546 - Insanity

Program Notes

https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty

Date this lecture was recorded: August 27, 1992

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna

“What I’m always afraid of is that I’ll be ostracized, except that it will be entirely deserved… . Disgraced! … Did you hear how this guy ended up?”

“Even as it is, I’m practically a ‘Repent! The end is nigh!’ person… . [The Timewave] is basically ‘the end is nigh’ rap of some sort.”

“From the point of view of the 19th Century, we don’t have to worry about madness. We are mad, every last one of us.”

Transcripts of Terence McKenna talks

Transcript

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Greetings from cyberdelic space.

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

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

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And I would like to begin today by thanking Sebastian M. for his donation to the salon and to Interlane LLC for a major donation to the salon.

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I thank you one and all from the bottom of my heart

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because, well, I couldn’t be doing this without your help

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and so all of the other salonners owe you a big thank you too.

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And I have one other announcement today,

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and that is to point you to a website that has quite a few transcripts of talks by Terrence McKenna.

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And if you are a sound artist who uses clips from some of Terrence’s talks,

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well, these transcripts are a great way to search his talks in text

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without having to first listen to an entire program to find the bit that you need.

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The site may be found at www.transcendentalobject.com

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And it is well worth the time to browse through it, I think.

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In addition to talks that I’ve played here in the salon,

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they have also transcribed many of his YouTube talks as well.

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It’s a really great resource, so check it out.

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And so, as you have now guessed,

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today I’m going to play part of another one of Terrence’s Esalen workshops.

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Although this is most likely one of a series of talks that he gave in August of 1992,

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it’s the only one from that time period that I have, and the topic is insanity.

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Now, I’ll warn you ahead of time that while this isn’t the most uplifting McKenna talk that I’ve heard,

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there are most definitely some little bits of wisdom that, well, it made it worth listening for me,

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and I hope that the same is true

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for you as well. Now, I also know that there are a lot of Bukowski fans here in the salon,

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and, of course, I’m one myself. So I’m sure that all of us Bukowski fans have, well, at one time

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or another, repeated one of his more famous quotes, and I quote, Some people never go crazy.

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What truly horrible lives they must lead.

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End quote.

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And that quote is what I had in mind

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when I first listened to this interesting workshop.

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Let’s join them now.

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Okay, well, let’s get started.

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These things, we usually sort of feel our way into them.

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These topics were self-generated by David’s,

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what the community might be interested in talking about.

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And he and I sort of cooked it up together. And the guiding notion this evening…

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Oh, here’s Paul.

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Hey, haven’t seen you around.

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Did you just get back?

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I got the answer the last night.

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Last night?

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Yeah, like a lot of other people. the answer the last night. Last night? Yeah, like a lot

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of other people.

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It was a wild night.

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Thank you.

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That’s going to be

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really good.

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Oh, great, Paul.

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Lock the front door

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so people won’t

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be coming in and out.

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Okay.

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This door,

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don’t walk through it

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if you think you want to go through there

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instead go around to the other one

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that was very helpful

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David did you want to introduce

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the theme

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good

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do it

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I actually made a few notes introduce the theme? Yeah. Good. Do it.

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I actually made a few notes.

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I suggested the idea of talking about insanity.

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It has a lot of

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personal meaning to me

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aside from the value

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I thought it would have

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for the group.

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I thought one thing to… I was. And I thought, one thing too,

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I was thinking about why do I want to talk about this to begin with.

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And for me there’s a way that I have this continual desire

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to somehow create an environment

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that somehow really is safer for myself.

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Somehow, some way that I can feel that

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the way that I express myself will somehow

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not result in me being ostracized or in some way otherwise sort of bottled up and packaged

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and sent off somewhere.

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I have this fear of what I’ll call insanity.

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of what I’ll call insanity.

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And I feel that this is something that really affects everyone

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in most of their daily life.

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I think it does mine

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at some subtle levels

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that we don’t acknowledge enough.

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So I’d like to talk about sort of what it is to begin with.

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What is it? What is insanity?

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What is this fear that I have about crossing a line

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at which point I would be really ultimately somehow ostracized in some way?

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And how that stops me from growing in general. really ultimately somehow ostracized in some way.

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And how that stops me from growing in general.

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So I had this desire somehow to kind of expand my own awareness,

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other people’s awareness enough so that it would allow more

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for myself and that I would feel in some way more free to explore areas that are frightening to me otherwise to explore. And I wanted to mention a personal example for me. About two

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A personal example for me, about two years ago, for those fortunate or unfortunate enough to find me, I could be seen in the garden at Esalen talking about God in a rapturous way.

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One of my fears of… Arnie Mandel was here about

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a year ago or so

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and he asked, in one of our processes,

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he asked us to go around the room, sort of,

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and actually to pair up and tell

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our partner,

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if we were to go crazy, what form would it take?

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And my idea was of being a religious fanatic in some way.

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I have this thing, among other things,

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that there are areas that I’ve sort of experienced for myself,

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and for me it’s been through drugs, mild drugs

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I might add, where I’ve seen things that I’ve shut off and have felt in some way I haven’t

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been able to integrate into my ordinary life. And I had this fear that

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for me to explore that area further

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might result in me

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not only walking through the garden

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talking about God,

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but I might be discovered.

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I was lucky.

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Not too many people saw me that day.

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people saw me that day. And I think that this, there’s something in general taboo about behavior, this is obvious, about behavior that just isn’t norm enough, but

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what I’m struck by is how

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low the threshold is, for myself

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as well, to tolerate behavior

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that isn’t ordinary

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enough. I mean, I’m

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very quick to say so-and-so is weird

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or so-and-so is

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off.

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And

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you know, this is part and parcel for myself, this judgment that I have of other

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people with the problems I’m sure that I have with allowing myself to be not ordinary.

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So I think there’s a lot of issues to talk about when we talk about insanity.

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From what I’ve said there’s a lot of ways to go.

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I could say more about what I’ve said.

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I’m really interested in other people’s experiences where they felt that they’re,

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where there are, those of you that are afraid of going crazy in any way,

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what that means to you,

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I find, you know, as I’m talking about it now,

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I feel vulnerable even, you know, talking about this experience I’d be open to going more into

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detail about

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by way of introduction

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that’s sort of where I’m at

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with the issue

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I’m trying to find ways to

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allow more for myself

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and not be afraid

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that if I explore too much that it’ll be too much,

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that I’ll be ostracized.

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I think the whole word taboo is relevant,

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and I’d like to talk more about that,

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for that to come up for people,

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what their idea of taboo is,

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and how maybe that relates to insanity.

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It’s like there’s also this distinction between

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if I’m on to something that’s real, that’s far out, that’s weird,

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that’s somehow…

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The difference between creative genius and being a fool or being crazy or being pathological,

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that’s a haunting thing.

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It’s like, in either case, if I were on to something that was real that maybe could be useful to

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other people, I still might be vulnerable to being called crazy and maybe I have a fear

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of being destroyed by that or something. And then I have the fear that I’m wacko, that I’m not on to anything that has any relevance to anybody else,

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and that it’s totally my own trip,

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and I would be more the kind of person that I look at and I say,

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oh, that guy’s just a little, that guy’s got a loose screw,

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or that guy’s off the wall.

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But in either case, I’m looking to find a way to have permission

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to be either of those things,

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either the fool or, you know,

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or onto something that’s maybe useful for other people.

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And how, in either case, to, you know,

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to reckon with my fear about being ostracized.

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Yeah, well, I I mean I sort of think

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along these lines although a little

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differently

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three times you used the word

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ostracized

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what I’m always afraid of

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is that I’ll be ostracized

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except that

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it’ll be entirely deserved.

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In other words, that going off the deep end into some kind of appropriate behavior,

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the word that I would use over and over again is disgrace,

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that it would disgrace everything and it’s gotten weird for me

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because there used to be nothing to disgrace

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because there was no reputation

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now I’m always aware that if I go bananas

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then people will say

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you know what happened to that guy?

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You think this is good? You read these books?

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Did you hear how this guy ended up?

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So then it’s all ruined.

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It’s like they’re saying about Woody Allen,

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his entire work must now be reassessed.

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And you think, oh God, what if that were me?

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Your entire work needs to be reassessed and you think oh god what if that were me your entire work needs to be reassessed

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and it’s interesting to think about

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madness

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what we’re calling madness

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I mean I’ve also

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the religious thing is the one that

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overcomes me

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or overcame me

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that’s how I imagine I would go.

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And even as it is, I’m practically a repent,

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the end is nigh person.

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I mean, it’s all couched and we have the computer

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and the mathematics and the dazzling rhetoric,

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but it’s basically a the end is nigh rap of some sort.

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And yet I’m very intolerant intellectually.

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I mean, there are perfectly harmless functioning people

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that I in my own mind consider crazy simply because of what they believe. I mean,

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you know, one way of thinking about crazy is it’s just you have looser rules of evidence

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than the rest of us. So, and in a society falling to pieces like ours, where nobody has a very firm grip on what’s going on,

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you know, if you’re nuts but you’re not sure you’re nuts,

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you just have to get ten people to believe you and suddenly you’re a method, a school, a point of view.

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You’re not nuts anymore. You’re invited to teach your insanity and show others the way.

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invited to teach your insanity and show others the way but I think there’s an unmistakable threshold that when I think people who are insane in the way that

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you’re concerned about and that I’m concerned about know it it’s not something and I think dick was the great exemplar in

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this area I mean he was nuts and he knew it and he managed it and worked with it

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and got juice out of it and sometimes overwhelmed by it because it’s a feeling

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don’t you think that it’s a it, don’t you think? That it transcends intellectualizing.

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One can believe all kinds of odd things,

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but there’s a certain existential intensity that overcomes you

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and then you are crazy or insane

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because it’s almost like with psychedelics or practices that are

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very powerful you do begin to rise

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through some kind of spiritual domain

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but if you’re unbalanced slightly to one

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side or the other you’ll start to skew

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and it’ll get worse and worse

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and it will feed back negatively

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into your life.

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And, you know,

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insanity is a kind of like

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a divine madness

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of some sort.

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I mean, it’s not clear

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what it is exactly.

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I mean, I think people really do

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touch extraordinary states.

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I’m not a psychotherapist,

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so I haven’t seen like hundreds of people

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who were diagnosed as mad.

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But these people who go off the deep end

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with religious ideas and so forth,

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it seems to me there’s more going on

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than a disintegrating psychology

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because it’s always accompanied by events in the real world which reinforce the crazy assumption

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it’s like from the point of view of the person who is undergoing this there’s ample evidence always at hand that they’re not crazy that this is really happening

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i remember when i was at my most

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unreclaimable you know one of the things i would do it was in the amazon and very fortunately

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because modern mental health care delivery systems couldn’t reach me.

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And so I survived it.

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But otherwise I doubt that I would have

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because when they drug you and interrupt these cycles of whatever this is,

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then it’s very hard to ever get straight again.

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But the form that my madness would take I mean on one level

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was I would go alone into the jungle

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and I could call butterflies to me

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which was a strange thing

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because I had earlier made my living

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as a butterfly collector

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and so I would just

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like Saint Francis I would go out and hold up my hands and so I would just like Saint Francis

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I would go out and hold up my hands

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and the butterflies would come

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and descend

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and walk on my hands

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and I would

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oh yes, no

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this happened

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I mean nobody was there but me

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and you know we can even create

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an explanation that I was able to generate an odor or something

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that brought him in

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but so then I would have like an epiphany

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it would prove to me my divine nature

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and my divine mission

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and so forth and so on

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and so then I would sink to my knees

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the butterflies surrounding me

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and weep with ecstasy that I had been granted this sign.

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And, you know, then weep a little more.

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But then the mind would begin to wander and then I would think about how, but nobody else is getting the benefit of this miracle.

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getting the benefit of this miracle and so then I would dry my tears

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and go look for somebody to show this to

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and then I would take these people who were

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by now fairly concerned about my state of mind anyway

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and I would insist that they walk with me

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into the jungle and then I would hold out my arms

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to the skies expecting butterflies to descend and

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envelop me and of course nothing would happen and then people would just turn away you know aghast

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at such a display of hubris ego fucked up delusory just that you’d lost it you know you would become

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unbearable egomaniacal.

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And then you say, but no, listen, it’s really true.

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And then it’s even more pathetic.

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And so there are, you know, cycles of distancing that go on.

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I don’t know.

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I think in the course of a life lived to its fullest most people have these

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passed through these places

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on some level or another

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is that generally agreed upon

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is this totally wild

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territory to everybody here

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or no

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no it’s pretty

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but I’m raising the issue of leaving

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not exactly passing through

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but for myself leaving something unresolved

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that still needs to be integrated. And I imagine you have this with places that you’ve been

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to, Terence, where in some way it’s not resolved and to go. and my fear is to explore too much

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is, you know, a ticket to,

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you know, a crazy farm of some kind.

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Well, leaving consensus.

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I mean, I think it’s true that, you know, with psychedelics, the practice works too well almost in that it will, if you insist on, I don’t want to use the word abusing it, but if you insist on using psychedelics frequently at high doses, back to back, you will unlock your way into a set of assumptions and perceptions and feelings that not very many know have you gone into a spiritual domain or have

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you just fallen off the track and it’s hard to tell and maybe it can happen

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both ways it’s so hard to convey the mind of the schizophrenic. I mean, people who we call crazy

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do not seem to themselves to be crazy.

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They look at the world from a different perspective

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and through a different logic,

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but they’re trying to make sense of it.

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It’s just that the data that they’re trying to handle

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is extremely alien from what the rest of us use.

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I mean, I can remember when I was in these states that I would, it’s so hard to explain, but I would like see waves of historical association out of my past.

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I mean, it’s like I would be in a small town in Colombia,

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but something would,

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it would be as though there was another time,

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a time from my past overlaid over everything.

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And so a waitress serving me in a restaurant,

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a hotel keeper would also be another person in another time, in another place with a set

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of associations to me. And I had a friend actually who became schizophrenic

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and did get electroshock in the whole nine yards.

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And he said, you know, what you have to do,

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what you must do is learn to shut up.

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You know, do not run around.

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And there’s a compulsion to confess as well. this is not easy, because there’s something about these perceptions that have to be communicated, and yet when you communicate them, people are appalled.

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They do not know how to handle it. when my brother did what he called turning inside out and he didn’t know whether he was Agnes or Angus

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and there was some intimation

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of some psychosexual transformation

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it wasn’t clear whether it was like a transsexual operation

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or the metamorphosis of an insect

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or something else

00:24:44 ►

and he’s saying this

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I mean

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I don’t know

00:24:50 ►

I suppose we can multiply these examples endlessly

00:24:56 ►

in thinking about this talk

00:24:59 ►

for me personally what it comes down to is

00:25:05 ►

somehow, and I don’t know the how,

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but the issue is clear, I think.

00:25:11 ►

It’s an issue of courage

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and a failure of nerve.

00:25:17 ►

You have to…

00:25:19 ►

You have to be willing to put yourself on the line.

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And it’s all tied into what we always talk about in these circles,

00:25:29 ►

which is the ego,

00:25:31 ►

and how the ego’s final defense against its own dissolution

00:25:36 ►

is telling you that you’re either going mad or dying.

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And in the psychedelics, you know,

00:25:43 ►

you can usually defeat the dying rap because you just

00:25:49 ►

have to have the faith that you’re not dying on 15 milligrams of psilocybin it’s highly unlikely

00:25:58 ►

not impossible but you can argue that it’s unlikely but when it tells you you’re going mad

00:26:05 ►

you have nothing to stand on

00:26:07 ►

because you can’t tell, who knows

00:26:10 ►

what is the effective dose of psilocybin for triggering madness

00:26:14 ►

the question doesn’t even exist

00:26:16 ►

back in the world you left behind

00:26:19 ►

and the only way I

00:26:23 ►

Shakespeare says screw your courage to the sticking point

00:26:27 ►

the only way I’ve found to deal with this

00:26:30 ►

is the rough

00:26:32 ►

personally speaking

00:26:34 ►

the absolutely rough straight ahead way

00:26:37 ►

which is after putting it off

00:26:39 ►

and putting it off

00:26:41 ►

and putting it off

00:26:42 ►

I finally just say

00:26:43 ►

oh fuck it

00:26:44 ►

you know do it you know, do it, you know.

00:26:46 ►

If that’s what you want to do, if you want to destroy me, do it.

00:26:51 ►

But it requires, you know, it’s a kind of recklessness.

00:26:54 ►

I can’t find a calm place in which to meet it.

00:26:59 ►

I can only meet it if I force myself to assume

00:27:03 ►

that it’s going to leave me high and dry. I remember

00:27:10 ►

a psychotherapist who I don’t want to name, but who used psychedelics very extensively

00:27:20 ►

for years and years and turned on hundreds of people and with

00:27:25 ►

combinations and all kinds of stuff toward the end of his life he he it grew

00:27:30 ►

harder and harder and harder for him to take it and when I asked him why he said

00:27:38 ►

I always have bad trips and And we talked about it,

00:27:48 ►

whether that it was, you know,

00:27:54 ►

that just a lifetime of tripping other people had done this, or whether maybe as you pass a certain age,

00:27:58 ►

it doesn’t do the same thing,

00:28:01 ►

it becomes darker and darker,

00:28:03 ►

or whether it was something in

00:28:05 ►

his personality I really resist the idea that you couldn’t ever get to the place

00:28:14 ►

where you say as some people love to say psychedelics I took them don’t need them anymore learned what it has to offer but one reason I

00:28:28 ►

mean I one excuse that I use in my own inner rhetoric is that you know sitting

00:28:37 ►

here in this moment I can really strongly imagine what it’s like to be stoned on any one of these things. It doesn’t

00:28:47 ►

feel remote to me anymore. And I don’t know whether that’s a delusion and an excuse for

00:28:53 ►

not doing it or whether my thresholds are getting lower. I don’t know. I was in London

00:29:02 ►

a few weeks ago at a party and I was the guest of honor and they brought out last year’s Welch mushrooms and made a big tea for everybody and the hostess said, you but we’ll each just get a little bit.

00:29:27 ►

Well, so I was first out of the chute.

00:29:35 ►

And, you know, I was, I don’t know whether it all pooled on the top in one place or what was going on, but, you know, I just sat down on the ground

00:29:40 ►

and this guy who said, some person of great reputation who said he’d wanted

00:29:46 ►

to meet me for years and years was sitting

00:29:48 ►

in front of me trying to get to

00:29:50 ►

know me and finally

00:29:52 ►

he just said

00:29:53 ►

you’re flaming aren’t

00:29:56 ►

you and I said yes I can’t

00:29:58 ►

carry on this conversation

00:30:00 ►

I just have to hold on to the grass

00:30:02 ►

well I don’t know

00:30:04 ►

what all this means.

00:30:08 ►

I don’t want to become afraid of it, and I blame myself.

00:30:13 ►

I don’t think the thing has a negative edge

00:30:17 ►

unless you’ve somehow come out of jiggle with it.

00:30:22 ►

And I don’t know whether that means, you know,

00:30:24 ►

what does it mean if it becomes

00:30:27 ►

harder and harder to take these things? Does it mean you’re getting out of balance? Does it mean

00:30:32 ►

you’re just getting older? Where should the blame be put? And then what can you do about it? The

00:30:40 ►

only thing I found to do about it is stop running and turn and face it.

00:30:50 ►

But each time I do that, it seems to require the very limit of my courage.

00:30:54 ►

And I don’t know how long one’s courage lasts.

00:30:57 ►

Maybe it’s not a bad thing. I mean, after all, people who climb mountains like Mount Everest,

00:31:01 ►

they don’t do it till their dying day.

00:31:04 ►

like Mount Everest, they don’t do it till their dying day.

00:31:07 ►

At some point, they, you know, knock off and become a consultant for a sportswear manufacturer or something.

00:31:15 ►

Well, what does anybody else think about any of this?

00:31:19 ►

I’m getting agitated.

00:31:21 ►

I’m getting really agitated because, you know,

00:31:23 ►

I don’t know even what you’re

00:31:25 ►

talking about except that you’re you’re talking about having your mushrooms and you’re having

00:31:29 ►

these experiences and i’ve never taken drugs in my life ever and i’ve had just normal or just

00:31:35 ►

abnormal you know kind of breaks and i’m having these things and i’m not eating anything it just

00:31:43 ►

comes on it’s very scary for me

00:31:45 ►

and from the time

00:31:47 ►

David I really feel for what you were saying

00:31:49 ►

because I’m scared to death

00:31:50 ►

because since I was like 15

00:31:53 ►

in high school and then they sent me to the hospital

00:31:56 ►

and the psychiatrist got hold of me

00:31:57 ►

35 years ago

00:31:59 ►

and did a number on me

00:32:01 ►

and you know

00:32:03 ►

quickly I learned that when the experience comes

00:32:07 ►

and that I get scared, I go back to that doctor.

00:32:10 ►

And I did that until I came to Esalen seven years ago.

00:32:13 ►

And when I came here, I came to meet Dick and work with him

00:32:18 ►

and ask him to work with me.

00:32:21 ►

And he took me under his wing for six weeks

00:32:24 ►

and worked with me every other day.

00:32:26 ►

And what I had then, David, was I had permission to go through it,

00:32:31 ►

and he was going to be there with me.

00:32:33 ►

And then Dick died.

00:32:35 ►

We hiked Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

00:32:37 ►

On Monday he said to me,

00:32:38 ►

are you ready to go up here by yourself because, you know,

00:32:42 ►

preaching, you have to go alone.

00:32:43 ►

And I said, I don’t want to go alone, I just want to be with you.

00:32:46 ►

And then on Wednesday he died,

00:32:47 ►

and I’m haunted by that, because

00:32:49 ►

I keep coming back to Esalen,

00:32:52 ►

and they say, well, Dick’s dead now,

00:32:54 ►

and this is not the place

00:32:55 ►

for you to go through that.

00:32:57 ►

And I said, well, where in the fuck is the place to go,

00:32:59 ►

because there’s so many people here that

00:33:01 ►

want to go through to this other side.

00:33:04 ►

I don’t want to do it living in my van on the streets in San Diego.

00:33:07 ►

I mean, it’s not about me telling people my experience.

00:33:12 ►

Sometimes the actions look pretty bizarre to the people out on the streets,

00:33:16 ►

and I get to the point where then they’re alarmed.

00:33:20 ►

Pulling back.

00:33:21 ►

Right, and I’m not walking around telling them that,

00:33:24 ►

so it’s like, okay, if I’m living away from Essel,

00:33:28 ►

well, even at Essel now,

00:33:29 ►

because last year I was having a break,

00:33:31 ►

and I went to jail in the lodge,

00:33:33 ►

and I was really scared, and I was reaching out,

00:33:35 ►

and she said, well, why don’t you go to a movie in town

00:33:37 ►

for a few hours and then see?

00:33:39 ►

And that was the wrong thing to say,

00:33:41 ►

so I terrified and somehow ended up in San Diego

00:33:44 ►

in the hospital,

00:33:45 ►

got on some new kind of medication, and that’s been the pattern too.

00:33:50 ►

But when Dick was here and I felt like there was a support to go through it, that felt okay.

00:33:57 ►

And then now when it comes up, I do get scared, and I don’t go through it like you just suggested.

00:34:03 ►

I go back and you

00:34:06 ►

know take a drug and I haven’t been on drugs for 10 months now and I’m back

00:34:10 ►

here I’m terrified that that when it when it comes up I’m gonna have to run

00:34:16 ►

away I don’t feel a support anymore here and and and and what’s paused me is that

00:34:23 ►

dick wanted to have that you You know, that was his

00:34:26 ►

dream. I know he’s dead and it’s not

00:34:28 ►

his place anymore. But, you know,

00:34:30 ►

his dream was to have a sanctuary

00:34:31 ►

right down there in that canyon.

00:34:34 ►

He talked to me for six weeks about

00:34:35 ►

putting me in on the deal

00:34:38 ►

and, you know, I’d be the first one

00:34:40 ►

he turns loose in there like they did with him.

00:34:42 ►

And that you wander around and have

00:34:44 ►

all kinds of experiences

00:34:45 ►

and then if you come out fine

00:34:47 ►

and if you don’t come out they can ship you off

00:34:49 ►

up the highway somewhere

00:34:51 ►

but in fact

00:34:54 ►

most people came out fine

00:34:56 ►

I think

00:34:56 ►

all these drugs

00:34:58 ►

these anti-psychotic drugs

00:35:01 ►

are basically warehousing

00:35:03 ►

strategies for the convenience of doctors

00:35:06 ►

because the only way that works with people who have this problem

00:35:10 ►

is so labor-intensive and so demanding.

00:35:15 ►

I mean, what you need basically is six people to watch you,

00:35:20 ►

some to hold your hand and reassure you,

00:35:23 ►

some to physically grab you and sit on you

00:35:25 ►

when you head for the hills.

00:35:29 ►

Very few people get through it

00:35:32 ►

without being messed with.

00:35:33 ►

Like I say, I think I was lucky

00:35:35 ►

and my brother was lucky

00:35:36 ►

because some force, some intuition

00:35:40 ►

led us to get so far out

00:35:42 ►

that they couldn’t find us.

00:35:46 ►

They literally couldn’t come and get us. R.D. Lange, as well as Dick, had this idea that people have to

00:35:54 ►

go through it.

00:35:55 ►

But not everybody can go to the, I can’t right now go to the jungle.

00:36:01 ►

Well, you’ve got to have some kind of a support group

00:36:06 ►

and if you don’t have a support group

00:36:08 ►

then you have to stay away

00:36:09 ►

from people who will mess with it

00:36:11 ►

and you know it’s hermit

00:36:13 ►

time if nothing else

00:36:15 ►

yeah

00:36:16 ►

there are several places now open

00:36:19 ►

one is called Pocket Ranch in

00:36:21 ►

Geyserville

00:36:22 ►

it’s $475 a day and I’ve been crazy since I’m 15,

00:36:26 ►

so I can’t even get insurance that would even pay for that,

00:36:29 ►

so it’s kind of for people that are rich.

00:36:31 ►

No scholarship?

00:36:32 ►

No, they don’t have anything.

00:36:35 ►

Steve gave me some brochures when I found out about that.

00:36:40 ►

Medicare doesn’t pay for that.

00:36:41 ►

I’m on disability for psychiatric problems from Social Security, and they don’t pay for that. I’m on disability for psychiatric problems from Social Security,

00:36:48 ►

and they don’t pay for shit, which is good in a way,

00:36:52 ►

because I don’t get too many drugs that way.

00:36:54 ►

I don’t cover it.

00:36:55 ►

Well, you know, it’s hard to tease apart whether you’ve got…

00:37:00 ►

I mean, I think it’s amazing to me that at Esalen that we’re discussing insanity

00:37:05 ►

it’s even I think a kind of an old

00:37:08 ►

fashioned word

00:37:09 ►

I mean you’d think this would be

00:37:12 ►

the thing they would have worked

00:37:14 ►

through here isn’t that what

00:37:15 ►

I mean it was Steve who said to me

00:37:18 ►

once

00:37:18 ►

you’ll understand this place a lot better

00:37:22 ►

if you think of it as a kind of hospital

00:37:24 ►

and I’ve you know looked at it like that ever since You’ll understand this place a lot better if you think of it as a kind of hospital.

00:37:29 ►

And I’ve looked at it like that ever since.

00:37:32 ►

We have all these therapists.

00:37:37 ►

The greats have come and gone of three schools now,

00:37:39 ►

and we don’t understand it.

00:37:43 ►

So what can we expect from the rest of society?

00:37:48 ►

I mean, when I was schizophrenic, if this is what we’re talking about, my feeling about it was, and maybe this is, if not true, a delusion worth

00:37:56 ►

playing with, is I thought, aha, what we call mental illness, what we call mental illness what we call schizophrenia and what we look into the

00:38:06 ►

body or the mind or the personal history or the dream state to try and understand

00:38:13 ►

and possibly cure it’s not like that at all it isn’t your if you’re the person

00:38:21 ►

who’s nuts it isn’t your problem.

00:38:25 ►

It’s something that’s happened to you.

00:38:28 ►

Not more fundamentally than catching the flu.

00:38:34 ►

It’s like you just happened to step in some cosmic doo-doo

00:38:38 ►

and now it’s on the bottom of your shoe

00:38:41 ►

and everybody’s pointing at you and backing up.

00:38:44 ►

But it isn’t your fault

00:38:46 ►

it just happened to be

00:38:48 ►

in your path

00:38:50 ►

it’s a kind of

00:38:51 ►

it’s a horrible piece of

00:38:54 ►

luck

00:38:56 ►

unless you can turn it

00:38:58 ►

to your own

00:39:00 ►

to your own advantage

00:39:02 ►

and what that means I think

00:39:04 ►

is obviously integrating it well then how do you

00:39:09 ►

integrate these things I think it’s has to do again a lot with where you start from just speaking from my own personal experience, what saved me was my cynicism

00:39:27 ►

that I didn’t believe in anything,

00:39:31 ►

never had,

00:39:33 ►

had always thought believing in things was a bad idea.

00:39:36 ►

So then when this whole cosmos of beliefs

00:39:41 ►

was handed to me on a platter,

00:39:44 ►

I just simply said,

00:39:47 ►

maybe, you know, I’ll act it out.

00:39:51 ►

But I won’t believe it.

00:39:54 ►

And I think that had I been

00:39:56 ►

a good Mormon, a good Catholic,

00:39:59 ►

a good Buddhist, a good something else,

00:40:01 ►

then I would have been lost

00:40:03 ►

because I would have traded whatever it was I believed

00:40:06 ►

for the new set of beliefs.

00:40:09 ►

As it was, I just said, you know,

00:40:11 ►

what’s this? Beliefs.

00:40:13 ►

I don’t do that.

00:40:15 ►

But I played with it

00:40:17 ►

and somehow the playing with it

00:40:20 ►

was able to depotentiate it.

00:40:24 ►

I had a conversation with someone very recently

00:40:28 ►

who by ordinary standards I think

00:40:31 ►

would have to be considered nutty as a fruitcake.

00:40:34 ►

And they could hardly speak of their condition

00:40:38 ►

without being swept by an emotion

00:40:41 ►

that was so intense that it reduced them to tears.

00:40:44 ►

And I said, you know.

00:40:45 ►

And I said, you know, if you’re going to be this nuts, you should enjoy it more.

00:40:53 ►

You know, it’s too, and they said, you know, I am enjoying it.

00:40:57 ►

And I said, well, I’m not enjoying it because you’re just projecting such an emotional intensity

00:41:02 ►

that it makes me very nervous.

00:41:07 ►

just projecting such an emotional intensity that it makes me very nervous and I think I’m generally I speak then for the same general masses about that what makes it hard for the person who’s

00:41:16 ►

going through this is that it’s so hard for other people I mean it’s freaky to be around somebody who’s crazy. I don’t, you know, because I’m such a purveyor of psychedelics,

00:41:29 ►

people are forever leaning on me to trip with them.

00:41:33 ►

And I dare say, you know, there are people in this room

00:41:35 ►

who’ve known me for years,

00:41:38 ►

and no one here can say they’ve ever been seriously loaded with me

00:41:42 ►

because I just don’t do it.

00:41:44 ►

I can’t take it.

00:41:46 ►

I can’t handle the feeling of risk that permeates that.

00:41:55 ►

That’s why it amazes me.

00:41:57 ►

I’m fascinated by people who have such faith in their knowledge

00:42:03 ►

that apparent difficult situations don’t freak them out.

00:42:10 ►

As an example, some of you know Frank Barr.

00:42:13 ►

He’s an emergency room doctor.

00:42:16 ►

And I’m amazed that he can deal with people

00:42:18 ►

who are dead out unconscious

00:42:20 ►

and just say,

00:42:23 ►

she’ll come to in 40 minutes or so don’t worry about

00:42:27 ►

that when I would be frantic I mean if I can’t get a reaction out of somebody I

00:42:33 ►

just go berserk and the notion I don’t know whether that’s a kind of callousness

00:42:42 ►

therapists are like that.

00:42:45 ►

I mean, they say, you know,

00:42:47 ►

you come upon somebody flopping around on the floor,

00:42:51 ►

screaming, pleading, weeping.

00:42:53 ►

My inclination is to make them feel better, for God’s sake.

00:42:57 ►

And a therapist would just say,

00:42:59 ►

well, they’re working through their stuff.

00:43:01 ►

It’s all right, you know.

00:43:03 ►

How do you get that level of

00:43:06 ►

self-confidence where you can see somebody in agony and say that’s all

00:43:12 ►

right it’s the best thing for them check on them in an hour and to see where

00:43:17 ►

they’re at it’s awfully so I stay away from it and in my own situation

00:43:25 ►

I keep people away from me

00:43:27 ►

I’ve had many trips where

00:43:29 ►

I’ve thought in the middle of it

00:43:30 ►

thank God there’s no one here to see this

00:43:34 ►

because if there were someone here to see it

00:43:36 ►

I’m sure they would become alarmed

00:43:38 ►

and decide that some crisis was in progress

00:43:42 ►

and you know ultimately

00:43:44 ►

you have to

00:43:45 ►

sort of get a kind of perspective

00:43:48 ►

where you just say,

00:43:50 ►

if I die, I die.

00:43:54 ►

But it usually has to slam you to the wall

00:43:57 ►

pretty severely to make you turn.

00:43:59 ►

The image I have is that I run from it

00:44:02 ►

until I become so furious at this humiliating

00:44:06 ►

situation that I turn and face it and then you know if you curse it it will

00:44:15 ►

step back sometimes and it’s worked every time the other thing is you know the wonderful instinct for equilibrium that the human mind has

00:44:32 ►

that you can get pretty twisted around and if you’ll wait 24 hours, 72 hours, 10 days, 6 months. It will restore to equilibrium. I’m puzzled by the

00:44:51 ►

cases of permanent raving madness and I wonder how common they are. It’s all messed up in this

00:44:59 ►

society. I mean, I can show you psychiatric residents who have never seen an unmedicated schizophrenic in their entire life, you know, because they just do not encounter people in that state.

00:45:14 ►

What they deal with are people who come in and have been given drugs and kept on drugs and drugs, drugs, drugs.

00:45:21 ►

That’s the whole dynamic.

00:45:24 ►

drugs, drugs. That’s the whole dynamic.

00:45:30 ►

Can I ask something about the last person here that the community really got behind suiting for through a state of… I’m wondering how much to say because she’s not here, but

00:45:37 ►

perhaps the reason we don’t know more about this is, as you say, how many psychiatric residents have ever seen somebody

00:45:45 ►

who’s not on a caretaking drug.

00:45:48 ►

And the amount of energy

00:45:50 ►

it took for the community

00:45:52 ►

to mobilize to take care of this

00:45:54 ►

person was pretty overwhelming.

00:45:55 ►

It takes a team of six to twelve people.

00:45:58 ►

Day in and day out.

00:46:00 ►

And this went on for ten days or so.

00:46:02 ►

Thirty days.

00:46:03 ►

Thirty days.

00:46:05 ►

And was there a resolution that was satisfying?

00:46:09 ►

There was a resolution of sorts, but the thing that I was most impressed with is in a psychiatric

00:46:16 ►

ward among people who didn’t know the person, you would have assumed that all these associations

00:46:21 ►

were meaningless stuff,

00:46:27 ►

and that this person had been in,

00:46:29 ►

and the review of the material,

00:46:32 ►

it all made sense in a particular way.

00:46:36 ►

And that would be completely missed.

00:46:38 ►

There was definitely a way that a lot of stuff was being worked through,

00:46:41 ►

maybe not to satisfaction,

00:46:43 ►

but on some level,

00:46:44 ►

that you couldn’t possibly know unless you knew this person very, very well. with being worked through, maybe not to satisfaction, but on some level,

00:46:46 ►

that you couldn’t possibly know unless you knew this person very, very well.

00:46:49 ►

Yeah, that’s exactly what I saw with my brother.

00:46:52 ►

I mean, when my brother went bananas,

00:46:55 ►

I sat, and, you know,

00:46:58 ►

it was a complicated case

00:47:00 ►

because there was something wrong with me

00:47:02 ►

in the sense that I didn’t sleep for 11 days.

00:47:05 ►

But he raved day and night.

00:47:10 ►

And what in every single thing was,

00:47:13 ►

or to my mind, at least 90% of it

00:47:16 ►

was incredibly interesting and revelatory.

00:47:19 ►

He imitated every relative.

00:47:23 ►

He imitated music teachers not dealt with since age six.

00:47:29 ►

He revealed vast scenarios of stuff going on in the town

00:47:35 ►

where we had grown up together.

00:47:36 ►

Well, if he had been straitjacketed in a ward somewhere,

00:47:41 ►

they would have just thought that this was garbage

00:47:44 ►

and what it actually was

00:47:45 ►

was, you know, brilliant,

00:47:47 ►

insightful,

00:47:48 ►

almost literarily deep stuff.

00:47:54 ►

The other thing is

00:47:55 ►

I’ve always thought, you know,

00:47:57 ►

that a mental ward,

00:48:00 ►

I don’t understand the thinking

00:48:02 ►

of the psychiatric community.

00:48:04 ►

A mental ward is my idea

00:48:07 ►

of an environment designed

00:48:08 ►

to drive you crazy

00:48:10 ►

I mean

00:48:11 ►

because crazy people drive me crazy

00:48:15 ►

just one

00:48:16 ►

who is very slightly crazy

00:48:18 ►

is unbearable

00:48:19 ►

and to be put into a ward

00:48:21 ►

with people wandering around

00:48:24 ►

and I really think it’s a pheromonal,

00:48:27 ►

that I don’t want to go as far as some people have gone

00:48:29 ►

and say that schizophrenia is entirely a pheromonal disorder.

00:48:33 ►

But do you know what I’m talking about here?

00:48:36 ►

Well, some people say that we have left over

00:48:42 ►

from earlier stages of evolution

00:48:45 ►

all kinds of physiological systems that produce odors

00:48:51 ►

that we are not consciously aware of,

00:48:56 ►

but that set the ambiance for social interaction

00:49:00 ►

because we are, after all, social animals.

00:49:02 ►

We’re as social as honeybees or something.

00:49:05 ►

And all social animals regulate behavior through pheromones.

00:49:10 ►

And it’s known, for instance,

00:49:12 ►

that when a person walks into a crowded room,

00:49:17 ►

instinctively the first thing they do is they take a deep breath.

00:49:22 ►

And it’s thought that this is a whole bunch of chemical messengers

00:49:25 ►

are coming in saying, you know, people have been drinking,

00:49:29 ►

one couple isn’t getting along, somebody’s on the make.

00:49:33 ►

So all this stuff is going on,

00:49:35 ►

and you get this gestalt in one single moment.

00:49:38 ►

Well, then, because of a phenomenon that’s fairly common

00:49:44 ►

called allophrinia

00:49:45 ►

which is where your friend gets committed

00:49:49 ►

to a mental hospital for schizophrenic behavior

00:49:52 ►

and you buy a book and take it to them

00:49:56 ►

and visit them

00:49:57 ►

and while visiting you behave so oddly

00:50:01 ►

that you’re not allowed to leave

00:50:03 ►

allophrinia.

00:50:06 ►

Schizophrenic behavior by non-schizophrenic persons

00:50:09 ►

in the presence of schizophrenia.

00:50:12 ►

It’s thought that perhaps what schizophrenia is

00:50:16 ►

is an odor malfunction

00:50:20 ►

where the person who is becoming schizophrenic

00:50:23 ►

is literally beginning to smell funny.

00:50:27 ►

And this causes the people around them

00:50:29 ►

to begin to send the wrong signal,

00:50:32 ►

which begins to activate anxiety

00:50:34 ►

in the schizophrenic person,

00:50:37 ►

which accentuates the production of the pheromone.

00:50:41 ►

So then people start saying,

00:50:42 ►

you know, that guy’s really weird.

00:50:44 ►

He’s so weird.

00:50:46 ►

Well, then the person picks up on this

00:50:48 ►

and what’s happening,

00:50:50 ►

your word, ostracized.

00:50:52 ►

They’re being pushed to the periphery

00:50:55 ►

of the social thing

00:50:56 ►

and they feel it’s unfair

00:50:58 ►

because they and the people doing it

00:51:00 ►

don’t know why they’re doing it.

00:51:02 ►

And what’s happening is

00:51:03 ►

it’s a horrible misunderstanding

00:51:04 ►

and it ends in making somebody completely dysfunctional

00:51:08 ►

because they don’t know they’ve lost their place in the net.

00:51:12 ►

They literally don’t know who they are.

00:51:15 ►

You’re pointing out like a fragile

00:51:17 ►

and kind of a desperate nature of consensual reality

00:51:20 ►

where there’s a desperate grip on this consensual reality

00:51:24 ►

and when that starts

00:51:25 ►

to slip, when people feel that that’s slipping, there’s some grabbing that goes on and that’s

00:51:35 ►

the response that you’re talking about.

00:51:37 ►

Yeah, that it’s somehow we’re all anxious about this. I mean consciousness after all is probably

00:51:45 ►

less than a hundred

00:51:48 ►

thousand years old

00:51:49 ►

and we’re losing

00:51:52 ►

it all the time I mean like when you

00:51:54 ►

deal with these

00:51:56 ►

real nightmare trips like

00:51:58 ►

the Jeffrey Dahmer

00:51:59 ►

thing the reason that’s

00:52:02 ►

so horrifying I think is because

00:52:04 ►

it’s a loss of any value that you can

00:52:09 ►

relate to it’s like the real darkness rises up and you say you know it’s all so fragile

00:52:16 ►

you know if we stopped loving each other or even just talking about how we should love each other, then cannibalism, murder, sacrifice, death,

00:52:29 ►

I mean, inevitably, these really horrifying mass murder things

00:52:33 ►

are very primitive in some sense.

00:52:37 ►

I mean, dismemberment and so forth.

00:52:40 ►

It’s fetishism.

00:52:41 ►

It’s activation of primitive forms of behavior.

00:52:45 ►

So I think the anxiety we feel around these issues

00:52:49 ►

is because mental clarity, sanity, belonging,

00:52:56 ►

these things are fragile.

00:52:58 ►

And we’ve each earned it, and it wasn’t easy.

00:53:02 ►

And so we’re anxious about our purchase on it you know I always felt that

00:53:11 ►

in the 60s it was so clear to me when LSD was around and that I would debate it with my parents

00:53:19 ►

and and people were talking about whether they would take it or not, that the people who were alarmed by it

00:53:26 ►

were alarmed by it because they self-diagnosed themselves as insane.

00:53:32 ►

They knew.

00:53:33 ►

They said, you know, we don’t want it.

00:53:36 ►

Are you kidding?

00:53:37 ►

A drug that opens the doorways to the inner world of the mind?

00:53:42 ►

No, thank you.

00:53:44 ►

You know, that’s the last thing we’re interested in.

00:53:47 ►

And they were right.

00:53:50 ►

You know, they had no business fiddling with that.

00:53:53 ►

Well, we’re the children of those people,

00:53:56 ►

and in some cases, you know, maybe those people ourselves.

00:53:59 ►

So it’s very dicey.

00:54:04 ►

I really admire people.

00:54:06 ►

I don’t understand these people

00:54:07 ►

who just take these enormous doses of psychedelics

00:54:11 ►

and it just beats the shit out of them

00:54:14 ►

and one week later they’re back ready for more.

00:54:18 ►

They don’t…

00:54:19 ►

I mean, it’s like they’re made of different stuff than I am.

00:54:23 ►

Don’t they understand, you know, that it’s like they’re made of different stuff than I am don’t they understand you know that it’s so

00:54:27 ►

it’s I don’t I mean I admire them I just don’t have that kind of stamina I take it too seriously

00:54:35 ►

Alan did you want to say something I was confused about what you were saying who are you referring to that does this?

00:54:46 ►

who takes huge doses and it slams them around?

00:54:50 ►

well I know people who just describe outlandish trips

00:54:53 ►

and then they say they’ll be doing 8 grams again

00:54:57 ►

and looking forward to it

00:55:00 ►

I know one person who says

00:55:02 ►

each time I take it, I try to stand more.

00:55:07 ►

And I have the feeling, you know, that it’s very coddling of me,

00:55:11 ►

and that I sort of march around inside a hall of mirrors,

00:55:18 ►

because I can say to it, stop coddling me.

00:55:24 ►

And after 30 seconds of what happens when I say that,

00:55:28 ►

I’m saying, coddle me, coddle me, enough already.

00:55:32 ►

Because it begins to go fugue-like and lift these veils.

00:55:37 ►

And you say, oh, you know, it’s, I don’t know,

00:55:42 ►

maybe I read too much H.P. Lovecraft as a kid

00:55:46 ►

and it contaminated my categories.

00:55:52 ►

Yeah, it’s something that David said that is sort of away from psychedelics

00:55:58 ►

but on this vein of discovering something that maybe I keep myself from. Not just your normal discoveries,

00:56:11 ►

you know, but those real choice little cherries. And somewhere I have this, it almost seems like it’s a tape, that says, well, if you know that, and if you claim it,

00:56:31 ►

then how will you fit in the rest of the world?

00:56:37 ►

And it’s like a stop measure.

00:56:40 ►

I don’t know how to explain it, but when you were talking,

00:56:42 ►

I was really getting that.

00:56:46 ►

And I was hoping I could share it.

00:56:50 ►

You know, I haven’t ever really talked about this with anybody,

00:56:53 ►

so it does feel vulnerable. But aside from that, it seems like there’s something that is remembered

00:57:01 ►

when I have a revelation, or when I really understand something,

00:57:07 ►

like I cognize with something.

00:57:09 ►

It almost feels like it’s a memory that’s come back.

00:57:15 ►

And again, I’m speaking of the real choice mysteries,

00:57:21 ►

but we kind of keep ourselves first.

00:57:26 ►

And I don’t know, I guess I just wanted to mysteries that, you know, kind of keep ourselves far from that. And I don’t know,

00:57:28 ►

I guess I just wanted to share that, but maybe what experience have you

00:57:30 ►

had with that?

00:57:31 ►

But that’s a positive, it’s an

00:57:33 ►

uplifting experience, right?

00:57:37 ►

The stopping

00:57:38 ►

isn’t.

00:57:39 ►

Talk more about the stopping.

00:57:43 ►

Well, I

00:57:44 ►

guess I get to a place that is almost like…

00:57:51 ►

Well, what I see are lots of different past lives.

00:57:58 ►

I don’t even know if they’re past lives, really.

00:58:00 ►

I can’t even categorize them as that.

00:58:01 ►

But I see different symbols,

00:58:04 ►

different relationships to civilizations.

00:58:09 ►

And, you know, just kind of I sense things that I knew,

00:58:14 ►

or things that, you know, were available,

00:58:16 ►

things that are available to all of us on an even greater scale.

00:58:21 ►

Sort of some universal or even, you know, some people call it the Akashic Records or something,

00:58:26 ►

but not to be too much in that vein.

00:58:29 ►

And I’ll start to grasp it and I’ll start to maybe claim it or understand it,

00:58:37 ►

and then I’ll get this, I’ll get sort of this imbalance going, or maybe it’s, you know, my thought that,

00:58:48 ►

you know, if I have it,

00:58:50 ►

then I won’t have this place in the world,

00:58:54 ►

you know, or I won’t have a place in the world

00:58:56 ►

that, you know, that nobody else is like me.

00:59:00 ►

You mean that you’ll learn something

00:59:01 ►

that will set you so apart

00:59:04 ►

that you’ll not be able to fit into the world?

00:59:07 ►

Yes.

00:59:12 ►

For me, I have a horror sometimes

00:59:18 ►

of the sense of when I come down, as I start to come down,

00:59:24 ►

of the certainty that I’m coming into illusion

00:59:28 ►

in something that is essentially meaningless

00:59:30 ►

compared to where I just was.

00:59:35 ►

So a horror of return.

00:59:39 ►

It’s a horror that I’ve somehow created a universe

00:59:42 ►

that is like somehow it’s my fault

00:59:45 ►

that I’m returning to something that is less than.

00:59:51 ►

What it might be or what it could be

00:59:54 ►

or what you saw it to be in that state.

01:00:00 ►

And then I will gradually forget

01:00:03 ►

and experiences of gradually forgetting even now.

01:00:09 ►

Well, you know, I don’t, maybe we’re a special slice.

01:00:15 ►

I mean, there is the notion that, first of all, it’s a monkey brain that we’re operating with here.

01:00:28 ►

a monkey brain that we’re operating with here nowhere is it writ large that it can actually encompass the truth i mean why should it i mean do we believe that banana trees perceive the truth

01:00:36 ►

they’re flat worms so why should monkeys so then if you’re into these consciousness-expanding techniques,

01:00:46 ►

whether they’re just simply paying attention

01:00:48 ►

or using psychedelic drugs or something else,

01:00:51 ►

then you actually get to a place where there is,

01:00:59 ►

you know, it’s like an abyss of knowing.

01:01:03 ►

It’s like an abyss of knowing. It’s like…

01:01:09 ►

You know that poem that says,

01:01:13 ►

I look over your meaning’s edge

01:01:16 ►

and feel the dizziness of the things that you have not said?

01:01:21 ►

Well, that’s about a relationship.

01:01:24 ►

But it could also just be i look over meaning’s edge

01:01:27 ►

and feel the dizziness of things unsaid it’s that nowhere is it writ that the universe should be

01:01:35 ►

rationally apprehendable and maybe when you get the distances and the energies and the time scales, when you have even a remote intimation of these things,

01:01:47 ►

your mind can’t handle it.

01:01:50 ►

It actually implodes under the force of reality.

01:01:57 ►

I mean, I sort of feel like that,

01:02:00 ►

that what we have uncovered with all this thinking and exploring is not the white light or some cheerful Buddhist hypostatization like that,

01:02:13 ►

but what we’ve uncovered is ungodly complexity.

01:02:18 ►

I remember once at the height of an LSD trip years ago,

01:02:23 ►

being with somebody who yelled

01:02:25 ►

out I’m drowning

01:02:27 ►

in the spaghetti of ambiguity

01:02:30 ►

I know

01:02:32 ►

that feeling you know

01:02:33 ►

it’s just that you know

01:02:35 ►

it’s all very cut and

01:02:37 ►

dried it’s you know

01:02:39 ►

and then you start delving

01:02:41 ►

and you start you know reading

01:02:43 ►

weird literature and taking strange drugs and

01:02:47 ►

going to strange places and you begin this deconstruction process and what you find out is

01:02:52 ►

not only that the world is weirder than you can suppose but that this situation is fundamentally

01:03:00 ►

alarming that the world is stranger than you can suppose and and it carries an

01:03:07 ►

existential implication it does for me I mean I’m I I you know I can’t believe

01:03:18 ►

anymore that the just now speaking of the psychedelics, that this is about human psychology.

01:03:26 ►

You press it too hard and go too far.

01:03:30 ►

And I always think of that amazing scene in Rosemary’s Baby

01:03:34 ►

where Mia Farrow, in the middle of this dream,

01:03:39 ►

sits up and says,

01:03:41 ►

my God, this is really happening.

01:03:41 ►

up and says my god this is really

01:03:44 ►

happening

01:03:44 ►

and that’s the

01:03:47 ►

thing which lies behind

01:03:50 ►

all this delving

01:03:51 ►

that you know the cheerful

01:03:53 ►

assumption that it’s all mental

01:03:56 ►

and that you’re going to return

01:03:57 ►

to reality and that the here

01:04:00 ►

and now is the stable part

01:04:02 ►

of the mandala

01:04:02 ►

it may not be true,

01:04:05 ►

or it seems to me that it’s not necessarily true.

01:04:09 ►

And then you just say, you know,

01:04:10 ►

you could find out something

01:04:12 ►

that would make it impossible to speak to anybody,

01:04:16 ►

you know, that you would just have to turn away

01:04:18 ►

from people with an unspeakable truth

01:04:22 ►

and be isolated by it.

01:04:27 ►

I wanted to ask a question

01:04:28 ►

that came up for me last weekend.

01:04:32 ►

You said that when you took DMT

01:04:34 ►

to the shamans in South America,

01:04:37 ►

the Iowa Scarabs,

01:04:39 ►

and they said that it was

01:04:41 ►

ancestor spirits were coming through.

01:04:45 ►

A comment,

01:04:46 ►

I believe I heard you say this,

01:04:49 ►

that the ayahuasca

01:04:50 ►

seemed to be more interested

01:04:52 ►

in using the ayahuasca

01:04:53 ►

or the medicines they had

01:04:55 ►

more like a doctor would.

01:05:00 ►

That is how I’ve used them, I would say, more like helping someone.

01:05:10 ►

And how you use them is more for an inquiry, like to ask a question.

01:05:17 ►

What’s the difference?

01:05:18 ►

Is one more of a psychological approach and one more an intellectual?

01:05:24 ►

I’m just curious.

01:05:27 ►

psychological approach and one more an intellectual i’m just i’m curious well yeah i mean one is a shamanic approach because the center thing of shamanism is healing i mean that’s really how

01:05:34 ►

you judge a shaman in in a traditional fashion is by healing and then this other you know it is

01:05:41 ►

intellectual and it had and because the idea is to be able to say

01:05:46 ►

something and i guess maybe where the problem comes and i’m blinded to it because i have the

01:05:52 ►

problem is that you it’s you have to have heart a lot of it i mean maybe more heart than I’m able to muster and that if you try and do

01:06:06 ►

it through the intellect alone

01:06:08 ►

it becomes

01:06:09 ►

I don’t know there’s some mythological

01:06:14 ►

metaphor here but it becomes

01:06:16 ►

titanic it becomes

01:06:18 ►

dangerous and

01:06:20 ►

possibly

01:06:21 ►

capable of collapsing

01:06:24 ►

upon itself.

01:06:27 ►

Maybe the healing is the way you pay your dues,

01:06:31 ►

and that somehow curiosity alone is a false coinage,

01:06:40 ►

and that the lack of the desire to heal

01:06:43 ►

is the manifestation of the lack of heart.

01:06:47 ►

I mean, I don’t know.

01:06:49 ►

I just know, you know, that if you have a heart mission,

01:06:54 ►

I think it’s easier to travel those rails.

01:07:01 ►

Anybody else?

01:07:10 ►

Yeah.

01:07:14 ►

I was just yesterday confronted with this accident on Highway 1 here, which was pretty major.

01:07:18 ►

And somebody died in a burning car wreck.

01:07:22 ►

And the ground process, I realized how traumatic that was for me.

01:07:28 ►

And how the whole day before I was calm, everything turned gray.

01:07:35 ►

I was really trying to get out of it. It reminded me of,

01:07:39 ►

not only for myself, but sometimes you see something that’s just so horrible.

01:07:43 ►

You feel you have seen too much and it makes you insane.

01:07:48 ►

And I was just wondering about that, you know, that connection that you maybe witnessed something

01:07:58 ►

as a child or at war or whatever that is just so horrific about the potential of, you know, the human

01:08:06 ►

race or whatever happens that you can’t fathom it, that you can’t, you know, try to leave.

01:08:12 ►

And you mean, and then you’re like contaminated by this image. Yeah, well, I think a lot about

01:08:20 ►

that kind of thing because, you know know one of the things that

01:08:26 ►

has been established

01:08:28 ►

through places like Esalen

01:08:30 ►

I think and rightly so

01:08:32 ►

and correctly

01:08:34 ►

is that images

01:08:36 ►

can heal

01:08:37 ►

and that visualization

01:08:39 ►

can promote health

01:08:42 ►

and this sort of thing

01:08:43 ►

but what you never hear discussed then

01:08:47 ►

is the implied opposite,

01:08:53 ►

which is that some images can harm

01:08:56 ►

and that information has a quality of harming and hurting.

01:09:03 ►

We are the inheritors of Lockean theories of government,

01:09:09 ►

and so our approach toward information is, you know, free speech,

01:09:14 ►

and anything can be said.

01:09:16 ►

But I don’t know whether this may…

01:09:22 ►

I mean, I feel very sensitive to images.

01:09:28 ►

It’s a kind of funny thing.

01:09:29 ►

So I don’t, like I don’t own a TV,

01:09:33 ►

simply because I think it’s a source of toxic imaging.

01:09:40 ►

And, you know, one of the forms that the encroaching madness

01:09:46 ►

induced by the psychedelics takes, I’ve noticed,

01:09:50 ►

is that you are open to invasion by images

01:09:55 ►

that are loose in the mass consciousness.

01:10:00 ►

You know, on three separate occasions,

01:10:02 ►

I’ve seen people freak out on psychedelics about Charles Manson.

01:10:11 ►

Either they thought they were Manson, or they thought I was Manson, or they thought something…

01:10:17 ►

Well, it’s clear that this is toxic information that moves around in the body politic

01:10:23 ►

and then is magnified under certain circumstances.

01:10:28 ►

Auschwitz, all of this stuff,

01:10:31 ►

and all the images of sadomasochism,

01:10:35 ►

and our society seems more into this than any in history.

01:10:42 ►

I read a really freaky thing I mean I don’t even

01:10:45 ►

understand some of this stuff

01:10:47 ►

I mean this is my idea of toxic information

01:10:50 ►

maybe some of you saw this

01:10:51 ►

it was in Timer Newsweek

01:10:53 ►

around the time of the Jeffrey Dahmer

01:10:55 ►

trial

01:10:56 ►

Norman Mailer wrote an essay

01:10:59 ►

01:11:00 ►

the psychotic

01:11:03 ►

as harbinger of future style

01:11:07 ►

and said, you know, the psychotic is the role model for the future.

01:11:15 ►

And like I say, I can’t even understand what this stuff means

01:11:20 ►

or who understands this, but I didn’t think it should be said.

01:11:24 ►

I thought, you know, this is the raving of a diseased mind

01:11:28 ►

and now it’s in the bloodstream

01:11:31 ►

of the culture

01:11:33 ►

yeah

01:11:37 ►

and it contaminates

01:11:41 ►

a whole culture

01:11:43 ►

can sink into madness, you know.

01:11:47 ►

I mean, you know, we like to think we’re in a terminal phase of decadence,

01:11:54 ►

but, you know, the Roman emperor Heterogabulus used to castrate his lovers

01:12:03 ►

and hurl them out on the front steps of the official residence to be found in the morning by the street sweepers. But still, maybe it’s because of Freud and Nietzsche

01:12:25 ►

and all the bad boys of the 19th century or something,

01:12:32 ►

but we really have pried open a fairly toxic aspect of ourselves.

01:12:38 ►

And in the name of facing ourselves,

01:12:42 ►

we tend to make ourselves more ill I think I’ve always had trouble

01:12:50 ►

with Stan’s theory about the unconscious and and I can’t go to those slideshows

01:12:59 ►

with the crazy I can’t take it you, and I don’t know what that means about me, whether

01:13:06 ►

it means I’m sensitive or feel threatened by all that stuff, but it just seems to me

01:13:12 ►

unnecessary and unhelpful. Yeah.

01:13:19 ►

I found that to be true, too. Six hours of that type of slideshow was too much.

01:13:26 ►

Well, and when you hear about somebody like Salvador Roquet,

01:13:30 ►

who will take, you know, a room full of Jewish women from Yonkers

01:13:35 ►

and give them 500 micrograms of LSD

01:13:39 ►

and then show Auschwitz army footage of Auschwitz,

01:13:45 ►

you think, you know, this is my idea of hell.

01:13:47 ►

This is exactly what I don’t want to get near

01:13:51 ►

and would expect to emerge from severely impaired

01:13:56 ►

in my personal progress, you know.

01:14:01 ►

This is kind of a downer, isn’t it?

01:14:11 ►

I think it’s all,

01:14:12 ►

there’s a lot of,

01:14:15 ►

an impulse in a lot of schools of psychotherapy

01:14:16 ►

to rub your nose in it.

01:14:18 ►

And I don’t know,

01:14:19 ►

you represent a school,

01:14:20 ►

how do you see that?

01:14:21 ►

I don’t know what your school’s

01:14:23 ►

position is on this,

01:14:24 ►

but do we have to rub our nose in it,

01:14:27 ►

or we miss it, or what’s that all about?

01:14:30 ►

I’m not going to talk in terms of the school,

01:14:32 ►

but if I take psychedelics, I go out in nature.

01:14:34 ►

And you’re okay there.

01:14:36 ►

And I’m okay there,

01:14:37 ►

and so that what I don’t want to amplify won’t happen.

01:14:40 ►

That’s what I personally do.

01:14:42 ►

I can’t imagine doing that or exposing it.

01:14:46 ►

I can’t imagine taking a thousand micrograms of LSD

01:14:50 ►

in this room at night.

01:14:52 ►

Right, that would be too profaning.

01:14:55 ►

That’s my own personal.

01:14:57 ►

But it isn’t, you can never insulate yourself from it.

01:15:01 ►

I mean, I’ve had trips on about nature that are sort

01:15:07 ►

of along the lines of you know the life cycle of the alien and it was all about

01:15:16 ►

the how it was a vision of nature as this thing feeding upon itself and how egg cases

01:15:25 ►

were being inserted into

01:15:27 ►

tissue and free

01:15:29 ►

swimming life stages

01:15:31 ►

were attaching to tissue

01:15:33 ►

and pathways

01:15:35 ►

were being, I mean it’s a yuck

01:15:37 ►

image and that

01:15:39 ►

could come easily out of examining

01:15:42 ►

six square inches of

01:15:43 ►

soil under a redwood tree it

01:15:46 ►

isn’t always affirming it’s like there’s a balance in your own perception that if

01:15:52 ►

it’s thrown off a sunset can drive you into despair what is the general I mean

01:16:03 ►

there’s a lot of expertise in the room

01:16:05 ►

is it useful

01:16:06 ►

for us to go through

01:16:09 ►

these darker sides

01:16:11 ►

of ourselves

01:16:11 ►

do we feel better afterwards

01:16:14 ►

or does bringing it to the surface

01:16:16 ►

bring

01:16:17 ►

then you have shit on the surface

01:16:19 ►

I personally think

01:16:21 ►

it must be my German heritage

01:16:23 ►

I like to go into those places

01:16:25 ►

and like to discover those dark sides of my soul or whatever it is.

01:16:30 ►

I like to really rub my nose into it,

01:16:33 ►

because usually if something isn’t a part of me, it doesn’t touch me.

01:16:39 ►

So if something touches me in a way, I like to go to the root of it.

01:16:45 ►

And what is there when you get there?

01:16:48 ►

I mean, what’s the experience, in other words,

01:16:51 ►

of instead of saying,

01:16:52 ►

oh, no, not that, my God,

01:16:54 ►

saying, oh, great,

01:16:55 ►

a chance to understand more about myself

01:16:58 ►

and rush in,

01:16:59 ►

what do you find when you get in there?

01:17:02 ►

I just find that I get a more complete picture of the whole

01:17:07 ►

like i i feel like i get you know the karmic wheel like i’m discovering every aspect of it

01:17:15 ►

instead of just heading for the light and gives me a better understanding of human nature, of the human psyche, of my own psyche.

01:17:27 ►

Yeah, well, I think you…

01:17:29 ►

I don’t think it’s pleasurable.

01:17:31 ►

But is it awful?

01:17:34 ►

It’s awful if you make it awful.

01:17:36 ►

It’s awful when you put a judgment on it.

01:17:39 ►

So the trick is to just not judge it.

01:17:42 ►

The trick is to just not judge it

01:17:43 ►

and just see it on the other side of the karmic wheel.

01:17:48 ►

Well, I think that’s what I do,

01:17:49 ►

but I feel, you know, it’s a struggle to not judge it.

01:17:54 ►

You say, oh God, if I judge this, it will get worse.

01:17:59 ►

I should just try and ride it through.

01:18:03 ►

I’ll give it a try on the school part of it.

01:18:07 ►

Uh-huh.

01:18:07 ►

I mean, what’s haunting me is this picture

01:18:11 ►

of having these women from Yonkers

01:18:13 ►

take 500 micrograms and watch this stuff.

01:18:17 ►

I mean, there is this modern pop psychology idea,

01:18:21 ►

some of which is to the monetary benefit of therapists,

01:18:24 ►

that wallowing in this stuff

01:18:27 ►

gets you somewhere. And my current thinking, which is always of course subject to change,

01:18:34 ►

is that very fine edge between not denying something and not wallowing in it either.

01:18:42 ►

And that’s a very difficult thing.

01:18:44 ►

That’s a good point. Allowing. it either. Yeah. And that’s a very… That’s a good point.

01:18:46 ►

Allowing.

01:18:48 ►

Allowing.

01:18:48 ►

That’s what I mean.

01:18:49 ►

You trust your state,

01:18:50 ►

you observe it to it.

01:18:51 ►

You become the witness to it

01:18:53 ►

and without judging it

01:18:54 ►

as good or bad or whatever.

01:18:57 ►

So a kind of detachment.

01:18:59 ►

Well, even more than that,

01:19:01 ►

from the gestalt perspective,

01:19:02 ►

which I’ll represent,

01:19:04 ►

the edge between wallowing and…

01:19:07 ►

I mean, you don’t ever want to deny,

01:19:08 ►

but you want to go into something far enough

01:19:10 ►

to begin to get a reversal,

01:19:12 ►

to begin to get the other side.

01:19:15 ►

So from the theoretical thing,

01:19:17 ►

I don’t know how wallowing would ever serve that purpose.

01:19:20 ►

So what you’re talking about, though,

01:19:21 ►

is coming to a sense of balance, right?

01:19:24 ►

Ultimately, it’s being able to integrate and accept all of the various aspects.

01:19:30 ►

But wallowing, obviously, is not coming to a point of balance.

01:19:35 ►

What you’re talking about with the women from Yonkers and watching the film,

01:19:40 ►

I mean, that is…

01:19:42 ►

You don’t come into balance by assaulting your psyche with everything that is the most

01:19:47 ►

horrific that you could possibly confront. And I think that can be very damaging, and

01:19:52 ►

probably more so to some people than others, because people’s tolerances are different,

01:19:56 ►

people’s individual place of balance is different. So I think there is a lot of individual variation,

01:20:02 ►

and it’s very subtle and it’s very delicate. But I agree that toxicity is toxic in whatever form it comes,

01:20:09 ►

and if it has that effect, I do not see benefit in that.

01:20:13 ►

Well, perhaps a better word than wallowing could be formulated.

01:20:17 ►

It’s just the one that I chose.

01:20:19 ►

But in dealing with psychological material,

01:20:22 ►

you’re mostly dealing with something that’s already happened.

01:20:26 ►

So why would you ever want to stay in something

01:20:29 ►

that the outcome is predetermined,

01:20:31 ►

that you already know the end?

01:20:34 ►

Most people are most afraid of what they’ve already experienced.

01:20:38 ►

So why would you want to spend a lot of time

01:20:41 ►

hanging around in a bad place that you’ve already experienced,

01:20:44 ►

that you already

01:20:45 ►

know the end

01:20:46 ►

outcome of

01:20:47 ►

but you also

01:20:49 ►

don’t want to

01:20:49 ►

deny that it

01:20:50 ►

happened

01:20:50 ►

and that’s the

01:20:52 ►

kind of edge

01:20:52 ►

that may be

01:20:53 ►

a better way

01:20:53 ►

to begin

01:20:55 ►

then to get

01:20:56 ►

a reversal

01:20:57 ►

yeah I think

01:20:58 ►

we all have

01:20:59 ►

a sense of

01:21:00 ►

that there

01:21:01 ►

should be

01:21:02 ►

a balance

01:21:03 ►

but we all

01:21:04 ►

have a different sense of where it should be a balance but we all have a different sense of where it

01:21:06 ►

should be I mean for instance I I feel some I feel mild irritation with people

01:21:14 ►

who don’t like horror literature but I don’t like slasher literature, and I’m very clear what the difference is.

01:21:27 ►

I mean, one is psychological and the other is science fiction.

01:21:33 ►

But I can’t put up with, you know, Silence of the Lambs and from there on, because it’s offensive.

01:21:42 ►

But on the other hand, if somebody doesn’t want to see Alien

01:21:45 ►

because they say it scares them,

01:21:48 ►

I think that they’re a nervous nelly, you know,

01:21:52 ►

and that they should actually steal themselves to this experience.

01:21:56 ►

And it’s good to watch Alien because you learn something.

01:22:01 ►

Well, I guess it confers an immunity

01:22:05 ►

it’s one of the reasons why people

01:22:07 ►

there’s a feeling that it confers

01:22:11 ►

some sort of immunity by having undergone it

01:22:14 ►

maybe that’s why people are into

01:22:17 ►

all these affectations of negativity

01:22:19 ►

it’s a kind of sympathetic magic

01:22:23 ►

so maybe this is why adolescents who feel tremendously empowered

01:22:29 ►

are into T-shirts with dismembered bodies

01:22:34 ►

and bands whose images rotate around themes of mayhem, incest, and destruction.

01:22:46 ►

It’s a kind of counter-charm.

01:22:52 ►

And in that case, it shouldn’t be put down.

01:22:55 ►

These people are not sick.

01:22:57 ►

They’re doing something to keep from being sick.

01:23:01 ►

They’re gaining confidence by associating in a familiar manner

01:23:06 ►

with the things that actually

01:23:08 ►

make them very nervous and uneasy

01:23:11 ►

I mean I don’t know

01:23:12 ►

this could be cheap shot

01:23:15 ►

but I tend to

01:23:18 ►

I mean I would stick with that for a minute

01:23:20 ►

I tend to think that’s true

01:23:22 ►

because I know some of these people who

01:23:27 ►

are behind all of these symbols and they seem like very nice people who are

01:23:33 ►

striving to keep their lives together I mean my son is one of them every time I

01:23:40 ►

have an impulse to condemn you know it is pretty horrific I mean my son brings home

01:23:46 ►

CDs

01:23:48 ►

and I read the lyrics

01:23:50 ►

and it is a jaw dropper

01:23:52 ►

what some of this stuff

01:23:54 ►

is you know

01:23:55 ►

but then if you actually play

01:23:58 ►

the CD you discover

01:24:00 ►

that the lyrics are so lost

01:24:02 ►

in walls of noise

01:24:03 ►

and special effects and all this other stuff

01:24:06 ►

that it isn’t as in your face

01:24:08 ►

as when you read the lyrics.

01:24:12 ►

And in any case, you know,

01:24:14 ►

nobody’s ever talked that Doors song

01:24:19 ►

about murdering your father and screwing your mother

01:24:22 ►

and that was the anthem of our generation.

01:24:25 ►

So who are we to point a finger at Guns N’ Roses?

01:24:30 ►

I mean, and, you know, we think of the doors as a wholesome impulse or something.

01:24:36 ►

I don’t know.

01:24:37 ►

Some incredible mental side of hand goes on here.

01:24:41 ►

Sympathy for the devil, all of this stuff.

01:24:44 ►

I mean, it’s black in that

01:24:46 ►

phase. But if you’re in it, it’s fun. It’s theater. It establishes a ring pass knot that

01:24:53 ►

keeps the boring people out. If you’re on the outside, you know, this is pathological,

01:25:00 ►

demented. It leads to mass murder and it’s unacceptable. Well, you’ve got to

01:25:05 ►

go easy on some of this.

01:25:09 ►

Anybody?

01:25:09 ►

Where do you stand to judge anything?

01:25:11 ►

This is what comes up with that.

01:25:14 ►

Right.

01:25:16 ►

I have a question

01:25:17 ►

about Prague.

01:25:20 ►

The conference that

01:25:21 ►

was held there, not the

01:25:23 ►

advertised conference, but the one that was not advertised, not the advertised conference,

01:25:25 ►

but the one that was not advertised?

01:25:26 ►

Uh-huh.

01:25:27 ►

What was the outshoot of that,

01:25:30 ►

if you can talk about it,

01:25:32 ►

as far as the future of psychedelics in this country?

01:25:35 ►

And will they be made legal again at some point?

01:25:38 ►

Do we anticipate that?

01:25:41 ►

Something’s going on.

01:25:43 ►

I don’t understand.

01:25:44 ►

There’s some kind of high level policy

01:25:47 ►

review underway

01:25:49 ►

it’s hard to figure out

01:25:53 ►

what is happening at this moment

01:25:55 ►

to motivate it

01:25:56 ►

maybe it’s that

01:26:00 ►

Europe is actually moving closer and closer

01:26:03 ►

to legitimizing research

01:26:04 ►

and it just puts pressure on the American scientific establishment.

01:26:10 ►

You know, Rick Strassman has been able to do his DMT study in New Mexico.

01:26:17 ►

That Ibogaine study on the East Coast is moving forward on the flimsiest of evidence.

01:26:25 ►

I mean, I don’t believe for a moment that Ibogaine interrupts morphine addiction.

01:26:31 ►

I think it’s a brilliant ploy for getting a research program funded,

01:26:35 ►

but just the evidence, I don’t know.

01:26:39 ►

As I understand it, it’s one guy’s sort of personal revelation.

01:26:43 ►

As I understand it, it’s one guy’s sort of personal revelation.

01:26:47 ►

I don’t know.

01:26:51 ►

It probably depends on whether or not there’s a change of administration.

01:26:54 ►

In that, if there is no change of administration,

01:27:00 ►

you can be damn sure there won’t be an era of psychedelic research.

01:27:03 ►

What was the conference?

01:27:05 ►

What was the conference? What was that conference?

01:27:07 ►

Well, it was the ITA,

01:27:10 ►

the International Transpersonal Association.

01:27:14 ►

And then there was an unannounced conference headed by Rick Doblin of MAPS,

01:27:19 ►

Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

01:27:23 ►

And I was just curious.

01:27:24 ►

I haven’t heard anything yet from that.

01:27:26 ►

They had a lot of people there.

01:27:29 ►

Essentially, the international psychedelic community

01:27:32 ►

is still defining itself

01:27:35 ►

because there’s no consensus about methods or materials.

01:27:41 ►

Some people are using ketamine in psychotherapy.

01:27:45 ►

Other people regard it as a veterinary anesthetic.

01:27:49 ►

And, you know, you can’t tell who’s got it right.

01:27:54 ►

But I think the maturity of the European research community

01:27:59 ►

is just sufficient that they’re probably going to restart it. And then this country will have to decide what it’s going to do.

01:28:09 ►

Anybody want to say any more about this?

01:28:13 ►

Let me see if I wanted to say any more about it.

01:28:17 ►

It made me think of a funny cartoon,

01:28:20 ►

the whole subject of madness.

01:28:22 ►

Maybe some of you saw this cartoon in The New Yorker a few years ago,

01:28:26 ►

but a bunch of obviously very straight businessmen

01:28:31 ►

are sitting around a conference table

01:28:33 ►

and they have the downward moving chart of their company’s profits

01:28:37 ►

up on the wall in front of them.

01:28:40 ►

And the CEO is saying to a smiling man sitting at the end of the table,

01:28:46 ►

it’s true, Hedley, a deliberate derangement of the senses worked for Rimbaud,

01:28:52 ►

but would it work for us?

01:28:55 ►

And it’s worth remembering, you know, that this madness we fear so much,

01:29:00 ►

we are essentially the unhappy inheritors of the romantic legacy.

01:29:05 ►

I mean, they brought this

01:29:06 ►

upon us

01:29:07 ►

this is what

01:29:08 ►

they wanted

01:29:09 ►

they worshipped

01:29:10 ►

this

01:29:11 ►

and the entirety

01:29:12 ►

of the 20th

01:29:13 ►

century

01:29:14 ►

has been a

01:29:15 ►

deconstruction

01:29:16 ►

of gentlemanly

01:29:17 ►

reason

01:29:18 ►

abstract

01:29:22 ►

expressionism

01:29:23 ►

all of these

01:29:24 ►

things Freudianism Jung National Socialism abstract expressionism all of these things

01:29:25 ►

Freudianism, Jung

01:29:27 ►

National Socialism

01:29:29 ►

it’s all anti-reasonable

01:29:31 ►

from the point of view of the 19th century

01:29:34 ►

we don’t have to worry about madness

01:29:36 ►

we are mad

01:29:37 ►

every last one of us

01:29:39 ►

we’ve so thoroughly

01:29:41 ►

imbibed the

01:29:43 ►

values of modernity

01:29:45 ►

that we are incomprehensible to our own past.

01:29:51 ►

And this brings up the issue of, you know,

01:29:55 ►

someone said it was a problem of consensus.

01:29:59 ►

What do you do if the society is crazy?

01:30:03 ►

Then what happens to the concept of madness?

01:30:09 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:30:11 ►

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

01:30:16 ►

Now that’s an interesting question that Terence just left us with.

01:30:20 ►

What happens when an entire society goes crazy?

01:30:25 ►

Well, now we know the answer.

01:30:28 ►

The society gone crazy puts a psychotic little boy in the White House.

01:30:33 ►

And now all around the world people are holding their breath

01:30:36 ►

and wondering if that insane man in the White House will bring an end to the so-called American experiment.

01:30:43 ►

And should this experiment end with Trump,

01:30:46 ►

well, then I think it’s going to be safe to say that the experiment has failed.

01:30:51 ►

So Bukowski’s quote again comes to mind.

01:30:54 ►

Some people never go crazy.

01:30:56 ►

What truly horrible lives they must lead.

01:31:00 ►

Well, at least today politics isn’t boring.

01:31:03 ►

You know, I had to smile when near the end of this recording,

01:31:07 ►

Terrence said that he thought there may be a chance to legalize psychedelics

01:31:11 ►

if there was a change of administration.

01:31:14 ►

Well, we all know how that has worked out.

01:31:17 ►

A few months after this event was held, the U.S. got Clinton,

01:31:21 ►

then Bush the Younger, then Obama the Drone King,

01:31:27 ►

and now there is the boy King Trump.

01:31:36 ►

So I think that it’s safe to say that by simply changing the administration of this besotted nation, well, it only seems to make things worse.

01:31:50 ►

My guess is that my great-great-grandchildren will still be dreaming about someday in the distant future when psychedelic medicines will be completely legal. And while that may be somewhat cynical, I do think that it provides a more practical way to approach these substances, which is to spend our time learning more about them by

01:31:55 ►

experimentation and through discussing them with others. It seems to me that the time spent in

01:32:01 ►

that way will, well, it’ll be much more productive for society than

01:32:05 ►

beating our heads against the wall of ignorant politicians and their dumbed-down supporters.

01:32:10 ►

I found and use these substances in the underground, and for this foreseeable future,

01:32:15 ►

it seems to me that the underground will remain the focal point of non-clinical psychedelic

01:32:21 ►

experimentation, particularly when it comes to delving ever deeper into the

01:32:26 ►

mysterious realms of spirituality. But hey, that’s just my opinion, and I’m likely to have

01:32:34 ►

changed it by the time you hear this podcast. So once again, you are on your own here and deciding

01:32:39 ►

how to best spend your spare time, using psychedelics yourself or working for their legalization.

01:32:45 ►

It’s your time. Spend it wisely. Earlier in this talk, we heard Terrence ask himself,

01:32:53 ►

what does it mean that it gets harder and harder to take these things? And then he listed all of

01:32:58 ►

the reasons that I’ve considered myself. For me, well, getting older is certainly one of them.

01:33:06 ►

considered myself. For me, well, getting older is certainly one of them. And for many years,

01:33:12 ►

I rejected that Alan Watts quote about hanging up the phone once you got the message. In fact,

01:33:18 ►

my friend Gary Fisher was actually at the dinner party when Watts first made that statement. And I argued with Gary that, well, it had nothing to do with getting the message, but everything to do

01:33:22 ►

with getting older. You see, at the time Gary and I were having these discussions, well, he was about the same age that

01:33:29 ►

I am now, and he would just smile at me and tell me to wait, and if I lived long enough, I’d see

01:33:35 ►

what he meant. Sadly, Gary is gone now, so I can’t tell him that I finally understand.

01:33:42 ►

And in case you think that the message I received was some earth-shaking wisdom,

01:33:47 ►

well, it wasn’t.

01:33:49 ►

The main thing that I’ve come to understand about myself is

01:33:52 ►

that for most of my life, I was, well, I was kind of a smart-ass jerk.

01:33:57 ►

Now, thanks to my reflections and learning from many, many psychedelic experiences,

01:34:02 ►

I’ve reached a place of peace with myself and hung up the phone.

01:34:06 ►

I’m not saying that I’ll never have another

01:34:08 ►

mushroom or ayahuasca experience.

01:34:11 ►

I’ve learned the hard way to never say never.

01:34:14 ►

But at this moment in my life,

01:34:15 ►

I have enough information from the psychedelic realm

01:34:18 ►

to keep me going for quite a while.

01:34:20 ►

But maybe I’m just getting old and overly cautious.

01:34:24 ►

But for now, cannabis is my only ally.

01:34:27 ►

You know, one of the things that seems to me to be missing among today’s psychedelic experimenters

01:34:33 ►

is the sense of potential danger that we once had.

01:34:37 ►

And I’m not sure that this is such a good thing.

01:34:41 ►

Back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, there was very little information available about how

01:34:47 ►

to use psychedelic substances safely. Now today we have arrowid.org and a whole raft of other

01:34:54 ►

sources of information that are available to us instantly online. Now cautious experimenters,

01:35:00 ►

well, they’ll have read a great deal about the journey that they are about to take,

01:35:04 ►

but it wasn’t always like that.

01:35:06 ►

On several other occasions here in the salon,

01:35:08 ►

I’ve talked about how terrified I was before my first LSD experience.

01:35:13 ►

Although I had learned all that I could about it from my friend who gave it to me,

01:35:17 ►

I also knew that the popular press was full of stories about people going crazy on acid.

01:35:23 ►

Most of them we’ve learned now were made up.

01:35:25 ►

But I clearly remember where I was on that afternoon of my first acid trip

01:35:29 ►

and how I told my sitter, who was my wife at the time,

01:35:33 ►

and who knew even less about LSD than I did,

01:35:36 ►

I told her that, well, there was a chance that I’d never be the same

01:35:40 ►

after the experience that I was about to have,

01:35:42 ►

that I might go crazy.

01:35:44 ►

To be honest, I was terrified.

01:35:47 ►

Thankfully, that terror before beginning a psychedelic experience never left me.

01:35:53 ►

You’ve heard many of the speakers here in the salon say that

01:35:56 ►

if you aren’t terrified before a major psychedelic experience,

01:35:59 ►

well, then you really don’t know what you’re doing.

01:36:02 ►

And I agree.

01:36:03 ►

So even though you’ve read a great deal,

01:36:06 ►

spoken with experienced friends,

01:36:07 ►

and know the source of your medicine,

01:36:09 ►

I think that it is also advisable to be a little scared.

01:36:14 ►

What motivational speakers say about sales

01:36:16 ►

is equally true about tripping.

01:36:19 ►

A casual attitude will cause a casualty.

01:36:22 ►

And we certainly don’t want to be singing

01:36:24 ►

Wish You Were Here

01:36:26 ►

about you. Well, I hope that this discussion about insanity hasn’t been too much of a downer for you.

01:36:34 ►

When I picked this tape to play today, I had no idea how the discussion would unfold.

01:36:39 ►

My hope, of course, was that this would be another fun and uplifting McKenna talk for me to play today, which happens to be my 75th birthday.

01:36:48 ►

So I promised to pick something a little more fun to play on my birthday next year.

01:36:54 ►

But for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:36:58 ►

Be well, my friends. Thank you.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

546 - Insanity

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Program Notes

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