Program Notes
Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Alan Watts.
Alan WattsPhoto from Archive.org
[NOTE: All quotations are by Alan Watts.]
“If you have a radio, you don’t only need an antenna, you also need a ground. So what happens in the world of mysticism, of psychedelic visions and so on, needs to be grounded.”
“Any law of this nature, any law that tries to enforce by the power of the state its morals, or your own business in looking after your own nervous system, is in fact an unenforceable law. And all unenforceable laws lead to blackmail and public demoralization.”
“The rule for all terrors is to head straight into them.”
“LSD is one such chemical that produces the curious effect of making you aware of the polarity of things.”
Download a free copy of Lorenzo’s latest book
The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
Previous Episode
600 - Elders from the Sixties Discuss LSD
Next Episode
Similar Episodes
- 213 - The Alchemy of LSD - score: 0.96968
- 526 - History Ends In Green – Part 3 - score: 0.79870
- 160 - The League for Spiritual Discovery - score: 0.79409
- 411 - Our Involvement With Matter - score: 0.78702
- 573 - Countdown Into Complexity – Part 1 - score: 0.78528
- 527 - History Ends in Green – Part 4 - score: 0.78313
- 165 - From Beats, to Hippies, to McKenna - score: 0.78306
- 418 - Death By Astonishment - score: 0.78039
- 191 - The Ethnobotany of Shamanism Part 5 - score: 0.77871
- 538 - Are Psychedelics Spiritual_ - score: 0.77846
Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:24 ►
And today I thought that maybe we should have another visit with an old friend, Alan Watts.
00:00:30 ►
In the talk that I’m about to play for you, we’re going to hear Watts talking about psychedelics, LSD in particular,
00:00:37 ►
in some ways that may sound a little strange to our ears today.
00:00:42 ►
Of course, we already know the history of Dr. Leary’s psychedelic research
00:00:46 ►
coming to a close at Harvard, and we’ve heard about Kesey’s acid tests, both of which were
00:00:51 ►
major stories in the popular press at the time this talk was given. So it’s easy to understand
00:00:57 ►
why people sometimes think that those two men were the prime movers in the psychedelic resurgence that became public in the 60s.
00:01:05 ►
What we all sometimes forget, very conveniently forget I should add,
00:01:10 ►
is that Leary and Alpert and Metzner and Wheel, as well as the Merry Pranksters,
00:01:16 ►
were actually latecomers to the resurgence of interest in these substances.
00:01:20 ►
Now if you’re interested in the deep history of psychedelic research and use here in the States,
00:01:26 ►
I think the best place you can begin is by reading A Terrible Mistake by H.P. Albarelli.
00:01:33 ►
Although I’ve read a lot about the CIA psychedelic research programs designated Bluebird, Artichoke, and MKUltra,
00:01:41 ►
until Albarelli’s book came out in 2009, most of the information available was still highly
00:01:46 ►
classified. But a terrible mistake was written after the declassification of much of this material,
00:01:53 ►
and even if you’re a jaded cynic like I can be at times, the information in this book will most
00:01:59 ►
likely shock you. To see how this psychedelic research got started, it’s necessary to understand the mood of the country back in the 1950s and during the Korean War.
00:02:10 ►
Back then, the word brainwashing was heard everywhere.
00:02:13 ►
And so the U.S. government began conducting a significant amount of tests using psychoactive chemicals trying to learn more about mind control.
00:02:22 ►
trying to learn more about mind control.
00:02:27 ►
In fact, legend has it that the psychedelic experience Ken Kesey had,
00:02:30 ►
which inspired him to write One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,
00:02:33 ►
was part of an MKUltra experiment.
00:02:38 ►
However, I remember Kesey saying that his first trip was in a VA hospital.
00:02:44 ►
And if that was the case, then maybe he was a part of the Army’s psychedelic research program that was run out of the Edgewater Arsenal and not actually part of the MK Ultra project
00:02:49 ►
which the CIA was running. The big difference between these two programs was that in the
00:02:56 ►
Army’s projects, all of the subjects were aware that they were participating in psychedelic
00:03:00 ►
research and that they were going to be drugged. The CIA’s program, which is still located at Fort Detrick, by the way,
00:03:08 ►
was designed largely to study ways to drug unsuspecting subjects
00:03:13 ►
and see how they would react.
00:03:16 ►
As I mentioned, the thrust of this research was to find a chemical truth serum
00:03:20 ►
as well as to also find ways to counter these substances
00:03:24 ►
because it was known that
00:03:26 ►
the Soviet Union was doing the same thing at this time.
00:03:29 ►
Well, I’ve had the good fortune to talk with some of the senior participants in both
00:03:34 ►
MKUltra and in the Army’s program at Edgewater and elsewhere, and from what they told me,
00:03:39 ►
I’m convinced of the fact that there really were two radically different approaches being
00:03:44 ►
taken by the government in the area of neurological agents that there really were two radically different approaches being taken by the
00:03:45 ►
government in the area of neurological agents that could be used in war. I guess that the main reason
00:03:51 ►
I believe the Army’s program was more principled was that one of the lead investigators for the
00:03:57 ►
Army was Jim Ketchum, and Jim was introduced to me at Burning Man of all places by Sasha Shulgin,
00:04:03 ►
with whom he was a close friend.
00:04:06 ►
And after spending some time with the two of them, I remain convinced of the safety concerns that the Army used concerning this testing,
00:04:14 ►
compared with the CIA’s reckless projects that resulted in several deaths and other horrific episodes.
00:04:20 ►
Now the reason that I’m telling you this before I play this talk, rather than afterwards
00:04:25 ►
like I usually do, is that when you hear Watts describing the current unfolding of the acid scene
00:04:31 ►
in America, it was against the background of rumors about the government testing that had
00:04:36 ►
begun back in the 1950s and before. In fact, I’m sure that you’ve heard of Operation Paperclip,
00:04:42 ►
in which the U.S. sought out some of the top Nazi
00:04:45 ►
scientists and brought them back to the States. That’s how Wernher von Braun got here to lead our
00:04:50 ►
rocket program. What isn’t talked about as much has to do with the Nazi chemists who were saved.
00:04:57 ►
One of them, with a grant from the CIA after he got here to the States, led the team that created
00:05:03 ►
Agent Orange.
00:05:10 ►
Now just think about that the next time you hear the World War II generation called the Greatest Generation.
00:05:17 ►
Well, I’m not sure that the people who graced in so many Nazis during Operation Paperclip should be called great.
00:05:20 ►
Personally, I have nothing but contempt for them.
00:05:27 ►
Well, I’m not sure that I’ve done a very good job explaining the political atmosphere of the times when this talk was given,
00:05:34 ►
but if you keep in mind the fact that this was perhaps a decade before the so-called War on Drugs first began,
00:05:40 ►
well, it may help you to better understand some of Alan Watts’ points of view when this talk was first given.
00:05:43 ►
And so now, here is Alan Watts.
00:05:56 ►
Now, today, we are living in an age which is quite peculiar, because in the world of science, there are no longer any secrets, because the method of science requires that all scientists be in communication with each other,
00:06:08 ►
and therefore that every scientist, as soon as he has discovered something or got a good idea,
00:06:14 ►
he rushes into print, and it’s important for him to do so,
00:06:18 ►
because some other scientist somewhere else in the world might be thinking about something on the same lines and would be stimulated in his work by this man’s
00:06:26 ►
speculations even if not by discoverers.
00:06:30 ►
And so the whole scientific world tries to remain in communication.
00:06:37 ►
And for this reason
00:06:39 ►
it was absolutely impossible to keep atomic energy a secret.
00:06:44 ►
In former ages that might have been managed it was absolutely impossible to keep atomic energy a secret.
00:06:48 ►
In former ages, that might have been managed,
00:06:51 ►
because there were many secrets once upon a time.
00:06:54 ►
And people were not admitted to these secrets,
00:07:00 ►
unless they were in some way tested and found capable of handling them without running amok.
00:07:06 ►
We live in such a dangerous age, because all the secrets are are out in the open and anybody can run amok with them. And that’s just the situation we have to face
00:07:12 ►
and that is just the situation we have to handle. It is too late to stop it because
00:07:19 ►
that would be as they say, locking the door after the horse has bolted.
00:07:32 ►
The vice president of an extremely important corporation in the United States, very progressive and very vital, a few months ago said, there are two major forces operating in the world
00:07:40 ►
today, for good or for evil.
00:07:42 ►
One is Red China, the other is LSD. And there is a certain reason
00:07:52 ►
why such a thing as a certain chemical, which is capable of opening people’s minds in a certain way, should be something extremely disturbing.
00:08:09 ►
Because this particular chemical,
00:08:12 ►
in common with a number of others that have been known for centuries,
00:08:17 ►
but have been rather played cool through those centuries,
00:08:21 ►
is capable of doing something which simply cannot be tolerated.
00:08:33 ►
That is to say, capable of letting properly prepared individuals, or sometimes improperly
00:08:40 ►
prepared individuals, in on a secret which is very closely guarded and which is, as a
00:08:49 ►
matter of fact, the deepest and most fundamental of all our social taboos.
00:08:56 ►
I have just finished writing a book, which I’ve had, with a sort of tongue-in-cheek attitude,
00:09:02 ►
had the temerity to call the book.
00:09:03 ►
with a sort of tongue-in-cheek attitude, had the temerity to call the book.
00:09:11 ►
And it is subtitled, the book, you see, on the taboo against knowing who you are.
00:09:16 ►
Because that is really the thing that cannot be let out.
00:09:21 ►
Sex is not really a serious taboo in our culture.
00:09:28 ►
If you are initiating a young person into life, and you realize that your son or daughter is going to college and that you ought therefore to have a serious talk with them, they’ll
00:09:32 ►
laugh at you and say, all this thing you’re telling us about sex, we knew years ago.
00:09:37 ►
And we know more about it than you do.
00:09:41 ►
So that is not a subject for a serious initiation talk to a young person.
00:09:48 ►
So we have to think again and try and find out, think deeply,
00:09:53 ►
what is fundamentally taboo in this culture and perhaps in other cultures as well.
00:09:59 ►
What information, in other words, would really let the cat out of the bag
00:10:07 ►
and give away the show?
00:10:11 ►
Now, quest around a bit.
00:10:15 ►
Ask yourself this.
00:10:17 ►
For what reason would a person be considered
00:10:19 ►
hopelessly insane?
00:10:23 ►
What sort of claims must a person simply not make? Well, there is one, and that
00:10:35 ►
is if anybody claims that he is God. That simply isn’t done. Certainly not in our culture, although it’s very frequent in India. But
00:10:47 ►
in our culture, that is simply not allowed because we, most of us from a Christian background
00:10:54 ►
and if not that from a Jewish background, and there’s a great deal in common. Because
00:10:59 ►
both Christians and Jews are deeply concerned about somebody called Jesus Christ. Both Christians and Jews
00:11:07 ►
are in a way followers of Jesus Christ in different ways. He is a problem to both. Because
00:11:15 ►
he was the man who came out and discovered he was God. And that simply is impermissible.
00:11:30 ►
God. And that simply is impermissible. The Jews handled it in one way. The Christians handled it quite as effectively in another way. The Christians handled Jesus perfectly,
00:11:37 ►
even more tactfully than the Jews, by putting him on a pedestal and saying, this was the
00:11:43 ►
only man who ever was God.
00:11:45 ►
And nobody else was really so before.
00:11:48 ►
And certainly nobody can be so afterwards.
00:11:51 ►
Stop right there.
00:11:53 ►
Put him on the altar.
00:11:55 ►
Bow down to him.
00:11:56 ►
Worship him.
00:11:57 ►
So that everything he had to say will be null and void.
00:12:15 ►
and void. And it worked beautifully. But you see, the trouble about deep secrets is they can’t be repressed indefinitely. Now here’s the problem, you see, that there are certain processes, some of which are what you might call spiritual exercises,
00:12:30 ►
others are simply chemicals, others are just horse scents, whereby one comes to see very
00:12:39 ►
clearly indeed that black goes with white and self goes with other.
00:12:48 ►
And as this becomes clear to you,
00:12:51 ►
it’s rather shaking.
00:12:56 ►
Because, look,
00:12:58 ►
if what you define as you
00:13:00 ►
is inseparable
00:13:02 ►
from everything which you define as not you, just as front is inseparable
00:13:08 ►
from back, then you realize that deep down between self and other there is some sort
00:13:15 ►
of conspiracy.
00:13:18 ►
If these things always occur in combination and look very different from each other and feel quite different.
00:13:27 ►
Nevertheless, the feeling of difference between them allows each one to exist.
00:13:36 ►
And so underneath the opposition or the polarity between self and other or between any other
00:13:42 ►
pair of opposites you can think of, there is something in common as there is for example between figure and background
00:13:50 ►
you can’t see a figure without a background you can’t have an organism
00:13:55 ►
without an environment equally you can’t have a background without a figure or an
00:13:59 ►
environment without organisms in it or without things in it, or without things in it. You can’t have space which is unoccupied by any
00:14:09 ►
solid. You cannot have solids not occupying some space. This is absolutely elementary,
00:14:16 ►
and yet we don’t realize it. Because, for example, the average person thinks that space is nothing.
00:14:29 ►
That it’s just a sort of not-there-ness in which there are things.
00:14:35 ►
And we are slightly afraid that not-there-ness,
00:14:38 ►
that nothingness, that darkness, that the negative poles of all these oppositions will win.
00:14:42 ►
That they will eventually swallow up every kind of being
00:14:47 ►
and every kind of there-ness. But when you catch on to the game, you realize that that
00:14:53 ►
won’t happen. Because what is called not existing is quite incapable of being there without
00:15:01 ►
the contrast of something called existing. It’s like the crest and the trough of a wave.
00:15:07 ►
You can’t have a wave that is all trough and no crest,
00:15:10 ►
just as you can’t have a wave which is all crest and no trough.
00:15:13 ►
Such a thing has never been manifested in the physical universe.
00:15:17 ►
They go together.
00:15:20 ►
And that is the secret.
00:15:22 ►
There really is no other secret than that.
00:15:25 ►
But it is thoroughly repressed.
00:15:29 ►
And therefore, we are all educated to feel
00:15:33 ►
that we’ve got to fight for the white
00:15:36 ►
because the black might win.
00:15:40 ►
We’ve got to survive.
00:15:42 ►
You must survive.
00:15:45 ►
That’s the great thing we’re all working under.
00:15:47 ►
And pounding it out, day after day, anxiety.
00:15:51 ►
Because this is a description of anxiety.
00:15:54 ►
Anxiety is the fear that one of a pair of opposites might cancel the other.
00:15:59 ►
Forever.
00:16:01 ►
And if by any chance, by any means, you find out that that is not so,
00:16:07 ►
you have an entirely new attitude to what human beings are doing,
00:16:11 ►
which may be very creative, but which also may be very dangerous.
00:16:17 ►
You see through the game.
00:16:21 ►
The game called white must win because you know that neither black nor white are going to win
00:16:32 ►
because they belong to each other so one of the problems of the various chemicals which can change
00:16:41 ►
the human mind in certain ways so that it becomes apparent that inside and outside go together.
00:16:48 ►
Is that they do rather give the show away
00:16:51 ►
and people who take these chemicals and see through the human game
00:16:56 ►
cannot be trusted.
00:17:01 ►
They may decide to be good sports
00:17:03 ►
and go back into the game and play it as if it were for real.
00:17:08 ►
Or they may not.
00:17:10 ►
And if they don’t, what’s going to happen?
00:17:15 ►
Now, you see, what is, let me speak specifically for a moment,
00:17:19 ►
I said the subject of this is LSD.
00:17:22 ►
LSD is one such chemical
00:17:24 ►
that does produce this curious effect of making
00:17:30 ►
you aware of the polarity of things. It does lots of other things. It does lots of rather
00:17:37 ►
unessential and trivial things. And these, of course, in all the publicity in the various
00:17:41 ►
national magazines about LSD, get thoroughly emphasized. In other words, when somebody says something’s real psychedelic, they mean
00:17:51 ►
bizarre. And when the national magazines try to illustrate the effect of these chemicals
00:17:57 ►
with various photographs, they come on with blurred photographs of all sorts of things piggledy-piggledy messed together.
00:18:05 ►
Naked girls seen through prisms.
00:18:09 ►
Well, that’s absolutely nothing to do with it.
00:18:13 ►
If you wanted some sort of appropriate illustration
00:18:17 ►
for a Life magazine article on the effects of LSD,
00:18:23 ►
you would have one very simple solution.
00:18:26 ►
You would publish the most gorgeous
00:18:29 ►
color reproductions of Persian miniatures
00:18:32 ►
and of Moorish Arabesques
00:18:36 ►
and of the illuminations of Celtic manuscripts.
00:18:39 ►
That would give you the story.
00:18:41 ►
So far as changes in human sensation are concerned. But there
00:18:47 ►
would be one thing very difficult to put across in pictures, because the people who looked
00:18:52 ►
at them, if they didn’t get the point of view, wouldn’t see it. And that is what I
00:18:58 ►
will call the sensation, as well as the intellectual understanding of polarity.
00:19:09 ►
That is to say that the inside and the outside,
00:19:11 ►
the subjective and the objective,
00:19:14 ►
the self and the other, go together.
00:19:18 ►
In other words, there is a harmony,
00:19:20 ►
an unbreakable harmony.
00:19:22 ►
When I’m using the word harmony,
00:19:24 ►
I don’t necessarily mean something sweet.
00:19:32 ►
I mean absolute concordant relationship between what goes on inside your skin and what goes on outside your skin. It isn’t that what goes on outside is so powerful that it pushes around
00:19:40 ►
and controls what goes on inside. Equally so. It isn’t that what goes on inside is so
00:19:46 ►
strong that it often succeeds in pushing around what goes on outside. It is very simply that
00:19:52 ►
the two processes, the two behaviors, are one. What you do is what the universe does.
00:20:01 ►
is what the universe does.
00:20:04 ►
And what the universe does is also what you do.
00:20:07 ►
Not you in the sense
00:20:09 ►
of your superficial ego,
00:20:12 ►
which is a very small,
00:20:14 ►
little tiny area
00:20:15 ►
of your conscious sensitivity,
00:20:18 ►
but you in the sense
00:20:19 ►
of your total
00:20:20 ►
psychophysical organism,
00:20:23 ►
conscious as well as unconscious.
00:20:26 ►
This is not something that arrived in the world from somewhere else altogether, that
00:20:31 ►
confronts an alien reality.
00:20:34 ►
What you are is the universe, in fact the works, what there is and always has been and
00:20:42 ►
always will be forever and ever, performing an act called a John Doe.
00:20:48 ►
And this is such a subversion of common sense.
00:20:53 ►
But it’s a matter of fact something, if you stop to think about it,
00:20:56 ►
that is completely obvious.
00:20:59 ►
Only everything conspires to prevent you from seeing that obvious thing.
00:21:05 ►
Because when you were babies, practically,
00:21:08 ►
all your parents and your teachers and your aunts and uncles
00:21:11 ►
and your older brothers and sisters got together and they told you who you were.
00:21:16 ►
They defined you as
00:21:19 ►
Johnny, who is just Johnny.
00:21:23 ►
And don’t you come on too strong, Johnny, because, no, you’ve got elders and betters around here.
00:21:29 ►
But you’re responsible.
00:21:32 ►
You’re a free agent.
00:21:34 ►
You’d better be.
00:21:37 ►
And so, when you are told from childhood that you are expected and commanded to behave in a way that will be acceptable only if
00:21:46 ►
you do it voluntarily you remain permanently mixed up that if anything is permanent brain damage
00:21:56 ►
so but that’s the idea you see because that’s the game we’re playing
00:22:05 ►
you started it
00:22:06 ►
I didn’t
00:22:08 ►
see
00:22:09 ►
that’s the game we’re playing
00:22:11 ►
we can make all kinds of complexities out of that
00:22:14 ►
and really in a way have enormous fun
00:22:16 ►
but once anybody sees through that
00:22:20 ►
well we are frightened
00:22:22 ►
once you get this sense of polarity of your inside
00:22:28 ►
being the same process as your outside and your ego being one and the same
00:22:35 ►
process as the whole universe going on then we are afraid that people may say
00:22:41 ►
well good equals bad and we can do anything we like, and we needn’t in any
00:22:48 ►
way be further subject to the ordinary rules of human conduct, and we can wear what clothes we
00:22:54 ►
like or no clothes at all, we can have what sexual life we like, we can do anything, and we are going
00:23:02 ►
to generally, because the world is being rather oppressive towards us,
00:23:05 ►
challenge the whole thing and run amok.
00:23:07 ►
And a lot of people are doing just exactly that.
00:23:11 ►
So I want to introduce into this whole problem some ancient wisdom.
00:23:17 ►
I have really two things to talk about.
00:23:20 ►
How cultures, which always did know in some way,
00:23:24 ►
or among whom a large number of people always did know this secret,
00:23:28 ►
handled it.
00:23:30 ►
And then I want to make some observations about how we are trying to handle it
00:23:34 ►
and how it’s not going to work.
00:23:36 ►
Among the Hindus and among the Buddhists,
00:23:40 ►
this view of the real identity of a human being has always been known, at least by a very influential minority.
00:23:50 ►
The central doctrine of the Hindu way of life, I call it that rather than a religion, is in Sanskrit, Tattvamasi, you’re it. I put it in a kind of colloquial way. You’re it. And it is the witch than which
00:24:10 ►
there is no witcher, which they call the Brahman, or the Atman with a capital A meaning the
00:24:16 ►
self. You are only just kidding that you’re just poor little me. See, the function of a guru, that is to say a spiritual teacher in India,
00:24:28 ►
is to give you a funny look in the eye.
00:24:31 ►
Because you come to him and say, Mr. Guru, I have problems.
00:24:38 ►
I suffer and it’s a mess and I can’t control my mind and I’m miserable and depressed and so on.
00:24:44 ►
And he gives you a funny
00:24:45 ►
look. And you feel a bit nervous about the way he looks at you. Because he thinks, you know, he’s
00:24:53 ►
reading your thoughts. And this man is a great magician. He can read everything that’s in you.
00:24:58 ►
He knows right down into your unconscious. And you know all the dreadful things you’ve thought
00:25:02 ►
and all the awful desires you have
00:25:05 ►
and you are rather embarrassed that this man looks right through you and sees them all
00:25:08 ►
that’s not what he’s looking at he’s giving you a funny look for quite another reason altogether
00:25:15 ►
because he sees in you the brahman the god, just claiming it’s poor little me.
00:25:27 ►
And he’s going to eventually,
00:25:29 ►
by all sorts of subtle techniques that are called in Sanskrit upaya,
00:25:31 ►
that in politics means chicanery,
00:25:34 ►
and in spiritual education means
00:25:36 ►
skillful pedagogy,
00:25:38 ►
he is going to try and kid you back
00:25:41 ►
into realizing who you really are.
00:25:44 ►
That’s why he gives you a funny look. And why he seems to see right kid you back into realizing who you really are. That’s why he gives you a funny look.
00:25:47 ►
And why he seems to see right through you.
00:25:50 ►
As if to say, Shiva, old boy, don’t kid me.
00:25:53 ►
I know who you are.
00:25:55 ►
But you’re coming on beautifully in this act.
00:25:58 ►
That you’re somebody else altogether.
00:26:01 ►
And I congratulate you. You’re doing a wonderful job
00:26:04 ►
playing this part
00:26:06 ►
which you call the person my person you know a person is a fake it the word
00:26:12 ►
means a mask so if you read books on how to be a real person you’re reading books
00:26:16 ►
on how to be a genuine fake the word persona as you, means a mask worn in Greco-Roman drama.
00:26:30 ►
So if you come on to the guru and say, well, he asks you who you are.
00:26:34 ►
Sri Ramana Maharshi, when anybody came to him and they said to him, as people do,
00:26:36 ►
who was I in my last incarnation?
00:26:38 ►
Or will I be reincarnated again?
00:26:41 ►
He always replied, who’s asking the question?
00:26:45 ►
And everybody was irritated because he wouldn’t give them answers about what they were in their former lives.
00:26:47 ►
He just said, who are you?
00:26:51 ►
And he looked at you.
00:26:52 ►
Have you looked at photographs of this man?
00:26:54 ►
I keep a photograph of him
00:26:56 ►
close by because of the humor in his eyes.
00:26:59 ►
They’re looking at you with a dancing twinkle
00:27:01 ►
saying, come off it now then in these asiatic traditions it is well
00:27:15 ►
recognized that people who get the knowledge that you’re it may very well run amok. And therefore they always couple any method of gaining this, whether it is yoga, whether
00:27:30 ►
it is smoking something or drinking something or whatever is the method, they always couple
00:27:35 ►
it with a discipline.
00:27:37 ►
Now I know the word discipline isn’t very popular these days.
00:27:41 ►
And I would like to have a new word for it.
00:27:48 ►
these days. And I would like to have a new word for it. Because most people who teach disciplines don’t teach them very well. They teach it with a kind of violence. As if a
00:27:56 ►
discipline was something that is going to be extremely unpleasant and that you’re going
00:28:00 ►
to have to put up with. But that’s not the real secret of discipline. I would prefer to use the word skill.
00:28:09 ►
Discipline is a way of expression.
00:28:16 ►
Say you want to express your feelings in stone.
00:28:20 ►
Now stone doesn’t give way very easily.
00:28:23 ►
It’s tough stuff.
00:28:29 ►
And so you have to learn the skill or the discipline of the sculptor in order to express yourself in stone
00:28:31 ►
and so in every other way, whatever you do, you require a skill
00:28:34 ►
and it’s enormously important, especially for American people
00:28:38 ►
to understand that there is absolutely no possibility
00:28:42 ►
of having any pleasure in life at all without skill.
00:28:47 ►
Money doesn’t buy pleasure.
00:28:52 ►
Ever.
00:28:54 ►
Look, if you want to get stone drunk
00:28:57 ►
and go out and get a bottle of bourbon
00:29:00 ►
and down it,
00:29:01 ►
you can’t do that
00:29:02 ►
except for people who have practiced the distiller’s art.
00:29:07 ►
You can’t even make love
00:29:09 ►
without art.
00:29:12 ►
Where I live in Sausalito,
00:29:14 ►
we have a harbor
00:29:15 ►
full of ever so many pleasure craft.
00:29:18 ►
Motor cruises, sailing boats,
00:29:20 ►
all kinds of things.
00:29:21 ►
And they never leave the dock.
00:29:26 ►
All that happens with them is their owners have cocktail parties there on Saturdays and Sundays, because they discovered,
00:29:30 ►
having bought these things, that the discipline of sailing is difficult to learn and takes
00:29:35 ►
a lot of time. And they didn’t have pleasure in life without skill. But it
00:29:50 ►
isn’t an unpleasant task to learn a skill if the teacher, in the first place, gets you
00:29:58 ►
fascinated with it. There is immense pleasure in learning how to do anything skillfully.
00:30:04 ►
There is immense pleasure in learning how to do anything skillfully.
00:30:10 ►
To make carpentry things, to cook, to write, to calculate, anything you want.
00:30:14 ►
It can be immensely pleasurable to learn the discipline.
00:30:18 ►
And it is completely indispensable.
00:30:22 ►
Because, look, you may be a very inspired musician.
00:30:25 ►
I’m not a musical technologist, you see, and I regret it, but I’m a word technologist. But I can hear in my head all kinds of symphonies
00:30:33 ►
and all kinds of marvelous compositions, but I don’t have the technique to write them down
00:30:37 ►
on paper and share them with somebody else. Too bad. Maybe next time around.
00:30:55 ►
But you see, so far as words are concerned, I can express ideas because I have studied language.
00:31:02 ►
And I work very hard. Not that I didn’t like it. I intensely enjoy the work of writing a book.
00:31:06 ►
Although it is difficult. But it’s fascinating, to say what can never possibly be said. So, do you see what’s happening? What you have to
00:31:17 ►
do, you have inspiration, but then you have to have technique to incarnate, to express your inspiration. That is to say, to bring
00:31:28 ►
heaven down to earth, and to express heaven in terms of earth. Of course, they are really
00:31:34 ►
one behind the scenes, but there’s no way of pointing it out unless you do something
00:31:41 ►
skillful. You see, we are all at the moment absolutely in the midst of the beatific vision.
00:31:47 ►
We are all one with the divine.
00:31:50 ►
I don’t like that sort of wishy-washy language.
00:31:53 ►
But we are all there.
00:31:55 ►
But we are so much there that we’re like fish in water.
00:31:59 ►
They don’t know they’re in water.
00:32:00 ►
Like the birds don’t know they’re in the air
00:32:02 ►
because it’s all around them.
00:32:04 ►
And in the same way, we don’t know what the color of our eyes is.
00:32:07 ►
I don’t mean whether you’ve got blue or brown eyes, but the color of the lens of your eye.
00:32:10 ►
You call that transparent.
00:32:12 ►
No color.
00:32:13 ►
See, because you can’t see it.
00:32:15 ►
But it’s basic to being able to see anything.
00:32:18 ►
So in order to find out where you are, there has to be some way of drawing attention to
00:32:23 ►
it.
00:32:24 ►
And that involves
00:32:25 ►
skill. Upaya in Sanskrit. Skillful means. So, it’s all very well. Anybody can have ecstasy.
00:32:37 ►
Anybody, as a matter of fact, can become aware that he is one with the eternal ground of the universe.
00:32:48 ►
But since that’s what you are anyway,
00:32:49 ►
I’m going to ask, so what?
00:32:53 ►
When a hero goes on an adventure,
00:32:55 ►
and he leaves his people,
00:32:57 ►
and he’s going to a strange land,
00:33:01 ►
he can go away and just hide himself around the corner in an obscure house,
00:33:04 ►
and then appear a year later, and and say I’ve been on a heroic journey
00:33:05 ►
and tell all sorts of tales.
00:33:07 ►
And they say prove it.
00:33:09 ►
Because they expect him to bring back something.
00:33:12 ►
Something which nobody has seen before.
00:33:15 ►
Then they believe you’ve been on the journey.
00:33:18 ►
So in the same way exactly
00:33:19 ►
anybody who goes on a spiritual journey
00:33:22 ►
must bring something back.
00:33:26 ►
Because if you just say oh oh man, it was a gas.
00:33:31 ►
Anyone can say that.
00:33:35 ►
Now this is why in the doctrines of Buddhism,
00:33:38 ►
there is a differentiation between two kinds of enlightened beings.
00:33:44 ►
They are both forms of Buddha, which is to say the word Buddha means somebody who has awakened. There is a differentiation between two kinds of enlightened beings.
00:33:49 ►
They are both forms of Buddha, which is to say the word Buddha means somebody who has awakened,
00:33:52 ►
who has discovered the secret behind all this.
00:33:58 ►
In other words, all this thing we call life with its frantic concerns is a big act,
00:34:04 ►
which you, in your unconscious depth, are deliberately setting up.
00:34:08 ►
So you can do one of two things when you discover this.
00:34:10 ►
You can become what’s called a pratyeka buddha,
00:34:12 ►
that means a private buddha,
00:34:16 ►
who doesn’t tell anything.
00:34:19 ►
Or you can become a bodhisattva.
00:34:23 ►
A pratyeka buddha goes off into his ecstasy and never is seen again
00:34:25 ►
Bodhisattva is one who comes back
00:34:29 ►
and appears in the everyday world
00:34:31 ►
and plays the game of the everyday world
00:34:35 ►
by the rules of the everyday world
00:34:36 ►
but he brings with him Upaya
00:34:39 ►
he brings with him some way of showing that he’s been on the journey
00:34:43 ►
that he’s come back
00:34:44 ►
and he’s going to let’s been on the journey, that he’s come back, and he’s
00:34:46 ►
going to let you in on the secret too.
00:34:48 ►
If you, if, if, if, you’ll play it cool and also come back to join in the everyday life
00:34:57 ►
of everyday people.
00:34:59 ►
Because this is the rule.
00:35:01 ►
If the world is dramatic, if the world, as the Hindus say,
00:35:05 ►
is a big act put on by the divine self,
00:35:08 ►
one of the rules of coming on stage
00:35:10 ►
is that you don’t come on as yourself.
00:35:13 ►
You come on as the part that you’re going to play.
00:35:17 ►
It’s very bad form
00:35:19 ►
if an actor always acts the same way.
00:35:22 ►
That’s what’s called a star,
00:35:23 ►
as distinct from an actor.
00:35:27 ►
A real actor can become anything. And so, but in private life, well, he’s just Mr. Jones.
00:35:37 ►
And, but he doesn’t come on the stage that way. So in the same way, if you know that
00:35:42 ►
behind the scenes, in the depths, fundamentally, you are it, you don’t come on that way. So in the same way, if you know that behind the scenes, in the depths, fundamentally,
00:35:46 ►
you are it.
00:35:47 ►
You don’t come on that way.
00:35:49 ►
It always comes on as something else.
00:35:53 ►
That’s
00:35:54 ►
the rule of the stage.
00:35:56 ►
Because without that, there wouldn’t be a play.
00:35:58 ►
It would only be reality.
00:36:01 ►
No illusion.
00:36:02 ►
And the whole point
00:36:03 ►
of life is illusion
00:36:05 ►
from the word Latin luderi
00:36:08 ►
to play
00:36:09 ►
showbiz
00:36:12 ►
the show must go on
00:36:14 ►
so don’t give it away
00:36:15 ►
but truth has a way of leaking
00:36:18 ►
it gets out
00:36:20 ►
but then the important thing is you see
00:36:23 ►
when the truth gets out. But then the important thing is, you see, when the truth gets out,
00:36:26 ►
those who catch hold of it
00:36:30 ►
must find a way of staying in contact
00:36:34 ►
with what society calls reality.
00:36:38 ►
That is to say, if you have a radio,
00:36:41 ►
you don’t only need an antenna,
00:36:43 ►
you also need a ground.
00:36:45 ►
So what happens in the world of mysticism, of psychedelic visions, and so on, needs to be grounded.
00:36:54 ►
So then there are always two directions in which such a discipline works.
00:36:59 ►
One, preparatory. In other words, those who taught disciplines for awakening in the Orient
00:37:06 ►
were always careful to screen, first of all to screen those who applied,
00:37:12 ►
and then after screening them, to make them sensible.
00:37:17 ►
So that they knew how to handle the game of ordinary human existence
00:37:24 ►
and play it by the ordinary human rules.
00:37:27 ►
In other words, that they had strength of character and were not the sort of people
00:37:33 ►
who would be wiped out because they had no strength of character by an overwhelming experience.
00:37:40 ►
Then they let them in.
00:37:43 ►
But there are certain disciplines, such as Zen,
00:37:46 ►
where you get into the essential secret very early on in the discipline.
00:37:52 ►
And after that, they are concerned with much more training
00:37:56 ►
in showing you how to use it.
00:37:59 ►
How to use the power to use the vision which you have acquired.
00:38:04 ►
And so it is with the current, what
00:38:07 ►
we will call LSD scene that is raging through the United States, it unfortunately lacks
00:38:17 ►
discipline. And I’m not trying to say this in a kind of severe, authoritarian, paternalistic
00:38:26 ►
to say this in a kind of severe authoritarian paternalistic way but only that it would be so much more fun if it had it in other words when people try to express what they have seen in
00:38:37 ►
this kind of changed state of consciousness they show five movies going on at once projected upon torn bed sheets
00:38:47 ►
with stroboscopic lights going as fast as possible at the same time
00:38:51 ►
and eleven jazz bands playing
00:38:52 ►
and they’re going to blow their minds, baby
00:38:57 ►
and everybody else who hasn’t seen this thing
00:39:05 ►
look around and say, well, it’s a mess.
00:39:08 ►
I don’t like the looks of it.
00:39:10 ►
Let’s suppose that while you were very, very high on LSD,
00:39:14 ►
you looked into a filthy ashtray
00:39:16 ►
and you saw the beatific vision.
00:39:19 ►
Which is, of course, the case
00:39:21 ►
because wherever you look, if your eyes are open, you will see
00:39:26 ►
the face of the divine.
00:39:28 ►
Then you come out of your ecstasy with the dirty ashtray and say to everybody, here it
00:39:34 ►
is.
00:39:42 ►
No.
00:39:44 ►
There is a possibility if you are an extraordinarily skillful painter
00:39:48 ►
or even photographer
00:39:50 ►
of presenting the dirty ashtray
00:39:54 ►
so that everybody else will see
00:39:55 ►
almost what you saw in it.
00:39:58 ►
But you will have to have a technique
00:40:00 ►
which will translate every grain of ash into a jewel.
00:40:05 ►
Because that’s what you actually saw.
00:40:08 ►
But that requires mastery of an art.
00:40:12 ►
And I’m afraid people think
00:40:15 ►
that all it’s necessary to do
00:40:17 ►
is just throw out any old thing
00:40:22 ►
because under that transformed state of consciousness, any old thing is the works.
00:40:28 ►
But nobody else can see it if they haven’t shared that point of view.
00:40:33 ►
So then, this becomes for us in the United States an extremely important social problem.
00:40:41 ►
The cat is out of the bag.
00:40:44 ►
We are living in a scientific world
00:40:46 ►
where secrets cannot be kept
00:40:48 ►
and anyone anytime
00:40:51 ►
can pick up something
00:40:53 ►
which will short circuit
00:40:56 ►
all the ancient religious techniques
00:40:59 ►
yoga practice, meditation, etc.
00:41:02 ►
this is all very embarrassing
00:41:03 ►
but it will happen,
00:41:05 ►
not for everybody, but for a lot of people.
00:41:08 ►
And they will see what all those sages and Buddhas
00:41:12 ►
and yogis and prophets saw in ancient times.
00:41:17 ►
And it will be very clear.
00:41:20 ►
So what?
00:41:23 ►
So you see, you can say,
00:41:25 ►
look at all these people
00:41:28 ►
who haven’t seen it.
00:41:32 ►
This is a temptation.
00:41:34 ►
Look at them all going about their business,
00:41:37 ►
earning money
00:41:37 ►
and grinding it out at the bank
00:41:41 ►
or the insurance office
00:41:42 ►
or whatever it is every day
00:41:43 ►
and how serious they look all about it and they don’t really know it’s a game.
00:41:48 ►
And you can cultivate a certain contempt for people like that.
00:41:52 ►
But it’s very, very bad to do that.
00:41:56 ►
Because, of course, don’t forget they have a certain contempt for you.
00:42:03 ►
You see, always the nice people in town
00:42:06 ►
who live in the best residences
00:42:08 ►
they know that they’re nice
00:42:13 ►
because there are some people on the other side of the tracks
00:42:16 ►
who are not nice
00:42:17 ►
and so at their cocktail parties
00:42:21 ►
they have a lot to say about the people who are not nice
00:42:24 ►
because that boosts their collective ego At their cocktail parties, they have a lot to say about the people who are not nice,
00:42:28 ►
because that boosts their collective ego.
00:42:31 ►
There would be no other way of doing it.
00:42:35 ►
You don’t know that you’re a law-abiding citizen unless there are some people who aren’t.
00:42:40 ►
And if it’s important to you to congratulate yourself on being law-abiding,
00:42:43 ►
you therefore have to have some criminal classes.
00:42:45 ►
Outside the pale, of course,
00:42:51 ►
of your immediate associates. On the other hand, the people who are not nice, they have their parties. And they boost their collective ego by saying that they’re the people who
00:42:56 ►
are really in. Whereas these poor squares who deliver the mail faithfully and who carry on what you call responsible jobs.
00:43:05 ►
They’re just dupes.
00:43:08 ►
Or when they earn their money,
00:43:10 ►
all they do is they buy toy rocket ships with it
00:43:12 ►
and go roaring around and so on.
00:43:15 ►
And they think that’s pleasure.
00:43:17 ►
So the people who are not nice
00:43:18 ►
boost their collective ego in that way.
00:43:21 ►
Neither of them realizing
00:43:22 ►
that they need the other
00:43:24 ►
just as much as a flower needs a
00:43:25 ►
bee and a bee needs a flower. So when you see the people who you think are not in on
00:43:34 ►
the secret, if you really understand, you have to revise your opinion completely and
00:43:41 ►
say that the squares are the people who are really far out because they
00:43:46 ►
don’t even know where they started see an enlightened Hindu or Buddhist looks
00:43:55 ►
at the ignorant people of this world and says my respects because here I see the divine essence
00:44:05 ►
having altogether forgotten what it is
00:44:07 ►
and playing the most far out game of being completely lost.
00:44:14 ►
Congratulations. How far out can you get?
00:44:23 ►
So if you understand that, you don’t start a war with people you might say are square.
00:44:30 ►
Don’t challenge them.
00:44:32 ►
Don’t bug them.
00:44:33 ►
Don’t frighten them.
00:44:36 ►
The reason is not because they are immature, because they are babies and you mustn’t scare babies.
00:44:41 ►
It’s nothing to do with that.
00:44:43 ►
You mustn’t frighten them because they are doing a very far out act.
00:44:46 ►
They are walking on a tightrope miles up
00:44:49 ►
and they’ve got to do that balancing act
00:44:52 ►
and if you shout they may lose their nerve.
00:44:55 ►
See, that’s what we call
00:44:57 ►
the responsible people of the world are doing.
00:44:59 ►
It is an act.
00:45:00 ►
It’s a game just like the tightrope walker.
00:45:01 ►
But it’s a risky one
00:45:03 ►
and you can get ulcers from it.
00:45:05 ►
And all sorts of troubles.
00:45:07 ►
But you must respect it.
00:45:09 ►
And say, congratulations on being so far out.
00:45:14 ►
So now.
00:45:16 ►
This is the whole essence, you see, of seeing.
00:45:19 ►
If you really see into this secret.
00:45:23 ►
That the world doesn’t contain any serious threats in it because
00:45:29 ►
it’s all the basic you running up behind itself and saying boo to see if you can get yourself
00:45:34 ►
to jump out of your skin.
00:45:39 ►
If you see that, be cool.
00:45:43 ►
That’s the whole art of Zen, you know, is cool Hinduism.
00:45:49 ►
The Hindus come on a little strong.
00:45:52 ►
When someone like Sri Ramakrishna,
00:45:54 ►
or openly, pretty much openly announces that he’s the godhead,
00:45:59 ►
that’s a little tough.
00:46:01 ►
And when Sri Ramana accepts the puja of all the followers
00:46:06 ►
and Sri Aurobindo sits every day for darshan,
00:46:09 ►
it’s coming on a little strong.
00:46:12 ►
Well, the Zen people feel that that’s just a bit too much.
00:46:17 ►
And the way they come on is they’re ordinary.
00:46:24 ►
And they say,
00:46:25 ►
when two Zen masters meet each other on the road,
00:46:28 ►
they need no introduction.
00:46:30 ►
When thieves meet,
00:46:31 ►
they recognize each other instantly.
00:46:39 ►
So they don’t say anything,
00:46:41 ►
don’t make any claims.
00:46:43 ►
As a matter of fact,
00:46:44 ►
so far from making claims, all good Zen masters say, they have not say anything, don’t make any claims. As a matter of fact, so far from making claims,
00:46:45 ►
all good Zen masters say they have not attained anything,
00:46:49 ►
they have nothing to teach, and that’s the truth.
00:46:56 ►
Because anybody who tells you that he is some way of leading you to spiritual enlightenment
00:47:03 ►
is just like somebody who picks your pocket and sells you your own watch.
00:47:09 ►
Of course, if you didn’t know you had a watch,
00:47:11 ►
that might be the only way of getting you to realize it.
00:47:21 ►
Now,
00:47:22 ►
so then,
00:47:34 ►
Now, so then, if though the people who do, by one means or another, prepared or unprepared, disciplined or undisciplined, get into this kind of interior secret about the nature of
00:47:40 ►
the universe, and they have hitherto been insecure about themselves. They’re going to use this secret as some way of creating trouble and of stirring things up and of boosting
00:47:51 ►
their own inadequate character structure, which is a word I prefer to use instead of
00:47:55 ►
ego. Then there’s trouble. Because those people who are out there on the tightrope are going to get pretty scared.
00:48:07 ►
And they’re going to call in the police
00:48:09 ►
and say this has got to stop.
00:48:14 ►
So then we have a situation right like that now.
00:48:18 ►
And I want to make a few comments about it.
00:48:23 ►
First of all,
00:48:30 ►
the major group, it seems to me, that are crying panic about LSD are psychoanalysts. To them, this sort of thing is extremely threatening, because psychoanalysis
00:48:40 ►
in its theory, whether it be Freudian or whether it be Jungian,
00:48:47 ►
has a theory of the unconscious,
00:48:53 ►
which is not unrelated to the general philosophy of science of the 19th century,
00:49:00 ►
which is that the unconscious, called the libido by the Freudians, is totally uncivilized blind lust.
00:49:11 ►
For the Jungians it may be something even more dangerous than that.
00:49:16 ►
Because they have not settled for the idea that it’s a sexual unconscious.
00:49:21 ►
It may be much more sinister than that.
00:49:27 ►
Deep down there is the spider mother.
00:49:34 ►
There are the screaming memes at the bottom of that pit. And Esther Harding in her book Psychic Energy says that civilization is a mere veneer over the abysmal depths of primeval
00:49:40 ►
slime, in which there are the great serpents and appalling influences just waiting for a
00:49:46 ►
chance to get up there and raise hell so if you are psychoanalytically oriented you are
00:49:52 ►
necessarily terrified of the unconscious but you’ve learned a trick let’s say the old-fashioned
00:49:59 ►
christians they discipline the unconscious with a club. Bible and birch rod.
00:50:06 ►
See?
00:50:07 ►
And they knocked it down.
00:50:08 ►
Freudian said, no.
00:50:10 ►
This is a very dangerous creature,
00:50:12 ►
but you’ve got to train it in a different way,
00:50:14 ►
like a good horse trainer.
00:50:14 ►
It doesn’t use the whip, but lumps of sugar.
00:50:18 ►
But it’s still the same animal.
00:50:21 ►
In other words, this whole philosophy of Western man,
00:50:24 ►
as it crystallized
00:50:25 ►
in the late 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries
00:50:27 ►
is that what we call humanity
00:50:30 ►
consciousness, spirituality, values
00:50:33 ►
is simply a veneer
00:50:34 ►
the real thing underneath, the gutsy thing
00:50:36 ►
is a terrible monster
00:50:37 ►
and watch out for that
00:50:39 ►
so anything that happens
00:50:40 ►
that might let that creature loose
00:50:42 ►
is looked upon by psychoanalysis as terrible
00:50:44 ►
I’m not going to accuse them of worrying about LSD that happens that might let that creature loose is looked upon by psychoanalysis as terrible.
00:50:49 ►
I’m not going to accuse them of worrying about LSD because they think they’re going to be put out of a job.
00:50:52 ►
I don’t think that LSD is an automatic psychotherapy at all.
00:50:57 ►
It needs, if you’re going to use it for that purpose, you need psychotherapy in the ordinary
00:51:03 ►
way along with it.
00:51:04 ►
LSD is simply
00:51:05 ►
an exploratory instrument, like a microscope or a telescope, except this one’s inside
00:51:10 ►
you instead of outside you. And according to your capacity and knowledge, you can use
00:51:15 ►
a microscope or a telescope to advantage. So in the same way, according to your capacity
00:51:19 ►
and your knowledge, you can use an interior instrument to your advantage. Or just for kicks.
00:51:28 ►
But when these people, you know, really feel threatened by this thing,
00:51:32 ►
they start sending around messages and public utterances
00:51:36 ►
which sound exactly as if they had taken LSD and had a bad trip with it
00:51:41 ►
and were coming on paranoid.
00:51:43 ►
had had a bad trip with it, and were coming on paranoid.
00:51:54 ►
So they are spreading subtle rumors that this substance causes permanent brain damage and utter destruction of the superego.
00:52:00 ►
There are people in New York, likewise, who are spreading around the idea that you see,
00:52:05 ►
once this thing has touched you, you are as if you’ve had a prefrontal lobotomy.
00:52:13 ►
You are somebody who ought to be put in a concentration camp because you’ve lost your conscience.
00:52:19 ►
You’re out of order.
00:52:21 ►
Nothing more can be done about it.
00:52:22 ►
Now, do you see how alarming that could be in our day and age?
00:52:24 ►
Do you think that your brother, your aunt
00:52:28 ►
has got permanent brain damage? Took some LSD?
00:52:31 ►
You see, the situation is exactly parallel. You know the thing that we learn from history
00:52:35 ►
is nobody ever learns from history.
00:52:39 ►
Consider, just go back a few hundred years
00:52:42 ►
to the days of the Inquisition and realize that the theologians
00:52:49 ►
of the church were in those days accorded the same kind of respect that we now accord to the
00:52:55 ►
professor of pathology at the University of California Medical School or to the professor
00:53:01 ►
of physics at Caltech. We think those people are real authorities.
00:53:06 ►
They know it works.
00:53:08 ►
They’ve experimented.
00:53:09 ►
They have knowledge.
00:53:10 ►
They’re the wisest people in our society.
00:53:12 ►
All right, a few hundred years ago, so were the theologians.
00:53:16 ►
And they had the same sense of responsibility towards the community
00:53:19 ►
that our great scientists and physicians have today.
00:53:24 ►
And they knew there was a thing called heresy going around.
00:53:29 ►
That was not only capable, once you caught heresy,
00:53:34 ►
of making you damned to hell forever and ever and ever,
00:53:40 ►
to the most unimaginable tortures that would go on without end,
00:53:46 ►
but that it was infectious.
00:53:48 ►
And one heretic would soon make other heretics.
00:53:52 ►
So those entirely humanitarian and merciful church fathers got together and said, what
00:53:57 ►
are we going to do to stop this?
00:53:59 ►
Well, now they knew there is an eternal life beyond the grave.
00:54:03 ►
And so perhaps, just in the same way as if you’ve got a cancer, and that’s something
00:54:07 ►
terrible because it might spread and destroy the whole body, cut it out, even burn it out
00:54:11 ►
if you have to.
00:54:12 ►
And a little pain on the part of the patient for several months on the end of tubes won’t
00:54:16 ►
be too bad if you get rid of it.
00:54:18 ►
So they said, we’ve got to torture these people.
00:54:20 ►
Because they might, in the middle of this extreme experience, recant.
00:54:25 ►
And if they won’t recant, we’ll burn them,
00:54:27 ►
because there’s just the chance that in the agony of burning at the stake,
00:54:31 ►
they will say at the end,
00:54:32 ►
Oh God, forgive me for my sins, and it’ll be all right.
00:54:38 ►
Now realize the absolutely merciful intent behind the inquisitors.
00:54:44 ►
Perfectly responsible, acting on the best knowledge that they had in their day.
00:54:48 ►
Don’t you see how that can happen again any time?
00:54:53 ►
Permanent brain damage.
00:54:55 ►
People lost their sense of social responsibility, utterly destroyed by taking the wrong kind of drug.
00:55:01 ►
Now, dear friends, there is absolutely no evidence for this kind of thing whatsoever.
00:55:06 ►
The only brain damage that is, I’ve just checked this out with the most eminent authorities
00:55:11 ►
in this area on the subject, that the only permanent damage that’s been perpetrated,
00:55:18 ►
and even that wasn’t permanent, was on some cats who were given doses that would be equivalent
00:55:24 ►
to a human being to over 2,000
00:55:26 ►
micrograms of LSD, the normal dosage for a human being being about 1 to 200.
00:55:34 ►
But give a cat the equivalent for a human being of 2,000 micrograms, there will be synaptic
00:55:42 ►
defects that are called acute as distinct from chronic.
00:55:47 ►
That means they will disappear
00:55:48 ►
after a little while.
00:55:52 ►
This has been worked out carefully.
00:55:55 ►
And there is no evidence whatsoever
00:55:58 ►
of any
00:56:01 ►
serious neurological damage
00:56:03 ►
to a human being,
00:56:05 ►
except in cases where A,
00:56:08 ►
they may have taken an absurdly large dose,
00:56:11 ►
or B, taken it in conjunction with some other form of drug,
00:56:17 ►
an amphetamine, a barbiturate,
00:56:19 ►
or something like methadone, a narcotic,
00:56:22 ►
which did indeed cut off the oxygen
00:56:26 ►
supply to the brain and therefore caused some damage.
00:56:31 ►
So
00:56:31 ►
this scare talk
00:56:33 ►
is simply without foundation.
00:56:36 ►
But nevertheless, there are certain reasons
00:56:38 ►
to be cautious and
00:56:39 ►
for those who understand
00:56:42 ►
the operation of these chemicals to issue
00:56:44 ►
certain clear warnings.
00:56:48 ►
And this I want to talk about quite seriously.
00:56:54 ►
Now this class of psychotropic chemicals, which includes LSD, mescaline,
00:57:01 ►
and its original form peyote, psilocybin, cannabis, and so on,
00:57:06 ►
which is a very mild psychotropic.
00:57:10 ►
These do not, in moderation and proper use in any way,
00:57:16 ►
harm the physical organism,
00:57:19 ►
nor form such habits that you can’t get rid of them without unpleasant withdrawal symptoms.
00:57:27 ►
But, if you take them in absurdly large doses, you are in for trouble.
00:57:33 ►
I knew a Methodist minister who was a very violent teetotalitarian and became extremely
00:57:39 ►
sick from drinking too much milk.
00:57:44 ►
So, after all, if you sit down and you buy a bottle of whiskey, which you can get at
00:57:47 ►
any store, anywhere, perfectly legit, and you consume the one quart of whiskey in one
00:57:54 ►
hour, you can expect trouble.
00:57:56 ►
So in the same way, if you’ve got LSD or something of that kind and you take a thousand
00:58:01 ►
micrograms because some friend of yours took 500 and you want to one-up him,
00:58:08 ►
watch out. You’re being just stupid.
00:58:10 ►
Furthermore,
00:58:11 ►
you’re being rather stupid if you buy the kind
00:58:14 ►
of LSD that is currently being circulated
00:58:16 ►
in the black market.
00:58:19 ►
Because
00:58:19 ►
for two reasons.
00:58:21 ►
You don’t know what else is in it
00:58:23 ►
and you don’t know how much is in it. And you don’t know how much is in it.
00:58:27 ►
There are two sorts of producers of LSD on the black market.
00:58:31 ►
One is the enthusiastic graduate student in chemistry
00:58:33 ►
who wants to turn the whole world on.
00:58:39 ►
And his product is apt to be pretty good,
00:58:42 ►
but excessive in dosage.
00:58:45 ►
And what says 100 micrograms may well be 300.
00:58:50 ►
There is another kind of producer who wants to make a good thing out of it,
00:58:55 ►
who wants to give you a big jazz, but he’ll mix it with amphetamines.
00:59:01 ►
There’s another more sinister kind of producer who’ll either cut the amount or mix it with heroin
00:59:06 ►
or anything, any other substance,
00:59:10 ►
maybe, again, amphetamines or whatever,
00:59:13 ►
who’ll get you hooked on it.
00:59:17 ►
So there is no control of the quality
00:59:19 ►
of what is being circulated.
00:59:21 ►
None whatever.
00:59:22 ►
And you just don’t know what you’re getting.
00:59:27 ►
Now this
00:59:27 ►
situation is the result
00:59:30 ►
of
00:59:32 ►
the fact that the United
00:59:33 ►
States never learns from history.
00:59:37 ►
It is
00:59:38 ►
the same old story of prohibition.
00:59:40 ►
To think the naive notion
00:59:42 ►
that you can control
00:59:44 ►
something that might turn into a social evil by handing it over to the police.
00:59:51 ►
Now, after all, who pays the police? You do.
00:59:57 ►
And if you can’t control yourself, the police won’t control you either.
01:00:02 ►
But in lieu of controlling you, they can suppress you.
01:00:07 ►
Now, in all conscience,
01:00:08 ►
the police have enough to do.
01:00:11 ►
Not only to control the traffic,
01:00:14 ►
which gets worse every day
01:00:15 ►
by virtue of Parkinson’s law,
01:00:17 ►
but also all the possibilities
01:00:19 ►
of robbery, violence, murder,
01:00:21 ►
and so on and so forth,
01:00:22 ►
which is a full-time job.
01:00:24 ►
But to ask the police to go and look for people who have LSD or marijuana or heroin or opium
01:00:33 ►
or whatever, or who are living irregular sex lives, or who have a gambling joint or a whorehouse,
01:00:39 ►
this is to ask the police to act as officers of the state in service of the church.
01:00:46 ►
Uniformed ministers.
01:00:50 ►
And that’s not their job.
01:00:52 ►
And when the police are asked to do that,
01:00:59 ►
they are put by lawmakers into a position which brings them into public disrespect,
01:01:01 ►
as it did in the days of prohibition. It is not fair to the police.
01:01:05 ►
Because if you send the police to hunt out LSD,
01:01:09 ►
it is a far more tough job than looking for a needle in a haystack.
01:01:13 ►
LSD can be disguised as anything whatsoever.
01:01:18 ►
It can be mixed with gum and put on an envelope.
01:01:21 ►
It can be entirely absorbed, vast quantities of it, into a piece of Kleenex.
01:01:26 ►
The alcoholic base is then allowed to evaporate, and nobody would know it from any other dirty
01:01:30 ►
piece of Kleenex that somebody stuck away in his pocket. It can then be reactivated.
01:01:35 ►
It can be made into lacquer to coat pins with. Anything. It can be disguised as peanut butter, orange juice, aspirin, just sugar, anything you want.
01:01:47 ►
And it’s very difficult indeed to detect.
01:01:51 ►
So when you try to suppress that sort of thing by law,
01:01:54 ►
you leave the gates wide open for every kind of blackmail.
01:01:58 ►
You want to get rid of your wife?
01:02:00 ►
Or your unfortunate business competitor?
01:02:03 ►
Just slip them some.
01:02:04 ►
And then arrange by a roundabout way to tip off the cops. Or your unfortunate business competitor? Just slip them some.
01:02:07 ►
And then arrange by a roundabout way to tip off the cops.
01:02:10 ►
The senator you don’t like?
01:02:11 ►
Political rival? Psst!
01:02:15 ►
You see, any law of this nature,
01:02:18 ►
any law which in a way tries to enforce by the power of the state private morals,
01:02:24 ►
or your own business
01:02:25 ►
in looking after your own nervous system
01:02:27 ►
is in effect an unenforceable law.
01:02:32 ►
And all unenforceable laws
01:02:33 ►
lead to blackmail
01:02:35 ►
and public demoralization.
01:02:40 ►
The only way to handle
01:02:42 ►
a thing of this kind
01:02:43 ►
is to bring it all out into the open.
01:02:48 ►
Nothing can be controlled when it’s driven underground.
01:02:51 ►
It ought to be controlled.
01:02:53 ►
Just in the same way as we have learned how to control automobiles,
01:02:57 ►
we license people to drive them.
01:02:59 ►
So in the same way, we don’t sell liquor to miners.
01:03:04 ►
We expect them to have some kind of
01:03:05 ►
education and grown-up responsibility before they go boozing around so in
01:03:10 ►
exactly the same way society has got to face the fact that it’s going to have to
01:03:14 ►
license people for certain spiritual adventures or perhaps just plain
01:03:21 ►
pleasures if that’s what you want to call it after After all, you can’t even join some churches without,
01:03:27 ►
can’t join the Catholic Church without taking a course of instruction.
01:03:30 ►
That takes a few weeks, and then they put you through an initiation.
01:03:35 ►
And you may say when you get through that,
01:03:37 ►
well, what was all that preparation for?
01:03:39 ►
I didn’t feel anything.
01:03:43 ►
But so in exactly the same way with this it is completely urgent in
01:03:47 ►
other words that we prevent the occurrence of a very serious socially
01:03:54 ►
destructive criminal situation created by law you’ve heard of yatra genic
01:04:00 ►
diseases that means diseases caused by physicians. There are nomogenic diseases, or shall we
01:04:07 ►
say nomogenic crimes. Like somebody said, the only serious side effect of marijuana
01:04:13 ►
is that you may go to jail. This is a nomogenic crime. In other words, it is a ritual crime.
01:04:21 ►
In exactly the same way that when the early Christians refused to burn incense in front of the Roman gods,
01:04:25 ►
in whom the Romans themselves didn’t believe,
01:04:29 ►
they were guilty
01:04:30 ►
of a crime. It was a ritual crime.
01:04:32 ►
And they refused. A reasonable
01:04:34 ►
man like the Emperor Marcus Aurelius said to the
01:04:36 ►
Christians, now come on. Really?
01:04:38 ►
Do you have to refuse to burn incense?
01:04:40 ►
They said, yes. We’re serious
01:04:42 ►
about it.
01:04:49 ►
So these are are ritual crimes and so in the same way
01:04:51 ►
various ritual crimes exist
01:04:54 ►
and our police, poor devils, are supposed to enforce it
01:04:58 ►
and if they don’t they’re going to get it from the politicians
01:04:59 ►
because the politicians have made all the old ladies
01:05:02 ►
up in Glendale scared and Pasadena and so on.
01:05:06 ►
They’re all just terrified about this.
01:05:08 ►
And so the politician gets the votes of those old ladies.
01:05:13 ►
And the police have to do what the politician tells them to do.
01:05:16 ►
And you know, the police, they’re just people.
01:05:22 ►
It’s a terrible thing to put the police in a position
01:05:25 ►
where they’re going to earn public disrespect
01:05:27 ►
by enforcing or trying to enforce
01:05:32 ►
unenforceable laws
01:05:33 ►
so I would say in general
01:05:36 ►
to sum up
01:05:36 ►
substances like LSD
01:05:40 ►
which give away a secret
01:05:43 ►
about the nature of the social game, the human game,
01:05:49 ►
and what underlies it, are potentially dangerous. Of course, like any good thing
01:05:58 ►
is, electricity is dangerous, fire is dangerous, cars are dangerous, planes are
01:06:02 ►
dangerous, but not so dangerous as driving on the freeway.
01:06:08 ►
The only way to handle danger is to face it.
01:06:13 ►
If you start getting frightened of it,
01:06:16 ►
then you make it worse.
01:06:20 ►
Because you project onto it all kinds of bogeys and threats
01:06:23 ►
which don’t exist in it at all.
01:06:27 ►
So this is also a rule.
01:06:29 ►
And please, anybody here who’s a psychotherapist, if he doesn’t know this already, take note.
01:06:35 ►
If you get someone thrown on your hands,
01:06:38 ►
who as a result of taking any psychotropic drug,
01:06:42 ►
is in a psychotic state,
01:06:46 ►
don’t be frightened.
01:06:49 ►
Because the moment you’re afraid,
01:06:51 ►
your patient will pick up your fear by a kind of osmosis
01:06:54 ►
and get worse.
01:06:58 ►
The rule about all terrors,
01:07:00 ►
going back to where I started from,
01:07:02 ►
the dweller on the threshold,
01:07:04 ►
the rule for all terrors
01:07:06 ►
is head straight into them.
01:07:08 ►
When you are sailing in a storm
01:07:10 ►
you don’t let a wave
01:07:12 ►
hit your boat on the side.
01:07:14 ►
You go bow into the wave
01:07:16 ►
and ride it.
01:07:20 ►
So in the same way
01:07:21 ►
old folklore says
01:07:23 ►
this is an old wives tale with a lot of truth in it,
01:07:26 ►
whenever you meet a ghost, don’t run away.
01:07:29 ►
Because the ghost will capture the substance of your fear and materialize itself out of your own substance.
01:07:37 ►
And will kill you eventually, because it will take over all your own vitality.
01:07:43 ►
So then, whenever confronted with a ghost,
01:07:46 ►
walk straight into it, and it will disappear.
01:07:50 ►
And so in the same way, when people stir up the depths of the unconscious,
01:07:55 ►
and are confronted with their own monsters,
01:07:58 ►
or with the terrors of discovering that they’re in a relativistic world,
01:08:01 ►
where black implies white, and white implies black, so who’s in charge?
01:08:05 ►
You know,
01:08:06 ►
grandfather’s dead,
01:08:08 ►
father’s dead too,
01:08:09 ►
this leaves me.
01:08:11 ►
Ooh, who’s the authority?
01:08:15 ►
See?
01:08:15 ►
When you get that
01:08:16 ►
that sense of terror,
01:08:20 ►
go right at it.
01:08:21 ►
Don’t run away.
01:08:24 ►
Explore. Feel fear as completely as you can feel it.
01:08:28 ►
Head straight into it.
01:08:29 ►
And just it so happens that these things give you the property
01:08:31 ►
and the opportunity, let me put it that way,
01:08:34 ►
the opportunity to go into some of your
01:08:38 ►
very, very most closely kept skeletons.
01:08:43 ►
And the result of that is invariably beneficial.
01:08:47 ►
It seems to me that maybe the best thing
01:08:49 ►
that you and I can do right now,
01:08:51 ►
as we face this uncertain future that lies ahead,
01:08:54 ►
is to keep the old faith and stay high.
01:08:58 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off
01:09:01 ►
from Cyberdallic Space.
01:09:03 ►
Be well, my friends.