Program Notes
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Neşe Devenot
Help Neşe complete her
Psychedelic Humanities Research
http://psychedelicsbecause.org/Today’s podcast features three short talks by Neşe Devenot who is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Puget Sound, where she teaches classes on psychedelics and literature. Nese received her PhD in 2015 in comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on the study of psychedelic philosophy and the literary history of chemical self-experimentation (what you and I call “trip reports”). She is a founder of the Psychedemia interdisciplinary psychedelics conference and is the former editor of “This Week in Psychedelics” (a Reality Sandwich column that reported on psychedelic news in the media between 2011 and 2013). And Nese is a founding member of the MAPS Graduate Student Association … and as you will hear in the second short talk that I play, Nese has also earned her wings as a psychonaut as well.
Neşe Devenot
Website: www.chemicalpoetics.com
Twitter: @NeseLSD
eMail: ndevenot (at) pugetsound (dot) edu
Online academic work: https://ups.academia.edu/ndevenot
Psychedemia Conference Documentary
https://vimeo.com/161582773?width=800&height=600
/*
#PsychedelicsBecause (video)
Psymposia
Psymposia, LLC is a group of collaborative social activism projects on psychedelics, plants, and policy, that includes live events productions, Psymposia Magazine, and the Palo Santo Project.
We’re an active network of entrepreneurs, students, activists, researchers, organizations, progressive businesses, artists, musicians, comedians, designers, and fresh voices.
We create projects that build community, have a positive social impact, and change perceptions of plants, psychedelics, and psychoactives.
Our live storytelling, Psychedelic Stories, could be described as “The Moth Radio Hour… On Acid,” and is hosted by drug writer Lex Pelger. People have the opportunity to share compelling experiences, peculiar underground exploring, or scientific research from The Academy.
We have organized social networking events, conferences, parties, fundraisers, and live streaming at lofts, universities, and venues in Amherst, Baltimore, Boston, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Montreal, Florida, Vermont, and Oakland.
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We are based on the East Coast, USA.
Psychedelic Mysticism: The Good Friday Experiment & Beyond
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:33 ►
And I’d like to begin today to thank fellow saloners Lynn N., Nina L., Gary M., Stephen F., as well as a very generous donation from John H.,
00:00:37 ►
and all of whose donations will be used to help offset some of the expenses associated with these podcasts.
00:00:43 ►
And so I thank all of you very, very much for helping us get these out to everybody.
00:00:50 ►
Now, last week, my podcast featured some words of wisdom from six men who began first exploring
00:00:57 ►
psychedelic medicines in the 1950s, our elders, we call them.
00:01:02 ►
But when you think about it, this new era of psychedelic research and exploration,
00:01:08 ►
well, it only dates back to sometime around 1947 or so.
00:01:13 ►
In other words, we are now only at the very beginning of what I’m hoping will become an age
00:01:19 ►
in which human consciousness is regularly amplified through the intelligent use of these powerful medicines.
00:01:26 ►
And when that age arrives and is in full bloom, well, then the 20th and 21st centuries will
00:01:33 ►
most likely be seen as the foundation years, the bedrock of the psychedelic consciousness
00:01:38 ►
movement, and that finally at long last leads me to my point.
00:01:43 ►
Today, our so-called psychedelic elders may actually be someone who is, well, not very old in terms of human years,
00:01:51 ►
but who, nonetheless, has covered so much psychedelic ground that their physical age doesn’t even matter,
00:01:59 ►
because they obviously have become an elder.
00:02:03 ►
And, in my opinion, that’s the case with today’s speaker,
00:02:06 ►
Neche Deveno, who we’ve actually heard from already
00:02:09 ►
here in the salon in several other podcasts.
00:02:12 ►
And today we’re going to get to hear
00:02:14 ►
three more short talks that she’s given.
00:02:17 ►
Now, just to remind you, Neche Deveno
00:02:19 ►
is a postdoctoral fellow in digital humanities
00:02:22 ►
at the University of Puget Sound,
00:02:25 ►
where she teaches classes on psychedelics and literature.
00:02:29 ►
Neche is also working on a book that’s titled
00:02:32 ►
Chemical Poetics, the Literary History of Psychedelic Science.
00:02:38 ►
Neche was also a 2015-2016 research fellow
00:02:42 ►
at the New York Public Library’s Timothy Leary Papers, as well as
00:02:47 ►
a research fellow with the New York University Psilocybin Cancer Anxiety Study, with which
00:02:53 ►
she participated in conducting a qualitative study of patient experiences.
00:02:58 ►
She actually received her Ph.D. in 2015 in Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania,
00:03:06 ►
where she focused on the study of psychedelic philosophy and the literary history of chemical
00:03:11 ►
self-experimentation, what you and I call trip reports.
00:03:16 ►
She’s also a founder of the Psychedemia Interdisciplinary Psychedelics. and as you’ll hear in the second short talk that I play, she’s also earned her wings as a psychonaut as well.
00:03:49 ►
So now let’s listen to a little storytelling by Neche
00:03:52 ►
from Symposia’s Psychedelic Stories in Brooklyn,
00:03:56 ►
which took place the weekend of Horizon’s 2015 conference in New York City.
00:04:02 ►
And Psychedelic Stories, by the way, is an ongoing series
00:04:06 ►
by Symposia that provides
00:04:08 ►
a forum for people to
00:04:09 ►
share their experiences with psychedelics
00:04:12 ►
and how they’ve impacted their lives.
00:04:16 ►
Alright, and now we are very pleased
00:04:18 ►
to have another friend of Symposia,
00:04:20 ►
Nishay, who recently
00:04:22 ►
got her doctorate
00:04:24 ►
in… technically in comparative literature,
00:04:29 ►
but really it was a study of the history of psychedelic literature in the past centuries,
00:04:33 ►
which is fascinating because whenever you have some person who tells you, listen, I
00:04:39 ►
know the first person to do this, or I was the first person to do this, there’s always
00:04:44 ►
somebody before
00:04:45 ►
them. And once you start reading the literature, you find out humans have been tripping ever since
00:04:49 ►
we, before we ever left the plains of Africa. And so she dug into all the old stories of all
00:04:53 ►
the old trippings we did and saw how we did it. And so now, one of her stories from her adventures.
00:05:06 ►
Hey guys.
00:05:08 ►
It’s nice to talk here.
00:05:10 ►
Actually, the only reason I got my PhD studying psychedelic literature
00:05:12 ►
is because of Horizons.
00:05:15 ►
It was five years ago in 2010
00:05:17 ►
I came to my first conference.
00:05:18 ►
It was my second year of my PhD program.
00:05:22 ►
And I knew I had all these
00:05:23 ►
personal interests in psychedelics, but I
00:05:26 ►
thought I had to keep that under wraps. But I walked into Horizons, and I saw that there was
00:05:31 ►
this movement in academia to actually bring these conversations back into open, above-board
00:05:38 ►
scholarship, and I realized there’s no reason that this should stay just in science. And so I decided I was going to do my own psychedelic studies in a literature field.
00:05:49 ►
And Penn’s literature program is in the top five in the country.
00:05:53 ►
It’s an Ivy League.
00:05:54 ►
They were extremely supportive of me.
00:05:56 ►
I recently got a graduate teaching award out of something like 600 nominations.
00:06:02 ►
They gave 10 awards, and they awarded me for teaching psychedelic literature classes
00:06:06 ►
because the students were so happy.
00:06:12 ►
So I’m not going to be talking about my stories tonight,
00:06:16 ►
just talking about other people’s stories.
00:06:20 ►
So the book that I’m working on that comes out of my dissertation research
00:06:24 ►
is called Chemical Poetics,
00:06:26 ►
The Literary History of Psychedelic Science.
00:06:29 ►
So I’m not studying, there’s psychedelic literature that’s trippy, that kind of has a psychedelic aesthetic to it,
00:06:35 ►
but I’m specifically looking at trip reports and the literary history of trip reports
00:06:39 ►
and that process of how people convey unprecedented experiences in language
00:06:44 ►
and the way that they can communicate it to other people.
00:06:47 ►
Because language is designed as something that’s between people
00:06:50 ►
to describe things out in the world.
00:06:52 ►
And so if you have an experience, in some cases,
00:06:54 ►
like if Shulgin invents a chemical,
00:06:56 ►
nobody in the history of humanity has ever tried that chemical before.
00:07:00 ►
So there’s no pre-existing language to convey the content of that experience.
00:07:05 ►
And so I just became interested in the way that poetry, creative uses of language, and metaphor are really central to psychedelic science research.
00:07:14 ►
And this is something that I think we should talk more about, because the language of science cannot capture the full extent of the psychedelic experience and what’s going on there.
00:07:22 ►
It’s one paradigm, and it’s one paradigm that does a lot,
00:07:25 ►
but it definitely doesn’t do everything.
00:07:27 ►
So in this past year, the New York Public Library,
00:07:30 ►
a few years ago, acquired most of Timothy Leary’s archive.
00:07:34 ►
I spent the entire month of August taking photographs.
00:07:38 ►
I took 20,000 photographs of documents,
00:07:41 ►
and I only got through a tenth of the total materials they have available.
00:07:45 ►
He kept absolutely everything. There’s the original Concord Prison Experiment trip reports.
00:07:50 ►
There’s correspondence between all of the, you know, kind of founding, mostly founding fathers
00:07:54 ►
of psychedelic science. And so I found this interesting correspondence between Leary and
00:08:01 ►
Gerald Hurd from dated April 10th, 1961. And he said at the, this is Leary and Gerald Hurd, dated April 10, 1961.
00:08:07 ►
And he said, this is Leary writing,
00:08:09 ►
at the height of the mystical experience,
00:08:12 ►
communication is unnecessary and indeed impossible.
00:08:16 ►
And this reminds me of Aldous Huxley’s line that trying to get people to answer questions about tripping
00:08:18 ►
when they’re at the height of their trip
00:08:20 ►
is sort of like trying to give a questionnaire to someone who’s making love.
00:08:23 ►
It just doesn’t really go with the experience. And so I said, one of the great challenges in our research is after
00:08:30 ►
communication. How can we describe it? The limitations of scientific prose become so apparent.
00:08:36 ►
My experience with psychedelics has made me less satisfied with the abstract and general terms and
00:08:41 ►
more comfortable with terms which are concrete, specific, and personal. In writing up our research, I’ve been experimenting with new modes of communication.
00:08:49 ►
The results, as expected, vary in effectiveness, but there’s reward in the trying. So here you see
00:08:54 ►
psychedelics are actually operating as a catalyst for the evolution of language, which is in turn
00:08:59 ►
the evolution of consciousness. It pushes the boundaries of what we can say, what we can think, and what we can communicate.
00:09:08 ►
So one of those experimental descriptions is in this other letter I found.
00:09:16 ►
This letter is from Leary to the poet George Andrews,
00:09:21 ►
the beat poet.
00:09:22 ►
And while George was living in Tangiers, Morocco,
00:09:26 ►
this is dated 1st of May, 1962,
00:09:29 ►
so after that other letter I just read.
00:09:32 ►
So Leary writes,
00:09:32 ►
Dear George, your letter arrived out of a clear blue sky,
00:09:36 ►
like a bolt.
00:09:37 ►
How on earth can I answer your question?
00:09:39 ►
And what does it mean if I tell you that I’ve seen
00:09:41 ►
the beginning in a mushroom vision,
00:09:43 ►
capital B beginning, by the way,
00:09:45 ►
where there are all kinds of strange things going on and very different to what we read about in
00:09:49 ►
history books. However, I shall attempt an answer of sorts. In the beginning, all was static. The
00:09:55 ►
earth was neither fire nor solid. It was a drop of water on someone’s kitchen table, an instant
00:10:01 ►
between the action of spilling and some future cleaning up. Or perhaps the earth
00:10:06 ►
is a barnacle on a rock formed between two waves, an event of no significance then, created in a
00:10:11 ►
vacuum between the ebb and the flow of some unthinkable, unimaginable sea. And man evolved
00:10:17 ►
in one billionth of a second, still less will he disappear. And then another wave will sweep across
00:10:22 ►
the rock and another barnacle will be created that is also the center of a universe. But what strange events took place in this one billionth
00:10:29 ►
of a second. Cities were built in the image of the human cortex. Religions were invented to explain
00:10:34 ►
the kitchen table. The stars are the reflection of distant electric light bulbs. Tangiers is the
00:10:40 ►
figment of your imagination. Mushrooms are eternally high. Times Square is a grain of sugar on a plastic hard top.
00:10:47 ►
We are in a cave of shadows,
00:10:49 ►
a subway ride with other shadows for company.
00:10:52 ►
And at any minute we can decide to leave the cave,
00:10:55 ►
come out into the sunshine of another existence that dazzles our eyes.
00:10:59 ►
But who will believe us when, upon our return to the cave,
00:11:01 ►
we tell of another world far more real in its magnificence
00:11:04 ►
than the accustomed half-light we call the shadow earth.
00:11:08 ►
Here, then, as part of the Platonic parable,
00:11:10 ►
which you must read,
00:11:12 ►
is one of the best metaphorical descriptions of man
00:11:14 ►
in a state of expanded awareness
00:11:15 ►
of his difficulties to communicate to his fellow man
00:11:18 ►
what he has seen beyond the cave,
00:11:20 ►
and of his joy, despair, and amazement at all of this.
00:11:24 ►
You will find it in the seventh book of Plato’s Republic.
00:11:27 ►
Peacefully and with warmest regards, yours ever, Timothy Leary.
00:11:36 ►
So you see this sort of like creative, poetic language.
00:11:40 ►
I don’t know about you guys, but sometimes I read a trip report
00:11:43 ►
and I just get these tingles.
00:11:44 ►
You know, someone writes something and I’m like, whoa, I feel that.
00:11:47 ►
Someone just experienced something and put it in language in a way that isn’t just telling
00:11:52 ►
me about it. It’s helping me feel what that person was experiencing.
00:11:55 ►
You fast forward to the early 90s when Ann and Sasha Shulgin wrote
00:11:59 ►
Pekal.
00:12:03 ►
Sasha Shulgin was describing Aleph 1
00:12:06 ►
when he was self-administering and testing it.
00:12:09 ►
And he said, you know, rather than try to remember
00:12:12 ►
and describe after the fact what happened,
00:12:14 ►
in this case he did decide to write during the experience.
00:12:17 ►
And he starts out very measured,
00:12:20 ►
slight alteration, division, that kind of thing.
00:12:23 ►
But then as you go on with the time markers,
00:12:26 ►
the language gets more and more far out,
00:12:28 ►
more and more philosophical, more and more experimental
00:12:30 ►
until you get to something like this.
00:12:35 ►
If all this is in all of us,
00:12:37 ►
it must be everywhere in the galaxy.
00:12:38 ►
And if nonverbal insight can be triggered chemically,
00:12:41 ►
then its chemistry must be universal, intergalactic,
00:12:45 ►
the infinitely effective catalyst. This is the truly intergalactic communication by chemistry,
00:12:51 ►
not radio or light or x-rays or binary codes, chemistry. And he leaves that there. He says,
00:12:58 ►
maybe a scientist might say that’s not the most objective language to be using, but that’s data from the experience.
00:13:06 ►
The poetry that results from these altered states is the scientific data that we’re working with
00:13:11 ►
in a lot of cases. And so it makes sense to have, because I was actually working with the NYU study
00:13:16 ►
that was looking at the transcripts of people who are describing their life-changing psilocybin
00:13:21 ►
experiences. And so, you know, having medical people come together with literary scholars
00:13:26 ►
and all the rest to kind of collaborate and try to unearth
00:13:29 ►
what the heck are we dealing with here?
00:13:31 ►
None of us individually knows.
00:13:33 ►
So it’s this communal project of collaboration and exploration.
00:13:37 ►
So I’ll just end with another quote from Anne Shulgin
00:13:40 ►
describing one of her altered states of consciousness.
00:13:43 ►
And you can see how language gets tripped out in her attempt to explain something that
00:13:47 ►
can’t be explained by normal language.
00:13:50 ►
From the upper left-hand corner of the universe, there came a greeting from something which
00:13:54 ►
had known me, and which I had known since before time and space began.
00:13:59 ►
There were no words, but the message was clear and smiling.
00:14:03 ►
Hello, dear friend.
00:14:04 ►
I salute you with a respect, humor, love.
00:14:07 ►
It is a pleasure with laughter, joy to encounter you again.
00:14:10 ►
Thank you.
00:14:23 ►
I was very pleased to learn that Nishhea had been able to spend so much time and work with the Timothy Leary archives
00:14:31 ►
that are now located in the New York City Public Library.
00:14:35 ►
If you’ve been with us here in the salon for a while, you most likely remember my stories about the day that I spent going through that amazing archive while it was still located
00:14:45 ►
in the hundreds of boxes in two storage sheds in Northern California. In fact, I think that in one
00:14:53 ►
of Bruce Dahmer’s talks here in the salon, he tells a story of how he recovered Timothy Leary’s
00:14:58 ►
library from the dumpster after the New York people threw most of his books away, including
00:15:04 ►
things like first edition of Dune
00:15:06 ►
that was personally inscribed to Leary by Frank Herbert.
00:15:10 ►
But that’s another story.
00:15:12 ►
As Neche just said, the Leary archive is truly amazing,
00:15:17 ►
so if you’re ever in the city with some time on your hands,
00:15:19 ►
well, that would probably be a good thing to look into.
00:15:24 ►
Now we’re going to get to learn a little more about Neche
00:15:27 ►
and how she navigated her way away from the intention she earlier had
00:15:33 ►
to focus her education on Middle East politics
00:15:35 ►
and ultimately instead being awarded a doctoral degree
00:15:40 ►
with a focus on psychedelics and literature.
00:15:44 ►
Hopefully, if you are out there on the edge of the
00:15:46 ►
tribe somewhere yourself right now, and you’re maybe questioning your own ability to do whatever
00:15:52 ►
it will take for you to create an interesting life for yourself, well then take heart, because I think
00:15:58 ►
that you’re going to find a wonderful example here in what Neche had to overcome in order to just do that for herself.
00:16:12 ►
We have Neche, who is not only an excellent diver into the literature of psychedelics,
00:16:17 ►
but also she brought a lot of her students along, which is why she has a fan club in the back.
00:16:29 ►
Let me get you a mic. Neche has one of the rare privileges of being able to teach in an academic setting about psychedelics,
00:16:33 ►
which is a wonderful spot to be.
00:16:36 ►
And so a round of applause for Nishay.
00:16:46 ►
When I was growing up, I was really, really not at home with myself.
00:16:52 ►
And I battled with really paralyzing social anxiety. I had to eat lunch in the bathroom in high school because I would have panic attacks walking into the cafeteria.
00:17:00 ►
I had crippling obsessive compulsive disorder.
00:17:04 ►
I had crippling obsessive compulsive disorder.
00:17:10 ►
If you looked at my notebooks, I would have some sentences that were written over ten times.
00:17:14 ►
They were just bold and black because I would have a thought that made me feel uncomfortable and I would have to go back to what I was doing before I had that thought.
00:17:18 ►
And it really got in the way of my leading a functioning life
00:17:23 ►
and being able to focus coherently on projects and goals and that sort of thing.
00:17:29 ►
But when I went to college, at first I decided to do the practical thing, the practical kind of career.
00:17:36 ►
And when I first started, the semester that a friend introduced me to LSD,
00:17:41 ►
I was taking international relations, introduction to macroeconomics,
00:17:48 ►
American and Arab world, intermediate Arabic, and I had just given a down payment to transfer
00:17:53 ►
to the University of Chicago to study politics in the Middle East. And then I took acid,
00:17:59 ►
and now my life is about psychedelics. And so I wanted to read just a few clips from my journals
00:18:08 ►
describing experiences right after.
00:18:10 ►
So this is describing my first really powerful LSD experience.
00:18:14 ►
I wrote this the summer after my freshman year of college.
00:18:18 ►
She was falling farther, so farther, beyond herself,
00:18:22 ►
losing herself, perhaps forever.
00:18:26 ►
But losing herself, she was merging with, losing herself, perhaps forever. But losing herself,
00:18:28 ►
she was merging with, beginning to understand, forever.
00:18:30 ►
She was falling farther and farther into
00:18:32 ►
darkness, into nothing, but screaming
00:18:33 ►
if she knew she could, as her body
00:18:36 ►
was screaming, far away from her now.
00:18:38 ►
But through the darkness was a point.
00:18:39 ►
Was it the point that was speaking?
00:18:41 ►
Was it the point beyond words, through the darkness
00:18:43 ►
that she saw? But the point exploded, was explosion Was it the point beyond words through the darkness that she saw?
00:18:47 ►
But the point exploded, was explosion.
00:18:49 ►
The explosion of everything in color,
00:18:51 ►
merging with darkness as light,
00:18:53 ►
darkness as light,
00:18:55 ►
blending with darkness in every direction,
00:18:56 ►
direction in every dimension,
00:18:58 ►
in a moment beyond time.
00:19:01 ►
And she saw her body, herself in that point,
00:19:03 ►
as one point in one direction of one dimension,
00:19:08 ►
existing for a moment of time as one moment of light, an explosion of light through darkness. It was energy, electricity itself in every direction,
00:19:12 ►
and she saw herself as one part of it, as one small, infinitely
00:19:16 ►
small part of it. And I just thought it was fascinating
00:19:20 ►
that the most profound experience in my life was an experience
00:19:24 ►
that I was forbidden
00:19:26 ►
to have, that didn’t really sit right with me, and so I’ve continued to kind of explore
00:19:31 ►
this topic and increase the dialogue around psychedelics. And after that, I had a brief,
00:19:41 ►
well, very passionate love affair with DMT, very stormy love affair with DMT.
00:19:47 ►
And I had a really hard time getting it to work.
00:19:51 ►
I didn’t know anyone who was interested in it.
00:19:53 ►
It was just me and the DMT Nexus on my computer
00:19:56 ►
and a pile of crystals in front of me,
00:19:58 ►
and it was a lot of, like, hit and miss.
00:20:00 ►
But then I figured it out,
00:20:01 ►
and one day, on every hour at the hour, I smoked, had an experience, came down, said, oh my god, what the fuck, and then did it again.
00:20:13 ►
And so this is the description of that series of experiences.
00:20:18 ►
It began with a song, something I remembered hearing before, but couldn’t remember from where.
00:20:23 ►
I saw into a world that I remember having born into. They told me that our maturation process was prophecy, but I didn’t
00:20:30 ►
understand what that meant. It was like there was a god inside of me being born and some kind of new
00:20:34 ►
age was beginning. There were aliens making adjustments to me, fine-tuning. They said that
00:20:39 ►
they’d been waiting. They told me that there’s something special that I know how to do and that
00:20:43 ►
I needed to find the others so we could all work together. I traveled through so many dimensions and levels
00:20:48 ►
of consciousness that it’s really quite difficult to write about. They were teaching me. I tapped
00:20:53 ►
back into a narrative that began a long time ago and something I could remember and understand my
00:20:57 ►
past experiences. I remember things that never happened in this lifetime. My body there was
00:21:02 ►
expansive. I could still feel my
00:21:05 ►
normal consciousness, but there was so much more that I usually didn’t experience. There were these
00:21:10 ►
great gelatinous blobby creatures, and I knew how to feed them. I was tapped into this universal
00:21:15 ►
energy matrix, and I knew how to convert it into nourishment. It was like I was nursing them.
00:21:20 ►
There was a spaceship, and it had to kind of unfold and unpackage itself. They needed me to
00:21:26 ►
help with something. There were people there, and they helped me do it. She needed someone to tell
00:21:30 ►
her when, one said to another, and they told me when to swallow and when to turn my head.
00:21:34 ►
I entered another dimension with more gelatinous creatures, and they told me to breathe and keep
00:21:39 ►
my eyes closed and swallow. I could feel liquid all around me. It was as if their dimension had
00:21:44 ►
to go through these
00:21:45 ►
transformations in order to make room for ours to grow. Things were happening that needed to be done
00:21:50 ►
for the transition. The humans told me that I was a perfect vessel of some kind, and they hooked me
00:21:55 ►
up to this infinitely wise future, something like a seahorse. It had to adjust to me, like it had
00:22:00 ►
just woken up. I could feel its consciousness next to mine, and it was different from mine.
00:22:01 ►
like it had just woken up.
00:22:03 ►
I could feel its consciousness next to mine,
00:22:04 ►
and it was different from mine.
00:22:07 ►
So every hour at 45 past,
00:22:09 ►
I would smoke again and return to the same world,
00:22:11 ►
the same faces, the same story as it was unfolding.
00:22:15 ►
I’d previously seen people building some giant structure in a dimension next to ours,
00:22:16 ►
and I saw that they were fitting it up to our dimension.
00:22:18 ►
At one point, there was a woman strapped
00:22:20 ►
into some kind of organic machine,
00:22:22 ►
and she was chatting with me really casually,
00:22:24 ►
telling me about her family and her day as she was working. I was learning to speak psychically,
00:22:28 ►
and I told her this whole adjustment thing was kind of hard. The woman told me that she
00:22:32 ►
understood. She said, oh honey, I know, it’s a strange thing becoming part of an organism.
00:22:39 ►
The other people explained to me that they were working on pulling me through, that that’s
00:22:43 ►
what they do, they do this often, almost as if they were the people in
00:22:46 ►
Zion pulling me out of the Matrix for the first time.
00:22:48 ►
They said they’d come find me, and that
00:22:50 ►
in time, I would find the others.
00:22:52 ►
There were witches and shamans, midwives
00:22:54 ►
at the borderline, between the two hits and before
00:22:56 ►
I went through. I noticed them
00:22:58 ►
as I held my first hit,
00:23:00 ►
spirits in the room. They told me how to
00:23:02 ►
transition. The shamans
00:23:04 ►
appeared in my room towards the end of
00:23:05 ►
the day. It was like I was watching some kind of ritual. They were blessing me, saying prayers over
00:23:09 ►
me, initiating me. There was one woman that showed me a bird. She told me that she was sending it
00:23:14 ►
after me to watch over me on my journeys, and she said that she was sending very small things through,
00:23:19 ►
small creatures to help me. That was my 10th breakthrough total, probably the 8th of that day.
00:23:26 ►
So that was that night, but otherwise I keep going back to the
00:23:28 ►
same places, seeing the same people.
00:23:30 ►
As time went on, I began encountering humans
00:23:31 ►
more and more frequently. At one point
00:23:34 ►
after finishing some kind of transformation,
00:23:36 ►
I was at this ceremony and this
00:23:37 ►
intergalactic general of sorts was congratulating
00:23:40 ►
me on joining some kind of order.
00:23:42 ►
People wanted me to do things for them everywhere
00:23:43 ►
I went. I started getting really confused and didn’t want to deal with them. I demanded that someone
00:23:48 ►
explain to me, in English, very clearly, what was going on. But after I broke through again,
00:23:54 ►
so many people were rushing towards me that it got overwhelming. It was almost as if I
00:23:58 ►
were a celebrity. One woman was sprinting after me, but I shook my head and chose to
00:24:02 ►
return to my room. There were these creatures in the borderline that sealed off the dimension from mine. I was frustrated and asked them
00:24:08 ►
why no one was explaining what was going on. They looked sadly back at the woman and said
00:24:12 ►
that she was supposed to talk to me. I felt horrible, but I couldn’t go back there, and
00:24:17 ►
that was the end of my DMT. There are a few other recurring dimensions I’ve seen. One
00:24:21 ►
is a very bright, mostly white dimension with shifting blocks with colored symbols on them.
00:24:26 ►
I see them sometimes when I haven’t smoked
00:24:28 ►
enough, so I can see into that
00:24:29 ►
dimension and see people laughing and running around,
00:24:32 ►
but I know I’m in my room and
00:24:33 ►
can’t go there. Sometimes in those
00:24:35 ►
not-enough instances, they laugh at me playfully
00:24:37 ►
and close the door, the blocks
00:24:39 ►
holding to shut me out. When I first
00:24:41 ►
went to these places, I knew very distinctly
00:24:43 ►
that I’d been there before.
00:24:48 ►
This has all been so paradigm-shattering and real that I can’t discount these experiences without discounting all of my experiences. I’m leaving possibilities
00:24:53 ►
open and trying not to jump to conclusions, and I hope to find the others.
00:25:04 ►
Two other really bizarre DMT
00:25:06 ►
things I wanted to add
00:25:07 ►
one time I was with my boyfriend at the time
00:25:10 ►
and I smoked DMT
00:25:11 ►
and I was suddenly in this room
00:25:14 ►
surrounded by entities and this light energy
00:25:16 ►
jumped out of my chest
00:25:18 ►
and they were all congratulating
00:25:20 ►
I saw my boyfriend, they were congratulating us
00:25:22 ►
on being the parents of this light energy
00:25:24 ►
and it was a really beautiful experience.
00:25:26 ►
Hard to explain, obviously.
00:25:27 ►
But I came back, and I was so overjoyed.
00:25:29 ►
I wanted to tell my boyfriend what had just happened.
00:25:32 ►
And I started describing the scene, and he interrupted me and said,
00:25:36 ►
Yeah, no, I was there.
00:25:38 ►
And it was weird because I had seen him there,
00:25:40 ►
but I assumed that it was what he meant to be represented to me in my head.
00:25:45 ►
But I thought it was super weird that I had seen him, and he said he was there, and was
00:25:49 ►
able to relay the same information about the scene that I just experienced.
00:25:54 ►
One last thing that definitely stood out amongst my experiences.
00:25:59 ►
One time, I was at this kind of tribunal, and they cleared some aspect of this dimension
00:26:04 ►
for evolution,
00:26:05 ►
and all these people rushed out
00:26:07 ►
to gather up all these reptilian beings that were parasites,
00:26:10 ►
and they had to transport them in a spaceship to another dimension
00:26:12 ►
so that this dimension could grow and evolve.
00:26:16 ►
And a few weeks later, I was visiting with a friend
00:26:18 ►
who was really into kind of new age ideas,
00:26:20 ►
and he said, there’s this great podcast.
00:26:22 ►
I really think you should listen to it.
00:26:24 ►
I started listening, and some guy that channels information, and he started talking about’s this great podcast, I really think you should listen to it. I started listening, and some guy
00:26:26 ►
that channels information, and he started talking
00:26:28 ►
about how, yeah, right now they’re
00:26:30 ►
rounding up all these reptilian beings
00:26:32 ►
and taking them to another dimension so this dimension
00:26:33 ►
can evolve. And I was just really
00:26:36 ►
weirded out by that. Because I, you know,
00:26:37 ►
what are the chances? It’s a pretty uncannily
00:26:40 ►
similar situation.
00:26:42 ►
But despite all this weirdness, I wanted to
00:26:44 ►
end with
00:26:45 ►
a warning.
00:26:48 ►
I kind of went too far with the DMT.
00:26:51 ►
I would say
00:26:52 ►
it’s the only drug I’ve ever been addicted
00:26:54 ►
to. I was so obsessed
00:26:56 ►
with it. It’s all that I thought about for a while.
00:26:58 ►
And it became something I didn’t
00:27:00 ►
just approach it
00:27:02 ►
reverently or with very much intention.
00:27:05 ►
And one day, I had this experience.
00:27:08 ►
I was halfway broken through, very out of it,
00:27:11 ►
and suddenly I noticed that there was this red liquid on my hands.
00:27:14 ►
And I looked down at my bed, and this red liquid was pooling up,
00:27:17 ►
and I looked at the walls, and all of the walls in my room started bleeding.
00:27:21 ►
And then I got really scared and ran into the hallway.
00:27:23 ►
I looked down, and all the walls were bleeding in my house and I ran outside and the sun was just
00:27:27 ►
about to go down. It was the day before Halloween and I sat outside for hours and couldn’t go
00:27:31 ►
back inside because I was so afraid. But a few weeks after that passed, I was still kind
00:27:36 ►
of fishing for DMT and I said, okay, it was just in my head. If I know it’s in my head,
00:27:41 ►
then I can still use it. But I chose to do it at a time when it wasn’t good. I had work to do.
00:27:45 ►
It wasn’t a good environment.
00:27:47 ►
And halfway through smoking again, I heard this horrible sound.
00:27:52 ►
It sounded like hell opening up.
00:27:54 ►
And I closed my eyes and I said,
00:27:55 ►
It’s just in my head.
00:27:57 ►
You’re just trying to scare me.
00:27:58 ►
You can’t scare me.
00:27:58 ►
You can’t scare me.
00:27:59 ►
And then it started getting hotter and hotter and hotter.
00:28:02 ►
And then I realized that that sound had been my hair catching on fire from a candle.
00:28:07 ►
And I was right next to some curtains.
00:28:09 ►
And I easily, easily caught the curtains on fire and the house on fire.
00:28:14 ►
And I patted my hair, and this huge mound of hair was on the floor.
00:28:17 ►
And for all I knew, I had completely burned all my hair off.
00:28:21 ►
And it was so horrifying.
00:28:22 ►
And I was, at the time, I was like, life will never be beautiful again.
00:28:26 ►
This is so terrible and so against,
00:28:28 ►
so opposite of the beauty
00:28:30 ►
of DMT that I experienced earlier.
00:28:32 ►
But as time went by,
00:28:34 ►
it felt like it was a kind of built-in
00:28:37 ►
check or
00:28:38 ►
safety mechanism. It’s like I was
00:28:39 ►
veering in the wrong direction with it, and DMT
00:28:41 ►
was like, hey, I don’t think so.
00:28:44 ►
So that’s not how you’re supposed to use this.
00:28:46 ►
And so, yeah, I just encourage
00:28:48 ►
everyone to explore, to
00:28:50 ►
think creatively about the
00:28:51 ►
possibilities and implications of their
00:28:53 ►
experiences, and now I teach
00:28:55 ►
a higher dimensions literature class, because
00:28:57 ►
I think it’s really fun to think
00:29:00 ►
through some of these
00:29:02 ►
storylines. So thanks a lot for
00:29:04 ►
listening.
00:29:13 ►
I really found Neche’s trip reports to be most wonderfully refreshing.
00:29:16 ►
I don’t know about you,
00:29:17 ►
but I, for one, have actually gotten somewhat tired
00:29:20 ►
of only hearing about machine elves
00:29:22 ►
and self-dribbling basketballs being seen in DMT space.
00:29:27 ►
Although for the most part I’ve refrained from my own descriptions of what I experienced there,
00:29:33 ►
I applaud Neche and, well, and everybody else who has broken away from
00:29:37 ►
what has almost become a mantra for describing a DMT trip.
00:29:41 ►
Maybe it’s just my Irish love of language,
00:29:44 ►
but I’m very much looking forward to reading and hearing from Neche
00:29:48 ►
as her linguistic and psychedelic powers continue to grow.
00:29:53 ►
I think that you can now see what I meant about her.
00:29:57 ►
Like many of us who have gone before her,
00:29:59 ►
Neche has earned her psychedelic credentials the hard way,
00:30:02 ►
you know, one trip at a time.
00:30:05 ►
In a way, I see her marvelous exploration of DMT
00:30:08 ►
to be right along the same lines
00:30:10 ►
as what the McKenna brothers did at La Charrera.
00:30:15 ►
The final talk by Neche that I’m going to play for you today
00:30:18 ►
was presented at Symposia,
00:30:20 ►
Envisioning a Post-Prohibition World,
00:30:23 ►
which was held at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on April 18, 2015.
00:30:30 ►
And this talk is also the basis for an extended article that Neche wrote for Symposia magazine,
00:30:37 ►
which I’ll tell you more about after we first listen to her talk about
00:30:41 ►
Coming Out of the psychedelic closet.
00:30:55 ►
And so now I want to introduce Nishay, who is one of our friends.
00:30:59 ►
She also helped organize the Psychedemia Conference,
00:31:02 ►
which was great because they had posters there and a wide swath of presenters.
00:31:06 ►
And she’s also a teacher in the academic system at Penn.
00:31:08 ►
She teaches about psychedelic literature.
00:31:13 ►
She’s one of the most well-read people I know in the earliest parts of the psychedelic history.
00:31:18 ►
I mean, for them, William James using nitrous oxide is kind of the latest stuff that they talk about.
00:31:19 ►
She really digs deep.
00:31:22 ►
And humans have been getting high for a long time. And then she can tell you about different writers who have done it.
00:31:25 ►
And she’s also given us somewhat the subtext for this conference.
00:31:29 ►
Last night we had our psychedelic storytelling.
00:31:31 ►
And it was just people standing up and saying, this was my first time.
00:31:34 ►
This is how it helped me.
00:31:35 ►
This is how it affected my life.
00:31:37 ►
And it’s all these people coming out of the closet and saying, this is what worked.
00:31:42 ►
And that’s the kind of thing.
00:31:43 ►
Just like the gay movement looked to the civil rights movement and said, what is what worked. And that’s the kind of thing, just like the gay movement
00:31:45 ►
looked to the civil rights movement and said,
00:31:47 ►
what worked for you? How did you gain
00:31:50 ►
rights for yourself? How did you demand
00:31:51 ►
rights in this society? And now our
00:31:54 ►
job is to look back at the activists who went before us,
00:31:56 ►
to look to the civil rights movement,
00:31:58 ►
look to the gay rights movement
00:32:00 ►
and see what worked for them. And coming out of
00:32:01 ►
the closet works. Having someone like Michael
00:32:03 ►
Pollan writing in New York works. Having. And coming out of the closet works. Having someone like Michael Pollan writing the New Yorker works.
00:32:05 ►
Having famous academics coming out
00:32:07 ►
and not just saying,
00:32:08 ►
I put, give psilocybin to mice
00:32:10 ►
and this is what happens,
00:32:11 ►
but to say, I take psilocybin
00:32:13 ►
with my friends in the spiritual setting
00:32:15 ►
and this is how it works on my heart.
00:32:17 ►
And so Neche is pushing that kind of model
00:32:19 ►
through a very,
00:32:20 ►
really one of the hardest paths.
00:32:22 ►
It’s easier to be an underground practitioner
00:32:24 ►
who is surrounded by lovely people like yourselves.
00:32:28 ►
It’s much harder to be in academia
00:32:29 ►
with a bunch of annoying eggheads
00:32:31 ►
who think all drugs are bad.
00:32:33 ►
But she’s going through that path,
00:32:35 ►
and she’s forcing her way through,
00:32:36 ►
and I think it’s one of the most noble things you can do.
00:32:38 ►
And she brought some of her students along,
00:32:41 ►
which is an impressive thing, too.
00:32:47 ►
If anything speaks for a Franklin teacher is that a bunch of her students came during
00:32:52 ►
party week at Penn to come to this conference to support their professor, and so I give
00:32:57 ►
you our great friend, Nishay.
00:33:12 ►
So the question of identity arises from the psychedelic experience itself.
00:33:13 ►
Who am I?
00:33:15 ►
How do you answer that question?
00:33:27 ►
I’m a mother, a wife, a teacher, a scholar, and I’m also a psychedelic woman. I first heard the phrase psychedelic woman during a talk by Annie Oak at the Horizon Psychedelics
00:33:31 ►
Conference. It resonated with me and I started to think more about the
00:33:35 ►
intersection of psychedelics and identity. This presentation is the result
00:33:40 ►
of five years of thinking deeply about the parallels between psychedelic
00:33:44 ►
identity and the LGBT rights movement. During this talk, I’ll address three main questions. First,
00:33:52 ►
what does it mean to identify as psychedelic? Next, what parallels can be drawn to the LGBT
00:33:58 ►
rights movement? And finally, what does it mean to come out as psychedelic? So first,
00:34:04 ►
what does it mean to be a psychedelic person?
00:34:06 ►
Okay, so Sasha Shulgin writes in the beginning of Peacock
00:34:09 ►
that for many thousands of years in every known culture,
00:34:13 ►
there has been some percentage of the population
00:34:15 ►
which has used this or that plant to achieve a transformation
00:34:18 ►
in its state of consciousness.
00:34:21 ►
Going back even further, the recent discovery
00:34:23 ►
of a 100- year old psychoactive
00:34:26 ►
fungus supports Mike Jay’s argument that we’ve been taking drugs longer than we’ve been human.
00:34:32 ►
The intense stigmatization and criminalization of psychedelics is a recent phenomenon. But
00:34:39 ►
I want to return to Shulgin’s phrase, some percentage of the population. There are some people for whom psychedelics
00:34:46 ►
are more than just a fun time on the weekend. Take Anne Shulgin’s description of her first
00:34:51 ►
mescaline experience, also from Kegel. The funny thing is that despite all the newness,
00:34:58 ►
there’s something about all of it that feels, well, the only way I can put it is that it’s
00:35:02 ►
like coming home. As if there’s some part of me that already knows, knows this territory, and it’s saying, oh yes, of
00:35:09 ►
course, almost a kind of remembering. My friend Becky semi-jokingly compared this experience
00:35:16 ►
to receiving a letter from Hogwarts. You go about your life thinking you’re a muggle,
00:35:20 ►
and all of a sudden you discover a part of yourself that actually existed all along.
00:35:25 ►
and all of a sudden you discover a part of yourself that actually existed all along. But not everyone has this kind of reaction to psychedelics, and that’s okay.
00:35:29 ►
And just like someone can be gay without ever having sex,
00:35:32 ►
I believe that some people are psychedelic without ever taking drugs.
00:35:36 ►
But I discovered that this comparison of queer and psychedelic identities is controversial
00:35:41 ►
after I first published some thoughts about it in a 2010 Reality Sandwich article.
00:35:48 ►
Reactions were extremely polarized.
00:35:51 ►
Some people wrote to tell me how much the comparison resonated with their own truth and their struggles,
00:35:57 ►
but other people were deeply offended and felt that the appropriation of LGBT discourse
00:36:02 ►
trivialized LGBT struggles.
00:36:07 ►
appropriation of LGBT discourse trivialized LGBT struggles. I am certainly not suggesting that the oppression of psychedelic people is identical to the oppression of LGBT people,
00:36:11 ►
but the continuing struggle of one oppressed group is not sufficient reason to avoid discussions
00:36:16 ►
about other kinds of systemic oppression. Which raises the question, are psychedelic
00:36:22 ►
people actually oppressed? It’s an injustice that people like Timothy Tyler are serving life sentences
00:36:28 ►
without the possibility of parole for the non-violent charge of conspiracy
00:36:32 ►
to possess LSD with intent to distribute.
00:36:36 ►
Many murderers and rapists get less time than that.
00:36:39 ►
Tyler considered LSD to be a sacrament.
00:36:42 ►
He is a grateful dead follower who was locked away in a federal prison where, for two decades, listening to music was forbidden. Another deadhead was
00:36:50 ►
Rod Walker, who died in prison this past December after serving over a decade of a life sentence.
00:36:56 ►
People who choose to take psychedelics run the risk of losing their jobs, being disowned
00:37:00 ►
by their families, and losing their children to state custody. Those are very real and very troubling consequences.
00:37:08 ►
So yes, I think this discussion is important.
00:37:12 ►
I also think it’s important to address the criticisms against it.
00:37:16 ►
Last summer, as I was preparing a festival workshop around this topic,
00:37:20 ►
someone wrote me to criticize the comparison of taking a drug with being queer, a comparison
00:37:26 ►
that she described as very dangerous and regressive. Her choice of words is telling. From her perspective,
00:37:33 ►
being queer is an identity that someone is born with. But taking a drug is something
00:37:37 ►
that people choose to do. It’s not essential to who they are. So on the basis of her reasoning,
00:37:44 ►
the gay rights movement
00:37:45 ►
is allowed to draw on civil rights discourse, but psychonauts aren’t allowed to draw on
00:37:50 ►
gay rights discourse. This person positioned herself as an authority on the subject, as
00:37:57 ►
an LGBT activist who has tripped and been to Burning Man. She had witnessed firsthand
00:38:01 ►
how non-essential psychedelics are, and I believe that’s true for her, but I don’t believe she is in a position to speak for all psychonauts. To consider
00:38:10 ►
a different angle on her reasoning, here’s an alternative scenario. What if I’ve been
00:38:14 ►
involved with multiple women during my life, but I don’t identify as a lesbian? If someone
00:38:18 ►
told me that I couldn’t be with another woman ever again, it wouldn’t be a big deal to me,
00:38:23 ►
but does that give me the right to go to a lesbian and say that therefore it shouldn’t be a big deal to her? My psychedelic
00:38:29 ►
identity is personally a bigger part of my life than my gender identity or my sexual
00:38:33 ►
identity. Consider for a moment the LGBTQIA acronym. It ends with the letter A, which
00:38:42 ►
stands for both ally and asexual. An asexual person is someone
00:38:46 ►
for whom, by definition, sexuality is not the most important aspect of their identity.
00:38:51 ►
So even within this acronym, there is an arrow that points to identities beyond it. While
00:38:56 ►
we’re here, let’s also consider the letter T, which stands for transgender. The transgender
00:39:02 ►
movement has taught us that we need to believe people when they say who they are. If I say I’m a psychedelic woman, who has the right to tell me that my
00:39:09 ►
experience of myself is false? In the process of thinking through these ideas, I decided
00:39:15 ►
to look more deeply into the history of the gay rights movement and its reliance on civil
00:39:19 ►
rights discourse. Something surprised me. The gay rights movement had to defend itself
00:39:24 ►
from criticisms that were essentially identical
00:39:26 ►
to criticisms being directed against
00:39:28 ►
psychonauts today
00:39:29 ►
for instance, some people say psychonauts
00:39:32 ►
don’t have a right to claim that they’re an oppressed group
00:39:34 ►
psychonauts are mostly privileged
00:39:36 ►
wealthy white people who just want an excuse
00:39:38 ►
to have hedonistic parties, right?
00:39:41 ►
compare this to legislation
00:39:43 ►
debates about gay rights from the early
00:39:44 ►
1990s, as
00:39:46 ►
described by Michael Bronski in his book, The Pleasure Principle. Bronski describes
00:39:51 ►
the view that gay men and lesbians did not need special rights because, far from being
00:39:55 ►
disenfranchised, they already were wealthier, had better jobs, more leisure time, and more
00:40:00 ►
disposable income than almost any other group in the U.S. economy. For many in the mainstream, the privileged economic status of homosexuals was conflated
00:40:09 ►
with their already established view of gay people as pleasure seekers and sexual libertines.
00:40:14 ►
Being gay was seen by many as a deviant lifestyle choice, but gay people weren’t convinced
00:40:19 ►
by this argument.
00:40:21 ►
Michael Nava and Robert Doudoff set out a defense of the alliance between gay rights and civil rights in their book,
00:40:26 ►
Created Equal, Why Gay Rights Matter to America.
00:40:29 ►
For our purposes here, I swapped out the author’s original race and sexuality terms
00:40:35 ►
for my own sexuality and psychedelic terms.
00:40:37 ►
The argument is still valid with these changes.
00:40:40 ►
Take, for instance, this altered quote.
00:40:48 ►
The special character of sexuality within the society and of the gay rights movement that grew out of it
00:40:50 ►
cannot preempt other movements for civil rights
00:40:53 ►
some members of LGBT communities
00:40:56 ►
are understandably sensitive and protective
00:40:58 ►
about the routine appropriation of their particular historical experience
00:41:02 ►
and the particularity of the extraordinary movement they carried forward
00:41:06 ►
to challenge their oppression.
00:41:08 ►
Nevertheless, the movement’s claim was to a common set of principles that must apply to everyone.
00:41:15 ►
If women, racially and ethnically diverse groups, LGBT people, and now psychomats
00:41:21 ►
rush to the standard first carried by the African American Civil Rights Movement
00:41:24 ►
and subsequently by the LGBT movement, that is not stealing but believing.
00:41:30 ►
Those who are so quick to denounce the appropriation of civil rights
00:41:33 ►
by movements based on gender, sexual orientation, physical ability, and other modes of identification
00:41:39 ►
probably need to examine their own record with respect to human differences other than race or sexuality.
00:41:49 ►
The author suggests that the key contribution of the gay rights movement
00:41:53 ►
to the history of civil rights and civil liberties
00:41:55 ►
is its re-emphasis on the individual,
00:41:58 ►
an individual asserting personal rights to personal freedom
00:42:01 ►
for personal choice about the personal life.
00:42:05 ►
They continue,
00:42:08 ►
the labeling of gays as degenerate and unnatural
00:42:11 ►
is the same kind of labeling that has always been used
00:42:13 ►
to justify the denial of rights to individuals
00:42:16 ►
belonging to minority communities.
00:42:18 ►
Remixing the authors again,
00:42:21 ►
people who are quick to shoot down the possibility
00:42:23 ►
of a psychedelic identity
00:42:24 ►
deny the validity of personal experience when it is at odds with convention.
00:42:29 ►
In effect, psychedelic men and women are taught that their experience of themselves as decent, productive, loving humans is false, because drug use is unnatural and sinful.
00:42:39 ►
In the face of this, the act of coming out is the acceptance of one’s fundamental worth in the face of social condemnation and likely persecution.
00:42:48 ►
It is common for members of oppressed groups to resist alliances with other groups.
00:42:53 ►
Andrew Solomon describes this phenomenon in his book Far From the Tree,
00:42:57 ►
where he explores what he calls horizontal identity categories,
00:43:01 ►
identities that people don’t necessarily inherit from their parents.
00:43:05 ►
He writes that deaf people didn’t want to be compared to people with schizophrenia,
00:43:09 ►
some parents of schizophrenics were creeped out by dwarfs, criminals couldn’t abide the
00:43:13 ►
idea that anything in common with transgender people, and some children of rape felt that
00:43:18 ►
their emotional struggle was trivialized when they were compared to gay activists.
00:43:22 ►
The compulsion to build such hierarchies persists,
00:43:26 ►
even among these people,
00:43:29 ►
all of whom have been harmed by such hierarchies.
00:43:33 ►
But Solomon cites the theory of intersectionality as an alternative to this trend.
00:43:36 ►
Intersectionality is a theory that various kinds of oppression
00:43:38 ►
feed on one another,
00:43:40 ►
that you cannot, for example, eliminate sexism
00:43:43 ►
without addressing racism.
00:43:46 ►
Solomon quotes Benjamin Jealous, president of the NAACP, who said,
00:43:50 ►
if we tolerate prejudice toward any group, we tolerate it toward all groups.
00:43:54 ►
We are all in one fight, and our freedom is all the same freedom.
00:43:59 ►
I argue that it doesn’t serve us to cherry-pick which identity groups are worth protecting and which are not.
00:44:09 ►
We need to focus on a common set of core principles and honor the right of individuals to make decisions about their own minds and bodies. Which brings me to the
00:44:14 ►
final section of my presentation. What does it mean to come out as psychedelic? I’ll start
00:44:20 ►
with my own case. When I went to college, I didn’t understand why the military’s
00:44:25 ►
don’t ask, don’t tell policy was such a big deal.
00:44:28 ►
Why do people need to talk about their sexuality at work?
00:44:31 ►
But then I moved from Bard College, a hippie school in the woods,
00:44:34 ►
to the University of Pennsylvania for graduate school,
00:44:37 ►
something I didn’t know anyone who had meaningful psychedelic experiences.
00:44:41 ►
I felt that I needed to keep that part of me hidden,
00:44:43 ►
and it was an extremely lonely time. I learned then the hard way that having to hide a part of who you are can have a
00:44:50 ►
deep psychological impact. Coming out as psychedelic was profoundly liberating. Instead of studying
00:44:56 ►
romantic poetry because of my secret interest in psychedelics, I started researching poetry
00:45:01 ►
explicitly alongside psychedelics. In my case, this doesn’t mean that I continue explicitly alongside psychedelics.
00:45:08 ►
In my case, this doesn’t mean that I continue to use psychedelics today.
00:45:13 ►
As a mother and a teacher, the current political climate makes the risk outweigh the benefits.
00:45:19 ►
But psychedelics helped me through crippling social anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder during my first year of college.
00:45:22 ►
And they shaped my entire worldview and life’s path.
00:45:25 ►
This isn’t something I would easily forget.
00:45:30 ►
But coming out as psychedelic entails a whole spectrum of possibilities.
00:45:32 ►
It could mean describing past views,
00:45:34 ►
but it can also mean striking up a conversation about the latest research out of NYU or Johns Hopkins.
00:45:38 ►
It can mean forwarding a recent article in the New Yorker or New York Times
00:45:41 ►
to your mom or your boss or your colleague,
00:45:44 ►
or even planning
00:45:45 ►
a trip to drink ayahuasca in a country where it’s legal.
00:45:49 ►
Taking a different tack, you can also choose to be a psychedelic ally, rejecting the current
00:45:54 ►
state of the drug war while personally abstaining from psychedelic use.
00:45:59 ►
What’s important here is that people are mindful of the decisions they’re making and why.
00:46:04 ►
Sometimes it can be more strategic to keep things under wraps. If you teach children or require a
00:46:09 ►
security clearance to work for the government, for example, it might make sense to hold some
00:46:13 ►
of your interests and experiences back. But if you’re holding back on coming out because
00:46:17 ►
of a knee-jerk fear reaction, I encourage you to reconsider. Sometimes the risks are
00:46:22 ►
low, and sometimes the risks are worth taking. The abolition of sodomy laws in this country did not eradicate homophobia, and
00:46:32 ►
anti-psychedelic prejudices will still exist in a post-prohibition world. By banding together,
00:46:37 ►
we have the power to own our narratives and to shift the cultural dialogue. And as people
00:46:43 ►
have noted at this event, it’s important to create safe spaces
00:46:46 ►
where people can come together
00:46:48 ►
to share their ideas and experiences
00:46:49 ►
without fear of persecution.
00:46:52 ►
Many cities host regular psychedelic discussion groups.
00:46:55 ►
In Philadelphia, we have Theorizing Psychedelics,
00:46:57 ►
which means bi-weekly.
00:46:59 ►
San Francisco has the San Francisco Psychedelic Society,
00:47:02 ►
and Baltimore has its psychedelic seminars,
00:47:04 ►
just to mention a few.
00:47:06 ►
I encourage everyone here
00:47:07 ►
to either get involved
00:47:08 ►
with their local groups
00:47:09 ►
or create a new group
00:47:10 ►
for people to come together
00:47:12 ►
on a regular basis.
00:47:14 ►
Terrence McKenna argued
00:47:15 ►
that sovereignty
00:47:15 ►
over one’s consciousness
00:47:16 ►
is the next great
00:47:17 ►
civil rights struggle,
00:47:19 ►
after sexism, racism,
00:47:21 ►
and homophobia.
00:47:22 ►
Coming out about
00:47:23 ►
one’s psychedelic identity,
00:47:26 ►
interests, and or experiences is an important part of redefining the public perception of psychedelics and of those who
00:47:31 ►
choose to experience their effects. But this debate is ultimately much bigger than us.
00:47:38 ►
In the words of Nelson Mandela, for to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains,
00:47:44 ►
but to live in a way that respects and enhances
00:47:46 ►
the freedom of others.
00:47:47 ►
At the end of the day, despite all differences,
00:47:50 ►
everyone deserves their compassion
00:47:51 ►
and respect. Thank you so much.
00:48:08 ►
And again, questions? The mic is in the middle.
00:48:11 ►
And I’ll throw one in to get started.
00:48:15 ►
What’s it been like for you coming out of the psychedelic closet? And how have you seen others struggle with that that you’ve seen in the academic circles
00:48:20 ►
or professional circles that you see?
00:48:23 ►
Well, when I applied to graduate school, my writing sample was about philosophy and fractals
00:48:29 ►
because I really wanted to go somewhere that would let me be a little bit experimental
00:48:33 ►
and do different things.
00:48:35 ►
I mean, I wasn’t explicit about psychedelics, but the fractal, there’s a certain subtext
00:48:39 ►
there.
00:48:40 ►
And I mean, my school has been extremely supportive.
00:48:43 ►
We got a $10,000 grant
00:48:45 ►
from the medical school to put on psychedemia
00:48:46 ►
some of that money went to bring in
00:48:48 ►
Burning Man artists to talk alongside
00:48:50 ►
researchers from Johns Hopkins
00:48:52 ►
and recently
00:48:54 ►
I was nominated as a finalist
00:48:56 ►
for a teaching award out of
00:48:58 ►
350 graduate students and
00:49:00 ►
30 finalists, so not only do they
00:49:02 ►
let me teach classes on psychedelics
00:49:04 ►
and higher dimensions, but they’re
00:49:06 ►
also very supportive of that.
00:49:09 ►
So I think part of what I’ve been doing over the past five years is going to conferences,
00:49:14 ►
talking to other students.
00:49:16 ►
And there’s a mass graduate student list there that is also open to undergraduates if you
00:49:20 ►
are very serious about going into this field.
00:49:23 ►
And it’s a great support network and a way to kind of bring in people
00:49:26 ►
from different disciplines and have a conversation.
00:49:29 ►
And a lot of people, I feel like they just don’t know
00:49:31 ►
that they can study this stuff in school.
00:49:32 ►
I mean, if people,
00:49:33 ►
if I could have done a psychedelic studies major in college,
00:49:36 ►
I definitely would have done that, you know?
00:49:38 ►
So, anyway, yeah.
00:49:41 ►
Do you have a question?
00:49:43 ►
Yeah, I do.
00:49:44 ►
First, I just want to thank you so much for your talk.
00:49:47 ►
I’m going to confess that at the beginning of your talk,
00:49:51 ►
I felt a little skeptical.
00:49:53 ►
There was something about the word oppression in this context
00:49:57 ►
that I hadn’t really thought of and didn’t expect immediately for me.
00:50:02 ►
And you pretty much sold me on your perspective.
00:50:06 ►
It worked really well for me.
00:50:10 ►
Let’s see, I think what I’m wondering about is,
00:50:15 ►
so I think certainly in terms of the examples of imprisonment
00:50:20 ►
that you offered, those are just terrible
00:50:24 ►
and shouldn’t happen.
00:50:26 ►
Your point about what I’m going to call
00:50:28 ►
sort of solidarity amongst identity movements
00:50:31 ►
seems really important to me.
00:50:34 ►
The next piece that comes to my mind is,
00:50:37 ►
I often think of rights and responsibilities
00:50:40 ►
and wonder about the potential of psychedelics and psychedelic work
00:50:47 ►
to open all of us up to other possibilities, other identities,
00:50:54 ►
become more tolerant and supportive,
00:50:57 ►
and that that may actually feed back into all of these rights movements
00:51:02 ►
and other movements, environmental, social justice.
00:51:06 ►
So I’d just be interested to get your thoughts on that as another piece of this.
00:51:12 ►
Yeah, well, I’m glad you asked that.
00:51:13 ►
Thanks, because Catherine McLean’s research at Johns Hopkins,
00:51:17 ►
they showed that psilocybin use led to an increase in the personality category of openness,
00:51:25 ►
and that refers to a general open-mindedness to different perspectives,
00:51:30 ►
increased curiosity about the world and that sort of thing.
00:51:35 ►
Matt Johnson, also at Johns Hopkins, he recently spoke at Penn,
00:51:38 ►
and he said it’s the only study he knows of where a laboratory procedure
00:51:43 ►
led to a measurable change in personality.
00:51:46 ►
And that’s a pretty major thing. If people are going to be more open-minded to difference,
00:51:50 ►
that’s a very worthwhile cause to champion. So I thank you, Catherine, for your work on
00:51:56 ►
that as well.
00:51:59 ►
Thank you very much for that talk. I’m probably going to come at this question from a different
00:52:03 ►
context than you were necessarily getting at,
00:52:05 ►
which I really appreciate and it’s very intriguing.
00:52:08 ►
However, to just play a little devil’s advocate,
00:52:10 ►
which I’m sure is probably a thought that’s crossed your mind when dealing with this,
00:52:14 ►
what about the personal quality to sacred beliefs?
00:52:20 ►
And not necessarily the opposition to wanting to share that with others,
00:52:24 ►
and not necessarily the opposition to wanting to share that with others,
00:52:30 ►
but almost like this anonymous nature of having a deeply personal-held understanding of, you know, call it your psychedelic identity, your religious beliefs,
00:52:34 ►
or whatever, your connection to the spirit.
00:52:36 ►
But where does that come into play with this coming-out-of-the-closet thing
00:52:40 ►
where you almost rather not talk about it with other people?
00:52:44 ►
Someone actually asked me that
00:52:45 ►
a week ago, too. They were mentioning
00:52:47 ►
that. And I said, I mean,
00:52:49 ►
I definitely think that, you know, if that’s how you feel
00:52:51 ►
and you find it personally meaningful
00:52:53 ►
to, you know, keep that
00:52:55 ►
as a private thing, I think that’s definitely,
00:52:57 ►
you know, your right to do so.
00:53:00 ►
But I also think that, like, for a lot
00:53:01 ►
of people, the process of
00:53:03 ►
languaging, as Terrence McConna would say, your psychedelic experiences,
00:53:08 ►
it’s a way of grafting those onto your life narrative in a way that’s meaningful in the long term.
00:53:14 ►
Because it’s like you can have an experience and then not put it into language and sort of have a sense of what happened,
00:53:20 ►
but you might forget a lot of the details.
00:53:22 ►
And what happens in that really creative
00:53:25 ►
wrestling of these altered states
00:53:27 ►
into a language that, the language
00:53:29 ►
wasn’t built to describe those states,
00:53:32 ►
so you have to be creative, you have to
00:53:34 ►
kind of weave different metaphors
00:53:35 ►
and approaches together. And so A,
00:53:38 ►
I think that’s a worthwhile project in itself,
00:53:40 ►
and B, by doing so, you make
00:53:42 ►
it meaningful to you in a way that helps
00:53:44 ►
integrate the experience
00:53:45 ►
for the long term.
00:53:46 ►
But I think if you feel personally
00:53:48 ►
that holding it as a private thing works for you,
00:53:51 ►
I definitely think that that’s a valid approach as well.
00:53:56 ►
Thank you.
00:53:58 ►
Thanks for a great talk.
00:54:01 ►
I recently was reading this book called Anti-Woman,
00:54:04 ►
about how during the
00:54:06 ►
Civil Rights Movement, a lot of African American feminists
00:54:09 ►
have to kind of choose to
00:54:12 ►
instead support the Civil Rights Movement instead of the Feminist Movement.
00:54:16 ►
And so I was wondering,
00:54:18 ►
I heard you mention Annie Oak or someone with that name,
00:54:21 ►
and I’ll look up her stuff, but could you say a little more about
00:54:24 ►
the lot in life
00:54:25 ►
for females coming out of the psychedelic body
00:54:28 ►
and how it does, I think,
00:54:30 ►
if you face a different set of oppression?
00:54:35 ►
Definitely. Thanks for asking.
00:54:36 ►
That’s something I think about a lot.
00:54:38 ►
And just recently, Graham Hancock released
00:54:41 ►
a new psychedelic anthology of essays called The Defiant Spark.
00:54:46 ►
And I was looking at the table of contents, and it was something like 27 men and one woman.
00:54:51 ►
And I was like, are you kidding me?
00:54:53 ►
You have this boundary-dissolving substance, and yet this hugely patriarchal, perhaps unconsciously, but influence.
00:55:03 ►
patriarchal, perhaps unconsciously, but influence.
00:55:10 ►
And one scholar that was printed in that book wrote me to try to explain the situation to me.
00:55:17 ►
And he said, well, women tend to talk about their personal experience. They don’t generalize into research.
00:55:19 ►
And this is an anthology for research.
00:55:22 ►
And then he encouraged me to make a women’s psychedelics anthology book.
00:55:26 ►
But I don’t want to write about women psychedelics only.
00:55:30 ►
And I don’t think there should be psychedelics and women psychedelics.
00:55:33 ►
So that’s a big place to work on breaking down those boundaries.
00:55:39 ►
But I really applaud Symposia for going all the way to include women speakers.
00:55:44 ►
Because oftentimes you’ll just end up with a roster of white men, and that’s it.
00:55:50 ►
And that’s been a big problem.
00:55:51 ►
Actually, I got flown out to a conference in Australia,
00:55:54 ►
specifically because they were having such a hard time finding male to female speakers.
00:55:59 ►
And when they were specifically looking, the year before that,
00:56:03 ►
there was something like 40 men and one woman. And even the year where they were
00:56:07 ►
looking for women specifically, they still only had 7 women speakers.
00:56:12 ►
So it’s a combination between
00:56:14 ►
having spaces that women feel comfortable speaking in
00:56:20 ►
where their voices won’t be overridden and they won’t be
00:56:24 ►
talked down to or told
00:56:27 ►
that they don’t do research, things like that.
00:56:30 ►
And it’s a matter of encouraging other women
00:56:33 ►
to stand up and share their stories
00:56:35 ►
and be told that your contribution is important
00:56:38 ►
and valid, really important, in fact.
00:56:40 ►
So thanks a lot for asking that.
00:56:43 ►
OK, so this is not actually a question,
00:56:46 ►
but it emphasizes exactly what you just
00:56:48 ►
said about the value
00:56:50 ►
and importance of your
00:56:52 ►
contribution.
00:56:54 ►
And I think I said this a little bit
00:56:56 ►
on Friday, but I wanted to say it in front of everybody
00:56:58 ►
here, how influential
00:57:00 ►
psychedemia was
00:57:02 ►
to who I am today versus who I was
00:57:04 ►
what, three years ago now.
00:57:07 ►
And I just want to honor you for sticking your neck out and making that happen.
00:57:12 ►
And I remember that I said to her while I was there, I said, I think this is so great
00:57:17 ►
because if something like this had come along when I was an undergraduate, it would have
00:57:21 ►
completely changed the trajectory of my life.
00:57:23 ►
And then even in my mid-30s, it changed the trajectory of my life.
00:57:27 ►
So thank you for your time.
00:57:35 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:57:38 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:57:43 ►
I think that now you probably understand exactly what I meant in the beginning when I said that Neche may be young, but in many ways she is already one of our elders.
00:57:53 ►
If you think about it for a moment, many of the stories and legends surrounding the brothers McKenna sprung from their now famous trip to La Charrera when they were both very young men.
00:58:06 ►
now famous trip to La Charrera when they were both very young men. Need I point out to you that even though Neche, while at least relative to me, is also very young, she’s nonetheless older than
00:58:12 ►
the McKenna brothers were at La Charrera. As Emerson once said, meek young men grow up in
00:58:19 ►
libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given.
00:58:27 ►
Forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books.
00:58:34 ►
So how old does one need to be in order to become a psychedelic researcher?
00:58:39 ►
Well, in my opinion, you’re that age already.
00:58:42 ►
So what are you waiting for?
00:58:42 ►
In my opinion, you’re that age already.
00:58:43 ►
So what are you waiting for?
00:58:50 ►
And step one is to go to arrowid.org and begin reading about whatever strikes your fancy.
00:58:53 ►
Follow your bliss, as Joseph Campbell often said.
00:59:02 ►
Now, this last talk that we just listened to is also the basis of a written piece by Neche in the Symposia magazine.
00:59:05 ►
And I’ll link to it in today’s program notes,
00:59:10 ►
which you can get to via psychedelicsalon.com. And if you haven’t already checked out the symposia.com, that’s P-S-Y-M-P-O-S-I-A, symposia.com website, well, it’s a treat that you owe yourself.
00:59:20 ►
In their magazine section, you’ll find Neche’s article titled Psychedelics and Identity Politics, along with Why I Came Out of the Psychedelic Closet by Daniel Miller, and The Reagans, Socrates, and Hypocrisis by Dorian Sagan.
00:59:46 ►
Symposia site. You’re also going to find videos and a link to information about the Psychedelics Because hashtag that they were promoting during the month of April, but which it seems to me is a
00:59:52 ►
really good hashtag to use all year long, which is what I’m planning on doing, and I hope that you
00:59:58 ►
will too. So check them out if you get a chance, both at symposia.com and at psychedelicsbecause.org.
01:00:07 ►
I also want to let you know about a remarkable new film about Walter Pankey,
01:00:13 ►
who, as you know, is famous for leading the research project that’s popularly known as the Good Friday Experiment,
01:00:21 ►
which was part of his thesis project under his advisors at Harvard, Timothy Leary
01:00:26 ►
and Ram Dass.
01:00:27 ►
Now, this new film by Susan Gervasi, titled Psychedelic Mysticism, isn’t yet available
01:00:34 ►
for purchase by the general public, but it will be soon.
01:00:37 ►
For now, you can see the trailer at LazyGFilms.net.
01:00:43 ►
I’ve had a chance to see an early cut of this film,
01:00:46 ►
and I found it to be by far the best and most thorough treatment of that experiment,
01:00:51 ►
and of those times that I’ve yet seen.
01:00:54 ►
While I thought that I knew a lot about those days and those people,
01:00:58 ►
well, for me, there was some new and extremely interesting interviews
01:01:01 ►
that are not to be missed if you’re into what I guess can now be called the very early days of this renewal of psychedelic research.
01:01:10 ►
Experimental mysticism is what Pankey called his work,
01:01:13 ►
and I think that after watching this film, you’ll understand exactly what he meant by that.
01:01:19 ►
The film itself is titled Psychedelic Mysticism,
01:01:22 ►
and was an official selection of the Alhambra Theater Film
01:01:26 ►
Festival in Evansville, Indiana, as well as at the Utopia Film Festival in Greenbelt, Maryland.
01:01:33 ►
And it’s going to be screened the evening of June 25th at the California Institute for Integral
01:01:39 ►
Studies in San Francisco. So if you’re in the Bay Area on that evening, well, you might want to stop by
01:01:45 ►
CIIS and meet Susan, who’s going to be there, as will one of the original participants in the
01:01:51 ►
experiment, Mike Young. And they’re going to participate in a panel discussion following the
01:01:56 ►
film, along with Bill Richards, who is a Johns Hopkins psilocybin investigator and who was a
01:02:03 ►
close friend and colleague of Walter Pankey.
01:02:06 ►
All in all, I think it should be quite an interesting event.
01:02:11 ►
Finally, I’d like to let you know about a truly fascinating new book that you may want to put into your Amazon wish list or to pre-order.
01:02:18 ►
It’s by fellow salonner Marcus Rumeri and legendary elder Frank Ogden.
01:02:27 ►
Marcus Rumeri and legendary elder Frank Ogden. I’ve been fortunate to see a pre-publication copy of it and I’m sure that even if you have only a very small psychedelic library that this is going
01:02:34 ►
to be a book that you’ll want to have. The full title of the book is Shamanic Graffiti,
01:02:40 ►
a hundred thousand years of drugs, a hundred yearshibition. And it’s divided into three parts, with the middle part focused on the work that was done from 1957 to 1975 at Hollywood Hospital near Vancouver, Canada.
01:03:05 ►
a private hospital generating a very lucrative business in which they use massive doses of both LSD and mescaline to treat alcoholism, among other things.
01:03:11 ►
And as far as I know, this may be the only well-documented and detailed account of that
01:03:17 ►
important early psychedelic research, thanks largely to the nearly 1,000 files of Ogden’s
01:03:23 ►
that he gave to Marcus for historical background.
01:03:27 ►
Hopefully, we’ll get a recording of Marcus discussing this book that I can play here on the salon
01:03:32 ►
when the publication date becomes a little closer.
01:03:35 ►
But if you’re interested, you should put in a pre-order for the paperback,
01:03:39 ►
just in case that this isn’t a large printing,
01:03:42 ►
because I’m sure that it’s going to be a collector’s item one
01:03:45 ►
day. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends. Thank you.