Program Notes
Guest speaker: Dr. Maddy Corbin
Watch a video of this talk
[NOTE: All quotations are by Dr. Maddy Corbin.]
“I’ve been a nerd for a long time. That’s how you get a Ph.D.”
“At least in my experience of psychedelics, and people who take psychedelics and why they value psychedelics, is because it helps to critique you. It helps to break you down. It helps to challenge your assumptions. Isn’t that part of what we find, whether it’s in our meditation or in our psychedelic practices is it pushes you to your edge, and it teaches you about your assumptions that you are making without even realizing it. And you learn to challenge yourself.”
“How can we be as rigorous in our engagement with the outer world as we try to be with our engagement with our inner world?”
“Psychedelics don’t actually come from the counterculture. They come out of scientific laboratories.”
“And because it came through a chemical that allowed them to study it, they began to engage with spirituality in a way that was historically unprecedented. The doorway, I argue that [psychedelics] are a doorway through which spirituality entered the scientific laboratory in a way that it usually doesn’t.”
Dr. Maddy Corbin “The Politics of Knowledge in the Psychedelic Sciences” - Burning Man 2012 from Palenque Norte on Vimeo.
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Transcript
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Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic
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Salon.
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And I would like to begin today by thanking those kind souls who have either purchased a copy of my Pay What You Can audiobook,
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or who made direct donations to the salon in the past several weeks.
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You got us over to the top once again, and so we’ll have another month of the salon going out to our fellow salonners, thanks to your generosity.
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And I hope to get a thank you email off to all of you in the next few days, but I just
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want you to know how much I appreciate your help.
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Now today we are not only going to continue with the Palenque Norte lectures at the 2012
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Burning Man Festival, we’re also going to once again feature another exciting and powerful woman. www.warsaw.com at Worcester State University in Massachusetts. And if you were fortunate enough to be able to attend the recent Women’s Visionary Congress,
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well, you already know about Dr. Maddy, who earned her Ph.D. in Sociology
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and her graduate certificate in Women’s Studies in 2010 from the University of Maryland.
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Now, the first thing that really caught my attention about Dr. Maddy was the title of her dissertation,
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The first thing that really caught my attention about Dr. Maddy was the title of her dissertation,
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Spirituality in the Laboratory, Negotiating the Politics of Knowledge in the Psychedelic Sciences.
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And if you are or have ever been involved in academia,
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you know how risky it is to one’s career to even mention the word psychedelic.
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And here’s what the Women’s Visionary Congress said about her work on their webpage.
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Given the traditionally demarcated and historically hierarchical relationship between science and spirituality,
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she examined how the epistemological, ontological, and political implications
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of this unusual intersection were negotiated in these sciences.
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As a spiritual practitioner and member of consciousness-oriented communities,
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she shares a belief in the emancipatory possibilities of spirituality and consciousness transformation.
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As a feminist scholar committed to liberatory politics,
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she seeks to investigate how we can ensure that our spiritual practices
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and consciousness transformations can best be accountable to the multiple politics of
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location which constitute our lives, communities, and traditions.
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Now, while that may seem a little too scholarly for some of our fellow Saloners, I really
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think that you’re going to find Dr. Maddy’s presentations
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so down-to-earth, fascinating, and full of energy
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that, like me, you’d go back to college again
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if you were guaranteed to have all of your professors
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as interesting to listen to as Dr. Maddy.
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I really think you’re going to enjoy this,
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the second of the 2012 Palenque Norte lectures at Burning Man.
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So let’s join the audience right now as Chris Pezza introduces her.
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Dr. Maddy earned her Ph.D. in sociology and a graduate certificate in women’s studies
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from the University of Maryland. She’s going to talk to us today about the politics of
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knowledge in psychedelic studies. So without further ado,
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here’s Dr. Batty. Hello, everybody. Welcome to Burning Man. Let’s use our brains while we still
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can. So I’m really happy to be here. and I have a variety of things I want to speak about
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that hopefully we will all find interesting and have some interesting conversation this afternoon.
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Before I get started, as Pez already said, I’m going to be talking about my research on
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psychedelics. I’m a feminist scholar, feminist sociologist, and my dissertation is on psychedelics. And so I’m going to talk about that in a couple
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ways. I just was curious, though, in the audience, do I have any other academics in the audience?
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Okay. And any non-academics, I guess, is everybody else. All right. I’m just curious who I’m speaking
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to. And I’m actually
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going to be speaking in terms of my own position in kind of walking from both sides, like my
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academic life and those concerns in my hippie life. Right. And those concerns and trying to
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weave back and forth. So hopefully, you know, wherever you fit in that, you’ll find something
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interesting. So with with that, let me
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go ahead and get started. So I am speaking about my finished dissertation, which I’m
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going to burn at the temple to get that monkey off my back, because it’s done and I’m free.
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off my back because it’s done and I’m free. So the title of my dissertation, and if any of you are dissertating, you know, this burning your dissertation and being free will have meaning to
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you, right? Because doing a dissertation under the best of circumstances is one of the hardest
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things you will ever do. But I decided just to make it extra difficult to do my dissertation
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on psychedelics. Not like on psychedelics.
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That would be hard.
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Because your keyboard would be melting.
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You’d be like, oh my God.
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But I wrote my dissertation on psychedelics.
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And the title of my dissertation is Spirituality in the Laboratory.
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Negotiating the Politics of Knowledge in the Psychedelic Sciences.
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Now, there’s a variety of, I mean,
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it’s a huge dissertation, right? So there’s a variety of things that I could talk about in that. And so I’m going to spend, I’m going to do two angles for you today. The first set of
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things, because this is a lecture series, really trying to engage psychedelics specifically,
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I’m going to talk a little bit more about my
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research, like the actual kind of nuts and bolts of what I was actually tracing out,
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because I assume that many of you in here are interested in psychedelics history and might find
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that interesting. And then I’m also going to kind of talk a little bit more about the feminist side
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of things and some of the politics of the, some of the folks in the audience I just gave a mini version of in terms of the politics of knowledge. So I’m also going to sort of talk
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about that thread. So that’s our, that’s my plan for today. So how did I end up writing a dissertation
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on psychedelics? How, how did this, how did this happen? Well, like most of, I imagine like everybody in the room,
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like in your life, you occupy multiple positions and multiple roles.
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And so for myself, as a feminist, as an activist, right,
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as a, quote, hippie, and I use that term really loosely, right,
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and as an academic, for me, like all of those things are deeply connected in my life.
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And yet in our institutions that we live in, those things are deeply connected in my life. And yet in our institutions that we live in,
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those things are not connected.
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And for most of us, we end up having this sort of bifurcated,
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compartmentalized experience in our lives.
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And so for myself, I’ve been a nerd for a long time.
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That’s how you get a PhD.
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You’ve been a nerd for a long time.
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So that intellectual path and scholarship and feminism has long been a part of my life. Well, when I finished my master’s
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degree, I escaped the Midwest, right? I was going off to a PhD program. I was going to find myself,
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right? And so I moved to Berkeley, and I cut off my hair, and I started reading Marion Zimmer Bradley and discovering paganism
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and incense and having this whole transformation, which I’m sure many of you can relate to,
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starting to think more about consciousness, practicing yoga, taking up meditation,
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which teaches you to pay attention to things that you had not been paying attention to
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as we go through life on autopilot. And you begin to think about your mind and consciousness. And for me, this was still connected to sort of liberation. Isn’t that what we say?
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We practice meditation to get free. We practice yoga to get free. We take psychedelics to get
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free. We do these things to get free. And so that was like part of my experience. And I was all
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excited, like, yay, this is so beautiful. It’s all love and peace and juicy and gooey and awesome,
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right?
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But so that was one side of my life which continues to be important to me.
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And then on the other side, I’m in graduate school studying theory and philosophy and
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feminist theory and hitting books and talking about Foucault and discourse, right?
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So in our usually institutionalized relationships, this is over here, you know, and this is over here.
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But what I was finding was the way that these two things kept colliding in my own life.
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They were not separate in my own life.
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They were the same thing in my own life.
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And so what I tried to do in my dissertation is find the place where those two things came together.
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So I ended up coming up with my dissertation topic at a voodoo ritual at a pagan
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ceremony in an enlightened state of mind, which is not usually where you find your dissertation
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topic, right? But I’m like out in the field with the hippies and the pagans and the dirt, like
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having this whole mind-blowing experience and just had this realization about how important
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that work is, right? And liberate
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your mind and how deeply transformative that is in your personal life. And I was like, oh my God,
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right? Because over here, the feminist theorists are talking about the same kind of thing,
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and post-colonialists and anti-racist scholarship and bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins, right?
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Talking about the important, we could go back to feminist consciousness raising.
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You could go to the Black Power Movement, right?
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They also say consciousness is important.
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Your mind is important.
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Liberation is important.
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And so I thought, oh, perfect.
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I’ll take my feminist scholarship,
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my feminist sensibilities,
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and I will try to bridge it over here
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with my interest in psychedelics
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and consciousness exploration.
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And I was, oh,
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this is perfect. I ran back to my advisor, right? My academic Jewish feminist philosopher of science,
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East Coast, New York, ivory tower advisor. You can see where this is going. And I was like,
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oh my God, I have the best topic. I’m going to study psychedelic drugs and pagan festivals.
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Aren’t you excited?
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And she was not as excited as I hoped she would be.
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And she’s like, hippies and drugs?
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Really?
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Hippies and drugs?
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You’re going to study hippies and drugs?
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Like, who cares about hippies and drugs?
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I was like, no, you don’t understand.
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We’re going to save the world.
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Right, you can see why it took me five years to defend my dissertation, right?
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But this was really actually painful painful as all dissertations are, but useful because she said, well, you’re a feminist scholar. You’re a feminist sociologist. So don’t come in here telling me psychedelics are liberatory.
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This, this is going to free your mind. She says, how do you know that they’re liberatory?
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this is going to free your mind. She says, how do you know that they’re liberatory?
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Liberatory for who? In what context? How do you know it’s liberatory? Who gets to decide if it’s liberatory? Do you get to decide? Does somebody else get to decide? Because see,
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to make a claim to be liberatory, that is a very serious claim to make, right? Those are very real conversations. And so I thought, huh,
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she’s right. How can I take my interest and knowledge about psychedelics and all, and by
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psychedelics, I mean both the substances themselves and the communities that emerge out of people who
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identify with those practices, right? So how can we take the knowledges coming out of psychedelics and the
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practices coming out of psychedelics that we believe are liberatory and then take our skills
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as scholars, our rational mind, our ability to critique, our sensitivity to power, our ability
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to analyze whether something is liberatory in a different type of lineage with a different set of criteria and learn to ask
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critical questions about psychedelics. And so that was my dissertation. In some ways, I’ve come to
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think of what I’m trying to do is what Ram Dass, who I also, I think he takes this from Jung,
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calls the Gnostic intermediary, right? Which means to go between two meaning systems. So you have a meaning
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system here and you have a meaning system here, but the logics and the conceptualizations seem
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very incongruent and very divergent. And so how can you bridge the gap? And that was very much
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what I tried to do in my dissertation. Now, one of the problems with being a Gnostic intermediary
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and going back and forth is that you always end up sort of on the other side of the coin in whatever community you’re in, right?
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So I just spent the last several years trying to convince philosophers of science and sociologists in the ivory tower about the importance of what the hippies with the drugs are doing and why that matters and why we should pay more attention to consciousness and that if we don’t attend in a deeper sense to liberation that it leaves a big
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hole in our practice and i succeeded at that because they gave me a degree the fools right
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so i did that and i’m like yay and so then i’m done and then i decide well what i should do now
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is to go over to the hippies of the drugs and to talk to them about the importance of socialist feminism and politics.
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You see what I’m saying?
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I’m always on the other side of the coin.
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But it’s because I think that there’s value in both sides of that.
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And interestingly, when I try to do that,
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and actually, this is the first time I’ve done this at Burning Man.
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But interestingly, sometimes when you do that, and actually, this is the first time I’ve done this at Burning Man, but interestingly, sometimes when you do that within a psychedelics community, and you try to bring up
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politics, and you try to bring in these bigger concerns, there can be kind of a pushback, like,
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here we go again, you’re such a buzzkill, don’t get her started. You know, we’re trying to have a good time here.
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Like, right, it’s all love here, right?
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Why are you bringing all this worldly, political, right, buzzkill, downer issues into our, right?
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We’re trying to get free.
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And I thought, well, that’s really strange, especially if, at
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least in my experience of psychedelics and people who take psychedelics and why they value psychedelics
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is because it helps to critique you. It helps to break you down. It helps to challenge your
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assumptions, right? Isn’t that part of what we find, whether it’s in our meditation or in our
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psychedelic practices, is it pushes you to your edge
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And it teaches you about those assumptions that you’re making without even realizing it and you learn to challenge yourself
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Now I think we see that in our personal lives with like in your meditation practice
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You it’s not always just about bliss at least if you’ve really been meditating for a while
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It might be blissy, but after a while you should start to come up against some of your shit, right?
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Some of your places that you’re like, oh, I am rude as hell.
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Oh, I am selfish, right?
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Like, oh, and you know that you need to do that work.
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You don’t go into meditation.
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And as soon as you discover something you don’t like about yourself, just set it down and walk away.
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Like, what kind of meditation practice is that?
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down and walk away. Like, what kind of meditation practice is that? So as I ran into this kind of resistance to talking about politics in our blissed-out, psychedelic, raver, burning man
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communities, I found that kind of incongruent with our general critical push, boundaries, work,
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dig out, find our stuff approaches. And one of the terms that sometimes comes up that I find kind
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of instructive is that, well, it’s disillusioning. It’s disillusioning to talk about the political
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complexities of Burning Man or the political complexities of psychedelics. Well, let’s think
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about the term disillusion. Isn’t that the point? To disillusionusion yourself you see what i’m saying and so in my work i did it
00:16:28 ►
over there and i’ve come here to just present to you some of those critical dimensions around how
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we engage psychedelics and how we engage psychedelic culture writ large in a way that we can be and this
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is a phrase i’ve come to sort of think with, how can we be as rigorous in our engagement
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with the outer world as we try to be in our engagement of our inner world? Like if you pride
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yourself on your inner work, whether that’s yoga or meditation or community building, whatever it
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is, your inner work, how can you be as rigorous with your outer work and make that connection?
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And that’s what I’d like to talk about today, that back and forth.
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Because I think one of the other things you have to keep in mind
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when you do a critical engagement with psychedelics
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is because psychedelics are so stigmatized and they’re illegal and they’re delegitimized
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that for many of us you’re already on the defensive half the time
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because of the sort of drug war rhetoric, you know what I mean?
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That’s totally not the spirit that I’m coming from.
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Like, I’m here. I’m at the table, you know what I mean?
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And it’s because I love this, and I love our communities,
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and I love these practices, and I think we can continue to do a better job.
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And so that’s the spirit I bring to you,
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just some questions that I’d like you to take home.
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I don’t have any answers, but I have questions. And so I’ve also sort of come to think of these questions as like a koan,
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right? Like what is a koan? Do you ever solve a koan? Kind of, you know, but in some ways it’s
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the question that you work with again and again that pushes you to do your work. And so that’s
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what I’m hoping to leave you with. Just this koan. In what ways are your practices, your inner practices, grounded in the world?
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And that’s what I’d like to walk through today.
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So, psychedelics, spirituality in the laboratory.
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The politics of knowledge of the psychedelic sciences.
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What’s that about?
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One of the things that brought me into studying psychedelics is partly my interest in science
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and knowledge and consciousness. Now, where did psychedelics come from?
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Now, most people, when we talk about psychedelics, always think of counterculture,
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right? You think of Ram Dass, you think of Tim Leary, you think of electric Kool-Aid acid tests,
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you think of the Mary Pranksters,
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you almost always think of the counterculture. But psychedelics actually don’t come from
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the counterculture. They come out of scientific laboratories. And so I actually restricted
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my analysis just to the sciences because that’s partly because that’s where it comes out of
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and partly because science is such a dominant narrative in our culture.
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So psychedelics started… Does anybody know this history? I’m just
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curious. Okay, like two people. Okay, story time. Okay, so once upon a time in a land far, far away
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in a pharmaceutical laboratory in Switzerland, there was a man named Albert Hoffman.
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So Albert Hoffman was a Swiss chemist, as I said, working in Sandoz Laboratories,
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which was a pharmaceutical company, and he invented LSD. So right there’s a connection, like there’s no separating psychedelics and
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pharmaceutical companies, right? So I was like, huh, because I’m interested in power, right, and
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inequality, and the pharmaceutical companies is a very dominant part of our scientific landscape.
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The other place that it came out of was Gordon, there was a man named Gordon Wasson. And Gordon Wasson was an amateur botanist and also vice president of JPMorgan Chase,
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which seldom gets emphasized in our history. Oh, aren’t we selective in what we pay attention to.
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So Gordon Wasson is interested in mushrooms. And so he goes down to Oaxaca, Mexico and finds Maria Sabina.
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And Maria Sabina gives him psilocybin mushrooms.
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And then he takes those mushrooms and he actually sends them back to Albert Hoffman at Sandoz Laboratories who then synthesizes out psilocybin, named psilocybin.
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And so whether you’re interested in the sort of mushroom ethnobotany side of things, or you’re interested in the LSD sort of chemical side of things, both of those actually come out of a laboratory. You
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could also talk about Schultz. What’s his first name? Thank you. Richard Schulte, who’s the father
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of modern ethnobotany, what Vandana Shiva would call biopiracy, actually. And so he also was a central figure in the early psychedelics movement,
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going into rainforests and looking for plants and identifying them
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and then feeding them back into the pharmaceutical industry
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where they can be synthesized and sold to Western markets
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so that we could all feel better.
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So when we talk about the history of psychedelics,
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we really have to talk about science and their emergence out of a scientific laboratory. So as I was looking at those studies, there was a couple
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things that I thought was quite interesting. First of all, what happened to these scientists
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when they discovered these, discovered, especially in the case of Wasson. Again, I don’t know how you
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discover someone else’s property, but he discovered mushrooms or
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Albert Hoffman in the laboratory. Like what happened to them? So both of these men were
00:21:29 ►
scientists, scientists. They believe in objectivity. They believe in empiricism. They believe that there
00:21:35 ►
is a hard material reality and using our sense data and empiricism and particular methodologies,
00:21:41 ►
we can make causal assertions about a material world. That’s the
00:21:47 ►
framework that they’re coming out of. So we’ll just start with Albert Hoffman. So Albert Hoffman
00:21:51 ►
takes LSD, right? And it’s hard to get more hard science than a chemist, right? Maybe a physicist,
00:21:57 ►
right? And so he takes LSD and what happens? He has his mind totally fucking blown, right? Bicycle day, right? And what happens when
00:22:07 ►
he takes psychedelics is it completely undermines his belief, and he begins to see it as a belief
00:22:16 ►
in the scientific cosmology. What if there is no objectivity? What if there is no subject-object dualism? What if I am not a reliable observer of
00:22:27 ►
the material world? Oh my God, what if there’s a God? Scientists aren’t allowed to talk about God.
00:22:34 ►
And so he has this whole scientific crisis. And he then begins to try to take that he’s very
00:22:42 ►
interested in this substance. And he does a variety, he feeds it back into research.
00:22:47 ►
He says, well, it undercuts my faith in science
00:22:50 ►
and what does this mean for science
00:22:51 ►
and how do we know what we know?
00:22:53 ►
And so what he decides is to do more science
00:22:55 ►
and then he turns it into a whole program of research.
00:22:58 ►
And then he actually takes the substances
00:23:00 ►
and sends it over to Harvard in the psychiatry department
00:23:03 ►
to Richard Alpert, who becomes Ram Dass, and to Timothy Leary. And then they do a bunch of experiments at Harvard
00:23:10 ►
until they’re eventually fired from tenure-track positions at Harvard University. Now, there’s
00:23:17 ►
debate about what they were fired for. Certainly, there were some shenanigans that they were up to
00:23:22 ►
that the university did not appreciate. But if you actually trace out the records, which is what I did,
00:23:27 ►
there was also very much an objection to their scientific methodology.
00:23:31 ►
So it really did become this epistemological crisis for science.
00:23:37 ►
And it is those crises that I end up tracing out, which is hence the spirituality in the laboratory.
00:23:42 ►
Because traditionally, science and religion are over here and over here.
00:23:45 ►
That’s called demarcation for the philosophy of science folks in the room.
00:23:50 ►
And so what happens with psychedelics is because typically the scientist is able to,
00:23:54 ►
if you go study indigenous spirituality or Christians or religious people or mystics or whoever it is,
00:24:01 ►
you can still stay detached from it.
00:24:02 ►
It doesn’t challenge your worldview because you’re a scientist and you construct truth and Indians just believe mythological things.
00:24:10 ►
And I can explain your quaint superstitious beliefs in a higher power. But see, LSD is a chemical,
00:24:16 ►
right? And we love chemicals. That’s our avatar. It’s material. You can measure it. You can put it
00:24:21 ►
on a slide. You can make studies about it. The NIH will fund you,
00:24:25 ►
right? And so it created this crisis because they weren’t able to dismiss it, right? Just like, oh,
00:24:31 ►
right, that’s just your little superstitious experience. They had this experience that they
00:24:35 ►
could not ignore. And because it came through a chemical that allowed them to study it,
00:24:39 ►
they began to engage with spirituality in a way that was historically unprecedented.
00:24:45 ►
The doorway.
00:24:45 ►
I argue that it’s a doorway through which spirituality entered the scientific laboratory
00:24:50 ►
in a way that it usually doesn’t.
00:24:52 ►
And so then my question was, well, what did they do with it?
00:24:56 ►
And what conclusions did they come to?
00:24:58 ►
And how did they deal with those aspects of the substance and this dialogue of spirituality
00:25:03 ►
given that science and spirituality
00:25:06 ►
and the way they approach things is so very, very different. And so I, that’s what I traced out
00:25:11 ►
in my dissertation is what they did with that. So typically, uh, and so I traced that out both
00:25:19 ►
from the early scientists and how they negotiated that. And in my dissertation, I have a sort of, I talk about first wave and second wave because there was the Hoffman in them in the 90s, actually late 1940s,
00:25:33 ►
1950s into the 1960s. LSD is criminalized in 1966. All of the major scientific institutions
00:25:40 ►
begin to come down on psychedelics once it’s criminalized, and pretty much all research grounds will halt by about the 1970s. I call that first wave. The second wave of scientific
00:25:50 ►
psychedelics research reemerged in 1990 with Richard Strassman’s work on DMT, the spirit
00:25:56 ►
molecule. And he was the first FDA-approved, go-ahead, do-a-clinical trial of psychedelics
00:26:02 ►
in the second wave. And so since 1990, after
00:26:05 ►
Strassman’s work and Deborah Mash with Ibogaine, and now of course there’s John Hopkins and the
00:26:11 ►
psilocybin studies and MAPS, right? So we are, I think we are in a revival of psychedelics research.
00:26:19 ►
So I was also tracing out like what was the difference between what those first scholars
00:26:23 ►
were doing, those first researchers were doing, and how they were grappling with those conundrums
00:26:29 ►
of this crazy substance and their scientific paradigm, and what the second group of people
00:26:34 ►
did.
00:26:35 ►
And one of the, I’ll just talk about one of the key differences, which is that if psychedelics are connected to spirituality or mystical experience,
00:26:47 ►
which Albert Hoffman argues, Walter Ponke argues,
00:26:51 ►
many of the early psychedelicists argued that what was unique about these substances
00:26:56 ►
was that they induce spiritual experience or they give you access to the realm of mysticism.
00:27:02 ►
They frame them as spiritual substances.
00:27:07 ►
access to the realm of mysticism. They frame them as spiritual substances. So in the first wave,
00:27:13 ►
there was more, I think, more space for that. So Walter Ponke, who was also part of Timothy Leary and Ram Dass at Harvard, who gets talked about less, was coming out of divinity school. And he
00:27:18 ►
coined this term experimental mysticism, which is a fascinating term. The science, sort of science and mysticism,
00:27:27 ►
science as mysticism. And that during the first wave, there was an emphasis on taking the substance
00:27:32 ►
themselves, which is also a very strange thing for scientists to argue, right? That you have to
00:27:37 ►
experience it yourself. That’s inherently non-scientific because science requires shared
00:27:41 ►
observation, right? So that was the first wave. And then everybody, everything came crashing down
00:27:46 ►
and they put the total kibosh on it.
00:27:48 ►
So in the second wave,
00:27:49 ►
what did they do with this question of divinity
00:27:52 ►
or also the question of mystical consciousness?
00:27:54 ►
Because mystical consciousness,
00:27:56 ►
if psychedelics induce mystical states of consciousness,
00:28:00 ►
mystical states of consciousness
00:28:01 ►
are by definition non-scientific.
00:28:04 ►
They’re inaccessible to anybody other than the person having it.
00:28:08 ►
So what do you do with a feeling state that’s so difficult to access reliably?
00:28:12 ►
And then what do you do with this question of divinity or this idea that it gives you access to mysticism or to God or to spirituality within a scientific paradigm?
00:28:23 ►
And so what they did in the second wave,
00:28:26 ►
unfortunately, I wish I had more positive things to say about this, because what I thought was,
00:28:31 ►
this is a moment where we could transform our scientific discourses, because we have a tendency
00:28:36 ►
to get so reductionistic and to be such a slave to empiricism and this very narrow worldview in
00:28:43 ►
the church of science that we have it all
00:28:45 ►
figured out. And I thought if psychedelics teaches you anything is that you sure don’t
00:28:50 ►
have it all figured out. And so I was like, maybe this will transform science in a way that’s
00:28:55 ►
interesting. But unfortunately, what has happened is if you want to do research today,
00:29:02 ►
you have to get that FDA approval. You have to get that grant money.
00:29:06 ►
And where are you going to get that from?
00:29:08 ►
And so there has been a tendency in second wave science to get even more scientific,
00:29:13 ►
to reduce everything down to measurable, quantifiable dimensions.
00:29:21 ►
And this is, again, where we come right back into big pharma.
00:29:24 ►
Because who’s interested in psychedelics
00:29:26 ►
research largely pharmaceutical companies to turn it into a pharmaceutical drug or a psychological
00:29:32 ►
protocol that can then be utilized as part of our sort of psychopharmacological regime
00:29:37 ►
now myself as somebody who is fairly critical of science i worry i mean I mean, I get it. I get that if you don’t do those things,
00:29:45 ►
you end up like Ram Dass and Tim Leary, and we can’t do any of the experiments at all. I mean,
00:29:50 ►
I get that. But my question is, by appealing to the dominant paradigm, by appealing to big pharma,
00:29:57 ►
by appealing to the NIH, by embracing these dominant models, what is lost? At what cost? And unfortunately, I think that one of the costs
00:30:08 ►
that concerns me particularly is what happens to this notion of mystical consciousness and its
00:30:14 ►
importance and the notion of divinity, the notion of the sacred, the notion of God, whatever language
00:30:20 ►
appeals to you. And you can see this, I think, even less so with LSD and more so with
00:30:25 ►
the psilocybin mushrooms. Because if you look at the plant-based psychoactives and you go to the
00:30:30 ►
indigenous context where people use them, such as the peyote with the Native American tribes,
00:30:35 ►
and I’m blanking on which tribes utilize peyote, or in this case, the mushrooms in Oaxaca, Mexico,
00:30:43 ►
the little children, and the little deer. And you
00:30:46 ►
ask those indigenous people, what is this substance and what does it do? They say, it is a gift from
00:30:51 ►
God. It is an entheogen, right? That’s our language for it. It’s that which brings God within you.
00:30:57 ►
And the little deer and the little children are beings and they have subjectivity. And what they
00:31:02 ►
do is they help you to commune with the divine and that’s what they do and scientists say well that’s nice that you believe that
00:31:09 ►
how quaint we’re here to tell you what it really does with a capital r and what it really does is
00:31:16 ►
affect your serotonin levels and your neurotransmitters and look we’ve mapped out the
00:31:21 ►
brain and it’s not that there’s God and there’s nothing sacred
00:31:25 ►
and it has nothing to do with divinity.
00:31:27 ►
It’s just this epiphenomenon of the complex biological brain.
00:31:31 ►
And we as scientifically oriented people
00:31:34 ►
and a scientifically oriented culture,
00:31:37 ►
I think too often end up accepting that explanation uncritically.
00:31:41 ►
But that’s exactly that politics of appropriation
00:31:44 ►
where native peoples or indigenous peoples say, no, no, but that’s exactly that politics of appropriation, where native peoples
00:31:46 ►
or indigenous peoples say, no, no, it takes you to God, and that this is a sacred plan. We say, no,
00:31:52 ►
it’s like aspirin, and we’re going to cut it open, and it has nothing to do with God, and we’re going
00:31:55 ►
to sell it back to you special price, and that’s what I argue was troubling to me in my research
00:32:02 ►
on the second wave, is that what do they do with this
00:32:06 ►
conundrum of divinity? And too often it becomes about psychology. Now we’re going to turn it into
00:32:11 ►
a therapy and it’s about the unconscious mind. Or it gets turned into neurology, right? And the brain
00:32:17 ►
and we start to do all of this serotonin research. And then the ghosts, we’re back to the ghosts and
00:32:23 ►
the machine. And the ghost just becomes a byproduct of the machine, and where did the sacred go? So unfortunately, in my research,
00:32:30 ►
I found that we end up just reinforcing the dominant scientific paradigm. And to me, that’s
00:32:36 ►
where we get to the politics of knowledge. That that in and of itself is an example of a type of
00:32:43 ►
appropriation, where you take this type of knowledge and just take the dominant knowledge and the logics of your own understanding and make it fit.
00:32:52 ►
And divinity and the sacred and mysticism and all the consciousness, all the parts that probably most people here who are interested in psychedelics find most interesting, gets washed out. And so what are the politics of knowledge between this subjugated
00:33:06 ►
discourse that we all are here to explore when we try to feed it back into the machine? You see what
00:33:12 ►
I’m saying. Now, that’s the first part of my talk. That’s just sort of what I was looking at
00:33:17 ►
in my dissertation. So I can do two things right now. I can either go on to the second part
00:33:25 ►
and talk about more like the feminist stuff and sort of the liberatory stuff,
00:33:29 ►
or I could take a couple questions now about that where I should keep going. Any thoughts?
00:33:36 ►
Experience. Just curious. How can a feminist…
00:33:43 ►
Well, and I actually, I’m going to get a little bit to this
00:33:47 ►
into the second part of my talk.
00:33:49 ►
From a feminist perspective,
00:33:51 ►
and this informs the sort of politics of knowledge part,
00:33:54 ►
first of all, and this is actually not drawing on feminism,
00:33:57 ►
but on Foucault and some of the post-structuralists
00:34:00 ►
who argued that between knowledge and power
00:34:02 ►
there is no exteriority, right? That find me a place in our society
00:34:07 ►
where there is no power-laden discourse happening.
00:34:14 ►
Science makes that claim.
00:34:15 ►
We’re ahistorical, acultural, apolitical,
00:34:18 ►
what Donna Haraway calls the view from nowhere,
00:34:20 ►
the God trick.
00:34:21 ►
I am disembodied.
00:34:22 ►
I’m like Zeus.
00:34:23 ►
I stand on the mountain.
00:34:24 ►
I have no physical
00:34:25 ►
location, and I make proclamations about the universe, right? So from a feminist perspective,
00:34:31 ►
that claim to supposed objectivity, to a supposedly non-locatable, non-spatiotemporal
00:34:39 ►
location, is itself a power-laden move that is problematic because between knowledge and power there is no exteriority.
00:34:47 ►
And then what do we mean by power?
00:34:49 ►
And this is just leading into the second part of my talk,
00:34:51 ►
so thank you for this question.
00:34:53 ►
But what do we mean by power?
00:34:54 ►
What do we mean when we say that power and discourse infuses all of us?
00:34:58 ►
There is no outside discourse.
00:35:00 ►
Well, we don’t mean power in any abstract kind of sense.
00:35:03 ►
From a feminist perspective, our entire society,
00:35:07 ►
whether we’re talking about knowledge and ideas and cultures and values,
00:35:11 ►
or land and money and voting and politics,
00:35:14 ►
are completely inseparable from the politics of location.
00:35:17 ►
Race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation.
00:35:20 ►
Find me a place where there’s no gender.
00:35:23 ►
Find me a place where there’s no race right find me a clear
00:35:26 ►
person and maybe we can talk about right a human problem so even this tendency to want to always
00:35:32 ►
talk through the human actually ends up erasing the lived political and embodied realities of
00:35:38 ►
people you see what i’m saying so if we reframe the question not so much through humanism, where we lose attention to the politics of location,
00:35:48 ►
but rather if we have some vision of liberation,
00:35:51 ►
which is what I hear in humanism.
00:35:52 ►
In some ways, humanism is a reference to like,
00:35:54 ►
we want everybody to be free.
00:35:58 ►
Well, how can we reframe that and say,
00:35:59 ►
in what ways would making sure we always attend
00:36:04 ►
to race, class, gender, and sexuality inform our practice
00:36:07 ►
such that we could perhaps move closer to a place where these things aren’t quite so heavy
00:36:12 ►
and aren’t quite so problematic?
00:36:15 ►
Any other questions?
00:36:18 ►
You separated science and religion or spirituality.
00:36:22 ►
at science and religion or spirituality,
00:36:27 ►
would you put philosophy?
00:36:30 ►
Philosophy?
00:36:32 ►
Yes, that’s the word.
00:36:33 ►
Sorry, non-native speaker here.
00:36:37 ►
Well, I’m separating religion and science because traditionally they are talked about
00:36:40 ►
and practiced separately.
00:36:42 ►
And if you look at the history of science,
00:36:44 ►
and actually the philosophy of science, this is partly a philosophy of science conversation,
00:36:49 ►
that’s called the demarcation problem. And there’s this historic attempt to demarcate
00:36:55 ►
science from pseudoscience, science from philosophy, and science from religion.
00:37:00 ►
And this goes back hundreds of years. And so what I’m doing is deliberately,
00:37:08 ►
and in my dissertation, that’s what I found so interesting about it,
00:37:12 ►
was it was a place where those traditional demarcations collapse upon themselves,
00:37:16 ►
and science and religion enter the laboratory.
00:37:21 ►
So I actually think that science is a religion, right?
00:37:24 ►
It just, it has a different cosmology.
00:37:26 ►
We like atoms better than god right but there’s a similar sort of faith in objectivity and it gives us a sense of comfort that we’re these fuzzy
00:37:31 ►
mammals on the rock and the sun and we got this but it serves a similar function of comfort and
00:37:36 ►
explanation hello um science is not only um the physical world, right? Math is a science. Math is the most logical
00:37:45 ►
thing, right? Which is philosophy
00:37:48 ►
as well. Yeah, we love logic.
00:37:50 ►
Yeah, as a culture.
00:37:52 ►
But then Kant, for example,
00:37:54 ►
said, okay, there’s only me as an
00:37:56 ►
observer and I don’t know what’s true outside
00:37:58 ►
of what I observe, which is
00:38:00 ►
what you said. So philosophy,
00:38:02 ►
if it’s as logical as
00:38:04 ►
something like math, isn’t’s as logical as something like math,
00:38:06 ►
isn’t it as scientific as math?
00:38:08 ►
And why is it not a science then?
00:38:11 ►
Well, it depends on how you define science
00:38:13 ►
because I would also say yoga is a science
00:38:15 ►
and acupuncture is a science.
00:38:17 ►
And so maybe we should talk about sciences.
00:38:19 ►
And so I’m really talking about the dominant scientific paradigm,
00:38:22 ►
which is grounded in empiricism and experimental research. And there’s also a disdain from scientists towards philosophers,
00:38:30 ►
right? Like if you can’t research, be a philosopher, right? Like all y’all do is just sit
00:38:35 ►
around in your office and think about things, right? We have fucking bridges to build over here,
00:38:38 ►
right? So there’s another kind of set of layers, but I don’t want to get too far off on that tangent.
00:38:43 ►
Yes, sir. In the science that I do, which is in origins of life work with reductionist chemists, with
00:38:52 ►
the complexity theorists and all that, I actually use visionary experience
00:38:59 ►
to come up with scenarios that I have no idea where they come from.
00:39:05 ►
They’re very, very powerful.
00:39:06 ►
Then I package them up in language and representations that those guys can understand,
00:39:13 ►
and I run them through the mill and see what sticks.
00:39:17 ►
And then I come out and we write a book about it and things like that,
00:39:21 ►
and then we go and try to build a laboratory experiment but in a sense
00:39:26 ►
i i source that and i think albert einstein uses gedanken experiments and you know we know a lot
00:39:34 ►
of other examples but it’s a wonderful i think it’s it’s a viable bridge between the two worlds
00:39:40 ►
it’s not maybe not used that often, but it can bridge those worlds.
00:39:47 ►
But my question is also about why are we bridging them?
00:39:52 ►
And what is it we’re looking for in science?
00:39:55 ►
And when we build the bridge, is there anything that we lose
00:39:58 ►
because we always have our gaze on science as the dominant way of knowing?
00:40:03 ►
Why is it that we want to translate all of our
00:40:05 ►
spiritual practices into the language of science? And this is what I mean by the politics of
00:40:10 ►
knowledge. I’m not anti-science, but I find it very curious that people who are so interested
00:40:17 ►
in all kinds of alternative realities and alternative ways of knowing and alternative
00:40:22 ►
spiritualities, and yet we all want to talk the language of science.
00:40:26 ►
We all feel more comfortable and more legitimated,
00:40:29 ►
like somehow what we’re doing is more legitimate
00:40:30 ►
if we can put a scientific stamp of approval on it.
00:40:33 ►
And I am suspicious of that, not that I’m anti-science,
00:40:37 ►
but I think that we need to be careful with what we bring in.
00:40:41 ►
As Audre Lorde said, the master’s tools will never dismantle
00:40:45 ►
the master’s house.
00:40:46 ►
I think we kind of
00:40:49 ►
hold on to the
00:40:51 ►
bathtub grip of science
00:40:54 ►
because of a long history
00:40:58 ►
of delusional constructs
00:41:01 ►
that lead to conflict, war,
00:41:03 ►
religious intolerance,
00:41:06 ►
humans and animal sacrifice,
00:41:09 ►
and all the bizarre beliefs that we were, in a sense, in a species, lost.
00:41:14 ►
So, you know, if you can’t hold on to any grip at all,
00:41:18 ►
you know, humanity can go into all kinds of wacky things,
00:41:21 ►
some of which are highly destructive.
00:41:24 ►
So maybe there’s a deep sense
00:41:26 ►
there’s a danger there.
00:41:29 ►
And there’s a danger in science
00:41:30 ►
as we all sit here
00:41:32 ►
on the cusp of environmental collapse.
00:41:35 ►
We have to be careful.
00:41:36 ►
All I’m saying is
00:41:37 ►
we need to learn to think more critically
00:41:39 ►
and more carefully about science
00:41:41 ►
because we have this tendency to reify it.
00:41:44 ►
And like, for example,
00:41:44 ►
well, scientists, like you hear it on NPR, scientists discovered. And what do you do?
00:41:48 ►
You’re like, well, which scientists and who funded the research and what was their methodology and
00:41:52 ►
what is the context in which I should understand it? No, you go home to your room and say, you know
00:41:55 ►
what? Scientists discovered blah, blah, blah. You don’t even know who they fucking are and you
00:41:59 ►
believe whatever they say. You see what I’m saying? I’m just saying we need to think more
00:42:02 ►
critically. What is it that we want out of science? Why? What does it add to our work? And why do we crave that legitimacy, right? And I
00:42:11 ►
question that, I come back to that phrase, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s
00:42:15 ►
house. And science, for all that it helps us build bridges, I’m not anti-science, it can do really
00:42:20 ►
useful things. Uncritically, it’s done all kinds of horrible things. And I want to use this as a bridge. You have a question, brother? I want to use this as a, this is a good bridge to
00:42:29 ►
the second part, because I want to transition off science just a little bit, because not everybody
00:42:33 ►
in the room is interested in philosophy of science. And so I have some things that might
00:42:38 ►
be a little more broadly interesting. All right. Now, so that was for all of the academics in the
00:42:44 ►
room who are interested in
00:42:45 ►
sort of science and very heady stuff. And now what I want to transition to is the dissertation
00:42:50 ►
that I wanted to write but didn’t write, which is a little more relevant to not so much science,
00:42:56 ►
psychedelic scholars or psychedelic research, but to psychedelic counterculture, of which this is
00:43:03 ►
an example. Because as I said, it started in the laboratory and then leaked into the streets. And then what happened? And what did we do with
00:43:09 ►
it? And what does it mean? And what are our practices? And how do we understand them? And
00:43:13 ►
that’s also something that I’m particularly interested in. And as I said, I’m going to come
00:43:17 ►
back to this, which I already talked about, thanks to this brother’s question. When I talk about
00:43:21 ►
these things, I’m talking about it from a feminist perspective, right?
00:43:25 ►
So most people, not most, but many people in psychedelic countercultures make this claim
00:43:31 ►
that psychedelics are liberatory, that they free the mind, right?
00:43:36 ►
That’s, you know, the whole Timothy Leary to turn on, tune in, drop out, right?
00:43:42 ►
That it’s all this discourse of liberation.
00:43:44 ►
Well, of course,
00:43:45 ►
feminists have talked for a long, long time about liberation and what liberation means.
00:43:50 ►
And so I come at this question of liberation, both as someone who shares those concerns within
00:43:55 ►
psychedelics communities and as someone who spends a lot of time with these questions coming out of
00:44:01 ►
feminist communities. And I’ve already articulated, I think, two important points. One is that power is everywhere. And two, that that power is always
00:44:11 ►
about race, class, gender, and sexuality, at least in our culture. We could talk about different axes.
00:44:15 ►
The axes are always dependent on the culture you’re looking at. If we were in India, we would
00:44:18 ►
add caste to the list. But I’m just going to talk about race, class, gender, and sexuality.
00:44:23 ►
So if we’re going to talk about liberation, I’m going to want to come back to power and race, class, and gender and how race,
00:44:30 ►
class, and gender inform our understanding of what liberation is. Now, in some ways, this is a very
00:44:37 ►
old conversation. I was at a conference recently, the Women’s Visionary Congress,
00:44:42 ►
which you can look up for women visionaries. It’s very, very cool. You should check it out. It’s up in Northern California.
00:44:49 ►
And so one of the sisters there was one of the OG hippies from way back in the day,
00:44:55 ►
Caroline Garcia, I think it was. Well, it had this way, she’s like, yeah, do, be, do, be, do, be, do,
00:45:00 ►
be, do. Like, do we do or do we be? Do we do or do we be? There’s this old argument. So
00:45:05 ►
here I am again, bringing up the old argument, right? But I think it continues to be relevant.
00:45:11 ►
So, okay. Psychedelics are liberatory. Okay. What, what does that mean? How would you know
00:45:19 ►
if they are liberatory? What are your criterion? Who gets to decide what liberatory is? And one of the sort of
00:45:26 ►
metaphors I was looking at as I was thinking about this question was the classic juxtaposition of the
00:45:32 ►
be-in versus the sit-in, right? Both happening at very similar moments of time, both claiming that
00:45:39 ►
consciousness is essential to liberatory work, both claiming that the work they were doing was liberatory. And yet I would argue that the definitions and criteria of liberation coming
00:45:50 ►
out of a sit-in were very, very different than the politics of liberation that were coming out
00:45:55 ►
of the be-in. And I’m not saying one’s right or wrong. I’m just saying that it behooves us to
00:46:00 ►
think more carefully. If we’re going to claim that our practices are liberatory, then we need
00:46:05 ►
to think more carefully about what that means and in what way and how so. So when I was looking at
00:46:11 ►
psychedelics, and to figure that out, I would argue that you have to pay attention to power
00:46:18 ►
and to race, class, and gender. And I want to make one more statement about that, which is like,
00:46:22 ►
what does that mean? Like, what does that mean?
00:46:29 ►
Well, too often when we want to raise a critical conversation about race, class, and gender, it becomes like what one of my mentors, Patricia Hill Collins, talked about, oppression studies, victim studies, right?
00:46:38 ►
Women’s studies is about women, right?
00:46:41 ►
African-American, right?
00:46:42 ►
Race studies, we’re going to talk about racism, that’s about people of color.
00:46:47 ►
And if we’re going to talk about sexuality, that’s about gay people, right? African American, right? Race studies, we’re going to talk about racism, that’s about people of color. And if we’re going to talk about sexuality, that’s about gay people,
00:46:52 ►
right? Victim studies. Because that’s an easier way to do it. Because if you frame it that way,
00:46:57 ►
especially if you’re not one of those people, you just end up in a place of pity, right? So white people are like, yeah, racism’s bad. I’m anti-racist. Y’all poor people of color, that must suck. Poor you. Right? It doesn’t do anything. There’s no
00:47:10 ►
transformation. You’re kind of off the hook. You’ve identified that it’s bad. You feel bad about it.
00:47:15 ►
And that’s the end of the conversation. So I would rather say if we’re going to talk about
00:47:19 ►
the politics of liberation and how race, class, and gender matter, we have to talk more about
00:47:24 ►
privilege than we have to talk. I matter, we have to talk more about privilege
00:47:25 ►
than we have to talk, I mean, we have to talk about disadvantage, of course, but it’s harder
00:47:29 ►
to talk about privilege. It’s harder to talk about white privilege and straight privilege and class
00:47:34 ►
privilege as we sit here with all this stuff out in the desert, spending up all our billions of
00:47:40 ►
dollars to be out here talking about, we’re free now. Go get my coffee. Right? So we
00:47:46 ►
have to talk more about privilege. In what ways do we grapple with our privilege if we’re going
00:47:51 ►
to claim that what we are doing is liberatory? You see what I’m saying? So I want to just raise
00:47:58 ►
two places where I think that comes up so that we can think about it a little bit more as we go out
00:48:04 ►
and whatever our practices are,
00:48:06 ►
and as we think about how we’re cultivating liberation with those practices.
00:48:12 ►
Within psychedelics communities, I think that one that concerns me particularly is the pervasiveness of individualism.
00:48:28 ►
is the pervasiveness of individualism. And in American culture, individualism, which we could also call neoliberalism, right, has a huge influence on how we approach the world and how
00:48:35 ►
we understand things. And so from a feminist perspective and a critical race perspective
00:48:39 ►
and an anti-racist perspective, definitions of liberation are never individualized. It’s always
00:48:46 ►
about a community. It’s always about a group. That’s the first point. It’s not just about the
00:48:50 ►
individual. It has to be a group-based liberation. Second of all, that that definition of liberation
00:48:57 ►
has to go beyond just consciousness. So if you look at women’s consciousness raising or the
00:49:03 ►
black power movement or any of these liberation struggles, yeah, for sure, consciousness matters. Of course,
00:49:09 ►
it matters in getting free on the inside, as Adrienne Rich said, digging out that piece of
00:49:13 ►
the oppressor deep within you. But if it stops there, as we know, faith without action is dead.
00:49:21 ►
And so liberation has to be both, from a feminist perspective, is both collective and material. Like it’s not just about sitting around feeling good and getting high. It has to
00:49:31 ►
be grounded in the material and lived realities of people who are struggling in our world. Because
00:49:36 ►
otherwise we can sit here and feel really good about ourselves and the same damn people live
00:49:40 ►
in the same damn ghettos who’ve been living that way in the belly of the beast and the economic collapse and we don’t do shit about it but we sure do feel better about ourselves
00:49:48 ►
and that’s a trap that’s also an old trap that you can fall into so as i approach these questions i
00:49:54 ►
think how does power matter how does race class and gender matter especially how does privilege
00:50:00 ►
matter and in what ways do my practices challenge the material inequalities of our
00:50:05 ►
society, especially if you live in an all-white class privileged community, like I know many
00:50:10 ►
of us do.
00:50:12 ►
In what ways does your practice not just transform yourself, not just even perhaps transform
00:50:17 ►
the small circle of people around you, but in what ways does it challenge the dominant
00:50:22 ►
systems of material inequalities in our society?
00:50:25 ►
And I think that’s where you start to get a more robust grip on something called liberation.
00:50:33 ►
Now, unfortunately, in psychedelics history, too often what I see is this obsession with the individual.
00:50:43 ►
Individual salvation, the work on myself,
00:50:46 ►
making myself feel better. We end up really reifying this image of the isolated mystic
00:50:51 ►
in his cave, right? Connecting with God all by himself out in the mountains, right? Again,
00:50:57 ►
we see this disembodied approach and people say, well, I am not the body, right? Because individualism and transcendence tend to go together.
00:51:07 ►
And we have this obsession on I as an individual having some transcendent mystical experience.
00:51:12 ►
And then that’s how I get free.
00:51:14 ►
So it’s both kind of a transcendence and an individualism.
00:51:17 ►
And there’s this sort of tendency of like, well, I am not the body.
00:51:20 ►
I am not the body, right?
00:51:23 ►
And so often this is said by, right, men on thrones, talking about
00:51:28 ►
get my coffee and can I touch your titties. Thought I’m not the body. What happened to that? You see
00:51:33 ►
what I’m saying? Because we don’t pay enough attention to that this is a practice that’s in
00:51:37 ►
a community and in bodies and on the ground. And it also reinforces a very problematic, if we want
00:51:43 ►
to come back to Western philosophy, it also replicates a very problematic, if we want to come back to Western philosophy,
00:51:54 ►
it also replicates a very problematic hierarchy where man is transcendent and spiritual and of the higher.
00:51:56 ►
And we try to transcend what?
00:52:01 ►
The body, the earth, the animal, the female, the dirt.
00:52:03 ►
You see what I’m saying? And you end up buying into actually a gendered hierarchy
00:52:05 ►
and a colonial hierarchy without even intending to do so. You see what I’m saying? That’s just
00:52:11 ►
one example when you trace out how we frame our understandings of liberation. Just one example.
00:52:18 ►
So I hope that we begin to think a little bit more about individualism and how our practices are grounded in our lives, in our
00:52:26 ►
small communities, and in bigger communities, especially communities where there’s a difference
00:52:31 ►
of power, whether if you’re in an all-white community or whatever it is. How can you connect
00:52:37 ►
your practices to the concerns of other people and challenge other people’s oppressions that we are bound up in whether
00:52:45 ►
we like it or not. And too often, when I bring this up, it almost always comes back to good
00:52:55 ►
intentions. No, but I have the best of intentions. Gordon Wasson had good intentions, right? When he
00:53:02 ►
took the mushrooms from Maria Sabina. And later on,
00:53:05 ►
Maria Sabina said, you stole my mushrooms and they don’t speak Spanish. They don’t speak my
00:53:10 ►
language anymore. And the sacrament is broken. And we said, yeah, but we feel awesome. So it’s okay.
00:53:19 ►
It can’t just be because we feel good. And it can’t be just be our good intentions because we
00:53:23 ►
all know the road to hell is paved with intentions. Ask missionaries and Indian boarding schools and any number of
00:53:29 ►
people who did all kinds of atrocious things with good intentions. So who gets to decide? Well, we
00:53:34 ►
have to move beyond the individual and we have to begin to move beyond just our sense of good
00:53:39 ►
intentions. And I think that as a community, if we begin to ask this question, and this is what I’ll end with, and I’ve come to think of these questions as a sort of koan, like a social political koan that you should spend time with.
00:53:53 ►
In what ways is my practice liberatory?
00:53:56 ►
In what ways can I connect my personal, political, and spiritual politics to the broader society, to broader material realities, to work towards justice?
00:54:04 ►
I don’t
00:54:05 ►
think that’s a question. I was talking to these beautiful people after our earlier conversation.
00:54:09 ►
They’re like, well, how do we solve this problem? What is the answer to the question?
00:54:14 ►
There are many answers to the question, but really it’s the question that is the answer
00:54:18 ►
because you have to keep working on it. And so I hope here at Burning Man, you have a beautiful time
00:54:24 ►
and you take whatever it is you came here to Burning Man you have a beautiful time and you take whatever
00:54:25 ►
it is you came here to take and you make friends, but that you go home and you think about if you
00:54:31 ►
view this as liberatory, what is it that you think is liberatory and how can you make it more
00:54:35 ►
liberatory when you take it home with you so we don’t fall into all kinds of traps of ego and
00:54:41 ►
politics and privilege. And with that, I’ll end it there.
00:54:45 ►
Thank you.
00:54:48 ►
Thanks, Maddie.
00:54:51 ►
We have about five minutes for questions if anybody has a couple.
00:54:54 ►
I’d like to go back for a second
00:54:56 ►
to some of the issues from the first part.
00:54:59 ►
Sorry I didn’t wedge these questions in earlier,
00:55:00 ►
but I wonder if you might have a few words about the relationship
00:55:08 ►
between your sense of the history of LSD in particular and the current rapid evolution
00:55:16 ►
of medicalized marijuana and that relationship between medicalization, the development of a market, and that issue?
00:55:30 ►
I think that the medical marijuana movement in some ways mirrors
00:55:36 ►
many of the things I’m concerned about.
00:55:38 ►
Like on the one hand, like I get the framework.
00:55:42 ►
I get how it’s a wedge, right?
00:55:44 ►
Like what are they going to do?
00:55:45 ►
Throw cancer patients in jail?
00:55:47 ►
It helps give us legitimacy.
00:55:50 ►
You know what I mean?
00:55:50 ►
I get that.
00:55:53 ►
But what’s the price?
00:55:54 ►
But what’s the price?
00:55:55 ►
And I had this interesting conversation with some folks at the WVC who are doing this policy work around medical marijuana.
00:56:03 ►
And then they were talking about all the people who go into the clinics with like, oh yeah, my back, my leg, my
00:56:08 ►
eyes hurt. I’m going to need some medicine. Yeah. Yeah. You know what I’m saying? Right. Like that
00:56:12 ►
whole kind of game we’re forced to play. And to me, that’s a symptom of what you’re talking about.
00:56:17 ►
Like it’s rather than just claiming, right. Our right, our right to do this and also challenging
00:56:24 ►
the biomedical model, you end up reinforcing the
00:56:27 ►
biomedical model and you get yourself into sort of a dead-end trap. And just one more story about
00:56:32 ►
that that helps me understand this is the recent debates about birth control, because now we’re
00:56:40 ►
supposed to get rid of birth control. And so I don’t know who was following the Sandra Fluke situation, right,
00:56:45 ►
where she came out and she was going to give a talk to Congress, right,
00:56:49 ►
to defend that birth control should be covered by insurance companies, right,
00:56:54 ►
and then Rush Limbaugh called her a slut, you know,
00:56:56 ►
and then because he does, yeah, anyway.
00:56:59 ►
So he called her a slut, right.
00:57:00 ►
And then so she came back and responded because it created this huge kerfuffle.
00:57:05 ►
And her response was something about, well, you know, I have this friend and she, I don’t remember
00:57:11 ►
if she was a lesbian or celibate, she’s like, but she doesn’t have sex and she has cysts. And what
00:57:16 ►
about all the sisters who need birth control for cysts? And she was doing that because it helps
00:57:20 ►
legitimate the discourse. I was like, yeah, but you fall into horrible traps because it says there’s something wrong with the fact that I need
00:57:27 ►
a pill because I want to have some sex because I’m a grown-ass woman and I don’t have cis
00:57:32 ►
and we end up violating this, you know, in this trap. And I wish she would have said,
00:57:36 ►
yeah, I like to have sex because I’m a grown-ass woman and I need my birth control. And what
00:57:42 ►
the, you know, so great, right?
00:57:45 ►
Nothing wrong with it.
00:57:47 ►
And so I feel like in some ways it starts turning us into liars
00:57:49 ►
and we have to start playing these games.
00:57:51 ►
So that’s one part of my answer to that.
00:57:55 ►
Thank you, Maddie, for that incredibly energetic talk
00:57:57 ►
to kick us off this week.
00:57:59 ►
It’s awesome.
00:58:01 ►
Yeah, it’s…
00:58:11 ►
I met Maddie at the Women’s Visionary Congress just several weeks ago.
00:58:17 ►
It’s interesting you bring up the BN because some women there were talking about it and how when the BN happened in Goldegate Park in San Francisco after LSD was made illegal,
00:58:23 ►
it was the talks that were given on stage were dominated by male speakers.
00:58:29 ►
So there’s a discussion about bringing back the BN with a more balanced style.
00:58:35 ►
So we might see that again in the future.
00:58:38 ►
So briefly, I’ll just let you guys know what’s coming on up.
00:58:42 ►
We have Dr. Brian Hewlett here, who will be speaking about an algorithm for human consciousness and his Ph.D. research.
00:58:51 ►
He’ll be going on in about 10 minutes.
00:58:53 ►
We’ll have a quick bio water break.
00:58:55 ►
And then we’ll have an hour break after his talk before Charlie Shaw and Ken Adams speak tonight.
00:59:02 ►
And then a movie screening for the Terrence McKenna
00:59:05 ►
experience.
00:59:06 ►
So if you guys want to take a quick break, we’ll get going here in just a few minutes.
00:59:10 ►
Thanks.
00:59:13 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one
00:59:17 ►
thought at a time.
00:59:21 ►
Well, we’ll be taking a little bit more than a 10-minute break right here,
00:59:25 ►
but I left Pez’s closing remarks in so that you know what’s coming next here in the salon in the next few weeks.
00:59:33 ►
You know, there have been several times in my life when I was either broke or out of work or brokenhearted
00:59:39 ►
or any of the other reasons that we have to feel sorry for ourselves from time to time.
00:59:44 ►
any of the other reasons that we have to feel sorry for ourselves from time to time.
00:59:49 ►
And at those times, I found that the best way out of those pits of depression was to take an inventory of all the privileges and advantages that I’ve had in my life.
00:59:55 ►
And when Dr. Maddy was talking about privilege just now,
00:59:59 ►
it reminded me that I should never forget to count my blessings,
01:00:02 ►
as my dear departed mother often said.
01:00:04 ►
And I realize that many of our fellow slaughters are truly going through some very tough times right now.
01:00:11 ►
Yet, just being in a position to access the net and download a podcast
01:00:15 ►
puts us way ahead of a significant number of our fellow humans.
01:00:20 ►
I don’t know how accurate this figure is, but the other day I was reading some article and it said that the net worth, that a net worth of only $34,000 puts one in the top 1%, economically, 1% when the entire world’s population is taken into account.
01:00:40 ►
And to me that means that the other 99% are in much worse shape than most of us realize.
01:00:46 ►
So, hey, let’s count our blessings.
01:00:49 ►
You know, it’s very liberating.
01:00:52 ►
Now, if you think back to the Esalen workshop that Bruce Dahmer and I led,
01:00:57 ►
you may remember Bruce quoting Alicia Danforth as saying something like,
01:01:00 ►
the days of old white men sitting on a stage and lecturing us about psychedelics have come to an end.
01:01:08 ►
And I think that after listening with me to Dr. Maddy and last week listening to Amanda Sage,
01:01:14 ►
that we can all agree that Alicia is correct.
01:01:18 ►
After listening to these two powerful, exciting, and intelligent young women,
01:01:21 ►
I have such a renewed sense of hope about the future of our species
01:01:25 ►
that, well, I’m simply bursting with joy.
01:01:29 ►
I have to admit that in doing research for my next novel,
01:01:33 ►
I’ve been sort of reading myself into somewhat of a dark corner,
01:01:36 ►
particularly when studying world economics and politics.
01:01:40 ►
But I sometimes forget about all that is going on behind the scenes.
01:01:44 ►
You know, it’s just below the surface of the default culture But I sometimes forget about all that is going on behind the scenes.
01:01:51 ►
It’s just below the surface of the default culture where this incredible assemblage of people,
01:01:58 ►
the people I call the tribe, as many of us call our collective of psychedelic human consciousness these days.
01:02:10 ►
Well, every time I return my focus to the lives being led by and the work being done by the tribe, well, I relax and smile and realize that there really is an incredible future already being created by a really enormous group of people
01:02:14 ►
who have come to understand what Terence McKenna meant when he said that
01:02:17 ►
culture is a cult.
01:02:19 ►
And I’m sure that you know what I mean.
01:02:22 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:02:27 ►
Be well, my friends.