Program Notes
Guest speaker: Annie Oak
Today we hear from civil rights activist and the founder of the Women’s Visionary Congress in her 2012 Palenque Norte Lecture at the Burning Man Festival. Anyone who is feeling that they are “out there at the end of the line” may find great encouragement in what Annie has to say as she tells the story of her own unique journey through life. And for the psychedelic community she has these powerful words, “We’re not the counter-culture. We are the culture, and we need to make the culture visible.”
The Women’s Visionary Congress
Consciousness, Healing, and Social Justice
Links mentioned in this podcast
The Terence McKenna Legacy Library book list at LibraryThing
Dr. Bruce’s Levity Zone
The Evolver Network
BrynStoneBooks.com
UKCSC Podcast 006: Please Hire Me, I’m a Cannabis Campaigner!
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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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Cyberdelic Space. This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And to begin, I want to thank our fellow salonners who either made a donation for the Pay What You Can audiobook edition of my novel, The Genesis Generation, which you can also download
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for free, by the way. But the donations are used to offset some of the expenses associated with
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these podcasts. And also, I’d like to thank those who
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bought one of the Kindle versions of it on Amazon. Although I don’t know who you are, since Amazon
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doesn’t share that information with me, I do know that there are six fellow salonners out here in
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Cyber Deli space who have also helped out. So my thanks goes out to you as well. Additionally, I
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want to both thank and to apologize to our fellow salonners
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who made a direct donation to the salon. The apology is for what appears to be a rude kind
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of shouting on our salon blog, and what happened is that somehow the index page wound up getting
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some spurious code in it that caused the text about donations and a few other things in the right
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sidebar to appear on the home page in an extremely large font. I’ve put a little patch there that
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helps a bit, but it still looks awful rude, and I apologize to you all for that. And next week,
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I hope to have the time to do some debugging and try to figure out what caused that to happen. So I’m sorry for how it looks right now.
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And in particular, I’d like to thank Sarah W.,
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who has been sending in a donation almost every month for a while now.
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You’ve gone way over and above the call of duty, Sarah, so thank you ever so much.
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Now, for today’s program, this is one that I think will have some new
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and quite interesting information
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for everyone. But it will be of particular interest to our women salonners who, well,
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they aren’t as well represented in these podcasts as they actually are out in our community. But
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there are reasons for that, and I think our guest speaker, Annie Oak, explains them extremely well.
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In a moment, we’ll be hearing a story about how Annie went from being
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a very discreet psychonaut to where today she has become a highly respected leader in our community.
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And while I’ve not yet met Annie in person, I’ve been hearing about her for many years now.
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As you will hear in just a moment, the path that Annie took to get where she is today, well, it’s had many twists and turns, as have all of ours as well, I guess.
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But I am ever so grateful that, indirectly, Annie’s path and mine have finally crossed.
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Because without her leadership, I doubt that the Palenque Norte lectures would have taken place this past year.
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And here’s how it all came about.
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At least it’s how I remember it, and I’m sure that
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Bruce Dahmer will let me know if I got something wrong. Now, as you might remember, the last year
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that I was able to attend the Burning Man Festival in person was in 2007, and from then until this
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past year, there were no Palenque Norte lectures held on the playa.
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But last year, Bruce Dahmer talked me into getting involved once again,
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and we began making plans for the 2012 festival.
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However, before we got too far along with our planning,
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well, the Burning Man ticket fiasco took place,
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and along with most of our original camp organizers, I didn’t get a ticket.
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Well, by the time they straightened out that mess, most of us had kind of lost our enthusiasm and decided not to attend.
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But not Bruce. He forged ahead, determined that the lecture should take place on the playa in 2012.
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And about that same time, our good friend Alicia Danforth got involved and introduced us to Annie Oak. As it turned out,
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the previous year saw Annie and her camp host a lecture series that was largely coordinated by
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Chris Pezza, or Pez as his friends call him. So Annie and Pez told Bruce that they would be happy
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to incorporate the Blanque Norte lectures into their new theme camp. However, before too much
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planning got done, Bruce had
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to leave for an extended trip overseas, which left Pez to do the bulk of the initial organizing
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for the talks. And the rest is now history, as they say. And in fact, even more history is
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going to be in the making for this year’s burn. But I’ll tell you more about that after we hear
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the talk that Annie Oak gave this past year, which I think is going to open up some new vistas for some of our fellow
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salonners, maybe even you. Up next, we have Annie Oak. Annie is a civil rights activist. She’s done
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a lot of work on human rights. She’s also the founder of the Women’s Visionary Congress
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and formerly the Saraswati Tea House
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and currently the Full Circle Tea House,
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which we’ve all been loving right over there at 915 and C.
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She’s a very dear friend
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and was an amazing help
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in putting together last year’s speaker series
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and supporting this year’s speaker series.
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So give it up for Annie Oak. Annie Oak Thank you. You know the plants are our teachers. And we, in our tea ceremony,
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welcome the plants to be our teachers who would like some tea yes all
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right we have a couple of cups here if anyone who would like some nettle tea or
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some pu-erh please come forward so what are we doing up here we’re drinking tea
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drinking tea is a ritual and ritual is an essential part of creating community
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and of grounding ourselves and uniting ourselves with the plants.
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We’re drinking nettle tea this morning, which is very nourishing.
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A lot of us had very long nights last night.
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Perhaps we got altered.
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Perhaps we were out on the playa.
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Perhaps we didn’t get much sleep.
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And the nettle tea helps to ground us and to nourish us
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and to bring us back to ourselves and to unite us with the plants.
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I believe that being part of a psychedelic community
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is to be closer to the plants,
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to allow the plants to be our teachers and our guides.
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One of the reasons I founded a tea house,
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which is here in our camp, the Saraswati and Full Circle Tea Houses, is so that we could engage together in ritual. Thank
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you. This is a ritual that helps bring us together, and this is the creation of community.
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We share something, we share the knowledge of the
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plants. We sit close together. We drink tea together. We nourish ourselves. We have conversations.
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We engage in ritual. Traditional societies did a lot of ritual together. I don’t think we do enough
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ritual together. I think it’s important to create rituals.
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And the simplest ritual is the serving of tea.
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Tea is one of the most consumed beverages all over the planet.
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Lots of different cultures serve tea in different ways.
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Anywhere you go on the planet, somebody stops at some point in the day and says,
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hey, time to sit down together and talk and have some tea.
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What a simple thing, right?
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It’s so welcoming.
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You could be in somebody’s kitchen or maybe you’re in their business and they bring a tea tray in.
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It’s different in every culture.
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It’s a ritual.
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It brings community together.
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And it brings us closer to the plants.
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And these are some of the themes I’d like to talk about today in the creation
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of community. I also want to do some storytelling and I want to talk about making the unseen
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seen. The unseen seen. The things that we can’t see, make them present and make them
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visible for us. And if anybody would like some more tea in the midst of this, I’m going to deputize a tea server to serve us tea.
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Who would like to be our tea server while I talk? One of you step up and be our tea server,
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our ritual leader. Here’s the water. Here is the pu-erh pot. We’re drinking pu-erh, which is fine tea.
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We’ll need to rinse those leaves first.
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This is the cup we reserve for the spirits in gratitude.
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So you can just pour that into the pitcher and pour it over.
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You can use the same pitcher here.
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I think it’s important to include ritual in all creation of community. What we do in the
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tea house here is an extended 24-hour ritual of serving tea to each other. It’s a really beautiful
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and simple thing that we can do for each other. It’s very nourishing, and it’s very calming. It
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helps to ground people. It’s difficult to stay grounded out here sometimes. We get dehydrated, we get stressed, we get tired.
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Thanks, Layer Cake.
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He’s doing a beautiful job.
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In addition to drinking the pu-erh,
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we’re drinking some nettle tea.
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We wash the pu-erh leaves.
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We do a first pour over the pot.
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So let me tell you a story.
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About 20 years ago,
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I was part of a small psychedelic study group in Boston.
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It was me and two other women.
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We were very, very interested in psychedelics and altered states,
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and we essentially formed
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what was a tiny little study group of three people.
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And we read books together,
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and it was our version of a great books group.
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And we sat for each other as we journeyed. And we were friends and we were there to support
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each other in our unfolding process of exploration. And one day, we got a visitor. And this visitor said, hi. It was another woman.
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She said, I’ve heard about you through friends and contacts,
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and I’m an envoy from another community
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on the other side of the country, a psychedelic community.
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And we were like, whoa.
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We had no idea.
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She said, we’re having a meeting of psychedelic women in California.
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And we want you to send an envoy to this meeting. And we will welcome you and we will give you an
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address. You don’t know whose house this is. You have no idea who’s going to be at this meeting,
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but you have to trust us that you’re part of our community and that you’re welcome.
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And this was really a big deal for us. None of us had any money. So we pooled all of our
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slender funds, and I was very fortunate. For me, I was voted to be the envoy,
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and I got on a plane with an address north of San Francisco.
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I didn’t know where I was going.
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I didn’t know whose house it was.
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I did it completely on faith
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because I believed that the spirits were leading us towards our destiny,
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towards the uniting with the greater community.
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So I get on the plane, and I land in San Francisco,
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a place I had never been,
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and I rent a car, and I drive north to an address.
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I had no idea where I was going.
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And I arrive at this compound,
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and I’m welcomed by this group of radiant women.
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And suddenly, I’m sitting in a room with 100 women and their children.
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And this was the women’s psychedelic community of Northern California.
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And it really blew my mind.
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It changed my life, really.
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And I didn’t know any of these women at all.
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But they knew who we were because they had
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sent their advanced scouts out looking for us. And I sat in ceremony with them and their children
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for several days, and I realized that there was this vast, large, submerged, very old psychedelic community of women that was completely invisible
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to those who didn’t know about it.
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Highly protected, very evolved, and very secret.
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And secret for good reasons.
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There are some good reasons why you very often see fewer women speak at psychedelic events.
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Often people ask me, why do you see fewer women speak?
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Well, let’s see.
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If you are identified by the authorities as a woman who takes substances that alters your consciousness,
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you could lose your children. You could lose your children.
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You could lose your home.
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You could lose your livelihood.
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You could lose your freedom.
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You could be imprisoned.
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Women typically make less money,
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and so they don’t have the funds to hire lawyers.
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And then there is a couple thousand years of persecution
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of women who understand the plants.
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And that community has been underground for a very long time.
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So there I was, with these women I didn’t know, being welcomed into this community.
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And I asked the plants, I said,
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What could I do in my life to help create and support and extend this community?
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Is there a role for me?
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And the plants said, yes, actually, we have some plans for you.
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We would like you to do a couple of things,
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and you’ll be receiving some instructions.
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So pay attention and make yourself a clear channel,
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and do what we say, and everything will be all right.
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And I said, all right, I guess so.
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I’m a science reporter by training. I’m a skeptic.
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I have a very skeptical view of the paranormal and these types of things.
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But I paid attention.
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I made some friends who are still my deep and old friends to this day.
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And I went back to Boston and resumed my life as a technology reporter, of all things,
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and began to pay attention to what the plants were saying to me
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and how I could help create and extend psychedelic community.
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About ten years later, I moved to San Francisco,
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and by that time I had some friends in this community,
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and I began to meet more and more women and also lots of men
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who are our allies and began to realize that this was a broad and deep and wise and generally
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well-protected community of people who really believed in cognitive liberty and were engaged in a civil rights struggle
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for the right to alter their consciousness.
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And that it was going to be one of the great civil rights struggles of our era
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and that we all had a role to play in that struggle.
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So I went about my job as a technology reporter. I arrived in San Francisco just in time
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to witness the collapse of the first great technology bubble in about 2000. And I was
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writing for Wired News. And I was interested in an event that took place in 2006 called the World Psychedelic Forum.
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It was held in Basel, Switzerland.
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It was the 100th birthday of Albert Hoffman.
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And I thought, oh, the World Psychedelic Forum, far out.
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I’m going to meet psychedelic people from all over the world.
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What a great opportunity.
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So I wrangled an assignment
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from my editors at Wired to write about
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the impact of LSD on
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creativity and on scientists,
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which I thought was a really cool topic.
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And I got there
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and there were 80 men speaking and 4 women.
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And I thought, and the group that ran it was called Gaia. And there were 80 men speaking and four women.
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And the group that ran it was called Gaia,
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which we called guys.
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And they were great guys.
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I really liked them.
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They were a bunch of Swiss guys.
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80 men and four women. And I’m like, really?
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Are you for real?
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really?
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because I by that point
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had the great fortune of knowing more
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and more really wise
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women, deep teachers
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powerful green witches
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handmaidens to the plants
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and I wrote my story I filed my story, I filed my story,
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and I thought to myself, well,
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I could either write some angry polemic,
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you know, and shake my fist,
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nobody would care, really,
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or I could throw a party.
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There’s a really great phrase that says,
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if you want to change the world, throw a better party.
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So I decided to throw a party
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and invite 25 of the most powerful psychedelic women I knew
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to come and speak. And we did it at a beautiful place called
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Wilbur Hot Springs, which is owned by a
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wonderful guy named Dr. Miller.
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And he understood exactly what we were trying to do,
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and he was our ally.
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And let me be clear here.
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We’ve always welcomed men into our community.
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They’re our allies and our friends and our lovers
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and our brothers and our partners and our co-conspirators.
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And he was definitely a powerful ally.
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And he knew what we were trying to do.
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And so we invited 25 women to speak and two men.
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I thought, oh, the universe loves balance.
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And so let’s just reverse what usually happens.
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Instead of 25 men speaking and two women,
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let’s have 25 women and two men
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and invite guys and have a great time.
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And 80 people showed up and some
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amazing presentations were offered, just blew our socks off.
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And that was the birth of the Women’s Visionary Congress.
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And it was really powerful
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and I realized, ah, this is an idea that’s much
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larger than me, much larger than me,
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much larger than a single event.
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And so I invited the two wisest, most powerful psychedelic women I knew,
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Carolyn Garcia, mountain girl, and Hidden Mountain,
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I was between two mountains, Maria Mangini,
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to form a non-profit organization with me called the Women’s Visionary Council.
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And the Women’s Visionary Council became a 501c3
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in order to keep this event moving forward
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and organized as a non-profit experience.
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And now we have a new board member, Diana Slattery,
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who is also a very powerful woman, wonderful.
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I’m the junior crone in this group.
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I just turned 51,
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and I very much look up to my elders.
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I am very grateful for their guidance.
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So we formed this organization,
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and we have a large women’s congress every year.
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We just had one up in Petaluma at IONS,
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the Institute of Noetic Sciences, in July.
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And we have events all around the country
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where we make contact
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with local women in the local psychedelic community
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and
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we do one day salons
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where we invite them to invite
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the leaders in their community, both women and men
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to speak and about four people speak.
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And of course, since it’s a women’s event, we all bring food, right? And we bring covered dishes,
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we potluck, and we have a meal together afterwards, which is a ritual. And we serve tea.
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Rituals bind us. So we do some ritual. We form a circle, we cast the four directions as is typical in our tradition, and we close
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the circle and then we leave.
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And this help creates communities all over the country and we’ve been doing this for
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a number of years.
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We just had our sixth Women’s Visionary Congress,
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and we’re having a Women’s Visionary Council Salon in Vancouver, Canada,
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our first international salon on the 22nd of September, and we are very much looking forward to making connections
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with the psychedelic community in Vancouver,
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which is very strong and wonderful, and I’m really looking forward to it.
00:22:08 ►
In the creation of this community,
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I think we’ve done a few things
00:22:11 ►
that could benefit the entire psychedelic community.
00:22:15 ►
We’ve focused on storytelling.
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As I’m doing here, I’m telling stories.
00:22:20 ►
It’s through storytelling that we gather our history,
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that we reveal who we are, that we
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acknowledge our own specialness as a community, that we share our experiences, that we pass
00:22:34 ►
down knowledge, that elders pass down knowledge to younger people, that people from indigenous
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communities pass down knowledge to us.
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It’s an essential part of what we do.
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And every year at the Congress,
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the stories keep getting more and more personal.
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We do a bit of magic in our gatherings.
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They’re public gatherings.
00:23:01 ►
When we first did it, it was scary.
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We didn’t realize what was going to happen.
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We have a history of persecution.
00:23:08 ►
And so we used all the power that we had
00:23:12 ►
to create a safe space.
00:23:16 ►
A public space where anyone could come,
00:23:19 ►
but a safe space where women who typically felt
00:23:23 ►
more vulnerable talking about their personal lives,
00:23:28 ►
their psychedelic histories, could tell very
00:23:31 ►
intimate stories and not worry about repercussion.
00:23:37 ►
So far, none of the women who have
00:23:39 ►
ever spoken have had any
00:23:44 ►
repercussion as a result of what they said as far as we know.
00:23:49 ►
And we use all of our power and all of our energy to make sure that is true. Part of forming a
00:23:55 ►
community is a way to protect ourselves, to watch each other’s back, and to be there for each other
00:24:02 ►
in times of distress,
00:24:06 ►
danger, and crisis.
00:24:09 ►
In the women’s community, it’s always been so.
00:24:11 ►
Always been so.
00:24:12 ►
We’ve always had to pool resources.
00:24:15 ►
We’ve never had much money, most of us.
00:24:17 ►
We’ve always had to do this.
00:24:20 ►
And so that’s something that we can extend.
00:24:23 ►
In addition to storytelling, we try to make the unseen seen.
00:24:29 ►
We try to take our unseen lives, our psychedelic lives that remain submerged for our own safety often,
00:24:37 ►
and show them to each other, reveal ourselves to each other.
00:24:47 ►
selves to each other. Our standard joke at the WVC, which is what we call the Women’s Visionary Congress and the Women’s Visionary Council, the non-profit that we formed, is that we should form
00:24:52 ►
a psychedelic dating service because we want people to make connections. And we’ve come to
00:25:01 ►
the conclusion that people are dating just fine on their own.
00:25:07 ►
We don’t really need to do that for most people.
00:25:11 ►
Sharing psychedelic experiences is a very interesting way to get to know people that you want to date.
00:25:15 ►
What we really think we’re going to do
00:25:17 ►
is to create a psychedelic dating service
00:25:19 ►
to introduce elders to younger people.
00:25:23 ►
Because we need grandparents.
00:25:26 ►
We need information from our elders.
00:25:29 ►
Our elders have a lot of information that we need.
00:25:33 ►
I miss my grandparents every day,
00:25:35 ►
but I have some wonderful adopted grandparents
00:25:38 ►
who guide me.
00:25:40 ►
And I think we all need that guiding.
00:25:43 ►
We need grandparents.
00:25:44 ►
We need elders to teach us.
00:25:48 ►
And we need to collect oral history
00:25:50 ►
before our elders leave us.
00:25:52 ►
That’s essential.
00:25:54 ►
I’d like to thank all the archivists here
00:25:56 ►
in this room who do that.
00:25:58 ►
It’s an essential thing.
00:25:59 ►
It’s our history.
00:26:01 ►
And it’s the passing down of knowledge
00:26:03 ►
that all communities must do.
00:26:07 ►
There’s another role for community that’s really essential.
00:26:12 ►
Communities help mediate disputes.
00:26:16 ►
They help us confront our shadow side.
00:26:19 ►
The psychedelic community, by and large, is unbalanced.
00:26:25 ►
There are not enough women in positions of power in this community.
00:26:29 ►
And that’s been so for a very long time.
00:26:32 ►
And that needs to change.
00:26:35 ►
We need more women leaders to step forward
00:26:37 ►
and to say to the men,
00:26:39 ►
we love you, you’re our brothers, share power with us.
00:26:43 ►
Balance this community, because without that balance,
00:26:46 ►
we can’t be as powerful as we need to be.
00:26:49 ►
And especially welcome the elder women.
00:26:53 ►
Especially welcome the elder women.
00:26:54 ►
They have a lot to say.
00:26:56 ►
They’re our grandmothers.
00:26:59 ►
We need a community of elders to help settle disputes.
00:27:03 ►
That community of elders should include
00:27:05 ►
elder men and elder women. We have people in this community who are in pain, who
00:27:11 ►
are suffering, who go to prison, who lose their children, whose houses and property
00:27:18 ►
are seized. This is a civil rights movement and we are the last oppressed
00:27:23 ►
group to claim and demand
00:27:25 ►
our civil rights, and we need to.
00:27:28 ►
And we need to tell the world that we have a right to cognitive liberty, to alter our
00:27:32 ►
consciousness, to explore other worlds, to gain inspiration from the plants in our spirit
00:27:39 ►
teachers, and that we have an indigenous psychedelic community.
00:27:46 ►
We honor and respect our elders in Central Latin America who
00:27:52 ►
are the ayahuasqueros.
00:27:55 ►
They have a lot to teach us.
00:27:58 ►
And we should honor them without commodifying their culture
00:28:03 ►
and without diluting their culture.
00:28:06 ►
And we have our own indigenous psychedelic culture, and that would be LSD, and MDMA,
00:28:15 ►
and psilocybin.
00:28:18 ►
And we should acknowledge that we have our own indigenous psychedelic culture as well
00:28:22 ►
that we need to cultivate. Back in the
00:28:26 ►
60s when this culture first started to emerge there were some big community
00:28:30 ►
gatherings. One of them was the human being which took place in the mid 60s. It
00:28:39 ►
took place to recognize the time when LSD was declared illegal.
00:28:46 ►
It was to acknowledge that moment.
00:28:50 ►
And there were many luminaries on stage,
00:28:54 ►
many great people who spoke,
00:28:58 ►
who, they did a huge event in Speedway Meadow and Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.
00:29:02 ►
And there were no women on stage.
00:29:10 ►
Not one woman on stage. We’ve looked at the pictures over and over and over again. We can’t believe it, really. Everyone’s talking
00:29:16 ►
about raised consciousness, and we’re going… So we’d like to do that event again.
00:29:26 ►
We want to do a do-over in 2014 for that event
00:29:31 ►
and declare peace in the war on drugs.
00:29:36 ►
Ask people to end that war, to end the suffering.
00:29:40 ►
And the women are going to run that event.
00:29:42 ►
We’re very excited about that.
00:29:55 ►
Without the full participation of women in this community,
00:29:58 ►
we will not change the drug laws.
00:30:02 ►
If you look at who typically votes against drug law reform,
00:30:03 ►
it is women with children.
00:30:04 ►
They’re worried about their children. Unless we
00:30:06 ►
can reach those women, and I say this over
00:30:08 ►
and over and over again
00:30:10 ►
to activists, you must
00:30:12 ►
reach the soccer moms.
00:30:14 ►
You must convince them
00:30:15 ►
that
00:30:18 ►
having their children go to prison
00:30:20 ►
and enter the criminal justice system
00:30:22 ►
is far worse than the chances of your
00:30:24 ►
kids smoking pot.
00:30:27 ►
And that’s an important message to get across.
00:30:30 ►
We will never, ever change the drug laws
00:30:33 ►
unless we reach those women in a profound way.
00:30:37 ►
And we will never change the drug laws
00:30:39 ►
unless we reach the community of color in a profound way.
00:30:43 ►
The community of color suffers much profound way. The community of color suffers
00:30:45 ►
much more than white people do
00:30:48 ►
from imprisonment, incarceration,
00:30:51 ►
the destruction of their families.
00:30:54 ►
They must be our allies. We cannot change the laws
00:30:58 ►
without a strong alliance with
00:31:00 ►
all communities of color. It won’t happen.
00:31:04 ►
We could pour all the money we want
00:31:06 ►
into it and it won’t happen.
00:31:09 ►
It must be an alliance.
00:31:10 ►
It must be an alliance
00:31:12 ►
of genders.
00:31:14 ►
It must be an alliance of generations.
00:31:16 ►
It must be an alliance
00:31:18 ►
of people
00:31:20 ►
of different ethnic backgrounds.
00:31:24 ►
And we must keep saying this over and over again.
00:31:28 ►
We must have a representative group of leaders
00:31:31 ►
in this community, or what happens
00:31:33 ►
is often what happens now.
00:31:36 ►
We have a relatively small collection of white men
00:31:39 ►
vying for power.
00:31:41 ►
And it happens over and over again.
00:31:43 ►
They’re like rams, you know. They crash their
00:31:46 ►
heads together. It’s fun to watch sometimes, but, you know, for pure theatrical. You know,
00:31:53 ►
and the women go, oh, and they drink their tea. And they go, oh, man, maybe we can recruit
00:32:03 ►
some lovely young women to sleep with them or something.
00:32:06 ►
Just like chill them out.
00:32:09 ►
What a waste of energy.
00:32:15 ►
So I’d like to invite you to imagine how you can create your own psychedelic study groups,
00:32:24 ►
wherever you are, and then reach
00:32:27 ►
out to your own local psychedelic community.
00:32:32 ►
In San Francisco, we have this lovely thing called the Friday night dinner.
00:32:37 ►
We get together and we eat.
00:32:38 ►
Eating is a ritual.
00:32:40 ►
We eat together.
00:32:41 ►
There are rules.
00:32:42 ►
You’re not allowed to smoke pot.
00:32:44 ►
You can’t bring
00:32:45 ►
drugs into the dinner. It’s a good rule. We’re all very present with each other.
00:32:50 ►
We share food. We’re a community. And it helps us build our local communities and
00:32:57 ►
then the local communities need to, of course, attend big events like this event
00:33:04 ►
that we’re at here and make connections
00:33:07 ►
between different communities and then go visit each other and and have big
00:33:11 ►
community events we think we’d like to form a production company at this point
00:33:16 ►
to have bigger community events that’s we think where we’re headed and so those
00:33:20 ►
small communities need to send out envoys, just like that community in California
00:33:25 ►
sent that envoy out to us in Boston,
00:33:28 ►
who said, hi, I know who you are.
00:33:32 ►
I know you.
00:33:34 ►
And you don’t know us, but you will.
00:33:37 ►
And you’ll be part of our community
00:33:39 ►
because we can offer you something.
00:33:43 ►
And so I’m hoping that small communities can send out envoys,
00:33:47 ►
that we can form a larger community,
00:33:49 ►
that we can make the invisible visible through our storytelling,
00:33:53 ►
that we can use ritual to bind us together,
00:33:57 ►
that we could bring in all genders,
00:34:00 ►
all people, people of color,
00:34:07 ►
all people, people of color, all generations,
00:34:10 ►
to make us stronger and make us wiser and fill the holes that we have in our community.
00:34:13 ►
And that we can settle our disputes
00:34:16 ►
and that we can offer ourselves as a model,
00:34:23 ►
as righteous, wise, good, psychedelic citizens.
00:34:29 ►
The rest of the world demonizes us,
00:34:32 ►
and we start internalizing that demonization.
00:34:35 ►
We are not worthy.
00:34:37 ►
We are just drug users.
00:34:39 ►
We’re not good parents.
00:34:41 ►
We’re not good citizens.
00:34:43 ►
We don’t contribute.
00:34:47 ►
People internalize this message.
00:34:57 ►
And it’s up to the community to say, no, send it back, send it back, send it back. We are good people. We are good citizens. We are good parents. We contribute to our communities. We’re healers.
00:35:05 ►
We’re activists.
00:35:07 ►
We’re researchers.
00:35:07 ►
We’re artists.
00:35:09 ►
We’re not the counterculture.
00:35:11 ►
We are the culture.
00:35:13 ►
We are the culture.
00:35:15 ►
And we need to make the culture visible
00:35:17 ►
and connect communities
00:35:20 ►
and bring in everybody
00:35:22 ►
who wishes to be part of this community.
00:35:25 ►
It will make us stronger and it will make us wiser,
00:35:28 ►
and it will make us safer.
00:35:31 ►
And it will offer a model to people who join our community
00:35:34 ►
and perhaps don’t use the medicines in as wise a way as they should.
00:35:40 ►
We have all the knowledge we need.
00:35:43 ►
Our elders have a lot to share. The Our elders have a lot to share.
00:35:46 ►
The younger people have a lot to share.
00:35:49 ►
We know what we need to say
00:35:51 ►
to people who come in and act in an unsafe way,
00:35:55 ►
who are doing damage to themselves and their families.
00:36:00 ►
We know what we need to say.
00:36:02 ►
It’s a matter of bringing communities together,
00:36:06 ►
finding ourselves in ritual,
00:36:08 ►
and making sure that that information gets passed down,
00:36:11 ►
and that we hold ourselves up as good citizens.
00:36:15 ►
As good citizens.
00:36:18 ►
I’m going to stop talking and get some questions.
00:36:21 ►
Who has a question they would like to ask?
00:36:25 ►
I was just wondering if you had any advice
00:36:27 ►
for finding communities in your local area.
00:36:30 ►
I, for example, am from San Francisco,
00:36:33 ►
and I was wondering if you had any advice
00:36:35 ►
for finding a psychedelic community within the Bay Area
00:36:38 ►
or just for people in general
00:36:40 ►
who may be experimenting on their own or just with close friends to branch out
00:36:49 ►
to meet new people who are interested in these things?
00:36:52 ►
Well, as it happens, this is a superb place to find those people, right here.
00:36:59 ►
And I always ask people where they’re from, you know, here at this event.
00:37:06 ►
And I say, oh, you’re from Cincinnati.
00:37:09 ►
Well, we have another person in our camp from Cincinnati.
00:37:12 ►
You all should get together.
00:37:13 ►
Have tea in the tea house.
00:37:16 ►
Talk about the things that you’re interested in.
00:37:19 ►
And find each other.
00:37:21 ►
Find each other. Find each other. Of course, there are some wonderful community virtual spaces, such as Arrowhead,
00:37:30 ►
where people post information that can help people find each other.
00:37:38 ►
Perhaps we really should run the dating service.
00:37:41 ►
Events.
00:37:43 ►
Events are the way that people find each other. That’s why it’s so important that
00:37:46 ►
we hold local events. Since we started our project, we have been contacted by psychedelic communities
00:37:53 ►
all over the world. That’s been the best part of this project. We have met remarkable people who have revealed themselves to us said hey we are your
00:38:07 ►
allies we’re part of your community and we say oh great let’s do a local event
00:38:15 ►
where you are this year we’re going to be doing local events in a number of
00:38:20 ►
places this year we’re we’ve done local events in Berkeley and in Seattle
00:38:26 ►
and a number of other places.
00:38:30 ►
This year, we’re going meta.
00:38:34 ►
We’re going to be doing our event in Vancouver, Canada
00:38:37 ►
to meet and help unite that local community.
00:38:41 ►
We’re going to be doing an event in Los Angeles.
00:38:44 ►
Oh, what a beautiful place overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
00:38:48 ►
We’re going to be doing a local event in New York City.
00:38:51 ►
We would want to do a Women’s Psychedelic Summit in New York City and perhaps if we’re very
00:38:55 ►
fortunate with our friends at COSM
00:38:59 ►
and we are visioning on that right now.
00:39:04 ►
Our friends at COSM up in the Hudson Valley.
00:39:07 ►
And we’re going to do an event in New Mexico.
00:39:10 ►
We have a community of friends in New Mexico.
00:39:13 ►
Find your community.
00:39:15 ►
Hold a local event.
00:39:16 ►
All we do is we say to those people,
00:39:19 ►
Hey, do you know of an event space
00:39:22 ►
that we could get for free or reasonable money?
00:39:25 ►
We try to get somebody to create a beautiful poster.
00:39:29 ►
Engage the artists.
00:39:31 ►
Artists are our messengers.
00:39:32 ►
They are essential to this movement.
00:39:35 ►
Have them make a beautiful poster.
00:39:37 ►
Publicize it on Facebook or wherever you wish to publicize it.
00:39:41 ►
I normally don’t like Facebook.
00:39:43 ►
I consider it a form of self-surveillance.
00:39:45 ►
I have many identities on Facebook, all minimal. Don’t find me on Facebook. But Facebook is
00:39:51 ►
an important way to make connections. Just realize you’re being heavily surveilled.
00:39:56 ►
I want to say something about surveillance. We’re all under surveillance. Our government surveils us deeply. They collect data on every phone call,
00:40:08 ►
every email, every text,
00:40:11 ►
every piece of digital traffic.
00:40:14 ►
Remember that. Remember that.
00:40:17 ►
We are a community that’s being heavily monitored.
00:40:21 ►
And anything that you give them in digital form,
00:40:23 ►
they will use against you in court
00:40:25 ►
i’ve seen it i just sat through a federal trial in san francisco of oshan anon and they projected
00:40:32 ►
his texts up on screen as evidence in his case do you want to see that no you do not want to see
00:40:40 ►
your texts on screen in federal court trust Trust me. Do not give them evidence
00:40:46 ►
against yourself, against your friends.
00:40:48 ►
Be mindful. Be mindful
00:40:50 ►
of what you offer
00:40:52 ►
into the machine because it’s collecting
00:40:54 ►
every bit and will
00:40:56 ►
use those bits against you.
00:40:58 ►
Do not talk about
00:40:59 ►
other people’s drug experiences.
00:41:02 ►
Be mindful talking about your own drug
00:41:04 ►
experience. Know that
00:41:05 ►
everything is evidence against you and will be used against you if they feel, your local
00:41:12 ►
prosecutors, that you’re a person who needs to be taken down and they will do it.
00:41:18 ►
Oshana Nan’s trial ended in a hung jury. There were at least two people in that jury who refused to send
00:41:25 ►
a young man to prison for 10 years.
00:41:28 ►
And you know what the prosecutors did?
00:41:30 ►
They’re retrying him.
00:41:33 ►
They’re going to retry him.
00:41:34 ►
They want him so badly.
00:41:37 ►
They want to take that young man.
00:41:39 ►
He runs the
00:41:40 ►
Om Shanti Tea House in San Francisco.
00:41:42 ►
He is our brother.
00:41:44 ►
And they want to send him
00:41:46 ►
to prison for 10 years. They want that
00:41:47 ►
so badly.
00:41:50 ►
So they’re going to retry. They’re going
00:41:51 ►
to have another jury
00:41:52 ►
and a whole other prosecution.
00:41:56 ►
He’s going to have to raise another
00:41:57 ►
30,000.
00:42:01 ►
And he’s
00:42:04 ►
trying to wrap his brain around that can you imagine that
00:42:07 ►
you imagine that so be mindful protect your community by protecting your data use tor
00:42:15 ►
encrypt your email use secure chat do whatever you need to do to take steps to protect your data if
00:42:23 ►
you don’t know how to do that, get someone who can help you.
00:42:27 ►
And by and large, don’t talk about drug use or drug experiences directly
00:42:32 ►
in any way that you think could be used in a case against you.
00:42:36 ►
Be mindful of that.
00:42:37 ►
That’s part of protecting ourselves as a community.
00:42:40 ►
Questions?
00:42:42 ►
I’d actually like to mention something in addition
00:42:46 ►
to your initial question
00:42:47 ►
there’s a tool which has been
00:42:50 ►
there’s a tool which has been developed
00:42:52 ►
a virtual tool
00:42:53 ►
by a mutual friend of several hours
00:42:56 ►
and a group team
00:42:58 ►
working together in New York
00:43:00 ►
it’s called the
00:43:02 ►
Evolver Network and I’m sure
00:43:04 ►
many of you know of it. Its premise is
00:43:07 ►
online tools for creating offline communities. And there’s a new version of the site which is
00:43:16 ►
up and running. And it’s not only within this community, but extending beyond its bounds into other fields and sharing interests.
00:43:25 ►
And I think it’s going to be a very helpful method for connecting, getting together, aside
00:43:32 ►
from the conventional kind of meetup or virtual forums.
00:43:38 ►
And it’s evolver.net.
00:43:42 ►
And there’s a link on the Reality Sandwich web magazine site.
00:43:47 ►
And the more people that work with that tool, the more feedback they get,
00:43:50 ►
the more they can improve the service, and I hope people check it out.
00:43:56 ►
Thank you.
00:43:57 ►
The Evolver community was present at the Women’s Congress this year,
00:44:02 ►
and it was wonderful to have them there.
00:44:04 ►
I think that it is a really wonderful community of people. Other groups who were present
00:44:10 ►
at our event also represent communities. The Marijuana Policy Project that runs
00:44:15 ►
the statewide initiative to change local statewide medical cannabis and cannabis
00:44:21 ►
laws. MAPS of course, the Multidisciplinary Association
00:44:25 ►
for Psychedelic Studies.
00:44:28 ►
The Psychedelic Society
00:44:29 ►
of San Francisco was there.
00:44:31 ►
Go form your own in your town.
00:44:34 ►
They can help you.
00:44:35 ►
We have lots of resources.
00:44:37 ►
We know everything we need to know.
00:44:40 ►
And I encourage you to
00:44:41 ►
form your own psychedelic communities
00:44:43 ►
and include as many different people in those communities as you can
00:44:48 ►
and do it in a really joyous way.
00:44:51 ►
Thank you.
00:45:00 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:45:03 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:45:08 ►
I think that my favorite quote from the talk that we just heard is when Annie said,
00:45:12 ►
We are not the counterculture, we are the culture, and we need to make the culture visible.
00:45:19 ►
Of course, there are countless ways to do just that.
00:45:23 ►
In my own little way, I’m doing these podcasts, and for me that has resulted in my being completely open about my use of psychedelic medicines.
00:45:31 ►
But that doesn’t mean that this is the best route for everyone to take.
00:45:34 ►
You should note that I’m a 70-year-old retired guy who blew most of his life savings having a good time,
00:45:41 ►
so I no longer have anything to lose by being open about who I am. But not many
00:45:46 ►
people are in such a fortunate state, and like Annie just said, our community is still less
00:45:51 ►
accepted than most of the others who are still also striving to get their civil rights. So we
00:45:57 ►
have to be cautious in just how we go about making our culture visible. Of course, you are the best
00:46:02 ►
judge of how to go about it in your own life,
00:46:09 ►
but a first step might be to tell your family that you smoke pot. If you do, of course.
00:46:16 ►
This may seem insignificant to many people, but I have friends in their 50s and 60s whose parents are still alive, but who don’t know that their little 60-year-old kid smokes dope.
00:46:21 ►
I mean, what are they going to do, ground you? On second thought, of course,
00:46:27 ►
telling your parents may not be the best idea if they’re really old and have heart conditions, but
00:46:31 ►
you have to admit that starting a discussion about cannabis and psychedelics at your next
00:46:36 ►
family gathering should, well, at least it should make it more interesting.
00:46:41 ►
Just the thought of it makes me chuckle. But now getting back to reality.
00:46:46 ►
In the program notes, I’ll post a link to an upcoming event sponsored by the Women’s Visionary Congress.
00:46:53 ►
And it’s going to take place from June 14th through the 16th of this year,
00:46:57 ►
which is 2013 for our fellow salonners of the future who may hear this.
00:47:03 ►
The conference is being held at the beautiful
00:47:05 ►
Ions Retreat Center up in Northern California near Petaluma, and among the many great speakers who
00:47:11 ►
will be there will be several who you’ve already gotten to know here in the salon.
00:47:15 ►
So if you felt a little resonance with what Annie Oak just now had to say, and if you hear this
00:47:21 ►
little voice in the back of your mind telling you that, well, maybe this is some place you need to be,
00:47:26 ►
well, when something like that happened to me 15 years ago,
00:47:29 ►
and I followed up on my instinct, stretched my finances a bit,
00:47:33 ►
and attended my first conference where I knew that I would meet some others
00:47:37 ►
who thought and felt much as I did,
00:47:39 ►
well, guess what?
00:47:41 ►
The vast majority of my current friendships can be traced in one way or another back to that first conference I attended.
00:47:48 ►
And I guess I should mention the fact that it was also the time and place where I met my wife.
00:47:54 ►
So, you know I had to chuckle when I heard Annie joking about her organization setting up a dating service.
00:48:00 ►
From what I’ve seen and experienced, all we really need is to find a large enough group of the others and then we can take it from there.
00:48:09 ►
Now, before I get myself into trouble here, I guess I better change the subject.
00:48:14 ►
And here’s something that we’ve all been waiting for.
00:48:18 ►
The Terrence McKenna Legacy Library Book List.
00:48:26 ►
Library Book List. This is a project that our friend Chris Mays has been working on for a long time now, and it’s based on the list of 2,800 titles passed to Chris by Cat Harrison and compiled
00:48:33 ►
by Dennis McKenna and probably some others as well. But what Chris has done lately is to put
00:48:39 ►
the list up at Library Thing, and here’s what he says about it, and I quote,
00:48:45 ►
It’s just a start, title by title, cataloged, and he has cataloged in quotes, cataloged
00:48:51 ►
using various means and sources, but others can play, and many on the internet have pined
00:48:56 ►
to see the list.
00:48:58 ►
I think this is the best way to present it, searchable, sortable, publicly available,
00:49:06 ►
presented, searchable, sortable, publicly available, web access maintained by book lovers,
00:49:13 ►
web hosting at no cost to me, possibility of adding covers and links to text, to reviews,
00:49:20 ►
or to purchase, end quotes. So if you’ve been wondering about what books Terrence had in his library, well, this is the place to go. And I’ll put a link to it in our program notes,
00:49:25 ►
which you can get to, as you know, via psychedelicsalon.us. And speaking of books, I just
00:49:31 ►
learned of a new book today by one of our fellow salonners who tells the story of his journey from
00:49:36 ►
being in the movies to being bemushroomed. It’s called The Dawning of Time and is by Brian Moore
00:49:43 ►
Stone.
00:49:48 ►
And while they say you can’t tell a book by its cover, and maybe that’s true,
00:49:51 ►
however, this cover I have seen before,
00:49:55 ►
and it is the wonderful work of art by fellow salonner Randall Roberts.
00:50:00 ►
And it’s the graphic I used in the MP3 file of my 300th podcast.
00:50:03 ►
So I’ll also put a link to that in the program notes,
00:50:05 ►
but if you’re on mobile right now and can multitask, the link is bryanstonebooks, that’s b-r-y-n-s-t-o-n-e-b-o-o-k-s, bryanstonebooks.com.
00:50:16 ►
A couple of other announcements that may be of interest to you come from podcast land. One of
00:50:23 ►
the new podcasts that’s been introduced lately is by
00:50:25 ►
friend at the salon and a close friend of mine, Bruce Dahmer, who you’ve heard on several occasions
00:50:31 ►
here in the salon. Well, Bruce now has started his own podcast, which you can find via drbruce.org.
00:50:38 ►
And that’s just D-R, D-R-B-R-U-C-E, drbruce.org. There you’ll discover that the full title of this new podcast is
00:50:47 ►
Dr. Bruce’s Levity Zone Podcast and Blobcast. And what is a blobcast, you ask? Well, I had the same
00:50:56 ►
question myself, so I had to learn about it on Bruce’s new website, which is where I’ll refer
00:51:01 ►
you to for your answer. But it should be an interesting way for you to interact with Bruce and some of the others,
00:51:07 ►
as I like to think of us all.
00:51:09 ►
Another podcast that you may enjoy is one of the new ones from the Cannabis Podcast Network,
00:51:15 ►
which you can get to via dopefiend, D-O-P-E-F-I-E-N-D, dopefiend.co.uk.
00:51:22 ►
And this one is titled the uk csc podcast and in particular i would like to point
00:51:29 ►
you to their podcast number six which is titled please hire me i’m a cannabis campaigner obviously
00:51:38 ►
they caught my eye with that title and here’s what the program notes say about this particular show, and I quote,
00:51:55 ►
This month on the UK CSC podcast, we’re returning to the conference put out by the great team at Students for Sensible Drug Policy UK last April.
00:51:59 ►
Do you keep your employment and activism separate?
00:52:09 ►
Jess Bradley from SSDP UK tells us how you can let potential employers know about the transferable skills you have picked up in the course of activism.
00:52:16 ►
Skills such as team working and organization which are very desirable to HR teams throughout the UK and the world.
00:52:28 ►
It might not strictly be cannabis focused, but the presentation and subsequent discussion throws up some great ideas for those who don’t want a spell of activism to look like a lazy gap in their CV.
00:52:29 ►
End quote.
00:52:38 ►
And while the audio quality, well, it suffers a little bit from the fact that the talk was recorded with a handheld recorder in a large auditorium,
00:52:41 ►
the information is very much worth listening to.
00:52:45 ►
And on top of that, in the introduction to the talk, you’ll learn about quite a few events and other ways to get involved with the tribe if you live in the UK.
00:52:50 ►
So if you’re a Brit and can’t make it to the Women’s Visionary Congress in California,
00:52:55 ►
well, there are still quite a few opportunities to meet some of the others at all of the events
00:53:00 ►
taking place in Britain in the coming months. So if you go to dopefiend.co.uk
00:53:05 ►
and click the link for this podcast, number 6,
00:53:08 ►
you’ll also find a lot of links to these events and organizations.
00:53:13 ►
And while you’re on the Dope Fiend site,
00:53:15 ►
be sure to download the latest podcast from Lefty’s Lounge.
00:53:18 ►
That’s one program that I never miss
00:53:21 ►
because, well, it keeps me from getting too serious about things.
00:53:25 ►
You see, Lefty always has a great selection of music, and I have to admit most of it I’ve never even heard before, but I love it.
00:53:31 ►
And he also includes some wonderful comedy, which I like myself, and I know it’s going to resonate with a few of our fellow Saloners who are also, like me, big fans of Joe Rogan, whose comedy makes it into lefties programs quite often.
00:53:46 ►
Finally, since this podcast features another one of last year’s Palenque Norte lectures,
00:53:52 ►
well, I think that it’s appropriate to tell you a little bit about the schedule for this coming year’s Burning Man Festival,
00:53:58 ►
which Pez sent to me the other day.
00:54:01 ►
First of all, this year there’s going to be events that will take place
00:54:05 ►
at night and not just during the afternoon. For example, and keep this in mind, this is only a
00:54:12 ►
tentative schedule and very much subject to change for a while here, but believe it or not, all of
00:54:18 ►
the speaker slots have already been filled, although some of them are not quite a hundred
00:54:23 ►
percent confirmed yet, but the slots are full. And
00:54:26 ►
here’s one example that I think of the tentative schedule that I think will show you the difference
00:54:31 ►
of scheduling in this coming year, and that is Daniel Pinchbeck will be speaking one night from
00:54:36 ►
midnight till 2 a.m. Now that should be an interesting event. And there are many former
00:54:43 ►
speakers who will be there, and also several new
00:54:45 ►
big names that are coming, all of which
00:54:48 ►
I’ll be telling you about as soon as
00:54:49 ►
Pez lets me know that things are as
00:54:51 ►
firm as they ever are with Burning Man
00:54:53 ►
plans.
00:54:55 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing
00:54:57 ►
off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:55:00 ►
Be well, my friends.