Program Notes
Guest speaker: Timothy Leary
[NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.]
“We deliberately keep kids dumb by treating them like kids.”
“We all know that if voting would change anything it would be illegal.”
“The future belongs to those who can see the future.”
“The smarter you are, the higher you want to be.”
“The key to the Sixties, as we see it now, was a period of self-discovery, of self-indulgence, and the refusal to accept the adult hive’s over-specialized models.”
“Show me a taboo, and I’m interested in it.”
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
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salon.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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Now, the other day, one of our fellow salonners on our forums posted a link to an interesting Grateful Dead concert that was on SoundCloud.
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And while I was listening to it, I was, well, of course, I was reminded of the 60s and everything that went on back then.
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So I got to thinking about the fact that it has now been over two years since I’ve podcasted a talk by Dr. Timothy Leary, and that’s been way too long.
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Now, as hard as it is for me to grok this fact, my guess is that a significant number of our fellow salonners have little or no idea about who Timothy Leary was,
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and of the huge impact that he has had on the worldwide psychedelic community.
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The talk that I’m about to play was actually recorded sometime in 1980, and in it you’re going to hear him say that already on college campuses, most of the students had no idea about
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who he was. Now, let me make this as clear as I can. If Dr. Timothy Leary had never done all that he did,
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you and I wouldn’t be here in the salon right now. If you take the time to go back to my podcast
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number 369, you will hear Dr. Leary most graciously pass the baton to Terrence McKenna,
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who then says that had it not been for Tim Leary, he never would have become the person
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that we now know today as Terrence McKenna. And without McKenna, well, there are no Psychedelic
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Salon podcasts because most likely I would, well, probably just be an old stoner living somewhere
00:01:59 ►
in the swamps of Florida. Needless to say, I owe a lot to these two guys. My guess is that there has never been a
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U.S. president who has even heard of Terrence McKenna, let alone knew anything about him.
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Shocking, isn’t it? But even more shocking to me is the fact that in the worldwide psychedelic
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community today, Terrence McKenna is probably better known than is Tim Leary, who was a very well-known
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person by several U.S. presidents, beginning with Richard Nixon, who declared Leary to be the most
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dangerous man in America. At one time, Timothy Leary was at the top of both the FBI’s and
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Interpol’s most wanted lists. Yet, not only did he survive the wrath of the U.S. government,
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he thrived. And by the time that he gave the wrath of the U.S. government, he thrived. And by
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the time that he gave this talk that we are about to listen to, even people like Robert Anton Wilson
00:02:51 ►
were paying to be in the audience. Now, Dr. Leary’s talks, while entertaining and enlightening,
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unfortunately don’t always captivate today’s audiences in quite the same way that Terence
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McKenna does.
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Yet, I believe that it’s important for us to not forget him. Without Timothy Leary,
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the psychedelic movement would be a thin shadow of what it is today. Now, one of the biggest differences in style of their speaking is that Dr. Leary usually gave prepared remarks that he
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had outlined earlier, whereas Terence McKenna’s style was to have people in attendance ask questions
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from which he could riff those marvelous answers.
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Terence was mainly freeform, and Timothy Leary was more structured.
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Of course, as you will hear in a moment,
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he peppered his main remarks with quite a few humorous asides in his wonderful laughter.
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Now, as a member in good standing of the worldwide psychedelic community,
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it’s up to you to not let the history
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of our elders pass into oblivion.
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You wouldn’t be here in the salon right now
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had it not been for Tim Leary.
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So please join me as we listen to him
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entertaining a San Francisco crowd
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sometime during 1980,
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the final year of the Jimmy Carter presidency.
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Adult means the finished form. The word adolescent comes from the present participle of the same
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word to grow. The adolescent is one who grows. Now, the key thing about the human species
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is this, that we have not committed ourselves to an over-specialized adult form. Now, the key thing about the human species is this, that we have not committed ourselves to an over-specialized adult form.
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Now, if you follow the logic here, it becomes very simple.
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The more power you give to the young of your species, the sooner you give that power to them,
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the faster your species is going to grow, the farther your gene pool is going to move into the future,
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and the, of course, it goes without saying, the key to everything, the farther your gene pool is going to move into the future, and of course,
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it goes without saying, the key to everything, the more growth in the individuals will result.
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Now, the amazing thing about the United States and about the new California culture is this,
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that it’s definitely a youth-oriented culture.
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As you move east, you will find the countries run by older
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and older men. That’s the way it should be, and I’m not knocking that whatsoever. But America has
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always been the place where it’s a frontier place where youth, and I would even use the word
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adolescence, has been the central cultural theme.
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Now, Europeans really think we’re nuts over here.
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We move around, we change, and nothing around us in the way of architecture is more than
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50 years old.
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We are, you know, let’s look at the characteristics of adolescence.
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The adolescent, see, the interesting thing about adolescence is sexually active, but
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hasn’t committed to a final over-specialized adult form.
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So it’s obvious that if any evolution, any quantum leaks are going to happen, it’s best designed to happen during a period of adolescence.
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Now, an adolescent is generally characterized by being intense, romantic, idealistic, change-able, enthusiastic, loves surprise, loves to joke,
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takes things very seriously but then jokes about them.
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And above all, your adolescent is horny.
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Now, I cite you the case of a species which has these characteristics.
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The trick is to remain, to keep within a central core, a seed essence of adolescence.
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Now, my friends, again, I’m not advocating anything.
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But I’ll tell you that I have tried to be an adult over 24 times.
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I mean, I wouldn’t knock it if I hadn’t tried it.
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I’ve had a lot of fun as an adult, but I knew that my basic
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compass reading my gyroscopic navigational readings told me that… So, become an adult.
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Matter of fact, you can be a swell adult if you know you’re just passing through. It’s
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a temporary gig.
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Because the definition of adult, of course, is someone who is uptight and takes things seriously.
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So, matter of fact, you can dress up like an adult and you can go into the adult hive
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and you can play that with more success because they really take it so seriously
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and they can’t move or change.
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And change is the name of the development game.
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Now, I want to use these notions of neoteny and pedomorphosis
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and adolescent commitment for practical politics.
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My friends, there is one minority group in this country
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which does not have its civil rights.
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There is one large minority group in this country which does not have its civil rights. There’s one large minority group
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in this country which is living in total repression. Now, the reason that this large and tremendously
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important minority group is kept without the ballot and without civil rights, the adults who
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run the Hive use the same line that they’ve used before. They used it to the Irish Catholics
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in Ireland and England. They used it to the blacks until recently in this country. They used it to the Irish Catholics in Ireland and England.
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They used it to the blacks until recently in this country.
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They used it against women.
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You’re not ready to handle
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adult responsibility.
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But step by step,
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each of these large minority groups
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has demonstrated its interest in
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and its readiness to take over responsibility,
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the obvious conclusion is that the political movement of the 80s is going to be a youth movement.
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Why shouldn’t the voting age start at seven?
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Well, at seven they can’t read Time magazine.
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Well, at seven, well, they’re not married.
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Does that mean you have to be married to vote?
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You go right down the list of all the arguments used to keep the vote away from young people,
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from the key segment of the population that’s ready to grow,
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and you’ll find that if you use those same criteria,
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you will knock out most of the current voters.
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So I suspect that in the 1980s, you’re going to have the classic situation.
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The key, of course, to intelligence increase in this country
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is power to the individuals and power, consumer power to young people.
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When young people have caught on now that because they have consumer power, people are
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listening to them.
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Now, the youth movement in the 1980s will, of course, split, as all political movements
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do, into a radical group and a conservative group of young people.
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The conservative young people will talk quietly
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to parents and will have meetings and so forth. The radical group will do such things as,
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can you imagine 5,000 six-year-old kids in the Senate chambers refusing to go?
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And international television watching the police ejecting these seven-year-olds?
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Well, I leave it to your imagination
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the techniques which can be used by intelligent young people
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asserting their competence and their…
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Now, of course, it’s again true that we deliberately,
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we deliberately keep kids dumb by treating them like kids.
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And it’s obvious and well known that the more choice and option you give to any group, sure, they’ll make mistakes.
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Sure, they’ll do like every one of our groups have done.
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It’ll take them some time.
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But now, here’s the way I see the scenario going down. I see in the 1980 election a total defeat for the juvenile vote.
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By 1984, however, the youth activism, militant terrorists nine years old putting sugar in gas tanks,
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and God knows what they’ll do to the adults, will lead to a backlash.
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and God knows what they’ll do to the adults,
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will lead to a backlash.
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And to the surprise of everyone in the 1984 election,
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Ronald Reagan will be elected on his program of firm but stern brat control.
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After the impeachment of Reagan in 86,
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the next election will be Tatum O’Neill versus Brooke Shields,
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who are clear and classic, futique expressions of the next political movement.
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Well, you know, talking politics in a feisty town like San Francisco is always reckless.
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I think that one of the greatest things happening in this country today is a disillusion with politics.
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Anytime you get a highly educated, affluent, free, independent, fast-moving populace,
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and they start not voting.
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You know, in the last election, less than a third of the voters voted.
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In the 1976 election, more people decided to stay home than voted for Jimmy or the other guy’s name.
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What does that mean?
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It means that more people in 1976, the 200th year of our republic,
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decided they had more important things to do that day for their own personal growth,
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to make some money, to keep their own rally going,
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to do something for a loved one or a friend,
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than to go to a polling booth under the illusion
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that voting for Jimmy or Jerry was going to change anything.
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We all know that if voting for Jimmy or Jerry would change anything, it would be illegal.
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Pardon?
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Yeah. Pardon? Yeah, well, we’re at a moment now where, you know, all the polls show that American people have no confidence in the great bureaucracies.
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They have these ballots that say 17% of the American people like the Democratic Party,
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11% have any confidence in the Republican Party, 12% for big labor, 12% for big government.
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As a matter of fact, it turns out that doctors and bankers at 18%
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are our most respected institutions because you have a 50-50 chance
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of getting quaaludes or cashing a check.
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I don’t know what that means.
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At the same time that we have no confidence in the great bureaucracies which think they run our country,
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when the American public is asked the question,
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how much confidence do you have in yourself and your friends and loved ones to make a life?
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And the result is close to 70 percent.
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A very interesting situation.
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to 70 percent. A very interesting situation. Now I think that the political issues in the next decade should not concern themselves with fighting over a diminishing globe, diminishing territory,
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overpopulation, diminishing resources. There are three scientific breakthroughs which are going to
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solve all of the economic and political and territorial problems.
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These are, I know you know what I’m going to say, space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension.
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Now, now is not the time or place to go into the details, the scientific hardware, off-the-shelf engineering details,
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the scientific hardware, off-the-shelf engineering details,
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which would convince any open-minded San Franciscan that within 15 or 20 years, we could have mini-worlds.
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We call them high-orbital mini-Earths.
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We’re not going to the stars.
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We’re not going to buckle down and shoot it out, Star Wars and galactic and all that.
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We’re simply talking about getting into high orbit.
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There is an ecological niche in high orbit.
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The Russians have been there 176 days. Our own sky lab people are up there for 70 some odd days.
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One thing we know about egg intelligence, one thing we know about the Gaia biological intelligence,
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she’s going to fill up every niche where she can go. So no question about it, is it going to happen?
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We’re being squeezed off the planet Earth the way we were squeezed from the water to the shoreline,
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from the shoreline to the forest, up in the trees.
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The unbroken trajectory of human evolution is we get higher, we move faster, we communicate better,
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we’re better to each other, and we’re getting more beautiful.
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I didn’t hear that question.
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Let’s wait for a minute.
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Now I’ll try to see if I have answers for questions after a while.
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Space migration.
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Yeah.
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The key to space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension is genetic.
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These things don’t operate separately.
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When it’s time for us to leave the water, we had to develop at one flash
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literally hundreds of thousands of new technologies and neurotechnologies.
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And I want to tell you that the same dialogue, the same debate,
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the same genetic issues and politics have been going on step by step
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as we move from unicellular form up to the present.
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And I think it’s important that we be able to feel in our own nervous systems
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that evolution has always involved people like us getting together as we are tonight,
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figuring out where we came from and who’s slowing us down
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and what’s the factual evidence as to how fast and where we can move.
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For example, one time, the same situation we have on this planet,
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of overpopulation, pollution, decreasing natural sources existed
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at the first stage of life on this planet where we’re all underground.
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You remember that time we were all unicellular creatures?
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Now, I’m not here to knock unicellular forms of life.
00:16:42 ►
There are no good guys or bad guys in this scenario.
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The unicellular form of life. There are no good guys or bad guys in this scenario. The unicellular form of life does nothing but
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float and suck. It’s got a one
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dimension brain.
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The sex life is interesting. You clone.
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There’s one of you and there’s two of you
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and there’s four of you and there’s eight of you.
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Now that’s wonderful. Unicellular
00:17:01 ►
unisexual division
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is a fine technique used by DNA when it’s time to
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really populate a niche. And we’re all going to be cloning each other when the time comes to move
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off this planet. So I’m not knocking cloning. But the problem with cloning unicellular sex is, yeah,
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it’s great because you don’t have to worry about a date on Saturday night.
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There’s no Lee Marvin suits when it’s all over.
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However, it gets a little boring.
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So when it’s time to slow down a rate of growth
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and when it’s time for DNA to improve neurotechnology,
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then you get the sort of evolution we’ve been through.
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Now, listen, the amoebas didn’t want that to happen.
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The adult authorities of amoebas went through the same thing in the pre-Cambrian
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situation we’re going through now.
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The amoeba police said
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dangerous reports are coming about
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young amoebas hanging around shallow lagoons
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ingesting a dangerous drug called calcium.
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Calcium.
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The AMA, that’s the Amoeba Medical Association,
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has conclusively demonstrated that calcium
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causes head-tail symmetry
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causes bones to grow
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you know why
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you young amoebas have bones
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and muscles
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why some amoebas
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have been known
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to ingest this dangerous drug calcium
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and swim away from the home
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and that’s never to be seen again.
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And amoeba theologians have clearly set the situation right
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when they say, if God had intended amoebas to grow bones,
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she would not have made calcium illegal.
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Now, I don’t have to tell a sophisticated crowd like this how we went from calcium ingestion to oxygen sniffing
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and up the chain of biochemical intelligence.
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The whole thing is genetic.
00:19:01 ►
Listen, we’re not going to move into space
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because some male macho
00:19:05 ►
militarists in the Pentagon or the KGB think it’s time to move guns up there. Sperm intelligence is
00:19:12 ►
great. Sperm intelligence moves out and establishes the first niches and so forth. Every species,
00:19:19 ►
every tribe, every gene pool. Oh, at this moment, I must pay tribute to a very honored guest tonight,
00:19:26 ►
Robert Anton Wilson and Arlen Wilson.
00:19:28 ►
Stand up.
00:19:31 ►
Arlen.
00:19:33 ►
One of the great heroes of our time.
00:19:37 ►
Author of Illuminatus, Cosmic Trigger.
00:19:41 ►
The Universe Next Door.
00:19:50 ►
What should I talk about, Robert? Oh, he went for oxygen sniffing. The adult hive, it’s all defined this way. The adults who run the hive naturally
00:20:02 ►
have to put up every barrier to change. You know,
00:20:06 ►
they’re robot programmed to do that. No good guys, bad guys. There are some of us who are
00:20:09 ►
robot programmed to be what I call outcasts. Every successful sperm egg ship has to have its
00:20:15 ►
people up there looking forward and sending back information as to where the next ecological niche
00:20:21 ►
is going. Because I’m ready to say it flat out,
00:20:28 ►
they accused us of this when we left the water.
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They said we were cop-outs.
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When we went to shoreline and developed our fur coats and binocular vision,
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they said we were copping out using terrible new technology.
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When we stood erect, they said you’re copping out,
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getting high that way with a backbone standing up.
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They’ve been telling us, and I’ll tell you right now, I admit it, it’s an escape trip.
00:20:52 ►
The people who know how to,
00:20:55 ►
the smartest, the most courageous people that like themselves and love their loved ones,
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don’t want to stay around and fight over the barnyard.
00:21:00 ►
Move out. Keep one step ahead of them.
00:21:02 ►
We don’t have to fight them because we’re smarter than they are.
00:21:05 ►
And we’re always sending them back.
00:21:07 ►
We’re always sending them back signals.
00:21:09 ►
We’re always sending them back.
00:21:10 ►
We’re doing it for them.
00:21:11 ►
Those of us that are outcasts, that are future people.
00:21:14 ►
And it’s our time, my friends.
00:21:16 ►
You know, there are times in history for centuries and nothing happens except one duke is changed by another baron and so forth.
00:21:21 ►
But this is a time when the outcasts and the future cast and those who are…
00:21:25 ►
And by the way, there’s no genetic thing here.
00:21:28 ►
Everyone in this room is carrying in his DNA and her DNA
00:21:31 ►
the machinery for a building in the 20th century,
00:21:35 ►
in the 21st century, in the 23rd century reality.
00:21:40 ►
Now, sure, we’re going to change morphologically during that period,
00:21:43 ►
but the neurological equipment is there
00:21:46 ►
that’s what LSD is all about in psychedelic drugs
00:21:49 ►
do you know about how the DNA operates
00:21:52 ►
when you were a little baby
00:21:55 ►
you didn’t know anything about disco
00:21:57 ►
all you could do was lie on your mother’s arms
00:22:01 ►
your calcium habit got your bones to grow
00:22:04 ►
but the way evolution works is lie in your mother’s arms. Your calcium habit, you know, got your bones to grow.
00:22:09 ►
But the way evolution works,
00:22:10 ►
see, the evolutionary,
00:22:12 ►
the DNA strand,
00:22:14 ►
the future of your life is a spool and it’s protected
00:22:16 ►
by what are called histone proteins.
00:22:19 ►
It’s a sheath.
00:22:20 ►
And there are certain
00:22:21 ►
specific anti-histone proteins
00:22:24 ►
usually coming from pollution.
00:22:26 ►
What’s pollution?
00:22:27 ►
Pollution is the signal to peel off the next layer.
00:22:30 ►
So that step by step, as each one of us grew, a new link in the histone protein coverage was peeled off.
00:22:39 ►
And we started moving around.
00:22:41 ►
We went to first grade.
00:22:42 ►
We went to high school.
00:22:43 ►
When we got to the high school, an enormous metamorphosis took place.
00:22:46 ►
Sperm egg rallies took over.
00:22:47 ►
This was all pre-programmed.
00:22:49 ►
Well, there’s no reason.
00:22:51 ►
I think it’s a very amusing hypothesis with a lot of scientific muscle behind it
00:22:55 ►
to suggest that everyone in this room is carrying around,
00:22:57 ►
in the other section of your nervous system
00:22:59 ►
and in the unpeeled-off sections of your DNA,
00:23:03 ►
a future neurotechnology.
00:23:06 ►
And, you know, it’s simply more fun
00:23:09 ►
to have a nervous system ahead of the DOM species
00:23:12 ►
than I think.
00:23:13 ►
We have no choice about it anyway.
00:23:15 ►
Okay.
00:23:18 ►
See, there’s always what Robert Anton Wilson
00:23:20 ►
has called neophobia.
00:23:22 ►
There’s this obsessive fear of the future.
00:23:26 ►
Back in the 60s, I went to the Hudson Institute,
00:23:28 ►
Herman Kahn. We had our intelligence agent
00:23:30 ►
penetrate the Pentagon and the KGB.
00:23:32 ►
Those mothers had no plan for the future
00:23:34 ►
except the next election, and that’s rocket
00:23:35 ►
anti-ballistic missile. They don’t care
00:23:38 ►
about the future. For the last 3,000
00:23:40 ►
years, our hives have been run by what are
00:23:42 ►
called Stoics. A Stoic is a person
00:23:44 ►
that says, well, the motherfucker barbarians are going to get us in a decade or two, but let’s keep
00:23:49 ►
the thing going one more generation. How noble Kissinger is. Kissinger knows that, you know,
00:23:56 ►
his life is going to be, keep it going until we get our pension checks, baby, and then
00:23:59 ►
forget it, right? Well, we’re coming to the point where we realize that, you know, the future belongs
00:24:09 ►
to those who see the future. The only interesting thing to do is to start building the future,
00:24:14 ►
because nobody knows. They don’t have a clue. So that those of us that are here tonight can
00:24:19 ►
begin thinking about creating, and I don’t mean, you know, better supermarkets. It’s genetics.
00:24:26 ►
Okay, space migration, genetics.
00:24:30 ►
We’re not going to go into space because the aerospace companies want us to go there.
00:24:35 ►
We’re not going to go into space because, sure, we can bring down solar satellite power energy.
00:24:39 ►
We can totally solve the energy problems of this planet within 10 or 15 years.
00:24:44 ►
Of course, the Arabs don’t like that. PG&E doesn’t like that. But we’re not going to do this for
00:24:53 ►
PG&E. We’re not going to do this for the Pentagon. We’re not going to do it for
00:24:56 ►
satellite communication. We’re not going to do it for the acrobatic male macho
00:25:00 ►
astronauts. We’re going to move into high orbit when the women of the Sun Belt in America
00:25:08 ►
realize that it’s time to move.
00:25:12 ►
It’s always been that way.
00:25:13 ►
The first wave is always male, macho.
00:25:15 ►
The Greek astronauts of Homer,
00:25:17 ►
you know, the wine, dark sea, and all that stuff,
00:25:19 ►
they were fighting and raping in the Homeric days,
00:25:21 ►
but the real issue didn’t come
00:25:23 ►
until the ships went with the children and the grandmothers until the big, great egg ship moves.
00:25:31 ►
And the egg ship’s going to move when it’s time to move.
00:25:35 ►
The saying is true.
00:25:36 ►
And this country was an interesting thing, you know.
00:25:39 ►
One of the greatest genetic experiments in the history of our planet occurred in the
00:25:44 ►
last 400 years.
00:25:46 ►
South America and North America.
00:25:49 ►
Now, South America was built up, invaded and built up by men sent from Madrid and from Lisbon,
00:25:59 ►
speaking Spanish and Portuguese.
00:26:00 ►
And they didn’t go over there to start new lifestyles or to have a frontier of growth or
00:26:06 ►
to have individual new lifestyles developed. They went over there to get the gold, to build the
00:26:11 ►
cathedrals in Toledo. They went back over there to preach their religion, their monotheistic religion
00:26:17 ►
to the natives. The key to the South American experiment was they didn’t bring the women. It
00:26:22 ►
was not an egg of wisdom. It was a sperm adventure.
00:26:25 ►
And the heritage of that still exists today. Now, in the North American continent, you know,
00:26:30 ►
it was dissonant, dissonant species groups. It was William Penn and the Mrs. Penn and the Quakers
00:26:38 ►
who were kicked out of England. They were wild, hippy-dippy spiritualists. They came to Pennsylvania.
00:26:45 ►
The Pilgrim Mothers and Fathers were out against the Church of England.
00:26:48 ►
They went to Holland.
00:26:49 ►
They were persecuted.
00:26:50 ►
They exiled.
00:26:52 ►
The history of this movement westward has been, sure, when we came west,
00:26:57 ►
it was the male macho John Wayne shooting them up and all that.
00:27:01 ►
But nothing happens that way.
00:27:02 ►
Nothing happens until the great egg ship moves westward.
00:27:08 ►
So space migration is going to happen.
00:27:11 ►
It’s going to happen quickly when the women understand
00:27:14 ►
that the best place to make love is in zero or multiple gravity.
00:27:21 ►
That the best place to raise children is in a place where you’re surrounded,
00:27:26 ►
you’re interacting with people who share your particular vision.
00:27:29 ►
Because the key, and this is what they don’t like about space migration,
00:27:33 ►
the civilian aspect of it.
00:27:35 ►
See, the real political scandal right now is this.
00:27:37 ►
In the last, what is it, five or six months, Robert,
00:27:40 ►
the Carter administration has for the first time instituted the military control of NASA.
00:27:44 ►
They’re cutting down on all those civilian flights on the shuttle.
00:27:48 ►
About two years ago, they said that high school kids could, for a small amount of money, send up their experiment.
00:27:52 ►
No more of that, my friends.
00:27:54 ►
NASA’s now being run by Pentagon people.
00:27:56 ►
They don’t want dissidents.
00:28:02 ►
They don’t want egg wisdom to
00:28:05 ►
occupy this psychological niche.
00:28:10 ►
Hijack a starship.
00:28:13 ►
Well, when the Jefferson
00:28:15 ►
airplane changed its name, that was
00:28:17 ►
the sign it was going to happen.
00:28:30 ►
Another political issue, of course, is drugs.
00:28:31 ►
It’s interesting.
00:28:36 ►
The drug issue was always there.
00:28:39 ►
It’s the one thing that none of the politicians will talk about. I would say that you wonder why people are disillusioned with their government.
00:28:44 ►
You know, talking about Prop 13, 35 to 45 million people are paying taxes to a government
00:28:50 ►
that’s putting Paraquat on their marijuana.
00:28:56 ►
The real scandal about drugs, and we’ve known it, everyone’s realized it for a decade,
00:29:01 ►
is that drug research is just beginning, that they are in the laboratories and in the
00:29:06 ►
experimental
00:29:07 ►
rooms in
00:29:10 ►
Basel, Switzerland, as well as in
00:29:12 ►
this country.
00:29:17 ►
Scientists working,
00:29:18 ►
pharmacologists working, developing
00:29:19 ►
an enormous repertoire
00:29:22 ►
of new drugs that will make you smarter, that will
00:29:24 ►
give you memory, that will make you memory, that’ll make you forget,
00:29:25 ►
that’ll make you horny,
00:29:26 ►
that will, of course, the key.
00:29:30 ►
Yeah, I don’t know if I told you this,
00:29:32 ►
but I had about three interviews on television
00:29:35 ►
before I came out here.
00:29:38 ►
Did I tell about experimental drugs?
00:29:42 ►
Oh, yeah, all right.
00:29:44 ►
Well, when I got out of prison, I started telling you, experimental drugs? Oh yeah, alright.
00:29:48 ►
When I got out of prison,
00:29:49 ►
I started telling you because I didn’t finish the story.
00:29:50 ►
I think someone interrupted.
00:29:52 ►
When I got out of prison,
00:29:52 ►
people would ask me
00:29:53 ►
if I used any drugs
00:29:54 ►
and I said I didn’t use any drugs.
00:29:55 ►
Remember I said that?
00:29:57 ►
I didn’t use any drugs
00:29:58 ►
that were illegal.
00:30:00 ►
Well now,
00:30:00 ►
I look right in the camera
00:30:01 ►
and I say,
00:30:02 ►
yes, Barbara and I
00:30:03 ►
use a lot of
00:30:04 ►
very powerful drugs.
00:30:05 ►
They’re new drugs, experimental drugs that will put our heads exactly in place where we want to.
00:30:09 ►
And who can complain because you don’t know about them and they’re not illegal.
00:30:17 ►
I think it’s a scandal that our government, forget the government,
00:30:22 ►
our government, forget the government,
00:30:24 ►
is stopping research on
00:30:25 ►
neurological and neurotransmitter
00:30:28 ►
drugs that can give the American
00:30:30 ►
people the option of putting their brain
00:30:33 ►
exactly in the kind of
00:30:34 ►
area of intelligence and of mood. There’s simply
00:30:36 ►
no excuse for any American to
00:30:38 ►
have his or her head where she doesn’t
00:30:40 ►
want it to be.
00:30:49 ►
We all know that.
00:30:50 ►
We were saying that in the 60s,
00:30:51 ►
but now it’s kind of cliché to say it.
00:30:53 ►
But still, it hasn’t happened.
00:30:57 ►
They’re not letting progress… And of course, the greatest scandal of all
00:30:59 ►
when you come to politics
00:31:00 ►
is life extension.
00:31:03 ►
Paul Siegel over in Berkeley
00:31:04 ►
and Robert Anton Wilson,
00:31:06 ►
a key intelligence center
00:31:08 ►
for longevity research.
00:31:10 ►
Roy Walford in UCLA.
00:31:12 ►
There are a dozen scores
00:31:13 ►
of scientists in this country.
00:31:15 ►
And if you ask them this question,
00:31:17 ►
how long before we can get a pill
00:31:19 ►
that will double the human lifespan?
00:31:21 ►
The answer is to come back
00:31:22 ►
two to ten years.
00:31:26 ►
How is it going to happen?
00:31:28 ►
This is the interesting thing.
00:31:30 ►
There are eight different
00:31:31 ►
scientific scenarios suggested
00:31:34 ►
by top university
00:31:35 ►
scientists. And these are not off-the-wall
00:31:38 ►
people, because the off-the-wall people already know it.
00:31:40 ►
I’m talking about
00:31:40 ►
respectable hive
00:31:44 ►
people.
00:31:47 ►
Full-fledged 10-year cast of engineers.
00:31:53 ►
They’ll say, two to 10 years, we can have a pill that will double your lifespan.
00:31:57 ►
And how?
00:31:59 ►
Eight different ways.
00:32:00 ►
Immunology.
00:32:01 ►
Maybe it’s our immune systems.
00:32:03 ►
immunology, maybe that it’s our immune systems that maybe aging and death is simply because
00:32:05 ►
our cells don’t recognize our own cells
00:32:09 ►
our cells don’t love us that much
00:32:11 ►
they simply don’t keep us immune
00:32:13 ►
there’s another theory that it’s the genetic RNA DNA
00:32:17 ►
antihistone protein approach
00:32:19 ►
Paul Siegel has been keeping rats
00:32:22 ►
more than double their lifespan
00:32:24 ►
in Berkeley using diet, which means chemicals.
00:32:33 ►
And I’m using, I just heard, maybe you can confirm this, Robert. Jay Levy, that they got a new drug that may be the drug that will produce rejuvenation
00:32:49 ►
and longevity.
00:32:51 ►
And it’s like a first cousin of lysergic acid.
00:33:11 ►
Well, what do you want? Controversy? You want CIA jokes?
00:33:20 ►
I’d like to tell you, indulge me once. I’ve done it all for you so far.
00:33:22 ►
Give me a funny story, all right? You know, when we came to Harvard in 1960,
00:33:27 ►
sent under assignment by galactic egg intelligence, the thing about Harvard is if you’re sent
00:33:35 ►
to a planet, it’s all in the navigation guidebooks they give you in Space Academy. So you take
00:33:41 ►
a planet like ours and you want to bring about an evolutionary mutational change.
00:33:46 ►
Where do you go?
00:33:47 ►
Well, you don’t go to Washington.
00:33:49 ►
You don’t go to Rome.
00:33:51 ►
Listen,
00:33:53 ►
suppose you had one million doses of LSD
00:33:55 ►
and your assignment on this planet
00:33:56 ►
was in five years
00:33:57 ►
you had to mutate the whole planet.
00:34:00 ►
Well, I wouldn’t use those million doses
00:34:03 ►
in India because they’d gobble them up and the trains would run better.
00:34:12 ►
They did have LSD in that, you know, that ergot of rye scandal when the bread in France,
00:34:21 ►
and they all began jumping out of the church windows.
00:34:27 ►
That’s premature post-terrestrial activity.
00:34:35 ►
The key to getting high is that you are transcending gravity.
00:34:40 ►
These cliches, these folk myths.
00:34:44 ►
Why do I say getting high? Well, it’s no accident. These clichés, these folk myths. Why say getting high?
00:34:45 ►
Well, there’s no accident.
00:34:48 ►
As they say, the trajectory of intelligence is we’re getting higher.
00:34:53 ►
The smarter you are, the higher you want to be.
00:34:55 ►
That’s obvious.
00:35:00 ►
You know, not sort of going out, out, out all the time.
00:35:11 ►
The key to neurological navigation is to be able to voyage into exactly the circus of your brain that you want to be, exactly when you want to be there and with whom you want to be there.
00:35:17 ►
Anyway, when we came to Harvard in 1960,
00:35:20 ►
the psychotropic drugs and their effects had been known for centuries, for millennia,
00:35:25 ►
for thousands of years.
00:35:27 ►
Whenever an empire got to a point
00:35:29 ►
when they conquered everything,
00:35:30 ►
there was no more barnyard, terrestrial games to play,
00:35:33 ►
then the next wave comes in.
00:35:37 ►
If you control everything out there,
00:35:39 ►
if you control the army, the navy, the air force,
00:35:41 ►
the chariots and all that,
00:35:43 ►
what do you want to do?
00:35:44 ►
Well, inevitably in these great empires in the past, in China, the air force, the chariots and all that, what do you want to do? well, inevitably in these great empires
00:35:46 ►
in the past in China, the Mongol emperors
00:35:48 ►
in India, throughout the Middle East
00:35:50 ►
they started making
00:35:52 ►
inward voyages using the
00:35:54 ►
obvious locomotion
00:35:56 ►
for neurological
00:35:57 ►
voyaging, so that the
00:36:00 ►
fact that drugs could change your mind
00:36:02 ►
that drugs could enhance beauty
00:36:04 ►
and eroticism and that could broaden your mind, it’s been known for thousands of years.
00:36:09 ►
We went to Harvard, for example, there were over 1,500 scientific reports on LSD alone.
00:36:18 ►
But the problem was that these reports did not tell anything about what had happened
00:36:23 ►
because the doctors, the psychiatrists who gave these experiments,
00:36:28 ►
gave the drug to other people.
00:36:31 ►
Now, of course, it’s no accident that all the LSD research
00:36:35 ►
that had preceded our arrival at Harvard
00:36:37 ►
was sponsored by an organization who has made possible our being here tonight.
00:36:42 ►
I refer, of course, to the CIA.
00:36:42 ►
made possible our being here tonight.
00:36:43 ►
I refer, of course, to the CIA.
00:36:49 ►
In the 1950s, when most of us were, you know,
00:36:55 ►
listening to Elvis and Neil Sedaka and, you know, Eisenhower and whatever,
00:36:59 ►
there was one boom of consumerism in the 50s that was fantastic.
00:37:01 ►
You know, automobiles.
00:37:06 ►
Every working woman and man in the country got an automobile with a driver’s seat and accelerators
00:37:08 ►
and shifting gears
00:37:09 ►
and transmission
00:37:10 ►
Europeans say
00:37:12 ►
you can’t do that
00:37:13 ►
you can’t let the working
00:37:15 ►
man and woman
00:37:16 ►
have a self-mover
00:37:17 ►
putting them
00:37:19 ►
in the driver’s seat
00:37:19 ►
well if you do that
00:37:20 ►
the kids will get
00:37:21 ►
in the driver’s seat
00:37:21 ►
you know where they’ll go
00:37:23 ►
and what they’ll do
00:37:24 ►
so all this 50s consumerism there was one group of Americans who were not indulging themselves.
00:37:31 ►
I refer, of course, to our friends in the CIA who were sending their agents up the Amazon headwaters
00:37:36 ►
through South Africa, through South Seas.
00:37:40 ►
There was not one root or vine or mushroom or nut or vegetable in the world they didn’t
00:37:45 ►
bring into their laboratories to figure out how they could fuck our heads up with it.
00:37:50 ►
They were going to drop it in the water supply of Russia.
00:37:52 ►
That was the scenario.
00:37:53 ►
Remember that?
00:37:55 ►
Well, when we came to Harvard, there was a lot of research done, but it wasn’t time until
00:38:01 ►
the 1960s when the consumerism of the 50s, the average American young person had an automobile,
00:38:08 ►
knew how to move their body around, knew their, you know, in a car.
00:38:11 ►
So the next step of body consumerism and brain consumerism,
00:38:16 ►
we didn’t do anything.
00:38:18 ►
It was time for that to happen.
00:38:20 ►
It’s always happened in times when the species is about to move out.
00:38:23 ►
It’s always happened in times when the species is about to move out.
00:38:30 ►
Though, of course, the key to the 60s, as we see it now,
00:38:37 ►
was a period of self-discovery, of self-indulgence,
00:38:43 ►
and a refusal to accept the adult hive over-specialized models.
00:38:49 ►
I remember when we first came to Harvard,
00:38:53 ►
there was a man named Dr. Max Rinkle.
00:38:54 ►
Has anyone here ever heard that name?
00:38:56 ►
Yeah.
00:39:01 ►
Dr. Max Rinkle was a psychiatrist at Harvard that did everything in his power to cause us trouble.
00:39:04 ►
He was writing letters and editorials in the Harvard Alumni Association, in his power to cause us trouble. He was writing
00:39:05 ►
letters and editorials in the Harvard Alumni Association, in the New England Journal of
00:39:08 ►
Medicine. He did his best politically to get us kicked out of Harvard and so forth. And years
00:39:13 ►
later, I was in Boston, and I had a taxi driver. As he was driving back to the airport, the taxi
00:39:20 ►
driver looked at me. He’s an old fellow, about 65, an Irish, wizened up Irishman,
00:39:25 ►
and he pulled the car to the side of the common path, and he said, listen, I’ve got to talk to you.
00:39:30 ►
I said, yeah, what do you want to say, Pat?
00:39:33 ►
He said, do you know that I was probably the first American to ever take LSD?
00:39:38 ►
I said, do you tell me that, Pat?
00:39:41 ►
How’d that happen?
00:39:42 ►
He said, well, did you ever hear the name of Dr. Max Renko?
00:39:46 ►
yes the gray fox of the Harvard Medical School
00:39:48 ►
I know him well
00:39:49 ►
because here’s what Dr. Max Renko
00:39:51 ►
and the other CIA psychiatrists would do in the 1950s
00:39:54 ►
they would go over to
00:39:56 ►
a place in Europe
00:39:58 ►
which
00:39:59 ►
as Rome is to the Catholic
00:40:02 ►
and as Mecca is
00:40:04 ►
to the Islamic follower this city is to the Catholic, and as Mecca is to the Islamic follower,
00:40:07 ►
this city is to the doper.
00:40:09 ►
I refer, of course, not to San Francisco,
00:40:11 ►
but to Basel, Switzerland.
00:40:15 ►
Now, in Basel, Switzerland,
00:40:17 ►
the Switzerland situation is
00:40:20 ►
you go to Zurich for money,
00:40:21 ►
you go to Geneva for diplomacy and espionage,
00:40:24 ►
you go to Basich for money, you go to Geneva for diplomacy and espionage, you go to Basel for drugs.
00:40:26 ►
My friends, in the great laboratories of Siba Geigy and Sandoz and the other Swiss companies,
00:40:33 ►
there are laboratories, there are storehouses, there are warehouses, there are locked rooms which contain drugs
00:40:38 ►
that would baffle and boggle our minds.
00:40:41 ►
It is said…
00:40:44 ►
Rumor has it, the legend goes like this, that there are in the high valleys
00:40:52 ►
around Basel, Switzerland, there are alpine villages where the inhabitants have not drawn
00:40:58 ►
an unhallucinated breath in 500 years. However, until the 1960s, with this mass neoteny revolt of the larvals and the sexually activated pre-adults,
00:41:14 ►
until that time, drugs, which changed the mind, were always the province of the sultan, the duke, the opium aristocrats of Europe,
00:41:29 ►
the hashishin clubs, all those titled English poets from Oxford and Cambridge who would have their laudanum and so forth.
00:41:33 ►
It was always something that you didn’t want the working class to know about.
00:41:38 ►
You didn’t want the working class to know there’s a way to satisfy yourself,
00:41:41 ►
a way to indulge yourself that didn’t require trucking off to the steel mill or
00:41:45 ►
doing what, you know, why? The last gasp of the adult authority happened the year, actually,
00:41:57 ►
that we started our research at Harvard. It’s almost no accident the precision of how these
00:42:01 ►
things operate. The last gasp of the adult authority in the United States
00:42:06 ►
came in the inauguration of President John Kennedy in 1960
00:42:13 ►
when he said, do you believe this?
00:42:16 ►
He said, ask not what the hive can do for you,
00:42:20 ►
but what you can do for the hive.
00:42:23 ►
2,000 years of Judeo-Christian ethic, of suffering.
00:42:26 ►
You’re fucked. You’re not supposed
00:42:28 ►
to have a good time. What do you think, a pleasure trip?
00:42:31 ►
You did
00:42:32 ►
something wrong. You don’t know what it is, but you’re cursed
00:42:33 ►
forever. Maybe if you play ball,
00:42:36 ►
keep cool, don’t cause any trouble,
00:42:38 ►
work hard, maybe we’ll ship
00:42:40 ►
your sperm and egg supply to another
00:42:42 ►
place.
00:42:56 ►
Well, the key to space migration,
00:42:58 ►
the key to intelligent crease,
00:43:01 ►
which means learning how to use the nervous system and learning which neurotechnologies
00:43:03 ►
and neurotransmitter drugs or techniques, bio feedback there are literally hundreds of techniques now that can and are going
00:43:10 ►
to be used to increase our intelligence now i don’t mean the intelligence measured on tests by
00:43:14 ►
middle class intellectuals you know with pen and paper i mean intelligence in the sense of
00:43:19 ►
getting control of your own brain getting control of your own brain, getting control of your own reality,
00:43:27 ►
and using the equipment that we have.
00:43:32 ►
The key to everything that I’ve said tonight,
00:43:36 ►
the key to everything that I’ve done throughout my life,
00:43:39 ►
and I’m sure this is true of almost everyone in this room,
00:43:45 ►
slowly, step by step, we’ve had to overthrow 2,000 years of this heritage that somehow we’re wrong
00:43:46 ►
and we’re not good people
00:43:47 ►
and we’re not lovable people.
00:43:49 ►
You know, so we’re
00:43:49 ►
step by step
00:43:50 ►
like undoing buildings.
00:43:51 ►
We had to
00:43:52 ►
un-carpent our way through this.
00:43:54 ►
So everything that
00:43:55 ►
we’re talking about tonight
00:43:56 ►
has to do with
00:43:57 ►
basically,
00:43:59 ►
basically
00:43:59 ►
liking yourself
00:44:02 ►
and taking responsibility
00:44:05 ►
for your own situation.
00:44:08 ►
I know there are thousands,
00:44:10 ►
thousands of people
00:44:12 ►
and hundreds of teachers
00:44:13 ►
that are going around
00:44:14 ►
preaching self-actualization.
00:44:16 ►
And this, I mean,
00:44:17 ►
whatever level you want to get it,
00:44:18 ►
great.
00:44:20 ►
But I’m talking
00:44:21 ►
not about being
00:44:23 ►
a better middle class robot.
00:44:29 ►
I’m talking about the tradition that we have going in this room tonight,
00:44:34 ►
which has gone back for thousands of years,
00:44:37 ►
which has probably gone back as long as the history of biological species on the planet has gone,
00:44:41 ►
of self-actualized species, self-actualized cast getting to a certain point where they say,
00:44:47 ►
listen, we’ve got to do it.
00:44:51 ►
This young man that said to me, when are they going to come?
00:44:55 ►
Well, listen, I’m sure you’re with me.
00:44:57 ►
If that UFO came down here right now with its platinum golden staircase
00:45:01 ►
and they came down and said, you want to come?
00:45:03 ►
I’m sure I’d go, you’d go, we’d all go.
00:45:08 ►
However, there’s one uneasy thought I have.
00:45:13 ►
It sounds to me
00:45:14 ►
that the UFO higher intelligence
00:45:16 ►
coming down here
00:45:18 ►
may be just another
00:45:20 ►
soporific,
00:45:23 ►
sedative,
00:45:26 ►
cargo cult,
00:45:28 ►
messianic theory that someone up there is going to do something
00:45:29 ►
for us.
00:45:31 ►
It may turn
00:45:33 ►
out that
00:45:35 ►
the thing’s been planned.
00:45:38 ►
Yeah, there is a
00:45:39 ►
species of higher intelligence that zaps around
00:45:41 ►
from planet to planet and comes down to
00:45:43 ►
make blockbusting movies.
00:45:47 ►
There may be one planet where people are running around the galaxy, you know, turning people
00:45:53 ►
on and activating and so forth.
00:45:57 ►
But maybe it’s my reality, and I can write history the way I want to.
00:46:10 ►
So as I read my own history, I see the way it’s always been.
00:46:14 ►
In cities like San Francisco, people like us getting together in hillsides and so forth,
00:46:20 ►
bringing us up to date as to where the thing is going,
00:46:22 ►
and saying, well, you know,
00:46:29 ►
they say that the fruit grows on the trees and the nuts grow on the trees
00:46:30 ►
because we do munga bunga to the God.
00:46:32 ►
But maybe if we planted these seeds, we could do it.
00:46:36 ►
Hey, you can’t do that.
00:46:36 ►
They’ll bust your ass if you plant seeds.
00:46:39 ►
Well, so we get a little ecological niche
00:46:41 ►
and we try it out.
00:46:42 ►
And sure, lo and behold, agriculture
00:46:44 ►
because some intelligent, probably women, but men and women back there,
00:46:49 ►
had the guts to go against the priesthood of the time and say,
00:46:52 ►
it’s not munga bunga up there.
00:46:54 ►
It’s groping human intelligence, trusting, taking risks to do it.
00:46:58 ►
The first people to use fire.
00:47:00 ►
You know, Prometheus, they gave him a 30-year sentence.
00:47:07 ►
For discovering fire. Well, it’sometheus, they gave him a 30-year sentence for discovering fire. Well,
00:47:15 ►
it’s another male macho trick. I think fire was probably invented by a woman or a man that loved a woman sitting around watching saying, well, you know, we can take, we have to wait for the
00:47:20 ►
lightning to come. It’s not Jove up there doing it. We can use that brand.
00:47:26 ►
We can cook with it.
00:47:27 ►
We can fashion.
00:47:29 ►
We can be warm with it.
00:47:31 ►
We can keep the light going in the night.
00:47:33 ►
We can have parties all night in the cave.
00:47:40 ►
We can make beautiful works of art with that on the walls.
00:47:40 ►
Yeah.
00:47:42 ►
Took guts to do that.
00:47:42 ►
Greek.
00:47:46 ►
Listen, the old histories of religions, they’re not screwing around they busted Prometheus
00:47:48 ►
for doing what we’re doing tonight
00:47:49 ►
the conquest
00:47:52 ►
of disease, Robert Hunter Wilson has written
00:47:54 ►
over and over again about our friend Simmelweis
00:47:56 ►
who was busted and driven
00:47:58 ►
into insanity because he said
00:48:00 ►
that you should wash your hands before
00:48:02 ►
you delivered a baby, well you weren’t going
00:48:04 ►
to tell the AMA of Vienna.
00:48:07 ►
In those days, a surgeon was known because he smelled of pus.
00:48:11 ►
You weren’t going to tell them they had to wash their hands like a peasant.
00:48:19 ►
It’s a long tradition.
00:48:21 ►
Listen, we don’t want to run anyone’s country.
00:48:24 ►
We don’t want to take anything away from anybody.
00:48:26 ►
But there is
00:48:28 ►
a tradition of
00:48:28 ►
people who have confidence.
00:48:33 ►
Like,
00:48:34 ►
I’m personally insulted
00:48:36 ►
that it rains on
00:48:38 ►
Barbara and I and we want to play tennis.
00:48:39 ►
What are we, inchoate primitive savages
00:48:42 ►
we can’t control the weather?
00:48:47 ►
I’m insulted that I have to be down here in a one gravity planet, a swamp like a slug down here 4,000 miles creeping around the bottom
00:48:53 ►
of an atmosphere well. I’m a high-flying creature. Barbara’s higher than I am. It’s an insult that
00:49:01 ►
75% of my energy in years goes into walking, lifting.
00:49:05 ►
Look at this building.
00:49:06 ►
It’s all set up to fight gravity.
00:49:08 ►
Well, it’s an insult to be trapped in this prison planet.
00:49:11 ►
Cloning.
00:49:12 ►
I told you DNA is going to be the big political issue in the future.
00:49:15 ►
Cloning.
00:49:17 ►
When we’re talking about taboos, my friends,
00:49:20 ►
it’s our professional job to lead some hive members
00:49:27 ►
to the door that says taboo
00:49:28 ►
let’s peek around and look at it
00:49:30 ►
show me a taboo
00:49:33 ►
and I’m interested in it
00:49:35 ►
now
00:49:44 ►
when the scientist cast comes up with a new technology,
00:49:48 ►
immediately the military and the old guys who run the hive take it over.
00:49:52 ►
And they scare us.
00:49:54 ►
See, we can’t go into space.
00:49:56 ►
I’m not an Air Force cadet.
00:49:58 ►
You’re not an astronaut.
00:49:58 ►
You know, you’ve got to be a Pentagon kid to go into space, right?
00:50:03 ►
Same thing with genetic engineering.
00:50:05 ►
Genetic simply means that DNA has programmed us to get to a point where we’re virtuous
00:50:11 ►
enough and intelligent enough and understand her flower intelligence.
00:50:17 ►
The flower kingdom plays a heavy-duty role in the evolution of mammalian species.
00:50:23 ►
I need not cite the fact that every neurotransmitter is a signal sent by the flower kingdom to these stupid animals up there.
00:50:30 ►
Right?
00:50:35 ►
So we get to DNA taboo.
00:50:37 ►
That’s the heaviest two of all.
00:50:39 ►
Because that’s the place where we are, are we?
00:50:42 ►
where we are, are we?
00:50:47 ►
Are we going to tamper with a genetic spool that says that we have to die 75,
00:50:50 ►
that after 45 you have to get menopausal
00:50:52 ►
and vote for Reagan?
00:50:55 ►
DNA is a program that when the time is ready,
00:50:58 ►
all the signals are coming in,
00:51:00 ►
overpopulation, pollution, swarming.
00:51:04 ►
Swarming is the key to the next move.
00:51:06 ►
We get to the point where we say, yeah, we’re virtuous enough and we’re intelligent enough,
00:51:11 ►
working together openly, not in secret, to clone ourselves.
00:51:17 ►
Now, I love myself.
00:51:20 ►
I love Barbara.
00:51:21 ►
And I love my friends.
00:51:22 ►
We’re going to clone ourselves.
00:51:24 ►
We’re going to send out rockets, little ones, small ones, out there.
00:51:28 ►
Because I think any planet would be better off having us there.
00:51:35 ►
Now, if we’re wrong and our seeds land on the planet, they look at it and say,
00:51:42 ►
Well, good God, here’s another 60s acid head
00:51:47 ►
messianic person
00:51:48 ►
thinking he’s going to see,
00:51:48 ►
oh, if that’s not supposed to be,
00:51:51 ►
that’s the way it’s going to be.
00:51:52 ►
But did that happen to us?
00:52:00 ►
Yeah.
00:52:03 ►
When I go to the more naive eastern provinces, you know, kind of interesting,
00:52:08 ►
they don’t know, most of those kids were in junior high school, grammar school in the 60s,
00:52:12 ►
and they don’t know who I am.
00:52:13 ►
They think the 60s are a bunch of naughty kids throwing rocks, you know.
00:52:18 ►
And they’re confused about what’s going on.
00:52:20 ►
And I say, well, you’ve heard a lot of images and a lot of stories about me and this and that.
00:52:20 ►
about what’s going on.
00:52:21 ►
I say, well,
00:52:23 ►
you’ve heard a lot of images and a lot of stories about me
00:52:24 ►
and this and that.
00:52:25 ►
Well, the true facts of the matter
00:52:27 ►
are this,
00:52:27 ►
that back in 1960,
00:52:30 ►
Harvard University,
00:52:31 ►
our crack team was working
00:52:32 ►
on some neurogenic experiments.
00:52:34 ►
The experiments succeeded
00:52:36 ►
and I was cloned.
00:52:41 ►
What time is it?
00:52:45 ►
Twelve after ten?
00:52:48 ►
Thank you.
00:52:49 ►
Oh, my love, thank you.
00:52:51 ►
Thank you.
00:52:52 ►
We’re going to a party at Bimbo’s now.
00:52:54 ►
I thank you and wish you all good night.
00:52:58 ►
Good night.
00:53:08 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:53:12 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:53:15 ►
As I’ve said many times in the past,
00:53:21 ►
I’m really not somebody who thinks that space migration is really worth focusing on until us humans first learn how to get along with each other here on our home planet. But isn’t it interesting that in the final phase of Dr. Leary’s life,
00:53:31 ►
space migration was one of his most treasured ideas. And if my friends from back there are
00:53:36 ►
any indication, well, then it was also a hot button for quite a few people who bought Leary’s
00:53:41 ►
books and went to his lectures. The reason this fascinates me is
00:53:45 ►
that in the final phase of Terence McKenna’s life, one of his most favorite ideas was the eschaton
00:53:51 ►
at the end of the time wave. So here we have two of the key figures involved in spreading information
00:53:57 ►
about psychedelics, and who were both attached to what I consider to be, well, somewhat rather far-fetched ideas.
00:54:06 ►
Yet, these two guys were also very grounded people, and they both had good noses for bullshit.
00:54:12 ►
So again, I pose the question, what does this say about people like you and me?
00:54:18 ►
And before you go beating up on yourself, I’ll pass along what I think, and that is
00:54:24 ►
that maybe you and I are not
00:54:25 ►
only just alike in many ways, we are also very much like every other sentient human being on
00:54:31 ►
this planet. We’ve got our good points and our flaky points, and I, for one, don’t regret the
00:54:37 ►
times that I bought into a flaky idea in the past, because as it becomes obvious to me that I’ve
00:54:43 ►
again deluded myself, it also becomes harder and harder to mislead me in the past, because as it becomes obvious to me that I’ve again deluded myself, it also becomes
00:54:46 ►
harder and harder to mislead me in the future. And I guess I shudder to use this phrase, but
00:54:52 ►
maybe something like personal growth is going on. Now, as much as I would like to talk a little bit
00:54:58 ►
more about the good Dr. Leary, I have to admit that instead I’m going to duck out of here right now and go back to our
00:55:06 ►
forums on the salon’s website. As you know, if you go to our website psychedelicsalon.com
00:55:13 ►
and click the forums link, you can still sign up as a lifetime member for free.
00:55:18 ►
And that offer will remain open for the rest of the month of October 2015, which is now, of course. After that, access
00:55:27 ►
to the forums will cost $12 per year, and hopefully that’s going to replace the need for an annual fund
00:55:33 ►
drive to cover the expenses of these podcasts. But membership in the forums will remain free for
00:55:39 ►
students and for anyone who has made a donation to the salon over the past 10 and a half years.
00:55:44 ►
And for anyone who has made a donation to the salon over the past ten and a half years.
00:55:48 ►
And don’t worry about proving that you donated.
00:55:53 ►
Once the free charter membership ends this month, and you were a previous donor,
00:55:57 ►
just get in touch with me through the new contact link on our website,
00:56:00 ►
and I’ll grandfather you in with a free lifetime membership.
00:56:06 ►
Now, while there are only, oh, I guess only about 200 people registered to use our new forums right now, already there are topics being discussed, such as the iTunes podcast
00:56:12 ►
store, Terrence McKenna quotes, anyone ever started a local salon?
00:56:18 ►
Journeying together and beginning now.
00:56:21 ►
Acid test with Grateful Dead Live, Glad to be Among My Friends and Travelers,
00:56:26 ►
Hacking the Code,
00:56:28 ►
Dennis McKenna,
00:56:29 ►
and a Cannabis Debate.
00:56:31 ►
But now that I’ve reminded myself about the contact form,
00:56:35 ►
I remember that there are several messages waiting for me there,
00:56:38 ►
and also there are some private messages waiting for me through the forums.
00:56:42 ►
If you’ve been with us here in the salon for a while,
00:56:45 ►
you most likely have heard me complaining about email, both because of spam and mainly because
00:56:51 ►
of the fact that it’s searched and saved by the big email vendors. But with the ability to send
00:56:56 ►
private messages within our forum section, I’m now getting directly in touch with many of our
00:57:01 ►
fellow salonners and it’s working great. So hopefully I can now quit being such an old curmudgeon about email
00:57:08 ►
and at the same time communicate directly with you.
00:57:12 ►
And hopefully, if you haven’t already done so,
00:57:15 ►
you’ll join us in our new and very private forums
00:57:18 ►
where there’s a good chance that you’ll be able to find a few more of us others,
00:57:22 ►
as we like to think of ourselves for some strange reason.
00:57:27 ►
So, for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.
00:57:31 ►
Be careful out there, my friends. Thank you.