Program Notes
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
http://www.psymposia.com/magazine/nick-sand-orange-sunshine-lsd-chemist-dies-75/Date this lecture was recorded: August 10, 1998
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“This always comes up in the discussion about are psychedelics spiritual. Or is it legitimate and coherent to talk about psychedelics as a part of a spiritual path, or a moral path, or a path to enlightenment. I’ve always said I wasn’t ready to make that claim.”
“The strange thing about the spiritual quest, or the quest for understanding whether it’s spiritual or not, is how endangered it is by answers, as I said, by closure.”
“The truth doesn’t require your cooperation to exist, but illusion does.”
“Bad trips make bad sex look like no problem, which is an amazing thing to achieve.”
“It’s very hard not to be a creature of your own time.”
Nick Sand on the Salon
Nick Sand Obituary
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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 ►
And I’d like to begin today by thanking fellow saloners,
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the Phase Theory Collective, Lee S.,
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and that wonderful Los Angeles plant shaman, Mark Y.
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And all of them have seen to it that these podcasts continue to come your way each week.
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Also, I want to thank Shane M., Nikita, Ringelad, and Lee S. once again, as these fellow
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slaughters are the first four patrons of my new Patreon site, where I’m drumming up a little
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support for a new book that I’m writing, and I’ll tell you some more about that after today’s
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podcast. Before that, however, although I’m sure you already know this, but our good friend and esteemed elder, Nick Sand, died earlier this week.
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In the future, I’ll be doing a special program dedicated to Nick,
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but in the meantime, there are already several of Nick’s talks here on the salon,
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and I’ll link to them in today’s program notes, which you’ll find at psychedelicsalon.com.
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Nick was, well, he was one of the most significant
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chemists, alchemists actually, that our community has ever had. In fact, literally millions
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of people have enjoyed his orange sunshine LSD, not to mention the fact that Nick is
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one of the people most responsible for making smoked DMT a staple item in the medicine kits of many
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psychonauts. Nick was one of the most interesting people that I’ve ever met, and he surely will be
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missed by us all. So, are you ready to listen to a little more Terrence McKenna? If you happen to
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listen to Cat Harrison’s talk at the Psychedelic Science 2017 conference,
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which I did via their live stream,
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well, you heard her make a rare mention of Terrence, who at one time had been her husband.
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And Kat, with a big smile on her face,
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said that while Terrence talked a lot about mushrooms and DMT,
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it was actually cannabis that was his number one substance.
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And she said he smoked it all day, every day.
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So anyway, let’s listen to this tape from a workshop that Terrence did in the little house at the Esalen Institute on August 10th, 1998.
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The tape is simply labeled Ellen’s Questions.
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And I haven’t cut out anything in the beginning. It starts just like this.
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And I haven’t cut out anything in the beginning. It starts just like this.
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200 B.C. to 900 A.D.
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where every third male mummy
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has this extremely elaborate drug kit
00:02:58 ►
that he was buried with.
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A grinding tool, a snuffing tray,
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little bird bone tubes,
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even bags of vegetable matter,
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which they’ve analyzed to determine that it’s
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Anodinanthra paragrena variety Seville.
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Anodinanthra paragrena was known to be a DMT containing snuff used widely over the
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Amazon, but this variety sibyl that they found, they then went on expedition right across the
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border from this part of Chile into Argentina and found these places where these trees are the major component of the flora.
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A single seed. They look like black dimes. They’re thin and very smooth and shiny. A
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single one of these seeds will intoxicate you if you grind it up and snuff it up. So it’s interesting.
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It’s in trying to imagine a culture
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where every third male is involved in this cult
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or involved to the degree that he’s buried with the snuffing kit.
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It probably means the whole population was,
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or at least all the men.
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Very little is known about this culture because it didn’t write.
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It’s a pre-Incan deal.
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Located where?
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In the Atacama Desert of northern Chile,
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which is some of the most remote, wild place on this planet.
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It looks like another planet i mean it’s a desert
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above 10 000 feet oases characterize there are a couple of oasis oasi whatever and
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no rain has fallen there in this century as far as the weather records go.
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So it’s one of the driest places in the world.
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And this explains the presence of these mummies,
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which are, they found thousands of them.
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When Manolo took over this project,
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there had been this sort of advanced Dominican character in this town for years and years and he had exhumed over
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three thousand of these mummies and had them on shelves in around and so he’s kind of a
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necrophilic
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archaeologist
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with a
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penchant for
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I don’t know
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I wasn’t there
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the felt presence
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of immediate experience
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I’ve talked about that a lot,
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it’s not my phrase,
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the felt presence of immediate experience,
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in other words, it just means
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how it is here now for you
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from your point of view,
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which is what you’re always inside,
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no matter where you go awake or
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asleep stoned or unstoned reality has a quality which is the felt presence of immediate experience
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wittgenstein called it the present at hand making making a more complicated metaphor by bringing into it the notion
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of something which grasps.
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I think we’ve talked at times about,
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is it Morris Berman’s book,
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Coming to Our Senses?
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Have you all read that,
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or do you know about that?
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It’s a great book,
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if you haven’t read it,
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and it basically is the history
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of our denial of our senses and
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what a denial of immediate experience pleasure erotic pleasure every other kind of pleasure the
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Western enterprise has become and he has he talks about some interesting things in there that i haven’t ever seen discussed
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anywhere else he talks in one chapter about the history of mirrors as an indices of self-awareness
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after all a culture without mirrors is a culture where people don’t care to look at themselves or don’t feel the need to look
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at themselves how far back can you trace mirrors how advanced is the technology of mirrors so the
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felt presence of immediate experiences is I mentioned it a lot because my notion is
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that this is what you always have to come back to this is what you have to
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measure everything against you open the door Paul so this idea we’re talking about the felt presence of experience, which the idea
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being that
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philosophy
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can push you one way,
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religious beliefs can push
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you another way,
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upbringing,
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education,
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all of these things, but the
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real, where you
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really live is the felt presence of
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immediate experience and anything which pulls energy from that either by causing
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you to regret the past or causing you to spend lots of time anticipating the
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future or even it could be argued, activities where you lose awareness of yourself, like
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reading. I was always guilty of this particular abandonment of the felt presence of immediate
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experience. I was thinking today, a day this beautiful is the kind of day where my father used to boot me out of the house,
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whether I wanted to go or not, on the grounds that on such a day you couldn’t possibly stay inside.
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So I used to dread days like this. It meant interrupted reading time.
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Help me out here, Ellen. What was the rest of it
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besides the felt presence of immediate experience?
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Well, I was curious,
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in your vast storehouse of cross-referencing,
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in philosophy and spiritual practice,
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Oh, yeah.
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where truth comes in,
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the speaking of it, the telling of it.
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Well, I think I said
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this always comes up in the discussion
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about are psychedelics spiritual?
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Or is it legitimate and coherent
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to talk about psychedelics
00:10:23 ►
as part of a spiritual path or a moral path
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or a path to enlightenment.
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And I’ve always said I wasn’t ready to make that claim,
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that having been raised Catholic,
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I had a pretty deeply ingrained notion
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of what constitutes the moral life.
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And then I listed one of these things they make you learn in catechism,
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which is, I believe,
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clothe the naked, feed the hungry, bury the dead,
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visit the sick and imprisoned, comfort the afflicted,
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minister to the sick.
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And I said, I felt like if you did those things
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and there is a kingdom of heaven,
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surely there is a place prepared for you.
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But it wasn’t clear in my mind
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what the relationship of moral good works is to self-development.
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And so Ellen’s question goes to the point of what is the role of seeking truth in spirituality. And I would argue that it’s primary, but that it’s probably the thing most fragile and most endangered
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in the ordinary process of seeking truth,
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because everybody has too many answers.
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You ask the question, and it turns out the answers are waiting right there.
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We were laughing the other night
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some friends of mine and I
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over the revelation on the internet
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on the part of a certain sect which guards its
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Privacy very highly it was revealed against their wishes that the central teaching of this sect
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was that God is a clam on another planet.
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And we were just puzzling over, you know, just how such a teaching
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and how its impact could be correctly managed.
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I don’t know what Ellen’s position is on this,
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but I’ve always felt, and this is my position
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and a minority position and not an orthodox position,
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that salvation was an act of understanding,
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that it’s all very well to feed the sick and bury the dead and all that stuff,
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but that ultimately somehow there was some kind of a heaven
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prepared for those who could treat this world as a conundrum,
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a puzzle, a paradox, and figure it out.
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And, you know, this is a persistent idea in folklore worldwide. You get it in Buddhism with the idea of the doctrine of the Parinirvana,
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that if a single being could attain enlightenment,
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all sentient beings
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would be instantaneously enlightened.
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So somehow we’re all waiting
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for just one of us
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to figure it out.
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Yes, the one monkey.
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Another example of where this happens
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on a folkloric rather than a world religious level
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is in people’s encounters with fairies and elves.
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You know, if you should for some reason
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get tangled up with fairies and elves,
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usually the only hope, the only way out is an act of brilliant
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intellectual synthesis. What I mean by that is they pose riddles, and they want you to
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pose riddles. Well, if you’re just, I think then you’re in bad shape. You’re never going
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to leave the hill. You’re going to sleep beneath the hill for eons.
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But if you can riddle your way out, it amuses them to let you go.
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So it’s sort of this idea.
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Great world religions present their own textual outpouring
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as a legitimate area in which to attain enlightenment.
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In other words, one can direct one’s understanding
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toward understanding the properties of herbs,
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the movement of the stars, the way the weather works,
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or a book, doesn’t matter what book.
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The Koran, the Talmud, the Bible, the Mandukya Upanishad, the Anuttara Yoga Tantra. It doesn’t
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matter. But somehow, and this is heuristics. This is the idea that textual analysis can lead to some kind of higher understanding. What is there
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more to say about that? Somehow, you know, given the strong intuition that nature is organized fractally and that man is somehow the microcosmic image
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of deity, then somehow our cognition, our thinking processes must surely be the most godlike things that we do, and so doing them is a kind of practice.
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Maybe we’ve talked about this in other evenings,
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that maybe finally what you’re left with
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is the fairly grim conclusion that mathematics is the way,
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because it does contain it is an infinite
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ascending staircase
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of ahas
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into higher and higher realms
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of unspeakable
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but very pleasing
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understanding
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the strange thing about
00:17:02 ►
the spiritual quest
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or the quest for understanding whether it’s spiritual or not,
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is that how endangered it is by answers.
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As I said, by closure.
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You ask a question, what is the world?
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Well, 50 different factions step forward with a revealed answer
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that they want to immediately sign you up for.
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So, and this sort of goes back to the tone of the first evening,
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you know, the truth doesn’t require your cooperation to exist,
00:17:41 ►
but illusion does.
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Illusion is in the eyes of the perceiver, and in fact the
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perceiver brings to the illusion its ontos, its power to be a thing. Truth isn’t like
00:17:59 ►
that. So I think people say, well, it’s not reverent to beat on the tires and honk the horn and want to drive it around the block.
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I don’t know, that’s just stand up, don’t meet this on your knees,
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meet it like an equal, you know, what’s the percentage of all this lollygagging?
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Of course, it has that kind of personality.
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I mean, it exalts, I was going to say freedom,
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but cognitive clarity.
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The Buddha image of all of this is Manjushri,
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the Buddha of discriminating wisdom.
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And Manjushri is always, not always,
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but in his peaceful form,
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always portrayed with a sword.
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And this sword is the sword of discriminating wisdom.
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It’s used to cut through the scrambled illusions
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and delusions of the weary world to reach to
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the to the Bodhi mind if you’re if you don’t know where truth is or if there is
00:19:37 ►
a bottom to the sea you’re swimming in and all that then I think it’s a very,
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that you feel an urgency about these questions.
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They have to be answered.
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You have to know.
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I don’t know how many paths there are that bring you to this place,
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but certainly with psychedelics,
00:19:59 ►
you fairly quickly,
00:20:01 ►
that urgency leaves you
00:20:03 ►
and you realize you now have the tools in hand
00:20:07 ►
to make the expedition you want to make,
00:20:12 ►
and now the question is to proceed judiciously in an ordered fashion,
00:20:18 ►
actually making sense out of what you perceive.
00:20:23 ►
The spiritual enterprise changes drastically once you have
00:20:27 ►
tools powerful enough to take you anywhere you want. So it’s not about the search for
00:20:34 ►
power. You have the power. And then what you have to decide is what are you going to do
00:20:40 ►
with it? Where do you want to go with it?
00:20:48 ►
I don’t know how much there is to say about all that.
00:20:53 ►
I do feel like, and I’m sure anybody who’s spent any time with me at all,
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privately or in these sessions, knows that there’s a tension between the psychedelic community, which is, to my mind,
00:21:02 ►
an exiled tribe of scientists the psychedelic community we’re
00:21:09 ►
the heirs of freud and jung but booted out of the tent of science because we dared to use the human
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brain body as an instrument and so the only place where we can gain shelter and comfort
00:21:27 ►
is at the fringes of New Age religion. But these are not our people, these people. You
00:21:36 ►
know, they serve strange gods and bizarre agendas, and we need to not lose our identity among them because they play by different rules
00:21:51 ►
now maybe you know somewhere in the history of the world through god knows what means the truth
00:22:00 ►
was actually downloaded to somebody a messiah a, a rabbi, a Buddha, somebody, a something, somewhere.
00:22:08 ►
But I find it unpersuasive, that idea,
00:22:15 ►
because truth is so contextually defined and precious
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that even if that had happened,
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what good would it have done you and me?
00:22:31 ►
We receive these things hideously deformed
00:22:37 ►
by the metamorphosis of historical process.
00:22:44 ►
Yeah.
00:22:48 ►
One thing I’ve noticed in my own exploration is as I make the inquiry,
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I’m able to distinguish now the difference
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between the facts,
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just the physical facts,
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and my truth,
00:23:01 ►
which is influenced by my experience of the facts,
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my feelings, my history, my
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whatever. And I don’t know, I’m not sure what to make of that, but I have noticed that there
00:23:15 ►
is a difference between those.
00:23:18 ►
Yeah, I think I understand what you mean. I live intellectually in a simpler
00:23:25 ►
universe than the one that
00:23:28 ►
my experience
00:23:29 ►
has taken place in.
00:23:31 ►
In other words, I could
00:23:34 ►
tell tall tales
00:23:35 ►
of
00:23:36 ►
shamanistic strangeness,
00:23:40 ►
apparent telepathy,
00:23:43 ►
impossible
00:23:44 ►
coincidental
00:23:46 ►
occurrences
00:23:47 ►
even transformations
00:23:49 ►
of matter
00:23:51 ►
and I’ve seen all of these
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things but never
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under controlled conditions
00:23:58 ►
and never with anybody
00:23:59 ►
claiming they understood what was going on
00:24:02 ►
what I doubt
00:24:04 ►
is that anyone understands any more of what’s going on. What I doubt is that anyone understands
00:24:06 ►
any more of what’s going on than I do.
00:24:10 ►
Not because it’s an act of self-elevation
00:24:14 ►
that I am so smart.
00:24:17 ►
That’s not the thought.
00:24:19 ►
The thought is everyone is ordinary.
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And it’s incredibly disempowering
00:24:26 ►
to not realize this.
00:24:28 ►
If you think that it belongs only to the Dalai Lama
00:24:32 ►
and somebody else,
00:24:34 ►
this is incredibly disempowering.
00:24:38 ►
The mushroom said to me once,
00:24:40 ►
it said, for one human being to seek enlightenment from another is like a
00:24:46 ►
grain of sand to seek enlightenment from another the message my interpretation of
00:24:54 ►
that being all grains of sand are capable of seeking enlightenment on
00:24:59 ►
their own damn steam you know I mean not that you people around you don’t have something
00:25:05 ►
to teach you but an understanding in the person sitting next to you is not your
00:25:14 ►
understanding and so it does you absolutely no good whatsoever it is only efficacious and functional if it’s yours.
00:25:27 ►
And so the primacy of direct experience
00:25:37 ►
and one’s own history and mathematics,
00:25:42 ►
and, you know, if you really study mathematics,
00:25:45 ►
we mentioned this the other night,
00:25:46 ►
you even get your legs cut out from under you there
00:25:49 ►
because you discover this thing called the incommensurability theorem,
00:25:53 ►
which shows that even simple arithmetic can’t be trusted.
00:25:58 ►
So it turns out, you know, even our platonic faith
00:26:01 ►
in some kind of philosophical super space out there that we’re measuring
00:26:09 ►
everything against, that that’s naive. Really, the only really real thing is this incredibly
00:26:17 ►
evanescent, ever-moving, barely grasped, hardly understood thing
00:26:25 ►
called the present moment as I experience it.
00:26:29 ►
And you say, well, my God, can you build a metaphysics
00:26:32 ►
and an ontology and a heuristic method on that?
00:26:37 ►
What choice do you have?
00:26:39 ►
Nothing else is as real as that is you know you if you if you know the language of
00:26:48 ►
theoretical biology you know that a human being an organism is a chemical
00:26:55 ►
system with granted other properties perhaps not derivative from chemistry
00:27:01 ►
but a chemical system that is riding far from equilibrium.
00:27:08 ►
It’s in a kind of, there are different terms for it,
00:27:12 ►
it’s a dissipative structure,
00:27:14 ►
or it’s an autocatalytic hypercycle,
00:27:17 ►
or it’s undergoing autopoiesis.
00:27:21 ►
But the basic concept is that it is maintaining itself as a coherent entity
00:27:27 ►
in a universe flowing toward entropy it’s somehow making its way the opposite direction
00:27:36 ►
and you know your your consciousness is embedded in one of these dissipative structures,
00:27:46 ►
which will, and apparently, your consciousness will cease
00:27:51 ►
at a certain level of disequilibrium of this system.
00:27:57 ►
But then when you draw back further,
00:27:59 ►
you see your consciousness is simply the reshuffling
00:28:03 ►
of the genetic deck of your ancestors,
00:28:06 ►
and before you existed, people potentially or partially like you existed,
00:28:14 ►
and after you exist, people potentially like you exist.
00:28:18 ►
But this non-dissipative energy flow where consciousness and life and everything is going on
00:28:28 ►
and is known through feeling, not because you’re embedded in it,
00:28:35 ►
but because you are it, essentially.
00:28:38 ►
It’s not something that you’re embedded in like a particle.
00:28:41 ►
It is your your essence well then that’s all there
00:28:47 ►
all that is given with certainty then everything else is extrapolated outward
00:28:54 ►
from that through convention language poetic intuition religious revelation, projected discovery, myth, so forth and so on.
00:29:10 ►
But that’s all so far from this point of immediate experience.
00:29:17 ►
That’s why, to my mind, although I don’t think we’ve ever put it quite this way before, the psychedelics are so important
00:29:26 ►
because taking a psychedelic drug is not like reading a book
00:29:31 ►
or even like moving to Italy for six months.
00:29:35 ►
It directly and immediately addresses this thing which you are.
00:29:44 ►
It becomes part of it because what you are is metabolism
00:29:47 ►
You know the way this trick is done where this dissipated structure can come into being and then ride
00:29:57 ►
magically
00:29:59 ►
away from the entropy point is because as
00:30:04 ►
Biological systems we take in highly organized matter food
00:30:09 ►
and we extract all the energy and everything useful from it and excrete it out and so by
00:30:18 ►
this means we overcome the the general drift toward entropy.
00:30:26 ►
Metabolism allows life to happen.
00:30:29 ►
Metabolism is life in some sense.
00:30:32 ►
Well, the drugs are metabolized.
00:30:36 ►
This is a fairly intimate way of relating to a substance.
00:30:41 ►
Put it inside your body and let it dissolve into every cell of your being.
00:30:49 ►
So metabolism is like the primary domain of communication.
00:30:58 ►
It’s the communication mode of the felt presence of immediate experience.
00:31:03 ►
And the drugs work there like foods.
00:31:09 ►
They’re not really that different than foods.
00:31:13 ►
They, you know, like it says in the Jefferson Airplane song,
00:31:17 ►
it feeds your head.
00:31:19 ►
I guess she was actually quoting Lewis Carroll.
00:31:21 ►
But in any case, it feeds your head.
00:31:30 ►
actually quoting Lewis Carroll but in any case it feeds your head bad trips they’re certainly easier to do in a movie than good trips I didn’t see fear
00:31:37 ►
and loathing in Las Vegas but everyone said it proves again that it’s very easy to portray a bad trip and very hard to portray a good trip.
00:31:49 ►
Well, first of all, I’ll say all the conventional things about bad trips,
00:31:55 ►
that, you know, it’s not always supposed to be easy,
00:32:01 ►
that sometimes learning curves feel very unpleasant when they’re unfolding, and
00:32:08 ►
we learn from our mistakes, and so forth and so on. So then having said all that, really I mean, bad trips make bad sex look like no problem,
00:32:33 ►
which is an amazing thing to achieve.
00:32:42 ►
I don’t know. You know, I guess part of the fun
00:32:48 ►
or part of the challenge of being psychedelic people
00:32:51 ►
is that our method, which is drop and wait,
00:32:57 ►
you never know.
00:33:00 ►
You know, you may think you know,
00:33:03 ►
and you may do your rolfing and your go to gestalt and just be
00:33:11 ►
scrubbed and drained and shined with all your enzyme systems up and going and it can still
00:33:18 ►
just chew your ass unmercifully it’s one of those places where I who am not necessarily
00:33:27 ►
that you know eager for astrological explanations reach eagerly for
00:33:34 ►
astrological explanations because if everything else is right but and I’ve even noticed, you know, moon in Scorpio, for me,
00:33:49 ►
is not a good time to do psychedelics.
00:33:53 ►
I also, you know,
00:33:56 ►
before a large trip, I will throw the I Ching.
00:33:59 ►
And without spending too much time on the I Ching,
00:34:03 ►
I can’t remember which hexagram it is,
00:34:06 ►
but one of the 64 hexagrams says,
00:34:10 ►
inquire again of the oracle if you have constancy,
00:34:18 ►
something or else, something else, something else.
00:34:20 ►
And almost invariably, I mean, I have no idea how many times in my life
00:34:26 ►
contemplating psychedelic trips I’ve thrown that hexagram the hexagram which
00:34:31 ►
says ask again and so then I ask again and if it’s negative I I don’t do it I
00:34:38 ►
think you’re you know you have right brain tools and left brain tools. Somehow this question about bad trips is about your pre-trip intuition,
00:34:51 ►
feeling into the situation.
00:34:53 ►
And then, of course, there are obvious rules.
00:34:56 ►
I mean, there are guaranteed situations which give you bad trips.
00:35:00 ►
I mean, taking too much of a drug with people you don’t know,
00:35:06 ►
taking large amounts of a drug and mixing it
00:35:10 ►
with a lot of moving around in crowded social spaces.
00:35:21 ►
Synergies are simply combinations of drugs you know if somebody
00:35:28 ►
tells you they took ecstasy and then they snorted some ketamine and then they had a little nitrous
00:35:36 ►
oxide and some ghb this is god knows i mean literally only God knows because no clinical medical research
00:35:47 ►
is ever done on stuff like that,
00:35:50 ►
on the way people in the street
00:35:52 ►
actually take drugs
00:35:54 ►
is never studied by medical science.
00:35:58 ►
And synergies are where the strange things,
00:36:04 ►
the dangerous stuff happens,
00:36:06 ►
the heart fibrillations, the convulsions, the convulsive vomiting,
00:36:12 ►
the states of disorientation, prolonged states of sleeplessness,
00:36:17 ►
all of these things.
00:36:20 ►
So, you know, my attitude toward avoiding bad trips is, for social purposes,
00:36:29 ►
raves and beach parties and whatever, low doses, you know.
00:36:37 ►
It’s almost a truism, or it is a truism, that if you want to come down from a drug,
00:36:47 ►
whether a psychedelic drug or any other drug,
00:36:50 ►
the very best thing to do is furious exercise.
00:36:54 ►
The guy who throws himself in the icy lake and swims across it,
00:36:58 ►
the guy who chops two cords of wood to come off some bender.
00:37:03 ►
cords of wood to come off some bender.
00:37:07 ►
Well, then a dance club is almost like the perfect social situation
00:37:12 ►
designed to shorten a drug trip
00:37:15 ►
and dampen the effects.
00:37:17 ►
But people are such social creatures.
00:37:21 ►
You know, I’ve said many, many times
00:37:24 ►
over the years to the point where it’s almost
00:37:26 ►
the McKenna method, although how you could think something so simple-minded was a method,
00:37:33 ►
was like the way to take psilocybin, for example, is take a stiff hit, like five grams if you’re a
00:37:41 ►
145-pound person, on an empty stomach and lie
00:37:45 ►
still in silent darkness well this is almost the opposite of you know and the
00:37:52 ►
idea is you don’t want you want to concentrate on the thing itself which is
00:37:59 ►
the drug projected against the black screen of your mind. You don’t need doof coming in.
00:38:07 ►
You don’t need smart drugs.
00:38:09 ►
All of these things are actually distractions.
00:38:13 ►
And I think people are so reluctant to follow this advice
00:38:19 ►
because they actually have no faith in the drug.
00:38:24 ►
They think they will be bored.
00:38:26 ►
They think, well, if I did that, nothing would happen.
00:38:31 ►
Well, I’m telling you, you know,
00:38:33 ►
it’s for ordinary people, isn’t that what we said?
00:38:37 ►
This stuff is not for the swamis.
00:38:39 ►
They have their own methods.
00:38:40 ►
This is for the great unwashed masses of spiritually seeking humanity. So
00:38:49 ►
lay down in silent darkness and take a look. And then if the trip is really bad then there are things you can do while it’s happening that are helpful
00:39:08 ►
the most obvious one is uh or the most effective i don’t know if it’s the most obvious but i really
00:39:16 ►
believe it’s the most effective is if you get into a place that you don’t like uh and it’s not
00:39:24 ►
physiological it’s not that you’re having convulsions or vomiting it’s just that you don’t like, and it’s not physiological,
00:39:28 ►
it’s not that you’re having convulsions or vomiting,
00:39:31 ►
it’s just that you’re having thoughts which alarm you,
00:39:33 ►
you should sing.
00:39:40 ►
You can make whatever shamanic hash of this you wish, but the basic concept is to oxygenate your brain.
00:39:49 ►
wish but the basic concept is to oxygenate your brain there’s something about bad states of mind on psychedelics are very frequently in my observation accompanied by shallow breathing
00:39:56 ►
people get you know when you thread a needle everybody holds their breath nobody can thread a needle without holding their breath it’s
00:40:08 ►
like keeping your eyes open while you sneeze a person a human being cannot do this so when we
00:40:17 ►
are really following our thought at the level of threading a needle, we stop breathing. And if you’re not paying attention, this can
00:40:28 ►
go on for minutes, this very shallow breathing. You know, you’re not breathing, dude. So the
00:40:39 ►
thing to do is to sit up and, you know, your favorite shamanic chant,
00:40:47 ►
Fleetwood Mac recitation or whatever,
00:40:51 ►
just belt it out.
00:40:52 ►
It doesn’t really matter.
00:40:54 ►
I mean, it may matter.
00:40:55 ►
I mean, if you choose certain mantras or something,
00:41:01 ►
you know, haystacks will burst into flame.
00:41:04 ►
But, you know haystacks will burst into flame but you know
00:41:07 ►
and there’s no obligation
00:41:10 ►
to be a courant
00:41:12 ►
or hip either
00:41:13 ►
it doesn’t have to be apex twins
00:41:16 ►
it can be
00:41:17 ►
row row row your boat
00:41:19 ►
I’ve always preferred
00:41:22 ►
because it does contain
00:41:24 ►
the refrain
00:41:25 ►
merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
00:41:27 ►
life is but a dream
00:41:29 ►
if you’re loaded on psilocybin or ayahuasca
00:41:32 ►
the thought that life is but a dream
00:41:35 ►
opens ahead of you
00:41:37 ►
and becomes epiphanous
00:41:39 ►
instead of ridiculous
00:41:42 ►
and then, I don’t know this is what I do instead of ridiculous.
00:41:49 ►
And then, I don’t know, this is what I do.
00:41:52 ►
This is maybe not universally good advice,
00:41:55 ►
but when I take psychedelics like that,
00:41:57 ►
I have bombers rolled,
00:42:05 ►
and if things get weird, I torch them up,
00:42:07 ►
although sometimes then things get weirder.
00:42:09 ►
You have to be careful with that.
00:42:13 ►
I mean, the way I do it, and I’ve really got this down, sort of,
00:42:16 ►
is with psilocybin anyway.
00:42:21 ►
You know, people say it comes on in 10 minutes, it comes on in 20 minutes, and they’re ripping in 40 minutes.
00:42:25 ►
It doesn’t work like that for me. It consistently, and I always take it not in tea or anything,
00:42:32 ►
but just the mushroom. I eat it. At the hour and 10 minute mark, it begins to come on, I guess. I mean, there’s a feeling of nausea
00:42:47 ►
and maybe coldness,
00:42:49 ►
and there’s just like a certain window of opportunity
00:42:52 ►
where then if you smoke cannabis,
00:42:56 ►
it immediately begins the hallucinations
00:43:01 ►
very dramatically
00:43:02 ►
and moves you quickly through that clammy
00:43:06 ►
handshaking part of the trip which is
00:43:12 ►
sometimes alarming most of my experience with cannabis it’s improved the if a
00:43:20 ►
trip was weird it got better with cannabis. I have had many experiences where it was so strong
00:43:29 ►
that the thought of smoking a joint was just like,
00:43:32 ►
no, I don’t think so.
00:43:34 ►
I think we’ll just take this as given here.
00:43:38 ►
We don’t need to amp it up or push it sideways.
00:43:44 ►
But nobody does this a lot
00:43:48 ►
who doesn’t then occasionally put in a very difficult evening.
00:43:53 ►
And part of your psychic, I guess your shamanic constitution
00:43:58 ►
is how quickly can you come back
00:44:02 ►
from a really bone-shaking psychedelic experience,
00:44:07 ►
either because it blew your mind in some way or something appalling happened.
00:44:15 ►
I remember a number of psychedelic trips that were hard to come back from,
00:44:21 ►
but I remember one in particular years ago where my friend and I took a lot of acid,
00:44:28 ►
and late in the trip, like about 3.30 in the morning,
00:44:36 ►
he had a very dramatic epileptic seizure,
00:44:40 ►
and I had never seen an epileptic seizure.
00:44:43 ►
and I had never seen an epileptic seizure.
00:44:53 ►
And, oh God, it just set off this cascade of hysterical activity.
00:44:59 ►
The 911 people had to be called.
00:45:03 ►
I remember there was a real moment of truth in all this for me. I remember the apartment was on the second floor,
00:45:07 ►
and I saw the cop cars and everything pull up in front.
00:45:12 ►
We had flushed staggering amounts of dope,
00:45:17 ►
knowing that they were about to arrive.
00:45:19 ►
And I went tearing down to the front door,
00:45:22 ►
and I was completely loaded on acid.
00:45:24 ►
I mean, I could barely stand.
00:45:27 ►
And I could see through the glass, the cop,
00:45:30 ►
and he said, open the door.
00:45:33 ►
We had locked the door earlier in the evening.
00:45:35 ►
He said, open the door.
00:45:36 ►
So I fumbled with the door for a few seconds,
00:45:40 ►
completely hysterically and ineffectively,
00:45:44 ►
and then I couldn’t get the door open so I
00:45:46 ►
stepped back from the door and said shoot the lock off and then I realized
00:46:05 ►
dude
00:46:07 ►
get a grip
00:46:10 ►
you’re going to have to
00:46:14 ►
you know
00:46:15 ►
this is headed in the wrong direction
00:46:18 ►
and the cop was like
00:46:21 ►
ah
00:46:22 ►
so then And the cop was like… So then I remember this trip to the hospital
00:46:32 ►
and I don’t know what was going on.
00:46:38 ►
It was Herrick Hospital.
00:46:40 ►
It was in Berkeley, which was also a mental hospital.
00:46:43 ►
This bed, me standing at the end of the bed,
00:46:47 ►
trying to figure out, is he dead, is he alive,
00:46:50 ►
what does this mean, who am I, what’s going on?
00:46:53 ►
And then there was a person who was obviously an inmate
00:46:58 ►
of the stranger wards of this mental hospital
00:47:02 ►
who was washing the floor with this big mop and sort of waltzing around us
00:47:09 ►
with this crazy expression and leaning over and looking at me and looking at him and I just didn’t
00:47:15 ►
know whether is this really happening and if it is happening why is it happening And if it isn’t happening, why do I think this is what’s happening? And
00:47:28 ►
then I, like, finally, the doctors threw me out of there, and I just walked the streets
00:47:33 ►
of Berkeley for hours, and my mind was, like, spinning, just saying, something terrible
00:47:38 ►
has happened. Something terrible, terrible, terrible has happened. And it took days to realize, yes, he had an epileptic fit.
00:47:51 ►
Here’s what an epileptic seizure is.
00:47:53 ►
Here’s the drug. Here’s the prognosis.
00:47:56 ►
Here he is, seemingly all right.
00:47:59 ►
He came through it in much better shape, it seemed, than I did.
00:48:02 ►
I mean, I was deeply spun by all of this crazy shit.
00:48:07 ►
And that’s not an out-of-control drug story.
00:48:10 ►
I mean, truly, I’m a very conservative person,
00:48:12 ►
so for me that was an evening really getting beyond management.
00:48:18 ►
But some people, you know, start out like that.
00:48:22 ►
I had friends in the 60s in New York City who would say, you know, start out like that. I had friends in the 60s in New York City
00:48:26 ►
who would say, you know, in Manhattan,
00:48:29 ►
they would say, let’s take 500 mics
00:48:31 ►
and hit the streets and mess with people’s minds.
00:48:35 ►
Well, you quickly discover there are people out there
00:48:39 ►
capable of messing with your mind
00:48:41 ►
and more than your mind,
00:48:43 ►
but sitting up all night in Manhattan diners just
00:48:47 ►
taking on all comers for mind games is you know no way to spend an evening anyway so much for the
00:49:00 ►
question what do you do about bad trips if you have
00:49:06 ►
character you live through them
00:49:08 ►
and after a few months go back to it
00:49:10 ►
many people
00:49:12 ►
it’s a bad trip
00:49:14 ►
that finishes them
00:49:15 ►
for psychedelics
00:49:17 ►
I don’t think you’re ever really
00:49:19 ►
immune to it
00:49:21 ►
the funny thing about psychedelics
00:49:24 ►
I think especially psilocybin, I’ve noticed,
00:49:27 ►
is it’s incredibly gentle with beginners. It almost never bites a beginner, you know,
00:49:36 ►
these clueless people who go to it with knees knocking. Usually, you know, the doors of heaven open and they’re swept in. It’s the veterans.
00:49:45 ►
It’s the old battle-scarred explorers
00:49:50 ►
who, you know, come back from a certain given evening
00:49:54 ►
with their eyes bugging and a tale to tell.
00:49:59 ►
I primarily understand that there is no such thing
00:50:05 ►
as a bad trip.
00:50:07 ►
There is the wrong context
00:50:09 ►
which is what you were saying
00:50:11 ►
in the story.
00:50:13 ►
That if you follow your…
00:50:14 ►
He’s like you.
00:50:15 ►
He thinks I shaved
00:50:16 ►
and shut out the world.
00:50:20 ►
And so you meet the demons
00:50:22 ►
and you go through the doors of hell
00:50:24 ►
and the belly of the whale and all of those other things,
00:50:27 ►
it’s just your ego slamming around,
00:50:29 ►
and you’ll come out of that with information,
00:50:32 ►
and hopefully, if you really let yourself go down that far,
00:50:38 ►
the doors of heaven will open too,
00:50:40 ►
and then one begins to dance between those two spaces.
00:50:44 ►
Yeah, the only place
00:50:46 ►
where I really think the concept
00:50:47 ►
bad trip
00:50:49 ►
is legitimate and
00:50:51 ►
is true
00:50:53 ►
in my experience as well as
00:50:55 ►
my opinion is
00:50:57 ►
when you
00:50:59 ►
mess with the actual
00:51:01 ►
physical substances in some
00:51:03 ►
way.
00:51:08 ►
In other words, if you take pure psilocybin,
00:51:12 ►
pure LSD, well-made ayahuasca,
00:51:14 ►
there is no such thing as a bad trip.
00:51:16 ►
It will teach you.
00:51:18 ►
It may put you through hell.
00:51:21 ►
It may change your personality, but it’s useful.
00:51:30 ►
Where it gets chancy is if you are physiologically compromised in some way.
00:51:34 ►
For example, and this is kind of controversial,
00:51:36 ►
so it’s worth talking about,
00:51:41 ►
but in my opinion, it’s a very bad idea to combine psilocybin with an MAO inhibitor but people I respect as much as
00:51:53 ►
I respect anybody do this in their therapy and so here and so I’ve looked
00:52:01 ►
at this hard because the the worst drug experience I ever had
00:52:09 ►
revolved around this combination.
00:52:11 ►
And I think my mistake, I did it differently than these people who use it therapeutically.
00:52:17 ►
As I understand it, the way they’re doing it is they’re inhibiting their MAO
00:52:23 ►
with, say, Pegamin Harmala, and then they’re taking a little
00:52:27 ►
bit of psilocybin. I have no judgment on that because I’ve not done it. What I did once years
00:52:35 ►
ago, to my immense regret, was I took half a dose of mushrooms, two and a half grams of mushrooms and half a dose of ayahuasca 50
00:52:47 ►
milliliters of ayahuasca and i put in a long strange evening that felt dangerous to me
00:52:58 ►
i mean we only have my account but something went on in that trip that I’ve never seen in any other
00:53:10 ►
trip and I can describe it for you and I even can have an analysis of it but I’m
00:53:16 ►
not sure that the analysis is true what happened was the trip seemed normal for
00:53:22 ►
the first hour so and then I in the part of the trip where I should have been smoothly hallucinating,
00:53:31 ►
roving and scanning, taking in data and learning,
00:53:34 ►
I noticed a rising anxiety that I couldn’t control.
00:53:44 ►
And the anxiety was,
00:53:46 ►
it was a generalized anxiety.
00:53:49 ►
It was a feeling,
00:53:51 ►
a strong feeling that something was wrong.
00:53:55 ►
And so then I would like stop my,
00:53:59 ►
whatever my trip was,
00:54:00 ►
and deal with this feeling that something is wrong.
00:54:04 ►
And I would look around
00:54:06 ►
and reassure myself, nothing is wrong. You know, heartbeat, okay, you’re sitting in the
00:54:12 ►
chair, moonlight is flooding in, the cat is at your feet, nothing is wrong. So I would
00:54:19 ►
go back to tripping. Thirty seconds later, something is wrong. wrong I would come out of it after about four or five times of this
00:54:29 ►
and it was getting the loop was getting faster and shorter I could even on the trip I analyzed
00:54:37 ►
what was going on what was going on was no short-term memory was happening at all I I knew who I was I
00:54:51 ►
could tell you my parents story and so forth and so on what I had lost was the
00:54:57 ►
last 30 seconds of my life didn’t exist and this may not sound like a problem,
00:55:09 ►
but in fact it’s like having your big toes cut off or something.
00:55:12 ►
You can’t stand anymore. The absence of the last 30 seconds
00:55:15 ►
creates this bizarre sense of a vertiginous void behind you.
00:55:23 ►
And you keep looking around,
00:55:25 ►
and then it’s there.
00:55:27 ►
You say, oh, well, it is there.
00:55:30 ►
Now I feel like it’s not there.
00:55:33 ►
Oh, yes, it’s there.
00:55:35 ►
Well, this is crazy making,
00:55:38 ►
and it may not sound so agonizing,
00:55:42 ►
but I found it to be as close to madness
00:55:46 ►
as anything I’ve ever experienced.
00:55:48 ►
And I felt at times that they’ll just find me here,
00:55:52 ►
just gibbering.
00:55:54 ►
They’ll just, you know, throw a light net over me
00:55:57 ►
and take me by the elbow and lead me away,
00:55:59 ►
and that’ll be it.
00:56:02 ►
And then finally, and I had this very overlaying,
00:56:07 ►
this thing was this very strong image from Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001,
00:56:14 ►
where the guy is outside the spaceship in the little robot,
00:56:18 ►
and he fixes the thing, and then it’s time to go back in,
00:56:22 ►
and he speaks to the main robot controlling the thing, and then it’s time to go back in. And he speaks to the main robot controlling the spaceship.
00:56:26 ►
And he says, open the pod doors, Hal.
00:56:30 ►
And the robot says, I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that.
00:56:35 ►
He says, open the pod doors, Hal.
00:56:39 ►
I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that.
00:56:42 ►
And I could almost see in my mind’s eye,
00:56:47 ►
maybe because I think to some degree
00:56:49 ►
in a chemical fashion or something,
00:56:53 ►
but I could see that a piece of machinery was jammed,
00:56:57 ►
that we were in a loop,
00:56:59 ►
that it was screwed up at the molecular level.
00:57:05 ►
And I felt crazy.
00:57:09 ►
I felt violent.
00:57:12 ►
And my wife was sleeping upstairs.
00:57:17 ►
Finn was tiny.
00:57:18 ►
Clea hadn’t been born.
00:57:20 ►
And I felt absolutely irrationally violent
00:57:24 ►
toward everybody and everything
00:57:26 ►
because of this odd collapse of my sensorium.
00:57:33 ►
And so then I said to myself, I will not leave this chair till this releases me.
00:57:43 ►
I just will sit here.
00:57:45 ►
Now that might have been a bad decision.
00:57:48 ►
In other words, I could have gone out and chopped wood,
00:57:50 ►
but I don’t think that was the moment to pick up the double-bladed axe.
00:57:56 ►
And so I sat there and I deep breathed,
00:58:00 ►
and I did every trick I knew,
00:58:03 ►
and after about an hour and a half
00:58:05 ►
it just, I could see it
00:58:08 ►
rotate around, decouple, drift away
00:58:11 ►
and then it was like
00:58:13 ►
the trip begins again
00:58:16 ►
it feels like a normal trip
00:58:17 ►
we’re right back where we were an hour ago
00:58:19 ►
and everything is normal
00:58:22 ►
but that was, I broke my own rule and everything is normal and, you know.
00:58:27 ►
But that was, I broke my own rule.
00:58:33 ►
It was an experiment, yeah, it was an experimental combination.
00:58:35 ►
And it’s not necessary.
00:58:39 ►
I mean, don’t get the idea that you have to take every drug that comes down the pike so that when people mention 2-CBT2 and all this, you have a story to tell.
00:58:48 ►
Psilocybin, LSD, mescaline, and ayahuasca,
00:58:52 ►
a little DMT now and then, it’ll do you.
00:58:56 ►
That’s it.
00:58:57 ►
You know, you can spend a thousand lifetimes
00:59:00 ►
exploring those substances
00:59:02 ►
and to never have a dull moment what a little dabble
00:59:12 ►
to you indeed I it seems to me that nothing is good in combination with something that is an MAO inhibitor. It should be…
00:59:25 ►
It’s not just psilocybin.
00:59:29 ►
Give me another example.
00:59:31 ►
You mean like Pagamin Harmala and DMT?
00:59:36 ►
Well, I don’t know enough chemistry,
00:59:40 ►
but what I know about MAO inhibitors,
00:59:44 ►
combining it, I know about MAO inhibitors, combining it,
00:59:45 ►
I know somebody, someone here recently was on an MAO inhibitor.
00:59:51 ►
Oh, a prescription one.
00:59:53 ►
A prescription one and took ecstasy and went into cardiac arrest and died.
00:59:58 ►
Not from the cardiac arrest, but from passing out
01:00:03 ►
and what happened as a result of passing out, nobody knew, and
01:00:10 ►
so death occurred.
01:00:12 ►
Well, that’s an extreme example. It shows you, it exactly makes the point I made earlier,
01:00:19 ►
that these synergies are completely unstudied. And that’s a simple synergy.
01:00:25 ►
Ecstasy with a prescription MAO inhibitor.
01:00:30 ►
If this person had also, you know,
01:00:31 ►
added in a little ketamine and some GHB,
01:00:35 ►
and as people do, I mean,
01:00:36 ►
people have told me appalling recitations
01:00:41 ►
of the drugs they took the night before.
01:00:47 ►
You know, this MAO thing is sensitive enough
01:00:51 ►
that if you are on certain MAO inhibitors,
01:00:55 ►
you don’t need to take a drug to bring on a hypertensive crisis.
01:01:00 ►
You can just drink a glass of red wine,
01:01:03 ►
or eat camembert cheese, or abuse a Hershey bar, or eat a big bowl of lentil soup.
01:01:13 ►
Who would dream that a bowl of lentil soup could send you over the edge?
01:01:29 ►
over the edge so yeah it it pays to do your homework and then it pays to you know I think if you’re getting good mileage from a particular psychedelic
01:01:35 ►
you should just stick with it you can always switch to something else but you
01:01:42 ►
know and people say well I’ve learned all I need to learn from this. Well,
01:01:47 ►
triple the dose and it’ll be a different horse. Ride, you know. And I say that, you know,
01:01:59 ►
in the knowledge that the LD50 of these compounds is very high. In other words, they’re incredibly safe. Of all drugs, the plant psychedelics, the alkaloid psychedelics are the safest, and yet their effects are the most dramatic. In other words, the LD50 for psilocybin
01:02:25 ►
is milligrams per kilogram.
01:02:32 ►
Well, but the effective dose for a 135-pound person
01:02:38 ►
is 20 milligrams.
01:02:40 ►
Well, then that means that from a pharmacologist point of view if you told
01:02:46 ►
him you’d taken 100 milligrams he would form no sense of alarm he would say well
01:02:53 ►
you took a big dose it’s really gonna get you high but he wouldn’t worry about
01:02:57 ►
your heartbeat or anything like that to to kill yourself with psilocybin you
01:03:04 ►
would have to eat a massive amount
01:03:06 ►
when people say well but you think you’re going to die well that’s an
01:03:11 ►
entanglement of ego image with body image and you know when the the ego is
01:03:18 ►
very fragile I mean you just shoot 100 milliliters of ketamine
01:03:25 ►
and the ego is dissolving before your very eyes.
01:03:29 ►
And that’s not an intrusive dose of a drug.
01:03:36 ►
The ego is fragile.
01:03:38 ►
The body is not.
01:03:41 ►
The ego plays the ace.
01:03:44 ►
You’re dying. But you’re not dying. The ego is not. The ego plays the ace. You’re dying, but you’re not dying. The ego is dying.
01:03:50 ►
You know, if you’ve not trained medically, and I’m not, it’s extremely alarming to have somebody
01:03:58 ►
become unconscious in your presence and not be able to rouse them I’ve talked to the number of
01:04:05 ►
times to friends of mine who are professional ER emergency room doctors
01:04:10 ►
and they say no big deal happens all the time not and if somebody can claim
01:04:19 ►
they’re dying they certainly are not dying and if they’re dying, they certainly are not dying.
01:04:29 ►
And if they’re hysterical that they’re dying,
01:04:33 ►
they certainly can’t be anywhere near death because that’s not the presentation of the near-death situation.
01:04:39 ►
So, if there’s any doctors in the house
01:04:46 ►
who want to dispute
01:04:48 ►
well I don’t know
01:04:53 ►
any more on any of that
01:04:55 ►
we sort of
01:04:58 ►
there’s a lot of will in this community
01:05:02 ►
to talk about psychedelic drugs
01:05:04 ►
probably because there’s the terrifying knowledge of the things I will talk about
01:05:09 ►
if we don’t talk about psychedelic drugs.
01:05:15 ►
Avoid at any cost.
01:05:24 ►
I just talked to somebody at length on the phone yesterday
01:05:28 ►
who was describing a psychedelic experience,
01:05:32 ►
and they were a person of moderate experience,
01:05:35 ►
but this was definitely a trip that pushed them into domains
01:05:40 ►
they had never experienced before.
01:05:43 ►
And it was basically the middle of the night around
01:05:48 ►
a suburban swimming pool everybody had gone to bed and this person was there and discovered that
01:05:57 ►
there are these protoplasmic heat-seeking intelligent creatures roughly the size of pickup trucks that are moving around
01:06:09 ►
in backyards and climbing over fences and uh you know and i i’ve i think i know what they’re
01:06:18 ►
talking about i’ve acoustical creatures i’ve encountered encountered being stoned on a hillside on psilocybin
01:06:29 ►
out in a fairly remote area at night.
01:06:33 ►
And you become able to, like,
01:06:37 ►
project your consciousness very large.
01:06:41 ►
It’s a little hard to explain how it is, but…
01:06:44 ►
And then you discover that there
01:06:46 ►
are infrared forms of life or something, coherent protoplasmic things. And I always think of
01:06:57 ►
that incident, I think it’s in the second Carlos Castaneda novel, where the thing comes
01:07:03 ►
near him in the sagebrush
01:07:05 ►
and he’s so horrified that he throws himself on the ground and he doesn’t
01:07:10 ►
look but he can hear boulders being ground to powder by this thing as it
01:07:16 ►
rolls nearby him through the the sagebrush yeah Yeah, attention.
01:07:26 ►
There are, I don’t,
01:07:31 ►
the life forms in nature are not infinite,
01:07:35 ►
but they are myriad.
01:07:37 ►
And the relationship between the edge of knowledge
01:07:41 ►
and the wilderness,
01:07:44 ►
that’s where the real boundary is it’s not a physical
01:07:49 ►
boundary it’s a boundary in understanding and expectation you know when they first began digging
01:07:59 ►
like in the 14th century in europe they figured out how to dig mines deeper than they had ever dug
01:08:06 ►
before. Before that time, no mine in the world had gone deeper than a thousand feet. And suddenly,
01:08:15 ►
they were able to push these mines deep, deep into the ground in Bohemia, Switzerland, southern germany and they encountered for a couple of hundred years elf attacks and gnome
01:08:30 ►
sightings and attacks in these dark galleries of these deep mines and it’s and then the question
01:08:41 ►
is like or for the positivist mind the question question is, well, are there elves in deep mines in Europe?
01:08:48 ►
Well, apparently there were once.
01:08:52 ►
It’s a boundary of understanding and expectation.
01:08:58 ►
The relationship of the deep earth to the medieval imagination
01:09:03 ►
is somewhat like the relationship of the modern imagination to the medieval imagination is somewhat like the relationship of the modern
01:09:06 ►
imagination to the sky. The sky is a place where we see an encounter and where rumors
01:09:14 ►
abound of life forms and even in forms of intelligence. I’m very interested in all of this because my inclination has
01:09:31 ►
always been to be rational and fairly demanding of robust evidence. But on DMT, you know elves are everywhere and the commonality of the experience well then what it
01:09:49 ►
what is the idea of autonomous life
01:10:08 ►
forms in the psyche I mean this is what a kind of Jungian explanation Jung said
01:10:16 ►
of these things called kibiri which are alchemical sprites, basically. Kabiri just means children.
01:10:25 ►
But alchemical sprites that are seen in certain parts of the alchemical work.
01:10:31 ►
He said autonomous portions of the psyche escape the ego’s control.
01:10:39 ►
Well, then what are we?
01:10:43 ►
Are we in fact not what we think we are? In other words,
01:10:49 ►
our myth is one body, each body comes with an ego. If the ego is fragmented, you need psychotherapy.
01:10:58 ►
It makes sense that it’s one body, one ego, because then there’s no struggle about deciding
01:11:06 ►
one body, one ego, because then there’s no struggle about deciding who’s in charge. The ego is in charge of the body. But what the psychedelics seem to show is that at least
01:11:12 ►
under that kind of pressure, the mind is sort of like the atom. Previously imagined to be indivisible you get it smashed and suddenly all these exotic constituent parts
01:11:29 ►
are flinging themselves around in your awareness the equivalent of uh of uh protons and quarks and electrons,
01:11:50 ►
what does that mean about the self and the structure of identity?
01:11:53 ►
It may not mean very much
01:11:56 ►
until we get deeply evolved
01:11:59 ►
in our electronic prostheses.
01:12:04 ►
Then we may discover, you know,
01:12:07 ►
that the dissolution of the ego
01:12:09 ►
turns each one of us into a tribe
01:12:12 ►
or a society of some sort.
01:12:16 ►
I mean, I don’t pretend to understand this,
01:12:18 ►
so I understand that what I’m saying
01:12:20 ►
is not entirely clear.
01:12:23 ►
But, you know, when you bring a mirror,
01:12:26 ►
when you have a mirror,
01:12:28 ►
and you bring it down in front of you like this,
01:12:30 ►
like on concrete, and smash it,
01:12:33 ►
and it smashes,
01:12:35 ►
you don’t see a shattered image of yourself.
01:12:40 ►
You see thousands of perfect images of yourself.
01:12:44 ►
Each shard of the mirror You see thousands of perfect images of yourself.
01:12:50 ►
Each shard of the mirror instantly becomes a whole reflection.
01:12:57 ►
And I think that this metaphor of the smashed mirror recalls the alchemical metaphors of the mercurial nature of the mind.
01:13:04 ►
The mind is mercurial, the alchemists insisted.
01:13:09 ►
And what does that mean, mercurial? Well, if any of you had a childhood in these non-toxic days,
01:13:19 ►
this doesn’t happen, but I used to be one who broke open hearing aid batteries, and God knows what
01:13:26 ►
toxins I exposed myself to in the act of collecting mercury. But mercury is, of course, a perfect
01:13:34 ►
mirrored surface, a liquid metal. And how is it like mind? Well, it’s like mind in two
01:13:41 ►
ways. First of all, it fills, it takes the shape of its container.
01:13:47 ►
You know, put it in a coffee cup, it has the shape of a coffee cup.
01:13:50 ►
Put it in a thimble, it takes the shape.
01:13:52 ►
So like mind, which is known only by the shape of its container,
01:13:58 ►
Mercury does this.
01:13:59 ►
The other thing is, you know, when you smash it,
01:14:03 ►
it beads and speeds away in all directions
01:14:08 ►
but it can be recollected and the image restored and and so it has this curious quality of being
01:14:18 ►
both uh multiplistic and unitary and it it’s probably for all these qualities
01:14:26 ►
that the alchemists were so fixated on.
01:14:31 ►
But this question of the nature of these entities,
01:14:39 ►
because we can debate whether they are part of ourselves or autonomous, but what seems pretty in hand is that whatever the answer to that question, they’re not made of matter. matter unless you’re going to take the position that when you smoke DMT you
01:15:05 ►
actually go to another universe as real
01:15:09 ►
in every way as this one which is
01:15:12 ►
arguable but but they well so then what
01:15:20 ►
are they well they could they leaving
01:15:23 ►
aside from the moment whether they are self-generated or
01:15:27 ►
autonomous they seem to be made they are in fact if they’re made of anything they’re made of
01:15:33 ►
information well we are not made of information for ourselves I, I experience myself as a body, not as information. However,
01:15:47 ►
I experience all of you as information. I mean, even if I grab you by the shoulders and shake you,
01:15:55 ►
it’s information that identifies to me what is happening.
01:16:01 ►
what is happening.
01:16:09 ►
My hope is sometime before the end of my life or my career that the definitive conversation is able to take place
01:16:14 ►
on this question of the edge of knowledge
01:16:19 ►
or what’s going on at the edge of understanding.
01:16:25 ►
Because here we have the unthinkable,
01:16:28 ►
no reason to bother about it.
01:16:31 ►
It’s unthinkable by definition.
01:16:33 ►
And here we have the utterly mundane.
01:16:37 ►
We all know that place.
01:16:39 ►
But somewhere between the unthinkable and the mundane,
01:16:43 ►
there is a gradient or a frontier or a corner that is turned and that place is the human place I
01:16:52 ►
don’t think animals dwell in that place the place where you know expectation
01:17:02 ►
meets incoming data and reality is defined I mean it is the
01:17:07 ►
most human place it’s our edge not the edge of our body which is topologically
01:17:14 ►
confined in 3d but our mind seems to actually have a kind of edge it’s our
01:17:21 ►
memories extend outward from our birth the future is difficult to triangulate
01:17:30 ►
but the edge of mind
01:17:32 ►
always accompanies
01:17:37 ►
the phenomenon of being
01:17:40 ►
I think you know that poem by Trumbull Stickney one of those poets who died in
01:17:49 ►
the First World War one of the young men of the trenches that whole generation
01:17:54 ►
Satchevelle Sitwell and so forth and so on but Trumbull Stickney said I do not understand you. It is because I lean over your meaning’s edge
01:18:08 ►
and feel the dizziness of the things that you have not said.
01:18:15 ►
And in this psychedelic enterprise,
01:18:18 ►
it seems that this is where the action is.
01:18:22 ►
The vertiginous dimension of the thing not said.
01:18:26 ►
Not said because it can’t be said.
01:18:30 ►
We’re working hard here to say everything that can be said.
01:18:35 ►
And once it can be said, it becomes of considerably less interest.
01:18:40 ►
But this idea that something wants to be communicated,
01:18:47 ►
something wants to be told.
01:18:51 ►
It’s sort of, we mentioned the other night,
01:18:53 ►
the idea of the Word made flesh.
01:18:56 ►
Well, this is a parallel idea.
01:18:59 ►
This is the parallel idea of the message
01:19:02 ►
that wants to be delivered.
01:19:08 ►
You know, for Christians it’s the gospel for finnegan’s wake it’s that letter from boston that the little chicken is scratching at
01:19:16 ►
down at the midden here a little there a little go a little do a little see a little the mysterious missive from Boston the message that wants to be delivered
01:19:27 ►
and I’ve I always have the feeling in the psychedelic experience that you you
01:19:38 ►
you come closer to this domain of the of the of the undelivered message
01:19:48 ►
domain of the undelivered message. This person who was describing this trip to me the other night said long parts of the experience were hallucinations of tables of numbers. Well
01:19:58 ►
that’s a strange one. Just numbers and numbers and numbers. It’s like the thing trying to communicate
01:20:06 ►
is not at all sure about who it’s communicating with.
01:20:10 ►
It doesn’t know quite how it is perceived,
01:20:16 ►
how it is understood,
01:20:18 ►
how it is folded into meaning.
01:20:24 ►
Well, that’s probably not very clear, but
01:20:26 ►
anyway, it’s not very clear.
01:20:29 ►
If it were clear, it would be something else.
01:20:35 ►
Anybody have anything else on any of this,
01:20:38 ►
or anything else for that matter?
01:20:42 ►
It’s very interesting to me how um i’m just sort of getting a grip on this
01:20:51 ►
maybe because we’re approaching the end of a century and the end of a thousand years or maybe
01:20:57 ►
because of the reading i’ve been doing but i’m beginning to understand how, no matter how hard you try,
01:21:06 ►
no matter how intellectually vigilant you are,
01:21:10 ►
it’s very hard not to be a creature of your own time.
01:21:15 ►
That the metaphors that we use, the expectations that we form,
01:21:22 ►
are inevitably drawn from the atmosphere that we breathe.
01:21:28 ►
I’ve been reading Eric Davis’s soon-to-be-published book
01:21:32 ►
about technosis, called Technosis,
01:21:36 ►
and he talks in there about how since the mid-19th century
01:21:43 ►
the whole notion of electromagnetic radiation
01:21:46 ►
has been articulated
01:21:48 ►
and how very few people can write the equations
01:21:53 ►
the Maxwell field equations
01:21:56 ►
that define electromagnetic radiation
01:21:59 ►
and yet all of our thinking is permeated by popular downloads of this understanding.
01:22:09 ►
How we think of falling in love, how we think of spirituality,
01:22:18 ►
how we think of God itself is very strongly colored by the technical environment in which we’ve
01:22:28 ►
evolved if we had to describe to someone in the 1860s of the last century how a
01:22:36 ►
century in the future every single centimeter of space around this planet would have music pouring through it
01:22:45 ►
hourly newscasts stock quotes airline control traffic and this is a completely
01:22:54 ►
occult universe you’re describing there was nothing it’s amazing that the nut
01:23:01 ►
that the idea of magic could even get going in a world
01:23:06 ►
without the concept of electromagnetic fields, radiation, action at a distance.
01:23:12 ►
The whole vocabulary of electricity supports the idea that the world is unified through magic,
01:23:22 ►
some kind of permeating medium where somebody can turn a dial over here
01:23:28 ►
and something can happen halfway around the planet.
01:23:35 ►
And I imagine in a shamanic society
01:23:39 ►
without the metaphor of electricity
01:23:42 ►
how these drug states,
01:23:44 ►
how difficult it would be to build linguistic models of them.
01:23:51 ►
Because we always think in terms of fields, vibrations, permeating changes,
01:23:59 ►
discharge, potential, positive, negative, flow.
01:24:07 ►
Think of the models of the human body that are taught at Esalen,
01:24:13 ►
how meaningless all those vocabularies would be
01:24:16 ►
without these concepts directly drawn from a mechanical universe. The whole idea of flow, blockage, potential,
01:24:29 ►
positive energy, negative energy, balancing.
01:24:32 ►
I mean, these are essentially the terms
01:24:34 ►
of electrical engineering of the 19th century.
01:24:38 ►
Does that mean that these models of the body
01:24:42 ►
aren’t real or correct?
01:24:45 ►
No, not at all.
01:24:46 ►
It means that the general understanding of the world
01:24:50 ►
that is our legacy as a civilization
01:24:54 ►
permeates everything,
01:24:57 ►
permeates everything,
01:24:59 ►
whether we’re conscious of it or not.
01:25:01 ►
I mean, even something as far removed
01:25:04 ►
from the engineering domain
01:25:05 ►
as falling in love is, you know, you speak of the spark and being struck and drawn together all metaphors from the technical domain.
01:25:28 ►
Yeah, did you want to say something?
01:25:30 ►
I’m at the end of my glass of water.
01:25:33 ►
I may be at the end of my rope.
01:25:36 ►
Anything else this evening,
01:25:37 ►
or shall we knock it off here?
01:25:40 ►
On my list.
01:25:41 ►
Well, on my list,
01:25:42 ►
I was going to actually talk more about aliens but
01:25:46 ►
oh yes only because i knew it was a crowd pleaser
01:25:53 ►
okay well what i just said is actually the lead-in into talking about aliens,
01:26:06 ►
because aliens throw into high relief this question about where is the edge of knowledge,
01:26:16 ►
where is the edge of the self,
01:26:19 ►
how do we image the world without contaminating our models with our technical
01:26:25 ►
assumptions
01:26:27 ►
maybe some of you
01:26:30 ►
saw the New York Times on Sunday
01:26:32 ►
there was a review of yet another
01:26:34 ►
book about aliens
01:26:36 ►
and it talked
01:26:38 ►
about
01:26:39 ►
sightings that occurred
01:26:42 ►
in the 19th century
01:26:44 ►
before the invention of fixed-wing aircraft in Kansas.
01:26:50 ►
In the latter years of the 19th century,
01:26:54 ►
there were several instances where
01:26:56 ►
apparently perfectly ordinary human beings
01:27:00 ►
landed aircraft on dusty roads,
01:27:04 ►
spoke briefly with farmers who were haying their
01:27:08 ►
crops, and then flew off. Well, so then now what does this mean in the light of the fact that
01:27:16 ►
by 15 years later aircraft had been invented and these things were happening. Is it that the future arrives? incrementally almost as a particulate gas and
01:27:29 ►
first in fantasy and dream and then thank you and then
01:27:38 ►
You know more concretely later the the alien phenomenon
01:27:50 ►
Concretely later, the alien phenomenon in its modern form begins essentially in 1947 when an airline pilot flying near Mount Rainier reported these disks,
01:28:00 ►
this formation of flying silver disks, the standard image.
01:28:06 ►
And then it was just a few months later that the Roswell incident occurred,
01:28:14 ►
which the government, it’s interesting if you actually go through the primary documents of the Roswell incident,
01:28:20 ►
the government immediately announced that it had captured a flying saucer. But then,
01:28:28 ►
within 24 hours, corrected itself and said, no, it was the detritus of a high-altitude weather
01:28:37 ►
balloon experiment. To me, the fact that the government immediately announced that it had captured a flying saucer
01:28:45 ►
doesn’t indicate government collusion.
01:28:48 ►
It indicates government cluelessness.
01:28:52 ►
They were as stampeded as everyone else
01:28:55 ►
by the so-called Rainier lights.
01:28:58 ►
There was a climate of possibility
01:29:02 ►
in the mass psyche at that moment for very good reasons i mean
01:29:11 ►
the human soul had just been exposed as an abyss and by that i mean the news of the holocaust and
01:29:18 ►
the death camps and the smoke was hardly cooled from all of that. The atom bomb had been used against human populations.
01:29:29 ►
The hydrogen bomb was right behind it.
01:29:33 ►
It was actually a moment in Earth’s history
01:29:38 ►
where if there were cosmic observers,
01:29:42 ►
if there were cosmic policemen who come to naughty planets and correct unsavory
01:29:49 ►
social practices, we were probably, if there is any hit list, we would have been on it
01:29:55 ►
at that moment. Enough bad shit had gone down that there was every reason to expect that possibility. As time passed, it became clear
01:30:07 ►
that apparently no cosmic cop was on the way,
01:30:12 ►
no ticket was going to be written,
01:30:15 ►
and the UFO thing developed all kinds of strange adumbrations.
01:30:25 ►
I mean, one thing I think you have to
01:30:27 ►
assume is that
01:30:28 ►
anything which happens on a
01:30:31 ►
psychedelic drug
01:30:32 ►
at any dose level
01:30:35 ►
must
01:30:37 ►
occasionally happen
01:30:39 ►
without a psychedelic drug.
01:30:42 ►
Maybe one
01:30:43 ►
in a million. In other words, if you give somebody DMT, if one in a million in other words if you give
01:30:45 ►
somebody DMT if you
01:30:47 ►
give a million if
01:30:48 ►
you give a thousand
01:30:49 ►
people DMT at the
01:30:52 ►
dose I tell you
01:30:53 ►
990 of them will
01:30:56 ►
see elves well to
01:30:59 ►
see elves without
01:31:00 ►
DMT you may be one
01:31:02 ►
in 10 million people
01:31:03 ►
have fleeting brushes with this but
01:31:08 ►
nevertheless one in ten million is what is it five thousand people on this earth
01:31:16 ►
who have that experience that’s a sufficient number of people for there to
01:31:20 ►
be a myth a whisper buzz, as they say,
01:31:25 ►
that these things are happening.
01:31:28 ►
It seems to me ordinary experience is in a way less reliable
01:31:35 ►
than psychedelic experience
01:31:37 ►
because the anomalous ordinary experience is almost never predicted.
01:31:44 ►
It just happens, you know.
01:31:45 ►
It always begins,
01:31:47 ►
I was just driving to my sister-in-law’s when,
01:31:51 ►
you know, and then this thing breaks through.
01:31:58 ►
The drug as a tool to elicit the phenomenon
01:32:04 ►
gives you what you never had before,
01:32:06 ►
which is some kind of control
01:32:09 ►
over the appearance of the phenomenon.
01:32:13 ►
One of the things that’s always puzzled me
01:32:15 ►
about psychedelics is that people
01:32:17 ►
who don’t understand what psychedelics are about
01:32:20 ►
always ask the question,
01:32:22 ►
can you do it on the natch?
01:32:27 ►
Is yoga the same thing? Is meditation the same thing? Can this be achieved with diet, exercise? Well, the answer is A,
01:32:33 ►
no, and B, why would you want to? The whole point is that this is what the drug does.
01:32:48 ►
does. You would not wish this experience to come upon you untriggered by pharmacological means or you would have to wonder just exactly what your story
01:32:53 ►
was. That’s like wanting to walk on water or move 120 miles an hour without
01:32:59 ►
benefit of machinery. It’s just not in the cards.
01:33:09 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:33:12 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:33:16 ►
I don’t know about you, but I’m still laughing at that story Terrence told
01:33:21 ►
that I’m now thinking of as his shoot the lock off story.
01:33:25 ►
Maybe the symposia team should use that clip as an introduction of some kind to their storytelling
01:33:32 ►
sessions so people get an idea of what a great drug story can be all about. And I suspect that
01:33:38 ►
you also noticed something that I can’t remember Terrence ever having said before. And that is that perhaps when psychedelics dissolve the ego,
01:33:48 ►
that each and every one of us then turns into a whole tribe.
01:33:53 ►
I’m going to try to think about that for a while when I’m really stoned,
01:33:56 ►
because I’m not sure what it means,
01:33:58 ►
but it certainly sounds like something interesting to think about, doesn’t it?
01:34:02 ►
Now, just a quick word about my new Patreon site.
01:34:06 ►
To be honest, I didn’t know about Patreon until our friends at Symposia began to talk about it.
01:34:11 ►
So I checked it out and discovered that it might be a good way for me to go about releasing a new
01:34:16 ►
book that I’m working on. Basically, it’s a collection of brief stories about things that
01:34:21 ►
I’ve done or have happened to me, and so far I’ve written over 150 of them. And each week I’ll be posting at least two of these stories on my Patreon site,
01:34:30 ►
where my readers can not only read them, but can also let me know whether they think they should
01:34:35 ►
be included in the published book. And I’m also planning on posting some of the hundreds of brief
01:34:40 ►
ideas that I have for new stories, and will be asking my patrons which ones I should be writing next. There’s a lot more to this, but I’ll spare you the details because
01:34:50 ►
you can read all about it on my site, which you’ll find at www.patreon.com
01:34:58 ►
slash Lorenzo Haggerty, all one word, all lowercase, and Haggerty with one g.
01:35:03 ►
all one word, all lowercase, and Hagerty with one G.
01:35:05 ►
Oh, and I almost forgot.
01:35:10 ►
You see, my plan is to publish this book directly into the public domain,
01:35:13 ►
which means that you’ll be able to download it for free and even print and sell copies if you want.
01:35:16 ►
And this will all be thanks to my Patreon patrons,
01:35:20 ►
whose names are going to appear in the published book
01:35:22 ►
as the people who are responsible for giving away the copies.
01:35:26 ►
And if this is a little confusing, then just go to my Patreon page,
01:35:31 ►
and I think you’ll find all of the details there that you need
01:35:34 ►
to better understand this new phase of my writing career.
01:35:38 ►
But for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:35:42 ►
Be well, my friends. you