511 - Psychedelic Book of the Dead

Program Notes

https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty

Guest speaker: Erik Davis

http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0806516526“The whole history of Buddhism in the West, the whole thing in the post war period as Buddhism starts to become really popular, is inextricable from psychedelics.” -Erik Davis

Today’s podcast features a talk that was given by Erik Davis in which he unravels the history of both the Tibetan Book of the Dead and its psychedelic sister, the Psychedelic Experience, that was written by Leary, Alpert, and Metzner during their infamous Harvard years. Erik Davis, who holds a Ph.D. from Rice University’s Gnosticism, Esotericism and Mysticism program, is a well known author and lecturer who has written books such as Techgnosis and Led Zeppelin IV.

Erik Davis’ Website
The Expanding Mind Podcast with Erik Davis
Erik Davis on Twitter
@erik_davis
The Psychedelic Experience:
A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead
by Timothy Leary

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 I’m very pleased to begin today by thanking fellow salonners Steve A. and Spatial Computer LLC,

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who also sent a very generous donation to help offset some of the expenses associated with these podcasts.

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I truly appreciate your help.

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As you know, there’s no advertising in these podcasts, nor are there ads of any kind on our website, which you’ll find at psychedelicsalon.com. And the reason that I

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don’t allow advertising on our sites is that if I did, well, then the advertisers would require

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tracking cookies and the rest of all that mess that comes with advertising. Recently, I turned down an offer of $500 a month for advertising on the site,

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which, well, it was tempting because, well, in three months,

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it amounted to more than this entire year’s donations so far.

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However, for me, that would take away from our community-supported model.

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And while the extra money would be great,

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well, we’re getting by okay without being a commercial program.

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And if you’re like me, well, you’re really tired of being assaulted by ads everywhere.

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So, for our fellow salonners who have made these generous offers to advertise here,

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well, please don’t take it personally when I turn you down.

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As our long-time listeners know, I like to think of producing these podcasts as my hobby,

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As long-time listeners know, I like to think of producing these podcasts as my hobby, and so I think that it’s best to rely on the occasional donation, such as Steve A. and Spatial Computer Made, to keep us going.

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Now, today we get to hear from another old friend, Eric Davis, whose talk at the first Palenque Norte Lectures in 2003 was featured in my third podcast from here in the salon.

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Podcast number one was a talk that I gave at Mind States in 2001, where Eric was the conference moderator, I should point out.

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And podcast number two was the next-to-last talk that Terrence McKenna ever gave in Palenque.

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And there’s a reason that Eric was the next one in line.

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Rather than repeat something that I’ve already said here,

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I’m going to play the first few minutes of podcast number 49,

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which I posted 10 years ago this September.

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And that podcast featured Eric’s 2006 Planque Norte lecture.

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And here’s how I introduced him back then.

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Thanks to Brian, we all now have a Burning Man gift in the form of a clear and complete Planque Norte lecture.

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And it’s only fitting that the first such recording is of the talk that Eric Davis gave on Friday afternoon.

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The big tent at Cantheon Village was packed, the heat was almost unnoticeable, and I don’t

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even remember there being much dust in the air.

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In short, it was a perfect afternoon on the playa.

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While I can’t remember exactly what I said when I introduced Eric, the point I tried

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to make was that without his support, enthusiasm, and help in organizing the first of the Planque

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Norte lectures at Burning Man in 2003, this lecture series and probably these podcasts

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would never have gotten off the ground.

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Eric was the first person I contacted after returning from the 2002 burn with an idea

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for this lecture series.

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And since I was new to the Burning Man community,

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I thought I’d first better ask an expert before trying to organize a theme camp to hold the talks.

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You know, what if no one would come to a lecture in the middle of the afternoon,

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in the middle of a desert, and during the time normally spent resting up for an all-night party.

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Now that I think about it, I’m surprised Eric just didn’t laugh me off, but he didn’t,

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and to be honest, I really wasn’t surprised.

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I’d first heard about Eric from Terrence McKenna.

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At the time I was working on my book, The Spirit of the Internet,

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I was asking Terrence about one of the concepts that I was writing about

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when he said, before you write another word, you should read Eric Davis’ new book, Technosis.

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And those of you who’ve read my book know that I not only took Terrence’s advice,

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but I also benefited greatly in my research, thanks to Eric.

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And I guess it’s kind of a sad footnote, but I think the last published interview of Terrence, at least the last one I ever read,

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was the final interview in Wired that Terrence gave to none other than Eric Davis.

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Well, I guess that’s kind of a roundabout way of introducing today’s program.

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After we hear Eric’s talk, I’ll give you some information about his new book,

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Visionary State, which he mentions briefly in this 2006 Palenque Norte lecture

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that he titled, Pharmacology and the Post-Human Future.

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And we’ll begin with Eric commenting on that first series of Planque Norte lectures in 2003.

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Hey, welcome.

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Yeah, that was a very interesting decision on my part

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because I had been coming to Burning Man more or less regularly since 1994.

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And even though I’m a writer and I did write about the festival in 1995,

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I wrote the first kind of national article for the Village Voice

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that really kind of introduced the festival to a larger world outside of the super underground.

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I’d always resisted otherwise talking or writing or getting involved in that whole world.

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I came out here to kind of lose myself.

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So that was a real pivotal year because there weren’t really spaces like this for many, many, many years.

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There were small classes that people would give in their camps,

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but the idea of really having a lecture space was really significant.

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A lot of things in Burning Man evolve over time, and new forms emerge,

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new needs emerge that are responded to with new technologies, new approaches.

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It’s constantly evolving and in some ways devolving. Both are going on at the same time.

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For me, the introduction of these kind of spaces was both an evolution and a devolution.

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It was a devolution because this is a space of reflection, of analysis, of discussion, of talking.

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In a way, it’s a step away from the pure chaos we also seek here.

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Of course, we can have them both.

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But it also represents the maturing of the community,

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the recognition that we’re not just a little bubble, a pure taz out here in the middle of nowhere,

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but that we’re involved in a larger culture.

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There are very pressing issues, and it’s a great opportunity to come together and connect and talk.

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Interestingly, at least to me, Eric Davis was born in the summer of 1967, the summer of love.

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Obviously, we didn’t know one another at the time.

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In fact, as he was being born, I was on a Navy destroyer in the Pacific Ocean,

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making my way to Vietnam, where I’d spend the rest of the year fighting with people with whom I had no quarrel,

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which, sadly, is something that this country continues to force its young people to do.

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So the chances of us eventually meeting and working together seemed to be very slim at

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the time.

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But, as I was thinking about this just now, I had to ask myself how an old Vietnam vet

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and a newborn baby ever did get together in the first place.

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how an old Vietnam vet and a newborn baby ever did get together in the first place.

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Well, it all began in the summer of 1998,

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when I attended a workshop led by a guy named Terrence McKenna.

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And one of the first things that I heard Terrence say was that in his opinion,

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the best resource available at the time, in regards to all things psychedelic,

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was a big book called The Psychedelic Resource List,

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which was edited by a man named John Hanna.

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Then in January of 1999, at the Entheobotany Conference in Palenque, Mexico,

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well, I met John Hanna there for the first time.

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Later that year, I attended the All Chemical Arts Conference in Hawaii,

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where John and I began to get acquainted.

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I was working on my book, The Spirit of the Internet, at the time, and while talking about it with Terrence,

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who, well, in addition to telling me to read Eric Davis’ book, Technosis,

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he suggested that I hire John as my editor when it was finished.

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I took the advice, and the following spring, John edited my new book for me.

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Now, John is a man of many talents, and in addition to being an editor and a publisher,

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John is also the person behind the famous MindStates conferences. Fortunately for me,

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in May of 2001, when John produced MindStates 2, he asked me to be one of the speakers. And the emcee for that event was none other than Eric Davis.

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And that’s where Eric and I first met.

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The following year, I attended Burning Man for the first time,

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and on my way home, I decided to organize a theme camp for the following year

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that would recreate the vibe of the Plan K conferences that had been held in Mexico

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during the last eight

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years or so of Terrence McKenna’s life.

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I decided to call our theme camp Planque Norte, and since I didn’t know very many of the movers

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and shakers in the psychedelic community at the time, I got in touch with Eric, who, well,

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he seemed to know everybody.

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As they say, the rest is history.

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And speaking of history, I should also mention that if you want to listen to Eric’s interview with Terrence McKenna,

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which took place over several days not long before Terrence’s death,

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you will find those recordings in my podcasts number 262 and 263,

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which actually was the last time that we heard from Eric here in the salon.

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And those podcasts took place in the spring of 2011.

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And at the time, Eric was deeply involved in pursuing his Ph.D.

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from Rice University’s Gnosticism, Esotericism, and Mysticism program.

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And now, at long last, Eric’s formal studies are completed,

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and so we may now call him Dr. Davis.

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However, for us here in the salon, he’s still just plain Eric,

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our fellow salonner and psychonaut extraordinaire.

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And right now, he’s going to tell us something about a book that many of us have read,

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but, well, I, at least until now, never actually understood very well.

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Thanks, everyone, for coming out on a dark and stormy night.

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And thanks to Joanna and the folks here at Morbid Anatomy Museum.

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I just came here the last time I was in New York, and I love the place.

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They had an amazing exhibit.

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So tonight I’m going to talk about the psychedelic book of the dead.

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I just received my Ph.D., so I am now Dr. Davis to you.

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received my PhD, so I’m now Dr. Davis to you. And it’s just a weird space as I kind of drift back into freelance, underground writer, talker guy, after the experience of the Academy, trying to do

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something with a lot of the work that I did. And the main project I did is a book called High

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Weirdness, or a dissertation called High Weirdness, Visionary Experience in the Early 70s,

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which I’ll be turning into a book this spring.

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This talk derives from another project I did from a term paper I did in a Buddhism class

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and I called it The Psychedelic Book of the Dead.

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And so usually I like to talk without text,

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but because there’s a lot of quotes and there’s a lot of information,

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I’m going to be kind of moving back and forth between a version of this work, this research

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that I did, and some extemporaneous discussion. But I’d like to start out with a non-academic prelude. The first time I smoked DMT,

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and it was over 20 years ago,

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not terribly far from here,

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my guide left the room,

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and I sat back with maybe the second full breath,

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don’t quite remember,

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and as I started to come on, before all the high weirdness began,

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I was struck with an overwhelming truth,

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one of those overwhelming truths that come upon us at times.

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And it was not so much a truth as a recognition,

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which was, now I understand. Now I know why people spend their entire lives

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preparing for the moment of death. And then all the weirdness started. And this has really stayed

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with me. In fact, it stayed with me more than almost any kind of content or visionary encounter

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or alternate dimension or weird alien or bug or goddess or whatever that

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happens in those psychoactive realms. A strange sense that the moment of death is a kind of

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hovers over us and is something that calls us to transform, calls us to consider, to work with it,

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to process, to practice in light of this moment.

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And I want to emphasize that I say this not because I have any conviction or certainly any

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lasting conviction that there’s something beyond the moment of death. I have no such conviction,

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nor do I think that this experience provided that. What it did provide was the sense that

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there’s something in the actual process

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itself, whether or not my whole life flashes before me or I suddenly grok the totality of the cosmos

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or whatever it is, even if it’s just the last 10 or 12 seconds as my brain shuts down.

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It’s of such extraordinary import that it kind of reflects back through the entirety of one’s life

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and is sort of a call to treat what the Zen guys call the great matter of life and death.

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And it’s that great matter that motivates my research here, which is sort of on a somewhat more scholarly, historical, cultural dimension.

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But it’s really animated in some sense by this conviction that this is an important thing to work with.

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So I think it’s like the 1980s Webster dictionary I was looking through,

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and one of the weirdest sort of loan words that they have in this dictionary is bardo,

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which they define as the intermediate or astral state of the soul after death and before rebirth.

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It’s a decent enough definition, although it’s very interesting to note the occult overtones of the definition.

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The word astral comes really from theosophy, from this idea that we have an astral body,

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or there’s an astral plane, a plane of kind of spiritual material above our physical plane.

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So it’s already kind of an interesting indication of the way that this idea of the bardo,

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drawn from Tibetan Buddhism, plays a role in Western esoteric imagination.

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The source of this popularity is this very, very popular, successful book,

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translated first by Evans Wentz in 1927,

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the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

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And it’s drawn, the materials that he translated

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and kind of redacted are drawn from a whole cycle of texts,

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of tantric texts that are used most essentially,

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although not entirely, and we’ll get to that,

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to ritually guide the dying and the dead through these bardos, although not entirely, and we’ll get to that, to ritually guide the dying

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and the dead through these bardos, or intermediate states, after the loss of the body.

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The cycle was traditionally considered a terma text, or a discovered text, meaning that the

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fellow who compiled them or discovered them, I think around the 12th century, Karma Lingpa,

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discovered an earlier text that was written by the great wizard sage Padmasambhava,

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who’s the most important figure in the Nyingma lineage of Tibetan Buddhism.

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And there’s this sort of way that kind of mode that Tibetan religion has,

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which from a historical point of view, you would say, allows them to make changes

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and add new things under the authority of the greats who have come before by discovering a

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magical text written by these figures from centuries earlier, which is what happened

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in this case. And then Evans Wentz sort of translated and repackaged this material. He

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didn’t actually translate.

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He worked with a Tibetan translator.

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But he himself was kind of an interesting figure.

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He was a scholar of sorts.

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He went to Stanford.

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He did his dissertation on fairy lore in Celtic countries, a big fatty with a lot of very good information in it.

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But he was also a theosophist.

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with a lot of very good information in it, but he was also a theosophist.

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So he kind of had, he was one of these one foot in scholarship,

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one foot in sort of seeking and weirdness,

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and you should never trust people like this, let me tell you.

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And you can kind of tell even from this picture,

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he’s got a little bit of, he’s got a little bit of tude.

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And so even here, though he’s kind of sort of adopting the guise of an Asian person, in some ways, in many ways, he actually kind of transformed the cycle of texts, which I’ll go into more detail on.

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He sort of transformed them in some ways into a more Western esoteric kind of operation.

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At once an art of dying and a science of death. And I should mention also that the texts that were originally called,

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the traditional name for this collection of texts is

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Great Liberation Upon Hearing in the Intermediate State or in the Bardo.

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And he translated it, he changed the name to the Tibetan Book of the Dead

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basically because Wallace Budge’s 1895 book, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, was such a hit.

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So he was like, yeah, this will be a great name.

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And it worked.

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It’s an incredibly successful book, went through many, many printings.

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And one of the things that Evans Wentz emphasized in this kind of theosophical frame that he put around these Tibetan materials

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is this idea that

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the death state that’s described

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isn’t just the actual physical

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death, but sort of represents

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or suggests another kind

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of death experience that we

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might have in life.

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And he compares it explicitly to the

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kinds of initiation ceremonies

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that were, say, a characteristic of the Greek mysteries in the age of antiquity,

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when people would go through some kind of harrowing cosmic transformative performance,

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and they would come out the other end having felt like they had gone to the world of the dead and returned.

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world of the dead and returned. And this model, which as you will see, plays an important role in understanding the psychedelic dimension of this text, was supported by some of the other

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materials that Evans Wentz’s introduction came along with, notably texts by Lama Govinda,

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who was another character like him, one of these sort of scholar Westerners who was pretty smart

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and they got totally into it and kind of faked their way through mysticism

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and sort of wrote these books that are at once scholarly and a little goofy.

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And an important text by Carl Jung.

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And Carl Jung made the same kind of argument about the value of this material,

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not for understanding what actually happens after physical death,

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but as some kind of model of an archetypal psychological process.

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So the book has been translated many times. We already see the way that it’s moved and shifted

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as these Tibetan materials went through the hands of Evans Wentz. But unquestionably,

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went through the hands of Evans Wentz.

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But unquestionably, the most bizarre and peculiar transformation of these texts was the psychedelic experience.

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A manual based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead,

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which was published in 1964 on university books,

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which was responsible for putting a lot of occultism and esotericism

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into the hands of ordinary folk outside of the

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university. Of course, we have the authors here, Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert.

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At the time they were putting this book out, they were all still at Harvard. Leary and Alpert were

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both teaching there. Metzner was a grad student who was getting his PhD. By the time the book,

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I think, actually came out, they had all been booted out. I think Metzner left for his own reasons, but they had been

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kicked out. And basically what the book does is it goes through the description of the afterlife

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process laid out in these traditional materials where you go through these various stages, which I’ll get to later in the talk. And they sort of just took that as a map for the

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sort of typical psychedelic experience. And they actively used the text. They used Evan Wentz’s

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text. They remixed it out of their own stuff and created a kind of manual that would help people, help guide people through psychedelic experience, mostly at this point LSD.

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Now, the first and kind of most obvious thing to say about this process that they did,

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particularly in our current moment with so much more concern about how Western scholars interact with non-Western sources, peoples, and cultures,

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is that this is an enormously brazen, crass act of appropriation,

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of just ripping something out of some other context,

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which in some sense had already been done by Evans Wentz to a certain degree,

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but the actual text is in there with Evans Wentz.

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to a certain degree, but the actual text is in there with Evans Wentz.

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And so this is kind of the first and most easy way to talk about this text.

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And indeed, the few academics who write about it, most academics don’t really pay much attention to psychedelic history,

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but the few ones who have looked at this in the context of understanding Buddhism in the West

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just say, ah, this is just appropriation, it’s just silly, it’s ridiculous,

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it’s worthy to be ignored. And basically what my talk and research is about is suggesting that

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despite the goofiness of the appropriation and the problematic quality of it, is that Leary,

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and I’m just going to say Leary because it’s easier than saying Leary et al. or Leary,

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Metzner, and Alpert, and it is mostly Leary’s book, that he was actually incredibly insightful

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and that he was productively engaging psychoactive potentials

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that already exist within the Tibetan concept of the bardo.

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So what we’re going to do is sort of look at the concept of the bardo,

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how it grows within Tibetan materials,

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and the way in which he

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redeployed this for a different context in a way that I think is a lot more interesting than you

00:23:32 ►

might get if you just look at it from the outside. Because, you know, and part of the reason to do

00:23:37 ►

this is just the fact that this is now part of our culture. The connection, Tibetan, death,

00:23:48 ►

the connection Tibetan, death, bardo, psychedelic is sort of, while somewhat esoteric, woven into our kind of popular cultural memory around psychedelics, around LSD, around Leary, around

00:23:54 ►

Buddhism, you know, all those fearsome monsters in the Tibetan tankas remind us of psychedelics.

00:24:00 ►

We don’t really know what to do with that. What is that? Why does that work? So it’s really part of our understanding and experience of Tibetan religion is this weird psychedelic underpinning.

00:24:12 ►

And just to kind of show you a little taste of this, the first person drug dealing Oscar meets his friend Alex,

00:24:29 ►

who has encouraged him because of Oscar’s interest in DMT and other psychedelics,

00:24:34 ►

has encouraged him to read the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Hey, what’s wrong with you?

00:24:52 ►

You’re tripping, man.

00:24:54 ►

Yeah.

00:24:55 ►

Yeah, you can tell?

00:24:58 ►

Yeah, you look pretty fucked up.

00:25:01 ►

I popped some… some tabs this morning

00:25:02 ►

and just took a hit at the MTV

00:25:04 ►

before you came actually.

00:25:06 ►

Shit, looks like a good day.

00:25:08 ►

Yeah, and the day isn’t over either.

00:25:12 ►

Hey, do you think Bruno has anything stronger than DMT?

00:25:16 ►

Come on, you’re gonna fry your brain, man.

00:25:20 ►

You should finish your book of the day. That’d be a lot better.

00:25:24 ►

You can wait until you die, then you get your picture.

00:25:28 ►

That book is still confusing to me.

00:25:30 ►

How would you explain it?

00:25:32 ►

It’s a little bit hard to explain.

00:25:36 ►

So, basically, when you die, the spirit leaves your body.

00:25:41 ►

Actually, at first you can see all your life

00:25:45 ►

like it’s reflected in a magic mirror.

00:25:48 ►

And then you start floating like a ghost.

00:25:51 ►

And you can see anything that’s happening around you.

00:25:55 ►

You can hear everything, but you can’t communicate with the world that’s leaving.

00:25:59 ►

And then you see these lights, all these different lights of all different colors.

00:26:08 ►

These lights are the doors that pull you into higher planes of existence.

00:26:20 ►

But most people, they actually like this world so much that they don’t want to be taken away.

00:26:24 ►

So that’s when the whole thing turns into a bad dream.

00:26:26 ►

The only way out is to get reincarnated does it make any sense?

00:26:31 ►

yeah I guess so

00:26:32 ►

I don’t know

00:26:34 ►

what’s the bad trip?

00:26:36 ►

well the bad trip is

00:26:38 ►

all these nightmares you know

00:26:40 ►

people are like real crazy

00:26:42 ►

all your fears become reality

00:26:44 ►

and it scares the shit out of you it’s like You go like, yo, crazy. All your fears become green, too.

00:26:47 ►

And it scares the shit out of you.

00:26:49 ►

It’s like, what’s that in your mind?

00:26:50 ►

That you don’t want to be with him, right?

00:26:56 ►

At that point, you wish you never died.

00:27:03 ►

Then, some darker yellow lights appear to you.

00:27:06 ►

They represent all these couples making love.

00:27:11 ►

And then the light comes out from their bellies and if you get closer,

00:27:13 ►

it gives you a vision of a possible future life.

00:27:17 ►

And you choose the light that suits you the best.

00:27:21 ►

You know, end up in a womb

00:27:22 ►

and you’re reincarnated.

00:27:25 ►

End of story.

00:27:27 ►

And basically, you do this forever and ever

00:27:30 ►

until you manage to break the circle.

00:27:35 ►

You follow me?

00:27:37 ►

So you mean we’re stuck in this world for all of eternity?

00:27:41 ►

You mean there’s nothing better out there?

00:27:47 ►

Hey, you know what?

00:27:49 ►

I can’t wait to see your sister.

00:27:52 ►

She looks really beautiful, man, you know?

00:27:54 ►

So, even though it’s a little difficult to understand,

00:27:56 ►

you get sort of the basic kind of good model

00:27:59 ►

of how this material has been translated into cultural memory.

00:28:02 ►

You sort of see yourself, but you can’t really

00:28:05 ►

interact. There are these strange lights that lead you to different dimensions. There’s some

00:28:09 ►

relationship with these lights. There’s a kind of nightmarish characteristic. You want to get out of

00:28:14 ►

it. It terrifies you. And the easiest way to get out of it is to, you know, is to sort of tune into

00:28:20 ►

a couple making love. And then you sort of see the life that is prepared for you, and you zip back into incarnation not to deal with it.

00:28:29 ►

You know, it’s a decent thumbnail sketch.

00:28:33 ►

And it’s one of the things that’s very interesting to do,

00:28:35 ►

and one of the things that I’ve done in my research is to look at,

00:28:38 ►

you know, I’m no Tibetan scholar,

00:28:39 ►

but I’ve been drawing from other people who actually know how to do this stuff,

00:28:43 ►

is to see where these ideas come from.

00:28:46 ►

Where does this model of the bardo actually come from?

00:28:49 ►

And it does not all originate in Tibet, but we’ll see that a lot of it does.

00:28:55 ►

There’s an example of this kind of bardo state in earlier Indian texts,

00:29:00 ►

and I’ll read just a little quote of it, give a flavor of what it’s like.

00:29:04 ►

When the time of his death is approaching, he sees these signs. He sees a great

00:29:07 ►

rocky mountain lowering upon him like a shadow. He thinks to himself,

00:29:12 ►

the mountain might fall on top of me, and he makes a gesture with his hands as though

00:29:15 ►

to ward off the mountain. Presently, the mountain seems to be made of white cloth,

00:29:20 ►

and he climbers up the cloth. Then it seems to be made of red cloth.

00:29:23 ►

Finally, at the time of his death,

00:29:25 ►

as it approaches, he sees a bright light,

00:29:27 ►

and being unaccustomed to it at the time of his death,

00:29:29 ►

he is perplexed and confused.

00:29:31 ►

He sees all sorts of things such as seen in dreams

00:29:34 ►

because his mind is confused.

00:29:36 ►

And so this is already an Indian model

00:29:38 ►

of what happens in this intermediate state

00:29:41 ►

that gets translated and elaborated

00:29:43 ►

when it goes into Tibet. This bright

00:29:48 ►

light becomes the clear light that in the kind of classic Nyingma account that goes into the

00:29:53 ►

Tibetan Book of the Dead, you encounter twice upon first dying, and then it’s usually just too much

00:29:59 ►

to handle. And so you go into the next bardardo, the Bardo of encountering reality, where you

00:30:05 ►

encounter these procession of cosmic gods and terrifying monsters. And you sort of go through

00:30:12 ►

this cycle for a bit. And then you get into a more kind of a Bardo called the Bardo of becoming,

00:30:20 ►

in which you have a kind of virtual body equipped with senses, and you sort of deal with this bizarre world you’re encountering,

00:30:28 ►

kind of dreamlike space, and then you’re torn apart by the god Yama,

00:30:33 ►

a kind of judge who tears you apart in an act that very much resembles,

00:30:37 ►

if you’re familiar with classic Siberian shamanism,

00:30:40 ►

very much resembles the way that the shaman is sort of ritually destroyed

00:30:44 ►

and put back

00:30:45 ►

together by beings of the other world. And then in this bizarrely Freudian, I mean, the language is

00:30:50 ►

straight Freudian. You see a couple making love, and it’s written from a male perspective, of

00:30:56 ►

course. You see a couple making love, you want to have sex with the woman, and you’re pissed off at the guy. And there, zip, you go for another round.

00:31:13 ►

Now, what I want to do is to talk about this concept of the bardo and talk about how elastic it is in the Tibetan context,

00:31:18 ►

that it doesn’t just refer to this period between the death of the physical body

00:31:23 ►

and then the rebirth in a new body,

00:31:25 ►

that it actually is a kind of plastic idea that can be applied to different things. So initially,

00:31:32 ►

the idea of the bardo just refers to this after-death period, but then people begin to

00:31:39 ►

elaborate it. So Naropa, some of you probably heard of Naropa, an 11th century saint. He says it applies

00:31:48 ►

not just to this period between birth and death, but also to dream. So, which is already a very

00:31:54 ►

interesting thing because we’re starting to see the way that different parts of the life can be

00:31:58 ►

seen as a bardo. The Karmalingpa tradition that gives us the Tibetan Book of the Dead further expands this

00:32:06 ►

concept to take in meditation and the dying process itself. So one scholar writes,

00:32:12 ►

by the first half of the 12th century, there had already been such a remarkable proliferation of

00:32:17 ►

ideas inspired by the generic notion of a period of transition between two states of consciousness

00:32:24 ►

that seemingly every

00:32:25 ►

significant experience or phase of existence could be divided into a series of bardos. And this is

00:32:32 ►

part of the idea we’re talking about, that there’s something very productive about the notion of the

00:32:37 ►

bardo, of an in-between, of shifting between consciousness. So the importance with dreams,

00:32:43 ►

for example, is not that dreams take you

00:32:45 ►

to another world and you encounter spirits or you fly or whatever you do in the dream.

00:32:50 ►

Really, the important part of the dream is the fact that you wake up from it. And in that waking

00:32:55 ►

up from the dream, there is this split, this kind of montage, a cut between different states of

00:33:01 ►

consciousness. And that cut can be elaborated and applied to all sorts of different things in life.

00:33:06 ►

In later accounts, in different Buddhist accounts of it,

00:33:11 ►

the orgasm is a bardo, even sneezing is a bardo,

00:33:15 ►

because it’s all about these sort of intense shifts of consciousness.

00:33:21 ►

And part of the kind of model, kind of the mind frame, the worldview of this

00:33:26 ►

tantric approach is to see the way that these little bardos resonate with or replicate the

00:33:34 ►

bardo. And there’s a great Robert Thurman quote where he says, he describes this kind of tantric

00:33:39 ►

worldview as a method of compressing eons of lives into one life, eons of deaths into one death,

00:33:47 ►

and eons of betweens, of bardos, into one between. So this is, you know, I think one of the ways to

00:33:54 ►

look at it, and where you really find this, what’s really interesting, is that if you look at the

00:33:59 ►

texts themselves that are already gathered together in these Tibetan materials. Initially,

00:34:10 ►

it looks like they’re all just about things that are read to people on their deathbed or who are already dead, as if the dead person can still hear the reader and be guided, be reminded by the voice

00:34:18 ►

of the guide why all these terrifying, completely unexpected things are happening to try to keep

00:34:23 ►

them from losing their shit. So maybe they can get out on the clear light, and if not, then maybe they can

00:34:28 ►

recognize the inherent emptiness of everything and transcend that way. So that’s the sort of

00:34:33 ►

main model. But there’s already a very interesting ambiguity in the texts themselves. If you look at

00:34:40 ►

them closely, you discover that some of them actually aren’t designed to be read to the dead.

00:34:46 ►

Some of them are actually protocols for meditation.

00:34:50 ►

Some of them are actually recipes for tantric visionary meditation for people who are alive.

00:34:56 ►

And the basic idea here is that as a living practitioner, I would imagine going through these stages and I would recapitulate or simulate this

00:35:08 ►

process on my own as a living person to better prepare myself for when it actually happens.

00:35:15 ►

So there’s this very interesting tension in the text themselves, and that I’m going to suggest

00:35:20 ►

has a lot to say to the psychedelic appropriation of the Bardo concept,

00:35:29 ►

that there’s a kind of tension in the text themselves between the thing itself and the simulacra of the thing itself, or the run-through, the simulation,

00:35:36 ►

like an airplane simulation or something, a rehearsal, a tantric rehearsal.

00:35:44 ►

And so you find this kind of running

00:35:46 ►

throughout the things, which kind of already makes you, you know, the question of appropriation then

00:35:50 ►

changes kind of slightly. And it changes a lot when you start thinking about psychedelic experience.

00:35:58 ►

I forgot, as usual, I forgot to do it. So this will, here’s an image of the Bardo of reality. So you miss the clear

00:36:08 ►

light and then you get to see all of these marvelous gods and terrifying monsters. This is a

00:36:14 ►

very interesting element of the Tibetan model that does not have anything to do with Indian Buddhism

00:36:20 ►

as far as we can tell. So, and I’ll get into a little bit more, well, if it’s not from Indian Buddhism, where does it come from? We’ll talk about that a little bit more. But let’s talk

00:36:29 ►

a little bit about psychedelics as death simulation. So if you go into the lore and you look at,

00:36:36 ►

let’s say, the first LSD trip that we have on record, well, you know, presumably this person

00:36:41 ►

did not really know what LSD was like. Presumably they didn’t have some idea in their head that LSD could produce a death trip,

00:36:49 ►

but they had one nonetheless.

00:36:51 ►

This is Albert Hoffman describing one aspect of his trip after he got home from his bicycle ride

00:36:58 ►

and made his way into his living room.

00:37:01 ►

This is what he experiences.

00:37:02 ►

Dizziness, visual distortions, the faces of those present appeared like grotesque colored masks, This is what he experiences. So here we have in the sort of, you know, foundation stone of the LSD trip, we have this death rehearsal.

00:37:38 ►

In Huxley’s Doors of Perception, though it’s not the main part of it, it’s not the part that most people talk about or remember,

00:37:43 ►

doors of perception, though it’s not the main part of it. It’s not the part that most people talk about or remember. He also goes through a kind of dress rehearsal rag, one that significantly,

00:37:51 ►

specifically mentions the Tibetan Book of the Dead. At one point, he’s confronted by a chair,

00:37:58 ►

and this terrifying chair looks like the last judgment, quote, or to be more accurate,

00:38:04 ►

by a last judgment

00:38:05 ►

which, after a long time and with considerable difficulty, I recognized as a chair.

00:38:11 ►

Then he remembers the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and he remembers the idea that the soul

00:38:15 ►

shrinks away from the clear light to shelter in the comforting darkness of selfhood as

00:38:21 ►

a reborn human being.

00:38:23 ►

And this is what he feels like he’s doing.

00:38:24 ►

He’s pulling away.

00:38:25 ►

He can’t handle it. And later on, his wife asked him if there was some way that he might have been

00:38:30 ►

able to resist his own resistance. And he says, only if there was somebody there to tell me about

00:38:36 ►

the clear light. I couldn’t do it myself. One couldn’t do it by oneself. To Tim Leary, who by

00:38:43 ►

the early 60s, before he gets kicked out of Harvard, is a

00:38:45 ►

successful professor of psychology. Interesting work focusing on personality typologies and social

00:38:53 ►

agency. So he took mushrooms in Mexico, but what’s important here is his first LSD trip

00:39:01 ►

through the medium of Michael Hollingshead’s mayonnaise jar of LSD.

00:39:08 ►

He described it as the most shattering experience of my life.

00:39:11 ►

So he’s at home in Cambridge by himself.

00:39:13 ►

His family’s there.

00:39:15 ►

I mean, he’s the only one on acid.

00:39:17 ►

He idiotically later trippers, no, don’t do it, Tim.

00:39:22 ►

He turns on the TV.

00:39:24 ►

And the TV tells him directly that he’s dead.

00:39:27 ►

You’re dead. You’re dead. And he, so he gets away from the TV and he starts going through books,

00:39:33 ►

you know, cause he’s a nerd. He’s a, you know, an intellectual. So he starts going through books

00:39:37 ►

and he sees the way that every word kind of devolves into the origins. its sort of primordial origins of language, and every time it’s the same

00:39:45 ►

morpheme, death, death, death. Everything was illusion, he said later of the experience, even

00:39:51 ►

love. Not long afterwards, he delivered a talk at the International Congress of Applied Psychology,

00:39:58 ►

and I don’t remember the name of this talk, but it’s really, really interesting and important to

00:40:01 ►

read. Leary had an enormous influence on the way people thought about psychedelics then,

00:40:06 ►

and to some degree the way we think about them today.

00:40:08 ►

And he did a very interesting kind of tango dance of like spiritual and not spiritual,

00:40:15 ►

you know, naturalism and more than just psychology.

00:40:19 ►

And this talk really shows him at the point when he’s still a professional psychologist,

00:40:26 ►

but he’s starting to dissolve.

00:40:28 ►

He can’t really hold on to it anymore,

00:40:31 ►

but the way he thinks about it I think is really key to understanding not just the subject,

00:40:35 ►

but psychedelics in the 60s in general.

00:40:38 ►

So at that point, like a lot of people in that time,

00:40:42 ►

Leary thought about psychology or social situations in terms of the metaphor of the game.

00:40:48 ►

You know, what we do is we play games.

00:40:50 ►

You know, I’m the game of the guy who knows something.

00:40:52 ►

And so I’m standing up here and I’m playing this game.

00:40:54 ►

And that structures you as like an audience.

00:40:56 ►

So you’re playing the audience game where you kind of listen and you get a little bored and you get a little sleepy and then you listen again.

00:41:01 ►

Think about what you’re going to do tomorrow and then you listen again.

00:41:03 ►

And, you know, so we have these games that structure our personalities,

00:41:07 ►

so we think we’re doing something

00:41:08 ►

when it’s actually the game that’s working.

00:41:11 ►

So Leary starts to take this model,

00:41:13 ►

which is obvious in sort of typical human interaction,

00:41:16 ►

and he starts to expand it into larger and larger,

00:41:19 ►

more kind of metaphysical principles.

00:41:20 ►

So he talks about how ordinary perception,

00:41:23 ►

and even science science are structured by

00:41:25 ►

the subject-object game, this game of dualism. And while the most treacherous game of all is

00:41:34 ►

the ego game, that there is an I, that there’s some kind of agency, some kind of decider.

00:41:39 ►

So defining the mystic or visionary as the one who, quote, sees clearly the game structure of behavior, he outlines this pragmatic program of what he calls applied mysticism.

00:41:50 ►

And this program includes the idea that great trauma can shatter the gamesmanship out of you and free you up to play better games.

00:41:59 ►

In a way, in a nutshell, this is the whole 60s, 70s approach to psychology. You see it in

00:42:06 ►

counter groups. You see it in drug use. You see it in changing ideas of madness. This

00:42:12 ►

is the idea that you can intensify things so much that you break down. You have a traumatic

00:42:16 ►

experience. You have a death experience. And out of this, you not only see more clearly

00:42:21 ►

the games you normally play, but you free yourself up for better

00:42:26 ►

games. Another quote, the mystic experience is the non-game, the meta-game experience.

00:42:34 ►

So here he’s sort of mashing up social psychology and comparative mysticism. And this is part

00:42:40 ►

of the other thing that’s happening to Leary. So as he starts to have these experiences

00:42:44 ►

and think about these things, he wasn’t traditionally interested in religion or mysticism at all.

00:42:49 ►

But as he’s doing this, he’s kind of going, oh, what’s going on? In some ways, this religious

00:42:53 ►

language is appropriate for these experiences. And he goes on and he meets people. He meets

00:42:57 ►

Houston Smith. Anybody know who Houston Smith is? Right, just a couple of folks. But he

00:43:01 ►

was a very important mid-century guy who talked about the secret connection between all religions,

00:43:08 ►

a point of view that’s known as perennialism.

00:43:10 ►

This is the idea, and Huxley also, Aldous Huxley, very much shared this idea, and it really structures his thought.

00:43:17 ►

It’s the idea that behind all the different mystical paths, all the different religions of the world,

00:43:23 ►

there really is one shared experience.

00:43:26 ►

And so it doesn’t really matter in some sense. And in some sense, all of them are talking about

00:43:30 ►

the same thing. And if you have this point of view, you’re sort of encouraged to make connections.

00:43:34 ►

You say, well, you know, the Zen Satori really isn’t that different than Meister Eckhart,

00:43:39 ►

even though from a more traditional or critical historical point of view, they’re totally

00:43:43 ►

different. They don’t have anything to do with each other.

00:43:45 ►

But no, no, no.

00:43:46 ►

Behind the surface of the cultural differences,

00:43:49 ►

there’s some core experience,

00:43:51 ►

and that’s the idea of perennialism.

00:43:53 ►

It’s an idea that was very important to Houston Smith,

00:43:56 ►

who was a professor in Cambridge

00:43:58 ►

and was friends with Leary

00:43:59 ►

and also was one of the participants

00:44:02 ►

in the Good Friday experiment,

00:44:04 ►

which some of you know about,

00:44:06 ►

which had to do precisely with how psychedelics

00:44:09 ►

seemed to be able to produce something like religious experience,

00:44:12 ►

at the very least a simulation of religious experience.

00:44:17 ►

So Leary’s already getting kind of excited about this,

00:44:20 ►

and he runs into Huxley not that long before Huxley dies,

00:44:26 ►

and Huxley says, hey, man, we need a guide.

00:44:28 ►

Of course, Aldous Huxley didn’t say, hey, man.

00:44:30 ►

That’s me.

00:44:31 ►

But Huxley’s like, we need a guidebook for the psychedelic experience.

00:44:37 ►

We need a way for you to put this in a kind of language

00:44:41 ►

that can be helpful for people who are going through this.

00:44:45 ►

Why don’t we do it with the Tibetan Book of the Dead?

00:44:47 ►

So then she comes from Huxley.

00:44:49 ►

So then Leary’s like, great, let’s do it.

00:44:52 ►

And so after this experience,

00:44:54 ►

when they’re, this is Alpert in Future Ram Dass.

00:44:58 ►

His glasses are back, you know,

00:45:00 ►

the thick black glasses, they’re back.

00:45:02 ►

So he’s on it there.

00:45:04 ►

So what Leary said is, hey, okay, let’s, the thick black glasses, their back. So he’s on it there. So what Leary said is,

00:45:06 ►

hey, okay, let’s take the book, you know, and there’s a quote from Metzner where he says,

00:45:10 ►

Metzner goes, Leary said, let’s take the text of the Tibetans and strip the particular cultural

00:45:15 ►

and religious language and rewrite it as a manual. I mean, you know, the more clear example

00:45:21 ►

of appropriate of appropriation you couldn’t get get as well as a perennialist idea that

00:45:27 ►

it’s the local and specific religious and cultural language that you can get out of the way in order

00:45:32 ►

to get to this meaty core experience this experience that he believed was replicated in

00:45:39 ►

uh in the psychedelic experience so in a way leary was lining up with Evans Wentz, with Carl Jung,

00:45:46 ►

and saying this thing about the dead body and saying it to the dead body

00:45:50 ►

and that the spirit is actually in these other realms,

00:45:53 ►

that’s just a facade for an experience that happens in life

00:45:57 ►

that we can experience as living people going through a simulated death and rebirth process,

00:46:03 ►

just like they did in the mystery religions, just like they did in the mystery religions,

00:46:05 ►

just like they do in Tantra, and just like we do now with our new thanatological chemicals.

00:46:15 ►

So what’s really interesting about this, thinking about it, is that in some ways we can say,

00:46:20 ►

okay, this is totally typical Western colonialist appropriation of the mysteries

00:46:26 ►

of the other people and where you change it and use it for your own purposes. Totally clear that

00:46:30 ►

that’s what’s going on. But if you’re interested, as I am in the history of religions and how

00:46:36 ►

religions change and how they particularly how they change when they encounter one another,

00:46:41 ►

harder to simply discount it for that reason. And one of the great examples of

00:46:46 ►

this is the way in which the Tibetans appropriated Buddhism. So Buddhism grows up in India and,

00:46:55 ►

you know, northern India, you know, flourishes for a couple of centuries. You know, by this point,

00:47:01 ►

it’s been going on for about 800, 900 years when it makes its way into Tibet.

00:47:07 ►

And it’s sort of a complicated story, but it shows up and then it kind of goes away and then it comes back with a vengeance.

00:47:12 ►

And so we can look at this process of what actually happened there.

00:47:16 ►

What was transformed?

00:47:17 ►

How did the Tibetans appropriate?

00:47:19 ►

And there are other scholars who look at this and go, look, you know, we might think that Leary is kind of ridiculous.

00:47:25 ►

But if you go back to Tibet at the same time, you find the same kind of thing.

00:47:28 ►

You have a bunch of crazies with their visions and scholastics who are trying to hold on to the old texts

00:47:34 ►

and keep them faithful and all sorts of strange politics of different ways of interpreting these things.

00:47:39 ►

And so what we find is that the Tibetan Book of the Dead, or really the texts that are represented by the Tibetan Book of the Dead,

00:47:46 ►

are themselves a perfect example of how this transformation happens as one cultural group’s religion gets appropriated and transformed by another group.

00:48:07 ►

this case, how Indian Buddhism gets transformed into Tibetan Buddhism, and particularly how a new indigenous and arguably shamanic dimension enters into Buddhist Tantra through the mediation of

00:48:15 ►

this transformation that the Tibetans are doing, represented again in no better place than the Tibetan Book of the Dead. So there’s two ways to, I’ll go back to this one,

00:48:29 ►

there’s two ways that the Tibetan Book of the Dead

00:48:34 ►

introduces something that we don’t find

00:48:36 ►

in the Indian tantric or Indian Buddhist texts.

00:48:40 ►

One of them is the bardo of reality.

00:48:42 ►

One of them is the idea that after death, whether you

00:48:45 ►

like it or not, you get to confront the whole panoply of gods and monsters. You’re going to

00:48:51 ►

get it one way or the other. Hope you can hold on. Hope you can keep your shit together.

00:48:57 ►

And this kind of model is much more similar. And again, we’re in this speculative realm where you

00:49:03 ►

can’t really prove it because there’s not text. And we’re talking about things a thousand years ago, and scholars

00:49:07 ►

are very cautious about it. But the only place you really see this kind of model is if you look

00:49:11 ►

at anthropological records of Siberian shamanism. If you’re familiar with Mircea Eliade’s book,

00:49:18 ►

Shamanism, which was itself a kind of perennialist book about how this one idea of shamanism coming out of Siberia can

00:49:27 ►

apply to lots of different groups. And he was finding these regular patterns. And one of the

00:49:32 ►

patterns is precisely this kind of after-death experience where you’re guided by the shaman

00:49:38 ►

through these different domains of gods and monsters. So that’s one of the ways that the Tibetan indigenous shamanic

00:49:47 ►

culture changed these materials as it went into Tibet. The other way is the role of the guide

00:49:54 ►

itself. The idea that there is a guide, someone who’s speaking, someone who’s directly addressing

00:50:01 ►

the dead person. Again, we don’t find this in the Indian texts, and there’s

00:50:07 ►

some evidence that if you go back to some of the earliest written materials we have from Tibet,

00:50:12 ►

that there’s something indigenous going on with this notion of a guy. Here’s a quote from a text

00:50:19 ►

that is like 400 years earlier than the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Again, now listen, you who are deceased, fickle impermanence,

00:50:29 ►

the real nature of the whole world has at this time befallen you.

00:50:34 ►

So there’s this idea of a guide, of a kind of shamanic guide.

00:50:39 ►

And what Leary et al. do in some ways is to transform this figure into the idea of a psychedelic guide.

00:50:47 ►

The idea that to maximize your psychedelic experience, you need a guide.

00:50:52 ►

You need someone there.

00:50:53 ►

You need someone who can shape it for you or who can create what we would call now a sort of safe container.

00:51:00 ►

Now, at this point, the Leary folks are pretty big on,

00:51:04 ►

they have a pretty big interpretation

00:51:05 ►

of their role as guides. And reading the manual is kind of funny because they’re really kind of,

00:51:12 ►

in a way, amping their own sort of ability to see what’s going on. Because the guide isn’t just

00:51:17 ►

the man Leary or the man Metzner. And the way they did their groups, they did their things

00:51:22 ►

collectively where different people would take on the role of the person who was recording what was going on, where everybody else tripped their

00:51:28 ►

balls off. And everyone, you know, they were mostly balls, I’m afraid. It was mostly guys

00:51:33 ►

doing this kind of thing at the time. But it’s not just the people who are guides. The manual

00:51:40 ►

itself, the book, the psychedelic experience, the book, was also a guide.

00:51:46 ►

Just the same way as the Tibetan Book of the Dead is in some sense a script for a human person to read to the dead,

00:51:53 ►

but it’s also itself a guide.

00:51:57 ►

The text itself is also a guide.

00:51:59 ►

And the Leary folks took this to the nines not only by saying, hey, you can use this book to help shape your LSD trip,

00:52:06 ►

but by saying, if you want to, you can actually record the prayers on magnetic tape and play it back for yourself when you’re in your experience.

00:52:15 ►

So there’s this weird kind of almost cybernetic idea about the guide and about using it in order to wake up. So I want to talk a little bit now about

00:52:28 ►

how Leary rewrites these phases. How do these traditional basic stages of the bardo get rewritten

00:52:36 ►

in the book, The Psychedelic Experience? The kinds of initial physical symptoms, the ones that Hoffman described, that discomfort, the senses. This is the clear light, according to Leary,

00:53:08 ►

who defines liberation as the nervous system devoid of mental conceptual activity. So again,

00:53:14 ►

we can see the way that Leary is like playing both ends against the middle in terms of like

00:53:19 ►

appropriating not just Tibetan materials, but spiritual, supernatural, transcendental ideas,

00:53:26 ►

and then naturalizing them, bringing them into psychology,

00:53:29 ►

bringing them into an idea of the nervous system running various psychological programs.

00:53:36 ►

But this idea of true ego loss, or non-game ecstasy, according to him,

00:53:42 ►

is very difficult to maintain.

00:53:45 ►

And the personal and genetically inherited dispositions of most people drive them into the second and third bardos,

00:53:51 ►

which he calls periods. During the period of hallucinations,

00:53:57 ►

this mandala or group of peaceful and wrathful deities, the gods and monsters I talked about,

00:54:02 ►

is recast as a hallucinatory parade of

00:54:06 ►

complexes like, quote, the retinal circus or the vibratory waves of external unity.

00:54:14 ►

Here the Leary text, which both samples and remixes the actual language of the Tibetan Book of the

00:54:19 ►

Dead, simply repeats the traditional Tibetan exhortation to remember the inherent lack of substance in the images and experiences.

00:54:27 ►

This is an amazing point.

00:54:29 ►

Because as I’m saying, he takes this material that is profoundly embedded in a supernatural, transcendental, mystical model,

00:54:38 ►

if you want to call it mystical, of other levels of reality where there actually is an afterlife,

00:54:42 ►

and he’s naturalizing it.

00:54:43 ►

He’s bringing it into a more psychological language. But in this sense, he’s saying almost exactly the same thing,

00:54:50 ►

because in the traditional Tibetan context, what they’re saying is, just remember, your mind is

00:54:55 ►

making this. Your mind is making the gods. Your mind is making the monsters. And if you can really

00:55:00 ►

see that these things don’t have any inherent existence, you really see that

00:55:05 ►

your mind is making, not even your mind, the mind is making it, then you have a chance

00:55:08 ►

at liberation.

00:55:09 ►

And here’s how Leary plays with that idea.

00:55:14 ►

In one of the redacted Tibetan prayers, that means it’s a Tibetan prayer that he transformed,

00:55:18 ►

that they give at the end of the text, here’s some prayers that you can use during your

00:55:23 ►

trip, it goes like this.

00:55:25 ►

Voidness cannot injure voidness. None of the peaceful or wrathful visions, blood-drinking

00:55:31 ►

demons, machines, monsters, or devils exist in reality, only within your skull. And most of that

00:55:41 ►

is from the Tibetan language, not the machines and not the skull.

00:55:45 ►

But in some sense, he’s saying the same thing.

00:55:49 ►

And there’s an important point, which may sound a little bit academic, but I think is more important to this.

00:55:54 ►

One of the big criticisms that someone might make of this Leary work is to say,

00:55:59 ►

look, not only are you appropriating, but you’re appropriating with this perennialist idea that beneath all the different cultural formations, there is just this one sort of experience that we all have access to.

00:56:13 ►

There’s an essential human mind, and this perennialist idea is clearly false.

00:56:20 ►

It’s clearly a superimposition, a kind of colonialist construct where we say, oh, everyone’s really talking about the same thing, and by the way, I know what that same thing is.

00:56:29 ►

So it’s a very kind of problematic approach. But Leary’s actually doing something a little

00:56:34 ►

bit more complicated than that, which is not saying that there is this fundamental reality

00:56:38 ►

behind all of these differences. He’s saying that the fundamental reality that’s behind all

00:56:42 ►

these differences is the deconstruction of reality, is the inability to see the game as a game or as reality anymore, to see through it, to deconstruct the self, to deconstruct our ideas about who we are, about what world we are in, or what demons are, what machines are, it’s all in your skull. So it’s a little bit more interesting and a little

00:57:06 ►

bit more complicated and potentially a little bit more what was actually going on in the first

00:57:12 ►

place. Tibetan scholars argue about the usefulness of the term shamanism to describe what’s going on

00:57:20 ►

in indigenous Tibetan religion. It’s a tough word.

00:57:26 ►

It clearly says something.

00:57:28 ►

It clearly helps us understand what’s similar about very, very different phenomena

00:57:30 ►

from Siberia to South America to North America to Africa.

00:57:33 ►

People talk about shamans.

00:57:35 ►

Are they really the same?

00:57:36 ►

Are they really different?

00:57:37 ►

How can we really talk about it?

00:57:38 ►

So people are very wary about using the term.

00:57:42 ►

Some people are okay with it.

00:57:43 ►

One of these guys, Gregory Samuel,

00:57:46 ►

points out that the shamanism,

00:57:48 ►

that the indigenous elements of Tibetan culture

00:57:51 ►

that last within Tibetan Buddhism

00:57:54 ►

aren’t just the kind of low stuff

00:57:57 ►

like village necromancers and astrology

00:58:00 ►

and possession rituals

00:58:02 ►

and the sort of village fringe you know, village fringe stuff outside of

00:58:06 ►

the monasteries. What he says is that some of the most highest teachings, particularly the high

00:58:12 ►

tantra teachings, are themselves really transformation of these shamanic currents rather

00:58:18 ►

than specifically Buddhist currents. And he has a wonderful description of the shaman that is so

00:58:24 ►

Leary-like.

00:58:25 ►

I just got to read it.

00:58:26 ►

So much coming from the same place that Leary’s coming from when he talks about non-game ecstasy.

00:58:32 ►

So this is Samuel’s talking about the shaman’s death and resurrection show.

00:58:37 ►

The training of the shaman involves the acquisition of control over a series of different potentialities or modes of operation within human experience.

00:58:47 ►

If shamans are to operate with these modes, or deal with the spirits, in other words,

00:58:51 ►

they have to acquire some kind of further mode or state from which they can view them

00:58:57 ►

and balance them within themselves and in their social context. In the process, they have to

00:59:03 ►

transcend or go beyond the normal experience of the world taken for granted within their social context. In the process, they have to transcend or go beyond the normal experience of the world

00:59:06 ►

taken for granted within their social and cultural context.

00:59:10 ►

This is the meaning of the symbolic death

00:59:12 ►

that forms a common part of shamanic training and initiation.

00:59:16 ►

So in a way, he’s saying the same thing.

00:59:18 ►

He’s saying in order for the shaman to function as a healer,

00:59:21 ►

as someone who can balance the energies

00:59:23 ►

both within a social community

00:59:24 ►

and between social community and

00:59:25 ►

between that community and its external environment, whether it’s what we call nature, or whether

00:59:29 ►

it’s animals, or whether it’s other people, that in order to really do that, the shaman

00:59:33 ►

has to be able to step outside of that local reality to find some way of breaking down

00:59:39 ►

the self, of breaking down normal identifications in order to gain a kind of meta-perspective

00:59:44 ►

or a meta-game in Leary’s language, a meta-game perspective.

00:59:50 ►

So in this sense, Leary, and possibly even what was going on with some of these characters,

00:59:55 ►

isn’t really captured by this idea that there’s some essential nature to human beings,

00:59:59 ►

and that’s why all these things, when you boil them down,

01:00:02 ►

Zen is like Eckhart and we’re all kind of doing the same thing.

01:00:05 ►

What they’re really saying is that we all have the same possibility of deconstructing our local realities.

01:00:13 ►

And I want to end with just talking a little bit about how the influence of this book was marked on psychedelic history and up to today. Because the psychedelic experience

01:00:28 ►

doesn’t hold up well. If you read it, it’s very dated. It’s very ponderous. It’s kind of

01:00:34 ►

arrogant. It’s kind of sort of Germanic in this weird way. And the way that we remember

01:00:41 ►

Huxley’s Doors of Perception or Alan Watts’ Joyous Cosmology,

01:00:48 ►

these are classics.

01:00:49 ►

They’re very beautiful.

01:00:50 ►

They still speak to us in a way.

01:00:52 ►

The Psychedelic Experience, it’s a little bit harder to track.

01:00:56 ►

And in fact, all of its authors at various points kind of distance themselves from what they had done,

01:01:01 ►

partly because the appropriation is so obvious,

01:01:03 ►

partly because they get so much wrong about Tibetan Buddhism,

01:01:06 ►

partly because it’s so clearly kind of crazy in some sort of way.

01:01:11 ►

But I think we sort of do ourselves a disservice by forgetting it,

01:01:16 ►

because it really is quite significant,

01:01:18 ►

not only in terms of an interesting example or a very significant example

01:01:23 ►

of how tantric and Buddhist ideas came

01:01:27 ►

into the West and indeed reminds us that the whole history of Buddhism in the West, the whole thing

01:01:34 ►

in the post-war period, as Buddhism really starts to become popular, is inextricable from psychedelics.

01:01:42 ►

Most Buddhist teachers don’t want you to know that. They don’t want to talk about that.

01:01:45 ►

Most Buddhist historians of Buddhism in America,

01:01:47 ►

increasingly they do acknowledge this because they have to,

01:01:50 ►

because it’s true, but it’s another one of those,

01:01:53 ►

you know, sweep the drugs under the carpet kind of moves.

01:01:58 ►

And so that’s part of the forgetting of this book,

01:02:00 ►

is forgetting of this kind of dimension of it.

01:02:03 ►

But even more specifically is that people in

01:02:07 ►

that period of time, so the book comes out in 1964. The 63 and 64 are just the years when LSD is

01:02:16 ►

leaking out of the lab. This means out of the research centers and out of the kind of elite

01:02:21 ►

Hollywood psychotherapeutic circles where it was circulating among, you know, stars and out of the kind of elite Hollywood psychotherapeutic circles where it was circulating among stars and sort of more hoity-toity folk,

01:02:30 ►

and becoming available to the masses,

01:02:33 ►

becoming available to crews like Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.

01:02:36 ►

But it’s also before it becomes scheduled and kind of goes underground

01:02:40 ►

and really begins to massify.

01:02:42 ►

So it’s a very sweet spot, 64 to 66, 67,

01:02:47 ►

in psychedelic history in the United States anyway.

01:02:51 ►

And this book was fundamental, fundamental.

01:02:54 ►

You talk to people from that era,

01:02:55 ►

almost everyone was like,

01:02:56 ►

oh yeah, we took that book really seriously.

01:02:58 ►

So there was this period where this book

01:03:01 ►

helped shape what it meant to do psychedelics.

01:03:04 ►

Maybe psychedelics aren’t about, maybe it doesn’t help.

01:03:08 ►

But it was the case that particularly the idea of ego death,

01:03:12 ►

that the point of psychedelics was to have a traumatic ego death

01:03:16 ►

and that this was going to give you what you wanted,

01:03:18 ►

was really kind of part of the lore.

01:03:19 ►

That’s what you were doing.

01:03:20 ►

That’s what you expected to have happen or hoped to have happen.

01:03:23 ►

Later on, people were like, maybe that’s not such a good idea. Maybe this heavy-handed guide stuff really isn’t

01:03:28 ►

so helpful. And by the 70s, psychedelic guides and therapists and people working with people as

01:03:33 ►

guides developed much more minimal methods, although some of them still emphasize this kind

01:03:39 ►

of traumatic sort of rupture. But at that point, it was really very significant. This is just one example of this

01:03:47 ►

guy, just as kind of evidence for this, John Griggs. And John Griggs in the early 60s was one

01:03:53 ►

of these, you know, he was like basically a thug, a San Jose grifter, greaser, thief, who, you know,

01:04:03 ►

was partying and taking a lot of speed and riding motorcycles. And he had

01:04:06 ►

his whole crew. And then he heard that there was some, I think he, then he moved. I can’t remember

01:04:11 ►

when he went to the Southland, but at some point he moved South. But he heard about this psychiatrist

01:04:16 ►

who, no, that’s right. He was from Orange County. Excuse me. I’m mixing up with two stories, but

01:04:21 ►

the characteristic is the same. He heard about this this shrink who’s got a store of acid.

01:04:25 ►

So he went up and he stole his LSD, brought it back down, took it, and had a complete life-changing religious experience.

01:04:33 ►

So much so that he took the rest of the acid back.

01:04:36 ►

He gave it back to the guys.

01:04:37 ►

I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

01:04:39 ►

And then started wearing flowers and became this guy.

01:04:45 ►

started wearing flowers and became this guy. And when they would do acid and he turned on everybody and he ended up being the head honcho behind the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which was

01:04:50 ►

extremely important in terms of the distribution of LSD in California and actually throughout

01:04:55 ►

the United States. Orange Sunshine came through the Brotherhood. They brought in a lot of the

01:05:00 ►

Afghani hash. And so they were very important drug distributor, but really took it seriously.

01:05:05 ►

They meant it, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. It wasn’t just the name of a drug gang.

01:05:09 ►

And when he did drugs or he wanted people to do it, it was all about the Leary experience and

01:05:14 ►

this sort of psychedelic experience. So it’s important to see it historically,

01:05:20 ►

this book and the connections that it makes. And again, the way in which it’s not just

01:05:25 ►

some facile appropriation or simple exoticism, the way we see exoticism now

01:05:30 ►

vis-a-vis shamans in South America. Oh, they know everything or whatever.

01:05:35 ►

Oh, let’s just take their culture and try to run with it. It wasn’t just that.

01:05:40 ►

It was also recognizing something inherent in the Bardo concept, that this idea of a between, of moving between states, and more so that these betweens resonated so that my orgasm or even my sneeze could resonate with my death and therefore be used as preparation or as confrontation or experiencing that death, at least in the simulated sense,

01:06:05 ►

was just ideal for psychedelics.

01:06:08 ►

Because in a way, that’s what it’s doing.

01:06:11 ►

That’s part of its potential, of its inherent potential,

01:06:15 ►

not just because we have expectations.

01:06:17 ►

It’s part of the process, I believe, itself.

01:06:20 ►

And then the other way that that’s manifesting,

01:06:21 ►

I had an image, but it didn’t show up.

01:06:25 ►

It was a picture of the sort of therapy room at Johns Hopkins when they were doing this psilocybin studies about 10 years ago that led to the 2006 study that came out that basically proved what we already knew from the 60s,

01:06:41 ►

which is that under certain circumstances, psychedelics can produce profound religious experiences.

01:06:48 ►

But more importantly than that study are a number of studies that are happening now that have to do with using psychedelics for people facing the end of life.

01:06:58 ►

So people who are cancer patients, people who have tremendous anxiety and fear,

01:07:06 ►

patients, people who have tremendous anxiety and fear, and using psychedelics as a way to ameliorate that, to get them prepared, to get us all prepared for what’s going to happen,

01:07:11 ►

whether we want it to or not. And I think these studies are incredibly profound,

01:07:16 ►

not only because they seem to show that this can really work. You can take people who are

01:07:20 ►

naive about drugs and don’t have drug experience, and it’s not even really a drug anymore.

01:07:26 ►

It’s a medicine. It’s a healing agent.

01:07:29 ►

It’s a pathogen, whatever you want to call it,

01:07:32 ►

can take psychedelics, and in the proper structure,

01:07:36 ►

the proper setting, and set and setting are part of the story,

01:07:38 ►

and I’ll wind up with that in just a second,

01:07:41 ►

in the right situation, they can really change. They can really grapple with these fears and move forward.

01:07:46 ►

But what I really like about the mortality psychedelic studies is because it’s a wonderful

01:07:52 ►

wedge. It’s a wonderful foot in the door. Why? Because we’re all in that position. We’re all

01:08:00 ►

terrified before death. I’m terrified. You’re probably terrified. You probably spent a lot of

01:08:05 ►

your time avoiding it. Oh, distract. Oh, no, no, no, not going to happen today. Not happening today.

01:08:10 ►

Nope. And so in some sense, we’re all there with the cancer patient who gets the news or the person

01:08:15 ►

who’s experiencing extreme anxiety. And once we kind of recognize that, I would like to think in

01:08:21 ►

a sane future that this will enable all of us to be able to access these things in more open context because we’re all in the same plight.

01:08:32 ►

On the note on set and setting,

01:08:47 ►

which is the most consistent, necessary, profound, and in some ways under-theorized,

01:08:55 ►

meaning people don’t quite recognize the full consequences of the concept

01:08:59 ►

within and without psychedelic culture,

01:09:02 ►

within the whole history of talking about these things in the West.

01:09:06 ►

Set and Setting is front and center.

01:09:08 ►

And the psychedelic experience, the book about the Tibetan Book of the Dead,

01:09:11 ►

is the place where the idea of Set and Setting is sort of released

01:09:15 ►

and introduced into the world.

01:09:18 ►

So with that, I think I will close,

01:09:20 ►

and I’m hoping we’re going to be able to have some fun questions.

01:09:23 ►

So thanks so much for your attention. It’s a little hot in here. Let’s go.

01:09:27 ►

All right.

01:09:34 ►

All right. Yes, sir.

01:09:37 ►

Thank you.

01:09:39 ►

You talked a bit about perennialism versus appropriation

01:09:45 ►

and I heard you saying

01:09:48 ►

that maybe

01:09:50 ►

this wasn’t appropriation

01:09:52 ►

because it actually was inherent

01:09:54 ►

or at other times

01:09:55 ►

that it wasn’t

01:09:58 ►

appropriation because it was talking about

01:10:00 ►

removing your attachment

01:10:02 ►

to reality altogether so it wasn’t even one

01:10:04 ►

specific version of reality to appropriate. But I was just wondering what you see as bad

01:10:12 ►

appropriation in contrast to this, to maybe shed light on how this is.

01:10:16 ►

That’s a good question. I’d probably clarify it a little bit, which is that I would never

01:10:20 ►

deny that this is appropriation. It is. It is like going, taking, you know,

01:10:25 ►

cut and pasting. I mean, literally, like, if you

01:10:28 ►

read what they do, they’ll, like, quote

01:10:29 ►

a whole paragraph from Evans Wentz

01:10:32 ►

and then just, you know, pluck

01:10:34 ►

it out. Like, in the traditional account,

01:10:36 ►

the soul wanders for

01:10:38 ►

40 days. And they

01:10:40 ►

just, like, pull it out and put in 8 hours.

01:10:42 ►

Because that’s an LSD trick.

01:10:44 ►

So, I mean mean it’s sort

01:10:45 ►

of ridiculous if by the way if anybody wants to go feel free to to leave um so they they are doing

01:10:51 ►

that but i just want to say that it’s more complicated than that that those other those

01:10:55 ►

things are also happening and the question of appropriation is a very difficult one you know

01:10:58 ►

and um i do think that uh the the psychedelics change the discussion a little bit.

01:11:07 ►

Because if we’re going to put on a naturalist hat,

01:11:10 ►

like not mystical hat,

01:11:12 ►

we all have the same nervous system.

01:11:14 ►

We all really do.

01:11:15 ►

There are some generalities about human beings across cultures.

01:11:19 ►

And where that line ends is very controversial.

01:11:23 ►

And so people who don’t like the universalism, don’t like perennialism, will insist that there’s very few things.

01:11:30 ►

We all have arms and legs.

01:11:31 ►

We exist in time.

01:11:33 ►

And there’s very few things that we can really talk about and agree on, whereas other people are more expansive.

01:11:39 ►

I think mystical experience to some degree, and psycho experience, but only to some degree,

01:11:42 ►

I think mystical experience to some degree,

01:11:44 ►

and psychic experience, but only to some degree.

01:11:49 ►

But to some degree, does force us to talk about those universals,

01:11:53 ►

because it is a compound that is entering into our nervous system,

01:11:55 ►

and being read and interpreted in different ways.

01:11:57 ►

Those different ways make a big difference,

01:12:00 ►

and you can’t universalize about people see God, or people don’t see God, or it proves that God exists,

01:12:03 ►

or proves they’re an afterlife.

01:12:04 ►

I don’t think anything like that is really available.

01:12:08 ►

So it’s, you know, there is a lot of bad appropriation.

01:12:12 ►

There’s a lot of ways of misunderstanding, to your own detriment, what’s going on.

01:12:18 ►

I mean, right now there’s all sorts of ways you can see the way people are looking at South American shamanism

01:12:25 ►

and misunderstanding it in a way that then becomes available for people within that culture

01:12:31 ►

to reflect back a misunderstanding and you get this really weird process going.

01:12:36 ►

But on the other hand, that’s how human culture works.

01:12:39 ►

And that’s particularly how religions evolve when they encounter each other.

01:12:42 ►

There’s misunderstanding, creative misunderstanding.

01:12:46 ►

And we might say that’s bad because we want everyone to control their meanings.

01:12:50 ►

Or we might say that’s just the way it goes.

01:12:51 ►

In fact, it’s actually kind of cool because it’s part of the creative process.

01:12:56 ►

The problems really arise when there’s an imbalance of power,

01:12:59 ►

which in this sense there kind of was, more so probably in an indigenous context. It’s so really

01:13:05 ►

complicated who gets the power.

01:13:07 ►

Is it the incoming tourist? Is it the person?

01:13:10 ►

On the other hand, white people

01:13:11 ►

are actually going like, there’s wisdom in the forest!

01:13:13 ►

Let’s go talk to the indigenous people! That’s actually

01:13:15 ►

kind of cool. Indigenous people get to be the ones who know.

01:13:18 ►

But at the same time,

01:13:19 ►

that’s really problematic. So it’s a very

01:13:21 ►

complicated

01:13:22 ►

situation. But I do think it’s

01:13:26 ►

important to talk about universals, not only in terms of mystical experience, but also in terms

01:13:30 ►

of dream. We all dream. We all have that dream as Bardo. Oh, I thought that was real. Oh, no,

01:13:36 ►

it’s not real. Everybody does that. And that’s an important point of universal connection that I

01:13:41 ►

think the Bardo idea is really reflecting as well. But to suggest one further element that I don’t want to see lost in the mainstreaming language,

01:13:50 ►

which is that if pressed against the wall, even with my naturalist hat on, I do believe

01:13:58 ►

that there’s something in us that we could call energy that has a weird, not quite a readable character,

01:14:06 ►

can’t quite get it on a machine, but that it has patterns and it can be constructed in relationship

01:14:12 ►

to different cultural forms and that that stuff becomes apparent and visible and malleable on

01:14:19 ►

psychedelics and that it is not different. I won’t say it’s the same, but it is not different

01:14:25 ►

than aspects of tantric energy work and the visualizations that are associated with it.

01:14:31 ►

So there really is some kind of resonating resemblance that’s going on that makes a

01:14:37 ►

connection between these things that’s more than just cultural symbolism. Okay, thank you very much.

01:14:42 ►

Really appreciate it.

01:14:42 ►

symbolism. Okay, thank you very much.

01:14:43 ►

Really appreciate it.

01:14:51 ►

You’re listening to the Psychedelic Salon,

01:14:53 ►

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:14:56 ►

Well, I hope that Eric’s talk

01:14:58 ►

sparked as many thoughts and questions

01:15:00 ►

for you as it did for me.

01:15:02 ►

For one thing, I’d never heard

01:15:04 ►

anyone talk about the change in consciousness that comes about when we sneeze. I guess that Thank you. Maybe there’s a connection there that I should spend a little more time thinking about. Also, we just heard Eric mention the legendary group called the Brotherhood of Eternal Love,

01:15:30 ►

and I suspect that many of us have read a book titled Orange Sunshine that was published in 2010.

01:15:37 ►

While I did find it to be an interesting read, my friend Nick Sand didn’t think that it was a very accurate book.

01:15:55 ►

My friend Nick Sand didn’t think that it was a very accurate book, and Nick should know, because along with Tim Scully, he produced over 3.5 million hits of Orange Sunshine, as he and Tim were the chemists, alchemists actually, for the Brotherhood.

01:16:01 ►

And if you’re interested in Nick’s stories, you’ll find several podcasts featuring him here in the salon.

01:16:25 ►

Now I’m sure that you also want to hear more from Eric, and I’m happy to say that he hosts the Expanding Mind podcast. Thank you. And if you don’t know who Kevin Kelly is, well, where have you been these last few decades? Among other things, Kelly has been a key figure involved with the Whole Earth Catalog, The Well, and, well, a little magazine called Wired.

01:16:34 ►

So for our fellow salonners who have already made it through all of my podcasts here,

01:16:39 ►

you might want to go to Eric’s site where you’re going to find many, many more programs that I’m sure are going to interest you.

01:16:48 ►

You know, I get a lot of requests for more talks by people like Kat Harrison,

01:16:51 ►

and, well, she’s one of Eric’s guests as well.

01:16:54 ►

Actually, as I look through the list of his programs,

01:16:57 ►

I’ve found several dozen that I can hardly wait to listen to.

01:17:02 ►

And the link to his podcast might be hard to remember if I just read it here,

01:17:05 ►

but I subscribe to it through my podcast app by searching for Expanding Mind.

01:17:08 ►

Now, you may also want to check out Eric’s main website

01:17:11 ►

at www.technosis.com

01:17:17 ►

where you can scroll through the summaries

01:17:20 ►

of Eric’s most recent podcast.

01:17:22 ►

And if you haven’t yet read Technosis,

01:17:24 ►

well, what are you waiting for?

01:17:26 ►

In preparation for today’s podcast,

01:17:29 ►

I got out the old and battered copy that I bought

01:17:31 ►

after Terrence McKenna recommended it to me,

01:17:35 ►

and in reviewing it, I find that it’s still very much in point

01:17:38 ►

and well worth reading.

01:17:40 ►

But you don’t have to trust only my judgment.

01:17:42 ►

Here are a few short quotes about Technosis by some people whose opinions I’ve always respected.

01:17:49 ►

Eric Davis sits on my bookshelf alongside William James, Terence McKenna, and Karen Armstrong.

01:17:56 ►

Douglas Rushkoff said that.

01:17:59 ►

Eric Davis has written one of the best media studies books ever published.

01:18:03 ►

And that’s from Bruce Sterling.

01:18:04 ►

written one of the best media studies books ever published, and that’s from Bruce Sterling.

01:18:11 ►

In this one, Eric Davis’s compendious recitation of the history of communications technology dominates the discursive landscape of techno-exegesis like a Martian war machine.

01:18:19 ►

And who do you think would use such language? Of course, it was Terence McKenna.

01:18:24 ►

Now it’s your turn to

01:18:26 ►

expand your mind even further by listening to some of Eric’s podcasts and reading some of his books.

01:18:31 ►

Just to give you a sense of the wide range of Eric’s writing, here’s what Blender magazine had

01:18:37 ►

to say about Eric’s book, the one that’s titled Led Zeppelin IV, which is the album where we all

01:18:43 ►

heard Stairway to Heaven for the first time.

01:18:46 ►

And here’s why Blender called Eric’s book

01:18:48 ►

one of the 40 greatest rock and roll

01:18:50 ►

books. And I quote,

01:18:52 ►

The most intellectually

01:18:54 ►

inspired and flat-out fun

01:18:56 ►

of Continuum’s ongoing

01:18:58 ►

33 and a third series of

01:19:00 ►

pocketbook album appreciations,

01:19:02 ►

Critic Davis’ adventurous

01:19:04 ►

treaty decodes every magical property

01:19:06 ►

embedded within Rock’s most geeked-out masterpiece.

01:19:11 ►

Well, that should be about enough

01:19:13 ►

to keep you busy until next week

01:19:15 ►

when I plan on talking about California’s Prop 64

01:19:19 ►

and marijuana legalization.

01:19:22 ►

But here’s the headline.

01:19:24 ►

If you’re inclined to vote in favor of this proposition,

01:19:27 ►

you most definitely need to read the entire 60-plus pages

01:19:31 ►

of this insanely horrible bill.

01:19:34 ►

And if you’re a medical marijuana patient in California,

01:19:37 ►

well, you’d better begin searching out a local underground grower right now,

01:19:40 ►

because among other things, it eliminates Prop 215

01:19:44 ►

that medical marijuana

01:19:45 ►

patients have been relying on for a long time. If this new proposition passes, well, we’re going to

01:19:51 ►

be in for some dark days out here on the coast. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from

01:19:57 ►

cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

511 - Psychedelic Book of the Dead

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