Program Notes
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Lorenzo
Date this lecture was recorded: January 30, 2017
In today’s podcast Lorenzo explains how he came to his decision to not vote in last year’s presidential election. He begins by quoting part of a poem by William Butler Yeats which read:
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
And by changing a single word in the final two lines of that poem, it would conclude:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Washington to be born?
Full Text (PDF) of Lorenzo’s remarks
“Deeper Down the Rabbit Hole”
by Jack Lukeman
from his new CD, Magic Days
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
00:00:23 ►
salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:31 ►
As you might have guessed, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks basically, well, doing what most people here in the States have been doing.
00:00:39 ►
Just laying low and waiting to see what kind of insanity would be coming out of the White House, now that it has a new occupant.
00:00:43 ►
And, as we all know, it was a short wait.
00:00:48 ►
So, today I’m going to do something a little different here in the salon.
00:00:51 ►
And instead of playing an interview or a lecture of some kind,
00:00:55 ►
I’m going to tell you how I see the current situation and maybe give you a few ideas about ways that you can cope with what seems to be coming our way.
00:01:02 ►
And don’t get me wrong, I’m still very optimistic about the next
00:01:05 ►
few years. There will be major changes and there will be some big speed bumps, but I truly have a
00:01:12 ►
lot of hope for a bright future. Next week I’ll get us back on a regular weekly schedule and
00:01:18 ►
I’ve got some new material that I think you’re going to enjoy. And that is when I’ll also thank
00:01:24 ►
the fellow Saloners
00:01:25 ►
who have made donations during these past two weeks.
00:01:28 ►
But since I’m going to be speaking my mind,
00:01:31 ►
I’m not really sure that everyone would want their names associated with today’s podcast.
00:01:36 ►
Also, after I finish my little rant,
00:01:39 ►
I’m going to close with some new music.
00:01:42 ►
As I was working out what I wanted to say today,
00:01:46 ►
I received an email from fellow salonner Jack Lukman, and he was letting me know about his new CD. And attached
00:01:53 ►
to the email was an mp3 copy of one of the songs from that CD. Well, after reading the title, I was
00:02:00 ►
very struck by the synchronicity of what I was doing and what Jack, who is an Irish minstrel, in case you don’t remember him from earlier podcasts,
00:02:10 ►
well, what he was doing seemed to me and thinking was along the same lines as I was.
00:02:15 ►
The title of his new song is Deeper Down the Rabbit Hole.
00:02:19 ►
And it seems appropriate to play it at the end of what I have to say right now.
00:02:24 ►
and it seems appropriate to play it at the end of what I have to say right now.
00:02:29 ►
I’m going to put the full text of the following remarks in today’s program notes,
00:02:32 ►
which you will find at psychedelicsalon.com,
00:02:37 ►
and what I have to say I’ve put in the form of an essay that I’ve titled,
00:02:39 ►
A Psychedelic Moment in History.
00:02:45 ►
In the words of the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats,
00:02:49 ►
Things fall apart, the center cannot hold,
00:02:52 ►
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
00:02:55 ►
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,
00:02:58 ►
And everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned,
00:03:00 ►
The best lack all conviction,
00:03:03 ►
While the worst are full of passionate intensity.
00:03:06 ►
Although those words were written in 1919, near the end of World War I and at the beginning of the Irish uprising,
00:03:13 ►
it seems to me that they also apply to the world today. And by changing a single word in the final
00:03:19 ►
two lines of that poem, it would conclude, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
00:03:27 ►
slouches towards Washington to be born. And so it is that I see us at the beginning of
00:03:35 ►
what I believe to be a truly psychedelic moment in history. Now, for those among us who have
00:03:42 ►
yet to have their first psychedelic experience, let me explain what I mean.
00:03:47 ►
Modern definitions of the word psychedelic, for the most part, imply that such an experience features hallucinations brought on by drugs.
00:03:56 ►
And that is fair enough, as it goes in today’s world, but we should remember that when Humphrey Osmond first coined that word, he said that it was to mean mind manifesting.
00:04:08 ►
And that is the definition that I’ll be using here.
00:04:11 ►
That is, an experience in which our minds become free to explore completely new vistas and roam free of the restraints of an ego.
00:04:22 ►
Furthermore, I would like to point out that I see a vast difference between
00:04:26 ►
our minds and our brains. While our brains may be command central when it comes to controlling our
00:04:32 ►
bodies, I think of my mind as the essential core of my being. Others may call it their soul.
00:04:40 ►
So how, you ask, could a rough beast who slouched his way to Washington cause a manifestation of mind or soul?
00:04:48 ►
Well, I’ll get to that a bit later, but first I would like to point out two of the basic features of a psychedelic experience.
00:04:56 ►
One is that cultural barriers are dissolved, and the other is that a change of paradigm often occurs.
00:05:03 ►
And the other is that a change of paradigm often occurs.
00:05:10 ►
I’ll get to the paradigm shift later, but first I’d like to explain what I mean by the dissolution of cultural barriers.
00:05:17 ►
A good metaphor for how our cultures shape our lives may be seen in the Russian matryoshka dolls,
00:05:20 ►
sometimes called a Russian nesting doll.
00:05:26 ►
I’m sure that you’ve at least seen a picture of these folk art dolls of a decreasing size that are placed inside one another. The way I like to think about them is that the smallest of the set
00:05:32 ►
is us as infants who haven’t yet learned our first words. We are just wonderful little unformed
00:05:38 ►
beings who now must begin to learn how to cope with the world around us. Then, as we mature,
00:05:42 ►
now must begin to learn how to cope with the world around us.
00:05:48 ►
Then, as we mature, we begin to coalesce into more fully formed humans.
00:05:52 ►
We do this first by figuring out how to fit into our families,
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and then into the larger community around us.
00:05:58 ►
And at various points along the way,
00:06:02 ►
larger and larger versions of us are built up over one another.
00:06:06 ►
Under my current persona, you will find a grandfather persona, a businessman persona, a lawyer persona, a military persona, a father persona, a student
00:06:14 ►
persona, and eventually, if I dig way down, I reach my core, the essential me, my mind, if you will.
00:06:23 ►
Each and every one of us has a core being like that deep down inside.
00:06:28 ►
A psychedelic experience, then, is a way to remove all of those outer casings,
00:06:34 ►
those cultural barriers that we have used to survive thus far
00:06:37 ►
in whatever culture we now find ourselves in.
00:06:40 ►
A truly productive psychedelic experience will return you to the essential core of your being
00:06:46 ►
by dissolving these cultural barriers that you have accreted over the years. And once you reach
00:06:53 ►
that inner core of your mind, well, there’s no limit to the magic that you can do. Over 100 years
00:06:59 ►
ago, the American philosopher and psychologist William James pointed out that human beings,
00:07:07 ►
by changing their inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.
00:07:14 ►
Well, it took me many years after first reading that quote to be able to actually put it into
00:07:20 ►
practice. And then it only came about after an intense psychedelic experience, one where I was
00:07:26 ►
able to shed all of the family, religious, national, and cultural boundaries that were covering up my
00:07:33 ►
inner core. Once all of those boundaries were dissolved and I was back in touch with the
00:07:38 ►
essential being that I think of as me, I was able to work out a plan to change some of the then current outer aspects of my life.
00:07:47 ►
And that’s what is meant when psychonauts say that they are doing the work. You see, anyone can have
00:07:53 ►
a psychedelic experience, but not everyone does the work that it takes to bring something back
00:07:59 ►
from that experience, something that could be used to better their lives. It takes work to do that.
00:08:05 ►
So if this is truly a psychedelic moment in history, then we have some heroic work ahead
00:08:11 ►
of us if we are to take advantage of these unusual times. As melodramatic as this sounds,
00:08:18 ►
I believe that the mass extinction of species that is currently underway isn’t necessarily
00:08:23 ►
going to spare the human species,
00:08:26 ►
unless we begin to pay much closer attention to the world around us.
00:08:30 ►
I realize that the news coming from wherever you are living right now seems to apply primarily
00:08:36 ►
to your own nation, but these are not normal times, and if you look around you will see
00:08:42 ►
that it isn’t just your country that is convulsing today.
00:08:45 ►
It is all of humanity.
00:08:48 ►
We humans certainly have the technology and the weapons to extinguish us all.
00:08:52 ►
What we seem to be lacking is the ability to recognize how mutually interdependent we all are,
00:08:59 ►
and that we simply can no longer continue to take advantage of our fellow humans,
00:09:04 ►
stealing their natural
00:09:05 ►
resources and treating them like slaves.
00:09:08 ►
Those days are coming to an end, which means that, like it or not, voluntarily or not,
00:09:14 ►
those of us who are now living in the United States are going to be forced to make some
00:09:18 ►
significant changes in the way that we now go about our lives.
00:09:23 ►
As one of my Texas law professors pointed out to me many years ago,
00:09:27 ►
there comes a time when we all have to take the bull by the tail and face the situation.
00:09:33 ►
However, the situation in the world today, as I see it,
00:09:38 ►
doesn’t actually look like the hind end of a bull.
00:09:41 ►
No, the situation as I see it today is that we have just begun a truly psychedelic
00:09:47 ►
moment in history, and how well we handle it is going to determine the course of this new
00:09:52 ►
millennium. Let’s just hope that we don’t have a bad trip. Thanks to the internet, it has become
00:09:59 ►
clear that the political struggles that are taking place in the United States today aren’t unique.
00:10:06 ►
Similar battles are found in almost every political body on the planet.
00:10:10 ►
At times, it seems as if the whole world is on fire and nobody knows where to find the fire department.
00:10:16 ►
Most human societies around the world are obviously in a major transition of some sort.
00:10:22 ►
The good news is that the way it will finally work out for you
00:10:25 ►
may actually be more up to you than you think. But before we get to that, it seems to me that
00:10:31 ►
we first need to take a closer look at how we got to this unusual point in history.
00:10:37 ►
Because without looking back and clearly seeing the roads that we took to get here,
00:10:41 ►
it’s going to be impossible to know in what direction we should
00:10:45 ►
proceed from this crossroad that we are at. Personally, I see this moment as the perfect
00:10:50 ►
time for each and every one of us to stand up and be counted. However, let’s be honest here.
00:10:57 ►
What standing up and being counted means is different for all of us. So, how do you figure
00:11:02 ►
out your next move? What I’ve done for myself, and something
00:11:06 ►
that you may want to do for your own self, is to spend some time trying to understand not just the
00:11:12 ►
historical events that have led you to where you now find yourself, but how those events impacted
00:11:18 ►
your thinking, how they hit you emotionally. History, you know, is the background music of our lives. And while we
00:11:26 ►
all share bits and pieces of human history, there’s no single story here. We all have our
00:11:31 ►
own stories about how we have come to think as we do. And so the only thing that I can do here
00:11:37 ►
is to tell you a little bit of the history that has shaped my own life. And I’ll only mention
00:11:42 ►
the big events, you know, ones that have also shaped the lives of
00:11:45 ►
many others in my generation. Of course, some of the more recent ones have touched us all.
00:11:52 ►
So, I’m going to take you on a little walk down the road that I have followed,
00:11:56 ►
and we’ll stop at a few of the historical markers along the way, where I can better explain how I
00:12:03 ►
have come to my own conclusions about the best way for me to
00:12:06 ►
proceed from here. Now, there are going to be some things that I say and with which you not only
00:12:12 ►
disagree, but perhaps you will strongly disagree with me. Let’s face it, none of us are 100% in
00:12:19 ►
agreement with another single person on the planet. We may agree on a lot of things with someone, but
00:12:24 ►
I would be
00:12:25 ►
shocked to find two people who totally agree about every little thing with somebody else.
00:12:30 ►
It seems to me that one of those people would then be redundant, and there aren’t any redundant
00:12:35 ►
people as far as I know. So what I’m suggesting that you do right now is to just listen to the
00:12:41 ►
facts that I present without emotionally disagreeing with me. There will be plenty of time for that later.
00:12:47 ►
Hopefully, you will at the very least be able to understand
00:12:50 ►
how I came to the conclusion to not vote in the recent presidential election in the United States.
00:12:57 ►
For what it’s worth, I did vote in the 13 presidential elections that preceded this recent one,
00:13:03 ►
and in every one of them I did what
00:13:05 ►
many of my friends did and gave my vote to the person I thought to be the lesser evil. In fact,
00:13:12 ►
that was one of the three primary reasons Clinton gave for casting a vote in her favor.
00:13:17 ►
She wasn’t Trump. Thus, she thought that everyone could see that she was the lesser evil.
00:13:23 ►
In my case, that argument didn’t wash,
00:13:26 ►
because, well, I was unable to decide which of those two was the lesser evil.
00:13:31 ►
To me, they were equally bad candidates,
00:13:34 ►
and I’ll talk about that in just a moment.
00:13:36 ►
Before I do, however, I would like to comment on the state of mind
00:13:40 ►
experienced by some Clinton supporters on the morning after the election.
00:13:45 ►
Although I didn’t expect Trump to win, when I did learn the news, I didn’t feel let down at all,
00:13:51 ►
at least not the way that Clinton’s most avid supporters did. In those first few hours after
00:13:57 ►
the realization of a President Trump began to dawn on us all, I was actually shocked to learn
00:14:03 ►
that some people that I knew, old people
00:14:05 ►
like myself, were actually considering suicide or at the very least moving to another country.
00:14:12 ►
Need I comment on the foolishness of those positions? Come on, suicide because Clinton
00:14:18 ►
didn’t become the first woman president like she expected? Unless someone was expecting to be appointed to a high-paying government job
00:14:26 ►
by Clinton, I think that suicide is a major overreaction to her losing the election.
00:14:32 ►
Get a grip, people. Of course, as a former Sanders supporter, the loss by Clinton didn’t feel nearly
00:14:39 ►
as bad to me as Bernie’s loss in the primary had felt, particularly after we discovered that he most
00:14:45 ►
likely would have won in a fair race. But the traitorous executives at the Democratic National
00:14:51 ►
Committee used their power to squash Sanders, who quite obviously had more popular support than did
00:14:57 ►
Clinton. So us Sanders supporters had already gone through the emotional letdown of losing an election to a person who we felt was inferior to our chosen candidate.
00:15:08 ►
Now as a little aside here, please keep in mind that I asked you to listen to what I had to say without letting your emotions become involved.
00:15:17 ►
I say this because if you were a Clinton supporter, I’m sure that you’d disagree with my opinion that the DNC and the Clinton campaign staff acted illegally in getting Sanders out of the way.
00:15:28 ►
That is my opinion.
00:15:29 ►
You are certainly welcome to your own opinion about these events,
00:15:33 ►
but what I’m attempting to do here is to let you know how I came to reach my decision to quit voting.
00:15:39 ►
So if we can, I hope that you’ll continue listening with as little emotion involved as possible,
00:15:45 ►
at least until I come to the end of this little rant.
00:15:49 ►
There are many reasons that I distrusted Clinton and supported Sanders.
00:15:54 ►
For starters, she was the most pro-war candidate in my memory.
00:15:58 ►
Some may want to dispute that, but this overabundance of experience that her staff always talked about
00:16:04 ►
included one disastrous military operation after another.
00:16:08 ►
However, the mess that she made of Libya, along with her comments about Syria,
00:16:13 ►
were enough to show me what kind of a president she would be.
00:16:16 ►
On top of that, I think it is very clear that the Democratic Party itself
00:16:21 ►
intentionally betrayed working people and poor people
00:16:24 ►
in favor of the Wall
00:16:25 ►
Street friends of the Clinton Foundation. Again, that’s how I happen to see it. You may disagree,
00:16:31 ►
and that’s okay too. Now, while I don’t expect Trump to be any less friendly to Wall Street,
00:16:37 ►
big oil, and the ultra-rich, I am hopeful, and probably misguided, about his position with regards to Russia.
00:16:46 ►
Taking both candidates at face value, which I agree is most likely pure folly,
00:16:51 ►
but based on what they said during the campaign,
00:16:54 ►
my takeaway was that Clinton was pushing for a major war with Russia,
00:16:58 ►
and Trump wanted to cut business deals with them instead.
00:17:01 ►
What I think we are seeing here is a major riff among the oligarchs
00:17:06 ►
who ultimately pull the strings inside the deep state. A few years ago, there weren’t many places
00:17:12 ►
where you could read about what is commonly called the deep state or the shadow government.
00:17:18 ►
There are many definitions of what makes up the deep state. One that fits what I have to say here comes from Charles Hugh Smith,
00:17:25 ►
who defines it as the unelected government that continues making and implementing policy
00:17:32 ►
regardless of who is in elected office. And he also provides an interesting graphical image of
00:17:39 ►
these interconnected decision makers that shows over 30 groups, all in circles that touch one another but have no
00:17:46 ►
direct lines of authority between them. Naturally, you would expect to see bureaucrats from the three
00:17:52 ►
branches of government represented, but on that pseudo-organizational chart, you will also find
00:17:58 ►
directors of major corporations, Wall Street and banking organizations, the Pentagon, the
00:18:03 ►
intelligence community, the defense industry,
00:18:06 ►
lobbyists, Silicon Valley, and over a dozen other such assemblages of like-minded individuals.
00:18:12 ►
There is no overarching structure to the Deep State.
00:18:16 ►
However, there are many interconnecting mutual interests and bonds of friendships
00:18:20 ►
between the permanent hierarchies of these organizations.
00:18:24 ►
They go to the same
00:18:25 ►
prestigious universities, take vacations in the same places, and belong to the same clubs as their
00:18:31 ►
peers do. Often their children are in school with one another. These are the people that C. Wright
00:18:37 ►
Mills wrote about in 1956 in his book The Power Elite, where he points out that these people are
00:18:44 ►
the leaders of the military,
00:18:45 ►
corporate, and political elements of society. Basically, these unelected people are in powerful
00:18:51 ►
and influential positions and actually run the government. These are the guys who call the shots.
00:18:57 ►
And if you don’t think that they hold the reins of power in this country, well, then you probably
00:19:02 ►
also still believe that Lee Harvey Oswald actually shot John Kennedy in Dallas. Sadly, the truth is that on November 22, 1963, Alan Dulles and other
00:19:14 ►
members of the deep state orchestrated the murder of President Kennedy, staged a silent coup, and
00:19:20 ►
took over the government. This isn’t the place to delve back into the Kennedy and King murders,
00:19:26 ►
but the truth is now available to the public in the form of many well-documented books and movies.
00:19:31 ►
While I don’t always agree with Oliver Stone’s point of view, I do believe, after reading dozens
00:19:37 ►
of books on the subject, that Stone’s movie, JFK, got it right. Stone also produced an excellent
00:19:43 ►
television series titled
00:19:45 ►
The Untold History of the United States,
00:19:48 ►
which should be mandatory viewing for every high school student in the country.
00:19:52 ►
Or, for those more inclined to reading,
00:19:55 ►
Howard Zinn’s book, The People’s History of the United States,
00:19:58 ►
is another must-read book for anyone who is actually interested in learning the truth
00:20:03 ►
about how this country evolved into its current form,
00:20:06 ►
that of a police state.
00:20:08 ►
I can almost hear the groans from here.
00:20:11 ►
How can you say this is a police state, Lorenzo?
00:20:14 ►
I’m just as free to go about my business as I ever was.
00:20:18 ►
Oh yeah?
00:20:19 ►
Are you sure that you aren’t living in a police state right at this very moment?
00:20:24 ►
Just look around.
00:20:25 ►
Every aspect of our lives are policed by the government.
00:20:29 ►
Every telephone call you make, every stroke on your computer keyboard,
00:20:34 ►
every time you leave your home and go somewhere,
00:20:37 ►
all of that is constantly being monitored by a government agency somewhere.
00:20:40 ►
There are communities in this country where people have been arrested
00:20:44 ►
for collecting rainwater from the roof of their own home, agency somewhere. There are communities in this country where people have been arrested for
00:20:45 ►
collecting rainwater from the roof of their own home, for growing vegetables in their front yards,
00:20:50 ►
for raising chickens in their backyard, and for putting solar panels on their houses.
00:20:55 ►
There are many instances when SWAT teams have broken into homes, killed the pet dog,
00:21:01 ►
caused extensive damage, and sometimes even kill people who have committed crimes no
00:21:05 ►
more serious than petty infractions such as unpaid traffic tickets. You can be forced to give blood
00:21:12 ►
and be strip searched at some traffic stops in this country, and yet there are people who still
00:21:17 ►
don’t think that this smacks of living in a police state. Right now, today, there are almost a million
00:21:23 ►
women and men who spend their nights in steel-barred cages
00:21:27 ►
and then spend their days making office furniture, working in call centers, taking hotel reservations,
00:21:34 ►
working in slaughterhouses, or who are making countless other products for the oligarchs who actually own this country.
00:21:40 ►
For their hard labor, these docile prisoners are paid 5 a day.
00:21:47 ►
Prisoners are packaging your Starbucks coffee, shrink-wrapping your Microsoft products, and sewing lingerie for Victoria’s Secret.
00:21:55 ►
They’re sewing uniforms for McDonald’s and making circuit boards for Dell and IBM.
00:22:00 ►
Prisoners are providing so much slave-type labor that the U.S. economy would have a serious problem
00:22:06 ►
should those people be paid fairly for their work.
00:22:09 ►
And you can bet that the corporate partners in the deep state
00:22:12 ►
are willing to do everything in their power to keep the war on drugs going.
00:22:16 ►
After all, it is the primary source of their slave labor workforce.
00:22:21 ►
So how did we get to this sorry state of affairs?
00:22:24 ►
How do you get millions of people,
00:22:26 ►
who seem to believe that they are free, suddenly roll over and accept a police state?
00:22:31 ►
In a word, fear. Fear is the deep state’s primary weapon. I can remember as a child in the 1950s,
00:22:40 ►
learning about the USSR, the Soviet Union, where citizens were exiled to the gulag,
00:22:46 ►
where the government had its nose in everybody’s personal business, and where neighbors were
00:22:51 ►
encouraged to spy on one another. I can vividly remember having discussions with my friends about
00:22:56 ►
how that could never happen in the United States. It could never happen here, we thought.
00:23:01 ►
How wrong we were, because, well, today the U.S. is considerably
00:23:05 ►
more of a security police state than the Soviet Union ever thought possible. And all it took were
00:23:11 ►
a few terrorist attacks, a mall shooting here, a bomb threat there, and before we knew it, stories
00:23:18 ►
about these possible threats began appearing in the media every day. It didn’t take very long for the brave U.S. citizenry to
00:23:25 ►
roll over and say things like, I don’t care if they listen to my phone calls and read my email
00:23:31 ►
because I don’t have anything to hide. Well, that may be true, but now you don’t have personal
00:23:38 ►
privacy anymore either. If you use a cell phone, a computer, or a credit card, almost everything you do is now open for the government to see.
00:23:47 ►
On top of that, millions of seriously deluded people continue to use social media outfits like Facebook,
00:23:55 ►
which is little more than an easy way for the NSA, the National Security Agency, to obtain even more personal information about you.
00:24:05 ►
agency to obtain even more personal information about you. If you ever accidentally get caught up in a police sweep of some kind, you can expect them to know everything about you,
00:24:10 ►
including what you ate for lunch yesterday and what your current favorite movie is and
00:24:15 ►
what kind of websites you’ve been visiting lately. Unless you have already been taking steps to keep
00:24:21 ►
some of your personal information private, your life is now an open book to the
00:24:25 ►
government. And yet most people say that they’re okay with all of this because of the terrorist
00:24:31 ►
threats that we are faced with. Did you know that there is a 17,600 times greater chance that you’ll
00:24:39 ►
die from heart disease than you will from a terrorist attack? You are a thousand times more
00:24:44 ►
likely to die in a car crash than from a terrorist attack, yet most likely you get in a terrorist attack? You are a thousand times more likely to die in a car crash
00:24:45 ►
than from a terrorist attack,
00:24:47 ►
yet most likely you get in a car every day.
00:24:50 ►
Are you aware that you are eight times more likely
00:24:53 ►
to be killed by the police than by a terrorist?
00:24:56 ►
Yet the mainstream media never points these things out.
00:24:59 ►
Why is that, do you think?
00:25:01 ►
You see, the top media moguls are also elite members of the deep state.
00:25:07 ►
Last year, the Obama administration, whose policies Clinton pledged to continue,
00:25:13 ►
began a major expansion of NATO forces into Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
00:25:19 ►
These three nations were once members of the Soviet Union.
00:25:23 ►
And when they were admitted to NATO, the U.S.
00:25:25 ►
pledged to Russia that NATO would not station troops in those three countries, nor would NATO
00:25:31 ►
hold military exercises on their soil, which borders Russia. Yet Obama and his generals have
00:25:37 ►
now started a significant military buildup in these three nations, right in sight of the Russian
00:25:42 ►
homeland. Think of this for a moment.
00:25:46 ►
During World War II, the Russians suffered unimaginable death and destruction when they
00:25:51 ►
were invaded through their western frontier. Can you blame them for getting nervous about what the
00:25:56 ►
U.S. is up to? And why, do you think, are the Americans causing such a provocation?
00:26:03 ►
This provocative buildup of NATO armies on Russia’s border
00:26:06 ►
comes with the additional risk of sparking a nuclear exchange
00:26:10 ►
between NATO, Russia, and the United States.
00:26:13 ►
Military experts now tell us that,
00:26:15 ►
due to the overwhelming superiority of U.S.-led forces,
00:26:19 ►
that Russia has begun exploring the possibility of using
00:26:22 ►
so-called tactical nukes on the front
00:26:25 ►
lines.
00:26:26 ►
It doesn’t take a Doctor Strangelove to see where that could lead.
00:26:31 ►
Believe it or not, the United States of America would suffer an immense financial meltdown
00:26:36 ►
if war no longer is the nation’s number one business.
00:26:41 ►
War is what this nation is all about.
00:26:43 ►
There is even a war against its own citizens.
00:26:45 ►
It’s called the war on drugs.
00:26:47 ►
But it’s people who are being locked up in prison cages and forced to work as slaves, not drugs.
00:26:53 ►
During the Johnson administration, we even had a war on poverty.
00:26:57 ►
And now there is a war on terror.
00:27:00 ►
I hate to be the one to break the news, but terror isn’t something that can be ended with more war.
00:27:05 ►
In fact, war actually causes terror. It will never end it.
00:27:10 ►
The United States economy is largely driven by the business of war.
00:27:14 ►
Well over one half of all the weapons sold in the world today are manufactured right here in the good old USA.
00:27:21 ►
And the U.S. arms manufacturers desperately need an enemy like Russia in order to continue
00:27:26 ►
to prosper. Each and every hour of every day since 2001, the citizens of the United States
00:27:34 ►
have shelled out $10,500,000 for an uncounted number of foreign military adventures. Add to
00:27:41 ►
that $2,200,000 that is spent every hour just to maintain the current
00:27:46 ►
nuclear stockpile, plus the $1,610,000 given every hour to foreign governments for their use in
00:27:53 ►
purchasing U.S. manufactured weapons. Well, right there you have over $14 million per hour going
00:28:01 ►
directly into the war machine. What could your local school do with just one hour’s
00:28:06 ►
worth of war money each year? Think about that for a moment. For now, that should be enough talk
00:28:13 ►
about life in a police state for you to get the idea. But I seem to have strayed far from my
00:28:18 ►
promise to take you on a little walk down the road that I have followed, and which has led me to
00:28:23 ►
believe as I do when it comes to the
00:28:25 ►
current state of affairs in the United States. In June of 1960, I graduated from high school,
00:28:32 ►
and after reading from an old journal that I kept at the time, I can now vividly recall my then
00:28:37 ►
almost constant state of terror about the possibility of an imminent nuclear war. Now,
00:28:43 ►
keep in mind that I was one of those children who,
00:28:46 ►
beginning in first and second grade,
00:28:48 ►
was being taught to duck and cover when we saw that bright flash
00:28:52 ►
that marked the start of the next war.
00:28:55 ►
In fact, we’d even speculate about whether it was true that
00:28:57 ►
with that bright flash we’d be able to see through our flesh to our bones.
00:29:02 ►
And that’s the state of mind in which I grew up as a child.
00:29:06 ►
During my last month in high school, I wrote that my deepest wish was to be able to complete just
00:29:11 ►
one semester of college before the nuclear war began. That is how frightened my classmates and
00:29:17 ►
I were. You see, going to college was a really big deal for me because no one in my family had
00:29:23 ►
done so before. When my grandfather
00:29:25 ►
immigrated to this country from Porty Down in County Armagh, Ireland, he was 17 years old and
00:29:32 ►
could not yet read or write. The housemaids on the farm where he found work taught him to read
00:29:37 ►
and to write. It was my Grandpa Fox who instilled in me the love of reading that I still have today.
00:29:43 ►
By the time I was born, my grandfather
00:29:46 ►
had already retired as a successful farmer in southern Illinois and had moved to a large house
00:29:51 ►
in a small town on the outskirts of Chicago, and that’s the house in which I grew up. One of my
00:29:57 ►
earliest memories from back then is of sitting at my mother’s desk and making a drawing for her to
00:30:02 ►
mail to my father, who at the time was in the
00:30:05 ►
Navy, fighting the war in the South Pacific. I have other fleeting memories about life during
00:30:10 ►
World War II as well, so it is safe to say that from my earliest days, war was always in the
00:30:16 ►
background of my life. Even during the Korean War, I was aware of it because my favorite cousin was
00:30:23 ►
over there with the army. Obviously,
00:30:26 ►
I made it through college without seeing the bright nuclear flash of my deepest fears,
00:30:30 ►
but my college years weren’t without other events that scared the shit out of me.
00:30:35 ►
The school I was at was the University of Notre Dame, which at the time was an all-boys-only
00:30:41 ►
school. I was there, at that bastion of Irish Catholic America when John Kennedy was
00:30:47 ►
elected president. I watched his inaugural speech in the basement of our dorm on a small black and
00:30:52 ►
white television. Then came the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the humiliation that was heaped upon Kennedy,
00:30:59 ►
our hero. Not much more than a year later came the Cuban Missile Crisis. Even if you’ve watched some of the documentaries about that crisis,
00:31:08 ►
unless you had grown up steeped in the constant fear of nuclear war,
00:31:12 ►
it will be difficult for you to understand the depth of our collective fear
00:31:16 ►
when President Kennedy came on the television and said,
00:31:19 ►
It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile
00:31:24 ►
launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere
00:31:28 ►
as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.
00:31:37 ►
That was a very grim moment for us all, both the citizens of the United States and the citizens of the Soviet Union as well.
00:31:44 ►
both the citizens of the United States and the citizens of the Soviet Union as well.
00:31:51 ►
That crisis remains, yet today, as the closest that this world has come to beginning a nuclear war,
00:31:56 ►
which would cause modern civilization itself to come to a halt for a very long time.
00:32:00 ►
One year and one month later, John Kennedy was dead,
00:32:06 ►
murdered by a deep state cabal that was organized by Alan Dulles, the former CIA director who had been fired by Kennedy after he set him up with the Bay of Pigs fiasco. I won’t
00:32:12 ►
try to explain here why I believe this, it would take too long, and if you are really interested,
00:32:18 ►
there are numerous books and documentaries that you can explore on your own. All that I will say
00:32:23 ►
here is that, in my opinion,
00:32:29 ►
the assassination of President Kennedy was the event that led to a silent coup in which well-connected persons within the deep state assumed control of the government.
00:32:35 ►
I’ll give you just one example.
00:32:38 ►
Approximately 50 days before his murder,
00:32:40 ►
Kennedy signed an order to begin withdrawing troops from Vietnam.
00:32:45 ►
On the day after President Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson ordered an escalation of the war,
00:32:51 ►
and a few days after that, one of his largest campaign contributors received a nearly exclusive
00:32:57 ►
contract to provide all of the construction work for the new infrastructure that expanding the war in Vietnam would require. Need I go on?
00:33:07 ►
Eventually, I wound up serving as a junior officer aboard a Navy destroyer off the coast of Vietnam
00:33:13 ►
in 1967. While my contemporaries were spending the summer of love in San Francisco, I was helping to
00:33:20 ►
shoot large projectiles at people with whom I had no quarrel. After returning from the war,
00:33:26 ►
I became a severe critic of the government of the United States, initially because of their
00:33:31 ►
abandonment of over 300 U.S. military personnel who were intentionally left behind to rot in
00:33:37 ►
Vietnamese prisons. At times, I felt like the only liberal who was involved in the prisoner of war
00:33:43 ►
issue. Every liberal news outfit that we contacted wouldn’t even review the evidence that we had to prove
00:33:50 ►
that these men were still alive. Basically, the liberal media told me that from their point of
00:33:55 ►
view, we were just a bunch of disgruntled vets who wanted to restart the war. Of course, nothing
00:34:01 ►
could have been further from the truth. And the conservative movement also pushed us aside,
00:34:07 ►
because they were well aware of the fact that it was the policy of the Department of Defense
00:34:12 ►
to abandon prisoners who were still being held after the end of hostilities,
00:34:17 ►
just as they did after World War II,
00:34:20 ►
when over 20,000 U.S. servicemen were observed by the U.S. Ambassador to Russia
00:34:25 ►
as they were being shipped to Siberia for slave labor.
00:34:29 ►
I realize how difficult it is to believe this,
00:34:32 ►
but there is a significant amount of documentation backing that statement up.
00:34:36 ►
It has finally been declassified and is now available to the public.
00:34:40 ►
As a member of the military myself,
00:34:42 ►
I took it very personally when I discovered that
00:34:45 ►
my own government was behind the cover-up of the POW issue, and I remain bitter about it yet today.
00:34:52 ►
For several years, I spent virtually all of my time and money in an attempt to raise awareness
00:34:58 ►
about our government’s intentional abandonment of our POWs. I gave speeches everywhere from
00:35:04 ►
farmhouse porches in Illinois to the steps of
00:35:07 ►
the Lincoln Memorial, and I produced dozens of television programs about the issue, but all to
00:35:12 ►
no avail. About the only satisfaction that I ever got out of all that protesting was the time when,
00:35:19 ►
for just a moment, I locked eyes with Ronald Reagan just as I was giving him the finger.
00:35:24 ►
For just a moment, I locked eyes with Ronald Reagan just as I was giving him the finger.
00:35:28 ►
But he just smiled and waved to me.
00:35:30 ►
I don’t think that he even knew where he was by that time.
00:35:36 ►
One of our main goals back then, though, was for the Senate to hold hearings at which we would be able to produce our witnesses
00:35:38 ►
and play the audio and videotapes that we had of the prisoners who were still being held captive.
00:35:44 ►
We actually raised so much noise that Senators McCain and Kerry finally called the hearing.
00:35:49 ►
And then these two cowardly traitors put the final nail in the coffin by denying our right to bring our own witnesses,
00:35:57 ►
and essentially they covered up the government’s involvement in the affair, essentially putting an end to our inquiries.
00:36:03 ►
It was then that some of us vowed to do
00:36:05 ►
whatever it took to see that neither McCain or Kerry ever made it to the White House. At least
00:36:10 ►
we succeeded with that mission. I could go on about other major historical milestones from then
00:36:16 ►
until now, but they most likely have been the historical background music of your own life as
00:36:21 ►
well. I’m talking about Watergate, the oil embargo, the hostage crisis
00:36:25 ►
in Iran, the sale of guns to the Contras, the first Gulf War, the rise of the Mujahideen,
00:36:32 ►
the end of the USSR, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
00:36:39 ►
No matter where I looked, the world seemed to be coming unglued. Eventually, I arrived at a tipping point,
00:36:46 ►
the 2016 presidential elections in the United States. Early on, political commentators pointed
00:36:53 ►
out that when Trump took the reins of power in the United States, it would have a massive
00:36:58 ►
repercussion all around the world as well. Well, it sure didn’t take very long for that to happen.
00:37:04 ►
Even people who normally avoid
00:37:06 ►
learning about the current news haven’t been able to avoid the crisis that Trump has now caused with
00:37:11 ►
his ban on Muslims entering the country. Interestingly, he didn’t ban the countries
00:37:17 ►
that 18 of the 19 hijackers on 9-11 came from. In fact, he also didn’t include in the ban 90%
00:37:24 ►
of the countries tied to terrorism in the
00:37:26 ►
United States. Naturally, the countries that should have been on the list but weren’t are all nations
00:37:32 ►
where Trump has major business interests. Does he have to make it any more clear that we are now
00:37:37 ►
being ruled by an insane band of oligarchs? But, you say, if I feel this way, why didn’t I at least give my vote to Clinton,
00:37:46 ►
rather than not voting at all? To be honest, my personal belief is that while she may have taken
00:37:52 ►
a little longer to exert her authority, Clinton would have been even worse than Trump has been.
00:37:57 ►
To me, they were equally bad candidates, and so I simply have quit voting. This two-party system
00:38:03 ►
here in the States is totally without merit
00:38:05 ►
when the best that they can do is to offer us these two horrible choices for president.
00:38:11 ►
I can’t understand why anyone would ever again want to participate
00:38:14 ►
in such a flawed system as we now have.
00:38:18 ►
Just based on what the two candidates said during their campaigns,
00:38:22 ►
Clinton’s position in regards to Russia
00:38:24 ►
was that she was eager to get
00:38:26 ►
into a shooting war with them, so as to further line the pockets of the arms industry and foreign
00:38:31 ►
governments who she pimped to get huge donations for her family business, the Clinton Trust. The
00:38:38 ►
oligarchs of war are her main backers. Trump, on the other hand, said that he wanted to talk with
00:38:43 ►
Russia, and rather than go to
00:38:45 ►
war with them, he wanted to engage with more trade deals with them. The oligarchs who are backing
00:38:51 ►
Trump, like his Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson, think that trade is better than war.
00:38:57 ►
Of course, we really shouldn’t believe anything that either of them says, because
00:39:01 ►
they’re both invertebrate liars. What many people in the Clinton camp don’t
00:39:06 ►
understand is how off-putting it was to have the press constantly tell us that it was now Clinton’s
00:39:12 ►
turn to be president. Her turn? Really her turn? To most people that smacked too much like a royal
00:39:19 ►
succession. Clinton became the queen of our political royalty, and simply by living long enough,
00:39:26 ►
some people thought that it was her turn to run the country. If I remember correctly,
00:39:32 ►
we fought the Revolutionary War with England because we wanted to get out from under the
00:39:37 ►
ridiculous habit of letting a single family own and run the country. The British can have their
00:39:42 ►
queen if it makes them happy, but here in the States, royalty has no place. There is no line to wait in for your turn to become the leader of
00:39:50 ►
this nation. And whether that position is fair or not, it is most definitely the way a significant
00:39:56 ►
number of people feel here in the States. What has taken place with the Trump inauguration, however,
00:40:02 ►
has much deeper significance when we see that a new center
00:40:05 ►
of power is arising within the deep state. In the past, the wealthy oligarchs who were the true
00:40:12 ►
power behind the Bush-Clinton-Obama thrones are the ones who I think of as the war lovers,
00:40:18 ►
people who have amassed great fortunes in the defense industry. And for the most part,
00:40:24 ►
these bloodthirsty psychopaths
00:40:25 ►
stayed in the background, hiding behind the politicians that they owned.
00:40:30 ►
But the Trump era has a slightly different look and feel,
00:40:33 ►
because some of them, some of those oligarchs,
00:40:36 ►
are now out in the open,
00:40:38 ►
and are about to become the members of his cabinet.
00:40:41 ►
Trump’s selection of cabinet members is quite revealing
00:40:43 ►
when looked at with a view of
00:40:45 ►
their wealth. Collectively, a dozen members of the newly proposed cabinet have a greater net worth
00:40:51 ►
than the bottom one-third of the citizens of the United States. Just think about that for a moment.
00:40:58 ►
A handful of white men that Trump wants in his cabinet own more stuff than do 108 million of our less rich citizens combined.
00:41:08 ►
In the past, the president’s cabinet wasn’t quite so obviously wealthy, they were just rich.
00:41:13 ►
That is no longer the case. The oligarchs are now clearly in charge. So what do you think that means
00:41:20 ►
exactly? Well, here is just one example of how the rich and powerful can become even richer
00:41:27 ►
through the manipulation of the public discourse and the nation’s laws. What I’m talking about is
00:41:33 ►
an issue that gets such a bad reputation through the mainstream media that sensible and intelligent
00:41:38 ►
people are shouted down even before they can point out a few facts. Yes, I’m talking about the current state
00:41:46 ►
of affairs with vaccines. And before you roll your eyes and tune me out, you may want to turn
00:41:52 ►
off your emotions for a moment and listen to some facts as I see them. There are a lot of people on
00:41:58 ►
both sides of the vaccine issue who seem to be constantly shouting one another down these days.
00:42:04 ►
So it has become difficult to sort through the conflicting facts on this issue without putting Thank you. have as high opinion as I do about Robert Kennedy, but for me, the way that he came to investigate
00:42:25 ►
the issue has a lot of bearing on why I trust what he has to say. To begin with, Kennedy states very
00:42:31 ►
clearly that he is not against vaccines. What he has a problem with is that the current schedule
00:42:37 ►
of vaccines now requires that school children in the United States must have a minimum of 69 shots.
00:42:45 ►
When I was a child, I received three vaccines.
00:42:49 ►
Today, the government is attempting to force the parents of my grandchildren
00:42:52 ►
to give their children 69.
00:42:56 ►
Doesn’t that seem a bit much to you?
00:42:58 ►
Well, it does to Robert Kennedy, and that is one of the things that he is trying to change,
00:43:02 ►
to reduce required vaccines to a more sensible level.
00:43:07 ►
But the main reason that he became involved in the issue
00:43:09 ►
has to do with the things that are put into these shots
00:43:12 ►
to keep them from spoiling too rapidly.
00:43:15 ►
And mercury is one of those horrible adjutants that the vaccines now include.
00:43:20 ►
Of course, virtually all of the vaccines that we are forced to give our children
00:43:23 ►
are manufactured in China, so there really is no are forced to give our children are manufactured in China,
00:43:25 ►
so there really is no sure way to know what they are putting in these shots.
00:43:29 ►
However, mercury has been one of them, and mercury toxicity is something that Kennedy knows a lot about.
00:43:36 ►
Over the past several decades, Robert Kennedy has been involved in several hundred cases where his clients were injured by mercury,
00:43:44 ►
mainly from the pollution caused by coal-fired power plants.
00:43:48 ►
In fact, he has clearly stated that after reading many studies, he believes that no one in the United States should eat any of the freshwater fish caught in the lakes and streams of this nation,
00:44:01 ►
because, basically, they have all accumulated unsafe levels of mercury in their
00:44:06 ►
flesh. Mercury toxicity is a serious problem in many ways. For one thing, mercury tends to
00:44:13 ►
accumulate in our brains, and the fact that the mercury added to vaccines disappears from the
00:44:18 ►
blood quite rapidly is actually a bad thing because, well, it never leaves the body. It just goes right to the brain where it remains until we die.
00:44:27 ►
And in the pockets of poverty close to sources of mercury contamination of air and water,
00:44:33 ►
one out of every six women already have such high levels of mercury in their systems
00:44:38 ►
that the IQs of their children have been measurably reduced.
00:44:43 ►
Why, you ask, is this not front page news?
00:44:47 ►
Interestingly, Robert Kennedy got a direct answer to that question from Roger Ailes,
00:44:51 ►
the former head of Fox News and, oddly, a longtime friend of Kennedy’s. And it was Ailes who told
00:44:58 ►
Kennedy that if one of the Fox News hosts had Kennedy on a show to talk about this, well, he’d have to fire that
00:45:05 ►
host immediately because 70% of Fox’s non-election year income comes from pharmaceutical companies,
00:45:12 ►
the very ones who are getting rich through their vaccine divisions. Oh, did I forget to mention
00:45:17 ►
the fact that in the late 1980s, the U.S. Congress passed a law that completely exempts vaccine manufacturers from any and all
00:45:26 ►
liability due to damages caused by their products. Just think about this for a moment. How would you
00:45:33 ►
like to be selling a product for which there is no liability, even for gross manufacturing
00:45:38 ►
negligence? And you don’t even have to go to the expense of actually selling your product in the
00:45:43 ►
way that other products are marketed and sold. You see, if you want your children to go to the expense of actually selling your product in the way that other products are marketed and sold. You see, if you want your children to go to the public schools,
00:45:49 ►
you have practically no choice but to pay a doctor to shoot who knows what into your child.
00:45:55 ►
Sure, there are labels on the vaccine bottles, but they wouldn’t be the first products from China
00:46:00 ►
that aren’t all that they claim to be. So first a group of oligarchs from
00:46:05 ►
the pharmaceutical industry got together and had the Congress remove all liability from their
00:46:10 ►
products. Then they arranged for the public school system to not teach unvaccinated children,
00:46:16 ►
except in a few rare instances where their parents have been able to show that they have a family
00:46:21 ►
history of adverse effects with vaccines. Getting your vaccine on the schedule of required vaccinations
00:46:27 ►
is worth around $1 billion of profit per year,
00:46:32 ►
and all without any marketing, sales, or liability expenses.
00:46:36 ►
That is how the oligarchs work.
00:46:39 ►
So, what are we to do?
00:46:42 ►
Well, my first and probably best answer is, fuck if I know.
00:46:48 ►
But I’ve never let that stop me before, so I’m going to tell you what I’m thinking about.
00:46:53 ►
And I’m also going to tell you what I would do if I was still in my twenties.
00:46:57 ►
As I see it, us ordinary people who don’t have access to great power and wealth have three basic options.
00:47:06 ►
One, we can just continue doing what we’ve been doing up till now. Or two, we can do what many of us have started to do
00:47:12 ►
already, and that is to become an edge walker, who have one foot in each of two different worlds.
00:47:18 ►
Or three, we can drop out of the default world and live a more joyful life in some underground kind of way.
00:47:26 ►
The first option, of course, is what a lot of people think is the only option.
00:47:31 ►
You can either keep your head down and remain in the middle of the herd,
00:47:34 ►
or you can stand up and be counted by organizing demonstrations and working with various groups
00:47:39 ►
who are doing their best to bring about some positive change in the world.
00:47:43 ►
Perhaps becoming involved in politics is something that you think you should do.
00:47:47 ►
My advice is that if you have a strong inclination for public policy action of some kind,
00:47:53 ►
well then follow it.
00:47:54 ►
In truth, I no longer have much faith that us common people can actually change things
00:47:59 ►
from our position at the bottom of the power ladder and with few resources.
00:48:04 ►
However, I do believe that all of these kinds of activities are worth the time and effort involved,
00:48:10 ►
at least as rearguard actions that slow the growth of the fascist police state we now find ourselves in.
00:48:16 ►
So, if things like this are calling you, then it seems to me that you should follow that call.
00:48:21 ►
But politics, demonstrations, lobbying, and other such activities haven’t
00:48:25 ►
worked for me in the past. Frankly, it’s all been a waste of my time for all of the results
00:48:31 ►
that I’ve achieved. So I’m now in agreement with Dr. Timothy Leary when, way back in 1967,
00:48:37 ►
he said, and I quote, you, the younger generation in particular, have got to drop out. And by drop out, I mean all the way.
00:48:47 ►
You can’t vote.
00:48:48 ►
I urge you not to do politics.
00:48:50 ►
Don’t picket.
00:48:51 ►
Don’t get involved in any of these menopausal mind games because it doesn’t make any difference.
00:48:57 ►
End quote.
00:48:58 ►
Well, it has taken me 50 years to finally get that message.
00:49:02 ►
And I now see that there are a couple of other roads that
00:49:05 ►
I could have followed. Where I suspect most of us will end up is by taking the second road and
00:49:10 ►
becoming edge walkers. By that I mean that many of us today already have one foot in the default
00:49:16 ►
world and one foot in the world where the psychedelic community lives and plays. If we
00:49:22 ►
had a choice, I suspect that many of us would elect to become permanent
00:49:26 ►
burners and live on the playa at Black Rock City all year. However, as you know, that isn’t actually
00:49:32 ►
an option. But us edgewalkers still are able to find local festivals, dance parties, and other
00:49:38 ►
community activities where we can shed the outer shells that culture has imposed upon us, and, for a short time, be able to live as free people,
00:49:48 ►
singing, laughing, and dancing through the night.
00:49:50 ►
Then we go back to the default world, where we return to our jobs
00:49:54 ►
and live what appears to be an ordinary life.
00:49:57 ►
But what about that third way, you ask?
00:50:00 ►
What’s that all about?
00:50:01 ►
Well, there are countless answers to that question,
00:50:04 ►
about how to live a joyous life outside of the constraints of our current default cultures.
00:50:10 ►
Artists, writers, musicians, and people of many stripes
00:50:13 ►
have always found ways to drop out and somehow live fun-filled and exciting lives.
00:50:18 ►
Of course, some of them have also led rather desperate lives as well.
00:50:23 ►
But what if there was a way, through an underground economy of sorts,
00:50:27 ►
and an underground culture of sorts,
00:50:29 ►
where free-spirited people like you and I
00:50:32 ►
can get out of the rat race of cubicle and jobless hell
00:50:35 ►
and live the lives that we were meant to live?
00:50:38 ►
I think that there is a way to create such a world culture.
00:50:42 ►
Even though I’m not a believer in reincarnation,
00:50:44 ►
just on the off chance
00:50:45 ►
that I do have to come back here for a few more trips around our sun, well here’s the world that
00:50:51 ►
I would like to find. As the default world around us continues to implode, one of the things that
00:50:57 ►
the ruling elite will need is a way to keep the people passive. Roman rulers are said to have held their citizenry together with bread and
00:51:06 ►
circuses. Well, why don’t we provide the circuses? I’m talking, of course, about turning the global
00:51:12 ►
festival and dance communities into major features of everyday society, and the initial infrastructure
00:51:19 ►
is already in place to do this. There are already many global festivals of all kinds. Additionally, there are regional and
00:51:26 ►
local events, such as the one that the Burning Man community has been fostering for many years now.
00:51:31 ►
Why don’t we now create our own business infrastructure among all of these festivals,
00:51:36 ►
and for the people who build and produce them? With blockchain technology and the internet,
00:51:42 ►
we now have the tools we need to incorporate these festivals
00:51:45 ►
in ways that keep as much of our labor out of the default world’s tax structure as is legally
00:51:51 ►
possible. There are many ways to do this, and every dollar of tax money that we aren’t forced
00:51:57 ►
to give to our governments is another dollar that isn’t going to be spent buying more weapons.
00:52:02 ►
In addition, there is an army of edgewalkers to provide the support that the festival culture needs to expand. The
00:52:09 ►
core of this new paradigm are the free spirits who will be organizing and
00:52:13 ►
producing these festivals, both large and small. In the Burning Man culture they
00:52:17 ►
are called theme camps. Other people may call them clans. In medieval times they
00:52:22 ►
were called guilds. They may be organized around a
00:52:26 ►
single activity, such as jewelry making, or fire spinning, or blacksmithing, or even computer
00:52:31 ►
programming to provide the infrastructure for a group of clans. I’m not describing this very well,
00:52:36 ►
but I hope that you are beginning to get the idea. Should I be reincarnated here on earth
00:52:42 ►
50 years from now, I would like to see a world that is held together by the festival vibe.
00:52:47 ►
I’d like to see a world in which I could join a guild or a clan or a theme camp that was focused on a place where my talents and dreams aligned.
00:52:56 ►
Rather than go to college, I could become a member of a clan that was cherished by the local community.
00:53:02 ►
Should I want to sculpt large pieces of art?
00:53:05 ►
was cherished by the local community. Should I want to sculpt large pieces of art? Rather than send me off to an expensive college, my parents could endow an artist guild where I could work.
00:53:11 ►
That is the kind of world in which I could be happily reincarnated. As I said, much of the
00:53:17 ►
infrastructure for a world like this is already in place. All you have to do is search it out.
00:53:23 ►
Ultimately, the road that you take will determine your destiny
00:53:27 ►
for like it or not we are at a pivotal moment in human history and by the way making no decision
00:53:34 ►
and just going along as you have been is a decision as well. So own it and remain aware of
00:53:40 ►
the fact that you have intentionally chosen the path that you are on.
00:53:48 ►
This doesn’t mean that you have to make any great initial changes in your life.
00:53:52 ►
The only thing you have to do right now is make a decision about where you want to be a few years from now and then take the first little steps in that direction.
00:53:56 ►
If one day you want to live in wine country and become a winemaker, then begin reading
00:54:01 ►
and watching videos about winemaking.
00:54:03 ►
Maybe even begin making a little wine at home.
00:54:06 ►
Although, I actually did try this myself once,
00:54:09 ►
and my end product wasn’t drinkable.
00:54:12 ►
So I moved on to other dreams,
00:54:14 ►
and right now, I’m dreaming about the amazing power
00:54:18 ►
that we possess to make positive changes in our lives
00:54:21 ►
after we come through a powerful psychedelic experience,
00:54:24 ►
like this
00:54:25 ►
particular moment in time. If I’m correct, and this is a truly psychedelic moment in history,
00:54:32 ►
then we can expect to see a major paradigm shift in one or more aspects of the world around us.
00:54:39 ►
It can be that the United States loses its preeminent position of power in the world.
00:54:44 ►
Perhaps the global corporate capitalist system will be replaced by something new.
00:54:49 ►
Maybe our environment will turn against us even more quickly than it is already doing.
00:54:54 ►
It could be all of those things and others besides.
00:54:57 ►
I obviously have no better crystal ball to look into the future than you do,
00:55:01 ►
but of this I am sure.
00:55:03 ►
Our world, the world of human diverse
00:55:06 ►
activities and diverse cultures, has begun to morph into something different. I don’t expect
00:55:12 ►
there to be another dark age, but if there is, then I am sure that the global psychedelic community
00:55:18 ►
will bring light into the dark soul of whatever is coming our way. I like to tell the story about a time when I was living before the mast
00:55:28 ►
and working as a deckhand on a three-masted bark during a Pacific crossing.
00:55:33 ►
There was a young man who joined our crew just before we set sail.
00:55:37 ►
He was brash and boisterous and really full of himself when he came on board.
00:55:42 ►
But that first night at sea brought with it a little squall
00:55:44 ►
and we had to go aloft to reef our sails. himself when he came on board. But that first night at sea brought with it a little squall,
00:55:50 ►
and we had to go aloft to reef our sails. Our little round-bottomed ship had begun to roll from side to side somewhat vigorously as the wind and waves tossed us about. Of course,
00:55:56 ►
this meant that after climbing the mast and making your way out to the end of the yard,
00:56:01 ►
you would be whipped about with great force. One hand for yourself and one hand for the
00:56:05 ►
ship was the rule of Loft, and at times it had to be both hands for yourself. But getting back to my
00:56:12 ►
story, the first time that we were ordered to Loft, this young man I was talking about got about
00:56:17 ►
halfway up the rattlings of a main mast when he suddenly froze, and I couldn’t blame him. The only
00:56:23 ►
thing that got me to the top of that mast
00:56:25 ►
was my fear that my shipmates would find out how scared I was. The truth is, I was more afraid of
00:56:31 ►
looking like a wimp than I was of falling to my death. So go figure. Anyway, this young man got
00:56:38 ►
about halfway up the mast and then was frozen in place. Two of us went back down and tried to talk
00:56:43 ►
him into relaxing and continuing to climb. That didn’t work, so the two of us went back down and tried to talk him into relaxing and continuing to
00:56:45 ►
climb. That didn’t work, so the two of us put a rope around his waist and then tried to pry his
00:56:50 ►
arms loose and then hopefully lower him back down to the heaving deck. That didn’t work either.
00:56:56 ►
Somehow he had acquired superhuman strength and we couldn’t get his arms to let go of the shrouds
00:57:02 ►
no matter what we did. Then Bill Bartz, our wonderful old bosun,
00:57:07 ►
climbed up to where the young man was clinging to the rigging with his death grip,
00:57:11 ►
and he began to talk to this kid in a very soft voice,
00:57:15 ►
telling him to not be ashamed,
00:57:17 ►
for this kind of thing happened to new sailors more than one would think.
00:57:21 ►
When he got up to where the young man was stranded, he said,
00:57:24 ►
There’s a little trick to going
00:57:26 ►
up and down the rigging that you need to know, son. Never look down. Always look up. Look up, son,
00:57:33 ►
look up. And with that simple suggestion, the young man looked up, relaxed his grip on the shrouds,
00:57:41 ►
and resumed his climb. From then on, he was fine up aloft with the rest of us,
00:57:46 ►
hanging on for dear life, but pretending that it was all in a day’s work, which it was after all.
00:57:53 ►
So, as this psychedelic moment in history continues to unfold, and as our ships of state
00:57:59 ►
traverse the coming storms, let us remember to keep looking up. We’ve already been through worse storms than this, and
00:58:06 ►
we’re going to make it through this one as well. And then, from time to time, when we anchor off a
00:58:12 ►
beach where there is a big party going on, let’s keep in mind what Henry Miller said in Tropic of
00:58:18 ►
Cancer way back in 1934. I believe that today, more than ever, a book should be sought after, even if it has only
00:58:27 ►
one great page in it. We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it,
00:58:34 ►
anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and soul. It may be that we are doomed,
00:58:41 ►
that there is no hope for us, any of us. But if that is so, then let us set up a last
00:58:47 ►
agonizing, blood-curling howl, a screech of defiance, a war-hoop. Away with lamentation,
00:58:55 ►
away with eulogies and dirges, away with biographies and histories and libraries and
00:59:00 ►
museums. Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater.
00:59:06 ►
A last expiring dance, but a dance. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:59:16 ►
Be well, my friends. so you just took off running with the map still in your hand
00:59:51 ►
Quoting revelations of a play across this land
00:59:57 ►
The dogs just keep on barking up, it echoes across the tomb
01:00:03 ►
I’m still standing wondering if I should follow you It echoes across the tune. Oh, yeah He put down the rabbit hole
01:00:25 ►
He put down the rabbit hole
01:00:28 ►
He put down the rabbit hole
01:00:32 ►
He put, oh, yeah
01:00:34 ►
Kingfishers and dragonflies
01:00:38 ►
Floating through the air
01:00:40 ►
Snails kiss upon the cherry
01:00:43 ►
Pipped the ladybirds to stay
01:00:46 ►
How come that you always go
01:00:50 ►
And the lords never leave
01:00:52 ►
Deep down below
01:00:55 ►
The mushrooms and the fusion trees
01:00:59 ►
Deeper down the rabbit hole
01:01:02 ►
Deeper down the rabbit hole Deeper down the rabbit hole Good night. Good Lord, good Lord, we will meet again. Deeper down the rabbit hole
01:02:17 ►
Deeper down the rabbit hole
01:02:20 ►
Deeper down the rabbit hole
01:02:23 ►
Go again till it’s good luck Keep her down, rub it home And go her again
01:02:25 ►
Till it’s good luck
01:02:29 ►
Good luck
01:02:32 ►
Good luck
01:02:35 ►
To all my old friends
01:02:38 ►
Good luck
01:02:42 ►
Good luck Good luck Good Lord, good Lord, good Lord, we will meet again. Thank you.