374 - Bootstrapping Ourselves

Program Notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“Ego is the absolute impediment to Tao.”

“We live in a domain of triviality that we have created.”

“Do we embody the radiant correctness of what we say we are pursuing.”

“I see the psychedelic experience as a birthright, and we can’t have a free society until people are free to explore their own mind.”

“I’m as against restricting access to drugs as I am to burning books. It offends me in the same way.”

“If you’re interested in drugs, the first stop is the library. And it’s a long stop. And you educate yourself.”

“In order to be free I must not believe anything. Then all things can be freely commanded in the mind.”

“It takes months to assimilate a large psychedelic trip.”

“I think the worst thing you can do is diddle with low doses. The nibblers of this world are no friends of mine. It should be overwhelming, and it should be an act of courage”

Book mentioned in this podcast
Amazing Dope Tales
by Stephen Gaskin

Russell Brand Sounds Off!

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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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

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And I’d like to begin today by thanking fellow salonners,

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Tony C., Eric F., Revlin J., Juan G., Rick H., and Daniel S., all of whom made donations to the salon to help us offset some of our monthly expenses.

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And I very much appreciate all of your help.

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expenses, and I very much appreciate all of your help. Well, let’s get back to the next to last talk in a Terrence McKenna workshop we’ve been listening to that was held in the summer of 1989.

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As you’ll hear momentarily, there were several topics that he covered from which I could have

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taken the title for today’s podcast, but I finally settled on, well, what I think

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is probably the most important one.

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Namely, what, if anything, are we as a psychedelic community charged with now, now that we know

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what we know?

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So let’s once again join Terrence and see if we can come up with a few answers to that

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question.

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Okay, well, welcome to Epistemology 101.

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This is our 19th meeting.

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There’ll be a midterm in two weeks,

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and your paper is due by the end of the month.

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And what we’re trying to get at here, partially,

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is communication,

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trying to get at here partially is communication that the world is made of the intention to communicate uh there is information we understand that but behind the information there is something

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much more mysterious that is the intention of the information to be understood,

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the way in which everything is massaging everything else with information,

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so that when you look into the heart of nature in this boundary dissolved state, whether you achieve it by yoga or shamanism or however, then the intentionality to be understood is there.

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this conundrum of do we belong to this world, is it ours,

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or are we passing through, and is this a kind of something which holds us back? Well, the strong argument, I think, which bears on what you’re saying,

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that we are of this world, is that it communicates to us. It is intelligible. It’s only when you existentialize

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your existence through living in cities or something like that, that nature becomes silent on the question of the transcendental.

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You know, Jean-Paul Sartre, when he formulated his philosophy in the 50s,

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said nature is mute.

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Therefore, man can only look within himself for any kind of structure or imperative to being.

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I reject that.

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And I think all psychedelic people must reject that

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because what is being accentuated by the dissolving of boundaries into the world

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is the discovery then of the transcendental presence.

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You know, the scholastics had a notion

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which Kat and I used when we named our little company.

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The reason we named it Lux Natura,

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what that means is the light in nature.

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The light in nature. And it is literally the light in nature, the light in nature. And it is literally the light in nature,

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the splendor in the grass. It’s in the ripples. And it is affirming. It is affirming. And we are, in many cases perversely blocked against it.

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The way in which perhaps by sharing our experiences we can begin to satisfy ourselves

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that the domain we journey to and from

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is not merely mental.

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And the way in which we confirm for ourselves that it is not merely mental. And the way in which we confirm for ourselves

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that it is not merely mental

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is in the observation of disturbances in this world

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that we call coincidental or synchronistic

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or something like that. Now, this is elusive, anecdotal kind

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of stuff, but nevertheless, there’s enough of it that I think there is something there.

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What do I mean? What am I talking about? Well, as an example, I have lived 42 years, only twice in my life have packages of matches burst into flame

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in my pocket. In each case, it was about four or five minutes before I turned somebody on to DMT. Well, now…

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Yes, an interesting coincidence.

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Totally non-sequitur sort of thing,

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but twice in my life packages of matches have burst into flames in my pockets.

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Other things.

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Many, many people who experiment with mushrooms report,

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it’s almost achieved anecdotal status now,

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the scurryings and rustlings on the periphery.

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And when you do mushrooms fairly frequently,

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you get with this to the point where you just say,

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oh, that’s the rats in the walls, the scratcher from hyperspace,

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whatever it is, because it’s, you know, you can’t wrap your mind around it,

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but it’s always there.

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And then less easily confirmed and communicated,

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but I’m sure we all have had this experience is you will

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take a voyage into another dimension be completely laid out on the floor for a long long time

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and then sit up and at the moment that you sit up the the fire flares up, the logs fall through the grate, the coals burst into flame.

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In other words, there is a wave of regenerative activity that sweeps through the whole system.

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And people report playing with clouds.

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people report playing with clouds.

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People report that after intense experiences,

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their lives are haunted by synchronicity.

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Well, psychologists get rid of this kind of anecdotal material with all kinds of semi-weasel-y arguments,

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such as your clue-sifting intellect has been shifted from the background to the foreground,

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so now you are paying attention to the environment and it is giving you messages. And we all know that schizophrenics move into mental spaces

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where every license plate carries a message

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and every headline is about them

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and every conversation among the people they pass on the street is about them.

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But we all also know that we ourselves dabble with this,

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that this belief that the world is entirely independent of our minds

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and objective and unaware of us

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is the kind of scientific fiction in which we operate.

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And then the real truth that appears to our perceptions the truth

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of our immediate experience is that the the mind is a concentric field of diminishing intensity

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that can draw events and circumstances far from the ranges of probability uh i mean i have had once i had

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the following experience it’s all anecdotal you see i was in a dry wash in the negev desert and there was absolutely no food, and I was a poor traveling hippie,

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a hashashin, and a cave dweller, and a ne’er-do-well,

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and it was like 120 degrees outside my cave,

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and I was sitting in front of my cave smoking hash,

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and out through the shimmering heat,

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I could see this dot of a person.

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And as I watched them making their way

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through the rocks and the scrub,

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I began to have a fantasy about this person.

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That they had food.

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That they didn’t simply have food, that they had oysters Rockefeller packed in ice, that they had Russian caviar, that they had Belgian chocolate,

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that they had all of this stuff. And, you know, I hadn’t had a bath in three weeks.

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There was barely any water in this place.

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And this speck made its way toward me, getting larger and larger.

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And finally it turned into this guy I barely knew, a fellow lost soul.

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This was in southern Israel 25 years ago.

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This was in southern Israel 25 years ago.

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And he came up to me and he said,

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I have oysters packed in ice.

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I have Belgian chocolate.

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I have…

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And he had gotten a job dishwashing that morning at the King David Hotel and had just quit in disgust halfway through the day and had raided this super fancy four-star hotel

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and just had a backpack full of this stuff.

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And I didn’t even bother to tell him. What am I going to say, you know? I mean,

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sure, of course. So these kinds of things, and they’re very private, you see. Nothing You see, nothing happens there except that a guy quits his job and rips off a hotel, except that it is coincident with an internal state, a private musing of somebody else.

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And when the two things come together, the coincidence of it is absolutely excruciating.

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Kat had an experience, she’s not here to tell it, but she went to Mexico when she was 19

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and traveled all over Mexico and took LSD at a certain temple. And on the LSD trip in

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and took LSD at a certain temple.

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And on the LSD trip in this place,

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she realized that she had been conceived there.

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And when she confronted her parents with it, it was so, it was so that she had been conceived there. Now, of course, you can say,

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well, in growing up, this must have been a story told around the dinner table, and then under LSD,

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the child brings it out. But sometimes these things just peels reality apart. The purest proof that I’ve ever had

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that goes against the clue-finding,

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integrative, unconscious thing,

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and really the time wave

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that we’ve spent so much time looking at

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is in a sense a net to trail through life.

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It’s a coincidental engine.

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It causes there to be more coincidences in your life.

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And in fact, a way to let coincidence in your life

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is to let numbers into your life.

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The schizophrenic who looks at the license plates

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passing on the freeway,

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is simply the lowest grade worshipper of numbers.

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But when you really let numbers into your existence, coincidence runs rampant.

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We have talked here a little bit about the most astonishing coincidence of all,

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which is that mathematics describes nature.

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That’s a coincidence as far as I can tell.

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Why should it?

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No philosopher that I have ever read,

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no mathematician has ever been able to make it make cogent sense

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that the abstract operations of the human mind should somehow

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map over the core dynamics of nature it’s like a coincidence um when i was working with the

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time wave the most perfect example of uh anticipation or disruption of ordinary flows of probability

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was I had this idea when I was working out the time wave.

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Before the 2012 date was chosen and settled on,

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way back in the early 70s,

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I discovered an odd coincidence

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which went like this.

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It’s embedded in a whole bunch of coincidences,

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but it goes like this.

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From the date of my mother’s death

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till the time when I met the woman

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who went with me to La Charrera, 64 days passed. From the

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time I met that woman till the actual experiment at La Charrera, 64 days passed. From thence forward, three times 64 days later was my 23rd birthday.

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And looking at all these coincidences, I propagated forward into time,

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not 64-day increments, but 384-day increments.

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And I discovered something really interesting which was when you went from

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my 23rd birthday 384 days forward no particular big deal but when you went 384 days forward again

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it landed on um the winter solstice of 1973.

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And I thought that this was mildly interesting.

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And so then I looked in a naval observatory almanac and I discovered that there was a total eclipse

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of the sun on this solstice,

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which I thought was pretty weird, and that this total eclipse of the

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sun would sweep across the Amazon, would only be visible from the Amazon basin, would be approaching

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totality as it swept across La Charrera, and it would in fact achieve totality

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over the city of Belém in Brazil. Well, now, Belém is a Portuguese word which means Bethlehem.

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And I began to see, I began to feel led. I began to feel as though I were being fed clues.

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So then I looked at the map, and you may do so as well,

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and you will see that the city of Belem in Brazil,

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the city of Bethlehem, is situated in the delta of the Amazon.

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Well, I’m Joyce Scholar and river freak enough

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to know that all rivers are female.

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And if you’re too dense to know that,

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certainly the Amazon River is female

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because it is named the Amazon.

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I mean, Gaia is what it is, you know,

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and Amazon is a giant woman. Well, here in her

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vulva, in literally in the delta, and delta, you see, is this triangular, the Greek letter delta

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is a triangle and has been a schoolboy symbol for the female genitals for 18,000 years.

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symbol for the female genitals for 18,000 years.

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In the delta of the Amazon sits the city of Belem,

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over which on a certain winter solstice,

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a total eclipse of the sun will appear.

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And I said, you know, my goodness, this is the stuff of prophecy.

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Something marvelous must be going to happen there. And, you know, you must know Yeats’ poem, what’s it called?

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The Second Coming.

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The one about what rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.

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And it is an apocalyptic image,

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an image of the shift of the aeon.

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So I had all this data, see, pointing at December 23, 1973.

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But I got this same argument from people,

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this argument that you must have known, you must have seen these astronomical ephemerides at some time in the past, you must have an unconscious photographic memory, the mind must be a computer at some level, and so forth and so on but what clinched it for me was early in 1973 still 13 11 months

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before this much anticipated moment uh i opened the san francisco chronicle one morning

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and it says long period comet headed toward Earth.

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And I closed the newspaper and said aloud,

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I know that this comet will make its closest approach to the sun on December 23rd.

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Then I open the paper and read it.

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It says, yes, it will approach Perhalion on the 22nd of December,

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give or take, you know, so many hours greenwich and then

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i saw for me that did it because what it was was a perfect proof my wish had been granted because you

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see no human being on earth knew that this comet existed or had ever known because it was a long period comet.

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It had never in historical times been in the skies of earth.

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When I had focused in on this date using all these clues, it was absolutely in the value dark dimension.

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It was not in the collective unconscious unless the collective unconscious anticipates the future.

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And if that’s the case,

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then there’s no way to contaminate any experiment from influence.

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So, you know, the mushroom was willing enough

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to provide for my edification, this thing.

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Well, but then see what happens you may remember

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this comet it was the comet kohotec and it was an excuse for all kinds of falderol i mean

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harmonic convergence eat your heart out this was a much bigger deal and yet this comet which

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physically should have blossomed out into the most spectacular

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comet of all human history was a dud and once again you know prophets ate it right and left

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and booksellers were left with vast unsold inventory so to me it’s like play. It’s like a joke. It’s like if you can’t, if that doesn’t

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seem like a joke to you, then you don’t have a sense of humor. You know, it’s not going to hand

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over your alchemical gold, because after all, why should it? Who are we to be the recipients of alchemical gold? But it does tease and it does play.

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And I think if you’re playful enough, you can coax it into being your playmate.

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And perhaps in these boundary-dissolved states, this is what happens.

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This is what happens.

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I’ve told the story about how in the Amazon, when all this stuff was breaking loose, I went through this period where very calmly and deeply and without having any need to tell anyone, I thought,

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I came to the opinion that I was, like, enlightened.

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And it was this very low-key thing.

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It was all about appropriate behavior.

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This was the cognitive hallucination that I was having.

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It was about appropriate behavior.

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And I had this idea there’s an appropriate way to do everything and if you do it the

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appropriate way no energy will be lost and so you become like super conducting you become like some

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kind of super tai chi character where you just do things so niftily that there’s no problem whether it’s plucking a flower or moving a boulder and i was

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told when you think sit on the ground this was there were all these teachings and they were very

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simple there were things like sit on the ground stupid and uh you know use your fingers. That was a big teaching. Use your fingers.

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So one of the things I was into was how you wash the pot.

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We had one pot. It was this little enamel pot.

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And we would bake it over a fire and we baked beans and we baked rice and all these terrible things that would get scum on the bottom.

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And so it was a big deal about drawing lots for who washed the pot.

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Well, I discovered in my enlightened state that we had been doing it all wrong and that if you would go down to the water with the pot and take sand

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and pat it very, very lightly in the bottom

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and then say, please,

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that then all you had to do was pour water into the pot

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and swish it around and empty it like that.

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And then when you looked in, it would be like Drano.

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It would just be blinding white.

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And I did this several times and I thought how appropriate a miracle this is. This is a real miracle. I mean, this is just simple stuff. It’s

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totally here and now. It’s absolutely Taoist. It’s completely, you know, on and on.

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It’s absolutely Taoist.

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It’s completely, you know, on and on.

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So then I had a critic in our crowd.

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And so I thought that I would enlighten the critic by a wordless demonstration of my obvious command of the howling Tao.

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So I invited the critic to in accompany me to the

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river and and I said and now notice that I pick up the sand I pat it into the

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bottom I’m not agitating it I look into the sky and I say, please.

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And then I put water in it and I swish it around.

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Voila!

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I said, is something supposed to happen?

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And I look and the crud adheres.

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And then this person says, you know, I pity you.

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And I would pity you more, but you alarm me.

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This was the sequela to the thing with the dancing butterflies,

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which was at the same time and the same thing, which is in my enlightened state, totally master of the Tao,

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I would go into the woods and I would hold out my hands,

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my outstretched hands like this,

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and butterflies that I had hunted relentlessly for months

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with a 16-foot extendable Japanese killing machine that was my tool in trade,

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these canopy butterflies would come down and land on my hands and strut and show their iridescence

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and tears of joy would stream down my face and I wouldel down, and they would all line up in front of me,

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and then I would weep more.

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But, you know, how much cathartic weeping

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and joy of this sort can you contain?

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So there would be this little nub in the experience

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which would begin to grow stronger,

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which was all about,

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this proves that I’m on to something.

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Nobody could look at this and not realize.

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I said, I must show someone.

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And the critic had not spoken to me since the pot washing incident,

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but was very, you know, on me.

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So then I went back to camp and I said,

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let’s just take a walk down the trail.

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Maybe we can work out these differences,

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thinking that I wouldn’t even mention it.

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I would just sort of, as I was consoling them,

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put out my hand and, you know,

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butterflies would drop from the trees.

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They would realize the error of their ways,

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so forth and so on.

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Well, of course, you know, that didn’t happen. So then I said, well, maybe I’m being too humble

00:28:52 ►

here. I should at least make a commitment to the thing. So I said, stand here and watch.

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And I raised up my hands to call the insects of the jungle to me. And then the line was delivered the second time, you know.

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I pity you.

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And you are, you’re not, you’re, you know, you’re…

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This is all true.

00:29:18 ►

It is true that the butterflies danced on the back of my hand.

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Well, so what do you, what is one to conclude from this?

00:29:26 ►

Well, I think what you have to conclude is that ego is the absolute impediment to Tao.

00:29:35 ►

And that if you care what other people think,

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if you care how it’s going to impact on your reputation,

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you care how it’s going to impact on your reputation if you care if you have any of these lesser concerns this this power this radiance this dimension of authenticity can’t approach you

00:29:59 ►

you know and we all have it and i’m sure I have it more than most people.

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And yet even I am able to let down into these places where the world works magic, you know.

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And I think women and intuitive men and people who aren’t quite as analytical as I may be

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are able to do it much more.

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And that is the real proof.

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You can talk about being here now until you’re blue in the face, you know.

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But the real proof is when nature responds like that.

00:30:42 ►

Well, no, I don’t mean caring about others.

00:30:50 ►

well no i don’t mean caring about others i mean that if you are i guess that the sin is pride the sin is pride if it thrills you that you’re enlightened or if you’re glad you beat out your

00:30:59 ►

competition or if you want to display your accomplishment, then it’s ruined.

00:31:07 ►

You know, it can only be, it has to be held so very lightly, so very lightly.

00:31:15 ►

It cannot be shared in a sense.

00:31:19 ►

Forget sharing it because we’re not pure enough to share it it’s amazing that we’re pure enough to

00:31:26 ►

occasionally embody it you know i’ve told you the story about sitting on the beach

00:31:36 ►

it always happens when you’re alone because then you get no credit you see it’s no credit to you, and you shouldn’t get any credit.

00:31:45 ►

But sitting on a beach, I can’t even remember the substance,

00:31:51 ►

but something like this, or maybe something like this, I’m not sure.

00:31:57 ►

But sitting on a beach, meditating, holding my hands like this,

00:32:01 ►

and in the middle of the meditation, I become aware of something like a bug or something is on my hand,

00:32:09 ►

and it’s like tickling me.

00:32:12 ►

And so I ignore it, and then I come back to it,

00:32:15 ►

and then it feels fairly substantial.

00:32:18 ►

Maybe I should check this out.

00:32:20 ►

So then finally I open my eyes, and look down and there’s a crab. And

00:32:28 ►

the crab is cleaning my fingernails. And the crab cleans all of my fingernails and then

00:32:37 ►

runs across my lap and cleans all of the fingernails on the other hand well what this is is just sitting still

00:32:48 ►

and letting nature be what it wants to be and letting it manifest its intentionality we tear

00:32:56 ►

through and bust up and smash apart and then we say well that was a nice hike in the woods, you know.

00:33:05 ►

And always, if you will go into the forest and sit down,

00:33:11 ►

and it’s about finding the time, finding the time of the place.

00:33:18 ►

And in the time of the place, the magic is coming and going in a way

00:33:24 ►

that if you’re moving faster or slower it just it just

00:33:28 ►

isn’t there and i’ve often had experiences that i felt that were connected with psychedelics but

00:33:36 ►

the main function of the psychedelic was to get me to be still for a long time. Cat had a wonderful experience on a Mexican pyramid.

00:33:48 ►

She was exploring it.

00:33:50 ►

She took LSD or something

00:33:52 ►

and fell asleep.

00:33:55 ►

And when she woke up,

00:33:57 ►

the tree she had been sleeping in

00:33:58 ►

that she had been staring into the branches

00:34:01 ►

before she fell asleep

00:34:03 ►

and so had a very clear picture of it.

00:34:06 ►

When she awakened, a very large snake had shed its skin

00:34:11 ►

directly above her in the branches of the trees.

00:34:17 ►

Well, you know, part of this is the doorway into coincidence,

00:34:30 ►

into coincidence, but part of it is magical attunement with what wants to be. This is what I think K must have been indicating. This is not language, this is communication.

00:34:37 ►

This is, you know, the breath of the Tao. And everything that we say betrays this.

00:34:46 ►

So, feng shui,

00:34:49 ►

geomancy,

00:34:51 ►

an elaborate theory about energy

00:34:52 ►

flowing through the earth,

00:34:55 ►

as a verbal model,

00:34:57 ►

to me, quite unconvincing.

00:35:01 ►

As a set of feelings

00:35:03 ►

about the world, as a sense of the intentionality of place,

00:35:10 ►

incontrovertibly true. You know, I said earlier, maybe we lie. Maybe language is to allow us to lie,

00:35:20 ►

that language betrays communication. Well, then we have to find our way into either silence or gesture or dance or song,

00:35:36 ►

some way of unbridling the horse we ride so that it can take us where it wants to go, which is back into this place where ego isn’t grabbing.

00:35:51 ►

Because you see, it must be so that if the magic retreats from each one of us in the wilderness,

00:35:56 ►

how much more then it must retreat from us as a community, en masse, as a planetary species.

00:36:04 ►

as a community en masse, as a planetary species.

00:36:10 ►

So we live in a domain of triviality that we have created.

00:36:13 ►

We have trivialized the world. The elves, the fairies, the water sprites,

00:36:17 ►

the energies that flow in the earth with the seasons,

00:36:21 ►

the movement of the stars, the machinery of being, the drama of life and death.

00:36:29 ►

We push all this away and we hold ourselves above it. I mean, death is sanitized, birth is sanitized,

00:36:40 ►

everything is made less authentic as though we are somehow threatened by the authenticity of being.

00:36:49 ►

Why are we threatened by the authenticity of being?

00:36:54 ►

Why does it take such tremendously powerful hallucinogenic agents to put us where we should be operating in terms of our pattern of caring for the world and for each other.

00:37:10 ►

And this is a real question, I think.

00:37:12 ►

It goes hand in hand with the question

00:37:15 ►

that I think is very worthwhile for the group to try and deal with,

00:37:20 ►

which is, if psychedelics are so wonderful are we better people and if

00:37:30 ►

they are wonderful and we’re not better people then why not

00:37:36 ►

what is what precisely is our relationship to people who know nothing of this?

00:37:47 ►

Is this a way?

00:37:49 ►

Is it the way?

00:37:51 ►

Is it no way at all?

00:37:57 ►

How does the mystical vision feed back into how we are

00:38:01 ►

with and for each other?

00:38:03 ►

Are we doing enough with that?

00:38:06 ►

Are we, you know, do we exemplify enough what we know and what we feel?

00:38:14 ►

And if we don’t, how can we?

00:38:18 ►

Because this is our faith, I believe, that we have something precious that we want to give to those who are operating without awareness of it.

00:38:34 ►

But before you give something away, you know, you have to wonder after the consequences.

00:38:40 ►

I don’t have answers to this.

00:38:41 ►

This is the question that should hover over our lives. Do we embody the radiant correctness of what we say we are pursuing? and fragile vessel for this. I mean, my strength is my ordinariness.

00:39:07 ►

It must be.

00:39:08 ►

It’s the only suit I can play.

00:39:10 ►

So that must have been the idea, you know,

00:39:14 ►

that it would be Joe anybody.

00:39:16 ►

But how can we make it live for ourselves?

00:39:21 ►

And this is a problem with the evolution of language,

00:39:24 ►

the evolution of communication

00:39:26 ►

of caring of intent and then of of implementing the vision i don’t know maybe i’m impatient

00:39:36 ►

maybe it’s happening and maybe the awareness of the changing earth the awareness of the changing earth, the awareness of the needs of the earth, the awareness of

00:39:45 ►

the needs of women, the awareness of social injustice generally, is all part of this thing.

00:39:55 ►

I had a very satisfying experience recently. A guy, a publisher, and editor came to see cat and i from australia and we talked about all

00:40:10 ►

this stuff and he was a fellow psychedelico and he said nobody had ever said this to me before

00:40:16 ►

he said from where i’m sitting i think that you’re winning and by by you’re winning, what he meant was

00:40:26 ►

that inch by inch by inch,

00:40:30 ►

the dream is actually gaining ground.

00:40:33 ►

There will be a second hearing.

00:40:36 ►

There will be an appeal

00:40:39 ►

from the absolute judgments

00:40:42 ►

of 20 years ago.

00:40:43 ►

Well, then in that case, it devolves upon all of us to embody this thing

00:40:51 ►

and to not cut corners and to, you know, as it says in the Grateful Dead song,

00:41:00 ►

try just a little bit harder, just a little bit more.

00:41:05 ►

And I think doing that, and a lot of it is a letting go.

00:41:09 ►

It’s not a pushing into.

00:41:11 ►

It’s a letting go.

00:41:12 ►

Then the magic draws close.

00:41:16 ►

I mean, nature loves courage.

00:41:20 ►

You’ve heard me say this. The way nature shows her love of courage is by removing obstacles.

00:41:31 ►

That’s how the shaman can dance in the waterfall.

00:41:35 ►

He can’t dance in the waterfall, except that he’s so damn courageous

00:41:41 ►

that God suspends the laws of physics in the face of such faith you know it’s

00:41:49 ►

something like that it’s the courage to be the courage to be to be is to dance in the waterfall

00:41:57 ►

and i’m really not if it sounds like i’m berating you i I’m not. I’m speaking, you’re serving as a screen for my own psychotherapeutic process

00:42:07 ►

because I clutch at many levels.

00:42:13 ►

But fortunately and thank God, you know, there were enough instances of recklessness

00:42:19 ►

and sheer error and pure madness and peer pressure and all of these things that I got a taste.

00:42:28 ►

And I think you all have a taste.

00:42:30 ►

That’s what unites us in trying to run this thing to ground.

00:42:35 ►

And it’s the heart of it that is so hard to talk about.

00:42:39 ►

I mean, I skim the ideas off the depth of a sea of heart

00:42:46 ►

whose boundaries cannot be taken,

00:42:50 ►

because that’s my style.

00:42:52 ►

But the unsaid part, the dizziness of the things unsaid,

00:42:57 ►

remember the poem by Trumbull Stickney,

00:43:00 ►

I lean over your meaning’s edge,

00:43:04 ►

and I feel the dizziness of the things you have not said.

00:43:10 ►

And the dizziness of the things unsaid for us fans of dizziness is ecstasy, the vertigo.

00:43:19 ►

Weren’t we first spun in the schoolyard? Wasn’t that your first altered state of consciousness?

00:43:25 ►

To be spun and spun until you fall down

00:43:29 ►

and watch the world move around?

00:43:31 ►

It’s the dizziness of the things unsaid.

00:43:35 ►

That’s a real problem for me.

00:43:36 ►

I’m a sayer.

00:43:38 ►

But it’s worth invoking it

00:43:41 ►

if only to let it resonate in the silence.

00:43:48 ►

Well, there are different things here.

00:43:52 ►

There’s a lot of good in psychedelics that is not what I’ve been talking about today.

00:44:00 ►

A lot of people are hurting.

00:44:03 ►

A lot of people have traumatic past histories. A lot of people need to be unplugged, cleaned out, straightened out.

00:44:24 ►

I see the psychedelic experience as a birthright.

00:44:30 ►

And we can’t have a free society until people are free to explore their own minds.

00:44:35 ►

It’s so obvious.

00:44:37 ►

So, you know, I’m as against restricting access to drugs

00:44:43 ►

as I am to burning books.

00:44:46 ►

It offends me in the same way.

00:44:49 ►

People must be free.

00:44:52 ►

We are the measure of the political universe,

00:44:57 ►

not the state, not the race.

00:45:01 ►

These have all been tried with horrible results. Individual human beings must be free.

00:45:11 ►

Anything which ameliorates that has to be looked at very, very carefully. Sexuality sexuality and the restriction of information

00:45:25 ►

access and understanding

00:45:27 ►

that

00:45:28 ►

revolved around that issue for the past

00:45:31 ►

500 years

00:45:32 ►

just

00:45:35 ►

shows me that we don’t

00:45:37 ►

want to go into that with the mind

00:45:39 ►

because anything can be

00:45:41 ►

taboo, your genitals don’t have

00:45:43 ►

to be taboo, your mind could be taboo, anything could be taboo. Your genitals don’t have to be taboo. Your mind could be taboo. Anything could be taboo. But the presence of the taboo is so destructive and alienating and so makes community so impossible that we have to take individual men and women and we have to make them free.

00:46:08 ►

That is the system where freedom has to be maximized.

00:46:13 ►

I don’t say that we have to convert these people to the existence of magic.

00:46:18 ►

In fact, we don’t have to convert them to anything.

00:46:20 ►

The nature of the beast,

00:46:30 ►

meaning the nature of these hallucinogens, will set the agenda once we are free to inquire. That’s all. Freedom of inquiry. Well, on one level you’re right. The laws are totally irrelevant. We ignore them. So does everyone else.

00:46:49 ►

You mean we worry about them.

00:46:55 ►

Styles of taking and styles of getting

00:46:58 ►

together. Yeah.

00:47:02 ►

Well this is like the same question about sexuality or automobiles or anything.

00:47:09 ►

Obviously, though we say all people are created equal, we don’t sell guns to eight-year-olds and this sort of thing.

00:47:33 ►

But within the context of reasonable people attempting to reach reasonable positions, I think this should be as free as possible.

00:47:47 ►

I think there should be anans who would be professionals and they would the would take out the adolescent boys and the adolescent girls and put them through ceremonies that would

00:47:55 ►

inculcate them into the secret life and belief systems of the tribe and then certain ones would be selected out to be the shamans of the next

00:48:08 ►

generation we don’t have any kind of institution like that part of my motivation for a public

00:48:17 ►

career is the belief that that psychotherapy could be this the motivation behind psychotherapy is entirely correct, but how can we make it

00:48:29 ►

real, you know? Shamanism does this. You see, I’m not, I wouldn’t go to a shaman for a cure if I had carcinoma or something like that. I regard them as most effective in the realm of mental problems, psychological conditions.

00:49:06 ►

conditions. This is why when ethnobotany got started, the first things that are looked at are the psychoactive plants. Because if someone, if a shaman tells you, this will cause you to see

00:49:13 ►

visions, he’s probably correct. But if he tells you this will cure a disease, this is less certainly so, because the concept of curing disease is a more western

00:49:29 ►

notion. The concept of restoring neurotic imbalance seems to be pretty generalized worldwide.

00:49:38 ►

I think that if you’re interested in drugs, the first stop is the library.

00:49:46 ►

And it’s a long stop.

00:49:49 ►

And you educate yourself.

00:49:51 ►

This all seems very natural to me.

00:49:54 ►

This is how I did it

00:49:55 ►

and how all my friends did it.

00:49:59 ►

In the early 1960s,

00:50:02 ►

there were articles in newspapers

00:50:03 ►

about morning glory seeds and this kind of thing.

00:50:08 ►

We followed up and learned how to use scientific literature to figure out dosages and all of this kind of thing.

00:50:18 ►

For me, I mean, I take drugs seriously.

00:50:26 ►

I mean, I take drugs seriously, so I also don’t want… I’m perfectly aware of their capacity to cause a problem.

00:50:31 ►

So you want to be educated, you want to have all the information.

00:50:35 ►

So people, number one, have to be educated,

00:50:39 ►

and then they have to be given the freedom to decide.

00:50:42 ►

And then they have to be given the freedom to decide.

00:50:51 ►

Now, inevitably, certain people will evolve pathological lifestyles,

00:50:55 ►

lifestyles of addiction, dependency, and abuse.

00:51:02 ►

But those people usually can evolve these lifestyles with… There are perfectly legal avenues to evolve these lifestyles with, there are perfectly legal avenues to evolve

00:51:06 ►

these lifestyles. I mean, there is

00:51:07 ►

alcohol is

00:51:09 ►

obviously more conducive

00:51:12 ►

to these maladaptive

00:51:13 ►

lifestyles than almost anything else.

00:51:17 ►

If I

00:51:17 ►

were totally juiced,

00:51:20 ►

you could tell it.

00:51:22 ►

If I were a

00:51:23 ►

lifelong junkie

00:51:25 ►

and I had just shot

00:51:27 ►

I could deliver this

00:51:29 ►

this lecture

00:51:31 ►

it wouldn’t trigger any awareness in you

00:51:34 ►

so the debilitating

00:51:36 ►

damaging

00:51:38 ►

maladaptive drugs are all legal

00:51:41 ►

and what is restricted then

00:51:44 ►

is stuff which gives you funny ideas.

00:51:49 ►

That’s the problem, the funny ideas category.

00:51:55 ►

Well, put that way, it doesn’t take long to see why.

00:51:59 ►

Because funny ideas are very problematic for institutions.

00:52:06 ►

On the other hand, funny ideas are the life breath of creativity.

00:52:11 ►

So who are we going to make comfortable?

00:52:14 ►

A bunch of control freaks?

00:52:17 ►

See, I think it was really a mistake in the 60s

00:52:21 ►

to try and take society away from the people who want to run it to wage revolution with

00:52:30 ►

psychedelic drugs where i don’t know if those people realized but their their weapon was

00:52:36 ►

effective enough that the world’s first nuclear power was quaking in its boots because you could produce 10, 20, 40 million hits of LSD.

00:52:50 ►

Well, so that’s terrifying to an establishment because what if you changed 20, 60, 40 million

00:52:58 ►

mines? But if it can be kept in a human scale, where you say out in California, people hang out at Esalen, and then they take off their clothes, and then they meditate, and then a few of them go on to drugs. It doesn’t threaten anybody. The way in which LSD was used to thumb noses at the establishment brought trouble.

00:53:32 ►

It, I don’t think, should have been seen as a direct tool of social and political action.

00:53:39 ►

It should have been handled as an adjunct to creativity. Its agenda would have surfaced. We would have ended

00:53:49 ►

up in a better place. This is what Aldous Huxley wanted to do, you know. He felt that you go to the

00:53:56 ►

people, to the power freaks, in a non-threatening way. You don’t say to them, hey, Mr. Dean, hey, Mr. President, 100,000 acid heads have

00:54:08 ►

surrounded your administration building, and if you don’t accede to these 15 non-negotiable demands,

00:54:17 ►

we’re going to pull the place apart. But no, you send his friend that he went to Yale with to him who says you know a few of us have

00:54:31 ►

been getting together and there’s really this extraordinary thing happening and we think you

00:54:35 ►

should be brought in on this this is going to be tremendous but it polarized I find it hard to understand. I mean, I like Leary very much, and Metzner is a close personal friend of mine, but I’m now 42 years old. I’m the age Leary was when he was fired from Harvard.

00:55:30 ►

If I were fired from Esalen, so to speak, my response would not be a tour of the major don’t see myself as the pope of the children’s crusade.

00:55:32 ►

It’s not like that at all.

00:55:38 ►

We need to reach creative people in all levels of society and in all positions of power.

00:55:41 ►

Creative people will respond to this.

00:55:43 ►

It is, after all, a personal thing. It’s a personal

00:55:48 ►

thing. The revolution that wanted to give everybody LSD also wanted to have sex in the streets.

00:55:57 ►

This was a banner. I’ve shouted it myself through the streets. But hey, is that going to do a lot for relationships, to have an orgy at

00:56:10 ►

the corner of Bancroft and Telegraph? Will this make us all better able to relate to our significant

00:56:17 ►

other? I’m not sure. So I think a lighter touch. What was also absent in the 60s was any awareness

00:56:28 ►

of tradition people thought that LSD came from God via Albert Hoffman they

00:56:37 ►

didn’t realize that shamanism was about this They didn’t realize that a whole,

00:56:46 ►

that there was a huge body of evidence

00:56:48 ►

that they could call on to support their position,

00:56:52 ►

which was, this is what religion really was about

00:56:56 ►

for the first million years,

00:56:58 ►

and this is what ecstasy was about

00:57:01 ►

before it became about, you know,

00:57:04 ►

silent prayer and abstention

00:57:07 ►

and rejection of the senses and all of this stuff.

00:57:12 ►

So that really, I think, was the revolution and contribution of the 70s,

00:57:17 ►

the anthropological angle.

00:57:19 ►

I mean, it’s pretty startling to read 1960s LSD literature that has not been edited or amended since.

00:57:32 ►

If you want to look at this, take a look at Stephen Gaskin’s book Amazing Dope Tales. was published in 1969. So it’s completely uncontaminated

00:57:45 ►

by the shifts in consciousness

00:57:48 ►

of the 70s and the 80s.

00:57:52 ►

Well, it’s an astonishingly unspiritual book.

00:57:56 ►

What people seemed to do on LSD

00:57:59 ►

back in the Haight-Ashbury,

00:58:00 ►

a lot of them was what was called

00:58:02 ►

power tripping and ego tripping. And people played

00:58:06 ►

games with other people who were on it. Power games, sex games, control games. And there wasn’t

00:58:16 ►

a sense of the sacred dimension. That quite all the metaphors are drawn from the transcendent realms of Mahayana Buddhism.

00:58:26 ►

Enlightenment, Bardo, Nirvana, white light, ego death.

00:58:32 ►

A lot about ego death.

00:58:35 ►

You know, I barely ever hear that pass my lips.

00:58:39 ►

I mean, I talk about diminishing the ego, but I don’t conceive it as a dissolving into whiteness.

00:58:48 ►

I conceive it as a coming to terms with the world that wants to be recognized all around us. So,

00:58:56 ►

we have evolved the language. We have created dimensions for the experience that we didn’t have before and i think we still are i mean

00:59:06 ►

lsd was a love drug but it was a kind of collective you loved your tribe you loved

00:59:16 ►

your affinity group mushrooms brought in this connection to nature and mushrooms were not available psilocybin was rare as hen’s

00:59:27 ►

teeth until 1975 i mean i know because i sought it and my brother and i wrote the book that we did

00:59:35 ►

specifically so that people could have mushrooms and i know who our competitors were and when those publication dates were and it just did not exist unless you

00:59:47 ►

were very close to the you know inner high mucky mucks of psychedelica i never i only once took

00:59:56 ►

something which was said to be synthetic psilocybin because i didn’t know anybody. I was a spear carrier back in the golden age.

01:00:07 ►

And what the mushrooms brought in

01:00:10 ►

was for a lot of people access to hallucinations.

01:00:15 ►

LSD is quite mental.

01:00:18 ►

You have to be of a certain inner constitution

01:00:21 ►

or you have to take a lot to have hallucinations and then the hallucinations

01:00:27 ►

are of a certain character psilocybin by being visibly from the earth and by having this tremendous

01:00:36 ►

synergistic effect on the vision producing part of the brain empowered the extraterrestrial wrath,

01:00:46 ►

the fairies, that was not seriously part of the LSD phenomenon, and so forth.

01:00:54 ►

So I think, you know, it evolves in time.

01:00:58 ►

We are filling in the pieces, and there are probably dimensions yet to come that we all will be involved in i mean i

01:01:09 ►

assume many of you will end up psychotherapists educators writers uh people who will make an impact on society through ideas

01:01:25 ►

and through the teaching and the imposition of methods.

01:01:31 ►

And so this has to be part of the armamentarium

01:01:36 ►

because it is so solitary to all our concerns.

01:01:44 ►

I don’t know that they do.

01:01:46 ►

You might ask Angie Arian.

01:01:48 ►

She’s the resident authority on the Bosques.

01:01:51 ►

I know they’re into something called the light work,

01:01:55 ►

and I know they’re herders from way back,

01:02:01 ►

shepherds, people who follow cattle. Probably were into all of this stuff very early you know

01:02:10 ►

maria sabina the great mushroom shamanist of watla always claimed that she really had never been

01:02:16 ►

taught about the mushrooms that she discovered as a girl hungry for food she was left to tend the cattle and she experimented with these

01:02:27 ►

things it certainly generally conceded that astrology astronomy observation of the stars

01:02:36 ►

was something that shepherds were the first people to pay attention to because they stayed up all night and watched their flocks and observed the horizon.

01:02:52 ►

This connection with domesticated animals, whether the Basques today use psychedelic plants, I couldn’t say.

01:03:14 ►

I couldn’t say. Most Europeans don’t, and the history of Europe is poor in instances of psychedelic use because the flora of Europe is poor. There are detourers and there’s henbane and monkshood and opium brought in and hashish, but it’s not a psychedelic ecosystem at all.

01:03:29 ►

Well, it clearly isn’t the only path.

01:03:36 ►

It may be the only path to a certain place,

01:03:40 ►

but if that’s not the place you want to go,

01:03:43 ►

then you would follow a different path

01:03:48 ►

they bring you to the discovery

01:03:52 ►

that everything you know is wrong, period

01:03:55 ►

if you are not interested

01:04:00 ►

in having that experience

01:04:02 ►

and many people aren’t when I mean, many people,

01:04:07 ►

when they get to the goal of drugs, say, okay, that’s it. I’m finished with drugs. Now I

01:04:13 ►

know. I didn’t need to know that, and I’m sorry I found out. You have to have a taste The weird, the weird, the bizarre, the ultra, the beyond.

01:04:28 ►

It’s an edge phenomenon.

01:04:31 ►

It’s a 12th house phenomenon.

01:04:33 ►

It’s a scorpionic kind of thing.

01:04:36 ►

The other objection that you raise, that it’s artificial,

01:04:42 ►

that it’s artificial well I agree

01:04:44 ►

to some

01:04:45 ►

in some sense in that I don’t

01:04:48 ►

like synthetic drugs

01:04:50 ►

but

01:04:52 ►

the banner under

01:04:54 ►

which the entire new paradigm

01:04:57 ►

is operating

01:04:59 ►

is that it is an

01:05:00 ►

illusion that there is an inside

01:05:02 ►

and an outside

01:05:03 ►

it is an illusion that there is an inside and an outside. It is an illusion that there is a self and world.

01:05:10 ►

So we cannot…

01:05:14 ►

If you believe that it’s artificial,

01:05:17 ►

you already are deeply committed to a dualistic view

01:05:21 ►

of the place of the person in the world.

01:05:24 ►

the dualistic view of the place of the person in the world.

01:05:31 ►

It’s the ordinary view that people are distinct from the world. There may be philosophical churches here that can’t be reconciled.

01:05:40 ►

I’m basically some kind of a phenomenologist.

01:05:52 ►

I’m basically some kind of a phenomenologist. When you begin to analyze perception, it can be analyzed different ways. is a misunderstanding. And that in fact all these distinctions

01:06:05 ►

between self and world,

01:06:08 ►

between real and unreal,

01:06:11 ►

between inner and outer,

01:06:13 ►

these are in fact the very boundaries

01:06:16 ►

that it dissolves.

01:06:19 ►

So,

01:06:21 ►

it will change you a lot then

01:06:25 ►

to dissolve those boundaries

01:06:27 ►

because they will then be seen by you

01:06:30 ►

as merely opinions

01:06:32 ►

rather than discoveries

01:06:34 ►

about how the world really is.

01:06:39 ►

Psychedelics don’t say how the world really is.

01:06:43 ►

They say how the world really isn’t.

01:06:46 ►

That’s what they always do is they negate.

01:06:49 ►

They say, no, it isn’t that, and it isn’t that, and it isn’t even that.

01:06:54 ►

So they’re not offering a kind of replacement faith.

01:07:00 ►

It’s really a religion of doubt.

01:07:04 ►

This is what drives people crazy.

01:07:06 ►

They say, well, you don’t believe in anything.

01:07:09 ►

Damn right.

01:07:11 ►

It wasn’t easy to get to this place of not believing in anything.

01:07:16 ►

But it’s not an existential abandonment.

01:07:19 ►

It’s not like I don’t believe in anything.

01:07:22 ►

It’s that in order to be free, I must not believe anything. Then all things can be freely commanded in the mind. And that’s what psychedelics show. They say everything you think is wrong, even what you think now is wrong therefore even your most advanced thoughts are provisional therefore if you like

01:07:48 ►

thinking think but don’t think that thinking is somehow important it really isn’t but

01:07:57 ►

it’s hard to learn that and the only way i’ve been able to learn it, I was, I am, you know, like a cured alcoholic, except I’m a cured materialist. You know, I thought that I could prove the correctness of materialism by taking drugs. And then I would see that all these people were wrong about the power of drugs. They were just soft heads. And I would survive the experience and keep my skepticism intact. But what did I know? It was quicksand and now I’m what I am.

01:08:41 ►

and now I’m what I am because I got in over my head.

01:08:48 ►

Your attitude is the correct attitude

01:08:51 ►

until reality makes it impossible

01:08:55 ►

to have that opinion any longer.

01:09:00 ►

I mean, that’s the reasonable…

01:09:01 ►

Anybody should have that attitude

01:09:03 ►

until reality forces them to think something else. I mean, I would much rather have that attitude than the attitude that, you know, Babaji is God or, you know, because I perform this particular ritual in this particular constellation, I don’t have to be a decent human being.

01:09:30 ►

But experience, this is the appalling thing about these drugs.

01:09:35 ►

They are forms of experience.

01:09:39 ►

And that’s all you can have. People who choose to go through life without the experience

01:09:45 ►

will form a set of impressions about reality

01:09:50 ►

based on the lack of that particular data.

01:09:54 ►

We can’t all know everything about everything

01:09:57 ►

or all go everywhere.

01:09:59 ►

So the only reasonable position in a spiritual quest which revolves around experiences is to be true to yourself.

01:10:22 ►

Try to think as clearly as possible.

01:10:25 ►

Try to transcend limitations.

01:10:30 ►

And then see where it gets you.

01:10:40 ►

And the other thing is, of course, you know, you spoke of drugs and I replied to your objection in terms of drugs.

01:10:44 ►

But there are all kinds of drugs that I wouldn’t take on a bet. And there are all kinds

01:10:46 ►

of experiences that you can assure me will be good for me, and I will still perversely avoid them,

01:10:55 ►

because I don’t want those experiences. I know already. Well, the drugs that I’m advocating,

01:11:11 ►

Well, the drugs that I’m advocating, their greatest enthusiasts do them least often because it’s so appalling. I mean, it is not recreation. I mean, you may call it recreation, but when you actually approach the big ones, your heart pounds, your palms sweat, you wish you’d chosen, you know chosen back at the ashram or something

01:11:26 ►

no, I don’t advocate living in a

01:11:32 ►

haze of drug-induced

01:11:35 ►

perception

01:11:38 ►

I may, but I don’t advocate

01:11:41 ►

and the big ones I may, but I don’t advocate.

01:11:54 ►

And the big ones, it takes months to assimilate a large psychedelic trip.

01:11:59 ►

No, the purpose is to enrich the here and now,

01:12:03 ►

to enrich the down state, because this is where we live, after all.

01:12:07 ►

This is where we live.

01:12:09 ►

And also, you know, it might as well be said,

01:12:11 ►

people who take drugs all the time are getting the wrong effect.

01:12:16 ►

I mean, your system just adapts.

01:12:18 ►

Everything becomes like caffeine after a while.

01:12:22 ►

It either becomes like caffeine or it becomes like opium. It

01:12:27 ►

either puts you to sleep or it wires you up. So it’s about doing it with attention and

01:12:37 ►

in a ritual setting and at high enough doses that you get somewhere.

01:12:45 ►

I mean, I think the worst thing you can do is diddle with low doses.

01:12:51 ►

The nibblers of this world are no friends of mine, you know.

01:12:58 ►

It should be overwhelming and it should be an act of courage.

01:13:02 ►

What I’ve said in other situations like this is if you’re not afraid, then you’re not doing either the right drug or enough of the right drug.

01:13:23 ►

then you’re just probably out for a good time.

01:13:26 ►

And I have nothing against having a good time,

01:13:29 ►

but I actually like having a good time without drugs because when I have a drug going,

01:13:31 ►

I feel an obligation to go to work, you know?

01:13:36 ►

Think, look, understand.

01:13:41 ►

Well, this is why we might question the wisdom

01:13:44 ►

of uniting the idea of psychedelic exploration with late adolescence.

01:13:51 ►

Is that a good idea?

01:13:54 ►

To take people 16 to 25 who are trying to come to terms with being independent in the world,

01:14:01 ►

defining their sexuality, leaving their parents’ home and getting a life for themselves,

01:14:08 ►

and then we add on, oh yes, and there’s one more thing you have to put up with this.

01:14:14 ►

I don’t know. I think people pretty much have to self-select.

01:14:18 ►

Since we cannot legally organize…

01:14:21 ►

See, if we could legally organize, there would be a network of shamans

01:14:26 ►

who would be sitters, who when someone wanted to do a certain drug, they would say, well,

01:14:33 ►

who sits good? Who sits well for this? And then you would go and that person would train you

01:14:40 ►

in whatever they had to teach, which would be diet, breath control, postures, mudras, dances, rituals.

01:14:50 ►

They would train you.

01:14:51 ►

And the last thing that they would bring on to the scene would be the halosemajin.

01:15:00 ►

Our situation is different and a real problem.

01:15:04 ►

This is why we have to hold meetings like this.

01:15:07 ►

We’re like somebody walking along a beach who comes upon a sailboat

01:15:13 ►

and decides they’re going to learn to sail.

01:15:18 ►

Well, can they learn to sail before they sink the boat?

01:15:23 ►

That’s the question.

01:15:24 ►

And it’s going to depend on how smart they are to begin with, to sail before they sink the boat. That’s the question.

01:15:28 ►

And it’s going to depend on how smart they are to begin with,

01:15:31 ►

how the weather is that day,

01:15:33 ►

how the tides are that day.

01:15:35 ►

They may, they may not.

01:15:38 ►

We’re trying to do the most difficult of all things,

01:15:41 ►

which is bootstrap ourselves,

01:15:48 ►

none of us knowing any more than any of the rest of us bootstrap ourselves to a new level of talking about this what we have to do i think in this situation is each of us tell

01:15:56 ►

our story somebody thought it was wonderful somebody thought it was terrible. Each tell our story and then try to create a set of techniques out of that that works.

01:16:10 ►

This is what I’ve been doing for 25 years.

01:16:13 ►

I mean, when we first got together, my peers at Cal, all we did, I mean, we took drugs a lot,

01:16:22 ►

but what we really did was we talked about it an awful lot.

01:16:26 ►

What is it? Trying to understand it?

01:16:29 ►

Trying to compete with each other for the metaphors that would encapsulate it.

01:16:37 ►

And out of this has come a very grassroots kind of consensus, I think,

01:16:46 ►

which unites ideas like shamanism, an invisible world,

01:16:53 ►

the importance of holding down ego,

01:16:57 ►

the importance of paying attention,

01:17:00 ►

that nature is somehow a friend and an ally.

01:17:06 ►

We’re putting it together ourselves.

01:17:09 ►

It isn’t a science. It’s an art.

01:17:12 ►

Shamanism is an art.

01:17:15 ►

And we take what we can get from all of these other traditions.

01:17:19 ►

Maybe we’re doing better than we think.

01:17:22 ►

You know?

01:17:24 ►

I mean, I’ve had the experience in the Amazon

01:17:26 ►

of talking with a shaman

01:17:30 ►

and we’re talking about something,

01:17:34 ►

how he uses a certain plant or something.

01:17:38 ►

And then I would say,

01:17:40 ►

well, you know, the so-and-so tribe,

01:17:44 ►

they know this plant and they use it in the following way. well, you know the so-and-so tribe,

01:17:49 ►

they know this plant and they use it in the following way.

01:17:53 ►

And then the guy would say, well, how do you know that?

01:17:54 ►

That’s amazing.

01:17:59 ►

Well, I know it because I read Harvard Museum botanical leaflets where this anthropological data is deployed.

01:18:03 ►

So while we don’t have a grizzled old master shaman hung

01:18:09 ►

with bones and beads to guide us through, what we do have is a huge amount of ethnographic data

01:18:18 ►

and material collected in all parts of the world about how people on all kinds of levels of culture,

01:18:26 ►

but many of them preliterate, handle these problems.

01:18:30 ►

So what we have is a kind of generic shamanism.

01:18:36 ►

And if we can infuse it with life, it will probably work for us.

01:18:43 ►

it will probably work for us.

01:18:50 ►

I’m very happy to see that the ayahuasca is coming up out of the Amazon and that people are trying to form circles.

01:18:54 ►

They’re trying to do it right.

01:18:56 ►

One reason they’re trying to do it right is because there is so little of this

01:19:01 ►

that you have to prove, you have to convince somebody that you’re worthy

01:19:07 ►

before you even get invited. So it’s not something that is just handed out to everyone.

01:19:13 ►

But if we could create a generic shamanism that we could infuse with life, I think we could

01:19:20 ►

probably create a series of interlocking institutions and rituals that would make this more accessible to other people.

01:19:31 ►

I have great admiration for the sitters, for the guides.

01:19:37 ►

I mean, I won’t do that.

01:19:39 ►

I worry too much.

01:19:40 ►

I’m too susceptible to the transference.

01:19:49 ►

too much. I’m too susceptible to the transference. Really, I am so empathetic with people on high doses of these things that I can’t stand to be around them. But it’s a different calling.

01:19:58 ►

So I don’t consider myself a shaman. I’m more like, you know, court jester and village bard. But the shaman is the person

01:20:08 ►

who will actually give you the techniques, whatever they may be, whether they’re substances

01:20:13 ►

or rituals, give you the techniques to carry you into the place. It’s difficult what we’re

01:20:20 ►

trying to do because we were robbed a long time ago of this birthright.

01:20:26 ►

This is different than recreating a dance

01:20:29 ►

or a sweat lodge or something like that

01:20:34 ►

because this is all in the mind and in the heart.

01:20:38 ►

Yeah.

01:20:39 ►

Where this can go.

01:20:41 ►

You’re right, we’re hoist on our own petard.

01:20:45 ►

Well, nobody said that knowledge is, that the pursuit of knowledge is not a dangerous path.

01:20:53 ►

I mean, I’m not sure that it can be entirely sanitized.

01:20:58 ►

And there’s something else to be said about all this.

01:21:01 ►

I say we have to create these shamanic forms ourselves.

01:21:06 ►

said about all this. I say we have to create these shamanic forms ourselves. We have to bootstrap ourselves to a generic shamanism. But in fact, we have the most powerful ally

01:21:15 ►

which the traditional shamans had, and that is the plants. The plants fundamentally shamanism is a one-to-one relationship between

01:21:28 ►

a person and a plant and if you know what i mean you know what i mean if you don’t it just sounds

01:21:36 ►

like somebody’s advocating that you talk to lettuces but i didn’t believe it myself until I got into the domain where it was happening.

01:21:47 ►

Nature wants to communicate.

01:21:50 ►

She wants us to pick up the telephone.

01:21:53 ►

She wants us to direct our attention toward the idea that nature can present itself as real communication. If we could let down into that,

01:22:06 ►

then the crab that cleans our fingernails

01:22:09 ►

or the snake that sheds its skin above us in the tree,

01:22:14 ►

these things then become the teacher.

01:22:17 ►

I mean, this is what the mushroom says.

01:22:19 ►

It says, you don’t need the teacher.

01:22:22 ►

I am the teacher.

01:22:24 ►

And it is but for you to recognize and come to terms with that. You don’t need the teacher. I am the teacher.

01:22:29 ►

And it is but for you to recognize and come to terms with that.

01:22:35 ►

It’s not a tough road to hoe and maybe it’s not for everybody.

01:22:40 ►

And maybe we are misguided to seek to expand our circle larger.

01:22:47 ►

I mean, maybe what we should seek to do is to deepen the experience and connections within our circle.

01:22:50 ►

This is another way to do it.

01:22:55 ►

You know, human beings don’t believe in anything unless it’s a mass movement.

01:23:04 ►

But when it’s something from the heart, maybe the real authentication of it comes from a deeper personal commitment.

01:23:08 ►

Well, why don’t we knock off for today?

01:23:14 ►

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

01:23:17 ►

Well, I guess that I haven’t been paying close enough attention all these many years that

01:23:22 ►

have passed now since the end of what we call the

01:23:26 ►

60s, because until Terrence brought it up, I hadn’t given any thought to how differently my friends

01:23:33 ►

and I now approach psychedelics compared with how they were treated by the acid heads way back then.

01:23:39 ►

And by the way, I found that old book that he mentioned in his rap about power tripping and ego tripping.

01:23:45 ►

It’s still available, and I’ll link to it in the program notes for today’s podcast,

01:23:50 ►

which, as you know, you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.

01:23:54 ►

So, in regards to the question that Terrence asked about whether we, as a community,

01:24:01 ►

have actually become better people through our use of sacred medicines?

01:24:05 ►

Well, I’ve got mixed emotions about that myself.

01:24:09 ►

Having been actively involved in this community for a long time now,

01:24:13 ►

it’s been my experience that using psychedelics in its own way

01:24:18 ►

acts much the same way upon people as does coming into a large amount of money.

01:24:23 ►

They simply make the person more

01:24:25 ►

of what they already were, already at their core at least. And so, sadly, I’ve, well, I’ve seen some

01:24:32 ►

real jerks who use psychedelics. And I’ve also seen some quite unfortunate cases where ego tripping

01:24:39 ►

and the loss of self-control resulted in more deaths than I care to think about. And that’s the downside.

01:24:47 ►

The upside is that I’ve also seen even more people come into their own full potential

01:24:51 ►

and evolve into amazing human beings.

01:24:55 ►

In my own case, I still have miles to go before I even get within sight of the person that

01:25:01 ►

I know deep down I’m one day capable of becoming.

01:25:04 ►

And hopefully, with a lot more work on my part,

01:25:07 ►

I still think that I can become the man that my parents were so proud of when I was young.

01:25:13 ►

Of course, it’s really difficult to be that guy

01:25:17 ►

when every day you’re becoming ever more of a grumpy old man.

01:25:22 ►

And what am I grumpy about, you ask?

01:25:27 ►

Well, rather than my trying to put it into my own words, I’m first going to sign off and then play a short clip from an interview

01:25:33 ►

that Russell Brand recently gave to BBC. However, since he is so much younger than I am, our mutual

01:25:40 ►

sentiments come off, well, they come off much better coming from his lips. And what does this have to do with psychedelics, you ask?

01:25:48 ►

Well, nothing, I guess, if you’re only going to use them for fun.

01:25:52 ►

But if you recall, the word psychedelic means

01:25:55 ►

mind manifesting. And for my money, Russell Brand’s

01:26:00 ►

mind is about as psychedelic as any I know of.

01:26:03 ►

While I intend to keep these podcasts as politics-free

01:26:07 ►

as possible, what he is calling for is for all of us to give some thought to the present condition

01:26:13 ►

of the world as it is currently manifest in our own lives, and then to figure out what we can do

01:26:19 ►

to leave this world in a little better condition than we found it in. As a wise man once said,

01:26:27 ►

almost everything you do will seem insignificant,

01:26:30 ►

but it is important that you do it.

01:26:33 ►

For now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:26:38 ►

Be well, my friends.

01:26:40 ►

And now, here is the one and only Russell Brand.

01:26:44 ►

Russell Brand, who are you to edit a political magazine?

01:26:48 ►

Well, I suppose like a person who’s been politely asked by an attractive woman.

01:26:53 ►

I don’t know what the typical criteria is.

01:26:55 ►

I don’t know many people that edit political magazines.

01:26:57 ►

Boris, he used to do one, didn’t he?

01:26:59 ►

So I’m a person with crazy hair, quite a good sense of humour,

01:27:02 ►

don’t know much about politics, I’m ideal.

01:27:04 ►

But is it true you don’t even vote?

01:27:06 ►

Yeah, no, I don’t vote.

01:27:08 ►

Well, how do you have any authority to talk about politics, then?

01:27:11 ►

Well, I don’t get my authority from this pre-existing paradigm,

01:27:14 ►

which is quite narrow and only serves a few people.

01:27:17 ►

I look elsewhere for alternatives that might be of service to humanity.

01:27:23 ►

Alternate means alternate political systems.

01:27:25 ►

They being?

01:27:27 ►

Well, I’ve not invented it yet, Jeremy.

01:27:28 ►

I had to do a magazine last week.

01:27:30 ►

I’ve had a lot on my plate.

01:27:31 ►

But I say, here’s the thing it shouldn’t do.

01:27:34 ►

Shouldn’t destroy the planet.

01:27:35 ►

Shouldn’t create massive economic disparity.

01:27:38 ►

Shouldn’t ignore the needs of the people.

01:27:40 ►

The burden of proof is on the people with the power,

01:27:43 ►

not people like doing a magazine.

01:27:44 ►

How do you imagine the people

01:27:46 ►

get power?

01:27:48 ►

Well, I imagine there are sort of hierarchical

01:27:50 ►

systems that have been preserved through generations.

01:27:52 ►

They get power by being voted in, that’s how they get it.

01:27:54 ►

You can’t even be asked to vote.

01:27:55 ►

It’s quite a narrow, quite a narrow

01:27:57 ►

prescriptive parameter that changes

01:27:59 ►

within the… In a democracy,

01:28:01 ►

that’s how it works. Well, I don’t think it’s working

01:28:03 ►

very well, Jeremy,

01:28:06 ►

given that the planet is being destroyed,

01:28:09 ►

given that there is economic disparity of a huge degree.

01:28:10 ►

What are you saying? There’s no alternative?

01:28:12 ►

No, I’m not saying that.

01:28:13 ►

I’m saying if you can’t be asked to vote,

01:28:16 ►

why should we be asked to listen to your political point of view?

01:28:18 ►

You don’t have to listen to my political point of view,

01:28:20 ►

but it’s not that I’m not voting out of apathy.

01:28:24 ►

I’m not voting out of absolute indifference and weariness and exhaustion

01:28:25 ►

from the lies, treachery, deceit of the political class that has been going on for generations

01:28:30 ►

now, and which has now reached fever pitch, where we have a disenfranchised, disillusioned,

01:28:34 ►

despondent underclass that are not being represented by that political system. So voting for it

01:28:39 ►

is tacit complicity with that system, and that’s not something I’m offering up.

01:28:43 ►

Well, why don’t you change it then?

01:28:44 ►

I’m trying to. Well, why don’t you change it, then? I’m trying to.

01:28:46 ►

Well, why don’t you start by voting?

01:28:47 ►

I don’t think it works.

01:28:49 ►

People have voted already,

01:28:50 ►

and that’s what’s created the current paradigm.

01:28:52 ►

When did you last vote?

01:28:53 ►

Never.

01:28:53 ►

You’ve never, ever voted?

01:28:55 ►

No. Do you think that’s really bad?

01:28:57 ►

So you struck an attitude, what, before the age of 18?

01:28:59 ►

Well, I was busy being a drug addict at that point

01:29:01 ►

because I come from the kind of social conditions

01:29:03 ►

that are exacerbated by an indifferent system that really just administrates for large corporations

01:29:07 ►

and ignores the population that it was voted in to serve.

01:29:10 ►

You’re blaming the political class for the fact that you had a drug problem?

01:29:13 ►

No, no, no. I’m saying I was part of a social and economic class that is underserved by the current political system

01:29:19 ►

and drug addiction is one of the problems it creates when you have huge, underserved, impoverished populations.

01:29:25 ►

People get drug problems and also don’t feel like they want to engage with the current political system

01:29:31 ►

because they see that it doesn’t work for them.

01:29:33 ►

They see that it makes no difference.

01:29:35 ►

They see that they’re not served.

01:29:36 ►

Of course it doesn’t work for them if they don’t bother to vote.

01:29:38 ►

Jeremy, my darling, I’m not saying that the apathy doesn’t come from us, the people.

01:29:42 ►

The apathy comes from the politicians.

01:29:43 ►

They are apathetic to our needs.

01:29:45 ►

They’re only interested in servicing the needs of corporations.

01:29:47 ►

Look at what…

01:29:48 ►

Ain’t the Tories going to court and taking the EU to court

01:29:51 ►

because they’re trying to curtail bank bonuses?

01:29:53 ►

Is that what’s happening at the moment in our country?

01:29:55 ►

It is, isn’t it?

01:29:56 ►

So why am I going to tune in for that?

01:29:58 ►

You don’t believe in democracy.

01:29:59 ►

You want a revolution, don’t you?

01:30:01 ►

The planet is being destroyed.

01:30:02 ►

We are creating an underclass.

01:30:04 ►

We are exploiting poor people all

01:30:06 ►

over the world, and the genuine, legitimate

01:30:07 ►

problems of the people are not being addressed by

01:30:10 ►

our political class. All of those things may be

01:30:12 ►

true. They are true. But you took…

01:30:14 ►

I wouldn’t argue with you about

01:30:15 ►

many of them. Well, how come I feel so cross

01:30:17 ►

with you? It can’t just be because of that beard.

01:30:20 ►

It’s gorgeous. It’s possibly because…

01:30:21 ►

If the Daily Mail don’t want it, I do.

01:30:23 ►

I’m against them.

01:30:25 ►

Grow it longer.

01:30:27 ►

Tangle it into your armpit hair.

01:30:29 ►

You are a very trivial man.

01:30:31 ►

What, do you think I am trivial?

01:30:31 ►

Yes.

01:30:34 ►

A minute ago, you were having a go at me because I wanted a revolution.

01:30:35 ►

Now I’m trivial.

01:30:36 ►

I’m bouncing about all over the place. I’m not having a go at you because you want a revolution.

01:30:38 ►

Many people want a revolution, but I’m asking you what it will be like.

01:30:41 ►

Well, I think what it won’t be like is a huge disparity between rich

01:30:46 ►

and poor, where 300 Americans have the same amount of wealth as the 85 million poorest Americans,

01:30:53 ►

where there is an exploited and underserved underclass that are being continually ignored,

01:30:58 ►

where welfare is slashed while Cameron and Osborne go to court to defend the rights of

01:31:03 ►

bankers to continue receiving their bonuses.

01:31:06 ►

That’s all I’m saying.

01:31:06 ►

What’s the scheme? That’s all I’m asking.

01:31:08 ►

What’s the scheme? You talk vaguely about revolution. What is it?

01:31:12 ►

I think a socialist egalitarian system based on the massive redistribution of wealth,

01:31:16 ►

heavy taxation of corporations and massive responsibility for energy companies

01:31:20 ►

and any companies that exploit the environment.

01:31:22 ►

I think the very concept of profit should be hugely reduced.

01:31:27 ►

David Cameron says profit isn’t a dirty word.

01:31:28 ►

I say profit is a filthy word, because wherever there is profit, there is also deficit.

01:31:33 ►

And this system currently doesn’t address these ideas.

01:31:36 ►

And so why would anyone vote for it?

01:31:37 ►

Why would anyone be interested in it?

01:31:39 ►

Who would levy these taxes?

01:31:41 ►

I think there needs to be a centralised administrative system.

01:31:44 ►

A government?

01:31:45 ►

Yes, a government. There needs to be a government. Well, maybe call it

01:31:48 ►

something else. Call them like the admin bods

01:31:49 ►

so they don’t get ahead of themselves. And how would they be chosen?

01:31:52 ►

Jeremy, don’t ask me to

01:31:53 ►

sit here in an interview with you in a bloody

01:31:56 ►

hotel room and devise a global utopian

01:31:58 ►

system. I’m merely pointing out

01:32:00 ►

that the current… You’re calling for revolution?

01:32:01 ►

Yeah, absolutely. I’m calling

01:32:04 ►

for change. I’m calling for

01:32:05 ►

genuine alternatives. But there are many people

01:32:08 ►

who would agree with you. Good.

01:32:09 ►

The current system is not engaging with all sorts

01:32:12 ►

of problems, yes. And they feel

01:32:13 ►

apathetic. Really apathetic.

01:32:16 ►

But if they were to take you seriously

01:32:18 ►

and not to vote…

01:32:20 ►

Yeah, they shouldn’t vote.

01:32:21 ►

That’s one thing they should do. Don’t bother voting.

01:32:23 ►

Because then when it reaches… There’s a point. So these little valves, these sort of like cosy little valves of recycling and Prius and like, you know, turn up somewhere.

01:32:31 ►

It stops us reaching the point where we think, oh, this is enough now. Stop voting. Stop pretending. Wake up. Be in reality now.

01:32:38 ►

Time to be in reality now. Why vote? We know it’s not going to make any difference. We know that already.

01:32:42 ►

So, you know, I have more impact at West Ham United cheering them on.

01:32:46 ►

And they lost the city unnecessarily Saturday.

01:32:49 ►

OK, well, now you’re being facetious.

01:32:51 ►

Well, facetiousness has as much value as seriousness.

01:32:54 ►

I think you’re making the mistake of mistaking seriousness for solemnity.

01:32:57 ►

We’re not going to solve world problems by facetiousness.

01:33:00 ►

We’re not going to solve them with the current system.

01:33:01 ►

At least facetiousness is funny.

01:33:04 ►

Sometimes.

01:33:05 ►

Yeah, sometimes, Jeremy.

01:33:07 ►

So listen, let’s approach this optimistically.

01:33:09 ►

You’ve spent your whole career berating and haranguing politicians,

01:33:13 ►

and then when, like me, a comedian goes,

01:33:14 ►

yeah, they’re all worthless, what’s the point in engaging with any of them?

01:33:16 ►

You sort of have a go at me because I’m not poor anymore.

01:33:19 ►

No, I’m not having a go at you about that.

01:33:21 ►

I’m just asking you why we should take you seriously when you’re so unspecific.

01:33:26 ►

You don’t have to take me…

01:33:27 ►

Firstly, I don’t mind if you take me seriously.

01:33:30 ►

I’m here just to draw attention to a few ideas.

01:33:33 ►

I just want to have a little bit of a laugh.

01:33:35 ►

I’m saying there are people with alternative ideas that are far better qualified than I am

01:33:39 ►

and far better qualified, more importantly, than the people that are currently doing that job

01:33:43 ►

because they’re not attempting to solve these problems.‘re not they’re attempting to placate the population

01:33:48 ►

their measures that are currently being taken around climate change are indifferent will not

01:33:52 ►

solve the you don’t think it’s possible as human beings they’re simply overwhelmed by the scale of

01:33:58 ►

the problem not really well possibly it might be that i mean but that’s just semantics really

01:34:02 ►

whether they’re overwhelmed by it or tacitly maintaining it because of habitual…

01:34:06 ►

Mate, this is what I noticed when I was in the Houses of Parliament, it’s decorated exactly

01:34:11 ►

the same as Eton, it’s decorated exactly the same as Oxford, so a certain type of people

01:34:14 ►

goes in there and thinks, oh this makes me nervous, and another type of people go in

01:34:17 ►

there and go, this is how it should be.

01:34:19 ►

And I think that’s got to change now.

01:34:21 ►

We can no longer have erroneous, duplicitous systems held in place

01:34:25 ►

unless it’s for the only systems that serve the planet

01:34:28 ►

and serve the population of the planet can be allowed to survive.

01:34:31 ►

Not ones that serve elites, be they political or corporate elites.

01:34:35 ►

And this is what’s currently happening.

01:34:36 ►

You don’t really believe that.

01:34:37 ►

I completely believe it.

01:34:38 ►

Don’t look at me all weary like you’re at a fireside with a pipe in your beard.

01:34:42 ►

Ed Miliband was an elite.

01:34:44 ►

Well, he went to the same primary school as Boris O, didn’t he?

01:34:47 ►

He did, but he then went to a comprehensive school in North London.

01:34:49 ►

Well, that’s very good. That’s all well and good.

01:34:51 ►

But what I’m saying is that within the existing paradigm,

01:34:54 ►

the change is not dramatic enough, not radical enough.

01:34:56 ►

So you can well understand public disturbances and public dissatisfaction

01:35:00 ►

when there are not genuine changes and genuine alternatives being offered.

01:35:03 ►

I say when there is a genuine alternative, a genuine option, then vote for that.

01:35:08 ►

But until then, don’t bother.

01:35:10 ►

Why pretend? Why be complicit in this ridiculous illusion?

01:35:13 ►

Because by the time somebody comes along, you might think it worth voting for.

01:35:18 ►

It may be too late.

01:35:19 ►

I don’t think so, because the time is now.

01:35:21 ►

These movements are already occurring. It’s happening everywhere.

01:35:23 ►

We’re in a time where communication is instantaneous instantaneous and there are communities all over the world.

01:35:27 ►

The Occupy movement made a difference, even if only in that it introduced to the popular public lexicon

01:35:33 ►

the idea of the 1% versus the 99%.

01:35:36 ►

People for the first time in a generation are aware of massive corporate and economic exploitation.

01:35:42 ►

These things are not nonsense and these subjects are not being addressed.

01:35:46 ►

No one’s doing anything about tax havens.

01:35:48 ►

No one’s doing anything about their political affiliations

01:35:51 ►

and financial affiliations of the Conservative Party.

01:35:53 ►

So until people start addressing things that are actually real,

01:35:56 ►

why wouldn’t I be facetious?

01:35:58 ►

Why would I take it seriously?

01:35:59 ►

Why would I encourage a constituency of young people

01:36:02 ►

that are absolutely indifferent to vote?

01:36:04 ►

Why would we? Aren’t you bored?

01:36:06 ►

Aren’t you more bored than anyone?

01:36:07 ►

And you’ve been talking to them year after year,

01:36:09 ►

listening to their lies, their nonsense.

01:36:11 ►

Then this one gets in, then it’s that one get in.

01:36:13 ►

But the problem continues.

01:36:15 ►

Why are we going to continue to contribute to this facade?

01:36:18 ►

I’m surprised you can be facetious when you’re that angry about it.

01:36:21 ►

Yeah, I’m angry. I am angry.

01:36:24 ►

Because for me it’s real. Because for me it’s not just some peripheral thing that I turn up once in a angry i am angry because for me it’s real because for me it’s

01:36:26 ►

not just some peripheral thing that i turn up once in a while to a church fight for for me

01:36:30 ►

this is what i come from this is what i care about do you see any hope remember that yeah

01:36:36 ►

totally there’s going to be a revolution it’s totally going to happen i said not only i ain’t

01:36:40 ►

got a flicker of doubt this is the end this is This is time to wake up. I remember I see you in that programme where you look at your ancestors

01:36:48 ►

and you saw that while your grandmother had to brass herself

01:36:51 ►

or got fucked over by the aristocrats who ran her gaff,

01:36:54 ►

you cried because you knew that it was unfair and unjust.

01:36:57 ►

And what was that a century ago?

01:36:59 ►

That’s happening to people now.

01:37:00 ►

I just come from a woman who’s being treated like that.

01:37:02 ►

I’ve just been talking to a woman today who’s been treated like that.

01:37:05 ►

So if we can engage that feeling, instead of some moment of lacrimal sentimentality

01:37:10 ►

trotted out on the TV for people to pour over emotional porn,

01:37:14 ►

if we can engage that feeling and change things, why wouldn’t we?

01:37:17 ►

Why is that naive? Why is that not my right because I’m an actor?

01:37:21 ►

I mean, I’ve taken the right. I don’t need the right from you.

01:37:24 ►

I don’t need the right from anybody. I’m an actor. I mean, I’ve taken the right. I don’t need the right from you. I don’t

01:37:25 ►

need the right from anybody. I’m taking it. Remember, almost everything you do will seem

01:37:31 ►

insignificant, but it is important that you do it.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

374 - Bootstrapping Ourselves

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Program Notes

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