500 - 500 Memories

Program Notes §

https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty

Guest speakers: Timothy Leary, Myron Stolaroff, Gary Fisher, Fraser Clark, Terence McKenna, & Sasha Shulgin

Today’s podcast features a retrospective of some of the highlights of podcasts with several of the elders who are no longer with us. These clips include talks by Timothy Leary, Myron Stolaroff, Gary Fisher, Fraser Clark, Terence McKenna, and Sasha Shulgin. Interspersed with these clips Lorenzo tells a few stories of his own.

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499 - PSYCHEology_ Psychedelics and the Soul

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501 - +PsychedelicsBecause

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Transcript §

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Greetings from cyberdelic space.

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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

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

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And welcome to our 500th podcast, which I’m pleased to begin by thanking Chaos Design,

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Marvin S., Tim H., Farista, Jean-Pierre W., Lynn N., and Poodle Chemist.

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Also, we received another anonymous Bitcoin donation from a fellow salonner who made a clever donation on 420 Day.

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And anyway, I want to thank you one and all.

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Your donations are greatly appreciated.

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And I also want to thank all the rest of our fellow salonners who have made donations over the past 11 years,

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without which these podcasts wouldn’t have been able to continue. And I thank you and all of our fellow saloners who tune in to listen to these podcasts each week

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because you are the psychedelic salon.

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Now, originally I hadn’t planned on doing anything special for this 500th episode.

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After all, I already celebrate our anniversary twice each year.

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After all, I already celebrate our anniversary twice each year Once on March 17th, when podcast number one was posted in 2005

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And again on June 10th, when I went back in 2005 and began numbering these podcasts

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And decided that, well, maybe I’d keep this up for a little while

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And June 10th, by the way, was also my mother’s birthday

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And so it just felt good to use, was also my mother’s birthday, and so it just felt

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good to use that date as the salon’s birthday as well. Also, since my friend KMO beat me to number

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500, even though I had a head start on him, I figured that I would just let my own number 500

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go by without making a big deal of it. But then after listening to KMO’s podcasts number 500 and 501,

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I was inspired to go ahead and do a little something myself.

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Now, if you haven’t yet had a chance to listen to those podcasts from KMO’s Sea Realm,

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I recommend that you do so, particularly if you’re an old-timer here in the salon,

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because he had recent messages from some people

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who are also old friends of the salon.

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It was really great once again to hear the voices of Dope Fiend, Sancho and Cody and

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Black Beauty among others.

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Of course, almost every week we all get to hear the lovely voice of Black Beauty, or

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BB as she is also known, just before my final remarks. The only

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main character that was missing in those podcasts of KMO’s was my dear friend Queer Ninja,

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whose opening words, easy now, always put me in such a good mood. However, since KMO already

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covered those bases for us, I thought that I ought to do something different.

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But with over 499 talks featuring more than 100 speakers, well, I have a lot to choose from.

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So for this program today, I decided that I would simply do a little reminiscing about several of the elders who I’ve featured here in the salon, but who sadly are no longer with us. It wasn’t easy to decide who to

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include, but in order to keep this program within a manageable time span, I’ve had to leave out some

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legendary elders such as Krishnamurti and Aldous Huxley. But I think that you’re going to enjoy

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hearing again from Timothy Leary, Myron Stolaroff,

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Gary Fisher, Fraser Clark, Terrence McKenna, and Sasha Shulgin.

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So, what I’m going to do right now is to play a brief clip from one of the talks that I’ve

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podcast of each of them, and then come back to comment on it and introduce the next speaker.

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Now, there is something important that I hope you have already picked up on here.

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Out of all the voices that you will be hearing in this podcast,

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the only voice from a person who is still alive is going to be my own.

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I have to admit that I found growing old to be somewhat tiresome and uncomfortable.

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It does come with one great advantage, however,

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and that is if you are the last one standing in whatever story you’re telling, then you can tell it however you want,

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because there’s no longer anybody left to contradict you, which is also the way human

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history is often recorded, by the last one standing. That said, I don’t think that I’ll

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be making up any stories that I tell you here

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today, and I’m going to try to keep my comments only to my own interaction with these elders,

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so I hopefully won’t be inventing any history here. Now to begin with, of all the people that

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you’ll hear from in this podcast, the only one with whom I never had any personal interactions was Dr. Timothy Leary.

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Like most people who lived through the 60s, I first heard of Timothy Leary when he was released from his contract at Harvard University.

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And there’s a really excellent story about that event told by Myron Stolaroff in one of the Lone Pine Stories podcasts, but I’m not going to get into that today.

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However, getting back to the 60s, on that January day in 1967,

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when Dr. Leary took the microphone at the Human Bee Inn in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park

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and famously said, turn on, tune in, and drop out,

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well, I almost got to see him because that morning my wife, my son, and I had

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been in the park, but we left before all the action began because all of the hippies who had

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begun to gather there were making us nervous. You see, at the time I was in the Navy and my ship was

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in the dockyards over at Hunter’s Point. On Saturday mornings it was our custom to feed the ducks and geese in the pond at Golden Gate Park.

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But that particular morning, we left early because with my military haircut, a wife, and a three-year-old son,

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well, we just didn’t seem to fit in at the time.

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But I’m here to tell you that in my heart of hearts, that was the moment that being in the Navy

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and knowing that within a few months

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our ship would be off the coast of Vietnam, engaged in that feudal war, well, that was the

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moment in which I realized that following the herd, going along with the powers that be,

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was a truly bad decision, and it was one that took me many years to overcome.

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But enough about me.

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Now let’s listen to Dr. Timothy Leary speaking to a young crowd in Santa Barbara, California in 1982.

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And this is from podcast number 175,

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The Intelligent Use of Psychedelic Drugs.

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Here’s Tim Leary.

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Oh, thank you, thank you.

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Thank you.

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Thank you. How about that, huh?

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Well, I think it is fantastic

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that we’re here tonight.

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You know, it’s 1982 this is the year of doom and gloom isn’t it

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and here we have assembled on the banks of the Pacific Ocean

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with Venus burning a golden hole in the velvet sky up there

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the moon’s almost full with Venus burning a golden hole in the velvet sky up there.

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The moon’s almost full.

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And we’ve assembled to discuss the intelligent use of drugs.

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I think the world should take note.

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I think you should applaud yourself for being here. How about that, huh?

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applaud yourself for being here. How about that, huh? The key to evolution in any species is swarming. And we’ve got enough intelligent members of any species together, decided they’re

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going to move in one direction into the future, it’s going to happen. So the more swarms like

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this, the better. Now, we are not alone tonight because behind us

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and in front of us, there are many generations of intelligent women and men who have met

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throughout the centuries discuss what we’re going to talk about tonight, the intelligent use of

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drugs or how to access your brain efficiently to help yourself develop. Now, you know, people like us

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sometimes get a bad reputation

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in places like Iran

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or Judeo-Christian America

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and so forth.

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Sometimes, you know,

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we’re led to believe

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that we’re not somehow

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straight arrow.

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So I want you to remember

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and recall

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what you know anyway

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when you walk out of here

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tonight with your shoulders

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back and your eyes

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looking up to that

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beautiful star-filled sky

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that we represent

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the aristocratic

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exploring elite

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of our species

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and we always have.

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Because we’re all

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united here

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on the eternal quest of inner exploration, discovery, the adventure of knowing yourself, of stimulating growth, personal evolution, and so on.

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It started, what, 2, 3, 4,000 years ago back in the banks of the Ganges, when perhaps for the first time in recorded history, women and men got together and said,

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hey, there’s more than just the caste system, more than just survival, root animal existence. The purpose of human

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life is to go within and find out who you are. The purpose of human life is to grow.

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The Sanskrit word, as Andre tells us in that funny movie, the Sanskrit word for to be is

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to grow. Back there in the Ganges several thousand years ago, this idea developed.

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And, you know, the first recorded book of human development, of human religion, for that matter, are the Vedas.

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And the first book of the Vedas is a hymn in homage of Soma.

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And you all know what Soma is.

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Then we popped up again.

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Well, I could go on forever telling us about how great we are in the past. we popped up again. Well, I could go on forever

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telling us about how great we are in the past.

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We popped up again in Athens.

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You remember that wonderful time in Athens?

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That was a hippie time

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when everyone went running around saying,

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I’m a philosopher.

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It’s up to me to figure out, you know,

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what are the elements

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or what life is all about.

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You remember Socrates said the purpose of an intelligent human life is self-discovery. Now, how come that funny little

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peninsula there, yet Sparta a few miles away, like San Luis Obispo, which was given over to military engineering. Sparta’s Gordon Liddy’s sort of town.

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How come places like Athens and Santa Barbara pop up now and then in human history,

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where people have the courage and the ambition to pose these basic questions? Well, just north of

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Athens is a place called Eleusis. And you well

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know the Eleusinian Mysteries for hundreds and hundreds of years were practiced there. Plato,

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Aristotle, most of those great philosophers went through the mysteries there. And recently,

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drug ethologists and scholars like Robert Gordon Wasson and Allegra have told us that the key to the Illusinian Mysteries

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was a ceremonial plant,

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which is probably related to LSD.

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Now, we popped up out history in France.

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The Hachichines, Baudelaire, Gautier, Verlin.

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We popped up in England, Wordsworth,

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Colleridge, Nietzsche.

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Nietzsche was over there in Germany.

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You know, he was very sickly.

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They used to say when you went to see Nietzsche,

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it was like going into a drugstore.

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I wonder why he got all those crazy ideas.

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Now, you’re never going to read about the history,

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you’re never going to read about the history of brain exploration in the textbooks in institutions like this, tax-supported, run by academic politicians to keep young people serenely and productively stupid.

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You have to, you know, it’s an intelligence test.

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If you want to get smart, you have to learn how to get smart.

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You have to look through history and you’ll find the fingerprints, the footprints, the vapor trails of people like us who have been doing what we’re doing here tonight,

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trying to learn how to grow and develop and make it a better planet.

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night trying to learn how to grow and develop and make it a better planet.

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You know, American history is filled with people who knew how to use drugs intelligently.

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Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe.

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You know, Edgar Allan Poe was actually considered in Europe to be the ultimate North American writer, much more famous there than here.

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Coming from Harvard, as I used to,

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it was a source of great amusement

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to realize that Ralph Waldo Emerson,

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who really started

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the American Transcendental Movement,

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who got kicked out of Harvard,

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I think it was 1838,

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because he went there and said,

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don’t go to those big Unitarian

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and Presbyterian churches in Boston.

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You’re going to find God within.

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Transcend this outer stuff.

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They didn’t want him around.

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They kept him away for 38 years.

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How come he got that way?

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Well, it turned out that he,

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along with Margaret Fuller,

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our first great feminist woman,

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had gone over to Europe

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and hung out with the Wordsworths

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and the Hashishins in Paris.

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And we have well-documented stories

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of how they turned on intelligently

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to pursue the philosophic quest.

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My favorite Harvard intellectual

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is a man named William James,

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who actually founded the psychology department there.

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He’s considered to be the father of American psychology.

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At the age of 13,

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according to his brother Henry’s memoirs, William James was in France. Now talk about teenage punks. At the age of 13, William James, coming from one of our top Brahmin Boston families, was experimenting with all sorts of curious and strange brain drugs in France. He later wrote the book Varieties of Literature Experience, in which he said over

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and over again, no attempt at the metaphysical quest, no attempt to probe the philosophic

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wonders of the cosmos can be undertaken by those that don’t have some experience with

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chemicals. In his case, it was peyote nitrous oxide.

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One of the reasons that I wanted to play that for you today is to remind you that in your pursuit of expanding your consciousness,

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you come from a long line of Western artists, scientists, and intellectuals.

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You most definitely aren’t a freak.

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In fact, just as Dr. Leary told those students in 1982, you should applaud yourself for being here. You come from a long line of explorers, or as Timothy just said, you

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are part of the aristocratic exploring elite of our species. And should you want to hear

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more from Dr. Leary, you’ll find that here in the salon there are now over 50 programs in which he is

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featured. And I should point out that all of the Timothy Leary audio in these podcasts came directly

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from his own archive, thanks to Dennis Berry, the keeper of his archive for many years, and also

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thanks to Bruce Dahmer, who put me in contact with Dennis. She is the person who gave me copies of all of the Leary talks that had been digitized

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before his archive was transferred to the New York City Library, where it resides today.

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I also want to say again how grateful I am to Dennis Berry, Zach Leary, and the Leary Trust,

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who, during one of the salon’s difficult periods, made a sizable grant to keep us going.

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So, while I never had any opportunity to meet Timothy Leary myself,

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in many ways he’s played a significant role in these podcasts.

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Now, a lot of people most likely think that it was Timothy Leary

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who first brought LSD to America, but that’s actually incorrect.

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Leary who first brought LSD to America, but that’s actually incorrect. It was in 1960, I believe,

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that Leary experienced a psychedelic for the first time, and that was on magic mushrooms in Mexico.

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From there, after a stop in Los Angeles where he tried LSD for the first time with Gary Fisher as a sitter, he returned to Harvard and, along with Ram Dass, began the famous Harvard

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psilocybin project. As you know, word about magic mushrooms first entered the public domain with

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R. Gordon Watson’s famous story in Life magazine. However, even before that, work involving LSD was

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already being done in North America. In fact, in the early 1950s, Humphrey Osmond and others were

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using LSD in a clinical setting to treat various disorders, including alcoholism. And one of the

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key players in that whole scene was the charismatic man that many people call the Johnny Appleseed of

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LSD. And that was the legendary Al Hubbard. Now although Al Hubbard is mentioned in several

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podcasts it’s only in podcast number 235 that we actually get to hear him speak and that recording

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was made on the day after Al Humphrey Osmond and Myron Stolaroff had taken LSD together and

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this was their decompression talk. But what I would like to play for you right now

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is part of a conversation between Myron Stolaroff and Gary Fisher

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that began with a discussion about Al Hubbard,

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who also happened to be a central figure in Myron’s life.

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Myron Stolaroff, whose patented discovery while at Ampex

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led to the audio and videotape revolution,

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was also featured in a really fascinating book by John Markoff that’s titled What the Dormouse Said,

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How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry.

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And in it, Markoff credits Myron with being one of the four people

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who were most responsible for shaping the 60s counterculture

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and the personal computer industry.

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It’s a really fascinating read if you’re into books these days.

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Anyway, let’s now join Myron and Gary for a brief discussion of Al Hubbard

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and of Myron’s psychedelic research project in Menlo Park.

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One of the questions that Gary asked me,

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which I hope you’ll all be interested in,

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is how did I get mixed up with Hubbard in the first place?

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And it’s a really fascinating story to me, in a way.

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But I’d gotten acquainted with Gerald Herd in Southern California,

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who’s one of the world’s really great mystics

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and a marvelous author if you’ve read his books.

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And I was very taken with him.

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I was with Ampex Corporation

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and went to Southern California frequently.

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And every time that I went down there in business,

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I tried to see Gerald.

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So one time I was visiting him

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and he started telling me about LSD

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and taking it

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and what a remarkable thing it was

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and all the openings that it provided.

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I thought, my God,

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what’s a mystic doing taking drugs anyway?

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And so I didn’t do much more about it, but then Alex Ponyatov was the head of

00:20:08 ► §

Ampex Corporation, and he’d gone to Canada, and somehow or other he’d run into Hubbard.

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And he came back and told me all kinds of stories that Hubbard had told him about the

00:20:19 ► §

work he was doing. So I thought, well, gee whiz, maybe I’ll get in touch with him. So

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I wrote Al a letter, and much to my amazement, two or three months later, there he is on the steps

00:20:30 ► §

of AMPATS. So we got acquainted, and I was sucked in immediately. He’s a very gregarious person full of fun and laughter and the thing that got me

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you know I was all shut up inside myself

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and worried about this and that

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and the other thing

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and I could never really feel anybody

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but in his presence

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I could feel his warmth

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and especially as I got to know him

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and spent more time with him

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I just thought it was great just to be in his presence.

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And he’s full of stories and all kinds of interesting things.

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So it only took that one meeting for me to make up my mind

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that I wanted to go to Canada, where he lived, and have LSD.

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And my first LSD experience was just absolutely remarkable.

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So I think I ventured to say right off the bat that that’s the greatest discovery man has ever made,

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because I don’t know much else about what a man discovered,

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but as far as I’m concerned, I’m willing to stand by that.

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So that’s how I got into it,

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and Hubbard came down

00:21:46 ► §

introduced him to some folks

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some of them he got along with

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some that he didn’t

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but in the end

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I just saw that

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I had to spend the rest of my life

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as much as possible

00:21:58 ► §

in doing something about LSD

00:22:00 ► §

so I used to visit him quite a bit

00:22:02 ► §

he got together with Ross McLean in Canada. Ross

00:22:06 ► §

McLean was a psychiatrist who had a mental hospital, and they administered LSD there

00:22:13 ► §

and I visited him there. And after a while, it got to the point where I felt we had to

00:22:18 ► §

do something, and so we started the clinic in Menlo Park, where for three and a half years, we gave people LSD, some mescaline, a little bit of psilocybin at times,

00:22:32 ► §

until the FDA finally put a stop to everything in 1965.

00:22:38 ► §

So that’s how I got in.

00:22:41 ► §

And, Myron, tell us how

00:22:45 ► §

how did he

00:22:48 ► §

get a hold of LSD

00:22:50 ► §

how was he introduced to it

00:22:52 ► §

I’m not

00:22:54 ► §

I’m not sure exactly

00:22:56 ► §

who the people were

00:22:58 ► §

that he got involved with

00:22:59 ► §

he did run into someone

00:23:02 ► §

in the Vancouver area

00:23:04 ► §

who introduced him to LSD,

00:23:07 ► §

and it only took one shot with him.

00:23:10 ► §

He had an amazing opening, a tremendously spiritual experience,

00:23:16 ► §

and he felt actually he’d been given a mission to really spread this around.

00:23:22 ► §

Fortunately, at the time, he was very well off financially.

00:23:26 ► §

He had a very close friend who was wealthy.

00:23:31 ► §

He gave LSD to his friend, and his friend had the same kind of opening

00:23:35 ► §

and was willing to support him in anything that he wanted to do.

00:23:39 ► §

So he began to devote a lot of time leading people, getting acquainted,

00:23:44 ► §

and he was very good at sizing people up He began to devote a lot of time leading people, getting acquainted.

00:23:51 ► §

He was very good at sizing people up and assessing whether they make good candidates.

00:23:55 ► §

He was very good at supporting people through the experience.

00:24:00 ► §

He began to spread the word around, and he covered an awful lot of ground. My connection was second-hand to him

00:24:06 ► §

because my mentor was a guy by the name of Nick Chawalos,

00:24:11 ► §

who was my brother-in-law.

00:24:13 ► §

And he was a research psychiatrist

00:24:15 ► §

at the University of Saskatchewan.

00:24:19 ► §

And at the time, they were studying LSD.

00:24:25 ► §

And it was called at that time a psychotomimetic, mimicking psychosis.

00:24:32 ► §

So they were giving people LSD,

00:24:36 ► §

thinking they would discover what were the structures and the dynamics of psychosis.

00:24:42 ► §

And Al went over and said, it’s easy to make people crazy.

00:24:45 ► §

What’s hard is to make them sane.

00:24:47 ► §

And unless people make them sane,

00:24:49 ► §

it won’t make them crazy.

00:24:50 ► §

But if you give it the wrong,

00:24:52 ► §

if you don’t give it in the proper environment,

00:24:54 ► §

it won’t make them crazy.

00:24:55 ► §

And so that’s how,

00:24:58 ► §

and I don’t know how he got to the Saskatchewan.

00:25:01 ► §

It was called the Saskatchewan Group on Schizophrenia.

00:25:04 ► §

That was the name of their project.

00:25:07 ► §

And that was Hoffer and Osmond.

00:25:09 ► §

And then my brother-in-law, Nick Chawalas,

00:25:12 ► §

and then his partner, Duncan Blewett.

00:25:16 ► §

And I had my first experience there with them in 1959

00:25:19 ► §

before any of you were born.

00:25:24 ► §

And I got born that day that I had my intercession.

00:25:30 ► §

And, Myra, why don’t you tell us a bit about

00:25:33 ► §

the work that was done at Menlo Park?

00:25:37 ► §

Well, I’ll be glad to do that,

00:25:39 ► §

but I’d like to interject a little bit

00:25:41 ► §

of what you just said about Duncan and Wood,

00:25:44 ► §

because I’m not sure

00:25:47 ► §

how the connection was made

00:25:48 ► §

but Al went to central Canada

00:25:52 ► §

and met with Hoffer and Osmond

00:25:56 ► §

and he’d heard about their approach

00:25:59 ► §

which really wasn’t recognizing

00:26:01 ► §

what LSD would do at all

00:26:03 ► §

but somehow he met Blewett.

00:26:06 ► §

And he’s very sensitive, and Blewett’s a very open, warm person.

00:26:10 ► §

He recognized right away that Blewett would be a good candidate.

00:26:14 ► §

So he gave Blewett LSD.

00:26:17 ► §

And he was off with Osman and Hoffer.

00:26:21 ► §

And he went in and looked at Blewett,

00:26:24 ► §

and Blewett was just having the time of his life.

00:26:27 ► §

So he went out to see Hoffer and Osmond

00:26:29 ► §

and he said, you know, this guy Blewett is having a psychosis.

00:26:36 ► §

You better come in and see if you can get him out of it.

00:26:39 ► §

So they walked in and immediately Blewett started laughing and laughing.

00:26:45 ► §

And Al says, see, see, can you get him out of it?

00:26:48 ► §

And he would just laugh all the way.

00:26:55 ► §

Well, anyhow, Hubbard worked with McLean at his hospital there for several years,

00:27:01 ► §

and I got to visit that.

00:27:05 ► §

Then Hubbard, well, he’s not an easy guy to get along with.

00:27:10 ► §

He very much likes things his own way,

00:27:13 ► §

and so I’m not sure what the conflict got between he and the claim,

00:27:20 ► §

but he decided to set up his own treatment place in downtown Vancouver,

00:27:25 ► §

and that went on for a while, and I thought,

00:27:27 ► §

gee whiz, we ought to do the same in California.

00:27:31 ► §

So I put the necessary things together.

00:27:35 ► §

Fortunately, I accumulated a little cash,

00:27:38 ► §

and we set up a place where really it was set up pretty much the way Al designed it. Very nice furniture,

00:27:50 ► §

comfortable setting, beautiful pictures on the wall, a lot of artifacts for people to

00:27:57 ► §

look at to stimulate them various ways. And then, of course, one of his main tricks was to have people bring pictures of their family,

00:28:09 ► §

their parents, their siblings, their marriage partners, and so on,

00:28:15 ► §

because looking at that under the influence is tremendously revealing.

00:28:22 ► §

And he had several really good pictures, too,

00:28:26 ► §

that actually one just really opened me wide open.

00:28:33 ► §

Well, I don’t know how much time…

00:28:35 ► §

Is that St. Veronica’s Veil?

00:28:37 ► §

Yeah.

00:28:39 ► §

Oh, hell, I use it thousands of times.

00:28:43 ► §

It’s worn out.

00:28:45 ► §

It’s a… Well, hell, I used thousands of pounds to get worn out. It’s a, well, Al was a Catholic,

00:28:50 ► §

and so it was, the setup that I created for my work

00:28:59 ► §

was exactly what they had in Menlo Park

00:29:02 ► §

because it’s what they had in Saskatchewan.

00:29:04 ► §

So we were all

00:29:05 ► §

the benefactors

00:29:08 ► §

of Al’s

00:29:09 ► §

insights.

00:29:12 ► §

And it’s

00:29:14 ► §

when, my

00:29:16 ► §

understanding is when Christ

00:29:18 ► §

was carrying the cross,

00:29:20 ► §

he fell, and

00:29:21 ► §

Veronica wiped his brow

00:29:24 ► §

with her handkerchief.

00:29:26 ► §

And then the next day on the handkerchief was the image of Christ.

00:29:32 ► §

And there’s this awesome painting called St. Veronica’s Veil.

00:29:37 ► §

And the most powerful thing, we used it every session.

00:29:44 ► §

You know, when they used it with me,

00:29:46 ► §

I was not happy with Christian

00:29:48 ► §

when I’m telling them.

00:29:49 ► §

I mean, I had a family of Christians

00:29:51 ► §

and they were all cool.

00:29:54 ► §

And so I wasn’t about to look at it, you know.

00:29:58 ► §

But Nick, you know, every hour or so

00:30:00 ► §

he’d pass it to me again.

00:30:02 ► §

And I’m not ready for that.

00:30:07 ► §

And so finally finally thank God I looked at it

00:30:10 ► §

and it was an overpowering experience

00:30:14 ► §

to experience

00:30:17 ► §

what Christ’s love is

00:30:20 ► §

and I was astounded

00:30:24 ► §

I was absolutely astounded. So that worked for me, and I thought

00:30:30 ► §

if it works for me, hell, it can work for anybody.

00:30:34 ► §

Well, you’re certainly right in my case. I’ll just elaborate briefly. I’ve covered this

00:30:40 ► §

in the book, but I looked at this figure and one of the things about it

00:30:45 ► §

is one of these pictures where you look

00:30:48 ► §

and the eyes are open

00:30:49 ► §

and then you keep looking and the eyes are closed.

00:30:52 ► §

Did that happen with you?

00:30:54 ► §

So I saw the eyes closed and I thought,

00:30:56 ► §

oh my God, something’s wrong with me.

00:30:58 ► §

Why is he closing his eyes?

00:31:00 ► §

Because the picture, when you’re under LSD,

00:31:03 ► §

is so alive, it’s almost like

00:31:04 ► §

the living person in front of you. under LSD is so alive it’s almost like the living person

00:31:05 ► §

in front of you. It is.

00:31:07 ► §

And so I looked again and then

00:31:09 ► §

all of a sudden there was a swish

00:31:11 ► §

and I was looking at a female face

00:31:14 ► §

like God what’s happening here

00:31:16 ► §

and all of a sudden swish

00:31:17 ► §

another face and then

00:31:19 ► §

in the next few minutes a thousand

00:31:21 ► §

faces of all variety of

00:31:23 ► §

mankind went by and and I said,

00:31:27 ► §

this is every man. I’m Jewish, mind you.

00:31:33 ► §

In the words of my father, I was Jewish.

00:31:36 ► §

As you most likely know already, if you are a long-time salonner,

00:31:50 ► §

that talk was recorded at one of Kathleen Wirt’s famous salons in Venice, California.

00:31:53 ► §

And should you want to learn more about those salons,

00:31:56 ► §

you can listen to podcast number 443,

00:32:00 ► §

which is a talk about her salon that was actually given by Kathleen at one of Ashley Booth’s salons in Los Angeles.

00:32:04 ► §

Also, you can listen to podcast 361, which is titled Caitlin’s Salon, and that’s a reading

00:32:10 ► §

from a chapter in my novel in which I fictionalize Kathleen’s wonderful salons.

00:32:15 ► §

And although my reading is fiction, much of the background in the story is authentic.

00:32:21 ► §

Before I forget it, one of the things that Myron and Gary just spoke about,

00:32:26 ► §

the painting titled Veronica’s Veil, deserves a little more discussion, I think.

00:32:31 ► §

First of all, you don’t need to be under the influence of a psychedelic to see the eyes close and open.

00:32:37 ► §

It’s quite amazing, actually.

00:32:39 ► §

And the other thing is that, as you no doubt guessed,

00:32:42 ► §

it was only a print and not the actual painting that

00:32:45 ► §

they were using. Now, I don’t know how many times Al Hubbard used that print in psychedelic sessions

00:32:50 ► §

before giving it to Myron to use at Menlo Park, but I do know that Myron showed it to over 300

00:32:56 ► §

people who were under the influence, and from what he told me, it was almost without exception a most

00:33:03 ► §

memorable experience for the participants.

00:33:06 ► §

Now today, that print is on a bookshelf here in my office. Myron gave it to me many years ago,

00:33:12 ► §

but I have to admit that although I’ve stared at it quite a few times, the truth is that I never

00:33:18 ► §

had the courage to look at it while I was under the influence of LSD or some other psychedelic.

00:33:24 ► §

while I was under the influence of LSD or some other psychedelic.

00:33:29 ► §

After listening to Myron’s experience of it, and Myron was a Jew,

00:33:33 ► §

then listening to Gary tell of how profound an impact that it had on him,

00:33:40 ► §

well, I, having been raised a Catholic and still working hard to overcome my childhood brainwashing,

00:33:45 ► §

I was afraid that it might have some kind of a weird effect on me that caused me to return to the Catholic Church. And that’s a risk that I’m not willing to take, so

00:33:51 ► §

it just sits out of sight on my bookshelf. Now, I had planned here on telling you how I first met

00:33:59 ► §

Myron and how my wife and I spent a week in the Northwoods with Myron, his wife Jean, Duncan Blewett, and his wife Jane.

00:34:07 ► §

But I want to get on with today’s program, and so those stories, I guess, would probably take the rest of our time and more.

00:34:15 ► §

I’ll have to skip them for now, I guess.

00:34:18 ► §

I do, however, want to mention Myron’s archive.

00:34:26 ► §

mention Myron’s archive. During the course of his research in Menlo Park, Myron and his staff took around 350 people on their first LSD trip. But unlike many current studies, the Menlo Park group

00:34:35 ► §

investigated the effects that LSD had on engineering, scientific, and artistic projects.

00:34:42 ► §

And in the book, What the Dormouse Said,

00:34:47 ► §

you will learn that many of the people who are the acknowledged founders

00:34:49 ► §

of today’s personal computer industry

00:34:51 ► §

were also participants in the Menlo Park research.

00:34:55 ► §

Without a doubt, psychedelics played a big role

00:34:58 ► §

in moving computers out of their big glass cages

00:35:01 ► §

and onto our desktops.

00:35:03 ► §

Sadly, sometime around 1986, when the Analog Drug Act was passed,

00:35:09 ► §

Myron became a, well, somewhat despondent about all of the psychedelic research

00:35:14 ► §

that had already been conducted, but which now, he thought, was at an end forever.

00:35:20 ► §

So, when his former administrative assistant called to say that she was moving to an apartment and would no longer have room to store all of the records, the records of what happened with those 350 people, and the work that they did while under the influence of LSD, well, Myron, being somewhat downhearted at the time, told her to throw them all away, which she did.

00:35:46 ► §

at the time, told her to throw them all away, which she did. It’s also important, however,

00:35:52 ► §

to note that Myron and Jean were part of the research group led by the Shulgens, and from which all of those wonderful experience reports that are now available in PCOL and T-COL came.

00:35:58 ► §

Now, it was around 2001 when Myron told me the story about the Menlo Park participant files.

00:36:05 ► §

But on a hunch, I asked him about the records from the human research that he did with the Shulgens.

00:36:11 ► §

You see, for each of those one-half-page trip reports in the Shulgens’ books,

00:36:16 ► §

Myron typed up a complete report of 12 pages or more of the actual experience,

00:36:21 ► §

for each of those people.

00:36:22 ► §

So, I asked him where those records were.

00:36:27 ► §

experience for each of those people, so I asked him where those records were. He smiled and said,

00:36:33 ► §

well, when the government started cracking down on MDMA, I decided that I’d better put them somewhere safe. So my neighbor agreed to store them in his barn, but he doesn’t know what’s in

00:36:39 ► §

those boxes. At the time, I just sort of filed this away, but then a few years later, Myron also showed me what was in his old dilapidated shed, and I was amazed to find, well, a lot of records from the Menlo Park research. In fact, it was almost everything except the now-destroyed participant files.

00:37:07 ► §

another few years passed and by then Myron sadly wasn’t Myron anymore. He would visit he was happy and he smiled a lot but his memory had left him. Now one afternoon during a visit I asked Jean if

00:37:14 ► §

Myron had ever retrieved the records from his neighbor’s barn and she was surprised to hear

00:37:20 ► §

that he’d stored them there. Apparently Myron hadn’t told her that he’d done this. She just assumed that they were in the old shed

00:37:27 ► §

along with everything else.

00:37:28 ► §

Well, long story short, we retrieved those records

00:37:32 ► §

and spent several days having a great time reading through them.

00:37:35 ► §

So now I’ll cut to the chase.

00:37:38 ► §

A few days ago, Gene called to tell me

00:37:41 ► §

that Myron’s entire archive of over 5,000

00:37:44 ► §

now meticulously maintained and indexed documents

00:37:47 ► §

has found a home alongside the Shulgin Archive.

00:37:51 ► §

And if I’m not mistaken, they may now be found at the University of California, Berkeley.

00:37:56 ► §

So the story has a happy ending after all.

00:38:00 ► §

Well, I’ve already gone on a lot longer than I planned,

00:38:03 ► §

so I’m going to try and shorten my comments from here on out.

00:38:07 ► §

In a moment, I’m going to play some more of that recording of Gary at Kathleen’s Salon.

00:38:13 ► §

And Gary Fisher was one of the most influential people ever to conduct psychedelic research, and yet he is one of the least known.

00:38:21 ► §

He was a close friend of mine, and in future podcasts I’m sure that I’ll be

00:38:25 ► §

telling you more about him. But in short, it was Gary Fisher who established the protocols that

00:38:31 ► §

Tim Leary built upon when he worked at Harvard. And it was Gary Fisher who took Timothy Leary on

00:38:37 ► §

his first LSD trip. And Gary, along with his wife and three daughters, were also part of Leary’s group that lived in Mexico, the Caribbean, and ultimately at Millbrook.

00:38:48 ► §

When it comes to the early stories about LSD, I think you’ll find that Gary Fisher often played a very prominent role.

00:38:56 ► §

So, now let’s return to Kathleen’s salon and listen in as Gary Fisher talks about those early years and about the research he did with severely disabled children

00:39:07 ► §

who were under the influence of psychedelics.

00:39:11 ► §

It was very interesting, too, to see sort of the net,

00:39:15 ► §

how LSD was networked around the country.

00:39:20 ► §

It did get into very well-known people were turned on by Claire Booth Luce

00:39:28 ► §

was one of them. She had quite a remarkable experience. And I don’t know if you know,

00:39:35 ► §

like Henry Luce, he was a pretty, you know, broomstick up his ass kind of guy. And so she gave him acid.

00:39:47 ► §

And he was a very devout Catholic.

00:39:49 ► §

And she said he was 15 hours on his knees

00:39:52 ► §

praying that he would survive.

00:39:56 ► §

And a lot of the Hollywood people

00:39:59 ► §

got involved in the networking.

00:40:03 ► §

Cary Grant was one of them, particularly.

00:40:08 ► §

And people,

00:40:13 ► §

heads of different kinds of industries,

00:40:16 ► §

I was familiar with.

00:40:19 ► §

I turned on a few of them, too.

00:40:22 ► §

And it was very interesting

00:40:23 ► §

how one session

00:40:27 ► §

would change how a whole company was run.

00:40:31 ► §

I turned this guy on.

00:40:32 ► §

He was really a toughie.

00:40:35 ► §

But he had something there

00:40:37 ► §

that he was intrigued by

00:40:39 ► §

my whole attitude.

00:40:43 ► §

He couldn’t figure out what.

00:40:45 ► §

And I said, well, I was an uptight, really.

00:40:48 ► §

I mean, all I was was one big IQ walking around

00:40:51 ► §

before I put it on.

00:40:53 ► §

It was just like I was nothing but brain.

00:40:56 ► §

And I was a basket case.

00:40:59 ► §

And so I told him that.

00:41:01 ► §

And I guess he thought, well,

00:41:02 ► §

hell, if it made you into a human being,

00:41:05 ► §

maybe it can make me into a human being.

00:41:07 ► §

And he did, and he owned his own company.

00:41:11 ► §

And he changed that whole company around

00:41:13 ► §

where people were teaching people below them

00:41:17 ► §

what their skills were and what their knowledge was.

00:41:22 ► §

So everybody in the company was teaching somebody below them

00:41:26 ► §

to take over their jobs eventually.

00:41:29 ► §

It was an amazing thing, and they didn’t have hours anymore.

00:41:32 ► §

People would come in and work when they wanted to.

00:41:35 ► §

And it became a real family.

00:41:39 ► §

And this was from one guy taking LSD.

00:41:42 ► §

All the employees never had LSD.

00:41:42 ► §

from one guy taking LSD.

00:41:44 ► §

All the employees never had LSD.

00:41:47 ► §

Make that clear.

00:41:50 ► §

But just from that he owned the company and the changes that he instituted.

00:41:53 ► §

And of course, I was very instrumental

00:41:55 ► §

in suggesting to him

00:41:57 ► §

what kinds of things could be done.

00:41:59 ► §

The atmosphere in that place was just amazing.

00:42:02 ► §

And there was another place down in San Diego

00:42:04 ► §

where the guy who owned the company was turned on.

00:42:09 ► §

And he also changed his whole company

00:42:11 ► §

the way the whole thing ran.

00:42:13 ► §

And then they started doing profit sharing.

00:42:15 ► §

And they just became like a big extended family.

00:42:20 ► §

So there’s all kinds of history.

00:42:24 ► §

Okay. What were the results of the positive? What were some of the things? family. So there’s all kinds of histories.

00:42:26 ► §

What were the results of the positive? What were some of the things?

00:42:28 ► §

Well, what was so remarkable was that, now I should tell you a little bit about how sick

00:42:37 ► §

these kids were. They were in a back ward in the hospital. They did not relate to each other.

00:42:46 ► §

Many of them were in camisoles 24 hours a day,

00:42:49 ► §

tied up because they were violent.

00:42:53 ► §

Most of them didn’t communicate.

00:42:56 ► §

Many of them just did the whirling

00:42:58 ► §

and bumping into themselves and other people.

00:43:01 ► §

The place was pandemonium.

00:43:02 ► §

It was like cartoons of Bedlam from the Middle Ages.

00:43:07 ► §

It was just trying to keep the place clean, as all the staff did. There wasn’t really any treatment

00:43:13 ► §

for them. You know, this was in the very early, this is the late 50s, so there weren’t any of

00:43:19 ► §

the medications available either. Well, the first patient that we did,

00:43:26 ► §

the psychiatrist,

00:43:28 ► §

he said, I said,

00:43:29 ► §

well, like, who should we start with?

00:43:30 ► §

And he said,

00:43:31 ► §

well, Nancy, she’s dying,

00:43:34 ► §

so why don’t you start with her?

00:43:36 ► §

Because if she dies, you know,

00:43:38 ► §

there won’t be any loss

00:43:39 ► §

because she’s dying anyway.

00:43:41 ► §

She had a lot of miroseness where she couldn’t

00:43:46 ► §

where she was so withdrawn

00:43:48 ► §

that even if they injected

00:43:50 ► §

her with nutrients

00:43:52 ► §

her body wouldn’t

00:43:53 ► §

absorb them. She would slough off

00:43:56 ► §

anything. And she was a skin and bones.

00:43:59 ► §

She weighed

00:44:00 ► §

like 40 pounds or something.

00:44:02 ► §

And she was black and blue.

00:44:03 ► §

She looked like a skeleton.

00:44:05 ► §

She was 11.

00:44:08 ► §

And she was tied down 24 hours a day.

00:44:12 ► §

If she was let loose, she would tear her eyeballs out

00:44:16 ► §

or, you know, mash herself.

00:44:18 ► §

So that was our first patient.

00:44:22 ► §

I’m like, oh, no.

00:44:22 ► §

was our first patient.

00:44:26 ► §

And so I thought, well,

00:44:31 ► §

I was always a risk taker.

00:44:35 ► §

So, you know,

00:44:38 ► §

I gave them the same doses that we were giving adults. I didn’t give them any less. We were using 500 mics

00:44:42 ► §

with them.

00:44:46 ► §

Because the idea was, you know, you have to use enough

00:44:47 ► §

to get the jet propulsion

00:44:50 ► §

going so that they don’t get into

00:44:51 ► §

conflicts. But he’s just like,

00:44:53 ► §

they don’t have any control over

00:44:55 ► §

stopping it.

00:44:57 ► §

And so she started

00:44:59 ► §

feeling the effects of it

00:45:01 ► §

after about 20, 25 minutes.

00:45:03 ► §

We did it IM.

00:45:05 ► §

And so she started groaning and howling.

00:45:10 ► §

And we had a room set up

00:45:13 ► §

where we did all our sessions.

00:45:14 ► §

It was actually the visitor’s room

00:45:16 ► §

that we used for sessions.

00:45:18 ► §

And she started howling.

00:45:21 ► §

It was like an animal that was wounded.

00:45:24 ► §

And howl and howl and howl.

00:45:28 ► §

It was treacherous to listen to her.

00:45:30 ► §

We would hold her, do everything out of the sun, nothing.

00:45:33 ► §

And so finally, after about six hours,

00:45:36 ► §

my frustration, I took her and looked at her

00:45:39 ► §

and just screamed at her,

00:45:40 ► §

Nancy, how fucking long are you going to scream and moan like this? I can’t take it anymore.

00:45:46 ► §

And she stopped and looked at me and she had a lisp and she said, Gowie, I have a long way to go,

00:45:55 ► §

so just leave me the hell alone. And she went back to howling again. That’s the first communication she had ever made with anybody. Wow.

00:46:06 ► §

And from then on, boy,

00:46:08 ► §

what a trip we had with her

00:46:10 ► §

because she was so bright

00:46:11 ► §

and she was a challenge.

00:46:14 ► §

But, you know, after a number of sessions,

00:46:17 ► §

she was having experiences

00:46:18 ► §

like all the sucks we would have.

00:46:21 ► §

You know, like it was…

00:46:34 ► §

they would have. One day we were going down and she said, well, the kids all knew when we were going to have a session. All the kids that were in the project all wanted to be

00:46:38 ► §

their turn. They didn’t want to wait. And so she was bustling down there and getting in there and so one of the other kids

00:46:47 ► §

was trying to get in

00:46:48 ► §

and she said,

00:46:49 ► §

you don’t belong in this room.

00:46:52 ► §

This is where we get to see God.

00:46:55 ► §

And they would verbalize.

00:46:57 ► §

They would verbalize completely

00:46:59 ► §

and they would talk about,

00:47:01 ► §

you know,

00:47:02 ► §

we’re all one

00:47:03 ► §

and God is love

00:47:04 ► §

and, you know,

00:47:04 ► §

all the stuff that people talk about. And these were kids, you know, we’re all one and God is love and, you know, all this stuff that people talk about.

00:47:07 ► §

And these were kids, you know, young, young kids

00:47:09 ► §

who had never been functional in their life.

00:47:13 ► §

So it was amazing.

00:47:15 ► §

They had the same results that anybody else did.

00:47:20 ► §

It took, because they would go back, you know,

00:47:23 ► §

you go here, here, and then you come back.

00:47:26 ► §

But we did as many as, I think, as many as like 19 or 21 sessions or something.

00:47:34 ► §

Gary, can you tell a story about the girl that you had to tell that was being shut down by the government?

00:47:40 ► §

Oh, yeah. Oh, that was awful.

00:47:45 ► §

She was an amazing gal.

00:47:47 ► §

I just adored her.

00:47:49 ► §

She was about 14.

00:47:53 ► §

Very, very…

00:47:54 ► §

She was crippled and she was blind.

00:47:58 ► §

And her skin was all diseased.

00:48:01 ► §

And she was a twirler.

00:48:04 ► §

And all she would do was twirl all day long

00:48:07 ► §

and bang into things.

00:48:08 ► §

And she would sort of warble as she twirled.

00:48:12 ► §

And she was always black and blue.

00:48:14 ► §

So every once in a while,

00:48:16 ► §

she would have to be tied down for a while

00:48:18 ► §

because she would be so self-destructive.

00:48:22 ► §

She had the most awesome experiences

00:48:24 ► §

that I’ve ever

00:48:26 ► §

sat with of anybody. I mean, she was

00:48:27 ► §

amazing. I’ll always remember her hands

00:48:30 ► §

because when

00:48:32 ► §

she would break through into

00:48:34 ► §

transcendental

00:48:36 ► §

consciousness, for lack of

00:48:38 ► §

a better word, her hands

00:48:40 ► §

became healing hands.

00:48:42 ► §

And I’d love to just sit

00:48:44 ► §

there and have her touch me. It was just awesome to feel hands. And I loved to just sit there and have her touch me.

00:48:45 ► §

It was just awesome to feel her.

00:48:49 ► §

And all the sitters wanted to be in

00:48:52 ► §

our patio sessions

00:48:53 ► §

because we got so much out of it.

00:48:56 ► §

And she would touch us.

00:48:58 ► §

She was wonderful.

00:49:01 ► §

And she became very functional.

00:49:03 ► §

She stopped all the curling.

00:49:04 ► §

She talked coherently

00:49:06 ► §

she would help other kids on the ward

00:49:09 ► §

she would try to help them

00:49:10 ► §

and she was blind

00:49:11 ► §

but she became a real caretaker on the ward

00:49:14 ► §

well finally

00:49:16 ► §

when we couldn’t

00:49:18 ► §

do the sessions anymore

00:49:20 ► §

I had to tell all these kids

00:49:22 ► §

so

00:49:24 ► §

I had to tell her and kids. So I had to tell her, and so she listened, and

00:49:27 ► §

she said, well, do you know who has LSD? And I said, yes. She said, well, what’s his name?

00:49:36 ► §

And I told her, and where does he live? Well, I said, he lives in San Francisco. He’s the

00:49:41 ► §

rep for Sandoz. We got all our LSD straight from Sandoz.

00:49:46 ► §

And she said, well,

00:49:47 ► §

I have an idea

00:49:49 ► §

that just might work.

00:49:53 ► §

You go

00:49:54 ► §

up and find him

00:49:55 ► §

and you tell him

00:49:57 ► §

that you’re there with a message

00:50:00 ► §

from Patty Simpson.

00:50:02 ► §

And Patty Simpson says,

00:50:03 ► §

please give Gary some LSD because Patty Simpson. And Patty Simpson says, please give Gary some LSD

00:50:06 ► §

because Patty Simpson really needs it.

00:50:13 ► §

I mean, just remembering that

00:50:15 ► §

just, you know,

00:50:17 ► §

throws chills at my spine

00:50:19 ► §

because how do you tell kids

00:50:22 ► §

that the government is fucked?

00:50:24 ► §

You know, crazy.

00:50:27 ► §

Any of those government people could come and talk with these kids.

00:50:33 ► §

And that kind of work that Gary did with young children

00:50:36 ► §

will most likely never be done again

00:50:38 ► §

due to all of the restrictions now in place.

00:50:41 ► §

Valid restrictions in my opinion, but restrictions nonetheless,

00:50:45 ► §

which prevent this type of research being done with children.

00:50:49 ► §

Fortunately, Gary did write several papers about his research, and while most of his

00:50:54 ► §

papers have now been moved to some archive that’s somewhere in the bowels of Purdue University

00:50:59 ► §

in Indiana, well, about ten years before he died, Gary gave me several of his more important papers to

00:51:05 ► §

post on the net. And today, if you go to psychedelicsalon.com and click on the salonners

00:51:12 ► §

link in the top menu, you’ll be taken to a page that in the right sidebar provides a link to where

00:51:18 ► §

I’ve posted those papers. So check them out if you get a chance. I think that they’ll really amaze you at what he accomplished, even if you’re not a scientist.

00:51:28 ► §

As I said, I was fortunate to become a close friend of Gary’s, and his stories about these children never ceased to amaze me.

00:51:36 ► §

One day, in fact, he told me that after an LSD session with the children, one of them said to him,

00:51:42 ► §

One day there will be more of us than there are of them.

00:51:46 ► §

And a little bit of trivia for the world travelers among us. When Timothy Leary and his little band

00:51:53 ► §

were expelled from Mexico, they went to Antigua, where they stayed in a motel called the Bucket of

00:52:00 ► §

Blood. Well, a few years ago, I checked on Google Earth and it was still there. So if you

00:52:07 ► §

ever go to Antigua, you can experience a little psychedelic history by staying in that legendary

00:52:12 ► §

hotel. And that, by the way, is where they were when their stash of LSD, the one they so foolishly

00:52:19 ► §

buried on a beach, was washed out to sea. Yet one day, perhaps hundreds of vials of Sandoz acid may yet wash up on some beach.

00:52:30 ► §

Now, you can hear that and other stories by Gary and Myron in past episodes of these podcasts,

00:52:36 ► §

and, well, I think that some of my podcasts also include stories of the days when Gary Fisher was a close friend of Aldous and Laura Huxley.

00:52:44 ► §

of the days when Gary Fisher was a close friend of Aldous and Laura Huxley.

00:52:51 ► §

And also in several early podcasts, both Myron and Gary tell stories about their interactions with Timothy Leary.

00:52:52 ► §

And I think those stories are also well worth the time to search out among the interviews

00:52:57 ► §

that I did with each of them.

00:53:00 ► §

Now, I think that it’s time for us to travel across the Atlantic and hear from a man who, in my opinion, did even more than Terence McKenna to revitalize the psychedelic movement.

00:53:12 ► §

And he is Fraser Clark, who actually became a legend while he was still alive.

00:53:18 ► §

Many of us talk the talk, but in every pore of his being, Fraser also walked the walk.

00:53:23 ► §

In every pore of his being, Frazier also walked the walk.

00:53:34 ► §

What I’m going to play right now is part of the talk that Frazier Clark gave here in the States at Stanford University in 1996 when he was a guest lecturer there.

00:53:40 ► §

And his talk was titled, Rave Culture and the End of the World as We Know It.

00:53:48 ► §

So there we were with our zippy philosophy. I was putting out a magazine at that time called Encyclopedia Psychedelica, and I was predicting a mass outbreak of consciousness raising among the

00:53:54 ► §

youth. And boom, just as we were printing that, the acid house party scene, now called the rave

00:54:01 ► §

scene, burst through my door. Well, let me back up a little bit and put this again in some context.

00:54:09 ► §

The reason so many people became hippies, including me, in the 60s,

00:54:14 ► §

there were three components to it.

00:54:17 ► §

There was a political component, there was an ecological component,

00:54:21 ► §

and there was a personal spiritual component.

00:54:28 ► §

The political component I’ve kind of touched on and that was basically that we saw politics, the old competitive politics

00:54:32 ► §

as just that, competitive and destructive. You know, the opposition

00:54:36 ► §

is very dutious to oppose. I mean, maybe it worked

00:54:40 ► §

300 years ago, but it’s definitely not the system we need today.

00:54:44 ► §

So hippies are saying a plague and all that.

00:54:46 ► §

We don’t want anything to do with that kind of competitive system.

00:54:49 ► §

The ecological component was this.

00:54:52 ► §

When, if you remember, Tim Leary advised everybody to turn on, tune in, and drop out.

00:54:58 ► §

Drop out of the sick system, which was becoming a threat to the planet.

00:55:02 ► §

That was basically the point.

00:55:04 ► §

So when you made the decision, as I did in 1965,

00:55:07 ► §

after I took my honours degree in psychology,

00:55:09 ► §

to become a hippie,

00:55:11 ► §

really it was a brave personal decision

00:55:14 ► §

to basically reduce my own personal level of consumption

00:55:18 ► §

by about 70%.

00:55:20 ► §

I decided I want to have a fancy sports car.

00:55:24 ► §

I want to have my own private motor launch,

00:55:27 ► §

I’ll give up that lifestyle, I’ll become a traveller, I’ll see the world, I’ll

00:55:31 ► §

write Zen poetry, I’ll live on beaches, I’ll read fine literature and I’ll go for

00:55:36 ► §

that. I’ll lower my consumption level by about 70% and that’s what I’ve done ever

00:55:42 ► §

since basically. That was what the planet needed and that’s what I’ve done ever since basically that was what the planet needed

00:55:46 ► §

and that’s what the hippie opted for

00:55:49 ► §

and I’ve lived that life ever since

00:55:51 ► §

until I became a zippy basically in the mid 80s

00:55:54 ► §

and I had to invent the zippy concept really

00:55:57 ► §

to kind of explain to myself who I was

00:56:00 ► §

and who my friends were and why

00:56:02 ► §

now I put it to you that if everybody at that

00:56:06 ► §

time in the 60s who were armed with the same information about the planet had made the

00:56:12 ► §

same decision, if everybody had voluntarily opted to reduce their consumption level and

00:56:17 ► §

their expectations, we would now be living on a very beautiful, harmoniously developed

00:56:22 ► §

planet with none of these problems we have now. But people didn’t

00:56:26 ► §

have the courage and so

00:56:28 ► §

now I think they’re going to have to live

00:56:29 ► §

through the objective

00:56:32 ► §

result of

00:56:33 ► §

they are not making those decisions then.

00:56:36 ► §

They’re now, I think, being forced

00:56:37 ► §

to lower their consumption level.

00:56:40 ► §

It’s not so clear here

00:56:41 ► §

but it’s coming and it’s very clear in Europe

00:56:44 ► §

and a lot of the West.

00:56:45 ► §

Now the personal spiritual component brings us directly to the rave.

00:56:50 ► §

The hippie conclusion was that mankind, the Western man, was basically stuck in his head,

00:57:00 ► §

and that the only chance for the planet, because the Western system was a threat to the planet,

00:57:05 ► §

the only chance for the planet was the discovery, or more likely the rediscovery,

00:57:12 ► §

of some kind of technique or some kind of technology which would one by one,

00:57:18 ► §

through all the people in the West, individually, one by one,

00:57:21 ► §

put them through a process where they got out of their heads

00:57:25 ► §

and back into their heart and their body.

00:57:29 ► §

In other words, as George Gurdjieff, a great teacher in the early 20th century, said,

00:57:34 ► §

he called mankind three brain beings.

00:57:37 ► §

We have an intellectual brain, an emotional brain, and a physical moving brain.

00:57:41 ► §

And these brains are equal in every way.

00:57:43 ► §

One is not more important than the other.

00:57:45 ► §

But they should work in harmony, all three together,

00:57:48 ► §

as a team, cooperating.

00:57:51 ► §

Now, that was the hippie analysis

00:57:53 ► §

of what would have to happen in the West.

00:57:55 ► §

We would need some kind of strategy,

00:57:57 ► §

some kind of technology, some kind of technique

00:57:59 ► §

to enable everybody to get this balance again.

00:58:03 ► §

Today, every high street in Britain is offering just such a commodity,

00:58:11 ► §

rave, non-stop, rhythmic, African-style, shamanic dance music,

00:58:17 ► §

which is taking an entire generation out of their heads

00:58:21 ► §

and back into their hearts and their bodies.

00:58:25 ► §

So that is actually happening to hundreds of thousands of young people all across Europe,

00:58:30 ► §

and it’s now spreading into America.

00:58:34 ► §

So, this is Kate, and I’m going to be talking about trans states,

00:58:41 ► §

so I thought it would be a good idea if we had an actual example.

00:58:46 ► §

Young people dance like this for hours on end.

00:58:49 ► §

I’ll be coming to that very soon.

00:58:51 ► §

Anyway, there I was.

00:58:52 ► §

I was editing and publishing the encyclopedia and predicting a mass consciousness-raising

00:58:59 ► §

outbreak among young people when suddenly these two young guys, Scooby Doobies they were called,

00:59:07 ► §

they were a design team and they’d found the magazine I was doing, which was kind of a,

00:59:13 ► §

I don’t know what you’d call it, an idealistic, small circulation, hippie-oriented magazine.

00:59:20 ► §

And they found that and they thought that was the message they wanted.

00:59:23 ► §

And they were ravers.

00:59:24 ► §

They explained to me they were ravers

00:59:25 ► §

And they came into my office and they were dressed very colorfully

00:59:29 ► §

Totally unlike the punk thing that was

00:59:32 ► §

Totally fashionable then they had no rings through their noses. None of this stuff

00:59:36 ► §

They were very colorfully dressed and they explained to me that they were going to acid house parties and they were raving all night

00:59:43 ► §

and

00:59:44 ► §

They got me

00:59:45 ► §

to go into my very first

00:59:48 ► §

as they were called then acid house

00:59:49 ► §

party now called raves

00:59:51 ► §

and as soon as I saw

00:59:53 ► §

my first acid house

00:59:56 ► §

party I knew this

00:59:57 ► §

was the consciousness raising

00:59:59 ► §

movement

01:00:01 ► §

the beginning of this very thing that I was predicting

01:00:04 ► §

and praying for

01:00:05 ► §

really

01:00:05 ► §

my first rave I went to was put on

01:00:09 ► §

by Tony Colston Hayter

01:00:10 ► §

who ran a posse

01:00:13 ► §

called Sunrise

01:00:14 ► §

and he was the acid house king

01:00:16 ► §

of that time when rave

01:00:18 ► §

burst out in England, this is 1987

01:00:21 ► §

1988

01:00:22 ► §

so he was on the TV

01:00:24 ► §

he was the famous acid house king.

01:00:28 ► §

There was 20,000 kids in a field,

01:00:32 ► §

and they were going for it all night.

01:00:35 ► §

That was the very first one I went to.

01:00:39 ► §

I remember him getting up, interrupting the music, which is quite rare,

01:00:45 ► §

and announcing that, he said,

01:00:47 ► §

they’ve hit us with 12 injunctions to stop this,

01:00:50 ► §

but they haven’t managed to stop it.

01:00:53 ► §

So I also picked up that there was a strong energy behind this.

01:00:56 ► §

It was young people determined on doing what they wanted to do,

01:01:00 ► §

as long as it didn’t harm anyone else.

01:01:01 ► §

And there was an element of rebelliousness

01:01:05 ► §

that hit us with 12 injunctions and they

01:01:07 ► §

haven’t managed to stop us so I thought

01:01:09 ► §

I paid attention

01:01:12 ► §

what did it look like

01:01:15 ► §

it was a massive

01:01:17 ► §

field with 20,000 people dancing

01:01:19 ► §

they had a big dipper, they had a ferris wheel

01:01:22 ► §

they had stalls selling champagne

01:01:24 ► §

hot dog stands all the way around this field. My first impression was this should be surrounded by

01:01:29 ► §

a massive Woodstock hippie festival with the rave in the middle. Perfect. But there were

01:01:36 ► §

differences and I don’t want to, I mean, this is, some of this is my theory. Not every

01:01:42 ► §

raver would necessarily agree with what I’m saying.

01:01:48 ► §

In fact, if you stay for the question and answer, you’ll probably hear a few objections.

01:01:54 ► §

So here are some of the differences between raves and the hippie thing.

01:01:58 ► §

The main thing to notice is that these ravers were yuppies.

01:02:03 ► §

I remember that very first rave, I sat down with a group of young people,

01:02:04 ► §

and this girl was saying to me,

01:02:11 ► §

isn’t it great? You work really hard all week and then you rave really hard all weekend.

01:02:17 ► §

So she was quite happy, she accepted the whole competitive system, she was doing quite well within it.

01:02:20 ► §

She was adding raving at the weekend as her weekend thing.

01:02:22 ► §

She was not trying to change society.

01:02:25 ► §

These were yuppies.

01:02:26 ► §

They were smart.

01:02:27 ► §

They were intelligent.

01:02:28 ► §

They were savvy.

01:02:30 ► §

And they were entrepreneurial.

01:02:31 ► §

If you think of Tony Colson.

01:02:33 ► §

This was 20,000 kids.

01:02:37 ► §

They were paying about $40 to work it out.

01:02:43 ► §

He was taking $800,000 in one night in a big open field just outside London.

01:02:45 ► §

The take was $800,000.

01:02:47 ► §

So this was not a hippie-inspired thing.

01:02:51 ► §

This was young, yuppie, entrepreneurial-based.

01:02:56 ► §

Now, you probably all know about Mrs. Thatcher,

01:02:58 ► §

and you’ve probably got mixed opinions,

01:03:01 ► §

but Mrs. Thatcher’s main call was for a revival in England of the entrepreneurial spirit.

01:03:04 ► §

If she had really meant that, then she

01:03:08 ► §

would have been behind the whole Raver thing and it would now be

01:03:12 ► §

Britain’s greatest export to the world.

01:03:16 ► §

But somehow she tried to stamp it out

01:03:19 ► §

in fact. If she had supported it, it would now be Britain’s greatest

01:03:23 ► §

cultural export.

01:03:27 ► §

But what it boiled down to was Mrs. Thatcher’s message was actually puritanical. It was mean-spirited.

01:03:35 ► §

She was protecting her own conservative-supporting industrial barons and the whole status quo.

01:03:41 ► §

She wasn’t really encouraging the entrepreneurial spirit

01:03:45 ► §

when it got right down to people just doing it.

01:03:48 ► §

And so when these kids, these yuppies who were part of the system up until then,

01:03:53 ► §

saw the full power of the state turned against them, for what?

01:03:58 ► §

For dancing? Or for organizing it and then charging somebody to go into it?

01:04:02 ► §

Totally entrepreneurial?

01:04:04 ► §

They were shocked and they began to question the system.

01:04:07 ► §

And they began to be radicalized.

01:04:09 ► §

And that is the history of the rave scene ever since.

01:04:13 ► §

That if she had gone along with it, I think now it would be a very controllable new kind of entertainment.

01:04:22 ► §

But she didn’t.

01:04:23 ► §

She fought it.

01:04:26 ► §

And it was radicalized,

01:04:30 ► §

and now there’s quite a large element of social protest or desire for social change within it at its base.

01:04:34 ► §

In a way, it really isn’t fair of me to just play that rather serious talk by Fraser,

01:04:41 ► §

because if you knew him, you also knew that Fraser was a very joyous person.

01:04:46 ► §

However, I do like his talk at Stanford because it shows what a thoughtful person he also was.

01:04:53 ► §

As I said earlier, I think that Fraser may be even more important to where we are today than

01:04:58 ► §

Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna, particularly in regards to the worldwide dance and festival communities.

01:05:10 ► §

As the really old-timers know, Terrence stepped out of the shadows of Esalen once he began making appearances on what was then called the Rave Circuit.

01:05:15 ► §

And if I’m not mistaken, it was Fraser Clark at his Megatripless Club in London where some

01:05:21 ► §

of this first took place.

01:05:23 ► §

And you can hear one of those appearances by Terrence at the Megatriplice

01:05:27 ► §

in podcast number 335.

01:05:30 ► §

Now, one of the reasons that I want to be sure that you don’t forget about Fraser Clark

01:05:34 ► §

is so that you also remember how risky it was back in the 90s

01:05:38 ► §

to even go to a rave, let alone produce one.

01:05:42 ► §

Someday I hope to be able to podcast a series of interviews with people who were instrumental in producing some of the early rave, let alone produce one. Someday I hope to be able to podcast a series of interviews with

01:05:45 ► §

people who were instrumental in producing some of the early raves, but not today. Right now,

01:05:52 ► §

it’s time to move on to the one and only Terrence McKenna. And if you go to the podcast page on our

01:05:59 ► §

website, in the right sidebar is a drop-down menu titled Categories. There, under the subsection labeled People, when you scroll down to the Ts,

01:06:09 ► §

you will see that next to Terrence McKenna’s name is the number 235,

01:06:13 ► §

which is the number of podcasts here in the salon featuring the barred McKenna.

01:06:18 ► §

So how, I wondered, do I come up with something short that gives a good representation of Terrence McKenna?

01:06:26 ► §

Well, for me at least, Terrence was the man who brought DMT into the light.

01:06:31 ► §

So I wanted to play one of his descriptions of a DMT experience.

01:06:36 ► §

However, there was so much more to Terrence than just DMT.

01:06:40 ► §

So what I’ve done is to take the easy way out.

01:06:43 ► §

I’ve got several hundred little McKenna soundb bites that I’ve set aside while working on these podcasts,

01:06:49 ► §

and they are anything from five seconds long to several minutes long.

01:06:54 ► §

In fact, I’ve converted around a hundred of them to MP3 format and linked to them on that Slauners page that I just mentioned.

01:07:02 ► §

So what I’ve done right now is, for this little Terrence McKenna bit

01:07:06 ► §

is to at random pick a few sound bites and place them both before and after the DMT bit.

01:07:13 ► §

There’s no real rhyme or reason to this collection of sound bites but

01:07:17 ► §

it’s still fun to listen to the one and only Terrence McKenna.

01:07:22 ► §

I’ve always been sort of a knowledge freak.

01:07:25 ► §

I mean, I was a very weird kid.

01:07:28 ► §

Well, yeah, but how much time

01:07:30 ► §

have you spent loaded?

01:07:31 ► §

That’s the important question.

01:07:35 ► §

To go

01:07:35 ► §

from birth to the grave

01:07:37 ► §

without ever encountering

01:07:40 ► §

DMT

01:07:40 ► §

is, to my mind, like going from

01:07:43 ► §

birth to the grave without ever having a sexual experience.

01:07:47 ► §

It means you skated through life. You never got it.

01:07:53 ► §

I mean I think of the mainland as Blade Runner land. It’s amphetamine land. It’s availability

01:08:01 ► §

land. It’s strontium 90 land. It’s newt land.

01:08:09 ► §

It’s just a horrific scene.

01:08:14 ► §

It’s not like camping in cornfields waiting for flying saucers.

01:08:15 ► §

If you camp in the cornfield and take six dried grams,

01:08:19 ► §

it will find you.

01:08:21 ► §

will find you.

01:08:28 ► §

And yet, clearly, I’m some kind of cannabis-smoking lunatic.

01:08:30 ► §

So how did that happen?

01:08:32 ► §

Well, it’s just the principle of the idiot savant, I think.

01:08:37 ► §

We are beginning to embed ourselves

01:08:41 ► §

into a cultural membrane of some sort.

01:08:46 ► §

You know, a 10-minute DMT trip is worth 20 years of academic pharmacology,

01:08:54 ► §

art history, psychology, and all this other malarkey.

01:08:58 ► §

Because then you just say, okay, I got it, I got it.

01:09:02 ► §

The things I encounter that I call elves or gnomes,

01:09:08 ► §

it’s just a gloss.

01:09:10 ► §

I mean, they’re small and they have the archetype.

01:09:13 ► §

They’re more like leprechauns,

01:09:15 ► §

and this maybe raises a racial issue.

01:09:21 ► §

And they make things,

01:09:23 ► §

and they live in domed spaces,

01:09:26 ► §

and you know the mythology of elves is that they live under hills,

01:09:31 ► §

and they’re master craftsmen, makers of jewelry and machines and stuff like that.

01:09:39 ► §

That is exactly the deal, and they’re dead souls is what they are. Interestingly, the whole notion of fairyland is when St. Patrick arrived in Ireland to convert the pagan Irish to Christianity, they were practicing what is called the fairy faith. They believed in little people. They believed

01:10:07 ► §

they were the souls of the departed. They believed they were everywhere around us, and they believed

01:10:12 ► §

that certain people who had the eye could see these fairies. And they believed this with such

01:10:20 ► §

conviction that Patrick quickly realized that he was not going to get anywhere

01:10:25 ► §

converting the Irish

01:10:27 ► §

unless he made a place

01:10:29 ► §

for this phenomenon.

01:10:31 ► §

So he invented purgatory.

01:10:34 ► §

Purgatory was invented

01:10:36 ► §

by St. Patrick. It was not

01:10:38 ► §

church doctrine before

01:10:40 ► §

that time.

01:10:42 ► §

And he then,

01:10:43 ► §

and if you are not catholic or don’t truck in this domain

01:10:49 ► §

you may not know what purgatory is is a place exactly like hell except you eventually get out

01:10:58 ► §

and and it’s where you do penance for your sins. Well, he was so successful converting the pagan Irish with this concept

01:11:08 ► §

that when word reached the Holy See, the Vatican,

01:11:13 ► §

it was made church dogma,

01:11:16 ► §

and then it was very successfully used to convert the pagan Slavs,

01:11:20 ► §

who also had a belief in a kind of fairyland.

01:11:24 ► §

who also had a belief in a kind of fairyland.

01:11:32 ► §

So I don’t know what this thing about dead souls is puzzling to me.

01:11:38 ► §

It even with my predilection for the peculiar and the psychedelic,

01:11:41 ► §

I find it hard to completely embrace the notion that these are ancestors alive in some other dimension

01:11:48 ► §

but in some ways that is the most conservative explanation after all if

01:11:55 ► §

you believe they’re extraterrestrials who came from the stars then you’re

01:12:01 ► §

supposing and hypothesizing all kinds of things. Since they are interested

01:12:07 ► §

in human beings, since they can converse with human beings, since they seem to know our boundaries

01:12:14 ► §

and limitations, they must be some kind of human being. And then the choices are they are a prenatal form of existence.

01:12:25 ► §

In other words, souls that never incarnated into a body

01:12:29 ► §

and are like up there waiting for the stork or something.

01:12:34 ► §

Or they are some future state of humanity

01:12:39 ► §

where apparently we no longer have bodies

01:12:42 ► §

and we’ve changed ourselves into self-dribbling jeweled basketballs

01:12:46 ► §

for God knows what reason,

01:12:48 ► §

or they are post-life forms.

01:12:55 ► §

They are people who once walked the earth as you and I do,

01:12:59 ► §

but have gone beyond into this other circumstance.

01:13:04 ► §

One of the things that is, to me,

01:13:06 ► §

almost as puzzling as the elfin nature of the DMT encounter

01:13:11 ► §

is that after you’ve been in there four or five times,

01:13:15 ► §

and it takes a while because at first it’s just absolute shock and disbelief.

01:13:21 ► §

I mean, you bring very little out of it.

01:13:23 ► §

You’re just appalled, and that’s about all

01:13:25 ► §

you can say about it. But after a while, I realized that the motif of the DMT encounter,

01:13:36 ► §

and I guess I should describe it briefly, when you burst into the DMT space you have the impression that you’re in a domed space

01:13:45 ► §

approximately the size of

01:13:48 ► §

the length of this room but round

01:13:50 ► §

with a somewhat lower ceiling

01:13:52 ► §

indirectly lit

01:13:54 ► §

warm

01:13:55 ► §

comfortable and the moment you

01:13:58 ► §

get your bearings they’re

01:14:00 ► §

there in fact as you

01:14:02 ► §

break into that space they

01:14:03 ► §

cheer and some of you may know that song by the

01:14:08 ► §

pink floyd from years ago the gnomes have learned a new way to say hooray so you break into this

01:14:18 ► §

space they scream their greeting and while you’re just trying to get oriented

01:14:25 ► §

they come bounding forward

01:14:27 ► §

somewhat like dogs actually

01:14:30 ► §

and they begin to

01:14:32 ► §

lick your face and crawl

01:14:34 ► §

all over you and jump in and out of your

01:14:36 ► §

body and they say

01:14:38 ► §

we love you, we love you

01:14:40 ► §

you send so many, you come

01:14:42 ► §

so rarely, welcome

01:14:44 ► §

welcome so you’re like you send so many you come so rarely welcome, welcome

01:14:45 ► §

and so you’re like

01:14:47 ► §

you know

01:14:49 ► §

trying to take your pulse

01:14:51 ► §

trying to make sure you’re breathing

01:14:53 ► §

because you really, you have the impression

01:14:55 ► §

this is so serious

01:14:57 ► §

that I may be dead

01:14:59 ► §

I may have just simply

01:15:01 ► §

killed myself

01:15:02 ► §

ten seconds ago

01:15:04 ► §

and this is what’s happening they use their voices I may have just simply killed myself 10 seconds ago,

01:15:07 ► §

and this is what’s happening.

01:15:11 ► §

They use their voices to make objects.

01:15:14 ► §

They speak a language which you do not hear,

01:15:15 ► §

but which you see.

01:15:18 ► §

You not only see it, you feel it. And so they use language to cause syntactical,

01:15:31 ► §

architectonic, techno structures to condense out of the air.

01:15:34 ► §

And they show you these things.

01:15:35 ► §

They’re proud of them.

01:15:40 ► §

They come bounding forward and jump up and down in front of you and say, Look at this! Look at this!

01:15:42 ► §

And they’re all competing like children to show you this stuff.

01:15:46 ► §

And as you direct your attention into one of these objects, you see beyond any power of

01:15:53 ► §

contradiction that this thing that they’re showing you is impossible. They’re constantly transforming

01:15:59 ► §

themselves in the most amazing way. And they’re showing you this stuff and they’re saying do what

01:16:07 ► §

we’re doing you can do this use your voice to make something and you’re like you know this is now 30

01:16:17 ► §

seconds into this experience reality has been obliterated and you’re just in this place well

01:16:25 ► §

and one can do this

01:16:29 ► §

and there is a

01:16:30 ► §

glossolalia and then these objects

01:16:32 ► §

condense out of the air

01:16:34 ► §

and the objects themselves are somehow

01:16:36 ► §

alive, you put one down

01:16:38 ► §

and they emit

01:16:40 ► §

sound and make

01:16:42 ► §

subsets of their own

01:16:44 ► §

type and all of this is just, you know, you’re just like They emit sound and make subsets of their own type.

01:16:45 ► §

And all of this is just, you know, you’re just like,

01:16:48 ► §

my God, what has happened?

01:16:51 ► §

The strange thing about DMT is it doesn’t affect your mind

01:16:55 ► §

in the ordinary sense so that you’re not ecstatic

01:16:58 ► §

or freed of anxiety or you’re exactly who you were

01:17:03 ► §

before this started happening with all your

01:17:06 ► §

neuroses fears doubts and you’re saying you know is this all right am i going to be okay

01:17:13 ► §

does it how long is it going to last so forth and so on but the point i wanted to make that i got

01:17:20 ► §

started on a few minutes ago is after many of these exposures to this,

01:17:26 ► §

I have realized, and I think I’m right,

01:17:30 ► §

that this environment into which you are catapulted,

01:17:35 ► §

bizarre as it is,

01:17:38 ► §

it is someone very strange.

01:17:41 ► §

It’s their idea of a reassuring environment

01:17:45 ► §

for a human being. They are

01:17:47 ► §

so marvelous to you

01:17:50 ► §

because you’ve never seen anything

01:17:52 ► §

like it. But on the other hand, you’ve just

01:17:54 ► §

been born into this

01:17:55 ► §

world. And trying

01:17:57 ► §

and this is why I think

01:18:00 ► §

perhaps it is a bardo.

01:18:02 ► §

Perhaps it is an after

01:18:04 ► §

death

01:18:04 ► §

I don’t know if maternity ward is quite

01:18:09 ► §

the phrase but it’s uh it’s uh it’s where you start your existence in this other dimension

01:18:16 ► §

but in the same way that a baby lying in a bassinet in a maternity ward could hardly conceive of growing up to drive Ferraris, collect art

01:18:26 ► §

and crush the competition

01:18:28 ► §

you lying there in this nursery

01:18:32 ► §

in this playpen

01:18:34 ► §

how can you extrapolate

01:18:36 ► §

what lies beyond that space

01:18:39 ► §

because clearly the entire space

01:18:40 ► §

has been prepared for baby

01:18:42 ► §

and you’re the baby

01:18:44 ► §

so you can’t figure out you know is this

01:18:48 ► §

the entirety of this universe or how far does it extend and i i suspect that when you die

01:18:56 ► §

this is what you get and that familiarity with the after death vehicle that DMT actually is a phenotoptic compound

01:19:06 ► §

and that this trip

01:19:09 ► §

is you are peaking over the edge

01:19:12 ► §

into eternity

01:19:13 ► §

and you know

01:19:14 ► §

questions you never thought

01:19:16 ► §

you would have answers to

01:19:18 ► §

are answered

01:19:19 ► §

just you know

01:19:21 ► §

is there life after death

01:19:22 ► §

you bet

01:19:23 ► §

next question

01:19:24 ► §

on that note Just, you know, is there life after death? You bet. Next question.

01:19:31 ► §

On that note, let’s go to dinner. Thank you.

01:19:38 ► §

I don’t consider myself Catholic in reflex,

01:19:41 ► §

and I’m trying to be a good anarchist, and I lean toward the idea that man is perfect but reading

01:19:46 ► §

about a group of people who absolutely believed and acted this out pushes you

01:19:54 ► §

up against it because you know if man is perfect theft is alright murder is

01:20:01 ► §

alright murder of your own children is alright

01:20:05 ► §

on and on and on

01:20:07 ► §

so then you think well then

01:20:08 ► §

so apparently I don’t think man is perfect

01:20:12 ► §

well then so where do I

01:20:14 ► §

draw the line

01:20:15 ► §

let me say to the group

01:20:18 ► §

as far as Amanita and Muscaria is concerned

01:20:20 ► §

don’t try this at home folks

01:20:22 ► §

I mean

01:20:23 ► §

it’s you know out there on the edge of the bardo.

01:20:29 ► §

As I say, I don’t think of myself as a guru.

01:20:33 ► §

I think of myself as a doorman.

01:20:37 ► §

I don’t, I should make it clear, you know, I don’t believe this stuff.

01:20:44 ► §

I don’t believe this stuff.

01:20:46 ► §

I don’t believe this stuff.

01:20:49 ► §

So says the bard McKenna.

01:20:52 ► §

And if you’ve been with us here in the salon for a while,

01:20:56 ► §

you’ve heard him say that a number of times in a number of different ways.

01:21:01 ► §

But I’ll let you be your own judge about the words and wisdom of Terrence McKenna.

01:21:05 ► §

For my part, well, I’m quite certain that he believed a good bit of what he had to say. And before I go, I’ll still play a couple more short sound bites from the man who

01:21:12 ► §

has become our favorite here in the salon. But first, there is one more person that we’re going

01:21:18 ► §

to hear from today, and that is the one and only Sasha Shulgin. While many of us think that the

01:21:24 ► §

person who first brought us all together was Terrence McKenna,

01:21:28 ► §

or maybe it was Timothy Leary for a few of the really old-timers here,

01:21:32 ► §

in my case it was Sasha Shulgin who played the most instrumental role

01:21:36 ► §

in my becoming involved with the psychedelic community.

01:21:39 ► §

As you may know, the first psychoactive substance that I took,

01:21:43 ► §

even before my first toke of cannabis, was MDMA.

01:21:48 ► §

And while Sasha Shogun didn’t actually invent MDMA,

01:21:51 ► §

he was the first person who resurrected it after laying dormant for many decades.

01:21:56 ► §

The paper that he wrote about it is what propelled it into the public mind,

01:22:00 ► §

and I know that there are a lot of people here in the salon, including myself, who have

01:22:05 ► §

danced under its influence all night. And while we may have danced for an hour or so without its

01:22:11 ► §

influence, I don’t think we would have danced all night. So, for me, there’s no question in my mind

01:22:18 ► §

that the original rave movement would never have taken off as fast and as big as it did without the influence of this important substance,

01:22:27 ► §

which is now being used, of course, to treat PTSD, among other things.

01:22:32 ► §

Sasha’s tireless work over many, many years in designing and testing

01:22:36 ► §

literally hundreds of psychoactive molecules

01:22:39 ► §

is completely unequaled in human history

01:22:42 ► §

and most likely will never be repeated.

01:22:45 ► §

If ever there was a person who deserved to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry,

01:22:50 ► §

it was Sascha Shulgin, the greatest chemist who has ever graced this planet.

01:22:55 ► §

Now, let’s have a few words of wisdom from our beloved Sascha.

01:23:01 ► §

There was a meeting last year when Dr. Hoffman came

01:23:05 ► §

and his opening sentence was,

01:23:06 ► §

you expected the shame and you’re going to get a chemist.

01:23:10 ► §

Actually, when I was first asked by Dr. Robert Gordon McCutcheon

01:23:14 ► §

to come here tonight and talk about whatever I wanted to do,

01:23:17 ► §

my first impression, as long as I allowed my first impression,

01:23:21 ► §

was to decline.

01:23:23 ► §

After all, I am a student of chemistry and of pharmacology

01:23:26 ► §

and not really a student of philosophy and religion.

01:23:29 ► §

And I felt I had probably contributed as much as I could last year

01:23:32 ► §

when I took chalk to blackboard and do hexagons and cryptamine rings

01:23:37 ► §

and gave my impression of what on a molecule caused it to do what.

01:23:43 ► §

But my wife intervened.

01:23:44 ► §

Why not tell them just why you

01:23:46 ► §

do what you do? It got me lost into an interesting question. I never had actually spoken to myself

01:23:52 ► §

and said, you know, why do you do what you do? The flippant answer is always at hand.

01:23:57 ► §

Well, one does it because it’s there to be done. In the Mount Everest routine, I climb

01:24:01 ► §

the mountain because it’s there to be climbed. But that is, of course, not the reason I do the research I do.

01:24:08 ► §

When I was questioned to come up in a seminar during a panel discussion, I placed special

01:24:13 ► §

emphasis on the word psychotomimetic. The word has been used quite a bit today, a term

01:24:17 ► §

that is usually used by the scientific community when they wish to speak about the psychedelic

01:24:22 ► §

drugs. The term psychedelic does not find a good audience in the psychiatric or in the chemical or in the medical literature.

01:24:30 ► §

It carries a meta-message of drug use, drug encouragement, drug proselytizing.

01:24:37 ► §

And as a result, the word is not often encountered.

01:24:40 ► §

In its origin, as was pointed out, it comes from psychoto, meaning in essence

01:24:45 ► §

psychosis, and mimesis, meaning the imitation of. And this indeed is the term that very

01:24:52 ► §

early in the work in this area, there had been given these materials because they had

01:24:57 ► §

been cast in the role of causing syndrome, causing symptoms that would reflect the character

01:25:04 ► §

of mental illness.

01:25:06 ► §

And as felt by studying the effects of these materials in normal subjects, you might be

01:25:11 ► §

able to glean some insight as to the mechanisms or at least the descriptions and definitions

01:25:16 ► §

of this syndrome when seen in people who are spontaneously ill.

01:25:22 ► §

This explanation, the search for new psychotomimetics

01:25:25 ► §

for materials

01:25:26 ► §

that would be more

01:25:27 ► §

exacting the definition

01:25:28 ► §

of psychosis

01:25:29 ► §

is completely logical

01:25:30 ► §

in that all the

01:25:32 ► §

hallucinogenics

01:25:34 ► §

the psychedelics

01:25:36 ► §

that are known

01:25:36 ► §

can be classified

01:25:37 ► §

into materials

01:25:38 ► §

that are indoles

01:25:39 ► §

and there are many

01:25:40 ► §

in this area

01:25:41 ► §

the cryptomines

01:25:42 ► §

the more convoluted

01:25:44 ► §

carbamines,

01:25:45 ► §

LSD as an ergot-type indole, or it can be classified as phenethylamines.

01:25:52 ► §

And there are perhaps some three or four score that are in this classification,

01:25:56 ► §

the analogs of mesclun compound that’s been mentioned several times,

01:26:01 ► §

or the substitution of variants of mesclun,

01:26:04 ► §

or the alpha-methyl compounds that have given rise to materials

01:26:07 ► §

that are lumped chemically together as the amphetamines.

01:26:10 ► §

And there are two principal neurotransmitters in the brain.

01:26:13 ► §

One is an indole, and this is serotonin.

01:26:16 ► §

One is a phenethylamine, namely dopamine.

01:26:20 ► §

And it’s very desirable from the point of the neurochemist

01:26:22 ► §

to find pigeonholes that can classify things.

01:26:25 ► §

Here we have a group of psychedelics that are all indoles, and we have a neurotransmitter that’s indolic, serotonin.

01:26:31 ► §

Here’s a group that are all phenethylamines, and we have a neurotransmitter that’s a phenethylamine.

01:26:36 ► §

All we have to do is understand why all of these work here and all of those work there,

01:26:40 ► §

and we shall now know how the neurotransmitters work in the brain.

01:26:43 ► §

And once we know that, we’ll be able to cure

01:26:45 ► §

mental illness.

01:26:47 ► §

Well, it’s an appealing

01:26:49 ► §

and it has not been

01:26:50 ► §

a particularly rewarding

01:26:51 ► §

classification.

01:26:53 ► §

And the explanation

01:26:54 ► §

beside being logical

01:26:55 ► §

is quite safe

01:26:56 ► §

because it’s an

01:26:57 ► §

unthreatening explanation.

01:26:59 ► §

It’s easily accepted

01:27:00 ► §

by the academic

01:27:00 ► §

and administrative community.

01:27:02 ► §

But the explanation

01:27:03 ► §

is still not the explanation

01:27:04 ► §

of why I do what I do.

01:27:07 ► §

My work is indeed dedicated to the development of tools,

01:27:10 ► §

but tools for quite a different purpose.

01:27:12 ► §

And here is where I want to get quite away from chemistry

01:27:15 ► §

and into some of my own personal thoughts.

01:27:18 ► §

I’d like to lay a little background

01:27:19 ► §

to establish a framework for these tools

01:27:22 ► §

and in part to define them

01:27:24 ► §

and in part to give emphasis to an urgency

01:27:26 ► §

that I really feel associated with them.

01:27:29 ► §

First, I am a very firm believer

01:27:32 ► §

in the reality of a balance

01:27:34 ► §

in all aspects of the human theater.

01:27:37 ► §

When there seems to be a development of move that-a-way,

01:27:41 ► §

somehow, very shortly, or almost in concert,

01:27:44 ► §

there is a move this-a- away that keeps things in some delicate balance.

01:27:48 ► §

If there must be a dichotomization of concepts into good and evil, then all good seems to contain its unexpressed evil, and all evil its unexpressed good.

01:28:10 ► §

Within the human mind there coexists the eros, the life-loving, the self-perpetrating force, with the thanatos, the self-destructive death wish.

01:28:19 ► §

Both are present in each of us, but are usually separated by a very difficult wall, a very difficult to penetrate wall, the unconscious. one definition of the tools I seek is that they may allow words of a vocabulary

01:28:26 ► §

a vocabulary which might allow each human being

01:28:29 ► §

to more consciously and more clearly

01:28:32 ► §

communicate with the interior of his own mind

01:28:35 ► §

and psyche

01:28:36 ► §

this may be called a vocabulary of awareness

01:28:40 ► §

a person who becomes increasingly aware of

01:28:43 ► §

and so begins to acknowledge

01:28:45 ► §

the existence of the two opposite contributors

01:28:47 ► §

to his motives and decisions

01:28:49 ► §

may begin to make choices

01:28:51 ► §

which are knowledgeable

01:28:52 ► §

and the learning process that follows such choices

01:28:56 ► §

is the path that leads to wisdom

01:28:58 ► §

but just as there is a balance within the mind

01:29:01 ► §

that needs establishment

01:29:03 ► §

there is an interesting record of balances of the same sort in society.

01:29:07 ► §

Just look for a few minutes at some of the coincidences

01:29:09 ► §

that have kept our human race in a rather precarious balance.

01:29:14 ► §

Throughout the early centuries of the current millennium,

01:29:17 ► §

there were carried out some of the most viciously inhuman wars that were known to man,

01:29:21 ► §

all in the name of the forces of religion

01:29:22 ► §

and the horrors of the Inquisition with its lethal intolerance of heresy.

01:29:27 ► §

And yet it was during these dark years that the structure of alchemy was established,

01:29:32 ► §

not to change base metals into noble ones, as is often thought, but to acquire knowledge

01:29:37 ► §

through the study of matter.

01:29:39 ► §

The work of the alchemists extended up to the age of enlightenment with the urges of

01:29:44 ► §

rationalism and of skepticism.

01:29:46 ► §

And it was always directed toward the learning process.

01:29:51 ► §

The reward of alchemistic effort has been simply stated

01:29:54 ► §

as the effort to achieve the transmutation of base metals into gold.

01:29:58 ► §

But as Ralph pointed out just a bit ago,

01:30:00 ► §

this is not the actual reward.

01:30:03 ► §

The value was the doing and the redoing and the redoing

01:30:06 ► §

of the process of distillation, of sublimation, of condensation, of precipitation. It was

01:30:12 ► §

a continual, ever more exact effort to understand these processes that from the learning of

01:30:17 ► §

the process, one would be able to find a unity between the physical and the spiritual world.

01:30:22 ► §

a unity between the physical and the spiritual world.

01:30:26 ► §

It was the doing and the redoing itself that was the reward.

01:30:29 ► §

In the last hundred years or so,

01:30:30 ► §

this learning process has evolved

01:30:32 ► §

into what we call science.

01:30:34 ► §

However, there has been a subtle shift in the goal

01:30:36 ► §

from the process itself

01:30:39 ► §

to the results of the process.

01:30:42 ► §

In this age of science,

01:30:43 ► §

it is only the end result, the gold, that really matters. It is not the act of the process. In this age of science, it is only the end result, the gold,

01:30:45 ► §

that really matters.

01:30:46 ► §

It is not the act of achieving,

01:30:48 ► §

but the achievement itself

01:30:50 ► §

that brings one the acknowledgement

01:30:51 ► §

of his peers,

01:30:53 ► §

that brings recognition

01:30:54 ► §

from the outside world,

01:30:55 ► §

that results in wealth

01:30:57 ► §

and in influence

01:30:57 ► §

and in power.

01:30:59 ► §

And these end achievements,

01:31:00 ► §

these results,

01:31:02 ► §

show the same dichotomy of directions

01:31:04 ► §

which was so

01:31:05 ► §

evident from the previous centuries. For years, there had been no separation of values. Neither

01:31:11 ► §

direction had taken the colors of good or for evil. But still, there were incredible

01:31:16 ► §

coincidences of timing. For example, in 1895, Wilhelm Conrad von Lenken observed that when

01:31:23 ► §

electricity was applied to an evacuated tube

01:31:26 ► §

containing certain gases

01:31:28 ► §

a nearby plate covered with barium

01:31:30 ► §

platino cyanide emitted a visible glow

01:31:33 ► §

and the next year

01:31:34 ► §

in 1896

01:31:35 ► §

Antoine-Henri Becquerel

01:31:37 ► §

found that these same metal producing emanations

01:31:40 ► §

were being emitted from uranium

01:31:42 ► §

radioactivity had been discovered

01:31:44 ► §

but it was just in the following year at 11.45 a.m. emanations were being emitted from uranium. Radioactivity had been discovered.

01:31:52 ► §

But it was just in the following year, at 11.45 a.m. on the 23rd of November of 1897,

01:31:57 ► §

that Arthur Hefter consumed an alkaloid that he had isolated from the peyote, dumpling cactus,

01:32:01 ► §

brought to the Western world by the irrepressible pharmacologist Louis Levine.

01:32:05 ► §

As Hefter wrote in his notes, and this is a quotation following 150 milligrams of mescaline,

01:32:08 ► §

from time to time, dots

01:32:09 ► §

with the most brilliant colors floated across

01:32:12 ► §

the field of vision. Later on,

01:32:14 ► §

landscapes, halls,

01:32:16 ► §

architectural scenes also appeared.

01:32:19 ► §

Mescaline had also

01:32:20 ► §

been discovered.

01:32:22 ► §

During the 1920s

01:32:24 ► §

and 1930s, both worlds, that of the physical sciences involving radiation

01:32:28 ► §

and that of the psychopharmacological sciences involving psychotropic materials,

01:32:33 ► §

continued to develop without any clear sense of polarity,

01:32:37 ► §

without the mine is good and yours is evil duality that was soon to come.

01:32:42 ► §

Radioactivity and radiation were becoming the mainstays

01:32:46 ► §

of medicine. X-ray

01:32:47 ► §

photography was invaluable in diagnosis

01:32:50 ► §

and radium therapy was broadly

01:32:52 ► §

used in treatment. Controlled

01:32:54 ► §

and localized radiation could

01:32:56 ► §

destroy malignant tissue while sparing the host.

01:32:59 ► §

And in the

01:33:00 ► §

area of psychology, there were parallel

01:33:02 ► §

developments. The theories of

01:33:04 ► §

Freud and Jung were being developed into increasingly useful clinical tools and approaches to mental illness.

01:33:10 ► §

And the basis of experimental psychology was laid in the pioneering studies of Pavlov.

01:33:16 ► §

Another coincidence in time, in which, in retrospect, started a dividing of science on the separate paths occurred during World War II.

01:33:22 ► §

of science on the separate paths occurred during World War II.

01:33:24 ► §

In the late 1942,

01:33:26 ► §

Enrico Fermi and several other scientists

01:33:28 ► §

at the University of Chicago

01:33:30 ► §

demonstrated for the first time ever

01:33:32 ► §

that nuclear fission could be achieved

01:33:34 ► §

and could be controlled by man.

01:33:36 ► §

The age of unlimited power

01:33:38 ► §

and freedom from dependency

01:33:40 ► §

upon our dwindling fossil reserves

01:33:42 ► §

had begun.

01:33:44 ► §

Just the next year, at 4.20 p.m. on the 19th of April,

01:33:47 ► §

Albert Hoffman consumed a measured amount of a compound

01:33:50 ► §

which he had first synthesized some five years earlier.

01:33:53 ► §

As Hoffman subsequently reported,

01:33:55 ► §

as a quotation following 250 micrograms,

01:33:58 ► §

after the crisis of confusion and despair,

01:34:01 ► §

I began to enjoy the unprecedented colors and plays of shapes that persisted.

01:34:07 ► §

Kaleidoscopic

01:34:08 ► §

fantastic images surged in on me,

01:34:10 ► §

alternating, variegated,

01:34:12 ► §

opening and closing themselves

01:34:14 ► §

in circles and spirals.

01:34:16 ► §

LSD had also been discovered.

01:34:19 ► §

But then,

01:34:20 ► §

still, and up until the last

01:34:22 ► §

decade, it was the rich promise

01:34:24 ► §

of the nuclear age, first with the rich promise of the nuclear age,

01:34:25 ► §

first with the power and potential of fission, and later with the virtually limitless potential of fusion energy

01:34:31 ► §

that carried the banner and the hopes of man.

01:34:34 ► §

And the area of the hallucinogenics was categorized as negative, psychosis-imitating, psychotomimetic.

01:34:42 ► §

imitating psychotomimetic.

01:34:46 ► §

It was not until someone in the 1970s,

01:34:48 ► §

sometime in the 1970s, that a strange and a fascinating

01:34:50 ► §

and a rather frightening reversal of roles

01:34:53 ► §

took place.

01:34:55 ► §

The knowledge of nuclear fission and fusion

01:34:57 ► §

took on a death-loving aspect,

01:35:00 ► §

with country after country joining the fraternity

01:35:02 ► §

of those skilled in the capacity

01:35:04 ► §

for the eradication of the human experiment.

01:35:07 ► §

And to have such power leads to the threat to use such power,

01:35:11 ► §

which in time will actually lead to its use.

01:35:15 ► §

But, as I said earlier, when one thing develops,

01:35:18 ► §

there seems to spring forth a balancing, a compensatory counterpart.

01:35:22 ► §

This balance can be realized with the psychedelic drugs.

01:35:25 ► §

What had been simply tools

01:35:27 ► §

for the study of psychosis at best

01:35:29 ► §

or for escapist self-gratification

01:35:31 ► §

at worst

01:35:32 ► §

suddenly assumed the character

01:35:34 ► §

of tools of enlightenment

01:35:35 ► §

and of some form

01:35:36 ► §

of transcendental communication.

01:35:39 ► §

If man’s alter ego,

01:35:41 ► §

his thanatos,

01:35:42 ► §

had been entrusted

01:35:44 ► §

with the imperpetual knowledge

01:35:45 ► §

of how he can completely destroy himself

01:35:47 ► §

and this extraordinary experiment,

01:35:50 ► §

then some development must occur

01:35:53 ► §

at the eros side of his psyche

01:35:55 ► §

that will and must afford the learning

01:35:58 ► §

of how to live with this perpetual knowledge.

01:36:02 ► §

It is a communication between these two sides of the mind

01:36:05 ► §

that requires an extraordinary vocabulary.

01:36:08 ► §

Where do these words come from,

01:36:10 ► §

the words of this vocabulary?

01:36:12 ► §

All depend upon an intimate insight

01:36:15 ► §

into the working of the human mind,

01:36:17 ► §

but this can be approached in many ways.

01:36:20 ► §

The study of religion,

01:36:21 ► §

of meditation, of self-yielding,

01:36:24 ► §

provides a peace,

01:36:26 ► §

but in my mind also tends toward a retreat and hence a capitulation.

01:36:31 ► §

The efforts to amalgamate the two sides of the mind, as seen in the Tao of physics,

01:36:36 ► §

and the rich findings of parallelisms between the Eastern and Western philosophies,

01:36:40 ► §

may eventually explain all and allow some unification for the human purpose.

01:36:41 ► §

may eventually explain all and allow some unification for the human purpose.

01:36:45 ► §

But I feel, along with many others,

01:36:47 ► §

that the efforts being invested

01:36:48 ► §

in the technology of destruction

01:36:50 ► §

does not allow sufficient time.

01:36:53 ► §

It is possibly only with the psychedelic drugs

01:36:55 ► §

that words of vocabulary can be established

01:36:58 ► §

which might tunnel through the subconscious

01:37:00 ► §

between the conflicting aspects of the mind and psyche.

01:37:04 ► §

It is here that I feel my skill lies.

01:37:07 ► §

And this is exactly why I do what I do.

01:37:11 ► §

Where do we stand as of today?

01:37:13 ► §

In the last handful of years, the forces of government and nationalism

01:37:16 ► §

have amassed an unprecedented arsenal of destructive power.

01:37:20 ► §

The power is in the current arsenals of the world,

01:37:24 ► §

if restructured into Hiroshima-strength weapons, to detonate one bomb every minute, on the minute, for the next two years.

01:37:33 ► §

And the rationalized need to do so is becoming manifest at a frightening pace.

01:37:39 ► §

But in the last handful of years, a number of tools of communication have increased at a like rate.

01:37:46 ► §

There are currently nearly 200 psychedelic drugs known and described,

01:37:50 ► §

some touching at one, some at another, of the fibers that unify our minds.

01:37:55 ► §

By learning each of their structures of sensory communication in turn,

01:37:59 ► §

we might find a form of communication that would disarm our destructive compulsion.

01:38:04 ► §

A way to disarm the destructive compulsion in our species.

01:38:10 ► §

Now, if that isn’t a goal worth working for, well, then I don’t know what would be.

01:38:16 ► §

Over the years, I’ve taken psychedelic medicines with quite a few people, people of all types

01:38:21 ► §

from all walks of life.

01:38:23 ► §

And there are two things that I’ve noticed that they all have in common.

01:38:27 ► §

And these are a heightened state of awareness regarding the ecological plight of our planet

01:38:32 ► §

and a love for one another that transcends family, religion, nationality, or even race.

01:38:40 ► §

And so I’ll continue to produce these podcasts in the hope that over time the facts about the nature and power of these medicines to heal us humans becomes more widely known each and every day.

01:38:54 ► §

Now before I sign off, I want to be sure that you know that all of the episodes of these podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are now also available on SoundCloud. If you go to our main site at psychedelicsalon.com

01:39:08 ► §

and click on the podcast link, in the right sidebar

01:39:12 ► §

you’re going to see a link to our SoundCloud page. And there you’ll

01:39:15 ► §

find a direct link to the group that holds all of these podcasts in reverse

01:39:20 ► §

chronological order. That is with the most recent one first.

01:39:24 ► §

Also on that page you’re going to find links to several of the playlists that I’ve set up.

01:39:29 ► §

As you will see, the Terrence McKenna list, not counting today’s podcast, has 166 tracks in it,

01:39:36 ► §

which don’t count the 43 tracks in the Trilogues playlist, of which he is in most of them.

01:39:42 ► §

In the Psychedelic Elders playlist, you’ll find 107

01:39:47 ► §

podcasts listed, and that includes more than 50 featuring Timothy Leary. And if you’re a SoundCloud

01:39:53 ► §

user, then you already know that you can not only create your own playlists of these podcasts,

01:39:59 ► §

all of them may also be streamed directly from the web links. And in the playlists that I’ve set up,

01:40:05 ► §

there are over 70 podcasts in the Planque Norte list,

01:40:09 ► §

54 in Women’s Perspectives,

01:40:11 ► §

24 in Mind States Conferences,

01:40:14 ► §

34 podcasts including information and live news broadcasts

01:40:18 ► §

during the Occupy Wall Street phase of the Occupy movement,

01:40:22 ► §

and there are over 50 tracks in the Ayahuasca list.

01:40:26 ► §

Also, I’ve been informed that the salon has now been approved

01:40:29 ► §

for inclusion in Google Music.

01:40:32 ► §

I haven’t had a chance to check that out yet,

01:40:34 ► §

but please let me know via the contact link on our program notes page

01:40:38 ► §

if you find us there.

01:40:41 ► §

Now, before I go, there are two final Terrence McKenna soundbites that I’d like

01:40:46 ► §

to play for you. The first one is about the fact, at least what I happen to believe is a fact,

01:40:53 ► §

that the worldwide psychedelic community of like-minded people are, in a very positive way,

01:41:00 ► §

minded mutants who hold the potential of transforming our species.

01:41:10 ► §

And that is followed by what I can best say is a call to action,

01:41:14 ► §

one which I hope you’ll take to heart, as I know you will.

01:41:20 ► §

The future evolution of mankind is going to be based on these states, but the last point I want to make is one about how evolution occurs.

01:41:26 ► §

It isn’t that a mutation happens and it confers greater adaptability upon an individual

01:41:35 ► §

and therefore that individual and his offspring numerically gain over competitor individuals of the same species.

01:41:46 ► §

This is not how it works.

01:41:49 ► §

The way it works is you have constant mutating of a gene pool

01:41:54 ► §

from the influx of cosmic radiation and other factors.

01:41:59 ► §

There is always a low level of mutagens, of mutants in a population.

01:42:06 ► §

But they are of no consequence

01:42:09 ► §

as long as the selective parameters

01:42:12 ► §

remain the same.

01:42:14 ► §

But when the selective parameters

01:42:16 ► §

change suddenly,

01:42:18 ► §

these individuals who were previously

01:42:20 ► §

masked in the general population,

01:42:24 ► §

the selective advantage that they have now

01:42:28 ► §

comes immediately to the fore

01:42:30 ► §

and they act very quickly and critically

01:42:33 ► §

to send the evolution of a given species off

01:42:38 ► §

in a different direction.

01:42:39 ► §

This is why the fossil record progresses

01:42:43 ► §

in fits and starts,

01:42:45 ► §

because sudden shifts of environment cause the apparent emergence of new types.

01:42:52 ► §

It isn’t that they cause it.

01:42:54 ► §

It’s that the new types were always there, but not with any advantage.

01:42:59 ► §

It’s that the new situation has conferred a sudden advantage on them,

01:43:03 ► §

the new situation has conferred a sudden advantage on them and they are moving then into positions of dominance in the population

01:43:09 ► §

or in society if we’re talking about human beings.

01:43:12 ► §

I think that the psychedelic experience is like that at the present level.

01:43:17 ► §

It has conferred, there is a population of different people

01:43:23 ► §

in the general population. And as conditions change,

01:43:29 ► §

these people will be seen to have adaptive advantages. Without being metaphysical about

01:43:39 ► §

it, an obvious adaptive advantage is what I call the deconditioning effect.

01:43:47 ► §

That we live in a jungle of propaganda, you know, buy this, believe this, wear this.

01:43:54 ► §

If you have a symbiotic relationship with a deconditioning agent,

01:43:59 ► §

you’re much more likely to thread your way through that with your soul and your bank account intact.

01:44:06 ► §

So this is one way of thinking of it.

01:44:12 ► §

What the psychedelics really do, I think,

01:44:15 ► §

is release us from cultural machinery

01:44:18 ► §

and put you right up against the human essence

01:44:21 ► §

and say you no longer have to pretend

01:44:24 ► §

that you’re Scotch-Irish or Wetoto or Jewish.

01:44:28 ► §

You can actually explore the human modality

01:44:31 ► §

independent of the inertia of these exterior labels.

01:44:37 ► §

And so it places responsibility,

01:44:40 ► §

it raises questions of validity,

01:44:43 ► §

existential honesty with oneself,

01:44:49 ► §

and I think it promotes the moral life,

01:44:53 ► §

which I don’t think happens if you buy deeply into myths of the tribe,

01:45:00 ► §

if you’re a devoted practitioner of Marxism, fascism, capitalism,

01:45:05 ► §

I don’t think these things will lead you to the moral life

01:45:08 ► §

because they don’t arise out of experience.

01:45:12 ► §

Experience is everything.

01:45:14 ► §

These are drugs of experience.

01:45:18 ► §

It’s very important to take the moment seriously.

01:45:23 ► §

Reincarnation and all these things aside,

01:45:26 ► §

what if this were your unique opportunity to unravel it all

01:45:32 ► §

and not to be caught in dissolution?

01:45:35 ► §

Because I think that there is a potential for immortality,

01:45:42 ► §

but it isn’t assured.

01:45:44 ► §

It is something which comes to the courageous.

01:45:53 ► §

So I submit to you that what we represent is a fifth column, a fifth column that represents the best aspirations that human community is capable of. A fifth column that is there. We have the tools, the intellect, the will to create a caring global culture. It isn’t going to come without a recognition of the power of the psychedelic experience.

01:46:52 ► §

The psychedelic experience is the birthright of every human being on the planet.

01:46:59 ► §

It is as much a basic part of each and every one of us as our sexuality, our national identity, our consciousness of self.

01:47:13 ► §

And any society which attempts to hold back or impede this dimension of self-expression, when the history of that society is written, it will be called barbarous.

01:47:28 ► §

The movement toward legitimizing psychedelics I see as part of the broader movement throughout human history that gave us the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, women’s suffrage. In the future, it will be unimaginable that governments once regulated the substances that people use to explore personal growth.

01:47:55 ► §

It is the mark of a barbarous culture, and we are here to raise a light, to say truth is not so easily swept aside.

01:48:06 ► §

One doesn’t just say no to truth.

01:48:11 ► §

Truth requires engagement.

01:48:24 ► §

It requires courage. It requires a sense of where we have been and of where we are going.

01:48:50 ► §

the temporary solution, the throwaway and disposable culture that ends up throwing away and disposing of human lives.

01:48:59 ► §

And what we place against that is a humanism that does not rise out of theory.

01:49:18 ► §

It’s a humanism that rises out of experience. The experience that informed the great mystics of every religion is not something that we strain for throughout a life of self-discipline and self-subjugation.

01:49:21 ► §

That isn’t it. It is our birthright. Each of us, Dr. Hoffman and his discoveries, place this dimension

01:49:28 ► §

within the reach of all of us. Dr. Hoffman and his discoveries place this dimension on

01:49:35 ► §

a social agenda that cannot be denied, that will not wait. If not now, when? If not us, who? It’s that simple. We are moving now, I think

01:49:51 ► §

unfortunately, into yet a darker political night in terms of the larger society around

01:49:58 ► §

us. And I make an analogy to the coming of the dark ages. But what the dark age has promoted that is going to work

01:50:07 ► §

in our favor were monastic gatherings of like-minded people who preserved information

01:50:15 ► §

through the time of darkness and social ignorance toward a new day when it could be utilized to mitigate the suffering of men and women everywhere.

01:50:29 ► §

LSD is, to my mind, first and foremost, the greatest medical discovery of the 20th century,

01:50:37 ► §

and I use it in the sense of ameliorating pain, creating caring, promoting unity,

01:50:49 ► §

healing not so much of the individual psyche,

01:50:52 ► §

although certainly its impact in that dimension is tremendous,

01:50:55 ► §

but ultimately as a deconditioning agent,

01:51:00 ► §

allowing us to move beyond the confines of historical society

01:51:05 ► §

to see what we could be, what we have been,

01:51:10 ► §

and what, in fact, we have the energy to be in the future.

01:51:15 ► §

Thank you very much.

01:51:16 ► §

Thank you.

01:51:21 ► §

Okay.

01:51:22 ► §

Okay.