Program Notes
Guest speaker: Timothy Leary
[NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.]
“In my function as a [college] lecturer, it’s my obligation, it’s my task, it’s my duty to instigate irreverence for authority, questioning of authority.”
“And that’s one of the things that is kind of amazing today, the junk information that we’re being inundated with, the cloud, the atmosphere, the smog of disinformation.”
“Reagan is a certifiable lunatic”
“The first narcotics bust in history is Jehovah busting Adam and Eve for eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.”
“We’re getting to one of those moments, one of those great moments in history, when evolution is going to happen.”
“At all costs avoid terminal adulthood.”
“You are as old as the last time you reprogrammed your brain or changed your mind.”
“You’re as old as the people you hang out with.”
“There is no reason why any human being should work. Robots work, humans perform.”
“The sensible thing to do about drugs is this, get yourself a really good dealer.”
Myron Stolaroff’s Lone Pine Stories
The Discovery of Love: A Psychedelic Experience with LSD-25
by Malden Grange Bishop (Dodd, Mead & Company: New York, 1963)
Reviewed by Lorenzo Hagerty
Mavericks of the Mind - Elizabeth Gips (read online)
Thought Provoking Interviews on Consciousness by David Jay Brown
http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0979862256/190-9701917-6618416
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321 - A Discussion About Psychedelics
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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.
00:00:26 ►
space. This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. And again, I want to begin by thanking our fellow salonners who either bought a copy of one of my books or made a direct donation
00:00:32 ►
to the salon. Hopefully you’ve already received a thank you email from me and please know that you
00:00:39 ►
will always be in my heart. And I hope that the same will be true of how you feel about me, even when I mess
00:00:47 ►
up and pass along some bad information. What I’m talking about are my remarks in the last podcast
00:00:53 ►
from the Esalen Workshop, where I was speaking without notes and gave an incorrect picture of
00:00:59 ►
the protocols used by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Menlo Park, where Myron Stolaroff, Jim Fadiman, and a few others
00:01:06 ►
did a significant amount of psychedelic research back in the 60s.
00:01:11 ►
And fortunately, Jim Fadiman,
00:01:14 ►
who now, I guess, is almost the last man standing in that group of early researchers,
00:01:19 ►
well, Jim is both a friend and one of our fellow salonners.
00:01:22 ►
So, when he heard my misstatements,
00:01:25 ►
he very gently passed along the correct information to me. both a friend and one of our fellow salonners. So when he heard my misstatements,
00:01:28 ►
he very gently passed along the correct information to me.
00:01:32 ►
So let me read from the recent email that he sent regarding my statement.
00:01:37 ►
Hi, just listening to the first few minutes of the latest release from the Big Sur workshop.
00:01:43 ►
For therapy, six-week preparation, Carbogen, as you described.
00:01:51 ►
The LSD day was 200 mics minimum, usually closer to 400 mics, and for alcoholics up to 800.
00:02:02 ►
For problem solving, the scientists had one evening of prep, no carbogen, and 100 mics tops, or 200 milligrams of mescaline. So I guess that maybe I was close about the six weeks preparation
00:02:08 ►
for the treatments using LSD,
00:02:10 ►
but I was completely wrong about the dose.
00:02:13 ►
And then I was close about the dose for the scientists and engineers,
00:02:17 ►
but wrong about the preparation they went through.
00:02:20 ►
My point here is that under no circumstances
00:02:23 ►
should you ever take my word about anything without first checking on my recollection of the facts.
00:02:30 ►
As for the Menlo Park work that Jim and Myron were involved in, most of my information about that research came from many hours of conversations with Myron,
00:02:41 ►
some of which were recorded and are now available in these podcasts, particularly
00:02:46 ►
the Lone Pine series.
00:02:48 ►
But I also wrote a review of what is one of the few books dealing with that research project,
00:02:54 ►
and that is the wonderful little book by Malden Grange Bishop titled The Discovery of Love,
00:03:01 ►
A Psychedelic Experience with LSD-25.
00:03:04 ►
The Discovery of Love, A Psychedelic Experience with LSD25.
00:03:10 ►
And you can read a review of that book on the Albert Hoffman Foundation website,
00:03:14 ►
which Myron was responsible for at the time when he asked me to write it.
00:03:18 ►
However, since I wrote that review back in 2001,
00:03:22 ►
and then returned the precious copy of that book to Myron, I didn’t have quite all the facts with me,
00:03:25 ►
and I didn’t have them quite straight in my head.
00:03:27 ►
And for that, I apologize to you for passing along some incorrect information.
00:03:33 ►
Unfortunately, that’s probably not the only time I’ve passed along something that isn’t factually correct,
00:03:37 ►
so please keep in mind that I’m only the carnival barker.
00:03:42 ►
My job is to get you into the tent where the real authorities are actually doing their work.
00:03:47 ►
And if you can get your hands on a copy of that little book,
00:03:50 ►
I think you’ll really enjoy reading about
00:03:52 ►
how psychedelic research was being conducted
00:03:55 ►
in the early days of the New Resurgence.
00:03:58 ►
But if you can’t find a copy,
00:03:59 ►
you can still read my review on the Hoffman site,
00:04:02 ►
which I’ll link to in the program notes for today’s podcast,
00:04:05 ►
which, as you know, you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.
00:04:10 ►
And in particular, I want to thank Jim Fadiman for taking his time to help me set the record straight.
00:04:16 ►
You know, there’s already enough incorrect information out there about our community,
00:04:20 ►
and I certainly don’t want to be responsible for adding to the confusion.
00:04:24 ►
and I certainly don’t want to be responsible for adding to the confusion.
00:04:31 ►
Now, today I’m going to take a little break from playing the recordings that were made during the weekend workshop that Bruce Dahmer and I led at Esalen earlier this summer.
00:04:35 ►
And while I don’t actually have a solid reason for doing so, my excuse is twofold.
00:04:42 ►
First, the talk I’m going to play for you today was given by Dr. Timothy Leary
00:04:46 ►
on the occasion of his 63rd birthday. And that age is significant in my life because my father,
00:04:53 ►
my brother, and my mentor all died when they were 63 years old. So that age has several layers of
00:05:00 ►
meaning for me. The other reason is that today happens to be my own birthday,
00:05:06 ►
and I’m happy to say that I’ve outlived that 63-year-old limit by seven years now, which
00:05:12 ►
means that today is my 70th birthday. And I’ll say a little bit more about that after
00:05:17 ►
we listen to today’s program. Actually, the talk we’re about to hear does have a slight
00:05:23 ►
connection to the Esalen Workshop in that it was sent to me by NER, who participated in that workshop and who originally received this recording from his friend, Elizabeth Gipps, who made the recording and whose credentials go all the way back to the 60s in the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco.
00:05:41 ►
And I’ll be having more to say about Elizabeth in a future podcast when I play a 1985 interview
00:05:47 ►
that she did with Terrence McKenna at his home.
00:05:50 ►
But here’s just a brief paragraph
00:05:52 ►
in Elizabeth’s own words
00:05:54 ►
that I’ve taken from David J. Brown’s wonderful book,
00:05:57 ►
Mavericks of the Mind.
00:05:59 ►
And I’ll link to this page from David’s book,
00:06:02 ►
the one that is now available online for us to read.
00:06:04 ►
So, hey, thank you very much, David. I’ll link to this page from David’s book, the one that is now available online for us to read.
00:06:06 ►
So, hey, thank you very much, David.
00:06:13 ►
Now, here is just a real brief little interesting snapshot of Elizabeth in her own words from that June 1994 interview with David J. Brown.
00:06:18 ►
I think that there are more young people aware today than there ever have been in the history of the world,
00:06:24 ►
and that the best part of the rave generation is proof of it.
00:06:28 ►
Hundreds and thousands of people all over the world, between 18 and 25, are sharing
00:06:33 ►
a spiritual experience with tribal overload and huge sensory input.
00:06:39 ►
There was a continuity of spirit that got bigger and bigger, and even though many people
00:06:44 ►
became yuppies, it’s okay to be a yuppie and be comfortable, but we didn’t know about that
00:06:49 ►
in the Haight-Ashbury, I don’t think that they have ever entirely forgotten who they
00:06:54 ►
are. But in that time, we really thought that in five years everything would be changed.
00:07:00 ►
We thought we would find better ways of communicating, which we have, that marijuana would be legal, and that people would be nicer to each other.
00:07:09 ►
That’s the bottom line.
00:07:11 ►
And as I said, I’ll have a lot more to say about Elizabeth in future podcasts.
00:07:17 ►
So thank you NER for sending this Timothy Leary recording that we’re about to listen to,
00:07:22 ►
and for the 1985 recording that Elizabeth
00:07:25 ►
also made of Terrence McKenna, which I’ll be playing at a later date.
00:07:29 ►
So what you and I are about to listen to right now is a talk that Dr. Leary gave to an audience
00:07:35 ►
in Santa Cruz, California, and following his remarks are a few comments by others in the
00:07:41 ►
audience.
00:07:42 ►
All in all, while parts of this almost 30-year-old talk are
00:07:45 ►
a little dated, such as the mention of floppy disks and no mention of the World Wide Web,
00:07:51 ►
which of course hadn’t even been invented yet, nonetheless I think that you’ll be struck with
00:07:56 ►
how little things seem to have changed politically from those relatively low-tech days.
00:08:03 ►
And just to give you a little historical heads-up,
00:08:07 ►
you’ll hear in a few minutes his attack on the Adam and Eve story in the Bible
00:08:11 ►
where he jokes about whether Sasha Shulgin will be coming up with a new form of Adam or Eve.
00:08:18 ►
And you should know that the play on words there is that at the time, which was 1983,
00:08:31 ►
The play on words there is that at the time, which was 1983, MDMA, or Ecstasy as it was then called, was just getting traction in the Dallas scene. And sometimes we also called it Eve, and 2CB was called Adam, both of which made it to the streets thanks to the tireless research of our beloved Sasha.
00:08:47 ►
research of our beloved Sasha. At least that’s how I remember it anyway, which of course tells me that I’ve most likely maybe messed this up somehow too. Anyway, when I first previewed this talk,
00:08:54 ►
I was taken at how relevant his thoughts are yet today. For example, he speaks of the smog of
00:09:01 ►
wrong-headed ideas that are inundating people every day.
00:09:08 ►
And since this talk was actually given on his birthday,
00:09:12 ►
that would have made it October 22, 1983,
00:09:17 ►
because he mentions the fact that the U.S. Navy is then on its way to invade Grenada,
00:09:21 ►
which I think took place just a couple of days later.
00:09:25 ►
So that makes these remarks almost 30 years old,
00:09:29 ►
and yet, as I said, much of what he talks about remains right to the point yet today.
00:09:33 ►
To me, at least, this is Dr. Timothy Leary at his best,
00:09:36 ►
at least on his best behavior,
00:09:40 ►
probably because his mentor, Frank Barron, was in the audience.
00:09:46 ►
So let’s listen now to a recording made by Elizabeth Gipps at the University of California in Santa Cruz. The topic of my lecture, the topic of the seminar tomorrow,
00:09:54 ►
is called the evolution of intelligence in species and individual, which covers a lot of territory. My function, of course, is the same as it’s always been.
00:10:09 ►
I’m an
00:10:10 ►
interent philosopher.
00:10:15 ►
By the way, now is the time I think I should
00:10:17 ►
welcome and pay respects to my
00:10:20 ►
oldest and dearest friends, Nancy and Frank Barron
00:10:24 ►
of the local faculty.
00:10:25 ►
Frank and Nancy, want to say hello?
00:10:34 ►
It’s all Frank’s fault.
00:10:37 ►
He was the one that turned me on to the visionary quest.
00:10:54 ►
visionary quest. But that is my function. The way I spend my time now, about a third of it is in college lectures. I lecture at about 30 or 35 or 40 colleges and universities a year. I write usually one or two books a year. And I’m working on software for artificial intelligence, the other third.
00:11:12 ►
In my function, in all three functions, but particularly in my function as a lecturer,
00:11:17 ►
it’s my obligation, it’s my task, it’s my duty to instigate irreverence for authority, questioning of authority, to do everything
00:11:35 ►
in my power to strobe, strafe, ricochet, bombard the audience with facts, figures, myths, jokes, legends, statistics, God, medicated barbs thrown
00:11:49 ►
into your brains, whatever I can do to remind you who you are and what your function is
00:11:57 ►
on this planet, to remind you, to give you courage to pick up the trail again,
00:12:05 ►
that you’re here to figure it all out,
00:12:07 ►
that the purpose of life is to solve the ultimate questions of philosophy,
00:12:12 ►
and you weren’t put here to become docile students or docile workers
00:12:15 ►
or docile employees or docile citizens,
00:12:17 ►
but to, you know, to carry us all to the next stage of our evolution.
00:12:36 ►
Now, I’ve used the term evolution and intelligence,
00:12:38 ►
and these are two very hot terms for me,
00:12:42 ►
and I think for our species in general.
00:12:45 ►
The word evolution is,
00:12:47 ►
you know, even today the word evolution
00:12:48 ►
is a hot, controversial topic.
00:12:50 ►
You know, there are probably
00:12:51 ►
80% of the human beings alive today
00:12:54 ►
that don’t believe in evolution.
00:12:58 ►
It is kind of staggering
00:12:59 ►
as I travel around the country
00:13:00 ►
and as I read newspapers
00:13:01 ►
and read scientific journals
00:13:03 ►
and, you know, talk to people
00:13:04 ►
and find out what’s going on
00:13:06 ►
that
00:13:07 ►
there’s this incredible gap between
00:13:09 ►
people who are really coming to understand
00:13:11 ►
how evolution works and how the process
00:13:14 ►
has been evolving
00:13:15 ►
and still the facts are that maybe
00:13:17 ►
80% of human beings alive in this planet
00:13:19 ►
today don’t have a
00:13:21 ►
don’t really, they have been totally
00:13:23 ►
brainwashed to feel there’s no such thing as evolution.
00:13:27 ►
And that’s one of the things that is amazing today.
00:13:35 ►
The junk information that we’re being inundated with.
00:13:42 ►
The cloud, the atmosphere, the smog of disinformation,
00:13:47 ►
of just plain kind of dumb lunacy that’s being peddled.
00:13:52 ►
You know, you watch the news, ABC, NBC, Time magazine.
00:13:55 ►
I mean, they really, you know, Reagan is a certifiable lunatic. I mean, really, you know, Reagan is a certifiable lunatic.
00:14:06 ►
I mean, really, you know.
00:14:10 ►
Without being partisan here, Tip O’Neill and Andropov and the rest of them are too.
00:14:14 ►
I mean, here we are hurtling into the 21st century, moving from the industrial society
00:14:20 ►
into the knowledge information processing society with the credible opportunities for growth and
00:14:26 ►
and discovery and change and just on the paper today we’ve diverted a fleet to granite Grenada
00:14:35 ►
we got another fleet that’s outside Beirut you know bombing the Druze. You didn’t know where it were with the Druze, did you?
00:14:49 ►
You don’t even know who the Druze are, do you?
00:14:52 ►
Do they have big noses or small noses or what? I don’t know. There must be something wrong with them.
00:14:59 ►
We’ve got another fleet going down to the Persian Gulf. Not to mention Central America.
00:15:07 ►
Well, anyway, what I do,
00:15:12 ►
and I really am in a kind of tricky position today
00:15:18 ►
because I don’t want to, you know,
00:15:22 ►
this is a very sophisticated group
00:15:23 ►
and I don’t want to bore you or to kind of slow you down.
00:15:33 ►
On the other hand,
00:15:34 ►
I could tell you a little bit
00:15:36 ►
about what I talk to other audiences about
00:15:38 ►
so you could maybe give me a little coaching
00:15:39 ►
maybe after a while.
00:15:41 ►
I’ll talk for about 45 minutes.
00:15:43 ►
We’ll have a 10-minute intermission
00:15:44 ►
and then we’ll have question question-and-answer period.
00:15:46 ►
Bob Diltz from Behavior Engineering
00:15:49 ►
is going to come up
00:15:50 ►
and I hope Frank Byron will come up too.
00:15:52 ►
And we’ll have a discussion
00:15:53 ►
about the evolution of intelligence
00:15:55 ►
and how we can move the thing forward
00:15:57 ►
more effectively and efficiently.
00:16:03 ►
I’m making tremendous fun of Orthodox fundamental Christianity. Now,
00:16:14 ►
you know, I do this with good will. I have no bad feelings about anything, but I think
00:16:19 ►
this crock of nonsense is really something that should be examined.
00:16:33 ►
I mean, according to the Judeo-Christian Bible, the entire… And I’m not talking about Christianity.
00:16:35 ►
I’m talking about the Bible.
00:16:36 ►
I’m talking about their theory of evolution.
00:16:39 ►
How many of you heard me talk here two years ago at that little place downtown?
00:16:47 ►
Can I have a show of hands?
00:16:49 ►
Okay, well, I’m going to repeat myself a little bit.
00:16:54 ►
According to the Judeo-Christian theory of evolution,
00:16:57 ►
the whole thing was started 4,010 years ago by a man, naturally it’s a man,
00:17:06 ►
named Jehovah.
00:17:09 ►
And the thing that’s amazing about it is that they don’t fool around.
00:17:11 ►
They just lay it right out.
00:17:13 ►
Jehovah is a mean,
00:17:15 ►
nasty,
00:17:17 ►
vengeful,
00:17:18 ►
paranoid,
00:17:20 ►
mafia,
00:17:21 ►
copper,
00:17:22 ►
condominium owner.
00:17:26 ►
He says,
00:17:27 ►
Me, I made it all.
00:17:31 ►
I made the stars and the planet
00:17:34 ►
and creepy crawly things
00:17:35 ►
and I made this ultimate Mediterranean resort,
00:17:41 ►
Garden of Eden for you, Adam and Eve.
00:17:45 ►
You can do whatever you want here. Go for it.
00:17:50 ►
Except there are two food and drug regulations.
00:17:58 ►
See this tree here?
00:18:02 ►
Now, do you believe this?
00:18:04 ►
I mean, do you believe this I mean do you believe this
00:18:05 ►
this tree is the tree of knowledge
00:18:09 ►
and you are
00:18:10 ►
the fruit of it is a controlled substance
00:18:13 ►
and you are forbidden by law
00:18:18 ►
to ingest or in any way absorb
00:18:20 ►
because if you do
00:18:20 ►
the blinds of good and evil
00:18:22 ►
and all the polarity thinking
00:18:24 ►
will fall from your eyes
00:18:26 ►
and you’ll become a god like me.
00:18:30 ►
Adam said, well, I don’t want to do that, sir.
00:18:34 ►
Then Joe said, now the tree over here is also a controlled substance.
00:18:42 ►
That’s the tree of life extension.
00:18:44 ►
That’s the tree of DNA life extension inoculations.
00:18:48 ►
And if you mess around with that,
00:18:50 ►
if you eat of that,
00:18:51 ►
you’ll live forever and become a god like me.
00:18:53 ►
And you don’t want to do that.
00:18:54 ►
And of course, Adam said, no, sir.
00:18:59 ►
Well, it comes as no surprise to you
00:19:01 ►
when I tell you that
00:19:02 ►
the Judeo-Christian Bible
00:19:04 ►
is not a women’s liberation tract.
00:19:07 ►
They lay all the blame on Eve, that hip-wiggling Eve.
00:19:15 ►
She caused all the trouble.
00:19:16 ►
A good old straight arrow atom would still be in the Garden of Eden if it weren’t for Eve.
00:19:22 ►
As soon as Jehovah jumped in his squad car and went back to headquarters,
00:19:29 ►
she ate of the fruit, the intelligence increased fruit, the new form of Adam or Eve or MDA
00:19:41 ►
or God knows what.
00:19:42 ►
Sasa Shogun’s name is going to come up for it the new version of the drug
00:19:46 ►
that’s going to increase our intelligence
00:19:47 ►
and make us feel the way we should
00:19:50 ►
loving, clear, outgoing
00:19:52 ►
happy people
00:19:53 ►
anyway
00:19:53 ►
Eve ate thereof
00:19:58 ►
and gave it to Adam
00:19:59 ►
and of course
00:19:59 ►
then it becomes like a
00:20:02 ►
prime time television show
00:20:05 ►
the sirens go
00:20:08 ►
the first narcotics bust in history
00:20:11 ►
is
00:20:13 ►
Jehovah busting Adam and Eve
00:20:16 ►
for eating of the fruit
00:20:18 ►
of the tree of knowledge
00:20:21 ►
now I mean
00:20:21 ►
how clear could it get
00:20:24 ►
it’s really spelled out isn’t it of the tree of knowledge. Now, I mean, how clear could it get?
00:20:27 ►
Really spelled out, isn’t it?
00:20:30 ►
The Darwinian theory of evolution, which came along about 100 years ago,
00:20:33 ►
is clearly an expression of the late 19th century
00:20:37 ►
British imperial colonial empire.
00:20:40 ►
Survival of the fittest.
00:20:43 ►
The tough survive.
00:20:46 ►
The tough get stronger.
00:20:48 ►
It’s the macho theory.
00:20:49 ►
Can’t blame them.
00:20:54 ►
But in the last 10 or 20 years,
00:21:00 ►
it’s been thrilling to see that the Darwinian theory of evolution is being revised.
00:21:12 ►
See, both the Judeo-Christian philosophy and the Darwinian theory of evolution imply that there’s nothing that you can do about your fate.
00:21:15 ►
Original sin, baby.
00:21:18 ►
Tough shit.
00:21:20 ►
As Bob Dylan said, you don’t know what you did, kid, but you’re going to get hit again, huh?
00:21:26 ►
You’re just, because of what Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden,
00:21:31 ►
you were born in a state of evil, and there’s nothing much you can do about it.
00:21:38 ►
There’s certainly no encouragement to increase your intelligence,
00:21:43 ►
to increase your virtue, to increase your virtue, to increase your knowledge,
00:21:46 ►
to increase your ability to compute
00:21:48 ►
and understand the situation.
00:21:51 ►
Nor does the Darwinian theory
00:21:52 ►
offer you much hope either.
00:21:54 ►
It takes 25 million years to change a fingernail
00:21:56 ►
or to do away with a vermiform appendix.
00:22:02 ►
The Bank of England and the Queen of England didn’t lose any sleep over
00:22:08 ►
the Darwinian theory of evolution. But just in the last 10 or 15 years, we’ve been inundated
00:22:14 ►
by both theories and facts from the laboratory suggesting that evolution can happen very
00:22:20 ►
quickly. The punctuated theory which is evolved from Harvard that
00:22:25 ►
when evolution happens, it happens all at once. It’s not a gradual chance, step-by-step
00:22:30 ►
thing. But when it’s time for that caterpillar to become a butterfly, whap, it happens, bang,
00:22:37 ►
all at once. And I know that everyone in this room senses that we’re at that moment in human
00:22:42 ►
history when it is moving and we sense it in our DNA and in our bones and our nervous systems. We sense it looking around us. We’re
00:22:50 ►
getting to those moments, one of those moments, those great moments in history when evolution
00:22:55 ►
is going to happen. And the glory of being alive today, being a human being today,
00:23:03 ►
is that we can understand this process,
00:23:06 ►
we can participate in it,
00:23:07 ►
we can’t change it,
00:23:08 ►
we can surf the wave
00:23:10 ►
that is going to come.
00:23:13 ►
In the seminar tomorrow,
00:23:15 ►
and to a certain extent briefly tonight,
00:23:16 ►
I want to summarize
00:23:18 ►
some of the tactics
00:23:20 ►
of how evolution works.
00:23:23 ►
Remember from the Orthodox Judeo-Christian theory,
00:23:26 ►
you’ve got no tactics as to how to change your life or revive your life, because all
00:23:31 ►
you could do is get down on your knees, baby. That’s all you could do. Nor from the Darwinian
00:23:37 ►
theory were there any tactics as to how to, well, what, survive, just get bigger and stronger,
00:23:43 ►
bigger navy, you know, kick ass down the Falklands, right?
00:23:46 ►
That’s the classic British solution.
00:23:50 ►
But if we begin to define evolution as the evolution of intelligence,
00:23:57 ►
and we begin to understand how evolution works and where we came from and the stages that we’ve been going through,
00:24:05 ►
both as species and as individuals,
00:24:08 ►
then it’s possible to start figuring out some ground rules,
00:24:12 ►
some blueprints, some how-to ABC-123 tactics
00:24:17 ►
as to how we can effectively increase our own intelligence.
00:24:24 ►
Now, the first
00:24:25 ►
tactic of evolution
00:24:28 ►
is called neoteny.
00:24:30 ►
N-E-O-T-N-O-Y
00:24:31 ►
sometimes called
00:24:32 ►
pedomorphosis.
00:24:33 ►
It’s a very
00:24:34 ►
simple concept.
00:24:35 ►
It suggests
00:24:36 ►
that evolution
00:24:37 ►
happens
00:24:38 ►
only in the
00:24:40 ►
juvenile,
00:24:41 ►
the larval,
00:24:43 ►
the adolescent,
00:24:44 ►
the pre-adult of a species.
00:24:46 ►
I’m sure many of you have heard me say this before, but it’s worth repeating when you go home tonight.
00:24:50 ►
Look up the dictionary definition of the word adult,
00:24:54 ►
and you’ll be amused and amazed to find that the word adult is the past participle of the verb to grow.
00:25:02 ►
In other words, an adult is someone who has stopped growing.
00:25:06 ►
By definition, an adult is that form of the species
00:25:09 ►
which has reached its final form.
00:25:15 ►
Now, I don’t pretend to know much about the blueprint.
00:25:20 ►
I think it’s rather audacious and reckless of people
00:25:24 ►
in our primitive, really immature,
00:25:26 ►
larval state of evolution to speculate with any dogma about where evolution is coming
00:25:31 ►
from or where we’re going.
00:25:33 ►
I know that there are certain stages ahead of us, but to make any final speculations
00:25:37 ►
is certainly premature and pompous.
00:25:40 ►
But there’s one thing I’m sure of, that the DNA code, the biological wisdom,
00:25:48 ►
the Gaia principle, the biological intelligence, God,
00:25:52 ►
I don’t care what name you want to give her.
00:26:00 ►
She does not like final forms.
00:26:02 ►
She works with juveniles.
00:26:05 ►
That’s why I spend most of my time
00:26:08 ►
lecturing and talking to and listening to
00:26:11 ►
people that are not adults.
00:26:14 ►
So one piece of advice I’d like to give you,
00:26:16 ►
and I don’t have many to give you
00:26:17 ►
because I’m not that loaded with advice,
00:26:19 ►
but one piece of evolutionary street wisdom I’d like to pass on, is that all cause avoid terminal
00:26:33 ►
adulthood.
00:26:34 ►
Nothing wrong with being an adult. I’ve played many adult roles.
00:26:47 ►
It’s very easy to put on the uniform.
00:26:52 ►
You’re an adult when you’ve stopped changing.
00:26:57 ►
So as long as you’re changing, adulthood has nothing to do with chronological age.
00:27:01 ►
Adulthood has to do with the last time you really reprogrammed your bio-computer.
00:27:07 ►
Later on tonight I’ll be defining, or I’ll be passing on to you the new definition of the human brain.
00:27:13 ►
The human brain is a network of 100 billion neurons,
00:27:18 ►
each of which has the knowledge, information, processing capacity of at least an Apple computer.
00:27:31 ►
So put your hand on your forehead and you’ve got your hand on a hundred billion—it sounded
00:27:39 ►
like Carl Sagan, don’t I? a billion. Apple computers.
00:27:46 ►
Questions immediately arise like,
00:27:47 ►
number one,
00:27:50 ►
who programmed your computers?
00:27:52 ►
And how were they programmed?
00:27:55 ►
And are you satisfied with that one program?
00:27:56 ►
Aren’t you kind of interested
00:27:57 ►
in changing the program?
00:28:03 ►
So, when it comes to defining adult, you’re as old as the last time you reprogrammed your biocomputer.
00:28:14 ►
And later on tonight and tomorrow, we’ll be discussing dozens of ways in which you can learn how to reactivate,
00:28:23 ►
access, and reprogram, re-imprint your bio-computer.
00:28:30 ►
There’s another technique of evolution, which I’ll mention briefly here because it’s not
00:28:35 ►
necessary to talk much about it here. It’s a migration. You know, for the last 4,000 years it seems obvious, it seems one thing that’s obvious,
00:28:48 ►
it’s the laws of demographic migration, that intelligence, freedom, evolution, the frontiers
00:28:55 ►
are moving in an unbroken line from east to west.
00:29:00 ►
Next time you, you know, when you look at a map, for example,
00:29:11 ►
why do they always have the north up and the south down?
00:29:18 ►
Since it’s a globe, you know, that’s a very tricky and easy way to fuck our minds up, isn’t it?
00:29:27 ►
Next time you see a map, turn it, you know, turn it so that Australia and South Africa are popping up there. Or turn it so that west is top and east is bottom.
00:29:35 ►
Then you’ll see so clearly that the farther east you go, the more authoritarianism,
00:29:43 ►
the more distrust of the individual, the more collectivism, the more traditionalism.
00:29:49 ►
The farther west you go.
00:29:51 ►
Now, you know, when I go back east to places like Boston, New York, Washington, B.C.,
00:30:01 ►
I tell them the same thing I’m telling you.
00:30:07 ►
There’s our lines on the map.
00:30:10 ►
They’re Greenwich, Pacific Mountain, Central Town. They’re not ours. They are
00:30:13 ►
centuries. Washington, B.C. is a
00:30:18 ►
Disneyland. It’s a museum. It really is.
00:30:22 ►
Here you are on the banks of the Pacific.
00:30:30 ►
All of you in this room have succeeded in deciphering the new Newtonian laws of demography, which are a body allowed any sense of freedom tends to be attracted to warm places.
00:30:50 ►
And the second law of demographic migration is that once set at west, a body tends to stay at west.
00:30:59 ►
Usually when I’m in Newark, New Jersey, I have to say,
00:31:02 ►
Hey man, you’re not going to spend the rest of your life in Newark.
00:31:07 ►
Illinois.
00:31:09 ►
From California, where do we go?
00:31:12 ►
Well, there are two options.
00:31:13 ►
We’re going to go into space, naturally.
00:31:15 ►
But also, Japan is emerging.
00:31:20 ►
And as we’ll talk later on tonight,
00:31:22 ►
and perhaps in the second half,
00:31:23 ►
we get into artificial intelligence and the fifth generation and the new concepts of knowledge information processing as the goal and the definition of human nature, we’ll realize that Japan is doing some very interesting things. intelligence is emerging in Japan and it’s wonderful to have
00:31:45 ►
a country like that as our allies
00:31:46 ►
as we look around the rest of the globe
00:31:48 ►
there’s one country that isn’t interested in
00:31:50 ►
fighting in the Falklands or the
00:31:52 ►
French are sending exocet missiles to
00:31:55 ►
the Iraqis and
00:31:56 ►
every country in Europe’s got some lousy
00:31:59 ►
cheap arms
00:32:01 ►
game going but you’ll notice the Japanese
00:32:03 ►
are interested in one thing
00:32:04 ►
knowledge processing and intelligence processing I think they’re looking for us cheap arms game going, but you’ll notice the Japanese are interested in one thing,
00:32:06 ►
knowledge processing and intelligence processing. I think they’re looking for us
00:32:08 ►
in this country to join
00:32:10 ►
them in this enterprise.
00:32:12 ►
So I don’t have to urge
00:32:14 ►
you, or I don’t have to tell you what I tell
00:32:16 ►
other audiences in the East, that if
00:32:18 ►
you find yourself depressed
00:32:20 ►
or blocked or neurotic
00:32:22 ►
or feeling that you’re
00:32:24 ►
mobile and not moving, you know,
00:32:25 ►
don’t blame your parents or your race, creed or color or whatever it is, you know, move.
00:32:32 ►
And I’m sure that most of you won’t spend the rest of your life in Santa Cruz.
00:32:38 ►
Santa Cruz is a fabulous, I think it’s one of the most interesting cities, towns in the world.
00:32:44 ►
I wouldn’t call it Fats Lane.
00:32:48 ►
But it’s a pulsing generator of high intelligence and higher consciousness.
00:32:59 ►
What I’m going to mention now is one of the most interesting things I’ve learned in the last year.
00:33:07 ►
It’s the concept of generation.
00:33:09 ►
I first read about this in a book by Landon Y. Jones called Great Expectations.
00:33:17 ►
It’s the concept that the generation now that you belong to
00:33:21 ►
is probably one of the most important things in your life.
00:33:25 ►
Have you ever watched, you know, as you drive along
00:33:27 ►
or as you walk along or as you
00:33:29 ►
swim along, you look up
00:33:31 ►
in the sky or as you
00:33:33 ►
float along or
00:33:34 ►
God knows how you get around here in Santa Cruz
00:33:37 ►
as you levitate
00:33:39 ►
along.
00:33:42 ►
You notice how a flock
00:33:43 ►
of birds moves, you know, and we’ve all been totally entranced that way. Or a flock of birds moves?
00:33:46 ►
You know, incredible.
00:33:48 ►
We’ve all been totally entranced that way.
00:33:49 ►
Or a school of fish.
00:33:52 ►
Well, that’s the way to think of generations.
00:33:56 ►
And just for a show of hands here,
00:33:57 ►
I’d like to have a show of hands.
00:33:59 ►
How many of you in this room were born between the years 1946 and 64?
00:34:02 ►
Could I have a show of hands?
00:34:03 ►
Yeah, see, we’re doing…
00:34:04 ►
You’re members of what’s called
00:34:06 ►
the baby boom generation
00:34:07 ►
or the post-war generation
00:34:09 ►
or the post-Hiroshima generation
00:34:12 ►
or the first knowledge,
00:34:15 ►
intelligence,
00:34:16 ►
processing information.
00:34:18 ►
You’re a different species, I think.
00:34:20 ►
Most everyone agrees about that.
00:34:22 ►
Because until you guys came along, we didn’t understand how important generation is.
00:34:27 ►
The very fact that you belong to this generation means that you are a member of a flock that’s moving.
00:34:32 ►
And just like those birds in the flock, they don’t even know they belong to that flock.
00:34:36 ►
They don’t even know sometimes why they’re moving, but they are moving.
00:34:39 ►
And that’s the way to understand your generational power.
00:34:42 ►
Because what happened in 1946 until 1964 is one of the great
00:34:47 ►
miracles of recorded human history. Something almost impossible happened. The birth rate doubled.
00:34:56 ►
And instead of about 36 million of you, we got 76 million of you. That’s 40 million more mouths and bottoms than we’d expected.
00:35:08 ►
You know, the demographers said, in industrial societies, birth rate is going down.
00:35:14 ►
So they figured after World War II, G.I. Joe would come home, you know, flambam,
00:35:18 ►
a few babies would be born, but then it would drop.
00:35:22 ►
That did not happen.
00:35:27 ►
During those 18 years, there were
00:35:34 ►
76 million of you born. Now you simply can’t let loose that number of people without totally
00:35:42 ►
changing a culture. And you have. The history of the last half of the 20th century is the history of the baby boom. And at each stage of your career, you have changed society in exactly the way it had to be changed to fit your needs.
00:35:53 ►
And why do I say your needs?
00:35:54 ►
Because you’re a different generation.
00:35:57 ►
You’re the Dr. Spock generation.
00:35:59 ►
You’re the demand-feeding generation.
00:36:02 ►
Now, I know Frank probably remembers,
00:36:06 ►
I remember,
00:36:07 ►
after World War II,
00:36:10 ►
we all read Dr. Spock.
00:36:12 ►
Dr. Spock said something that’s so amazing,
00:36:15 ►
and of course,
00:36:16 ►
he was just an instrument,
00:36:17 ►
he probably didn’t know what he was doing,
00:36:19 ►
he was just,
00:36:19 ►
he was expressing as Bob Dylan did
00:36:21 ►
and John Lennon did,
00:36:22 ►
and as we all do,
00:36:23 ►
he was simply expressing a message that had to be spoken. But he put out lines that are absolutely staggering in
00:36:30 ►
their implications. He said, treat your children as individuals.
00:36:41 ►
For two or three or four thousand years, if you know Christian Bible and things,
00:36:48 ►
your children are born sinners, mean, horrible animals.
00:36:52 ►
Beat them, knock them, club them, ABC, catechism.
00:36:54 ►
My father, oh my God, you know, Hail Mary.
00:36:56 ►
Beat them out, they’re animals.
00:37:00 ►
You know, treat them as individuals.
00:37:07 ►
They went totally against every precept of religion, of human nature.
00:37:11 ►
He also said, you know, feed them when they’re hungry.
00:37:21 ►
Now right there, there was a prelude.
00:37:30 ►
There was a precognition. There was an anticipation of the move from the industrial society to the knowledge society.
00:37:33 ►
In industrial society, you’re goddamn right.
00:37:35 ►
You’ve got to feed them at 8 o’clock.
00:37:36 ►
You’ve got to get them at their factory at 9 o’clock. You’ve got to be there until 12, 12 to 12.30.
00:37:39 ►
Then you eat, and then they get back on that line.
00:37:41 ►
Then they go home at 6 o’clock, 5 o’clock, bang.
00:37:43 ►
They drink that six-pack of beer. They go to bed, and 9 o’clock the next morning they’re back there, right?
00:37:49 ►
This is demand feeding.
00:37:52 ►
The drug, of course, the drug of choice is booze.
00:37:56 ►
Booze isn’t going to, you know, you’re going to feel so bad the next day when you’re welding,
00:38:01 ►
you’re not going to be thinking about alternate realities.
00:38:03 ►
the next day when you’re welding, you’re not going to be thinking about alternate realities.
00:38:16 ►
Visionary quest. Joseph Campbell, what? Really? You were the first post-Hero Shima generation,
00:38:21 ►
the first generation that knew in your bones there could never, never, I’m sorry, Ronnie and Tipone but there can never be another World War.
00:38:26 ►
You were the first electronic generation. When you left the crib, crawled across the room,
00:38:33 ►
when you were three, four, five years old, your chubby little baby hands,
00:38:37 ►
started working with the boob tube, started dialing and tooling realities.
00:38:42 ►
By the time you were five, you had experienced more realities, more perspectives, more historical landscapes, more dramas, more melodramas, more comedy, you name it.
00:38:53 ►
You experienced a hundred times more of life’s possibilities than the most widely traveled, sophisticated sultan emperor of the preceding century. So the history of the
00:39:08 ►
50s, the history of the 50s is just your generation, you know, goofy, oh, because it was all for
00:39:16 ►
you. Wheaties are the Brexit champion for you. Pesacola for you because you’re the champ.
00:39:22 ►
No, Coca-Cola because you’re the best one on the block.
00:39:25 ►
Davey, Coonskin caps, right?
00:39:28 ►
We did it all for you.
00:39:29 ►
We doubled the nursery schools.
00:39:32 ►
We doubled the
00:39:34 ►
hula hoop factories.
00:39:36 ►
When you got to high school, we doubled the high school.
00:39:38 ►
We doubled the colleges. The big boom,
00:39:40 ►
the enormous boom, you know,
00:39:41 ►
in education in this country came
00:39:43 ►
in the mid-60s, 70s. Why? For you. They talk about the 60s, you know, in education in this country came in the mid-60s, 70s.
00:39:45 ►
Why? For you.
00:39:46 ►
They talk about the 60s, you know.
00:39:49 ►
The 60s is a concept that really doesn’t exist except, you know, people say,
00:39:53 ►
oh, yeah, the 60s.
00:39:54 ►
Well, thank God the 60s are over.
00:39:57 ►
Jeez, what an insane time that was, right?
00:40:02 ►
People running around, you know, being themselves.
00:40:09 ►
sane time that was, right? People running around, you know, being themselves. The 60s is simply the time when the baby boom generation hit high school and college. And you were
00:40:15 ►
trained for excellence. You were trained to expect the best. You were trained to be treated
00:40:21 ►
as individuals. You weren’t going to be pushed. So naturally, you didn’t want the old
00:40:25 ►
hypocritical sex mores
00:40:27 ►
when co-eds were locked away
00:40:29 ►
like nuns.
00:40:31 ►
And there were two ways
00:40:32 ►
of fucking.
00:40:34 ►
Face-to-face,
00:40:35 ►
white-son missionary
00:40:36 ►
when you’re married,
00:40:37 ►
or nun.
00:40:39 ►
You were not about to accept,
00:40:41 ►
as good consumers,
00:40:43 ►
you were not about to accept
00:40:44 ►
that sleazy war in Vietnam, nor the draft.
00:40:48 ►
So that the 60s and 70s were a time when you simply burst through American culture, changing every aspect of it.
00:40:55 ►
So you look around now, Wall Street brokers have long hair, and you can wear whatever you want,
00:41:01 ►
and talk about unisex, multisex, My God, it’s whatever, you know, whatever.
00:41:07 ►
We’re certainly shaking it up.
00:41:09 ►
You know what your 60s, what your generation did,
00:41:13 ►
and nobody gets any credit for that.
00:41:14 ►
You had no leaders.
00:41:15 ►
Dylan was right.
00:41:16 ►
No fellow leaders.
00:41:17 ►
Watch your parking meters.
00:41:18 ►
The total, the total genetic avalanche, tidal wave of expectation for excellence and change in something new.
00:41:29 ►
No one’s telling you what to do.
00:41:30 ►
There are a few of us around the sideline acting as cheerleaders.
00:41:33 ►
But what you did, you took the Johnson-Nixon administrations at the height of American power and influence.
00:41:41 ►
You just turned it upside down.
00:41:43 ►
They simply couldn’t deal with it.
00:41:46 ►
76 million people, you know, wanting to think for themselves.
00:41:50 ►
Now, the 70s was a period when this generation kind of settled down to get jobs,
00:42:01 ►
pursue excellence, learn crafts, learn skills, have children, or not have children, get your head together.
00:42:13 ►
There’s a tremendous boom in the 1970s in what?
00:42:17 ►
Personal health, personal fitness, all these gurus, swamis, est, you know, you name it, Arika.
00:42:24 ►
There were a thousand different
00:42:26 ►
ways of improving yourself. Inner potential. Inner potential, yeah, that’s the key. Inner
00:42:31 ►
potential. A life of growth. A life of development. A life of change. That’s the bottom line to
00:42:38 ►
it. And of course you were sampling the different ways, the different methods of change. And
00:42:43 ►
of course you got into funny places, put on funny costumes,
00:42:48 ►
and be an ass of yourself at times.
00:42:49 ►
So what? Nothing wrong with that.
00:42:52 ►
Learn as you move along.
00:42:54 ►
The interesting thing about your generation is,
00:42:58 ►
and this is the profound thing that must be confronted tonight,
00:43:03 ►
your generation has had no political influence whatsoever.
00:43:09 ►
The reason for that was because you were too young.
00:43:12 ►
In 1966, you were between the ages of 2 and 20.
00:43:19 ►
In 1968, you couldn’t possibly…
00:43:22 ►
You could protest and get beat up at Chicago,
00:43:24 ►
but you weren’t old enough to vote.
00:43:27 ►
The 1976 election, that was Carter versus, what was his name?
00:43:37 ►
That didn’t excite young people.
00:43:44 ►
In the 80 election between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter,
00:43:50 ►
you know, the hype, the propaganda, the straight-out media lying.
00:43:53 ►
They say that there was a Reagan landslide.
00:44:00 ►
Reagan was elected by 27% of the eligible voters.
00:44:03 ►
That meant that if Reagan were running against none of the above,
00:44:07 ►
none of the above would have got 73% and Reagan would have got 27%
00:44:09 ►
something like that
00:44:10 ►
and one thing that was very interesting about the 80 election
00:44:14 ►
young people did not vote
00:44:16 ►
a certain percentage, I’m not totally sure
00:44:20 ►
many young people voted for Anderson
00:44:23 ►
simply because you were not interested totally sure, many young people voted for Anderson. Right?
00:44:25 ►
Yeah.
00:44:30 ►
Simply because you were not interested in the old partisan politics of dinosaur donkey Democrats like Tip O’Neill
00:44:34 ►
and dinosaur elephants like Ronald Reagan and Alexander Hague and so forth.
00:44:43 ►
I want to say two things before I stop for intermission
00:44:46 ►
about other generations.
00:44:49 ►
I don’t want to leave anyone
00:44:51 ►
with the feeling
00:44:52 ►
that I’m trying to
00:44:55 ►
set up a generation gap here
00:44:58 ►
or pose older people
00:45:02 ►
against younger people.
00:45:03 ►
I repeat it
00:45:04 ►
and I’ll repeat it again and I’ll repeat it again,
00:45:05 ►
and I’ll repeat it several times
00:45:07 ►
before the night is over.
00:45:08 ►
You are as old as the last time
00:45:10 ►
you reprogrammed your brain
00:45:11 ►
or changed your mind.
00:45:12 ►
You’re also as old,
00:45:14 ►
you’re as old as the people you hang out with.
00:45:18 ►
And at the end of a week,
00:45:19 ►
just add up the people
00:45:20 ►
that you really hung out with.
00:45:22 ►
Now, by hung out with,
00:45:23 ►
I don’t mean that you’re lecturing to people.
00:45:28 ►
I’m not talking about Ronald Reagan in the Rose Garden
00:45:30 ►
giving a sermon to a Girl Scout troop from Mississippi.
00:45:34 ►
I wouldn’t call that hanging out, Ronnie.
00:45:38 ►
I mean, you know, getting on down,
00:45:41 ►
looking at each other and learning from each other
00:45:43 ►
and really eyeballing it and learning, really learning from each other.
00:45:48 ►
You know, in a sense, here’s how I see it.
00:45:51 ►
You know, and this is probably a wide-eyed druid, hallucinogenic, intoxicated Dublin vision, Frank,
00:46:01 ►
that I see each generation as like a flock of birds up there, you know.
00:46:06 ►
And I think, you know, you can jump from one flock to another.
00:46:11 ►
I have a great time talking to people that are my age and older.
00:46:15 ►
We can talk about World War II.
00:46:16 ►
We can talk about, I can talk about alcohol prohibition.
00:46:22 ►
And speakeasies with great fun
00:46:26 ►
I enjoy every second of it
00:46:28 ►
I think it’s possible
00:46:30 ►
there’s a new concept we’re working on
00:46:32 ►
there’s a concept of geographical migration
00:46:35 ►
like you’re born in Sicily
00:46:37 ►
you know and you want to get freedom
00:46:40 ►
you want to grow, you want to evolve
00:46:41 ►
so you get on that boat and you come to New York
00:46:44 ►
or you come to San Francisco or or it’s our duty, really, to kind of, just as you
00:46:49 ►
move from, you go to India, you go to back east to Boston, I mean, it’s our duty to learn
00:46:55 ►
from each other from different generations.
00:46:57 ►
And there’s another generation I haven’t mentioned, and I’ve got to, and it’s those that are born
00:47:02 ►
after 1964.
00:47:05 ►
and I’ve got to, and it’s those that are born after 1964.
00:47:10 ►
Remember the baby boom lasted for 18 years, 1946 to 64. 1964, zap, the baby bus started.
00:47:14 ►
How come?
00:47:16 ►
How come?
00:47:18 ►
Certainly people didn’t stop making it after 64.
00:47:22 ►
Well, you begin to figure it out.
00:47:24 ►
By 1964, the first cohort, the first wave of the
00:47:29 ►
baby boom generation had reached the age of 18. And for the first time, I don’t know, maybe in
00:47:37 ►
human history, I don’t know, maybe the Egyptians did it, I don’t know, but for the first time in a long time,
00:47:41 ►
for the first time in a long time.
00:47:43 ►
The members of your generation did not conceive blindly.
00:47:46 ►
They did not breed blindly.
00:47:49 ►
Automatically, you see,
00:47:50 ►
before that for thousands
00:47:51 ►
and thousands of generations,
00:47:52 ►
the minute you got a woman
00:47:54 ►
or a girl got to that period
00:47:56 ►
of puberty,
00:47:57 ►
the minute a boy dropped
00:47:58 ►
those testicles
00:47:59 ►
and got hair in his arm,
00:48:00 ►
got that big light,
00:48:01 ►
boy, girl, bang, bang, bang,
00:48:03 ►
started breeding blindly,
00:48:04 ►
rut animals
00:48:05 ►
your generation is a first generation history that had demand breeding
00:48:10 ►
you know the average the average uh baby boom couple say well um should we have a baby this
00:48:20 ►
year or maybe the wife will finish law school or medical school or let’s
00:48:27 ►
buy the Porsche and we’ll have the baby the next year or let’s go around the
00:48:31 ►
world or let’s take a year off and just vegetate in Santa Cruz
00:48:39 ►
definitely a deliberate program to make us feel depressed, make us feel that the apocalypse is coming
00:48:47 ►
and there’s no…
00:48:47 ►
And anyway, it doesn’t do any good.
00:48:50 ►
You know, if you don’t have Reagan,
00:48:51 ►
you’re going to have Mondale
00:48:53 ►
and my God, you know,
00:48:54 ►
or McGovern or what.
00:48:55 ►
So the whole message,
00:48:57 ►
you’re being given that message
00:48:58 ►
in every newscast,
00:49:00 ►
in every article,
00:49:01 ►
in every editorial,
00:49:03 ►
in every magazine.
00:49:04 ►
It doesn’t… There’s nothing you can do about it.
00:49:06 ►
We’re all screw-blued and tattooed.
00:49:08 ►
Now, that’s not accidental.
00:49:10 ►
And I want to give you some good news.
00:49:13 ►
I’m traveling around the country a lot,
00:49:15 ►
and I really talk to literally thousands every month of people like this,
00:49:21 ►
and we have a long question-and-answer period and debates, as we will tonight.
00:49:24 ►
of people like this, and we have a long question-and-answer period and debates, as we will tonight.
00:49:34 ►
And I want to tell you that there are 20 million, maybe 30 million, maybe even 40 million, I want to be scientific here, reasonably intelligent, enlightened people in America.
00:49:42 ►
enlightened people in America.
00:49:44 ►
Now,
00:49:46 ►
I’m not talking Buddhas.
00:49:48 ►
You know,
00:49:50 ►
I’m talking about people that have that basic sense
00:49:51 ►
of multiple reality.
00:49:53 ►
Yeah.
00:49:54 ►
That you can change your program.
00:49:56 ►
And okay,
00:49:57 ►
you were born an Arab
00:49:58 ►
or you were born a Jew
00:49:59 ►
or you were born a Catholic.
00:50:00 ►
That’s all right.
00:50:00 ►
I can dig that.
00:50:01 ►
I can put that program
00:50:02 ►
and I can pull it out.
00:50:03 ►
But God,
00:50:04 ►
I’m not going to run my whole life.
00:50:05 ►
I’m not going to kill you
00:50:06 ►
and everyone else
00:50:06 ►
on the basis of that
00:50:07 ►
old program
00:50:08 ►
laid on my
00:50:09 ►
little floppy,
00:50:10 ►
sloppy disc
00:50:10 ►
that some primitive person
00:50:13 ►
4,000 years ago
00:50:14 ►
laid on the,
00:50:15 ►
you know,
00:50:16 ►
there’s that basic wisdom.
00:50:18 ►
The younger generation today,
00:50:20 ►
they’re not conservative.
00:50:21 ►
They’re not liberal.
00:50:22 ►
They’re basically realistic.
00:50:24 ►
They’re basically practical. They’re basically good humor. They’re basically conservative. They’re not liberal. They’re basically realistic. They’re basically practical. They’re basically good-humored. They’re basically open-minded. Now, I’m not
00:50:29 ►
just slathering you with goodwill and buttering you up and stroking you, because there’s probably
00:50:36 ►
just as high a percentage of assholes among you as any other generation. But it’s that
00:50:44 ►
flock of birds, see? You don’t even know, but you’re moving. You’re moving
00:50:48 ►
in the right direction. You’re moving away from the narrowness and the polarity and the hatred
00:50:52 ►
and the single programming of the past. So we’re in the golden age of human civilization,
00:50:58 ►
particularly in America and particularly in California. We’re in the golden age. We’re aware
00:51:04 ►
of a lot of the problems, but at least we’re aware of them. We’re in the golden age. We’re aware of a lot of the problems, but at least we’re aware of them.
00:51:06 ►
We’re in the golden age,
00:51:07 ►
and in the last half of this program,
00:51:09 ►
with your help,
00:51:10 ►
we’ll figure out a way
00:51:11 ►
that within two or three years
00:51:13 ►
we can take this thing platinum.
00:51:15 ►
Thank you.
00:51:15 ►
Thank you.
00:51:38 ►
Okay, I heard Dr. Leary speak at the University of Rhode Island in 1968,
00:51:42 ►
and I’d like to say I’m really glad to see that he’s still fired up.
00:51:48 ►
But my question is, Dr. Leary, do you still recommend the use of LSD?
00:51:57 ►
The question is, do I still recommend the use of LSD?
00:51:59 ►
I’ve never recommended the use of any drug.
00:52:06 ►
I personally have used and intend in the future to use
00:52:08 ►
any and every drug available
00:52:09 ►
I intend to do this intelligently
00:52:18 ►
prudently
00:52:19 ►
thoughtfully
00:52:20 ►
always, hopefully as part of a
00:52:24 ►
life plan.
00:52:26 ►
Oh, I may slip now and then, you know.
00:52:27 ►
I may take a toot too late and bore someone at three in the morning,
00:52:33 ►
or I may have an extra martini on Friday night and make a vulgar ass of myself.
00:52:40 ►
I’ve been known to do that. Right, Frank?
00:52:41 ►
I have a brief question.
00:52:44 ►
But I don’t advocate the use of drugs for anyone.
00:52:50 ►
Number one, there’s no drug problem in America today.
00:52:53 ►
There are a million problems, but the problem of, particularly, there’s no illegal drug problem.
00:52:59 ►
You know, the thing about Nancy Reagan, Nancy’s image went down because of all the designer gowns.
00:53:05 ►
So the PR people said, Nancy, we’ve got to do something to raise your image.
00:53:08 ►
So we’re going to give you your own war.
00:53:14 ►
She said, oh, goody, my very own war.
00:53:17 ►
Who, the Druze?
00:53:19 ►
No, we’re going to give you a war on people that won’t fight back.
00:53:24 ►
Young Americans.
00:53:26 ►
I don’t know how much we want to get into drugs.
00:53:28 ►
I really seriously believe that the average person in this room is more sophisticated about drugs
00:53:34 ►
and can use drugs’ intelligence and can make selection and use the options that are there
00:53:40 ►
a hundred times better than we Ph.D. psychologists could 20 years ago.
00:53:46 ►
I have total confidence in young people’s ability.
00:53:49 ►
Now, in any group of people,
00:53:52 ►
there are going to be 10% of people who are losers.
00:53:57 ►
You remember when you were in junior high school
00:53:58 ►
or in high school or in college,
00:53:59 ►
you can look around your neighbor,
00:54:00 ►
you know there are some people
00:54:01 ►
that are simply going to fuck up.
00:54:04 ►
They’re going to fuck up with money
00:54:06 ►
or with kiting checks
00:54:08 ►
or with gambling
00:54:08 ►
or with sex
00:54:09 ►
or with God knows what
00:54:11 ►
you know
00:54:11 ►
they’re going to
00:54:12 ►
and drugs are an easy way
00:54:15 ►
so the 10% of the people who screw up
00:54:19 ►
it’s not the problem of the drugs
00:54:21 ►
I knew John Belushi
00:54:22 ►
he was at my house
00:54:23 ►
three days before he died
00:54:24 ►
and John he was a lovely, wonderful person,
00:54:26 ►
but he was headed like a 10,000-ton truck towards disaster.
00:54:33 ►
You remember that animal house where the sorority girl said,
00:54:36 ►
that boy is a P-I-G pig.
00:54:40 ►
Remember that?
00:54:42 ►
Well, that was John.
00:54:43 ►
He really was he was he was
00:54:45 ►
food
00:54:45 ►
marshmallow
00:54:46 ►
experience
00:54:48 ►
music
00:54:48 ►
bumping
00:54:49 ►
dancing
00:54:50 ►
bodies
00:54:51 ►
liquor
00:54:52 ►
wine
00:54:53 ►
whiskey
00:54:54 ►
drugs
00:54:54 ►
you name it
00:54:55 ►
that was him
00:54:56 ►
so it was not drugs
00:54:56 ►
but I don’t know
00:54:58 ►
I don’t advocate
00:54:58 ►
never have advocated
00:54:59 ►
any
00:55:00 ►
I’ll say
00:55:01 ►
one more thing about drugs
00:55:02 ►
and then let’s not talk about drugs anymore
00:55:03 ►
let’s talk about
00:55:04 ►
Frank can but let’s talk about computers
00:55:06 ►
the sensible thing to do about drugs is this
00:55:11 ►
get yourself a really good dealer
00:55:16 ►
I mean
00:55:23 ►
you know, you had a toothache,
00:55:27 ►
some slimy character in an alley said,
00:55:29 ►
hey, man, come here, I got a little ticket.
00:55:30 ►
You wouldn’t go in an alley, you know.
00:55:32 ►
If you had one of your appendix out, you know,
00:55:35 ►
you wouldn’t, some guy down on the west end, east end,
00:55:39 ►
you know, you wouldn’t go there, you know.
00:55:43 ►
More important than your lawyer. How do you find a lawyer? You go to your friends, you wouldn’t go there, you know. More important than your lawyer.
00:55:46 ►
How do you find a lawyer?
00:55:47 ►
You go to your friends.
00:55:48 ►
You check them out.
00:55:49 ►
You talk to him.
00:55:50 ►
You know, you experience him.
00:55:51 ►
You check him out.
00:55:53 ►
A dentist.
00:55:53 ►
A dentist, you just lose a root canal, right?
00:55:57 ►
But a dealer, you know, is the most important.
00:56:00 ►
He’s going to be influencing your brain.
00:56:03 ►
And I’m not urging anyone to take drugs.
00:56:06 ►
I’m saying if you take drugs, use the same intelligence there that you would if you’re
00:56:10 ►
going to have a masseur or an orthopedic doctor or a gerontologist. And let’s be frank about it.
00:56:18 ►
Drugs are neither good nor bad. They are. And there are going to be more of them, and all the
00:56:22 ►
indices of use are going up and up and up, and they’re going to continue to go up
00:56:25 ►
because they’re moving from the industrial society
00:56:27 ►
to the brain society.
00:56:30 ►
And there are going to be more and more and better drugs,
00:56:32 ►
and Sasha Shogun and people like Bruce Eisner
00:56:35 ►
and his friends are involved in research.
00:56:40 ►
But don’t abuse drugs.
00:56:42 ►
Please, please don’t abuse drugs. More than anyone else in the world, I’m against the abuse abuse drugs. Please, please don’t abuse drugs.
00:56:46 ►
More than anyone else in the world,
00:56:47 ►
I’m against the abuse of drugs.
00:56:48 ►
Number one,
00:56:49 ►
because I’m going to get blamed for it.
00:56:53 ►
Frank?
00:56:54 ►
I’d like to have Frank talk.
00:56:56 ►
Well, I have a brief question.
00:56:57 ►
I don’t want to buck the line,
00:56:58 ►
but this will take only a second.
00:57:01 ►
Tim, you can construe this
00:57:02 ►
as related to your views of evolution
00:57:04 ►
if you wish,
00:57:05 ►
but do you think Adam has a future?
00:57:10 ►
Yeah, this is not so much as a question for Tim,
00:57:13 ►
but I guess maybe a generational question,
00:57:15 ►
but how does it feel to be 63 years old tonight?
00:57:19 ►
I don’t know if anybody was aware of it, but tonight’s Tim’s birthday. Ten years ago, on my 53rd birthday, I was
00:57:39 ►
in the visiting room of Folsom Prison, and my birthday cake was a candy bar with a match on it. And in 1971,
00:57:54 ►
my birthday was in Algiers. Eldridge Cleaver gave me a.45 Magnum, which I immediately
00:58:04 ►
gave back to him
00:58:05 ►
so
00:58:06 ►
looking back over my birthdays
00:58:08 ►
this is one of the greatest
00:58:09 ►
of all time
00:58:10 ►
and I thank you for sharing it
00:58:11 ►
a lot of what
00:58:20 ►
Tim has said tonight
00:58:22 ►
seems very complimentary
00:58:23 ►
to the people I guess
00:58:24 ►
of my generation and I think a lot of it is right on I’m very complimentary to the people, I guess, of my generation.
00:58:25 ►
And I think a lot of it’s right on.
00:58:26 ►
I’m really glad to hear it.
00:58:28 ►
But I can’t help think about the 95% or so people in the world
00:58:33 ►
who won’t inherit this particular way
00:58:35 ►
for whatever reason, circumstances, or inability,
00:58:38 ►
or narrow-mindedness, or whatever.
00:58:40 ►
And maybe it’s some stale democratic values in me,
00:58:44 ►
but I’m wondering what we should think about that.
00:58:48 ►
The function of America,
00:58:51 ►
America, the North American continent,
00:58:53 ►
is a genetic experiment for the rest of the world.
00:58:57 ►
Right now there are still millions of immigrants
00:59:00 ►
coming to America every year.
00:59:04 ►
So when I talk about California, and I talk about coming west,
00:59:08 ►
the gene pools from all over the world are still squirting and spurting
00:59:12 ►
and pushing their ambitious ones here.
00:59:16 ►
You know, the Nobel Prize was won by Americans last week, three.
00:59:22 ►
Two of them were immigrants.
00:59:24 ►
Wasn’t that wonderful?
00:59:25 ►
One was an Indian and one was a Canadian.
00:59:29 ►
The point I’m making is that what America is supposed to do is invite freedom people from all over the world to come here to join us, a society of intelligence and knowledge and openness and success and productivity that
00:59:47 ►
will, you know, we don’t want to conquer them. We don’t want to run around disestablishing them in
00:59:53 ►
their countries. We can’t get involved in their wars. You know, Reagan’s running around. You know
01:00:00 ►
that Reagan wants to be on the side of every right-wing government, every little banana republic in the country.
01:00:08 ►
I mean, he’s against the Druze and he’s for the, what are they, the Falangists, you name it.
01:00:14 ►
He can’t even keep the score.
01:00:15 ►
I mean, America’s not supposed to be that.
01:00:17 ►
America’s supposed to be the island.
01:00:19 ►
America’s supposed to be the free place where anyone can come.
01:00:23 ►
Black, green, white, even Irish, wild Irishmen like Frank and I are allowed in here.
01:00:28 ►
We’re the global experiment to show the rest of the world, join us.
01:00:33 ►
We’re going to take the whole planet ship higher.
01:00:38 ►
That’s our function.
01:00:39 ►
Does that satisfy you?
01:00:41 ►
Well, not everybody will make it.
01:00:45 ►
What do you mean make it? What do you mean make it? Sure, not everybody will make it. What do you mean, make it?
01:00:47 ►
What do you mean, make it?
01:00:49 ►
Sure they’re going to make it.
01:00:52 ►
When we come back from space in 5,000 years,
01:00:57 ►
after we’ve taken Roy Wolfer’s longevity pills, right,
01:01:01 ►
we’ll come back to the planet Earth to pay a visit to the old territory.
01:01:03 ►
Ralph Nader will be the chief forest ranger.
01:01:07 ►
In Tehran,
01:01:08 ►
the Shiites will still be fighting the Sunnis.
01:01:10 ►
In the Gulf of Persia,
01:01:12 ►
the Persians will still be
01:01:13 ►
fighting the Arabs.
01:01:15 ►
In the Golan Heights,
01:01:17 ►
they’ll still be fighting.
01:01:18 ►
In Belfast,
01:01:20 ►
unfortunately enough,
01:01:21 ►
the Protestants will still
01:01:21 ►
be fighting the Arabs.
01:01:23 ►
They want to do it.
01:01:25 ►
They want to do it. They want to do it.
01:01:26 ►
You know, there are 200,000 people in El Salvador, in L.A. County, my county alone right now.
01:01:31 ►
Who are they?
01:01:32 ►
They’re the peace lovers.
01:01:33 ►
They’re the ones who are smart enough.
01:01:35 ►
They didn’t want to be on the side of the Catholics or the…
01:01:37 ►
Can’t keep the score straight there.
01:01:39 ►
Or the fascists.
01:01:41 ►
Yeah, they’re going to survive.
01:01:44 ►
And they’re going to produce…
01:01:46 ►
Think of gene pools here.
01:01:47 ►
Each gene pool produces its members
01:01:52 ►
that are going to keep it going.
01:01:54 ►
We’re doing it for everybody.
01:01:55 ►
We’re doing it for everybody, aren’t we?
01:01:57 ►
Noah’s Ark, we’re doing it for everybody, right?
01:02:00 ►
We’re all one unified life biological system, aren’t we?
01:02:05 ►
One tree of life, aren’t we? We’re one tree of life, aren’t we?
01:02:09 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:02:11 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:02:18 ►
Well, as much as I’d like to think that Timothy is correct
01:02:22 ►
about the function of the United States,
01:02:26 ►
I’m afraid that I’m going to have to come down on the side of reality here and state the obvious fact that
01:02:30 ►
to achieve his dream of a unified consciousness of freedom, well, we still have a very long way to go.
01:02:37 ►
But at least you and I are heading in the right direction, I think. Now, I realize that a
01:02:43 ►
significant number of our fellow Sal salonners are much younger than the
01:02:47 ►
baby boomers that Dr. Leary was talking about here, but as he said, with a cohort that large,
01:02:53 ►
we simply must pay attention to them. And for what it’s worth, I’m not part of that generation. I’m
01:02:59 ►
actually a little older than the boomers, but nonetheless, I still think of them as the children of the
01:03:05 ►
60s, the ones who demonstrated in order to end the draft, to end the American war in
01:03:11 ►
Vietnam, and to begin the long and far from unfinished struggle for civil rights.
01:03:18 ►
Those struggles, of course, continue yet today, but we have a lot to thank the baby boomers
01:03:23 ►
for in building some momentum
01:03:25 ►
on the equality fronts. But now, if they aren’t careful, these old and gray boomers risk losing
01:03:31 ►
all of their gains by becoming cranky old people who seem to be forgetting that the
01:03:36 ►
world, as always, actually belongs to the young among us. Not necessarily the young
01:03:41 ►
in body, but the young at heart. And and as you probably guessed I also really like that part about him saying
01:03:48 ►
we should avoid terminal adulthood at all costs
01:03:51 ►
that’s why I like to hang out with you because
01:03:55 ►
even if I get a little corny or goofy or tell an exaggerated story once in a while
01:04:00 ►
well that’s what kids do and you let me get away with it
01:04:03 ►
I suspect probably because you, are a kid at heart.
01:04:08 ►
You know, recently I’ve heard from some of our fellow salonners who are as old or even older than me,
01:04:14 ►
and it seems like we all still feel about 15 years old inside, at least once in a while.
01:04:20 ►
Of course, the outside is another story, but we’re not going to go into that, which I’m sure is a great relief to everyone.
01:04:28 ►
Now, as I mentioned at the beginning of this podcast, today is my 70th birthday.
01:04:34 ►
And just to get this out of the way, no, there is no way that in my wildest dreams, even as recently as my 60th birthday, that I could ever have imagined that
01:04:45 ►
this is what I’d be doing today. But on significant days like this, well, I like to be with a few of
01:04:52 ►
my close friends, and that now includes you and the rest of our salonners. In fact, being here
01:04:58 ►
with you in the Psychedelic Salon today is exactly where I most want to be. And so I’m going to close with a little remembrance about someone
01:05:08 ►
to whom I owe a great deal, my maternal grandmother.
01:05:12 ►
But to get to her role in my life, I’m first going to take you on a little
01:05:15 ►
hyperlinked trip. I don’t know about you,
01:05:20 ►
but you’ve maybe found yourself sometimes thinking about something totally unrelated,
01:05:24 ►
at least so you think, unrelated to what it was you started thinking about just a little earlier.
01:05:30 ►
Sure, we all do that, and that’s what I mean by a hyperlinked trip.
01:05:35 ►
While the beginning and ending seem pretty far apart, they are nonetheless linked together in some way.
01:05:42 ►
Now, during the last years of my mother’s life, I usually sent her flowers
01:05:45 ►
on my birthday as a way of saying thank you for bringing me to life. After all, I had very little
01:05:51 ►
to do with it and she risked a great deal. The doctor had warned her to never get pregnant due
01:05:58 ►
to her severe epilepsy and the powerful medicine that she had to take constantly to keep it at bay.
01:06:04 ►
But nonetheless, she and my dad ignored the warnings,
01:06:07 ►
and after about six years of marriage, I was on the way.
01:06:11 ►
And during my delivery, my mother suffered a grand mal seizure,
01:06:15 ►
and it took them over eight hours to stabilize her after I was born.
01:06:20 ►
But that all turned out fine, and my birth ultimately had no serious impact on her health.
01:06:25 ►
Nonetheless, I always recognized the risk that she took for me,
01:06:29 ►
and so I always tried to thank her for my birthday.
01:06:34 ►
Now that’s one part of my little story here.
01:06:36 ►
Part two begins with an encounter that I recently had on Facebook.
01:06:40 ►
As you probably realize, I don’t actually know, in person, most of my Facebook friends.
01:06:46 ►
So, when someone sends a friend request, I accept, and then I go to their page and read a little about them.
01:06:52 ►
So, the other day, when a request came in and I went to her page,
01:06:56 ►
I realized that this was not only someone that I had heard about before,
01:07:00 ►
but a person who was one of my personal heroes.
01:07:03 ►
You see, for most of my adult life, I’ve been deeply fascinated by boats and ships in the sea.
01:07:10 ►
While I was in college, I read Josh Slocum’s landmark book, Sailing Alone Around the World,
01:07:16 ►
and for many years, my dream was to follow his path.
01:07:20 ►
In college, I was on the sailing team, and during the summer months months I taught sailing at the Houston Yacht Club in Texas
01:07:26 ►
Later I sailed the Pacific in a square rigged sailing ship under the command of the famous British sea captain Alan Villiers
01:07:34 ►
Then I joined the Navy and spent a great deal more time at sea
01:07:38 ►
And even after leaving the Navy and returning to Houston where I finished law school and began practicing
01:07:44 ►
I couldn’t shake my dream of a solo sailing adventure Even after leaving the Navy and returning to Houston, where I finished law school and began practicing,
01:07:48 ►
I couldn’t shake my dream of a solo sailing adventure.
01:07:53 ►
But late one night, as I was once again talking with my mentor about this dream,
01:07:59 ►
he said it was time to put up or shut up and that he would put up the money for me to make this solo voyage.
01:08:09 ►
It was a real moment of truth for me because I then realized that, well, the bottom line for me was the fact that I simply didn’t have the courage,
01:08:16 ►
the immense amount of courage that would be required to set out all alone in a small sailboat and attempt to cross an ocean.
01:08:22 ►
Just the thought of being alone, completely isolated from human companionship for several months,
01:08:26 ►
not to mention the horrific dangers that the open ocean poses to a small boat,
01:08:30 ►
well, that reality check hit hard,
01:08:35 ►
and I realized that I just didn’t have the right stuff to undertake such a perilous journey.
01:08:38 ►
Now, fast forward to 2010,
01:08:43 ►
and I remember reading about a young German woman named Janice Jacquet,
01:08:45 ►
who was about to row,
01:08:50 ►
yes, I said row, across the Atlantic from Portugal to Barbados,
01:08:56 ►
which is a distance of around 6,500 kilometers, and she’s going to do it by herself.
01:08:58 ►
Now, just think about this.
01:09:03 ►
Month after month after month, all by yourself, often in 10-foot seas, rowing and rowing.
01:09:07 ►
There was no support boat to provide food and water,
01:09:09 ►
and most importantly, companionship.
01:09:13 ►
She was totally on her own, and yet after three months, she made it.
01:09:16 ►
I can still remember reading that she actually made it,
01:09:18 ►
and just being totally amazed.
01:09:22 ►
Needless to say, when I realized that this was the same person who had just sent me a friend request on Facebook,
01:09:26 ►
well, I was like an overjoyed little boy.
01:09:30 ►
But then, after we exchanged a couple of emails, I was even more excited to hear from her,
01:09:35 ►
because not only did she accomplish a feat that, well, I consider equivalent to climbing Mount Everest without oxygen,
01:09:42 ►
hey, get this, she’s a fellow salonner.
01:09:46 ►
You know, it’s always fun for me to hear from our fellow salonners
01:09:50 ►
who listen to these podcasts at work or in some unusual place,
01:09:54 ►
but Janice’s story is really going to be hard to beat.
01:09:58 ►
Here’s part of what she told me.
01:10:01 ►
As you know, I spent a few months alone at sea,
01:10:04 ►
and my big iPod broke on the first day.
01:10:08 ►
There was not much music left, but your podcast was on my remaining mobile.
01:10:12 ►
Must have been important to me.
01:10:14 ►
I listened to it, well, let’s say, a lot.
01:10:18 ►
While rowing, while cooking, while eating, while sleeping, during days, at night, when I was euphoric, and even in fear. Thank you. That night, after nights of sleep deprivation, and my squeaking rudder was talking to me.
01:10:45 ►
Janice, Janice, Janice, culture is not your friend.
01:10:50 ►
McKenna was with me, sort of.
01:10:53 ►
I had a lot of time to think out there, and it was very inspiring to think after listening to your podcast.
01:10:59 ►
Thank you, Lorenzo.
01:11:01 ►
This row was pretty much a three-month meditation trip.
01:11:04 ►
Eye-opening, sometimes my thoughts were overwhelming, and then your podcast was a big help.
01:11:10 ►
I was alone out there, but I realized I was not alone with my thoughts.
01:11:14 ►
Thank you. Love, Janice.
01:11:17 ►
Well, I’m sure you can imagine how deeply that touched me.
01:11:21 ►
And while I sincerely appreciate all of the kind words that Janice and the other
01:11:26 ►
slaunters have had to say about these podcasts, I think that by knowing about my relationship to
01:11:31 ►
the sea and to people who test themselves against it, well, I think that then you can understand
01:11:36 ►
why Janice’s story touches me so. But there’s one more hyperlink to click here. You see,
01:11:43 ►
when I first made this connection with Janice this week,
01:11:45 ►
I was already thinking about my birthday and, of course, about my mother. But in all these years,
01:11:52 ►
the one person that I’ve never properly honored is my mother’s mother, my grandmother,
01:11:58 ►
Margaret Junkersfeld Fox, another German woman of great personal courageage And somehow, Janice’s story brought my dear German grandmother back to my mind.
01:12:10 ►
I won’t go into her whole story now, but it is important for me to tell this small piece of it,
01:12:15 ►
since, well, ultimately I’m really doing these podcasts so that by the time my grandchildren are old enough
01:12:21 ►
to want to know a little about me and our family history, there will be some kind of a record of my personal stories.
01:12:28 ►
As you know, I always talk about being Irish, and both of my grandfathers were Irish,
01:12:33 ►
but both of my grandmothers were German, and I feel that I’ve never done justice to my German heritage.
01:12:40 ►
Someday I’ll probably tell you a few stories about my Grandpa Fox,
01:12:43 ►
and you’ll better understand why the Irish influence in our family is so strong.
01:12:48 ►
Unfortunately, it has overshadowed my equally important German heritage
01:12:53 ►
and the debt of gratitude I owe to my mother’s mother.
01:12:57 ►
You see, I was conceived a few days after the attack on Pearl Harbor,
01:13:02 ►
and not long after I was born, my dad was drafted into the Navy.
01:13:06 ►
And so my mother and I moved into her parents’ house. Before long, my dad was shipped off to
01:13:12 ►
fight the war in the South Pacific, and my mother took a job at the Elgin Watch Factory, helping
01:13:17 ►
to build bomb sites, I think. So that left my dear grandmother to become my primary caregiver.
01:13:24 ►
And so for the first three years of my life, it was my grandmother who bathed me, changed me, fed me, hugged me, and sang sweet German lullabies to me.
01:13:34 ►
Now, if you believe, as I do, that the first three to six years of one’s life is the time during which one’s character is formed,
01:13:44 ►
one’s life is the time during which one’s character is formed, then you can understand what a tremendous debt of gratitude I owe to that wonderful old German woman who had
01:13:50 ►
previously given birth to eight children of her own on a small farm in southern Illinois.
01:13:55 ►
By the time I arrived, she’d already done more than her share of child rearing, yet
01:14:00 ►
she devoted herself to caring for me at a time when my parents were both fully occupied by the war.
01:14:07 ►
Even yet today, when I hear Christmas carols sung in German,
01:14:11 ►
well, a huge wave of love just floods through me.
01:14:16 ►
And I’m certain that it’s due to this wonderful woman who gave me so much of her time
01:14:21 ►
during what turned out to be her last three years of life.
01:14:24 ►
so much of her time during what turned out to be her last three years of life.
01:14:32 ►
Sadly, Grandma Fox, as we all called her, died in October of 1945, just a few months after the end of the war and before my father returned from the Pacific.
01:14:36 ►
She had done her part and more.
01:14:38 ►
So that’s kind of a long way, I guess, of getting around to thanking two of the most
01:14:43 ►
important women in my life.
01:14:48 ►
One of German stock, and the other of German-Irish stock.
01:14:51 ►
As the good Dr. Leary said in his talk today,
01:14:55 ►
there’s a lot of mingling of genes here in the U.S., and in my case, it was a very fortunate combination indeed.
01:15:00 ►
So, thanks for listening to my little tale,
01:15:03 ►
and for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:15:08 ►
Be well, my friends.