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321 - A Discussion About Psychedelics

Aug 07, 2012, 52 min read

Program Notes

Guest speaker: Lorenzo and Friends

Today’s podcast features the next installment of the workshop that Bruce Damer and Lorenzo led at the Esalen Institute in June of 2012. The majority of this program features comments by some of the workshop’s participants who bring up topics that include:
-Heroic doses
-Body load with psychedelics
-Techniques for using psychedelics
-What exactly is the psychedelic state
-The perfect answer when a cop asks, “Were are you at, buddy?”
-The re-introduction of psychedelics to our species
-How do we tell the psychedelic story
-The Occupy Movement and the banking system
-The need for a parallel system of money

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320 - Occupy Yourself

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322 - The Evolution of Intelligence

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Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:20 ►

This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

00:00:27 ►

space. This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. And as you can most likely tell, I’ve been kind of taking it easy this summer and so I haven’t been getting these

00:00:33 ►

podcasts out as regularly as I’d like to. However, I do want to acknowledge our fellow salonners who

00:00:39 ►

either bought one of my books or who made a direct donation to the salon over the past couple of

00:00:43 ►

weeks. I think that I’ve already sent you a personal note of thanks, but I also want you to Thank you. I really appreciate all of your support. Now, after we listen to today’s program, I’ll tell you a little something about what I’ve been reading and thinking these past few weeks.

00:01:11 ►

But first, let’s get on with today’s show.

00:01:14 ►

So, here we are, back with some more recordings from the workshop that Bruce Dahmer and I led at the Esalen Institute this past June.

00:01:23 ►

Bruce Dahmer and I led at the Esalen Institute this past June.

00:01:30 ►

And by now you’re probably wondering why you haven’t heard very much from Bruce in the previous two podcasts.

00:01:33 ►

Well, there’s a good reason for that.

00:01:39 ►

You see, Bruce has requested that several of his monologues be strung together into a single podcast.

00:01:42 ►

And I’m working on that as I go along. And since I promised Bruce to get his talks out before he leaves for the playa at Burning Man,

00:01:46 ►

well, I guess I’d better get a move on, as the old-timers used to say.

00:01:52 ►

Of course, now that I think about it, I guess maybe I’m an old-timer too, huh?

00:01:57 ►

Anyway, to get all of Bruce’s pieces edited into a single podcast,

00:02:01 ►

I first have to go through the recording of each session and

00:02:05 ►

pull those parts out.

00:02:06 ►

So in order to keep from having to go through two edits, what I’m doing is stripping out

00:02:11 ►

Bruce’s pieces and then playing for you what’s left over, which is a little of Bruce, more

00:02:17 ►

of me, and a lot from the participants in the workshop.

00:02:21 ►

And after we listen to the part that I’m going to play for you today, it looks like there may be at least one or two more podcasts like this one,

00:02:29 ►

and then they’ll be followed by the Bruce compilation. Now, as we listen to this next

00:02:35 ►

segment, please keep in mind that this is not the complete record of this event, because some of our

00:02:41 ►

participants didn’t want their comments to be made public here in the salon.

00:02:47 ►

And the way we handled that in the workshop is,

00:02:50 ►

for those who didn’t want to go public with their comments,

00:02:53 ►

well, we simply didn’t pass them the microphone.

00:02:57 ►

And that made it much easier for me to figure out what to eliminate and what to leave in.

00:03:02 ►

However, for the most part, it seems that the majority of participants wanted to go on record with their thoughts,

00:03:04 ►

which is what you and I are about to hear in just a moment.

00:03:09 ►

So let’s now rejoin this workshop for the Saturday afternoon session,

00:03:14 ►

which begins with a discussion of the so-called heroic dose,

00:03:17 ►

as the Bard McKenna sometimes put it.

00:03:22 ►

Yeah, I mean, I think we’ve all had our share of high-dose heroics

00:03:26 ►

in the trip reports and stuff like that,

00:03:29 ►

but there really is, it’s one of the three major factors.

00:03:33 ►

You know, you have set and setting, and you have dosage.

00:03:37 ►

The thing is that it’s different.

00:03:39 ►

A lot of us were talking about variations of this at lunchtime,

00:03:44 ►

but it’s really different, and this is my position,

00:03:47 ►

from one individual to another, radically different,

00:03:54 ►

from substance to substance, from day to day,

00:03:57 ►

from setting to setting, from relationship to relationship.

00:04:02 ►

And to make these, you know, there are really broad generalities that are given that I think need close examination.

00:04:12 ►

And I personally don’t know any other way to examine these issues other than personally.

00:04:19 ►

In other words, your own bioassay.

00:04:21 ►

And that’s what Sasha, you know, said.

00:04:24 ►

He didn’t give anything to anybody else

00:04:26 ►

without trying it himself. And you go from a low dose to a high dose. That’s one way to do it. But

00:04:32 ►

to answer your question about high dose, I’ve done some very high doses of psilocybin and,

00:04:40 ►

you know, for my body weight and all. And you do them for a particular reason, you know,

00:04:46 ►

because you go, you know, it’s different than doing, you know, a slight microdose.

00:04:53 ►

However, that being said, I’ve found that once you know that place,

00:04:59 ►

this is my experience, And what it’s like, then lower doses, the path has already been opened.

00:05:12 ►

Yeah, and, you know, I don’t think I’ve ever heard Terence say, I took so much.

00:05:19 ►

You know, he talked about the heroic dose and the five grams of dried mushrooms in silent darkness.

00:05:27 ►

And I never bought that because I always have music.

00:05:30 ►

And I can’t imagine doing mushrooms without music, although I haven’t done them in a while.

00:05:36 ►

But there are a lot of things that Terrence said that didn’t quite click with me.

00:05:41 ►

One time I heard him talk and say that in a podcast, he said that he was talking about ayahuasca.

00:05:49 ►

And he said, oh, the real ayahuasca, it’s like tea, real thin.

00:05:52 ►

If you get some of that thick, syrupy stuff, it’s the wrong kind.

00:05:55 ►

It’s not the real McCoy.

00:05:57 ►

Well, the tradition I’ve been in, it’s like pea soup you can hardly swallow.

00:06:02 ►

It’s like real thick and, you know, watery down.

00:06:06 ►

So, and even with mushrooms, there’s a lot of variety in how much, how strong the mushrooms are

00:06:11 ►

too. Now, back in the 50s, when they were first doing research with LSD, both up in Canada and

00:06:20 ►

at Menlo Park, where they used the same protocols before, and by the way, in Menlo Park where they used the same protocols. And by the way, in Menlo Park where they did the study,

00:06:26 ►

the 350 people about increasing and enhancing creativity,

00:06:33 ►

those were very low doses.

00:06:35 ►

I don’t think probably anybody did 200 mics.

00:06:39 ►

It was really around 100 mics.

00:06:41 ►

But before they gave them that,

00:06:43 ►

they had to go through a six-week training course

00:06:46 ►

before they got their one dose of 100 mics of acid, and the training included several experiences

00:06:54 ►

with, I just said it the other day, with carbogen, yeah, and carbogen is, I think, 75% oxygen,

00:07:06 ►

Carbogen is, I think, 75% oxygen, 25% carbon dioxide, I think, something like that.

00:07:10 ►

John actually has the original tank they used.

00:07:12 ►

You took a photo?

00:07:13 ►

Okay.

00:07:14 ►

The photo is on Arrowhead.

00:07:22 ►

But they would take that, and it would be like three or four minutes of very – it’s like training wheels.

00:07:29 ►

And that’s what they were doing is they were training people to get into the space to see what it was like.

00:07:31 ►

And then the low dose was sufficient.

00:07:38 ►

And they had some really astounding results of, like, engineers that had problems they’d been working on for months and couldn’t solve.

00:07:40 ►

And in an afternoon solved the whole thing. And so, you know, there are a lot of things that we still don’t know about these. And

00:07:45 ►

so Terrence’s advice about some of this stuff is to be taken kind of like with a grain of salt,

00:07:52 ►

I think, maybe. Go ahead, Tom. I’d like to ask a technical question of the room.

00:08:03 ►

I’ve looked around on Arrowwood and stuff, and I haven’t really found a good

00:08:07 ►

nailed down answer to this question, which is, you know, sometimes with mushrooms it

00:08:13 ►

can come on really strong, and so you don’t want, you get kind of scared taking a big dose, but you want to get to that level. So sometimes I’ll take like a small dose, get over that hump,

00:08:31 ►

and then you feel comfortable, you go for more,

00:08:33 ►

but it doesn’t seem to get to the same place as one big dose.

00:08:37 ►

So I was wondering if anybody else had experience with that.

00:08:40 ►

Does that first peak, does it limit you if you start small and add on?

00:08:47 ►

Does anyone know?

00:08:50 ►

I’ve never done that.

00:08:53 ►

I think that doing numerous smaller doses,

00:08:59 ►

the system doesn’t really quite respond to it with the amplitude that it otherwise would.

00:09:06 ►

There can be the initial shock during the first two hours or hour when the peak comes up.

00:09:15 ►

Yeah.

00:09:15 ►

How often do you get it?

00:09:19 ►

Well, only after like two hours.

00:09:24 ►

So Simon does have a tolerance buildup.

00:09:27 ►

Right, right.

00:09:28 ►

I’m not sure it’s that quick acting.

00:09:31 ►

Okay.

00:09:33 ►

I know with something like MDMA,

00:09:35 ►

at about the hour, hour and 15 minutes point,

00:09:38 ►

you can take a small dose of 2C-B.

00:09:41 ►

And what that seems to do for a lot of people

00:09:44 ►

is not change the experience, but keep the plateau

00:09:47 ►

longer. Yeah, that’s been my experience with mushrooms.

00:09:53 ►

Yeah, it doesn’t launch you

00:09:56 ►

you can’t launch off to the next level once you’ve gotten

00:09:59 ►

there, but you can keep it going longer.

00:10:04 ►

That could be.

00:10:08 ►

I’m sure that would work.

00:10:11 ►

In fact, my experience with ayahuasca,

00:10:15 ►

not in the beginning, but later on, there have been people

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in our group who, all they are interested

00:10:24 ►

in is that great light show and all that stuff.

00:10:27 ►

And to me, that is the worst part of the experience.

00:10:30 ►

To me, it’s something to live through.

00:10:32 ►

And I liken it to going on the Matterhorn ride at Disneyland that when you’re waiting

00:10:40 ►

in line, you go through all of this little tunnel with all these little nice neon lights

00:10:44 ►

and everything,

00:10:45 ►

and then you get on the ride.

00:10:47 ►

And so I look at the light show that I get on ayahuasca as, well, I’m going through the tunnel.

00:10:51 ►

Okay, I know that I’m high, and now I can get rid of that and get on with the work.

00:10:56 ►

And a lot of people with ayahuasca, once that’s over, which is, you know, 45 minutes to an hour or something,

00:11:04 ►

and once that’s over, they think it’s done.

00:11:07 ►

The experience is over.

00:11:08 ►

And that’s really when the experience is starting because, in my opinion,

00:11:12 ►

that’s when the work starts and you start hearing the voices and thinking.

00:11:16 ►

And my advice to them is if they think they’re back to baseline,

00:11:20 ►

they should try to stand up without any help.

00:11:22 ►

And generally they can’t.

00:11:26 ►

But, you know,

00:11:31 ►

it’s again, like Diana just said, it’s so different for everybody. And that’s one of the difficulties I think we have in talking to other people about it. And one of the things that Terrence said that

00:11:38 ►

really made a lot of sense to me is that he talked about these, when you go to a rave and taking substances at a rave. And,

00:11:47 ►

you know, I’ve been at a rave and taken MDMA and it’s great to dance on. But he said, if you want

00:11:51 ►

to come down from a psychedelic trip, you should get into a loud, noisy environment with a lot of

00:11:56 ►

activity and it’ll bring you down quickly. And so all of these people who are going to the big

00:12:01 ►

parties and taking these substances, you know, who knows what they’re

00:12:06 ►

doing to themselves, because it’s not really the way that these substances were used two, three,

00:12:12 ►

four thousand years ago, I don’t think. And I think that’s what part of what this community is doing

00:12:17 ►

and on a global basis, you know, that we like to, sometimes we say it’s so difficult to find the others, to find one or two others.

00:12:26 ►

But I haven’t checked in over two years.

00:12:29 ►

But two years ago, I was getting downloads of my podcast from over 100 different countries.

00:12:35 ►

And even yet today, while I’ve only had one or two emails from there, China is in the top 10 downloads, which is pretty amazing.

00:12:46 ►

And another great place I get a lot of downloads is from the dot mil, the military, and from

00:12:52 ►

the Middle East.

00:12:53 ►

So it’s not like we’re just a few isolated individuals here in North America.

00:12:58 ►

This is a global phenomena that people are really interested in.

00:13:03 ►

And that’s why I think that, like we were talking last night,

00:13:06 ►

that maybe we should be a little less scared to mention this around the water cooler at work.

00:13:14 ►

And finding ways to do it is the difficult thing,

00:13:18 ►

but once you break the ice, my guess is that one person out of every five or six people you know

00:13:24 ►

would be interested in talking about this if you could safely breach it.

00:13:29 ►

And one way to do it is say, oh, I went to this workshop at Esalen, you know, and I don’t know how you feel about this.

00:13:35 ►

But they’re talking about, you know, once you get started, you’d be amazed, I think, at how many people will say, oh, you know, back in the 60s I did acid and stuff. And now I’m hearing from a lot of people that are in their 50s and 60s that did psychedelics

00:13:52 ►

back in the 60s and are now coming back to it, not taking it, but reliving those experiences,

00:13:59 ►

trying to talk about what they got out of it.

00:14:01 ►

And that’s one of the things I think that Terrence has helped is getting people to get back into the discussion of these things on a rational basis and not just say no and it’s going to fry your brain and your chromosomes are going to get messed up and all that stuff. so much misinformation out, and yet there’s so much great information available. I don’t know

00:14:26 ►

if you all go to Arrowid, but E-R-O-W-I-D dot org is the mother load of information. And I always

00:14:34 ►

tell young people who write to me and say, I’ve never done such and such, and is it safe? What

00:14:40 ►

should I do? And I just say, go to Arrowhead and read about the bad trips because you can handle a good trip.

00:14:47 ►

But if you read about a bad trip and you can’t handle that, then that’s something you shouldn’t even think about.

00:14:53 ►

And so that’s really a good starting point from my point of view is that, you know,

00:14:57 ►

anybody can have a good time if things work out right.

00:15:01 ►

But if things aren’t working out right, what do you do?

00:15:04 ►

How do you handle it?

00:15:05 ►

And what’s your backup plan?

00:15:07 ►

Who’s there to support you that’s straight?

00:15:13 ►

Cheryl, did you want to?

00:15:17 ►

Briefly, just while we’re talking on these kinds of things,

00:15:20 ►

I would really be interested in feedback from other people.

00:15:24 ►

I find for myself, with all psychedelics, while I value the inner experience, physically my body feels awful.

00:15:34 ►

I do not like physiologically the way I feel, and it is a big deterrent.

00:15:40 ►

And I’m curious to know if other people find that as well.

00:15:44 ►

I saw some nods.

00:15:49 ►

I’m right there with you. And about 10, 12 years ago, I was involved in a study group that was

00:15:56 ►

working its way through the, you know, Sasha’s books. We were trying different things every

00:16:00 ►

month. And I can’t even consider swallowing one of those things anymore.

00:16:08 ►

The only thing that I can even consider is mushrooms and ayahuasca

00:16:13 ►

because the chemicals, for some reason, have really started, you know,

00:16:18 ►

my body does not accept them.

00:16:20 ►

And I don’t know if that’s because I’m getting older

00:16:22 ►

or because I’m paying more attention to it.

00:16:24 ►

But in any event, I’m right there with you to where, you know, I have to have a really deep spiritual need before I’ll even think about it anymore.

00:16:35 ►

And just in all honesty.

00:16:36 ►

But, you know, I feel that I’ve done enough to really have a lifetime of processing yet to go on. And, and like, I think like Diana

00:16:46 ►

said that a real low dose can really trigger a lot of things again. And for me, my, my drug of

00:16:54 ►

choice is cannabis and, and I can have a little bit of cannabis and get rid of my back pain or,

00:17:01 ►

you know, some of the new strains. I can have a psychedelic trip on cannabis,

00:17:06 ►

but because I know the territory.

00:17:07 ►

If you know the territory, you can get there.

00:17:11 ►

Tom.

00:17:12 ►

Yeah, one of the things that,

00:17:16 ►

and I agree that having a wide variety of flavors to choose from is great,

00:17:22 ►

but one of the great things about psychedelics

00:17:27 ►

is that your mind comes up with things

00:17:31 ►

you never would have come up with without it.

00:17:34 ►

And you learn a lot from that.

00:17:37 ►

And also, what do you consider the psychedelic state?

00:17:44 ►

Is it just imagery and visuals, or is it boundary dissolving?

00:17:51 ►

I’m no longer here.

00:17:53 ►

I’m the universe, and I’m you.

00:17:56 ►

I think it goes to so many levels.

00:18:03 ►

So a definition of the psychedelic state.

00:18:08 ►

So, yeah, keeping it simple,

00:18:12 ►

I mean, get started.

00:18:13 ►

Have the experience.

00:18:14 ►

You’re safe.

00:18:16 ►

Just tell yourself you’re safe.

00:18:17 ►

You have to allow yourself to go that far,

00:18:19 ►

but create that space.

00:18:22 ►

And then you will have that experience

00:18:23 ►

and then you can return to it mentally.

00:18:26 ►

You can return to it again if you want to.

00:18:29 ►

You solved something or you’ve seen something

00:18:32 ►

and you want to revisit it, you can do that.

00:18:35 ►

Yeah.

00:18:37 ►

Down weight.

00:18:38 ►

Now, I don’t know whether you agree with this or not.

00:18:40 ►

But I was told, again?

00:18:42 ►

Oh.

00:18:50 ►

But I was told, again, oh, I was told that somewhere I’m in control.

00:18:58 ►

And if I need to absolutely be in control, I tested it a couple times, I can be.

00:19:01 ►

I can have a perfect conversation with a policeman.

00:19:05 ►

And, you know, except that the one time the policeman looked at me and said,

00:19:08 ►

what’s your problem, buddy?

00:19:10 ►

I couldn’t speak, so I just said,

00:19:12 ►

and this is where I got

00:19:13 ►

to that space and realized

00:19:16 ►

that that’s it.

00:19:17 ►

I could only say love.

00:19:19 ►

Love. It’s a whole

00:19:21 ►

description of where you at, buddy.

00:19:25 ►

Love. So I was there. What a nice place to be.

00:19:29 ►

Jeez. And the police officer, he said, oh, take care of him.

00:19:34 ►

You know, whatever. Take care of him. I thought that was nice, too.

00:19:37 ►

Anyway. But I think as a beginner, you know, you guys got to talk to beginners if you want to spread the word.

00:19:43 ►

I think as a beginner, you know, you guys got to talk to beginners if you want to spread the word.

00:19:45 ►

Okay.

00:19:51 ►

I think what we’re all pointing out here is that, you know, as, you know, this is a, we’re just reintroducing this state of consciousness to our species

00:19:56 ►

after a couple thousand years of it being really repressed.

00:20:00 ►

And we’re just babes in the woods trying to figure out how to do this.

00:20:05 ►

You know, I’ve just marveled at the fact that here, you know,

00:20:10 ►

the mysteries of Eleusis started back in the Bronze Age, you know, in 3000 B.C.

00:20:17 ►

And how did we get from some hunter-gatherers who started using some form of a psychedelic that induced this consciousness

00:20:27 ►

and started creating what is today called Western civilization, loosely described as civilization.

00:20:33 ►

And how did we get from the good start to all of a sudden where we are today,

00:20:41 ►

where psychedelics are illegal, war on drugs?

00:20:45 ►

And I think Richard Glenn Boyer is correct that it’s really a war on consciousness.

00:20:49 ►

You know, it’s an attempt to keep new ideas, new thoughts from springing out and changing the status quo

00:20:58 ►

because the people that own the status quo don’t want to change things.

00:21:03 ►

And if you look back to a point in time when the mysteries changed in Eleusis,

00:21:09 ►

is that around 300 B.C. is when the state took control of the mysteries.

00:21:15 ►

Up until then, it was more of a priestly kind of thing that essentially the philosophers went to and everybody.

00:21:22 ►

But once the state took control, anybody that hadn’t committed murder could go.

00:21:26 ►

Even slaves could go.

00:21:28 ►

And the way the society was formed or constituted at the time,

00:21:34 ►

there were a few very fabulously wealthy people.

00:21:37 ►

And then there were their dependents and their court, their hangers-on.

00:21:41 ►

There were a small number of prosperous merchants and military people,

00:21:46 ►

but the great mass of people were living just above subsistence,

00:21:50 ►

and one-half to one-third of the population were slaves.

00:21:55 ►

Now, you know, there are several kinds of slaves.

00:21:57 ►

There are chattel slaves, where the person is physically owned,

00:22:00 ►

and then bond slaves, who have to work off a debt.

00:22:04 ►

And if you’re born in the United States of

00:22:06 ►

America, you are born a bond slave because you owe $100,000 of the national debt. You have got

00:22:12 ►

to work off your share of the debt. So we are pretty much like Eleusis when the state took

00:22:18 ►

control, and then the priestly king class essentially changed the mysteries to a point where it was really tightly controlled.

00:22:29 ►

In fact, the first trial for the war on drugs was some of the jet setters of the day started to figure out how to do this,

00:22:37 ►

and they were having parties on their own.

00:22:39 ►

And that’s a historical record of that.

00:22:43 ►

And that’s a historical record of that. So there’s, to me, one of the big mysteries is how did we get from such a good start to the last couple thousand years?

00:22:52 ►

And I think you can see a lot of answers about that.

00:22:54 ►

And I think that we’re in a state now where there are some of us in the world, tens of millions most likely,

00:23:03 ►

who have had some sort of a psychedelic experience,

00:23:06 ►

certainly who have used at least cannabis,

00:23:09 ►

and know that there’s some alterations of consciousness other than alcohol.

00:23:14 ►

And alcohol is a great drug for the control of people because it’s a warlike drug.

00:23:19 ►

You know, I’ve never seen people that are stoned on cannabis have fights,

00:23:24 ►

except maybe over food.

00:23:26 ►

You know, they want somebody to steal your food.

00:23:28 ►

But, you know, they’re not aggressive.

00:23:32 ►

And the ancient civilizations, particularly Rome, was built on aggression, you know, on war.

00:23:39 ►

This country is in a permanent state of war and has been since the 40s.

00:23:45 ►

We spend more of our excess labor, which goes to taxes,

00:23:52 ►

more of that goes to the war machine than the entire rest of the world combined.

00:23:58 ►

How did we get here?

00:24:00 ►

To me, that’s one of the reasons I think that they don’t really know what psychedelic consciousness is and can do,

00:24:08 ►

but they have a hunch, and it goes way back in their DNA, that people that use these things weren’t warlike.

00:24:16 ►

They didn’t want to fight.

00:24:17 ►

They didn’t want to support the machine.

00:24:18 ►

They couldn’t keep the royalty up there. And so we are, you know, we, well, it’s the 60s and the 50s when LSD hit the streets and

00:24:28 ►

then the mushrooms came out. Watson found them and brought them to the Western world. I mean,

00:24:35 ►

they were there for centuries, millennia. The role that’s going on with all of us right now is

00:24:42 ►

we’re little children coming down out of the trees,

00:24:46 ►

planting the mushrooms in the cow patties and saying, hey, there’s something here.

00:24:50 ►

But we have to figure out how to use them and how to work them into the rituals. I shouldn’t say we

00:24:57 ►

have to, but I think it’d be a good idea if we tried to do this. And my whole thing with the psychedelic salon

00:25:06 ►

is not to promote anything more

00:25:09 ►

than the ability for somebody at work around the water cooler

00:25:12 ►

to talk about these things without fear of getting into trouble.

00:25:16 ►

And we are getting a little closer there.

00:25:20 ►

I had a comment to the conversation about learning the yoga, I guess,

00:25:26 ►

and not doing substances while learning it.

00:25:29 ►

I think it may simply be a kind of an ancient wisdom of trying to learn something

00:25:37 ►

and master something for itself before you combine it with other things

00:25:41 ►

that could distract you from that learning,

00:25:45 ►

especially if what you’re learning is difficult or takes a lot of time.

00:25:51 ►

The more you focus simply on it, the more you’re able to develop it and learn it for it.

00:25:57 ►

And then once you’ve mastered it, then maybe you can experiment with how you combine it with other things that you’ve learned.

00:26:03 ►

You can experiment with how you combine it with other things that you’ve learned.

00:26:10 ►

And I think Claudia pointed out to me one of the most important things and the biggest threat to young people is the legal establishment,

00:26:15 ►

the legal trouble they get in.

00:26:17 ►

I got a few years ago, I got an email from a young man who,

00:26:21 ►

when he was 16, and he was in a very strict Christian family in Kansas, I think.

00:26:27 ►

And when he was 16, his father caught him growing mushrooms in the bedroom,

00:26:33 ►

turned him into the authorities. The kid got convicted of a felony, went to prison

00:26:37 ►

to straighten him out. And then he got out of prison after a couple years, and he said, I had been so scared,

00:26:46 ►

I just started going to church on Wednesday and Sunday and got into the whole thing.

00:26:51 ►

He said, I just did everything to conform as best I could, and I didn’t even think anymore.

00:26:56 ►

And then he found Terrence McKenna and went out and got a job, saved money, and moved out to California.

00:27:03 ►

And he’s a very happy young man now.

00:27:04 ►

Went out and got a job, saved money, and moved out to California, and he’s a very happy young man now. But the legal problems are what the real danger of drugs is,

00:27:12 ►

is the government problems that you can get into if you’re not very careful.

00:27:17 ►

And as far as putting somebody in a hospital,

00:27:21 ►

I think that’s one place where I think Dennis McKenna owes his whole life to

00:27:26 ►

Terrence, because when Dennis tripped out at La Charrera, the rest of the group that they were

00:27:31 ►

with were just adamant they were going to fly him to a hospital and put him in the institution,

00:27:37 ►

and Terrence just adamantly said, we’re going to wait a week, a month, whatever it takes until he

00:27:41 ►

comes down, and that was the right thing to do and kept him in a safe place.

00:27:46 ►

So, again, we’re

00:27:48 ►

babes in the woods learning these things

00:27:50 ►

and we don’t have the right protocols

00:27:52 ►

and the right ideas yet. And that’s

00:27:54 ►

part of why I think that those

00:27:56 ►

of us who have had some of these experiences

00:27:57 ►

and thought about this really have

00:28:00 ►

I don’t want to use the word responsibility

00:28:01 ►

but I would hope that we will

00:28:03 ►

speak up more and start talking to other people,

00:28:06 ►

getting their experiences, and seeing if collectively as a community

00:28:10 ►

we can’t start coming up with ways to deal with some of these problems

00:28:13 ►

and finding out what’s going on.

00:28:16 ►

And they don’t have to be young people.

00:28:20 ►

I’ve run into a couple people almost my age who had their first psychedelic experience

00:28:23 ►

and freaked out.

00:28:25 ►

And so it’s just that we don’t have the right containers.

00:28:28 ►

Many of us do.

00:28:29 ►

We’ve been fortunate to fall into the right circumstances to do that.

00:28:32 ►

But there’s still too much just random use.

00:28:35 ►

Here’s a pill.

00:28:36 ►

Take it.

00:28:36 ►

See what it does.

00:28:37 ►

And I went through that myself for a while, and it was not a good thing to do.

00:28:47 ►

while and it was not a good thing to do so that kind of goes along with the you know stoned ape theory because i i always use the the analogy of discovery of fire you know imagine whatever

00:28:57 ►

apes or hominids or you know when when that first uh running into the uh burning embers of a forest fire, you know,

00:29:07 ►

to recover that delicious smelling roast boar, you know, and say this might have some use,

00:29:13 ►

and then experimenting for however many hundreds or thousands of years

00:29:17 ►

and getting burnt a whole lot of times and starting forest fires and everything else.

00:29:23 ►

And then all of a sudden there’s something called a campfire.

00:29:26 ►

And we start talking story.

00:29:27 ►

And somewhere in there,

00:29:30 ►

but there must have been an awful lot of experimentation that went on.

00:29:33 ►

And I think we’re doing that same experimentation

00:29:35 ►

with the fires of the mind.

00:29:38 ►

And it’s just as crazy.

00:29:40 ►

And people doing nutty things

00:29:42 ►

and running in and out of the fire.

00:29:45 ►

And we’re learning. and it will take time.

00:29:50 ►

I’m not so sure.

00:29:51 ►

I think most of the learning is happening in the underground.

00:29:55 ►

I think the science that is being done is fine.

00:29:59 ►

It’s very limited, and it’s teaching us a great deal about the brain,

00:30:02 ►

but it’s not teaching us an awful lot about the mind and practices and things like that.

00:30:10 ►

Yeah, I agree.

00:30:11 ►

And you’d mentioned about the hospital setting in the 50s.

00:30:15 ►

I remember we were fortunate to get to meet Duncan Blewett,

00:30:19 ►

who worked with Humphrey Osmond up in Canada.

00:30:22 ►

And since then I’ve seen some of the videos on YouTube of this very sterile,

00:30:26 ►

and the doctors in their coats, and they have them in a room.

00:30:30 ►

And I could see how that really isn’t going to produce any real good science, I don’t think.

00:30:37 ►

And yet there were other research experiments, like in Menlo Park, where know, the living room set up and nature and all.

00:30:45 ►

And even when Mary C. and Charlie Grove were doing the end-of-life psilocybin experience or research,

00:30:52 ►

Mary C. went to great lengths to, you know, drape the hospital room,

00:30:58 ►

and she had flowers and nature in there.

00:31:01 ►

And, you know, it looked like a psychedelic hippie’s room.

00:31:04 ►

And so they unsterilized it as much as possible. and nature in there. It looked like a psychedelic hippie’s room.

00:31:08 ►

So they unsterilized it as much as possible.

00:31:09 ►

I think that’s one of the reasons they had a lot better results

00:31:10 ►

than just going in a sterile room.

00:31:12 ►

So again, the set and the setting

00:31:15 ►

that they’ve been preaching about forever

00:31:18 ►

is, I think, pretty important.

00:31:21 ►

Oh, okay.

00:31:23 ►

I guess the conversations about your experiences, they’re wonderful.

00:31:28 ►

And those are the kind of, let’s see, if you want to talk to a lot of people now,

00:31:34 ►

you’ve got to get out of the past and get right where they are

00:31:38 ►

and how they’re communicating and tell the story, but simplify it.

00:31:44 ►

You don’t need all the history stuff.

00:31:47 ►

You know, they’re just not interested because they don’t have time for that.

00:31:50 ►

But you want to get it out there and get the safety and whatever,

00:31:56 ►

describe the good and the bad, et cetera,

00:31:58 ►

but create those spaces that they, we, can go to to find out what we need to find out.

00:32:05 ►

That whole generation, and you know, you guys are in it and not, and whatever, I’m not,

00:32:11 ►

but I kind of have a foot there and I listen to the kids.

00:32:14 ►

I have a kid who’s 27, so he’s speeding around the world.

00:32:18 ►

And that’s what they’re doing.

00:32:22 ►

And you want to reach them.

00:32:24 ►

And the only way you can reach them, but they’re very curious.

00:32:28 ►

So you create spaces for them to go to. And they don’t need all the history because that’s all scary stuff.

00:32:35 ►

Talk about where they can go with this, what they can do for themselves with this. What’s possible? Tell stories. Tell the possibility of a bad trip.

00:32:46 ►

Because that’s what…

00:32:47 ►

And remove as much as you can of the fear.

00:32:50 ►

Remove the fear.

00:32:51 ►

Don’t create spaces where…

00:32:54 ►

And perhaps a guide,

00:32:56 ►

someone that has used before

00:32:58 ►

and is willing to spend eight hours with you

00:33:01 ►

and keep you safe

00:33:02 ►

and within little rules or something.

00:33:05 ►

But anyway, those things can be described very simply, very quickly,

00:33:09 ►

you know, it seems to me.

00:33:11 ►

And if you guys thought about it the way you’re thinking about

00:33:14 ►

what you’re talking about, I know you’d get it.

00:33:18 ►

Well, anyway.

00:33:20 ►

Your point about fear is well taken,

00:33:22 ►

because that’s what is running things right now.

00:33:25 ►

That’s all you hear is fear of this, fear of that.

00:33:28 ►

Not just about psychedelics, the whole planet.

00:33:31 ►

Well, and Esalen included.

00:33:33 ►

So you can’t be in fear and in love at the same time, and there’s a lot of that going on.

00:33:41 ►

Let us just move forward without fear. I mean,

00:33:47 ►

you guys don’t have the fear of being arrested. It’s bullshit. You can’t be arrested for what you’re

00:33:51 ►

saying on the internet, as long as you’re not telling them psilocybin or something.

00:33:55 ►

Tell them where to get, well, I don’t know whether you can do that. But don’t be so afraid.

00:34:00 ►

Wait a minute, don’t be so afraid. Put people out there that are super

00:34:03 ►

clean, who are at the first level of defense for you guys,

00:34:08 ►

which you’re more afraid than they are.

00:34:10 ►

So they’ll come, and they’ll be the first defense, meaning they’re running whatever that site is that you run

00:34:17 ►

and get information out there and so on.

00:34:19 ►

You said that there are already people there that are doing that.

00:34:23 ►

I’m going to look that up, too.

00:34:25 ►

But anyway, that’s my point.

00:34:27 ►

My point is that it’s not just us.

00:34:29 ►

It’s all of us.

00:34:30 ►

You know, it can be something as simple as writing a comment on a web page

00:34:36 ►

because one thing that is so different today that’s never been in human history before

00:34:42 ►

is this interconnectivity of the human species.

00:34:45 ►

You know, four billion people that have some sort of connection to the net.

00:34:49 ►

And we are hardwiring the neural system of our species.

00:34:55 ►

And so we’re in really brand new times.

00:34:59 ►

I’m not hardwiring it, I guarantee you that.

00:35:01 ►

This is all whoop.

00:35:02 ►

Well, I’m a little geeky.

00:35:10 ►

But anyhow, I agree with you that we have to take fear out of it.

00:35:14 ►

And I don’t think we need to be talking so much about substances.

00:35:17 ►

It’s about the thoughts that come from them.

00:35:19 ►

That’s the danger to the status quo.

00:35:22 ►

There’s no medical danger.

00:35:26 ►

I mean, you can talk, there could be some, but on a smaller scale,

00:35:31 ►

the big danger to the status quo is the thinking, the psychedelic thinking.

00:35:35 ►

And, you know, when I started this podcast a little over seven years ago,

00:35:42 ►

I was shying away from the word psychedelic because it has a lot of baggage.

00:35:46 ►

And a dear friend of ours, Jade, who’s gay, he said,

00:35:51 ►

you know, if you use it, call it the entheogen salon or something like that,

00:35:53 ►

they’ll take that word away from you too.

00:35:56 ►

He said, we took queer back, you ought to take psychedelic back.

00:36:00 ►

And just the other day I went to the net and I looked at the word,

00:36:02 ►

I just typed definition, psychedelic. The number one definition came up in a number of

00:36:05 ►

search engines said something that psychedelic means of characterized by or generating hallucinations,

00:36:12 ►

distortions of perception, altered states of awareness, and occasionally states resembling

00:36:17 ►

psychosis. That is so far from what Humphrey Osmond came up with when he said psychedelic means mind manifesting.

00:36:26 ►

And that’s all it means is manifesting our own mind outside of the cauldron of the culture that we’re in, I think.

00:36:32 ►

One more thought.

00:36:33 ►

All you need to do there is get yourself a geek, but a present geek, okay, in the present, and he’ll fix that.

00:36:44 ►

You need to get up on top of Google.

00:36:46 ►

You guys, get on top of Google.

00:36:47 ►

Put the definition up there and find a way to create yourself to the top of that.

00:36:54 ►

That’s easy.

00:36:55 ►

I may be naive about all of this, but I think that that’s fairly known how to create that.

00:37:02 ►

I think even if the definition on Google number one comes up, mind

00:37:06 ►

best, it’s in the culture that

00:37:08 ►

we have to really work at it. It’s what we

00:37:10 ►

can think of already.

00:37:11 ►

You know, I’m not

00:37:14 ►

trying to convince anybody of anything.

00:37:17 ►

They won’t come to you

00:37:18 ►

unless they’re part of the choir.

00:37:19 ►

I guarantee it.

00:37:22 ►

I’m there to just, you know, kind of

00:37:24 ►

say, you know, and I make a point.

00:37:27 ►

I know some people don’t appreciate this, but I think of myself as a carnival barker and all the actions in the tent.

00:37:34 ►

You know, I’m not a philosopher.

00:37:35 ►

I’m not a scholar.

00:37:36 ►

I’ve read a whole bunch of things.

00:37:38 ►

I’ve made connections as weird as Terrence has made and as unrational.

00:37:42 ►

But my job is to get people in the tent

00:37:45 ►

and say, boy, there’s some great books, there’s some

00:37:47 ►

lectures, there’s some people you should talk to.

00:37:50 ►

And so I try to keep it entertaining

00:37:51 ►

and interesting that way, but I’m not

00:37:53 ►

going out of the

00:37:55 ►

choir. I’m only staying with the choir

00:37:57 ►

and talking to them because there’s so many

00:37:59 ►

people that are so isolated

00:38:02 ►

thinking that, you know,

00:38:03 ►

I think many of us as teenagers or young people, young adults,

00:38:08 ►

thought, oh, I’m the only one that thinks this way, and, you know, I must be weird, something wrong with me.

00:38:13 ►

And so I’m trying to help people see that there’s a lot of us oddballs around.

00:38:18 ►

Excuse me. Are you talking about using the Internet that way, or are you talking about you two on the road?

00:38:25 ►

No, no, no.

00:38:27 ►

Actually, this may be my last personal appearance because I don’t like going on the road.

00:38:32 ►

So it’s only on the Internet.

00:38:33 ►

But over the last seven years, over a million people have downloaded at least one of my podcasts.

00:38:38 ►

So that’s how I’m doing it.

00:38:40 ►

And that’s how I’m comfortable doing it and letting them come to me in this word of mouth that’s it does does anybody have something they would like to uh pick up with now

00:38:53 ►

before we uh kind of plant a few other seeds we’ve we’ve lost a few of the less hearty of our souls

00:39:00 ►

so more sensible of our souls. More sensible of our souls.

00:39:11 ►

So, going back to your occupied movement

00:39:13 ►

at the beginning, if I

00:39:15 ►

recall,

00:39:18 ►

that was the

00:39:20 ►

beginning of your conversation.

00:39:22 ►

I think

00:39:22 ►

we are sitting, as I said in the morning,

00:39:29 ►

with tension growing between the haves and have-nots and

00:39:33 ►

basically a very systemic oppression

00:39:38 ►

of people rising up.

00:39:44 ►

And we’ve seen last year

00:39:46 ►

in the less free countries, the pressure came to boil

00:39:53 ►

and things have changed. And I recall

00:39:57 ►

I’ve been coming here this year almost

00:40:01 ►

like part-time.

00:40:05 ►

Half of this year I spent here.

00:40:07 ►

I’ve been to a lot of

00:40:09 ►

workshops, including one

00:40:11 ►

with Essendon

00:40:13 ►

friends, where Michael Morphy

00:40:15 ►

himself was over there,

00:40:17 ►

trying to

00:40:19 ►

create the future of Essendon

00:40:24 ►

as well as relating to what happens in the world right now

00:40:29 ►

and how we can help.

00:40:31 ►

And in some other meeting I asked Mr. Wheeler if he sees the future of the United States

00:40:37 ►

as an evolution or as a revolution,

00:40:42 ►

because we see that in other parts of the world revolution happens

00:40:47 ►

and as a result there is a chaos and the unknowing that comes after the revolution.

00:40:53 ►

We don’t know who replaces the old regime and how it progresses to something new and better.

00:41:00 ►

And over the course of the time I’ve been here, I’ve done some writing

00:41:04 ►

and some thinking about the Occupy Movement and whatnot.

00:41:08 ►

And I think the core, core issue of our society is the banking system.

00:41:14 ►

Because the money gets created out of nothing by some private individuals or private institutions.

00:41:29 ►

or private institutions, and then they create whatever they create in order to protect their turf,

00:41:35 ►

and they think they know better what’s good for the world.

00:41:49 ►

And they’re talking right now the world governments and all of that. And if one wants to think about an evolution into new things,

00:41:56 ►

another evolution, attempting not to snap the tape,

00:42:00 ►

it would have to be a parallel system of money.

00:42:08 ►

You know, I called it, I actually did some writing about it, and I called the first bank then give credit, let’s say based on certain criteria, other than the criteria that right

00:42:15 ►

now you get at the bank, I call it bypass bank.

00:42:20 ►

And I were to bypass the federal system and create a credit system,

00:42:30 ►

at least in places like Esalen, where people basically barter and attempt to as much as possible not to use the currency.

00:42:36 ►

Some of that is happening here with the world scholar coming here,

00:42:40 ►

offering 32 hours of work and studying. And I just wonder if an institution like this,

00:42:49 ►

where there is really integrity and trust between the people that are coming in an institution like that,

00:42:56 ►

if they could exaggerate and just do more of that and use less of the currencies that is created by the banking system.

00:43:12 ►

And I think in a place like this, it’s entirely possible,

00:43:17 ►

because they grow their own food, and of course they have insurance and those kind of things.

00:43:24 ►

and of course they have insurance and those kind of things so going back to the Occupy movement

00:43:28 ►

Occupy movement needs a purpose, a slogan

00:43:32 ►

and the very first thing that is wrong with the society

00:43:37 ►

the very first thing, the core thing, the seed of the seed

00:43:41 ►

is the banking system and the Federal Reserve,

00:43:46 ►

which needs to be abolished because it really is a private bank printing money on behalf of the American consumer

00:43:54 ►

and using it however they want.

00:43:56 ►

And this $50 trillion that we owe, which you suggested translates to each one of us owing,

00:44:07 ►

before we were born, 200,000 per person, I mean, why not some of that credit be given to the people?

00:44:12 ►

So the Occupy movement can rise to change the credit system and to create a parallel.

00:44:21 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

00:44:29 ►

Now, I’m cutting into the workshop recording right here so that I can add my own brief comments about what was just said regarding the establishment of a new system of money.

00:44:40 ►

And I’ll begin by saying that I don’t actually have any ideas about how to do this, or even if it’s possible.

00:44:46 ►

Nonetheless, I think this is a good direction in which to proceed.

00:44:51 ►

Now, the way I see it, the only way we humans are ever going to be able to break the chains that have been forged for us by the financial elite

00:44:59 ►

is to first, somehow, wrestle away the food supply from its connection to money.

00:45:06 ►

Let’s face it, without money to buy food, most of us would probably starve.

00:45:11 ►

And that is why I think that the fast-growing home garden movements in the U.S. and other countries

00:45:17 ►

are perhaps some of the most important efforts that are taking place in our societies today.

00:45:27 ►

taking place in our societies today. My guess is that any new form of money will probably have to grow organically somehow from the various ways in which these home gardeners find to exchange

00:45:34 ►

their surplus food for things other than the kind of money that we are currently stuck with.

00:45:39 ►

Let’s face it, the people at the top of this current system have been there for several thousand years,

00:45:50 ►

and the chances of us changing that during our lifetimes is, well, negligible.

00:45:57 ►

So, it seems to me that the only way to eliminate the power that their huge piles of money have over us is for us to remove the need for their money from our lives.

00:46:01 ►

And, of course, that has to begin with the control of the food supply.

00:46:06 ►

What has been occupying most of my time lately is my very pleasurable hobby of reading.

00:46:13 ►

And ever since I got my Kindle I’ve been reading almost constantly and what I’ve been doing

00:46:17 ►

is I started at the beginning of some award lists like the Pulitzer Prizes and then I

00:46:23 ►

downloaded copies of the award-winning

00:46:25 ►

books that interest me, and which are still available for free from places like Project

00:46:30 ►

Gutenberg, or not to mention the almost 1 million free Kindle books that Amazon and

00:46:36 ►

others have made available.

00:46:38 ►

And one of these free books that I recently read has a brief metaphor about the rich and

00:46:43 ►

poor, or let’s say about the 1% and the

00:46:47 ►

99% in today’s language. And the book I want to read this short piece from is by Edward Bellamy,

00:46:54 ►

and it’s titled Looking Backward, 2000 to 1887. And it was actually written and published in 1887.

00:47:03 ►

And it was actually written and published in 1887.

00:47:10 ►

And actually the parts he talks about the year 2000 were pretty utopian.

00:47:12 ►

We’re not even close to there.

00:47:17 ►

But at the time he wrote the book, of course, there were no automobiles.

00:47:21 ►

And in fact, only a very few people even had a horse-drawn vehicle of any kind.

00:47:23 ►

Carriages were only for the rich.

00:47:25 ►

But since most everyone in the U.S. has seen a few of what we call western or cowboy movies, we all know what a stage

00:47:31 ►

coach looked like. And so this little metaphor should still be understandable. Anyhow, here’s

00:47:37 ►

how it goes. And what he’s talking about is he’s talking from the position of the year 2000 looking back at the year 1887 and how society was composed back then, which really isn’t any different than it is right now.

00:47:51 ►

But here’s what he says from his fictional standpoint of the year 2000 looking back to 1887.

00:48:13 ►

I cannot do better than to compare society as it was then to a prodigious coach which the masses of humanity were harnessed to and dragged toilsomely along the very hilly and sandy road.

00:48:20 ►

The driver was hunger and permitted no lagging, though the pace was necessarily very slow.

00:48:26 ►

Despite the difficulty of drawing the coach at all along so hard a road, the top was covered with passengers who never got down, even at the steepest ascents. These seats on top were very

00:48:33 ►

breezy and comfortable. Well up out of the dust, their occupants could enjoy the scenery at their

00:48:39 ►

leisure or critically discuss the merits of the straining team. Naturally, such places were in great demand,

00:48:46 ►

and the competition for them was keen,

00:48:49 ►

everyone seeking as the first end in life

00:48:51 ►

to secure a seat on the coach for himself

00:48:54 ►

and leave it to his child after him.

00:48:56 ►

By the rule of the coach,

00:48:58 ►

a man could leave his seat to whom he wished,

00:49:01 ►

but on the other hand, there were many accidents

00:49:03 ►

by which it might at any time be wholly lost.

00:49:07 ►

For all that they were so easy, the seats were very insecure, and at every sudden jolt

00:49:12 ►

of the coach, persons were slipping out of them and falling to the ground, where they

00:49:17 ►

were instantly compelled to take hold of the rope and help to drag the coach on which they

00:49:22 ►

had before ridden so pleasantly.

00:49:24 ►

and helped to drag the coach on which they had before ridden so pleasantly.

00:49:29 ►

It was naturally regarded as a terrible misfortune to lose one’s seat,

00:49:34 ►

and the apprehension that this might happen to them or their friends was a constant cloud upon the happiness of those who rode.

00:49:40 ►

Well, I think that pretty much sums up the human experience as it now stands.

00:49:44 ►

Well, I think that pretty much sums up the human experience as it now stands.

00:49:50 ►

Even those riding on the top of the coach are living under a constant cloud upon their happiness.

00:49:55 ►

And as the great Gildersleeve once said, what a revolting development this is.

00:49:58 ►

You know, let’s face it.

00:50:09 ►

If 10,000 people working together in over 100 locations over the course of a decade or more can design and build an extremely complex robot and then have it successfully land on a distant planet to begin exploring that other world, well

00:50:14 ►

doesn’t it follow that we humans can also probably solve the problem of

00:50:18 ►

distributing our food and other resources among us in a way that enables

00:50:23 ►

everyone on the planet to have an enjoyable and a peaceful life?

00:50:27 ►

We don’t lack the resources or the technology.

00:50:31 ►

As I see it, we only lack the common will to do so.

00:50:35 ►

It’s really something worth thinking about.

00:50:38 ►

Don’t you agree?

00:50:40 ►

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

00:50:45 ►

Be well, my friends.

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