit a few of those podcasts and see if perhaps the work of Gary Fisher might inspire you

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to pursue a career in psychedelic research

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now that the field is once again becoming respectable.

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On a more cheery note, I am very happy to report that

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the last of the videos from the workshop that Bruce Dahmer and I gave in January has

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now been posted on YouTube. Also, I should note, our

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next event, which is a weekend workshop that will be held at the Esalen

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Institute in California, is now about two-thirds full. So

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it looks like we’ll be having a full house for that event, which will actually be

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my very first visit to that fabled home of so many of the Terrence McKenna lectures that we’ve heard here in the salon.

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And from what I know about some of the people who will be attending, I think it’s going to be a very fascinating weekend, and one in which those in attendance will most likely remember for a long time.

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most likely remember for a long time.

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And one more thing before I introduce today’s talk is that I want to thank our fellow sloners who either bought a copy of one of my books

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or who made a direct donation to help offset some of the expenses

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associated with producing and distributing these podcasts.

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You truly are the ones who are making this all possible,

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and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

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And hopefully I already got a thank you out in the email to each of you already.

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Now, the interview that I’m going to play for you right now may be the most important program that I’ve done so far here in the salon.

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It took place a couple of weeks ago when my friend Matt Palomary came over,

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and we called Jim Fadiman to talk about his new book, The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide, which may also be one of the most important books that you’ll ever own.

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As you already know, if you’ve been here with us in the salon for a while, Jim, or I should say Dr. James Fadiman to be more precise, is one of the last of the original psychedelic researchers from the 60s

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who is still very active.

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He was a research associate with the International Foundation for Advanced Study

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that Myron Stolaroff and others founded,

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which is well documented in John Markoff’s brilliant book,

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What the Dormouse Said.

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Well, in 1975, along with Roger Frager, Jim also co-founded

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the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. Now, the reason I think that this interview is so

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important is that it can easily serve as an introduction to all things psychedelic for

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anyone that’s interested in these sacred medicines. But most importantly, I’m suggesting that,

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well, that this is a podcast that maybe parents can play for their children as they come of age

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and begin to investigate the exploration of consciousness. And also, as strange as this may

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sound, this would be a great program for our younger salonners to play for their parents,

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particularly parents

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who missed the first phase of the psychedelic resurgence and themselves know little or nothing

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about how to better approach these substances.

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Although I planned on cutting out all of our initial conversation where we were just kind

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of shooting the breeze, I decided to leave in a little part of it and pick up in the

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middle of our chat just before I turned it over to Matt for the interview itself.

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And here it is.

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We’re all still trying to save the world.

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You know, for a while there, when I stopped trying to save myself,

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or stopped trying to save the world, I wasn’t saving myself.

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So I got back on board here after a few years off, you know.

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I feel the same way.

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Yeah.

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Very much so.

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Yeah.

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And, you know, I’m so encouraged by all the Occupy movement,

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which I’ve gotten kind of deeply involved in just, you know,

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by following it and podcasting about it.

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But it’s amazing the people I’ve met through that,

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the cross-section of people involved.

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It’s very encouraging to think that.

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Very encouraging.

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Also, a large percentage of them came to some of their conclusions by using sacred substances.

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Yeah, exactly.

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And they’re not afraid to admit it, you know.

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Exactly.

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Now, that’s a real difference.

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Yeah.

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So everything that you guys did in the 60s is starting to pay off now.

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Well, I’ll just give you one little fascinating moment.

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And I asked the people in Santa Cruz, this is 360 people, you know, how many use this and that.

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And very high, very high percentage because they came to my talk.

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Then I said, how many of you have parents who use psychedelics?

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About 80%. Wow whoa there’s hope for the world well so we’re getting the second generation of people

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who are comfortable with psychedelics yeah that’s that’s really that’s that’s

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worth following up on and doing a little research I think that’s that’s a very

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encouraging statistic it’s a second wave. Yeah.

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So that’s really new. Yeah, that’s brand new information

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there and I’d like to go ahead and play that in the podcast if it’s okay. Sure.

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Good. Let’s bring it up. Will do. Okay.

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So we’re going to go about an hour or so, give or take. There’s no set time on this.

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Okay.

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And what I thought I’d do is talk a little bit about sort of my experience and play it off against yours a little bit because mine was totally insane

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and yours was more organized.

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And then I have read your book, so I’ll just dip into some topics here and there.

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And if there’s anything you want to, you know, elaborate on, you know.

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Don’t worry.

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Yeah, no, I’m not.

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So I’m going to start out and say welcome to the Psychedelic Salon once again.

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Today, Matteo here and Lorenzo sitting by.

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And I’m very happy today to have as a guest on our show James Fadiman, Ph.D., who I know is Jim.

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And Jim and I met 10 or 12 years ago, I think, at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference.

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Right.

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And I’m here to talk today, and Jim is here today, to talk about his newest book,

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The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide.

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But before we do that that I want to mention that

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when I met Jim at the Santa Barbara conference he had recently published his

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novel the other side of hate h-a-i-g-h-t and we we connected we met we connected

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and we traded novels and I have to say it’s a really well-written novel, so I’m giving it a plug here.

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Because, you know, anybody who’s younger has heard about the big San Francisco scene

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and the Summer of Love in the 60s and all that.

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And The Other Side of Hate is, to me, a really good, though fictional, slice of that.

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of hate is to me a really good though fictional slice of that and the funny thing about fiction is one of the definitions of fiction is that you’re

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telling lies to tell the truth right and so I felt that it was you know a good

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cross-section of that so I’m giving a plug for that the other side of hate

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haigh-t because it is a well-written novel and Jim’s an accomplished writer. Well, I’m very grateful

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for that kind of a compliment and

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as this…

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I’ve been getting some letters about that

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novel. It’s been out of print for a while and I’m going to

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bring it back because

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there’s still

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a lot of nonsense about

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the hate in the 60s that’s out there

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and it’s nice when there’s

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a somewhat realistic novel

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that is useful right and it tells some truth um if you don’t mind too i’m going to give a little uh

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of jim’s background i i’ve come into my psychedelic research through the back door or the

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side door or the or almost a jailhouse door i have not been uh on top of things in that way, but I’ve

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been coming around slowly, whereas Jim has been on it all along. So he did his

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undergraduate work at Harvard and his graduate work at Stanford doing research

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with the Harvard group, the West Coast Research Group in Menlo Park, and Ken

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Kesey. He’s a former president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences and a

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professor of psychology. He teaches at the Institute of Transpersonal

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Psychology which he helped found in 1975. He’s an international conference

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presenter and a workshop leader, a management consultant, and he’s authored

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several books and textbooks. And I’m going to just go on just a little bit more sure

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this is on the book here it says called America’s wisest and most respected

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authority on psychedelics and their use James Spadaman has been involved with

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psychedelic research since the 60s in this guide meaning the psychedelic

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explorers guide here I lost my spot there in this guide to the immediate and meaning the Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide here.

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I lost my spot.

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In this guide to the immediate and long-term effects of psychedelic use for spiritual, parentheses, high dose, therapeutic, moderate dose,

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and problem-solving, low dose purposes,

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Fadiman outlines best practices for safe, sacred, entheogenic voyages

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learned through his more than 40 years of experience

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from the benefits of having a sensitive guide during a session and how to be one,

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to the importance of the setting and pre-session intention.

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So Jim has done a lot of, I was really amazed at the amount of work he’s done

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and how organized and methodical he was.

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So let me start off just by poking at your brain Jim and

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I’ll ask you about the book just a little bit. What prompted you to write

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this book? Well I’d written an essay about kind of the events when the

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government stopped all our research and it was a fun essay for a book on the 60s,

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that it turns out there are history classes on the 60s.

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And a good writer friend of mine said,

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you know, there’s a whole book in there.

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And I thought, oh, memoir, me, interesting, famous.

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Who have I been next to?

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Who have I slept with?

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Who did I take drugs with?

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And so I spent a couple

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of months actually researching myself, old documents, old diaries, and also reading a

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lot of the things that I should have known about at the time. You know, when you are

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doing a memoir, actually you’re talking about your own era where you weren’t conscious about

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it. And then I had this great epiphany which is, who cares?

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and the list was so small it was kind of less than my Christmas card list

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so then I had, you know, but I’d done all this work

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and then I thought, well

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do I know anything that other people don’t know?

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and I realized that I’d been involved with

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pretty much all the different

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kinds of research that had been done on psychedelics. I had individual friends who had been specialists

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in one or another, but I actually had a pretty bird’s eye view.

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So I started to put down the things that I felt were being lost, kind of lost lore.

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And from that came the book.

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It’s really, really well done.

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You know, I’m going to talk just a little bit about my own experience and then dovetail it into yours because yours opened my eyes a little bit.

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For me, other than sniffing glue about 1969, which was my first quote-unquote psychedelic experience,

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I discovered LSD in 71, and I grew up in Boston.

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And we used to get it from a chemist who went by the name of My Favorite Martian,

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and he was at MIT, which we used to call mental Institute for the touched and that stuff then was like four away I think it was probably 250 mics and I just kept getting my brains blown out over and

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over again and I couldn’t stop myself and I just got all messed up and went

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all over the place but I never connected any spirituality with it or all that I

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just like getting really blasted into the altered states.

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And so then I went through many years of many substances,

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and then I finally got to a point where I thought,

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I need to get baseline again and stop everything

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and really take a good hard look, which I did for 13 years.

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And then it wasn’t until reading Terence McKenna food of the gods hmm

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that I even thought wow there could be a spirituality in this and you know

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intention and purpose and and you know psychological growth so I dove back into

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it from that perspective and you know one thing led to another and I’ve had a

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number of really life-changing experiences and I met some really

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incredibly amazing people such as yourself and Lorenzo and, you know,

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Sasha Shulgin and Oscar Janager, lots of great people.

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And so then I started getting into the research of what everybody’s been done,

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and that’s what’s fascinated me the most because there were approaches I never would have even imagined,

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which is kind of what I’m leading up to now.

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You talked about using, you know, high

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dose for spiritual purposes, moderate dose for problem-solving, and I thought

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that section on problem-solving was fascinating. And then the low dose. You

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want to give us a maybe a spin on sort of each one from, you know, your own

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words of perspective? Let’s go through the kind of high dose fairly quickly

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because the people who I know listen to this know about it,

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which is a high dose is the chance for a transcendent spiritual unitive.

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Atman is you are the soul of the universe,

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a kind of universally letting go of personal identity and realizing your identification with everything else.

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And that is really best done with a guide.

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And that’s a high dose, when I say high dose, up to 400 mics.

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Above that, you begin to not bring back or retain much.

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You may have an experience, but you don’t really gain much from it.

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Right.

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And below that, around 200 micrograms, is psychotherapeutic, where you get incredible insights about yourself,

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but you don’t lose your identity. You’re still you. You’re just finding out that you can be you

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without a lot of your neuroses and just bizarre beliefs.

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I just talked to a young man yesterday.

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He said he had this really tough experience with such and such a drug.

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And I said, what happened?

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He said, all my beliefs turned out to be false.

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And I said, sounds like a pretty good experience to me.

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And he suddenly got it and laughed.

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So that’s that level. And those are ones i think a lot of us know about and but when you get down to say 100

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micrograms it turns out with a with a lot of set and setting a lot of very careful putting a scene

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together that people with serious scientific problems,

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which in a sense almost obsess them because they’re so important to them,

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can actually have scientific breakthroughs.

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And at this point, only two Nobel Prize winners have acknowledged how the use of psychedelics helped them become Nobel Prize winners.

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But the work that we did with senior scientists in half a dozen fields

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and architects and designers was quite mind-blowing

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in terms of how much people could focus not on the universal truth,

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not on that we’re all loving beings, and not on their own psychological issues,

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but literally staying tightly focused on the problems that matter to them enormously in this world.

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And when I say scientific breakthroughs, the nice thing is when you have scientists with problems,

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you’re not driven to kind of give them some little test and say they went from a 6 to an 8.

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But you find out, did the company produce the product?

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Was the idea patented?

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Did a peer of your journal publish the ideas?

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And that was our criteria.

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And we had a little other criteria, which is what we noticed is when one member of a research

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team would come through our little study we were doing, is a couple of weeks later someone

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else or two or three from the same research group would contact us and ask was there any

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room in the study so that they could see in their colleague and in the work

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they were doing together real breakthroughs.

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So that’s an area that I get now and then people very, very seriously looking at that

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because an awful lot of people in Silicon Valley started an awful lot of companies and

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they quietly credit a lot of their own breakthroughs to

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starting those companies to their own psychedelic use.

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So it’s really made a huge difference in the culture, even though the scientific and medical

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establishment hasn’t spoken about it.

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Yeah.

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So that’s one area.

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The chance is about two.

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Right. The chance is about two. Let me talk a little bit about what’s called microdosing or 10 micrograms or a fifth to

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a tenth of what you would take if you were taking a psilocybin experience.

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Basically a little bit.

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A little bit is such that it’s called sub-perceptual, meaning there’s no visual excitement.

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As someone said, the rocks don’t glitter even a little.

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So it’s definitely not a psychedelic effect.

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And the effect turns out to be what someone else described as an all-chakra enhancer,

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which is it seems to be for people who have experimented with these very low doses,

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that they simply have a more successful day,

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that they’re not more creative, but they’re creative longer.

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And they also report they’re a little nicer,

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they’re a little more accepting of people’s faults,

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that they eat a little more closer to healthy, that they may do one more set of reps at the

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gym. Not a big deal. But you know at the end of some days you say,

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gee I just had a great day. And that seems to be the general report.

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For some people they say, this is not for me.

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They are somehow a little bit excited or a little bit upset.

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They say this doesn’t work for me and so they stop.

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In the research I’ve done so far, I’ve had no negative effect.

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I’ve had some people that said,

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I don’t think this is something I want to do.

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So that’s a whole area, again, that I’m very much interested in exploring.

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That’s great.

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You know, I’d be curious about your thoughts, my own thoughts bubbling around here.

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Through my years of personal research and experimentation,

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I’ve kind of come to the conclusion,

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and I don’t know how much of this is original.

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I may have read some of it somewhere,

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but I’ve kind of come to the conclusion that psychedelics, LSD in particular,

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but even ayahuasca and other ones are generally amplifiers,

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and that if, you know, people would say to me,

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oh, gee, that was badass and I had a bad trip.

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Well, that wasn’t the case.

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They had some issues inside that they weren’t aware of that came up.

00:22:10 ►

Well, also they may have had amplified some things that were because of a bad situation.

00:22:17 ►

Exactly.

00:22:17 ►

So if you win someone, for instance, you don’t really trust and you amplify that, you can have a very paranoid experience.

00:22:24 ►

That’s my

00:22:25 ►

point so that for me it’s sort of an overall amplifier so whatever is inside

00:22:30 ►

there if you take a big you know a big dose and you have you have these

00:22:33 ►

revelations of things that were inside of you you weren’t really aware of and

00:22:38 ►

then through the degrees of taking it down to the lower levels for me it is a

00:22:43 ►

perceptual enhancer you

00:22:47 ►

know Terrence McKenna talked about the the hominids coming out of the trees and

00:22:50 ►

then eating the mushrooms and and and mushrooms of small doses enhance edge

00:22:55 ►

perception it let’s say it’s as good an explanation as any and it’s a lot more

00:23:02 ►

fun than the ones that you get in the anthropology books where the

00:23:07 ►

trees kind of gave way to the grasslands and so they had to walk a lot and it was easier

00:23:12 ►

to walk upright and their brains got bigger.

00:23:15 ►

Yeah.

00:23:16 ►

That’s hard to buy.

00:23:17 ►

Right.

00:23:18 ►

But what we do know, and this is actually very new research, And I just did some work talking at Santa Cruz, and my

00:23:26 ►

host, Andrew Kornfeld, was telling me about the way he’s now understanding how psychedelics

00:23:35 ►

work. And what he used was a term called neuroplasticity, which is that the brain is capable of making new connections.

00:23:49 ►

And it looks like, and this is what neuroscience is moving toward,

00:23:52 ►

it looks like what psychedelics do, on the one hand,

00:23:57 ►

is they allow the brain to make a huge amount of connections very quickly.

00:24:04 ►

And those connections literally feel like you are connected to more parts of yourself and parts of nature and so forth.

00:24:06 ►

That’s one piece that we now have a way of thinking about it,

00:24:10 ►

and also that a bad experience and a very negative experience or a trauma in the real world

00:24:15 ►

diminishes connections because you kind of withdraw from whatever happened.

00:24:22 ►

Yeah.

00:24:22 ►

And literally your brain becomes, says,

00:24:26 ►

well, let’s cut off as many connections as we can

00:24:28 ►

so we don’t have to feel the pain.

00:24:30 ►

That’s amazing.

00:24:31 ►

That’s a nice notion.

00:24:33 ►

Yeah.

00:24:34 ►

And then there’s some wonderful research just a couple of weeks out

00:24:38 ►

where they gave psilocybin intravenously to people

00:24:44 ►

and basically watched their brains for the 15 minutes that intravenous psilocybin seems to have as its peak.

00:24:55 ►

I do not recommend this.

00:24:56 ►

Yeah, don’t try this at home.

00:24:58 ►

Do not do this at home.

00:25:00 ►

And what they found is, and it’s wonderful, is that blood flow changes in different parts of the brain.

00:25:09 ►

And rather than all kinds of interesting things being amped up in blood flow,

00:25:15 ►

what they found is the parts of the brain that deal with personal identity was diminished.

00:25:22 ►

So literally, if you’re in a good, safe setting with a psychedelic,

00:25:27 ►

and these, again, are the higher doses,

00:25:29 ►

your self or your personality gets out of the way.

00:25:35 ►

And that suddenly makes all the spiritual traditions which talk about that make more sense.

00:25:42 ►

Yeah, right.

00:25:43 ►

So it’s like all of that magnificence that you get with psychedelics

00:25:48 ►

is always available, because that’s also the way it feels,

00:25:53 ►

but that we get in the way.

00:25:55 ►

Yeah.

00:25:57 ►

And that makes so much sense to me.

00:25:59 ►

So I’m very excited with that as very new connecting research

00:26:04 ►

that says, says gee science actually

00:26:07 ►

can help us understand the quality of mystical experience yeah it’s almost

00:26:15 ►

kind of a bridge between the physiology and psychology there’s always been that

00:26:19 ►

gap right right because the physiologist said we don’t know what’s going on yeah

00:26:24 ►

yeah yeah right.

00:26:25 ►

It doesn’t fit into this thing.

00:26:28 ►

You know, the whole part about rewiring the brain I’ve always found fascinating, too.

00:26:32 ►

You know, I read for years that ayahuasca rewires the brain,

00:26:36 ►

and I’ve gone into the Amazon numerous times doing the dietas.

00:26:42 ►

And one of the things that fascinated me is that when you do the dieta in the jungle,

00:26:47 ►

in the tradition I’ve been working in, you don’t get any salt for 10 days.

00:26:51 ►

Right.

00:26:52 ►

And, you know, that’s kind of ancient wisdom.

00:26:54 ►

And then some years ago I read a study, and they did a study with rats,

00:26:59 ►

and they deprived them of salt for a period of time, and then they gave it to them,

00:27:03 ►

and when they gave it to them, they gave it to them it stimulated neuronal growth Wow so to me it’s like

00:27:09 ►

they knew you know years and years and years and years ago they would give you

00:27:13 ►

the experience in there and then they would more or less kind of tattoo it

00:27:16 ►

into your brain well because I know that the you know I lost her the whole

00:27:20 ►

different world then then LSD or mescaline or so forth, or even psilocybin.

00:27:27 ►

Right.

00:27:28 ►

Partly because you’re doing it in a very special setting with someone with 15 to 30 years of training.

00:27:36 ►

Right.

00:27:37 ►

And the other is that you’re connecting deliberately to one part of the universe, namely the spirit world,

00:27:45 ►

that in the West we simply have kind of lost touch.

00:27:50 ►

So it’s a whole, and again, in both cases, you, the personality, have to get out of the way.

00:27:57 ►

Exactly.

00:27:58 ►

It really is fascinating because even in the spiritual traditions and the medicine men and all that,

00:28:10 ►

it’s all about sort of getting out of the way there’s an old medicine man i think he was sued by the name of fool’s crow and he he was a great healer and he called himself a hollow tube

00:28:15 ►

because he said it’s not me it’s just coming through me yeah and uh the other thing i always

00:28:22 ►

quoting for some reason is that some years ago they interviewed all the people they considered to be geniuses.

00:28:28 ►

And every one of them to the person said, it’s not me.

00:28:31 ►

Yeah.

00:28:32 ►

So, you know, there’s something here in terms of connecting with what’s bigger than us.

00:28:37 ►

Well, we’ve had it in the West, but it’s kind of been pushed off to the side where in the arts we talk about the muses,

00:28:42 ►

to the side where in the arts we talk about the muses,

00:28:48 ►

who are these spirit beings who get you to be a better poet or a better sculptor or a better painter,

00:28:51 ►

and that they help you.

00:28:54 ►

And then you get to the wisdom traditions,

00:28:57 ►

such as your win with Ayahuasca, where they say,

00:29:00 ►

well, yeah, of course.

00:29:02 ►

Yeah, right.

00:29:03 ►

How else do you think you can do that stuff

00:29:04 ►

unless you have the spirit world assisting you

00:29:07 ►

yeah

00:29:08 ►

so maybe it’s

00:29:11 ►

as we get out of the way

00:29:13 ►

not only is

00:29:14 ►

you know we get amplified

00:29:16 ►

but also we can pick up

00:29:18 ►

these other stations

00:29:20 ►

right that’s a good analogy right there

00:29:23 ►

yeah Maslow

00:29:25 ►

used to talk about

00:29:26 ►

that the

00:29:26 ►

there was this

00:29:28 ►

very small voice

00:29:29 ►

that basically

00:29:30 ►

would tell you

00:29:31 ►

to do the right thing

00:29:32 ►

yeah

00:29:32 ►

and he said

00:29:33 ►

the problem is

00:29:34 ►

that it’s not very loud

00:29:35 ►

and if you have

00:29:37 ►

other voices

00:29:38 ►

inside of you

00:29:38 ►

that are loud

00:29:39 ►

you can’t hear it

00:29:40 ►

yeah

00:29:42 ►

the still small voice

00:29:43 ►

within

00:29:43 ►

right

00:29:44 ►

yeah and

00:29:46 ►

my understanding and you can

00:29:49 ►

elaborate my understanding is the idea is

00:29:51 ►

to sort of get the whole band singing the same tune

00:29:53 ►

yeah

00:29:55 ►

and what we’re doing is beginning to bring

00:29:57 ►

together you know western

00:29:59 ►

science eastern

00:30:01 ►

kind of spiritual science of

00:30:03 ►

understanding consciousness

00:30:04 ►

and really the kind of South American plant wisdom

00:30:08 ►

and they’re all converging in this picture of a being, us

00:30:17 ►

with an enormously greater capacity for

00:30:21 ►

on the one hand love and compassion

00:30:23 ►

we know that Buddhists who meditate for 20 years, the part of their brains that deals

00:30:28 ►

with compassion literally has enlarged.

00:30:31 ►

And on the other hand, scientific problem solving, because scientists, that’s the part

00:30:37 ►

of their brain that’s been enlarged.

00:30:39 ►

And so, in a sense, what we’re getting is that psychedelics not only are amplifiers,

00:30:44 ►

but they can be focused amplifiers.

00:30:47 ►

Yeah.

00:30:49 ►

Used, as you really do point out really well here,

00:30:52 ►

used in a responsible manner with a sense of structure.

00:30:57 ►

Yeah, and I’m kind of the right-wing nut about responsible and structure,

00:31:03 ►

not because I don’t think that if people want to go to

00:31:07 ►

a concert and have a little psychedelic and watch the stage lights wiggle, that matters

00:31:12 ►

much, but it’s such a trivial use of one of the most valuable tools you have.

00:31:20 ►

Right.

00:31:21 ►

And I used to talk about people saying well I’ve got this great tool

00:31:25 ►

it’s called a microscope and it’s heavy

00:31:27 ►

and you have a great handle

00:31:28 ►

and it’s a fantastic doorstop

00:31:31 ►

and I’d say well

00:31:35 ►

yeah but it has other uses

00:31:37 ►

and you’d say well okay it has other uses

00:31:39 ►

but hey look at this doorstop

00:31:41 ►

yeah

00:31:43 ►

that’s good

00:31:44 ►

so my feeling is when people tell me

00:31:46 ►

yeah, you know, I dropped this and I dropped that

00:31:48 ►

and I could, you know, the sand wiggled

00:31:51 ►

and my hands kind of turned into webs

00:31:54 ►

and I think, yeah.

00:31:57 ►

Right.

00:31:57 ►

How about the way it’s been used

00:32:01 ►

by sophisticated civilizations

00:32:04 ►

like the people in South America or the ancient Greeks.

00:32:08 ►

I mean, we forget that the Eleusinian mysteries revolved around the psychedelics.

00:32:13 ►

They were only for the highest class of the culture, the people who mattered, the people who made changes,

00:32:18 ►

people who led armies and invented things.

00:32:21 ►

And it lasted for 1,500 years.

00:32:23 ►

Yeah.

00:32:24 ►

As the center of the culture from which we say

00:32:28 ►

we’re descended yeah right and then you get the the the real crazy the real true crazy hard to

00:32:35 ►

the right sort of people and they really denying their roots yes yeah they’re denying their roots

00:32:42 ►

and they’re also when a person is truly cut off from connection with other people, with nature, with themselves,

00:32:51 ►

they obviously behave in a somewhat blind manner.

00:32:55 ►

Yeah.

00:32:56 ►

And we’re seeing, of course, at the moment a lot of blindness.

00:33:00 ►

I mean, the idea that you go to somebody else’s country and shoot them.

00:33:04 ►

I mean, the idea that you go to somebody else’s country and shoot them.

00:33:11 ►

You don’t take a hammer and beat up one of your fingers.

00:33:16 ►

Because you can really tell that you are connected to your finger.

00:33:17 ►

Right.

00:33:21 ►

And when you lose track of that, and there are people who do lose track of that,

00:33:24 ►

and, you know, literally harm themselves.

00:33:27 ►

And if you’re connected with other human beings,

00:33:32 ►

you can’t harm them either unless you have no awareness of that connection.

00:33:35 ►

Well put, mate. Well put.

00:33:40 ►

You know, while we’re dancing around this and, you know, the roots and the denial of a lot of contemporary culture for all that,

00:33:46 ►

would you mind talking a little bit, you know, I’m peeking at your book here,

00:33:49 ►

because this is probably a good point, you talk about myths and misperceptions.

00:33:54 ►

And I think it would be good for people to hear about that.

00:33:56 ►

There’s a whole chapter in the book which basically says,

00:33:58 ►

this is the kind of things that are out there that simply aren’t true

00:34:03 ►

and confuse people about psychedelic use.

00:34:07 ►

Yeah.

00:34:07 ►

And I had not intended to kind of have that, but a Stanford girl was doing some research

00:34:15 ►

and interviewed me, and she really knew a lot about the world.

00:34:19 ►

She had already as an undergraduate done research in Africa.

00:34:24 ►

She was clearly going to be very successful and was already very smart.

00:34:29 ►

And she had some psychedelic experience.

00:34:32 ►

And in the middle of the interview, she says,

00:34:33 ►

Oh, by the way, is it true that if you take LSD seven times, you go insane?

00:34:38 ►

And I thought, what?

00:34:41 ►

That was as if she’d said to me, Is it true you have intercourse seven times and you’re sterile?

00:34:45 ►

I mean, it had as little sensibleness as that.

00:34:49 ►

And I said, where’d you get that?

00:34:51 ►

And she said, well, I know people say that.

00:34:54 ►

So I looked it up on Snopes, which you go to for when someone sends you an email that says something horrible will happen.

00:35:01 ►

Check it out.

00:35:01 ►

Yeah.

00:35:03 ►

And it’s out there.

00:35:07 ►

And there’s a lot of that kind of nonsense and in some places even when they are doing the best they can i’m thinking of things

00:35:13 ►

i’ve seen from say a student health organization from a major university you know trying to tell

00:35:19 ►

students about psychedelics and there’s a lot of confusion between what they say that’s true and what

00:35:25 ►

they say that is absolute myth. And so I thought, let’s put the myths in there and take a look

00:35:33 ►

at them so that, again, we can operate. Truth simply is better than the alternatives.

00:35:40 ►

Yeah. I remember when I was a kid first experimenting and there the big

00:35:47 ►

deal then was that LSD screws up your chromosomes and then somehow I got to

00:35:55 ►

the mindset that if I had sex while I was on acid then the baby would be

00:35:59 ►

retarded oh that’s wonderful oh and I went through years and years and years

00:36:03 ►

of I wouldn’t allow if I was tri, I wouldn’t allow, if I was tripping,

00:36:06 ►

I wouldn’t allow any sexual thoughts in there at all because I was paranoid.

00:36:09 ►

Well, and it’s one of the things that I just discovered

00:36:12 ►

when I was down in Santa Cruz

00:36:14 ►

and I was talking to over 300 students

00:36:16 ►

and I asked them about their own psychedelic use

00:36:19 ►

and the people who’d come to listen to me, obviously,

00:36:22 ►

had some experience or were intended to,

00:36:25 ►

but most of them had a lot of experience, undergraduates.

00:36:29 ►

And I just threw out, how many of you have parents who have used psychedelics?

00:36:35 ►

And about 80% of them raised their hands.

00:36:39 ►

And I realized here’s two generations of people who are trying not to get caught up in the myths,

00:36:46 ►

who are actually getting information,

00:36:48 ►

and who are raising their children with enough information so they can make healthy decisions.

00:36:52 ►

I was actually very impressed and aware of there is so much more psychedelic use in this country

00:37:01 ►

than any of us, even those of us who think we know a lot, are aware of.

00:37:07 ►

And the figure that I love, because it’s from the federal government, and after all, you

00:37:12 ►

know, if you can’t trust the government, according to them, 23 million Americans have used LSD

00:37:20 ►

since it became illegal.

00:37:23 ►

Wow.

00:37:24 ►

And that figure, because I’ve been tracking it,

00:37:27 ►

goes up 600,000 a year.

00:37:30 ►

All right.

00:37:30 ►

Just pretty much brain or something.

00:37:33 ►

Yeah.

00:37:34 ►

So there’s 600,000 people this year

00:37:37 ►

who are going to be taken.

00:37:39 ►

And that’s just LSE.

00:37:40 ►

That doesn’t deal with Ecstasy or OWASC or anything else.

00:37:40 ►

That’s just LSE.

00:37:44 ►

That doesn’t deal with ecstasy or IOSC or anything else.

00:37:50 ►

So there’s this growing, continual, large number of people,

00:37:54 ►

and they tend to be better educated and brighter.

00:37:56 ►

We do have research on that.

00:38:01 ►

So what I’m doing a lot with this book is simply saying, hey, it’s okay to admit what is true,

00:38:03 ►

book is simply saying, hey, it’s okay to admit what is true.

00:38:08 ►

Yeah. Which is the person next to you at your work probably had some

00:38:11 ►

acid in their background just as you did. Yeah, right.

00:38:16 ►

That’s good.

00:38:18 ►

It brings up a point, too. You know, when I

00:38:23 ►

was doing my experimenting at a young age, there was, God knows how much

00:38:26 ►

shit I took or what it came from or what it was. And I got into trouble a few times here

00:38:32 ►

and there because there wasn’t any, no precedent for what I was doing.

00:38:39 ►

Exactly. No one you knew could tell you anything.

00:38:42 ►

Exactly. So I had to find out the hard way, which was crash and burn.

00:38:47 ►

But it is always better when you have somebody as a guide.

00:38:51 ►

I’ve guided a number of people through the years.

00:38:54 ►

And I know you have extensive experience with that.

00:38:57 ►

So I thought maybe this could be, if you don’t mind, maybe give it a little riff on, you know, what is it,

00:39:04 ►

responsible guidance and, you know, that kind of thing?

00:39:08 ►

Yeah, well, a guide basically is there so that in some way,

00:39:14 ►

a little bit so you won’t get in trouble,

00:39:16 ►

but mainly they’re there so you can feel safe enough to really discover

00:39:21 ►

whatever it is that you’re allowed to discover that time.

00:39:25 ►

And to me it’s similar to having a guide when you’re on safari,

00:39:30 ►

where the guide doesn’t interfere with your experience,

00:39:34 ►

but you’re walking along and there’s this kind of little mound and you’re tired

00:39:38 ►

and you think, I’ll just sit down on this mound.

00:39:40 ►

And your guide says, you can do that if you want,

00:39:43 ►

but we have a word for that in swahili

00:39:45 ►

and in english it translates as anthill you know it’s up to you yeah and later on there you are

00:39:54 ►

later in the day and he says i’d look over there and you look over there and there’s a bunch of

00:39:58 ►

elephants and a little later he says you know you see that rhinoceros that’s coming towards us?

00:40:07 ►

I don’t know about you, but I’d stand behind a tree.

00:40:11 ►

So he’s not preventing you having your experience.

00:40:15 ►

Right.

00:40:15 ►

But he’s making it, when necessary, helpful and better.

00:40:20 ►

Right.

00:40:21 ►

And that’s really what a guide is about.

00:40:21 ►

Right. And that’s really what a guide is about.

00:40:24 ►

And a guide should basically know more than you do, been there more often,

00:40:31 ►

and because they feel safe with very unusual experiences,

00:40:36 ►

should you have one, they’re there to say that’s fine.

00:40:40 ►

So, for instance, it’s not unusual in a psychedelic experience for someone to

00:40:45 ►

say, I think I’m dying. And if you’re like most of us, that’s scary. And you say to your

00:40:55 ►

guide, I think I’m dying. And your guide says, oh, that’s great. Just relax and you’ll see

00:41:01 ►

what that’s about. And then inside yourself you think, oh, I just said I think I’m dying.

00:41:10 ►

I didn’t say I was dying.

00:41:11 ►

Maybe I’m not dying.

00:41:12 ►

Maybe there’s something going on.

00:41:13 ►

I’ll just do what he says.

00:41:16 ►

And so the guide allows people to have their own experience.

00:41:24 ►

Right.

00:41:23 ►

to have their own experience.

00:41:24 ►

Right.

00:41:28 ►

And the guide’s agenda is to have absolutely no agenda except whatever is best for that person.

00:41:32 ►

Yeah.

00:41:34 ►

How it unfolds.

00:41:35 ►

And so I’ve got a couple of chapters in the book

00:41:38 ►

that are about how to be a really good guide

00:41:41 ►

and also how to be a really good voyager.

00:41:44 ►

And just so we are clear

00:41:47 ►

that although I’d like people to have the book,

00:41:50 ►

those chapters have been put up on the web

00:41:53 ►

and they’re found under enceoguide.net

00:41:57 ►

enceoguide.net

00:41:58 ►

And it’s a site that I have nothing to do with

00:42:01 ►

but people said,

00:42:02 ►

would you put those chapters there?

00:42:04 ►

And we’re going to put a lot of other things to help people have good sessions.

00:42:08 ►

That’s great.

00:42:09 ►

And so that’s available because I think it’s too important to do it poorly.

00:42:15 ►

And let me give you kind of why I think it’s important.

00:42:20 ►

Research, 100 people, all of whom had a single psychedelic experience,

00:42:27 ►

but guided and in a safe setting and with music,

00:42:31 ►

kind of the best we could come up with.

00:42:34 ►

And they were asked to rank that experience as how important was that

00:42:39 ►

in terms of all the other experiences of your whole life.

00:42:42 ►

78% of them said it was the single most important experience of their

00:42:46 ►

lives.

00:42:47 ►

I look at that and I think, if it’s potentially that important, why don’t we do it right?

00:42:57 ►

Why don’t we do it as right as possible?

00:42:59 ►

That’s why I’m a veritable guide nut, which is, it’s really helpful.

00:43:08 ►

Just as when people are out drinking and someone says, you know, we should have a designated driver so that somebody can guide us home.

00:43:16 ►

Right.

00:43:16 ►

And nobody says, oh, don’t be silly, let’s all get as drunk as possible and, you know, then we’ll throw lots for who drives.

00:43:23 ►

Nobody does that.

00:43:24 ►

Right.

00:43:25 ►

So it’s the reason behind guiding is that it’s too valuable and too important

00:43:31 ►

to not do it as well as you can.

00:43:35 ►

That’s a great, great analogy.

00:43:37 ►

By the way, for you listeners, Lorenzo’s going to post that on the podcast page,

00:43:43 ►

that link, so people can get to it.

00:43:46 ►

Do you have any other – I don’t remember, Jim, so forgive me.

00:43:49 ►

Do you have your own webpage or any other place you want to go?

00:43:51 ►

Yeah, I do.

00:43:52 ►

JamesFanneman.com has a whole bunch of talks at the moment.

00:44:00 ►

Okay.

00:44:01 ►

So there’s a fair amount of information about various topics.

00:44:05 ►

Yeah, I’ve been there, but it’s been like months and months, so my brain’s a bit mush.

00:44:11 ►

But, so there’s good therapeutic uses and there’s guided journeys.

00:44:20 ►

And then, like you say, somebody takes something and goes and walks the lights at a rock show and, you know, the ground wiggles and all that.

00:44:28 ►

You want to touch a little bit on, you know, we don’t have to go too far into this,

00:44:33 ►

but you want to touch a little bit on what could go wrong?

00:44:37 ►

Sure.

00:44:38 ►

What goes wrong, and this is why I’m so in on guides, is basically the basics,

00:44:43 ►

and most people talk this way now, which is

00:44:46 ►

when Tim Leary started, he talked about set and setting.

00:44:49 ►

And set is what are your mental expectations and setting is what’s the situation.

00:44:55 ►

And when I ask a group to talk about their bad trips or their challenging trips that

00:45:02 ►

have been difficult and what made them difficult,

00:45:09 ►

most people will immediately say, I know what went wrong.

00:45:13 ►

I realized I didn’t trust the people I was with.

00:45:21 ►

I thought, oh, no, you just don’t take this when you’re about to, you know, ride the New York subways. That’s just not the right setting.

00:45:21 ►

ride the New York subways.

00:45:23 ►

That’s just not the right setting.

00:45:27 ►

And kind of my favorite comment from someone was,

00:45:30 ►

the session was really going well until the car caught on fire.

00:45:34 ►

So that’s not a good setting.

00:45:37 ►

So when things are disruptive,

00:45:40 ►

or if you’ve been,

00:45:43 ►

worst case is if you’ve been what’s called dosed,

00:45:45 ►

which means somebody snuck it to you.

00:45:51 ►

And that to me is like one of the, you know, that’s a crime way up there with rape in my book.

00:45:51 ►

I agree.

00:45:56 ►

And I know people in the Burning Man world who help people.

00:45:58 ►

That’s their task at Burning Man.

00:45:59 ►

They’re called the Green Rangers.

00:46:00 ►

Right.

00:46:06 ►

And they talk about people who basically are dosed by their date,

00:46:10 ►

and it gets sexual, it gets crazy, and the person doesn’t know what’s going on.

00:46:11 ►

And that’s a terrible experience.

00:46:11 ►

Yeah.

00:46:15 ►

So what goes wrong is not taking it seriously.

00:46:16 ►

Right.

00:46:20 ►

And not knowing what you’re taking or who you’re taking it with.

00:46:21 ►

Yeah.

00:46:25 ►

And so think of it, you know, you’re in a foreign country and there’s something on the road and someone says, why don’t you try eating that? And you

00:46:34 ►

think, I have no idea what it is and I have no idea, I’ve never met the person who suggested

00:46:40 ►

it. Maybe it’s not a good idea. Yeah. Maybe it’s dog shit, right?

00:46:46 ►

Exactly.

00:46:49 ►

Oh, good. That’s a good answer. So now that we

00:46:53 ►

dipped into the dark side there, so to speak, stepped in the dark side,

00:46:59 ►

how about, if you don’t mind, we could just talk a little bit

00:47:02 ►

about, you know, there are levels here like, okay, there’s spiritual experience revelation.

00:47:08 ►

Right.

00:47:09 ►

And then there’s therapy.

00:47:11 ►

And then there’s creative problem solving.

00:47:15 ►

Yep.

00:47:16 ►

And so there have been really big gains in those areas in the past few years where things, you know, the research is coming out a little bit more and the government to lighten up? What most of

00:47:29 ►

the research has been is kind of proving what most of us in this community already

00:47:33 ►

know but there’s been a few genuine breakthroughs particularly in the

00:47:38 ►

therapy area where it turns out that psychedelics can actually prevent

00:47:44 ►

cluster headaches and

00:47:46 ►

cluster headaches are they make migraines look like you didn’t enjoy

00:47:50 ►

them hmm they are so horrifyingly painful that people will literally

00:47:55 ►

commit suicide rather have another series of cluster headaches and it turns

00:48:01 ►

out that in modern medicine simply has very little that’s of any good.

00:48:10 ►

But it turns out, and we have no idea why, and I always like that kind of science,

00:48:14 ►

is somebody of the 23 million people took LSD and then noticed that the next series of cluster headaches didn’t come.

00:48:20 ►

They started communicating with other cluster headache sufferers

00:48:23 ►

because that’s what the web is so good at.

00:48:26 ►

And it seems to be that it is one of the really miracle, not necessarily a cure,

00:48:34 ►

but it prevents a cycle or two of these headaches.

00:48:37 ►

And then you take a psychedelic again and you get another couple of maybe six months or a year without these terrible headaches.

00:48:43 ►

Wow.

00:48:44 ►

And so now they’re doing research at Harvard to find out whether this is true.

00:48:49 ►

And, of course, since it is true, they’re probably going to find out that it’s true.

00:48:53 ►

And then they’ll publish it and so forth and so on.

00:48:56 ►

And the medical profession then will have the option of this very remarkable tool.

00:49:04 ►

Because when you haven’t been able to do research for 40 years,

00:49:08 ►

you obviously are missing things.

00:49:11 ►

Yeah, you think.

00:49:13 ►

I mean, let me give you an example.

00:49:15 ►

A study I’d love to do is called stuttering.

00:49:18 ►

Why might psychedelics help stuttering?

00:49:21 ►

Well, what I remember very much when I was working with individuals in this kind

00:49:26 ►

of safe, secure therapy-like setting is that people who had speech problems tended not to

00:49:32 ►

have them during the day. And we would be able to determine when they were coming down by the

00:49:38 ►

return of speech problems. Now, this is also true about glasses. People would take off their glasses

00:49:44 ►

early in the day,

00:49:45 ►

and they would be able to see as well as they wished for many hours,

00:49:49 ►

and then near the end of the day, they’d ask for their glasses.

00:49:52 ►

But the stuttering, I hadn’t looked at too seriously,

00:49:57 ►

but I now have two cases of someone who cured themselves of stuttering in one psychedelic session

00:50:07 ►

and one of them is Paul Stamets and Paul Stamets is you know the most important

00:50:14 ►

famous mycologist in America right and he talks about when he was 15 taking

00:50:21 ►

some kind of mushroom and he was a terrible stutterer,

00:50:27 ►

so the idea of dating was out of the question.

00:50:30 ►

And let us go back to that most frightening time of our lives,

00:50:34 ►

called high school,

00:50:35 ►

when there was that other sex,

00:50:38 ►

and you wanted them in some obscure way that you didn’t quite understand.

00:50:43 ►

And imagine if you stuttered.

00:50:46 ►

So he’d kind of given up.

00:50:48 ►

And then a day or so after this amazing experience, he’s somewhere in high school and a girl goes

00:50:56 ►

by and says hello.

00:50:57 ►

And he says, hello.

00:50:59 ►

And he’s just in ecstasy.

00:51:03 ►

Because he said hello.

00:51:11 ►

And he could talk to people and obviously it transformed his life well um the stuttering world doesn’t really know about this and it seems to me as we begin to

00:51:19 ►

you know make the world again safe to find out about psychedelics. This is a piece of research that’s a wonderful, easy to do,

00:51:28 ►

and you can obviously see whether it succeeds or not.

00:51:31 ►

Wow.

00:51:33 ►

And so I’m kind of collecting those cases,

00:51:35 ►

and if anybody out there has cured themselves of stuttering,

00:51:38 ►

can they send a note to jfadiman at gmail,

00:51:42 ►

that’s one word, jfadiman. And let me know.

00:51:46 ►

I’m collecting really cures for things

00:51:49 ►

because that alerts the regular medical world

00:51:53 ►

that this is worth exploring.

00:51:54 ►

Right.

00:51:56 ►

So if people out there hear that,

00:51:58 ►

if you got something,

00:51:59 ►

you can be part of some really important research.

00:52:02 ►

Yeah.

00:52:02 ►

Let me give you one that isn’t a psychedelic.

00:52:04 ►

It’s marijuana, but I’m fascinated. There’s a video out there, part of some really important research. Yeah. Let me give you one that isn’t a psychedelic.

00:52:06 ►

It’s marijuana, but I’m fascinated.

00:52:11 ►

There’s a video out there, and it’s this very nice young woman talking about the possibility that if you take the juice of marijuana leaves, and that’s what’s thrown away, but literally

00:52:17 ►

juice the leaves, and that turns out, in some cases, to overcome the symptoms of epilepsy.

00:52:27 ►

Wow. turns out in some cases to overcome the symptoms of epilepsy because the the drugs that are out there for epilepsy and the most well-known was something called delantin they do suppress

00:52:33 ►

epilepsy but they also make you feel like you’re sleepy and dumb and as i listen to this very

00:52:41 ►

vivacious interesting woman talk about it what you get as you watch the video is, oh, it’s her.

00:52:48 ►

She was someone who had been dulled by the lantern

00:52:50 ►

and was now symptom-free drinking this liquid.

00:52:56 ►

And the point that she said is that what happens when you smoke marijuana

00:53:00 ►

is it undergoes some chemical changes

00:53:03 ►

so that the juice is really not particularly, that the juice doesn’t get you high, but

00:53:09 ►

it has this remarkable property.

00:53:12 ►

I haven’t followed it up, but if I were interested in epilepsy, I sure would.

00:53:19 ►

Sure.

00:53:20 ►

There’s a lot of interesting things out there that, because we’re now allowed to do the tiniest bit of research, we are discovering.

00:53:29 ►

And the last one that kind of is very exciting, because it’s a huge population, is post-traumatic stress disorder.

00:53:35 ►

Right.

00:53:36 ►

Which, again, the traditional medical model is kind of tranquilizers and suppression, and it doesn’t work very well.

00:53:48 ►

So that people who have been in therapy with drugs for say 30 years or 40 years because

00:53:53 ►

of Vietnam still are not much better.

00:53:58 ►

There has been some really breakthrough research that MAPS put out with MDMA, with ecstasy, that it is part of therapy, what they call

00:54:08 ►

MDMA assisted therapy, can break the cycle of post-traumatic stress.

00:54:15 ►

They’re now working with veterans.

00:54:17 ►

Then you start the numbers.

00:54:20 ►

We have probably between 400,000 and 700,000 veterans of the last nutty wars coming back

00:54:28 ►

with post-traumatic stress disorder.

00:54:33 ►

It’s not a psychological condition.

00:54:36 ►

It’s a condition that’s really deeper.

00:54:38 ►

It’s really the soul.

00:54:41 ►

Because it isn’t that you’ve been fired on by other people.

00:54:49 ►

That’s scary, but it’s not the depth of the problem.

00:54:56 ►

It’s when you’ve been basically in fear 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,

00:54:59 ►

of the people you’re supposed to be liberating and saving.

00:55:00 ►

Right.

00:55:07 ►

And that many, many of our soldiers have either killed or attempted to kill civilians.

00:55:09 ►

Yeah.

00:55:13 ►

And what do you do when you’re in your Humvee and you’re driving and there’s some children playing in the road

00:55:15 ►

and your sergeant says, drive, it might be a trick.

00:55:24 ►

And it might be.

00:55:25 ►

It might be if you stop, you get blown up.

00:55:27 ►

Right.

00:55:28 ►

So you drive over the children.

00:55:32 ►

Yeah.

00:55:33 ►

And then because this is war and this is macho,

00:55:36 ►

you can’t really let go of that trauma.

00:55:39 ►

Right.

00:55:40 ►

Well, it turns out with MDMA,

00:55:43 ►

you can really become a healthy human being again.

00:55:47 ►

Right.

00:55:47 ►

And the first group of research that was published is a lot of people who were admitted to the study.

00:55:55 ►

By the end of the study, they were fully employable,

00:55:58 ►

and they basically didn’t have enough symptoms to get back in the study.

00:56:03 ►

Right.

00:56:04 ►

So that’s another whole area that’s new, that’s new and that’s really exciting.

00:56:09 ►

Yeah.

00:56:10 ►

Can I ask you one more loaded, jaded, sinister kind of question?

00:56:14 ►

Load up.

00:56:16 ►

Fire at will.

00:56:17 ►

Fire at will, yeah.

00:56:18 ►

We’ll find a will somewhere.

00:56:36 ►

I know in the reading I’ve done on the MDMA PTSD studies, more often than not, the subjects need maybe two, maybe three sessions.

00:56:40 ►

Then they’re guided by psychotherapy and they’re done. They don’t need to keep taking MDMA.

00:56:43 ►

They may want to, but I mean, they don’t have to, whereas they would they may want to but I mean they don’t have to whereas they would be on say Valium or some other exactly

00:56:49 ►

they come off of medications because they don’t have any symptoms right and

00:56:53 ►

what’s the loaded question well here’s the thing like like LSD and the cluster

00:57:00 ►

headaches it breaks the cycle and it sounds to me like with enough of that

00:57:03 ►

you wouldn’t have to need constant medication either would that be a fair

00:57:06 ►

statement from what you know well what I’m I’m not as quite clear because they

00:57:11 ►

are looking at it yeah looks like with cluster headaches literally if you’re a

00:57:17 ►

sufferer you can put a date on the calendar when the next series is okay

00:57:23 ►

okay so what I’m driving at is do you think there’s going to be resistance from

00:57:27 ►

pharmaceutical companies who want to have a debit on your credit account so you

00:57:32 ►

get your Valium every week?

00:57:34 ►

Do you think there’s going to be resistance to these new breakthroughs that are

00:57:36 ►

happening?

00:57:37 ►

Let me give you the one where the resistance is going to start.

00:57:43 ►

Antidepressants, which are the most popular drugs

00:57:45 ►

in the country. That’s what I’m driving at.

00:57:49 ►

Maybe 10%

00:57:50 ►

of the population is on them. They’re a daily

00:57:52 ►

drug. Right.

00:57:53 ►

Pharmaceutical companies obviously love

00:57:55 ►

daily drugs. Right. And

00:57:57 ►

they may not work very well,

00:58:00 ►

but getting off them will give

00:58:02 ►

you withdrawal. Right.

00:58:03 ►

So they meet a lot of the criteria for addiction.

00:58:08 ►

You don’t up the dose, which is one kind of addiction,

00:58:10 ►

but you can’t stop taking them.

00:58:11 ►

Right.

00:58:13 ►

And when you start on antidepressant,

00:58:15 ►

it’s two to three weeks before any effects will be found,

00:58:20 ►

which always seems very bizarre.

00:58:22 ►

Yeah.

00:58:22 ►

You know, if I take an aspirin for a headache,

00:58:24 ►

I don’t want to wait three weeks. Yeah. You know, if I take an aspirin for a headache, I don’t want to wait three weeks.

00:58:26 ►

Yeah.

00:58:27 ►

No kidding.

00:58:28 ►

So ketamine, which is an odd drug,

00:58:31 ►

it happens to be legal,

00:58:33 ►

it’s used in veterinary medicine,

00:58:34 ►

it’s an anesthetic,

00:58:36 ►

but in a lower dose than for anesthesia,

00:58:38 ►

it has some psychedelic effects.

00:58:41 ►

And it turns out that it seems to, in one or two studies now,

00:58:47 ►

stops depression in a couple hours.

00:58:50 ►

Wow.

00:58:51 ►

And in terms of your question, it seems to stop it for a couple of weeks.

00:58:57 ►

Right.

00:58:58 ►

So if you move from an antidepressant daily to another pharmaceutical,

00:59:06 ►

but every couple of weeks.

00:59:08 ►

That’s very different.

00:59:09 ►

Yeah.

00:59:10 ►

So if we’re going to get any resistance from the pharmacology world, that’s it.

00:59:15 ►

See, there’s no resistance with cluster headaches because we don’t have anything.

00:59:19 ►

Right, yeah, that’s true.

00:59:20 ►

Yeah, good point.

00:59:20 ►

And there isn’t really resistance with the MDMA and post-traumatic stress

00:59:27 ►

because it’s such a monstrous problem.

00:59:31 ►

And again, we don’t have anything that’s very good.

00:59:33 ►

Good. Excellent. Good point.

00:59:36 ►

So the nice thing is there’s enough ways in which we can use psychedelics successfully

00:59:43 ►

for healing of various kinds of things.

00:59:47 ►

Just as in a sense, one of the questions that you might have said is,

00:59:51 ►

well, if psychedelics at a high dose can give you a mystical experience,

00:59:55 ►

is there going to be pushback from the churches?

00:59:58 ►

And the answer is, in the 60s, there was.

01:00:01 ►

Yeah.

01:00:09 ►

the 60s, there was. And what I’m seeing now is there is remarkably little resistance to any of these breakthroughs. And let me give you kind of my favorite example, which is

01:00:15 ►

at John Hopkins University, they did a study. They found out, and this is not going to excite

01:00:21 ►

anybody in this audience, that if you take people who wish to have a spiritual experience,

01:00:28 ►

who are mentally very healthy and involved in spiritual practices,

01:00:33 ►

and you give them psilocybin in a spiritual setting,

01:00:37 ►

with a spiritual basically set setting and guide,

01:00:40 ►

that, whoa, they have spiritual experiences.

01:00:44 ►

And like the 78% I talked about earlier,

01:00:48 ►

most of them indicate it’s one of the top five experiences of their lives,

01:00:53 ►

and the positive results in terms of the way they look at their lives

01:00:57 ►

seem to last a couple of years, not as long as we’ve been watching them.

01:01:02 ►

Well, that’s the study.

01:01:03 ►

And it appeared in one of those peer-reviewed, up-at-the-top scientific, really dull journals.

01:01:13 ►

But within a week of its appearance, there were 300 media mentions around the planet.

01:01:18 ►

Wow.

01:01:19 ►

Now, where was the media mentions?

01:01:21 ►

Well, sure, High Times and so forth.

01:01:24 ►

But how about the Wall Street Journal?

01:01:26 ►

Now, the Wall Street Journal really isn’t a big outlet for good psychedelic research results.

01:01:34 ►

Particularly if you’re in the Occupy movement, they’re not big Wall Street Journal people.

01:01:38 ►

You think not.

01:01:41 ►

But there was this article in the Wall Street Journal. But the one that I love, because it says how far the culture has moved,

01:01:48 ►

is the Scottish Sporting News.

01:01:51 ►

Now, the Scottish Sporting News had a little story,

01:01:53 ►

and the headline was,

01:01:55 ►

Shrooms Get You High.

01:01:59 ►

Okay?

01:02:00 ►

Yeah.

01:02:00 ►

Now, what that says to me is that the readers of the Scottish Sporting News knew what that meant.

01:02:09 ►

Yeah.

01:02:10 ►

And that the headline writer knew it was a good headline,

01:02:15 ►

and whoever was the editor of the day who was looking at that issue thought that was fine.

01:02:22 ►

that issue, thought that was fine.

01:02:28 ►

So we’re in a culture where there’s so much more, not tolerance,

01:02:33 ►

that suggests you don’t know what you’re talking about, but you’re nice about it,

01:02:38 ►

but genuine knowledge about the way these things work.

01:02:39 ►

Yeah.

01:02:42 ►

When you then add science to it, there’s a lot of acceptance.

01:02:45 ►

Nice. And the, kind of the last people to get it

01:02:47 ►

are going to be legislators

01:02:49 ►

and regulators. Yeah.

01:02:52 ►

But even the regulators,

01:02:54 ►

as I meet many of them, you know,

01:02:56 ►

I say, oh, you’re a regulator about

01:02:58 ►

such and such pharmaceuticals, so

01:03:00 ►

forth. Do you ever have any

01:03:01 ►

psychedelic experience?

01:03:03 ►

And they, like almost everyone else

01:03:05 ►

I meet as a professional,

01:03:07 ►

says, oh yeah, you know,

01:03:09 ►

once in college,

01:03:11 ►

and this kind of misty look comes into

01:03:13 ►

their eyes. You know,

01:03:15 ►

I remember running

01:03:17 ►

down the streets of my college

01:03:19 ►

town naked

01:03:20 ►

and yelling, what are you all

01:03:23 ►

doing hiding in your clothes right and then you know the kind

01:03:30 ►

of dreamy look goes away and the the three-piece suit and the tie you know kind of re-emerge

01:03:35 ►

and the person says that was a long time ago but what i know is those people are probably doing a much better job of genuinely regulating rather than witch

01:03:46 ►

hunting yeah good good good the world is changing yes do you uh portugal decriminalized everything

01:03:56 ►

and i say everything meaning heroin cocaine everything. Ten years ago. Yeah.

01:04:06 ►

So what happened?

01:04:10 ►

Well, everything that we think should did.

01:04:11 ►

Right.

01:04:14 ►

Which is use went down.

01:04:17 ►

Marijuana use went down.

01:04:18 ►

Heroin use went down.

01:04:19 ►

Everything went down.

01:04:24 ►

And treatment went up because the law said you’re allowed to get treatment and we have treatment for you if you need it.

01:04:27 ►

So people weren’t afraid to get treatment because if you get treated for illegal things, does that mean they send you to jail?

01:04:34 ►

Well, not if it’s not illegal.

01:04:37 ►

Now, the big one, of course, is crime went down.

01:04:40 ►

Yeah.

01:04:40 ►

Yeah.

01:04:46 ►

So here we have a 10-year experiment with a, you know, civilized country with a sizable minority population from their African colonies.

01:04:50 ►

It’s not as different from the U.S. as, you know, our kind of drug czars would like to think.

01:04:57 ►

Right.

01:04:57 ►

And it’s all working really well towards everyone being healthier.

01:05:02 ►

So those are the things that are happening, and those are very exciting.

01:05:06 ►

Awesome.

01:05:07 ►

Do you have any final words of wisdom for us?

01:05:11 ►

How much time do I have?

01:05:13 ►

How much wisdom?

01:05:14 ►

As much as you want.

01:05:15 ►

As much as you want, dude,

01:05:15 ►

because this isn’t like network television.

01:05:18 ►

We’re psychedelic podcasters here,

01:05:20 ►

so we can go on for hours if you want.

01:05:22 ►

No, no, no.

01:05:23 ►

Short wisdom.

01:05:27 ►

so we can go on for hours if you want no no no short wisdom short wisdom is is that that there’s nothing better than information about what you’re interested

01:05:34 ►

in doing to your own body and mind and that you do have the right to do things to your own body

01:05:40 ►

and mind as long as they don’t hurt other people and i recommend always that when people ask

01:05:45 ►

me really tricky questions of using two or three drugs at once or doing it while hanging upside

01:05:52 ►

down kind of bizarre stuff i said go to the airwood site yeah look in the vaults because

01:05:58 ►

someone has done something weirder than anything you’ve imagined and they’ve told you about it

01:06:03 ►

whether it was good or awful.

01:06:05 ►

And so we really have a great information store that was never available before.

01:06:10 ►

And the other thing is I go back to saying if it’s really important

01:06:14 ►

and it really could make your life better,

01:06:18 ►

do it as carefully and as wisely and as sacredly as possible, because you are fundamentally part of a sacred universe

01:06:32 ►

that is linked together just the way the atoms in your body are linked together.

01:06:39 ►

And knowing that makes your life both richer and easier, and also when things are particularly awful,

01:06:48 ►

you have something to fall back on other than how could we destroy the planet with climate change

01:06:56 ►

and how could we have all these wars and so forth and so on.

01:06:59 ►

It protects you from the depression by realizing that you are part of a larger system

01:07:05 ►

and that each one of us actually can do something about it,

01:07:10 ►

even if it’s only to clean up our own heads.

01:07:13 ►

That’s enough wisdom.

01:07:14 ►

That’s awesome, bro.

01:07:18 ►

Thank you.

01:07:19 ►

And I’m not blowing sunshine up your ass here,

01:07:21 ►

but this is one of the best interviews I’ve done.

01:07:26 ►

Good shit in here. I think it’s probably because I’m so fond sunshine up your ass here, but this is one of the best interviews I’ve done. So, good sitting here.

01:07:29 ►

I think it’s probably because I’m so fond of both of you.

01:07:31 ►

Well, the feeling’s mutual.

01:07:32 ►

Okay.

01:07:35 ►

And, you know, Jim, I’m sitting here.

01:07:40 ►

I’ve got two podcasts that will have to go out before this because we’re podcasting the workshop that Bruce and I did. But I’ve been sitting here thinking, my gosh, I wish I could get this out tonight.

01:07:45 ►

You know, I’m really sorry we’ve taken so long to get this interview in because this is important.

01:07:51 ►

Well, the timing was correct.

01:07:53 ►

Yeah, and the timing is really correct.

01:07:56 ►

I think this information is fantastic that you put together here,

01:08:00 ►

and I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us today.

01:08:03 ►

Well, I am delighted to, you know, it’s wonderful to hang out with friends

01:08:07 ►

and to get to share what is most wonderful and exciting in your lives.

01:08:12 ►

Amen.

01:08:13 ►

So you guys get to be this wonderful, you know, remember the name of the gospel.

01:08:19 ►

They’re called the good news.

01:08:20 ►

They say, hey, I got some good news for you.

01:08:22 ►

There you go.

01:08:23 ►

So you guys are, you know, our version of gospel guys.

01:08:28 ►

Well, right on. Now I want to sing a spiritual from my high school

01:08:31 ►

choir days.

01:08:35 ►

So I want to reiterate that Jim’s novel, The Other Side of

01:08:39 ►

Hate, H-A-I-G-H-T, highly recommended reading.

01:08:44 ►

I really, I did enjoy it. I read it in like a couple of days.

01:08:47 ►

And his newest

01:08:47 ►

book, just out, a couple months

01:08:50 ►

now, is The Psychedelic Explorer’s

01:08:52 ►

Guide, Safe, Therapeutic

01:08:54 ►

and Sacred Journeys. So thank you, Jim,

01:08:55 ►

for being on the show and thank you for taking the time

01:08:58 ►

to talk to our audience. They’re really

01:09:00 ►

hungry for the wisdom that you do have.

01:09:02 ►

Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot, both of you.

01:09:04 ►

Thank you, Jim. This has been a lot of fun

01:09:06 ►

and I’m sure this will

01:09:08 ►

bring some questions and stuff in from the kids

01:09:10 ►

and we’ll try to do this again in the future

01:09:12 ►

here. Well, if we need to do

01:09:14 ►

it again, we’re just going to grit our teeth and do it.

01:09:16 ►

Yeah.

01:09:19 ►

Okay, guys.

01:09:20 ►

Or we’ll just get together and tell sea stories

01:09:22 ►

or something. Absolutely.

01:09:24 ►

Okay, Jim. Well, thanks again and stories or something. Absolutely. Okay, Jim.

01:09:25 ►

Well, thanks again and take care now.

01:09:26 ►

Okay.

01:09:27 ►

Take care, Bob.

01:09:28 ►

Bye-bye.

01:09:28 ►

Bye-bye.

01:09:31 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:09:33 ►

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

01:09:39 ►

So before I say anything else,

01:09:41 ►

I want to make it clear that, in my opinion,

01:09:44 ►

this book is an important one to add to your psychedelic library.

01:09:47 ►

And if you don’t already have the beginnings of a psychedelic library, this is the perfect

01:09:52 ►

book with which to begin.

01:09:54 ►

And I have to admit that as much as I like my Kindle, it really feels good here in my

01:10:00 ►

little office to be surrounded by hundreds of books, and a good many of them of the psychedelic genre.

01:10:07 ►

After all, if that prediction of a major solar flare in the next 20 years comes true,

01:10:12 ►

all of our electronic books may become inaccessible.

01:10:16 ►

And now that I think of it, perhaps the question about what books you would want with you

01:10:21 ►

if you were marooned on a desert island, maybe it isn’t so hypothetical

01:10:25 ►

after all. But we better not go down that rabbit trail right now. Now to make my point about the

01:10:33 ►

value of Jim’s book even stronger, I want to play a short conversation that I had the other day in

01:10:39 ►

which I asked my dear friend, Wild Bill Radizinski, to give me his comments about Jim Fadiman’s new book.

01:10:49 ►

And for what it’s worth, I’ve seen Bill’s psychedelic library, and without a doubt,

01:10:54 ►

it’s the most comprehensive that I’ve ever come across, and I’ve seen my share of him.

01:11:01 ►

But there are few people walking around today who have a wider grasp of psychedelic literature of all stripes than Wild Bill, and here he is.

01:11:01 ►

of psychedelic literature of all stripes than Wild Bill.

01:11:03 ►

And here he is.

01:11:05 ►

Well, I haven’t read the little section

01:11:09 ►

of the encore, Last Words,

01:11:11 ►

which is kind of like, you know,

01:11:12 ►

it’s a little end piece.

01:11:14 ►

And I skimmed the checklist

01:11:18 ►

for the Entheogenic Journeys and stuff.

01:11:21 ►

I’m going to go back to that stuff.

01:11:23 ►

But I just completed the book. and I just think it’s just,

01:11:27 ►

thank God, where was this back in 1971?

01:11:31 ►

I really needed it.

01:11:33 ►

It’s a beautifully written book, too.

01:11:38 ►

There are a couple of items in here from other people

01:11:42 ►

or written with other people.

01:11:45 ►

items in here from from other other people or written with other people but his voice in the book is really it’s it’s a really beautiful voice I can’t

01:11:50 ►

think of the guy who speaks better for psychedelics today yeah you know I mean

01:11:54 ►

he’s working yeah he doesn’t have all the you know he doesn’t have a little

01:11:58 ►

before ash and he’s not looking to collect a bunch of groupies and shit like some of the people on the circuit.

01:12:08 ►

If someone was going to start out doing it with psychedelics, I’d say take a real good read of this book first.

01:12:17 ►

I think anybody wants to know about psychedelics,

01:12:19 ►

even people who are not involved in it at all and like to know what’s going on.

01:12:24 ►

This is a wonderful book, especially when he talks about all the research and the stuff.

01:12:31 ►

It’s heartbreaking.

01:12:33 ►

And you’ve got a lot of books.

01:12:35 ►

Oh, yeah.

01:12:37 ►

I’ve got a lot of books.

01:12:39 ►

First of all, it’s very clear, straightforward.

01:12:44 ►

First of all, it’s very clear, straightforward.

01:12:52 ►

I’ve read some books by people with essays where people get so involved in their intellectual masturbation.

01:12:54 ►

I just get lost and I just put it down.

01:12:57 ►

This man really grabs ahold.

01:13:02 ►

In plain English, it tells you exactly what’s going on, the work that they did.

01:13:06 ►

You see how much promise and potential there was and how it all got flushed down the tubes.

01:13:09 ►

The part about psychedelic dives is just really well written.

01:13:16 ►

The book is beautifully written.

01:13:19 ►

It’s a book you can really get comfortable with.

01:13:22 ►

As a matter of fact, you can skip chapters and go back to them, go back around.

01:13:27 ►

You can kind of pick and choose if you want, although I pretty much went from front to back.

01:13:32 ►

But it’s a beautifully written book, and there’s some great stuff in here.

01:13:41 ►

There’s some great passages that are absolutely just really big.

01:13:46 ►

Do you mind if I read one to you?

01:13:47 ►

No, go ahead.

01:13:48 ►

Go ahead.

01:13:48 ►

This is one of my favorite passages.

01:13:50 ►

It’s in the chapter, Closing the Doors of Perception.

01:13:53 ►

And it’s three paragraphs I’m going to read.

01:13:56 ►

It’s short.

01:13:58 ►

And it’s under the title, A Moment of Reflection.

01:14:00 ►

Why did our drug research frighten the establishment so profoundly?

01:14:04 ►

Why does it still frighten them?

01:14:06 ►

Perhaps because we’re able to step off or toss off the treadmill of daily stuff

01:14:10 ►

and so will the whole system of life, death, life.

01:14:13 ►

We discovered that love is the fundamental energy of the universe,

01:14:17 ►

and we wouldn’t shut up about it.

01:14:19 ►

What we found out was that the love is there, the forgiveness is there,

01:14:23 ►

and the understanding and compassion are there. But like water to a fish or air to a that the love is there, the forgiveness is there, and the understanding and compassion is there.

01:14:26 ►

But like water to a fish or air to a bird, it is there all around us,

01:14:31 ►

and it exists without any effort on our part.

01:14:33 ►

There is no need for the Father, the Son, the Buddha, the saints, the Torah,

01:14:37 ►

the books, the bells, the candles, the priests, the rituals, or even the wisdom.

01:14:40 ►

It is just there, so pervasive and so unending

01:14:45 ►

that it is impossible to see,

01:14:48 ►

as long as you are in the smaller world of people separated from one another.

01:14:52 ►

No wonder enlightenment is always a crime.

01:14:56 ►

Wow.

01:14:58 ►

That’s amazing.

01:14:59 ►

That’s really well put, isn’t it?

01:15:01 ►

Yeah, that’s a beautiful,

01:15:03 ►

that’s a beautiful beautiful uh description of

01:15:08 ►

this this awful dilemma that we’re in that the substances that hold so much promising potential

01:15:15 ►

for good on this planet i’m not even gonna say society because i don’t get into the society

01:15:21 ►

thing i’m in the planetary thing and it’s. And it’s just so much fear and resistance about it.

01:15:31 ►

To this day, I mean, you can’t bring this stuff up, even in liberal circles.

01:15:38 ►

That’s a good point, yeah.

01:15:40 ►

Some of the biggest hawks in the war on drugs are the liberals who should be, you know, a little bit more free-thinking and progressive.

01:15:49 ►

But there is so much fear.

01:15:52 ►

You know, I always get this.

01:15:52 ►

I had one woman and her son had a few problems with them.

01:15:55 ►

And I said, well, what about bad trips?

01:15:57 ►

And you can’t tell them, well, you know, a lot of experienced people say the bad trips are some of the best ones, the most enlightening ones.

01:16:03 ►

But people don’t understand. And Jim’s book really goes a long way to explaining what this stuff is

01:16:11 ►

about. People only get to hear about the accident reports in the mainstream, pretty much, with

01:16:18 ►

some exceptions, like the Peter Jennings special on MDMA. But the James Fadiman book, I mean, this guy should be out on talk shows,

01:16:30 ►

talking to people because he’s such a reasonable man.

01:16:37 ►

He’s such a reasonable man.

01:16:38 ►

He’s just saying, let’s give science some breathing room.

01:16:41 ►

And this is more than, this is science and spirituality tied up in one.

01:16:51 ►

That’s what scares a lot of science types too you know you know you know what if i i just think so highly this book i wish it was a hardcover i wish it was a hardcover

01:16:57 ►

another comment i want to add on a personal level is to expand a little on what Jim Fadiman said just now

01:17:06 ►

about noticing how psychedelics seem to help people who have a stuttering problem.

01:17:11 ►

Although I wasn’t aware before of the positive impact these sacred medicines have on stuttering,

01:17:18 ►

my own problem, if you want to call it that, because most of the time it’s something I can probably safely ignore.

01:17:24 ►

want to call it that because most of the time it’s something I can probably safely ignore.

01:17:31 ►

Although I wasn’t aware before of the positive impact that these sacred medicines may have on stuttering, my own problem, if you want to call it that, because most of the time it’s something I

01:17:37 ►

can ignore, but I have a relatively bad case of tinnitus, which means that I have a continual

01:17:43 ►

ringing in my ears. And at times it

01:17:45 ►

can really get quite irritating, to be honest. But I’ve noticed that when I’m under the influence

01:17:50 ►

of some psychedelics, the ringing in my ears goes away completely. And to be honest, that is what I

01:17:57 ►

find to be one of the greatest pleasures of being high. I can actually for a while experience

01:18:02 ►

silence. You don’t know how valuable that is if you never hear it.

01:18:06 ►

Now, that probably doesn’t…

01:18:08 ►

I guess that really sounds strange now if you don’t have tinnitus yourself.

01:18:12 ►

But if you do, then you know just what a wonderful treat it can be

01:18:15 ►

to not hearing this constant sound of a million crickets in the room.

01:18:20 ►

So if you’re looking for a psychedelic research project that could help a lot of people,

01:18:24 ►

maybe that’s one you can investigate.

01:18:28 ►

I should also mention that you can hear more from Jim Fadiman

01:18:31 ►

if you go back to my podcast number 42,

01:18:34 ►

where he spoke about using psychedelics for rational work.

01:18:38 ►

And also in podcast 235, you can hear Myron Stolaroff, Humphrey Osmond,

01:18:43 ►

and Al Hubbard’s conversation where they talk about Jim at one point.

01:18:48 ►

Now, I’m not going to be able to get in my

01:18:52 ►

Occupy segment this week because the time that I normally have

01:18:56 ►

to gather that information has been taken up with another pursuit.

01:18:59 ►

What I’ve been doing lately is to begin digitizing a number of

01:19:03 ►

old television programs that I did back in the 80s and 90s while I was living in Tampa, Florida.

01:19:11 ►

And I hope to have them up on YouTube here in another week or so.

01:19:15 ►

And what you may find interesting about at least the first one, had you not known that it was filmed in 1989 or so,

01:19:23 ►

that you’d probably think that it was a documentary

01:19:25 ►

about a current Occupy action. It’s a documentary I did about the story of a hunger fast by John

01:19:33 ►

Standing Eagle in an attempt to block an open burn incinerator near where he lived. What I find most

01:19:40 ►

interesting about it today, actually, is that in the background you see a number of small children who were there with their parents.

01:19:47 ►

And if my math is correct, they are now about the age of many of the women and men who have taken to occupying various public spaces.

01:19:56 ►

And I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the kids in my old documentary are now leaders of the local Occupy somewhere.

01:20:04 ►

At least that’s my latest fantasy.

01:20:08 ►

And so I’m going to have to leave it there for today,

01:20:11 ►

at least if I’m going to have any hope at all of getting this thing online pretty soon.

01:20:16 ►

It’s been too long since my last podcast, I think.

01:20:19 ►

As I said in the beginning, though,

01:20:21 ►

I think that this could be perhaps the most important podcast

01:20:25 ►

that I’ve done. And I hope that if you are just now gaining an interest in psychedelics,

01:20:30 ►

that you listen to this again and with your parents. Of course, I also know that there are

01:20:36 ►

some salonners who are approaching my age and who are just now getting interested as well.

01:20:43 ►

And if so, my advice to you is that you re-listen to this,

01:20:47 ►

but with your children and grandchildren.

01:20:50 ►

In other words, no matter what your age

01:20:51 ►

or how much you already know about this subject,

01:20:54 ►

I think that the information Jim Fadiman passed along just now

01:20:58 ►

and in his new book is as good a jumping-off point

01:21:02 ►

into the psychedelic pool as you’re going to find.

01:21:04 ►

is as good a jumping off point into the psychedelic pool as you’re going to find.

01:21:10 ►

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

01:21:12 ►

Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

302 - The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide

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