Program Notes
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speakers: Nathan Ehrlich & Terence McKenna
Today the first feature is a story by Nathan Ehrlich which first appeared on the Israel Story Podcast this past January. This is a story of healing, both physically and psychologically by two men from different countries who discovered the healing properties of psychedelic medicines. We then close with a short rap by Terence McKenna who explains what he believes to be the best method for smoking NN-DMT.
Nathan Ehrlich, Multimedia Journalist
Shamanic Journeys in Peru with Sergey Baranov
Israel Story Podcasts on iTunes
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. And I’m happy to begin today’s podcast by first thanking Q. Pye,
00:00:29 ►
who became the 22nd fellow salonner to support these podcasts this year
00:00:34 ►
by making a donation through our forums.
00:00:37 ►
And unless I’m mistaken, the two audio clips that I’m going to play for you today,
00:00:43 ►
both were recommended to me on the forums.
00:00:45 ►
Now, I might be mistaken about that because I haven’t been too good at making notes about the source of some of these talks.
00:00:53 ►
So if I’m wrong about that, please forgive me and I promise to be better at keeping up with these things in the future.
00:00:59 ►
In any event, I was referred to an interesting podcast that comes out of Israel,
00:01:06 ►
and after listening to the story that I’m about to play for you,
00:01:09 ►
I got in touch with Nathan and asked him if he could get permission for me to podcast it here in the salon.
00:01:16 ►
Now, if you’re looking for an interesting series of podcasts,
00:01:19 ►
you should surf on over to the Israel Story podcast,
00:01:23 ►
which is Israel’s leading podcast and national radio show,
00:01:27 ►
produced together with Tablet Magazine
00:01:29 ►
and brought to us by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.
00:01:33 ►
You can find all of their episodes in English
00:01:36 ►
on iTunes, Stitcher, or any of the other main podcast platforms,
00:01:40 ►
all under the name Israel Story.
00:01:44 ►
Now, this podcast series goes back to 2014 and is packed with all kinds of different
00:01:49 ►
stories that represent the best of documentary radio.
00:01:53 ►
The selection that I’m going to play for you today is from their January 12th podcast,
00:01:58 ►
which is titled Sacred Plants, and it features a story by fellow salonner Nathan Ehrlich.
00:02:07 ►
Plants, and it features a story by fellow salonner Nathan Ehrlich. Nathan is a freelance multimedia journalist with a master’s degree from the Columbia School of Journalism, and is currently
00:02:13 ►
training to be a therapist at the Gestalt Center for Psychotherapy and Training. And you can contact
00:02:19 ►
him through his website at nathanerlich.com. That’s n-a-t-h-a-N-E-H-R-L-I-C-H dot com. And now, here is Nathan’s story
00:02:30 ►
as introduced by the program’s narrator, Mishi Harmon.
00:02:34 ►
Our next story is about a very different kind of sacred plant, an actually sacred plant.
00:02:41 ►
It takes place far away from the anemones of Nest Siona, but its beginning was
00:02:46 ►
right here in the north of Israel with this guy, Sergei Baranov. When we moved to Israel,
00:02:52 ►
we lived in the north, kind of hilly terrain. And that was one of my habits, just to look for
00:03:01 ►
scorpions and snakes under the rocks,
00:03:07 ►
touring the rocks, looking for those guys.
00:03:10 ►
And I had a few of them, brought them back into my house and kept them in a jar,
00:03:13 ►
and I was feeding them every day grasshoppers,
00:03:17 ►
which my father didn’t like, of course,
00:03:19 ►
and I had to release them.
00:03:20 ►
By the time Nathan Ehrlich met him,
00:03:23 ►
a lot had changed in Sergei’s life, to begin with
00:03:25 ►
his home country. But I’ll let Nathan tell you all about that, and about how it is that they came to
00:03:31 ►
meet, and how they bonded over a plant. Act II, Where the Wild Things Grow.
00:03:39 ►
I am on a porch overlooking a lake in a forest. Before me is a friendly, mild-looking man in his mid-forties.
00:03:47 ►
He’s boiling cactus in a giant propane-fueled cauldron,
00:03:51 ►
taking large puffs of mapacho, pure tobacco leaf cigarettes,
00:03:55 ►
and blowing the smoke into the pot,
00:03:57 ►
muttering healing words as the smoke and steam come together.
00:04:00 ►
Eat it for the world.
00:04:02 ►
Eat it for the lake.
00:04:06 ►
The other retreat participants
00:04:08 ►
begin to arrive, and we
00:04:10 ►
form a circle at the edge of the lake around a large
00:04:12 ►
drum. They are an eclectic
00:04:14 ►
bunch made up of different ages,
00:04:16 ►
nationalities, and coming from different
00:04:18 ►
life circumstances.
00:04:20 ►
But all of us have come here for one purpose.
00:04:22 ►
Let’s tune in, let’s be quiet, silence,
00:04:24 ►
and let’s allow for silence, not talking.
00:04:31 ►
For the next three days,
00:04:33 ►
we are going to drink large quantities of huachuma, or San Pedro,
00:04:37 ►
a psychedelic healing cactus from Peru.
00:04:40 ►
Even though this is probably my 30th ceremony,
00:04:42 ►
I pretend to be calm, but I am not. Not even close.
00:04:47 ►
I like to present myself to the world as a laid-back, relaxed person,
00:04:51 ►
but it’s a terrible lie, a coping strategy,
00:04:54 ►
because I’m actually the opposite, a bald, neurotic, anxious, self-hating Jew.
00:04:59 ►
When I drink this stuff, I’m like Larry David on steroids, or LSD.
00:05:03 ►
But yet, here I am, scared silly. Why do I
00:05:07 ►
do things like this? Travel to the Peruvian countryside to seek out this medicine? It’s a
00:05:12 ►
good question. And it’s more of a story than an answer. One that begins in high school when I was
00:05:18 ►
punching my friend and he was punching me back. It was not a fight. It was a game. A game called dead arms. Dead arms is where
00:05:27 ►
you punch your hopefully smaller opponent in the tricep muscle, alternating turns until one of you
00:05:32 ►
taps out. My friend was bigger. The next day he was showing off the damage he had inflicted on me
00:05:38 ►
to our classmates. It was etched into my arm in deep, intricate blacks and blues. There were oohs and aahs, and all my peers were laughing.
00:05:47 ►
But when I got home, and my father, who is a doctor, saw the wounds,
00:05:51 ►
he responded not with laughter, but with alarm.
00:05:54 ►
Yes, anyone who gets punched in the arm by their bigger friend will be bruised,
00:05:58 ►
but these bruises were ominous, so big they appeared cartoonish.
00:06:02 ►
And that’s because, we found out the next morning morning I had a lethally low platelet count and that’s because we learned by
00:06:08 ►
the afternoon I had leukemia
00:06:13 ►
in the weeks and months that followed I had substantial doses of chemo and
00:06:17 ►
radiation to eviscerate my bone marrow and make room for a transplant for my
00:06:21 ►
brother I vomited into pink plastic buckets five to ten times a day for a transplant for my brother. I vomited into pink plastic buckets five to ten times a day
00:06:25 ►
for a hundred days, and in this painful ordeal, my life was both spared and condemned. On the one
00:06:32 ►
hand, AML leukemia is something many people don’t survive, succumbing to either the disease itself
00:06:37 ►
or the toxic treatment. And on the other hand, there are people who struggle through the treatment
00:06:42 ►
and emerge largely unscathed.
00:06:48 ►
And then there is the rest of us who are stuck somewhere in the middle.
00:06:54 ►
And we, the scathed cancer survivors, we suffer in the in-betweens,
00:06:58 ►
with vague undiagnosable symptoms that doctors and therapists,
00:07:01 ►
even those who specialize in the late effects of cancer,
00:07:04 ►
write off as the complaints of crackpot hypochondriacs.
00:07:05 ►
You can find us, tens of thousands of us, maybe hundreds of thousands of us, maybe millions,
00:07:10 ►
on discussion boards and listservs, trying to figure out, and help each other figure out,
00:07:15 ►
how we can heal, when the toxins we received continue to wreak havoc in ways that even many
00:07:20 ►
of the most accomplished doctors can’t help. We are like the mythical Greek centaur Chiron,
00:07:26 ►
who was shot by Hercules’ poison-tipped arrow. Chiron survived the shot, but was destined to
00:07:32 ►
live the rest of his eternal life with tainted blood. He was a healer and was dubbed the wounded
00:07:37 ►
healer, an archetype, a repeating motif in the unconscious of the human soul that exemplifies
00:07:43 ►
how those who have suffered in life and have somehow managed to emerge from their suffering are the most powerful healers,
00:07:49 ►
because it is they who can best teach others how to emerge from theirs.
00:07:54 ►
Over the course of a decade, I got through the treatment, healed the initial side effects,
00:07:59 ►
and built my immune system back up. But then came the late side effects. After telling the
00:08:03 ►
various doctors I would see about how I was falling asleep in journalism school and on trains to and from work, winding
00:08:10 ►
up at the end of the line in Bronx or Coney Island, or that I didn’t take a shit once for nine days,
00:08:15 ►
they pronounced to me as though they had just solved a murder case. Nathan, you have chronic
00:08:20 ►
fatigue syndrome and irritable bowel syndrome. And I would say, no shit, that’s what
00:08:25 ►
I literally just told you. You just gave me a fancy name for it. It was at this point that I
00:08:30 ►
turned my back on Western medicine and started collecting healers of all stripes. Hypnotists,
00:08:35 ►
acupuncturists, biofeedback specialists, bioenergetics, tai chi, Chinese herbalists,
00:08:41 ►
craniosacral practitioners, ayurvedists, nutritionists, physical therapists,
00:08:45 ►
yogis, chiropractors, homeopaths, dream analysts, and a wonderful therapist.
00:08:51 ►
All part of my path that would eventually lead me to Peru and to this lake and Sergei.
00:08:57 ►
And Sergei is, I’ll let him describe it.
00:09:03 ►
Sergei, I wanted to ask you, what do you call yourself? Are you a shaman?
00:09:10 ►
No, I’m not a shaman. I’m a recovering Jew.
00:09:18 ►
When I first met Sergei, I thought he was a Peruvian shaman.
00:09:21 ►
And he kind of is, but he comes in a Ukrainian Jewish package which was shocking it was pretty wild to travel as far as Peru to have a one-of-a-kind cultural
00:09:30 ►
healing experience and meet a shaman who fled the same part of the world as my great-grandparents
00:09:34 ►
and for the same reasons how is the recording voice now because this is the voice I will talk
00:09:41 ►
like that’s that’s good no just kind of all All right, let’s roll. My name is Sergei
00:09:47 ►
Baranov. I’m originally from Ukraine. We were hated. When you’re hated, you’re not living in peace.
00:09:55 ►
In Khmelnytsky, Sergei would get beat up in the street. Just coming on the street saying,
00:09:59 ►
are you a Jew? Yes. Here’s your fist in your face. His parents were excluded from the higher-paying jobs,
00:10:05 ►
so they did what many Jews from the Soviet Union did.
00:10:08 ►
They moved to Israel.
00:10:09 ►
Well, it’s kind of ironic, because when we went to Israel,
00:10:13 ►
we were told that we were going home.
00:10:15 ►
It’s a Jewish country, now you’re going home,
00:10:18 ►
and no more persecution, no more hatred.
00:10:21 ►
So what happened, when we came to Israel,
00:10:24 ►
we became Russians and
00:10:27 ►
the local population didn’t accept us who said well we are Jews we came to our
00:10:33 ►
homeland no it’s our homeland you get out here so same thing began same
00:10:40 ►
absolutely like I had in the childhood the same thing began in Israel. Just kind
00:10:45 ►
of like a bad movie, you know. It’s like you’re watching a bad movie once again.
00:10:51 ►
Sergei never felt welcomed in Israel. So he moved. First to California, where he was duped
00:10:57 ►
into a cult, and then to Mexico, where he met peyote shamans. And then finally, to Peru.
00:11:03 ►
But soon I got my ticket and I went to Peru.
00:11:07 ►
And since then I live there and my life completely changed there.
00:11:10 ►
You know, I went through all these memories and childhood and countries
00:11:14 ►
and all this mess and suffering and everything.
00:11:18 ►
And I thought, man, from all that, I’m here.
00:11:23 ►
And I do what I love.
00:11:25 ►
And I walk my spiritual path using sacred plants.
00:11:27 ►
And I live with people who love me and who I love.
00:11:30 ►
I mean, this is happiness.
00:11:31 ►
To me, it’s a definition of happiness.
00:11:34 ►
And if happiness means something else, I’m not interested.
00:11:40 ►
Before the ceremony, Sergei recruits some of us to help him prepare the medicine,
00:11:44 ►
cracking the cactus into pieces.
00:11:46 ►
They are doing something I’m supposed to do.
00:11:49 ►
They’re tired, so…
00:11:52 ►
Well, they’re basically parting the big chunks of cactus that I was drying for a few weeks.
00:12:02 ►
And this is what we’re going to brew in a minute.
00:12:05 ►
Then some of it gets ground into a fine green powder
00:12:07 ►
so that it can be eaten.
00:12:10 ►
That’s how you break and crush your fears
00:12:13 ►
and sickness and depression.
00:12:15 ►
That’s how you crush it.
00:12:16 ►
Yeah, I want to do this.
00:12:17 ►
You just crush it, you know.
00:12:18 ►
The majority of the cactus gets boiled and reboiled
00:12:21 ►
until it is in a thick, concentrated liquid
00:12:23 ►
ready for drinking.
00:12:24 ►
Can you tell me when it gets to two meters?
00:12:28 ►
Two meters.
00:12:29 ►
Do you see?
00:12:31 ►
Yeah, there.
00:12:32 ►
Two.
00:12:32 ►
Yeah.
00:12:33 ►
San Pedro is a post-colonial name.
00:12:35 ►
It’s San Peter.
00:12:37 ►
And according to the biblical story, that was the guy who received key from heaven.
00:12:42 ►
The original name of this cactus, as it was known here
00:12:46 ►
for thousands of years,
00:12:48 ►
it’s Huachuma.
00:12:50 ►
Which means vision.
00:12:52 ►
Shamanism is the first
00:12:54 ►
religion of humankind.
00:12:56 ►
Through certain plants, you connect
00:12:58 ►
to spirits and you bring healing
00:13:00 ►
into your people, to your
00:13:02 ►
patient. For the western mind,
00:13:04 ►
anything which is not seen with your
00:13:07 ►
eyes would be hard to believe in so plant spirit might sound a little bit strange to somebody but
00:13:15 ►
there are plant spirits and this is experiential this is not something you should trust me or
00:13:22 ►
somebody else you just need to experience that for yourself what it is
00:13:26 ►
because it’s not describable it’s not enough to take medicine it’s not enough you have to
00:13:32 ►
help people to guide them through that i create environment safe environment for people to relax
00:13:41 ►
and just to think about their life and finding their solutions to their problems.
00:13:51 ►
We drink the liquid in the morning when the ceremony begins, and then Sergei serves spoonfuls
00:13:56 ►
of booster powder doses in the afternoon. But each morning, as I sit there waiting for my turn to
00:14:02 ►
drink, I contemplate backing out.
00:14:07 ►
It’s a terrifying proposition to have your ego shoved aside.
00:14:11 ►
But I journeyed too far to get here to back out now.
00:14:15 ►
And not just physically, spiritually and psychologically as well.
00:14:16 ►
So I drink my cup.
00:14:23 ►
The path has taken many turns.
00:14:46 ►
Almost a decade after my diagnosis, I left my doctors behind in Boston Oh, God. the following dream. Katia was captaining a ship. I was on board, and we were at sea. In the middle of the night, she led me up to the top of the mast where there was a platform to stand on and a giant
00:14:51 ►
searchlight. She flicked the massive switch and shined the light at the sea, which illuminated
00:14:56 ►
and became as transparent as a swimming pool, and the aquatic life under the water. These strange
00:15:02 ►
creatures of the deep, they became visible to me.
00:15:06 ►
Together we saw my own unconscious laid bare with fierce clarity.
00:15:10 ►
And then I dove in.
00:15:13 ►
And sometime shortly after this dream, I surfaced with some memories,
00:15:17 ►
like the time when I was five years old and had my first playdate with a girl.
00:15:21 ►
As soon as she came over, I was so excited,
00:15:24 ►
I pulled down my shorts and underwear to my ankles and began laughing hysterically. But her mom, she didn’t
00:15:29 ►
find this to be very funny, and so neither did mine. There was another memory. When I was 10,
00:15:35 ►
I was really bored at my Jewish day school. I never cared much for religious doctrine,
00:15:39 ►
and certainly not for the Talmud. So I wrote an expressive story in creative writing class
00:15:44 ►
about a lawyer who committed suicide. This again brought on the authorities. The school called my parents,
00:15:50 ►
and I had to see a shrink who had no clue how to talk to me. I perceived the whole thing as being
00:15:55 ►
terribly shameful. It’s not that these incidences were so harmful in and of themselves, but they
00:16:02 ►
pointed to one big childhood takeaway. Do not reveal your real self.
00:16:06 ►
It’s rotten and dangerous. Whatever you do, hide. Keep it all in. So my therapist and I had
00:16:13 ►
discovered this about me, that the me that presented myself to the world wasn’t me, that the real me
00:16:19 ►
lay somewhere deeper inside, and that this might be playing a role in why I was still not healthy.
00:16:24 ►
deeper inside, and that this might be playing a role in why I was still not healthy.
00:16:30 ►
This was an empowering discovery, but still, no matter what my therapist and I did,
00:16:35 ►
I wasn’t able to lower my defenses, drop the facade, and become that Nathan that lay hidden inside of me. It was like Kati and I were digging, making strides for a few years,
00:16:40 ►
but then boom, we hit a barrier. Or maybe it sounded more like this.
00:16:47 ►
Here, this guy is a professional. He can describe it better than me.
00:16:51 ►
I’m Neil Goldsmith. I’m a psychologist here in New York City. I’m a psychotherapist.
00:16:56 ►
Neil says when we were born, we were all like a well with a glowing spring at the bottom.
00:17:00 ►
But through cultural conditioning, poor parenting, and various physical and emotional traumas, it’s as though leaves fall into our wells and dry up and harden over our spring.
00:17:10 ►
So you go to a psychologist and you’re a psychiatrist. You say, listen, you know,
00:17:14 ►
I need some help. So he says, no problem, no problem. Let me get my pickaxe out. And he takes
00:17:18 ►
the pickaxe and it’s almost like, you know, the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote in the cartoons.
00:17:24 ►
And he takes this pickaxe and he says,
00:17:26 ►
he puts it over his head and he pulls it down at full strength
00:17:29 ►
and he hits against the top of those dried, hardened leaves
00:17:32 ►
and he goes, ping!
00:17:35 ►
And he tries again, ping!
00:17:38 ►
And a few sparks of concrete fly away.
00:17:41 ►
And he says, no problem.
00:17:42 ►
20 years or so, we’ll be down to the bottom of this.
00:17:45 ►
But Neil, as well as many other anthropologists and psychologists that I began reading in my
00:17:50 ►
quest for healing, all say there is a solution, or at least a shortcut to getting around that
00:17:55 ►
bing sound. And that is psychedelics and theogens, visionary plants.
00:18:01 ►
So with psychedelics, you know, it loosens, it softens, the leaves begin to fly
00:18:06 ►
away. And after a while, you can get in touch with that glow again, much more rapidly than
00:18:11 ►
without these substances. Getting in touch with the glow. That’s what I needed. In the early 1990s,
00:18:17 ►
the US government had meetings deciding that they would now again treat psychedelics like they would
00:18:24 ►
any other new
00:18:25 ►
investigational research drug. And there’s three wonderful studies being done at Johns Hopkins
00:18:29 ►
Medical School, NYU Medical School, and UCLA. These are cancer patients generally who have
00:18:36 ►
terminal diagnoses, who will have maybe six months to live. And in the last months of their lives,
00:18:43 ►
they take psilocybin in this gentle
00:18:45 ►
psychotherapeutic way. Psilocybin is the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms.
00:18:51 ►
The participants are placed in comfortable rooms, administered the proper dose, and rather than be
00:18:56 ►
guided by a shaman, they are guided by therapists. And the results have been extraordinarily positive.
00:19:01 ►
They come in touch with perfection, with their God, with the universe,
00:19:06 ►
with love. They release their anger. They seek rapprochement with their estranged brother-in-law
00:19:13 ►
or the like, or their parents. They forgive. And they begin leading their lives for the last six
00:19:19 ►
months of their life, rather than leading their deaths for the last six months of their lives.
00:19:25 ►
While Western medicine may be administering psychedelics for therapeutic purposes in the
00:19:29 ►
decades to come, they are not there yet. I gave NYU a call, but it was a no-go. You had to be
00:19:35 ►
dying to get into the study. And thankfully, I was very much alive. But I was suffering.
00:19:42 ►
I had to take 60 milligrams of extended-release Adderall just to get out of bed or take a shit.
00:19:47 ►
I was also about to turn 30 and get married, and I wanted so desperately to be off drugs and healthy.
00:19:54 ►
In my early 20s, I had become a voracious reader of all things healing.
00:19:58 ►
I had read that there was a vine in the jungle called ayahuasca,
00:20:02 ►
which when combined with another plant allows the psychoactive ingredient DMT, dimethyltryptamine, also nicknamed the spirit molecule, to cross over the blood-brain
00:20:11 ►
barrier. This process allows one’s body and mind to reorganize its neural network, thereby having
00:20:17 ►
healing potential for all sorts of mental and physical disorders. I had filed this away in the
00:20:22 ►
back of my mind, occasionally reading about people’s experiences with the Vine and online forums, and never thinking that I would be bold enough for
00:20:29 ►
such a venture. But at this time in my life, when I was about to get married and still having
00:20:34 ►
symptoms from an illness that began back when I was 16, I just decided, fuck it. I’m not having
00:20:40 ►
a bachelor party. I’m having a bachelor sojourn. Healing exists for me, and I have to go find it.
00:20:46 ►
I don’t need strippers.
00:20:47 ►
I need a completely different kind of female presence.
00:20:50 ►
I need ayahuasca, the great mother plant.
00:20:53 ►
I’m going to Peru.
00:20:55 ►
I just had to tell Shula, my wife-to-be.
00:20:57 ►
Do you remember when I told you that I was going to go to Peru
00:21:04 ►
because there was a hallucinogenic vine down there that I wanted to use for the purposes of my health.
00:21:11 ►
Why are you making that face?
00:21:12 ►
You have to ask open-ended questions.
00:21:13 ►
It’s the first rule of being a journalist.
00:21:15 ►
You should start over.
00:21:17 ►
I rephrased.
00:21:18 ►
Do you remember how you felt?
00:21:20 ►
I remember you mentioning it sort of like vaguely that you were interested in it.
00:21:26 ►
I think you were sort of nervous to tell me that you were really going to go to Peru to do it because you knew I wouldn’t be happy about it.
00:21:33 ►
I didn’t have specific feelings about the vine itself necessarily, more the fact that you were going to be away for three weeks and in a country that, you know, on your own and you don’t speak Spanish.
00:21:45 ►
Did you think it was weird?
00:21:47 ►
No, not for you.
00:21:50 ►
I mean, you’ve tried a million sort of weird type of healing things.
00:21:58 ►
Shula may not have thought so, but I thought it was weird.
00:22:01 ►
I have undertaken a few bold ventures in my life beforehand,
00:22:04 ►
but this one had a more brazen flavor. I bought a plane ticket, flew into Lima,
00:22:09 ►
and hopped on an eight-hour bus ride north to the heart of the Andes, where the retreat center was.
00:22:14 ►
Almost every evening for a week, 15 of us tourists would gather together in a big yurt
00:22:18 ►
in the pitch black at the foothills of the 20,000-foot snow-capped mountains with the
00:22:23 ►
shaman that had been bussed up from the Amazon jungle.
00:22:26 ►
I brought a recorder to one of the ceremonies.
00:22:29 ►
Hear that?
00:22:31 ►
That is me taking long, deep breaths as the shaman begins to sing the traditional ayahuasca chants called Icaros.
00:22:37 ►
Ayahuasca is a spiritual teacher, and like one of those old school ruler-hitting teachers, she can be a little harsh.
00:22:44 ►
Except she doesn’t use a ruler.
00:22:46 ►
She uses vomit.
00:22:47 ►
Like a snake shedding skins from the inside out,
00:22:50 ►
you purge those hard and stagnant layers of your psyche.
00:22:54 ►
Step by step, she closes down your story-spinning head
00:22:57 ►
and pries open your heart.
00:23:00 ►
It ain’t easy.
00:23:01 ►
An hour after drinking the medicine,
00:23:03 ►
at the first ceremony,
00:23:04 ►
a wave of severe nausea came at me.
00:23:07 ►
The problem was the vomit buckets they had handed us for just this situation
00:23:11 ►
were the exact same pink plastic ones they had given to me in the hospital.
00:23:16 ►
I couldn’t do it.
00:23:17 ►
I couldn’t re-enter that space.
00:23:19 ►
The whole ceremony I was sick, nauseous beyond belief, and I could not purge.
00:23:24 ►
But the next ceremony,
00:23:25 ►
I came armed with a plant. After the shaman poured my cup, I gestured for more until the
00:23:30 ►
cup was full, and the shaman and the entire room of people were laughing at me. That did it. That
00:23:36 ►
night the puke and shit came flowing out of me both ends, black as oil, and I had a vision in
00:23:41 ►
which the ayahuasca vine was whispering to me, saying, this is chemotherapy.
00:23:48 ►
I had other visions too, like about how alive a single plant or teaspoon of soil is,
00:23:53 ►
or how poorly we treat the earth.
00:23:55 ►
I filled an entire notebook with my experiences,
00:23:58 ►
but talking about it always feels cheesy.
00:24:00 ►
So I’ll just say that these ceremonies provided a taste of exactly what
00:24:04 ►
Neil Goldsmith,
00:24:07 ►
the New York therapist, was articulating.
00:24:09 ►
The hardened leaves inside me were clearing,
00:24:13 ►
and at long last I was catching a glimpse of the spring in my well.
00:24:22 ►
When I got back home, I got married,
00:24:25 ►
something I was initially very ambivalent about.
00:24:28 ►
So it was with great surprise that I absolutely loved my wedding.
00:24:32 ►
It was on a beautiful mountain in the Catskills, overlooking the Ashokan Reservoir,
00:24:37 ►
and I felt loved in a way that I thought I was too hardened and cynical of a man to feel.
00:24:42 ►
I believe that ayahuasca was very instrumental in this opening of my heart.
00:24:45 ►
Slowly, my chronic fatigue was resolved.
00:24:48 ►
I could poop again, and no more Adderall.
00:24:49 ►
I had a great year.
00:24:54 ►
I continued participating in ayahuasca ceremonies in the Peruvian Andes.
00:24:58 ►
After one of them, though, I headed south to Machu Picchu and the Sacred Valley,
00:25:02 ►
where I got wind of a shaman who worked with a visionary plant called San Pedro.
00:25:04 ►
I didn’t think I’d be able to talk to him, though, since, as my wife gently pointed out, I don’t speak Spanish.
00:25:08 ►
But I figured, what the hell?
00:25:10 ►
I picked up a payphone in Cusco, and I gave him a call.
00:25:13 ►
That was the first time I spoke to Sergei.
00:25:15 ►
To my pleasant surprise, his English seemed pretty good.
00:25:18 ►
We arranged to meet at the bus station in the town square of Culca, where he lived.
00:25:23 ►
While we were introducing ourselves,
00:25:28 ►
sizing each other up, and working out the logistics of doing a ceremony, he asked that we convene later because he had to pick up his daughter at kindergarten. Only, he didn’t say
00:25:33 ►
kindergarten. He said gan, and my ears did a double take. Gan in Hebrew means garden and is
00:25:40 ►
short for kindergarten. Had this Peruvian shaman just spoken Hebrew to me?
00:25:49 ►
Yeah, yeah, that’s true, that’s true, that’s true. Yeah, that’s strange, because it’s a kindergarten,
00:25:55 ►
which somehow I said gone, without even, I didn’t speak Hebrew for like 15 years now. I thought I’m Peruvian, that’s right, I said no, I’m Russian Jew. Having made this connection,
00:25:59 ►
Sergei moved around his schedule so he could guide me in a ceremony the following day.
00:26:03 ►
It was a beautiful, lovely encounter, and by the time it was over, I had a tremendous sense of trust in this man.
00:26:09 ►
It wasn’t just our similar backgrounds. There was something else that made him feel like a brother
00:26:13 ►
to me, and I think it had to do with the fact that he too once found himself close to death.
00:26:19 ►
It didn’t happen in a hospital room, though. It happened in a desert, under a night sky, after drinking peyote.
00:26:27 ►
Can you talk about the story of…
00:26:30 ►
Was it a rattlesnake or a scorpion?
00:26:32 ►
Scorpions, yes.
00:26:34 ►
Can you tell the story of the scorpions?
00:26:36 ►
Sure.
00:26:37 ►
In Peru, I was working with a sacred cactus, San Pedro, also known as Huachuma.
00:26:43 ►
And at the same time, I was going to Mexico
00:26:45 ►
working with another sacred cactus, which is called peyote.
00:26:49 ►
Sergei had met some Indian shamans in Mexico
00:26:51 ►
and was invited to take part in a series of peyote ceremonies
00:26:54 ►
in the middle of the desert.
00:26:56 ►
They all drank the peyote and were sitting together on mats
00:26:59 ►
on the desert floor when Sergei felt something out of the ordinary.
00:27:04 ►
And it was not a hallucination.
00:27:06 ►
It was a sting. Two stings, in fact. I didn’t see the scorpions. They were crawling under my pants.
00:27:12 ►
And this is when I felt stings on both thighs, like an inch below my genitals. I jumped off my
00:27:20 ►
mat and I started to panic. The scorpions in that part of Mexico are notoriously deadly.
00:27:28 ►
So the shaman I was with said, well, don’t panic. You will make it worse. Just try to keep calm.
00:27:35 ►
There was nothing the shaman could do to get the venom out and Sergei’s body began shutting down.
00:27:39 ►
The scorpions, their venom is neurotoxin. It targets your nervous system and shuts the whole body
00:27:47 ►
down, including all your breathing organs, like lungs and all the muscles that move there. So
00:27:55 ►
first you choke. You can’t breathe. You can’t move a finger. You can’t open your eyes. You can’t talk.
00:28:01 ►
Absolutely, you don’t have saliva nothing everything is dry pain and
00:28:05 ►
itching and burning and you just want to get out of your body you just want to be outside of it but
00:28:10 ►
you can’t you’re totally chained into it you can feel like your soul actually getting frozen and
00:28:17 ►
ready to leave your body did you think you were gonna die that night to be honest i don’t remember that thought but
00:28:26 ►
i do remember laying down and thinking the whole thing can end to me like this it was very sad
00:28:32 ►
to die that’s the feeling i remember i realized how much i love life and i only
00:28:36 ►
started to walk my path and here i am dies dies.
00:28:46 ►
And out of this
00:28:48 ►
love to life,
00:28:50 ►
I actually push
00:28:52 ►
the death back.
00:28:54 ►
And of course, the great medicine of peyote
00:28:56 ►
helped me on a physical level.
00:28:58 ►
Without the medicine, I would be dead for sure.
00:29:00 ►
Because it blocked the venom
00:29:02 ►
from killing my liver.
00:29:04 ►
As I see it now, I mean, eight years later,
00:29:07 ►
this is what they call the rite of passage.
00:29:10 ►
So I feel sanctioned by that experience to do what I do.
00:29:22 ►
I’m stumbling now around the lake,
00:29:28 ►
looking for a place to get comfortable while trying to operate my audio recorder.
00:29:32 ►
Not an easy feat when you are deep in the medicine.
00:29:35 ►
Oh man, I’m not sure I’m going to be able to work this thing.
00:29:39 ►
So we took the medicine like three hours ago.
00:29:44 ►
I’m just feeling really warm, light.
00:29:47 ►
So glad to be here.
00:29:55 ►
But the warm feeling didn’t last.
00:29:59 ►
I was sitting by the lake when I started to feel my health problems.
00:30:02 ►
The severe bloating in my stomach, the terrible pains in my neck,
00:30:45 ►
and then my mind started yelling at me. What’s wrong with you, Nathan? Why did you get cancer? Why do you keep making yourself sick? I just wanted to ask you about, I needed help, so I went looking for Sergei. Thankfully, he hovers nearby precisely for moments like this. started like… Like how it’s anxious? Explain me. My mind starts going like a million thoughts a second
00:30:48 ►
and I can’t turn it…
00:30:49 ►
Thinking about what?
00:30:51 ►
I don’t know.
00:30:52 ►
Like…
00:30:52 ►
I mean, you don’t know.
00:30:53 ►
I’m not comfortable.
00:30:54 ►
It’s just a sensation
00:30:55 ►
of not being comfortable.
00:30:56 ►
How do you feel?
00:30:57 ►
It’s a sensation
00:30:58 ►
of not being comfortable?
00:31:00 ►
Yeah.
00:31:00 ►
With yourself?
00:31:01 ►
Yeah.
00:31:04 ►
Man.
00:31:07 ►
What? That’s something totally new for you?
00:31:09 ►
You’ve never heard of people being that way?
00:31:12 ►
I remember it took Sergey a minute to understand where I was coming from.
00:31:16 ►
Well, it’s a little extreme, I would say, you know.
00:31:21 ►
I mean, I can…
00:31:22 ►
But in the process of explaining my state of being,
00:31:26 ►
he got me to laugh at myself, which was a huge relief.
00:31:29 ►
And then he was able to say something
00:31:30 ►
that would be a big take-home for me
00:31:32 ►
and something I really needed to hear.
00:31:35 ►
You need to start accepting yourself for who you are.
00:31:37 ►
I think this is where it is.
00:31:39 ►
I think this is it.
00:31:41 ►
I think this is the healing,
00:31:42 ►
to start accepting yourself as you are.
00:31:44 ►
As you are as you are with
00:31:46 ►
all your problems with all your defects if you have some that’s how you see it you know it would
00:31:52 ►
if if all that crap that you have inside you know it’s okay it’s you you know nobody’s perfect
00:32:00 ►
everybody has problem I’m full of my stuff too, you know.
00:32:05 ►
So it’s okay, I accept myself.
00:32:08 ►
I want to be a good person, but I want to be me first.
00:32:12 ►
So you have to be you.
00:32:15 ►
You have to want to be you.
00:32:16 ►
I mean, this is serious soul healing.
00:32:21 ►
As the ceremonies wound down and day turned to night, we drummed.
00:32:25 ►
And feeling unguarded, light, and energized, even I was on my feet.
00:32:30 ►
Listen, that’s me chanting into the night.
00:32:51 ►
When I ventured back home to my wife and two cats, I was radiant.
00:32:55 ►
And amidst this glow, I decided to take on a new challenge.
00:32:58 ►
I enrolled in a four-year therapist training program at the Gestalt Center for Psychotherapy and Training in New York,
00:33:01 ►
beginning to dream of my own version of Sergei’s path, Nathan’s path.
00:33:06 ►
Perhaps it is not set in the sacred valley in Peru, serving hallucinogenic cactus, but maybe
00:33:11 ►
in the Hudson Valley as a therapist, allowing my life’s challenges to inform my practice.
00:33:17 ►
The radiance of Sergei’s retreats wears off quickly for me. While I’ve mostly healed the
00:33:22 ►
constipation and fatigue, and feel my heart has been opened
00:33:25 ►
and my spirit awakened, for mysterious reasons my stomach is severely distended, and I am
00:33:31 ►
having numbness, lightheadedness, and balance issues, to the point where it can be incredibly
00:33:36 ►
difficult to go to work and to go to school. We think maybe it’s a nerve thing.
00:33:44 ►
Is that the sound of my nerves?
00:33:46 ►
That’s the interaction between your nerve and muscles.
00:33:50 ►
So I keep on going to appointments, having blood tests.
00:33:54 ►
Are you ready?
00:33:55 ►
Yep.
00:33:56 ►
Which arm do you want to draw?
00:33:57 ►
Like a fist?
00:33:58 ►
And attending ayahuasca ceremonies whenever I can.
00:34:01 ►
Come on.
00:34:03 ►
Ah.
00:34:05 ►
Fuck. ceremonies whenever I can. I have tried western medicine, eastern medicine, but it’s the medicine of the south, shamanic
00:34:18 ►
medicine, which despite or in spite of my difficulty and suffering, has fanned an ember
00:34:24 ►
of hope into a burning flame,
00:34:26 ►
and that glowing emanating heat reminds me that healing is out there for me,
00:34:30 ►
or perhaps in there, lying dormant deep inside, right on the verge of being unleashed. Nathan Ehrlich.
00:34:53 ►
Nathan’s a multimedia journalist from Brooklyn, New York.
00:34:56 ►
He’s currently working on a young adult novel,
00:34:58 ►
which is told from the perspective of a teenage boy undergoing cancer treatment.
00:35:03 ►
Sound design, mixing, and original scoring for that story by Aaron Leder.
00:35:07 ►
Thanks also to Michael Reed for additional sound recording.
00:35:11 ►
Sergei Baranov lives in Peru, in the sacred valley of the Incas.
00:35:15 ►
Check out his website, shamansworld.org, or order his book called Path on Amazon.
00:35:22 ►
Now that’s the way to tell a story.
00:35:24 ►
Now that’s the way to tell a story.
00:35:30 ►
The Israel Story podcast is an excellent place for you to find the very best of documentary radio.
00:35:36 ►
Their podcast is one of the most professional programs that I’ve come across here in podcast land,
00:35:39 ►
and I really hope that you’ll check out some of their other programs.
00:35:50 ►
I also hope that as you listened with me to Nathan’s story just now, that you were also struck how universal these psychedelic medicines actually are.
00:35:59 ►
As we just heard, an American-born Jew and a Ukrainian-born Jew wound up participating in a San Pedro ceremony in Peru.
00:36:08 ►
And I’m sure that even if you haven’t had a personal experience like that yourself, you most likely have come across other stories just as interesting.
00:36:15 ►
Over the years, I’ve participated in psychedelic experiences with women and men from several other countries who spoke different languages and whose backgrounds were very different from my own.
00:36:21 ►
And yet, once we ingested one of the psychedelic medicines,
00:36:30 ►
And yet, once we ingested one of the psychedelic medicines, we discovered that, just like the New Agers say, we were truly one.
00:36:33 ►
At the core of our beings, we were the same.
00:36:45 ►
And those are experiences that, if everyone on the planet had a similar one, I think it would do much to eliminate the main troubles that we humans seem to create for ourselves in this world.
00:36:49 ►
When listening to Nathan’s story just now,
00:36:54 ►
I was struck by how wide-ranging are the healing properties of our psychedelic medicines.
00:36:58 ►
Nathan, as you just heard, is a cancer survivor, and Sergei was suffering from the abuse that the less educated among us sometimes heap upon people who aren’t like them.
00:37:06 ►
So there were both physical and psychological ailments involved in these two stories,
00:37:11 ►
and yet it was psychedelic medicines which provided healing to them both.
00:37:16 ►
I can remember back in the mid-1990s when I was first diagnosed with prostate cancer,
00:37:21 ►
how helpless I felt at first.
00:37:24 ►
And, to be honest, without the support of other cancer patients and survivors,
00:37:28 ►
whom I contacted through various forums and listservs,
00:37:32 ►
I don’t think that I would have made it through those early months leading up to my surgery.
00:37:37 ►
Fortunately, I also had access to both cannabis and to psychedelic mushrooms,
00:37:42 ►
which, along with my new friends on the net, well, they pulled me through.
00:37:46 ►
Next to being a Vietnam veteran, being a cancer survivor is something that I consider
00:37:52 ►
to be one of the most important events of my life.
00:37:55 ►
Hopefully, with the current resurgence of psychedelic research that’s now underway,
00:38:00 ►
better ways of overcoming cancer are sure to be found.
00:38:04 ►
In my own case, should I ever have a
00:38:07 ►
recurrence of cancer, the very first thing that I would do is to find my way to my ayahuasca friends
00:38:13 ►
in Peru and let Lady A heal me, as she has so many times before. As you already know, the primary
00:38:21 ►
psychoactive ingredients in the ayahuasca brew is DMT.
00:38:26 ►
And while I believe that the best way to experience DMT is to ingest it in the ayahuasca brew,
00:38:33 ►
another way to use it is by smoking.
00:38:36 ►
Now, I’m tempted to say that smoking DMT isn’t for the faint of heart.
00:38:40 ►
However, I also think that it is a good way for the psychedelic skeptic to take a look at
00:38:46 ►
what it is that we’re talking about when we discuss the psychedelic experience.
00:38:51 ►
Although in my opinion, NN DMT is the most potent psychedelic substance there is,
00:38:57 ►
the smoke experience usually lasts for less than 10 minutes. So whenever someone would give me a
00:39:03 ►
hard time about my love of psychedelics
00:39:05 ►
and say that they get the same thing from meditation or yoga or something like that,
00:39:11 ►
I would challenge them to spend just 10 minutes of their life and try smoking a little DMT,
00:39:17 ►
if only to see whether they were correct in thinking that it was just like deep meditation.
00:39:22 ►
that it was just like deep meditation.
00:39:27 ►
Interestingly, nobody ever took me up on that challenge.
00:39:32 ►
Now, having done many high-dose LSD trips before first trying DMT,
00:39:37 ►
I thought that people were exaggerating about the power of this interesting chemical,
00:39:41 ►
which, by the way, is present in your own brain right at this very moment.
00:39:45 ►
But for those who haven’t yet had a DMT experience,
00:39:52 ►
I now want to play a recording of Terence McKenna explaining what he believes is the best way to smoke DMT. Now if you’ve listened to the salon for a while, you most likely have already heard
00:39:57 ►
this McKenna rap, but thanks to Collective Awakening, it is now also available in a YouTube video that I highly recommend.
00:40:07 ►
Over the years, I’ve seen quite a few psychedelic videos, many of them about DMT. But for me,
00:40:14 ►
this one has the most impressive graphics associated with it that I’ve ever seen. And
00:40:19 ►
I’ll link to it in today’s program notes, and I hope that you take the time to watch
00:40:23 ►
it for yourself. In my opinion, you won’t be disappointed.
00:40:27 ►
Now, here is Terrence McKenna explaining how he thinks is the best way to smoke DMT. DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT Hash smokers are greatly favored in this endeavor
00:40:48 ►
because you really need leather lungs for this.
00:40:53 ►
The great problem is that people will cough or not be able to hold it in.
00:40:59 ►
You take two hits in a situation where your clothes have been loosened
00:41:05 ►
and you can just flop backward when you need to.
00:41:09 ►
You take two hits.
00:41:11 ►
Now, many people miss the point because after two hits, you feel completely peculiar.
00:41:19 ►
You feel as though your body is undergoing some strange kind of anesthesia.
00:41:23 ►
All the air has been pumped out of the room.
00:41:26 ►
This is the visual acuity thing I talked about last night.
00:41:29 ►
The colors jump up.
00:41:31 ►
The edges sharpen.
00:41:33 ►
And at that point, people say,
00:41:36 ►
Whoa, wow, it’s really coming on strong.
00:41:39 ►
And then what you have to do is you have to take one more enormous hit.
00:41:49 ►
And this separates the intrepid from the casual, believe me.
00:41:55 ►
Because most people, and the facilitator doesn’t want to lean on the person. You say, you know, dammit, take the third hit.
00:41:58 ►
And they say, no, I feel completely weird.
00:42:00 ►
I know you feel weird, but take the third hit.
00:42:03 ►
Well, if you can coax somebody into that,
00:42:06 ►
then what happens is you close your eyes and you see the ordinary warm brown back, you know,
00:42:15 ►
closed eyelid scenario. And then these colors begin racing together and it forms this mandalic floral slowly
00:42:26 ►
rotating thing
00:42:28 ►
which I call the chrysanthemum
00:42:30 ►
this is a
00:42:32 ►
place in the trip that you want to
00:42:34 ►
see as you go by it
00:42:36 ►
the chrysanthemum forms
00:42:38 ►
and you watch it for like
00:42:40 ►
15 seconds
00:42:42 ►
if it doesn’t
00:42:44 ►
give way,
00:42:46 ►
then you didn’t do enough.
00:42:48 ►
You have to do more.
00:42:51 ►
One more hit usually will do it.
00:42:53 ►
Well, then what happens is
00:42:55 ►
it like physically propels you
00:42:57 ►
through this chrysanthemum-like thing.
00:43:01 ►
And there’s a sound like a saran wrap bread wrapper being crumpled up and thrown
00:43:08 ►
away you know that crackle a friend of mine says this is your radio infolecchi leaving through the
00:43:15 ►
anterior fontanelle at the top of your head i don’t know what it is but it’s something is being… Yeah, right. That’s what it is.
00:43:26 ►
And then there’s this very, very defined sense of bursting through something, a membrane.
00:43:38 ►
And on the other side, and this is now, remember, my experience.
00:43:43 ►
On the other side, as you break through, there’s a cheer.
00:43:48 ►
There’s a whole bunch of entities waiting on the other side.
00:43:56 ►
And they, you know that Pink Floyd song, the gnomes have learned a new way to say hooray.
00:44:04 ►
Well, it’s that place. It’s those gnomes. And you burst
00:44:08 ►
into this space and they’re saying, how wonderful that you’re here. You
00:44:17 ►
come so rarely. We’re so delighted to see you. And one of the things about DMT that’s really puzzling is, in a sense, it doesn’t affect
00:44:31 ►
your mind. In other words, you don’t change. For instance, if you take ketamine, the first thing
00:44:40 ►
you notice, the very first thing you notice before the trip hits, is you notice that you no
00:44:45 ►
longer are anxious about having taken ketamine. You just sort of, anxiety leaves you. That means
00:44:51 ►
it’s affecting your mind. It’s doing something to the judgmental machinery. DMT doesn’t lay a hand
00:44:59 ►
on the judgmental machinery. You break through into that space exactly who you were before
00:45:05 ►
breaking through and the usual reaction of most people is something like you
00:45:15 ►
know you think God heartbeat normal Normal. Everything’s normal. Yeah, everything’s normal. Oh, God.
00:45:27 ►
Because these things are there and they’re hammering at you and they come forward.
00:45:34 ►
They’re like jewel self-dribbling basketballs.
00:45:38 ►
And there are many of them.
00:45:41 ►
And they come pounding toward you and they will stop in front of you and vibrate
00:45:46 ►
but then they do a very disconcerting thing which is they jump into your body.
00:45:52 ►
They jump into your body and then they jump back out again and the whole thing is going
00:45:59 ►
on in this very high speed mode where you’re being presented with thousands of details per second
00:46:08 ►
and you can’t get a hold on,
00:46:10 ►
you say, you know, my God, what’s happening?
00:46:13 ►
And these things are saying,
00:46:15 ►
don’t abandon yourself to amazement,
00:46:19 ►
which is exactly what you want to do.
00:46:22 ►
You just want to go nuts with how crazy this is. They say,
00:46:25 ►
don’t do that. Don’t do that. Pay attention. Pay attention to what we’re doing. Well, what
00:46:33 ►
are they doing? Well, what they’re doing is they’re making objects with their voices.
00:46:40 ►
They’re singing structures into existence.
00:46:46 ►
These things are… And what they will do is they’ll come toward you
00:46:49 ►
and then…
00:46:50 ►
And you have to understand, they don’t have arms,
00:46:52 ►
so we’re kind of downloading this into a lower dimension
00:46:56 ►
to even describe it.
00:46:57 ►
But what they do is they offer things to you.
00:47:00 ►
Say, look at this.
00:47:02 ►
Look at this.
00:47:03 ►
And as your attention goes toward these objects, you realize that what you’re being shown is impossible.
00:47:13 ►
It’s impossible.
00:47:15 ►
It’s not simply intricate, beautiful and hard to manufacture.
00:47:21 ►
It’s impossible to make these things.
00:47:23 ►
The nearest analogy would be to the Fabergé eggs or something like that. But these things are like the toys that are scattered around the nursery inside a UFO or something. Celestial toys. And they are the toys themselves appear to be somehow alive the toys themselves can sing other
00:47:47 ►
objects into existence so what’s happening is there’s just this
00:47:52 ►
proliferation of elf gifts and the elf gifts are moving around singing and the
00:47:58 ►
whole thing is directed toward they’re saying do what we are doing, they’re saying, do what we are doing.
00:48:05 ►
And they’re very insistent.
00:48:07 ►
They say, do it, do it, do it.
00:48:10 ►
And you feel like a bubble.
00:48:14 ►
And now this is subjective.
00:48:16 ►
I mean, only 5% report this, but it happens to me.
00:48:20 ►
You feel like some kind of bubble inside your body
00:48:24 ►
that’s beginning to move up toward
00:48:27 ►
your mouth.
00:48:28 ►
And when it comes out, it isn’t sound, it’s vision.
00:48:33 ►
You discover that you can pump stuff out of your mouth by singing.
00:48:40 ►
And they’re urging you to do this.
00:48:42 ►
They say, that’s it.
00:48:43 ►
That’s it.
00:48:44 ►
Keep doing it. And the whole thing is like, you know, we’re now at minute 4.5 with this stuff. And you speak in a kind of glossolalia. There’s a spontaneous outpouring of syntax unaccompanied by what is normally called meaning.
00:49:04 ►
of syntax unaccompanied by what is normally called meaning.
00:49:07 ►
It’s sort of, you know,
00:49:23 ►
And this is accompanied by a modality, something seen.
00:49:26 ►
And they’re saying, yes, do it, do it, do it.
00:49:28 ►
And then after a minute or so of this,
00:49:32 ►
the whole thing begins to collapse in on itself. And they literally begin to physically move away from you.
00:49:36 ►
And usually their final shot is
00:49:38 ►
they actually wave goodbye
00:49:41 ►
and they say,
00:49:43 ►
déjà vu, déjà vu, which makes no sense at all if you analyze it so then
00:49:51 ►
you come down and you’re now at minute six to seven and you come down and it’s like being more
00:49:58 ►
loaded than you’ve ever been it’s like about a 700 mic acid trip but you embrace it as totally down you say i’m
00:50:08 ►
totally down i mean you look you look like a termite from our tourists and the room is
00:50:15 ►
decorated in amish quilts but i’m completely back and then over a minute or a minute and a half or so,
00:50:25 ►
the room just comes right back together.
00:50:28 ►
And four minutes after that,
00:50:31 ►
some people can give no account of it whatsoever.
00:50:35 ►
They just say, you know, I don’t know.
00:50:38 ►
It was the weirdest thing that ever happened to me,
00:50:40 ►
and I can’t remember it now. Thank you. It’s like mushrooms times a million plus aliens.
00:51:44 ►
It’s like mushrooms times a million plus aliens.
00:51:48 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:51:51 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:51:55 ►
As we just heard Joe Rogan say,
00:51:58 ►
it’s like mushrooms times a million plus aliens.
00:52:03 ►
However, those among us with what Terrence calls leather lungs are most likely going to have the best time of it.
00:52:07 ►
Now, before I go, there are a few announcements that I’d like to pass along to you.
00:52:12 ►
First of all, I want to be sure that you are aware that during this month of April 2016,
00:52:18 ►
a coalition of global research, policy, and socializations have launched a social media campaign titled
00:52:26 ►
Psychedelics Because.
00:52:27 ►
It’s all one word, and there’s a hashtag in front of the single word, hashtag psychedelics
00:52:33 ►
because.
00:52:34 ►
This campaign aims to actively increase awareness around the benefits of psychedelics and to
00:52:40 ►
share stories humanizing the diversity of psychedelic users, reverse decades of negative stigma that surrounds psychedelic and psychoactive drugs,
00:52:50 ►
educate people about current psychedelic research,
00:52:54 ►
promote psychedelic harm reduction by understanding the true risks and how to manage them,
00:52:59 ►
help end arrests, incarceration, and criminalization associated with global drug prohibition, and to unite psychedelic drug policy reform and harm reduction movements.
00:53:12 ►
So be sure to spread the message through your own network, encouraging everybody to use the hashtag psychedelics because on social media.
00:53:27 ►
social media. Also, I want to give you a heads up that on Sunday night, April 24th, I’ll be a guest on Inner Journey with Greg Friedman, which is an internationally acclaimed radio program that
00:53:32 ►
broadcasts Sunday nights from 7 to 9 p.m. Pacific Time, live on KXRN 93.5 FM on Laguna Beach,
00:53:44 ►
California’s only FM station. And in case you aren’t living on Laguna Beach, California’s only FM station.
00:53:46 ►
And in case you aren’t living in Laguna Beach right now,
00:53:49 ►
you can also listen to this program through a feed on the web.
00:53:53 ►
It can be heard live online at http://kx935.com.
00:54:00 ►
And I would very much enjoy having you be a part of this program yourself.
00:54:05 ►
The call-in number is 949-715-5936.
00:54:11 ►
But if you don’t want to call in, you can send your questions via Twitter.
00:54:15 ►
It’s at sign I-N-N-R-J-R-N-Y-R-A-D-I-O, which is short for Inner Journey Radio.
00:54:24 ►
Y-R-A-D-I-O, which is short for Inner Journey Radio.
00:54:30 ►
And we’ll do our best to answer any and all calls and tweets from fellow salonners.
00:54:36 ►
So if you are calling in, however, the best time is between 7.30 and 8.30 Pacific Time.
00:54:41 ►
Now there’s one last thing that I want to mention before I go, and that is to pass along the sad news that we have lost yet another elder this past week.
00:54:47 ►
And what an elder he was.
00:54:49 ►
I’m talking about the legendary Howard Marks, who, in my opinion, was to cannabis what Sasha Shulgin was to psychoactive chemicals.
00:54:58 ►
As I’m sure you know, Howard was the world’s greatest cannabis smuggler, even surpassing the wonderful work
00:55:05 ►
of the Brotherhood of Love.
00:55:07 ►
Whenever I see Howard’s name, the
00:55:09 ►
first thing that flashes in my mind is
00:55:11 ►
the sound of Fraser Clark’s
00:55:13 ►
British voice telling me about
00:55:15 ►
all the wonderful activities of
00:55:17 ►
Howard Marks. He was a
00:55:19 ►
true giant among men, and
00:55:21 ►
he will be very much missed.
00:55:24 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo
00:55:26 ►
signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends. Thank you.