602 - RAW Theology

Program Notes

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson

Date this lecture was recorded: Sometime in 1987.]

[NOTE: All quotations are by Robert Anton Wilson.]

There truly is no way to succinctly describe a talk by Robert Anton Wilson. This is one that you will want to listen to more than once.

“The first time I tried [ketamine] I had an experience unique in my whole life. I was absolutely convinced I was god. I have had that suspicion on occasion, but this time I was absolutely convinced.”

“I’m really not about to set up as an exponent/proponent telling people to go around trying [ketamine]. It’s a very interesting experience, but I think it’s post-graduate work for those who have already been through the more elementary courses. I don’t recommend it for beginners.”

“I think that the best way to achieve immortality is by not dying at all.”

Download a free copy of Lorenzo’s latest book
The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1

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 before I introduce today’s talk, I want to point out something from last week’s podcast with Alan Watts that I forgot to mention.

00:00:32 ►

In his presentation, Watts seemed a little bit dismissive about the then-current adventures of Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary.

00:00:40 ►

Basically, he seemed to think that they weren’t being very professional.

00:00:43 ►

Basically, he seemed to think that they weren’t being very professional.

00:00:53 ►

Well, if you go back to some of my early podcasts and listen to the three interviews that I recorded with Myron Stolaroff under the title Lone Pine Stories,

00:00:57 ►

somewhere in one of those you’re going to hear the rest of the story about Alan Watts.

00:01:03 ►

So what happened, I guess it was probably a year or so after Watts gave the talk that we listened to last week, is that Al Hubbard and Myron Stoleroff both thought that somebody needed to have a talk with Leary

00:01:09 ►

and try to calm him down a bit and nudge him back into the shadows.

00:01:13 ►

So they enlisted Alan Watts to travel to the Millbrook estate in New York,

00:01:18 ►

where Leary and his gang were ingesting a lot of LSD.

00:01:22 ►

And Watts was to try to talk Leary into being a little less public about

00:01:26 ►

this work. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s such a cool story. I can still remember

00:01:32 ►

sitting at Myron’s dining room table when he told me this story, and I asked him how that trip by

00:01:38 ►

Watts worked out, because it didn’t seem like the Millbrook work calmed down very much. And that’s when Myron slapped

00:01:45 ►

his forehead with the palm of his hand and said, well, Watts went native on us and joined them.

00:01:52 ►

Unfortunately, I never followed up about that, and so I don’t know if Myron was exaggerating or

00:01:58 ►

if Alan Watts actually did join the fun and games at Millbrook. Maybe somebody will post an answer

00:02:03 ►

to that question in the comment section for last week’s podcast, which you will find at psychedelicsalon.com.

00:02:10 ►

Anyway, today we’re going to get to hear from someone many of our fellow saloners have been

00:02:15 ►

asking for for a long time, Robert Anton Wilson. And like in the case of Alan Watts, there

00:02:22 ►

really isn’t much that I can say in the way of an introduction,

00:02:25 ►

since most of us here in the salon are already familiar with his books and talks.

00:02:30 ►

And, while you don’t have to listen to this talk while you’re stoned,

00:02:34 ►

in my opinion, it can only enhance your enjoyment of this talk.

00:02:38 ►

Of course, I’ve listened to this talk now both straight and stoned,

00:02:42 ►

and for what it’s worth, I think that stoned is better.

00:02:45 ►

Of course, I think that everything is better when you’re stoned, so I guess that advice isn’t worth all that much after all.

00:02:52 ►

In any event, no matter what state you’re in right now, I think this is going to be a really fun talk for you to listen to.

00:03:00 ►

So now, here is the one and only Robert Anton Wilson.

00:03:03 ►

So now, here is the one and only Robert Anton Wilson.

00:03:09 ►

Since it is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception,

00:03:13 ►

how many people know what the Immaculate Conception is at all?

00:03:15 ►

I live in Ireland where everybody knows.

00:03:20 ►

The Immaculate Conception is the conception of the BVM,

00:03:22 ►

that’s the Blessed Virgin Mary.

00:03:26 ►

And she was immaculately conceived.

00:03:29 ►

That means she was conceived without sin.

00:03:32 ►

All the rest of us were conceived in sin.

00:03:35 ►

I’m not sure exactly what that means,

00:03:38 ►

but as far as I’ve been able to research Catholic theology,

00:03:41 ►

it means that the church suspects our parents may have had a little fun while they were fucking.

00:03:44 ►

And so we’re all conceived in sin but apparently uh mary’s parents were an impotent man and a

00:03:51 ►

frigid woman so she was conceived without sin uh she’s the patron saint of andrea dworkin i think

00:04:00 ►

andrea dworkin is the one who used to say that all sexual intercourse between men and women

00:04:05 ►

was degrading to the woman

00:04:06 ►

and recently she revised her position

00:04:09 ►

she said it’s okay if the man doesn’t have an erection at the time

00:04:12 ►

people laugh at her

00:04:16 ►

but I think she may be the first female pope

00:04:19 ►

she has a definitely

00:04:22 ►

papist

00:04:23 ►

she could be a Jesuit.

00:04:27 ►

I wonder how many people ever have had intercourse without an erection.

00:04:32 ►

Oh, well.

00:04:33 ►

Maybe I’ll find out in a few years.

00:04:36 ►

Most men my age are dead already, as Casey Stengel once said.

00:04:43 ►

Jesus was conceived without sin

00:04:45 ►

and it took them 1900 years

00:04:47 ►

to decide his mother was conceived

00:04:49 ►

without sin too

00:04:50 ►

when the Immaculate Conception was promulgated

00:04:52 ►

it was in the 1870s

00:04:55 ►

and at the rate the church is going

00:04:57 ►

in another 1900 years

00:04:58 ►

they’ll decide his grandmother was conceived without sin

00:05:01 ►

so it’ll go retroactive

00:05:03 ►

back to the

00:05:03 ►

amoebas and the formless creatures of the featureless void was conceived without sin. Go retroactive, back to the abebas

00:05:05 ►

and the formless creatures of the featureless void, I suppose.

00:05:10 ►

It’s only that one line.

00:05:11 ►

The rest of us are all conceived in sin.

00:05:15 ►

Anyway, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception

00:05:18 ►

is an appropriate evening

00:05:21 ►

to consider the subject of religion for the hell of it

00:05:25 ►

I think it’s really a wonderful

00:05:28 ►

remarkable tribute to

00:05:30 ►

to humanity

00:05:32 ►

that we’ve had for 2,000

00:05:34 ►

years we’ve had a religion that’s basically

00:05:36 ►

based on the idea that

00:05:38 ►

a Jewish girl who got mysteriously

00:05:40 ►

pregnant was able to convince

00:05:42 ►

her husband that a pigeon did it

00:05:44 ►

and people have been repeating this for nearly 2,000 mysteriously pregnant, was able to convince her husband that a pigeon did it.

00:05:49 ►

And people have been repeating this for nearly 2,000 years,

00:05:50 ►

and a lot of them have been believing it.

00:05:54 ►

And to realize how remarkable that is,

00:05:59 ►

just imagine if some woman you know suddenly started swelling,

00:06:01 ►

and you said, oh, expecting, huh?

00:06:03 ►

And she says, yes, but it was a pigeon.

00:06:08 ►

Somehow the fact that it happened 2,000 years ago, some people are willing to believe it. That illustrates Voltaire’s

00:06:12 ►

general principle. The only way to get any conception of what

00:06:16 ►

mathematicians mean by infinity is to consider the extent of human

00:06:20 ►

stupidity.

00:06:24 ►

You know, the Ayatollah of Rumania,

00:06:28 ►

he’s written a commentary on the Koran,

00:06:32 ►

and in it he says Allah is very vehemently opposed to divorce.

00:06:38 ►

The Ayatollah is on very intimate terms with Allah,

00:06:42 ►

and he knows what Allah thinks about just about everything.

00:06:46 ►

And the Ayatollah takes up a lot of hard cases,

00:06:49 ►

just like Thomas Aquinas.

00:06:51 ►

I admire theologians who are willing to deal with hard cases.

00:06:55 ►

They produce remarkable results

00:06:57 ►

that inspire a great deal of the satire in my books.

00:07:01 ►

The Ayatollah takes up the case of a man

00:07:04 ►

who’s in the habit of sodomizing

00:07:05 ►

camels. And he demonstrates that even in that case, the wife does not have any legitimate

00:07:12 ►

grounds for divorce. I mean, this guy may give her something worse than AIDS, but she married

00:07:17 ►

him, so she’s stuck with him. However, the Ayatollah believes Allah has some sense of

00:07:23 ►

relativity. Allah will grant the woman a divorce if her husband is in the habit of sodomizing her brother.

00:07:32 ►

This may sound like surrealism or something, but it’s rigorous logic.

00:07:38 ►

Theologians always use rigorous logic.

00:07:41 ►

And the reason it sounds like a lot of Catholic theology is that both

00:07:45 ►

Thomist theology and Islamic theology were very heavily influenced by Vence Ibn Sen,

00:07:52 ►

a great Sufi theologian who tried to systemize the Islamic system. And the reason it’s better

00:08:02 ►

to sodomize a camel than your brother-in-law,

00:08:05 ►

those of you who have been wondering whether you should try sodomy or not,

00:08:10 ►

and when you should start and who you should start with,

00:08:13 ►

according to the Ayatollah, it’s much better to bugger a camel than your brother-in-law,

00:08:19 ►

because, you see, if you’re stooping a camel, that’s only a sin on your part,

00:08:24 ►

and you’re not corrupting another

00:08:25 ►

soul because camels don’t have any souls but if you mugger your brother-in-law you’re leading him

00:08:30 ►

into sin too and so you see the whole thing makes sense every that’s the wonderful thing about

00:08:38 ►

religion it all makes sense if you grant the original premise. The Pope says, the Pope is on intimate terms with God, too.

00:08:49 ►

Only his God isn’t named Allah.

00:08:51 ►

His God has an unpronounceable name.

00:08:53 ►

He’s got a Jewish God.

00:08:55 ►

Considering the record of anti-Semitism of the Catholic Church,

00:08:59 ►

that in itself is astounding that they’ve got a Jewish God and they hate the Jews.

00:09:03 ►

But their God is going to name something like Yahweh or Yahawah or something like that,

00:09:09 ►

and he’s against divorce too.

00:09:11 ►

Now, he’s even more vehemently against divorce than Allah.

00:09:16 ►

According to the Pope, God doesn’t approve of divorce in any case, no cases whatsoever.

00:09:21 ►

And the church is very Aristotelian.

00:09:24 ►

When they say no cases, they mean no cases.

00:09:27 ►

So a Catholic male can bugger all the camels he wants

00:09:31 ►

and his brother-in-law on weekends.

00:09:34 ►

He can go out with whores every night,

00:09:37 ►

and he can come home drunk and beat his wife up

00:09:39 ►

and sexually abuse his children

00:09:41 ►

and give his wife a case of AIDS,

00:09:44 ►

and she still can’t divorce the bastard,

00:09:46 ►

because to the Church, no divorce means no divorce.

00:09:51 ►

You see, the Ayatollah is really a flaming liberal compared to the Pope.

00:09:58 ►

I should say the Catholic Pope,

00:10:01 ►

because there are around 8 million popes in the world today, a fact for which I am

00:10:08 ►

largely responsible.

00:10:12 ►

I’m a Pope myself. As a matter of fact,

00:10:15 ►

as a matter of fact, for those of you up front

00:10:20 ►

here, you see, there’s my Pope card, right? The bearer of this card is a genuine

00:10:24 ►

and authorized Pope, right? The bearer of this card is a genuine and authorized Pope, right?

00:10:29 ►

You don’t have to have a Pope card to be a Pope.

00:10:33 ►

When we started out, this is part of one of the New Age religions that I helped found.

00:10:41 ►

A lot of people get involved in New Age religions.

00:10:44 ►

Here’s another pope card. Okay,

00:10:49 ►

shall we do the O-Walk commercial? Hold up your pope cards. Only two in the house? Oh,

00:10:56 ►

well, that’s okay. I’m going to make you all popes automatically right now anyway. Spectacles, testicles, brandy, cigars. Okay. You’re all popes now. This is a Discordian

00:11:13 ►

institution. The Discordian society, and I belong to the lunatic fringe of the Discordian

00:11:20 ►

society, which is the paratheoanimate and mystic hood of a recessoteric, which is the paratheo-animatomistichood of Arisa Soteric, which some of you may have

00:11:28 ►

heard of. That’s abbreviated P-O-E-E and pronounced P-O-E-E. This was founded when my good friend

00:11:38 ►

Malaclips the Younger was in a bowling alley in Yorba Linda, California, where Richard Nixon grew up.

00:11:45 ►

You see, it’s all one seamless web, as Alan Watts used to say.

00:11:52 ►

And originally, Mal was printing Pope cards and distributing them,

00:11:56 ►

and I started doing that too.

00:11:59 ►

And then I got the idea of writing a novel and including a Pope card in the novel

00:12:03 ►

so everybody who owned the novel would be a Pope. And since the novel sold about a million copies so far i’ve created a million

00:12:10 ►

popes that way and then margot adler repeated the pope reprinted the pope card and her book

00:12:17 ►

drawing down the moon which is about matriarchal religions in the united states and so all the

00:12:24 ►

readers of her book became popes just by having the Pope card in their book in their

00:12:28 ►

possession and then just recently the the guy in Rome who still thinks he’s

00:12:34 ►

the only Pope he announced that the Cardinals could give indulgences over

00:12:39 ►

television which which is something entirely new the church is adapting to

00:12:44 ►

the modern technological

00:12:45 ►

age, and now a cardinal can get up on television and give an indulgence, and everybody who

00:12:51 ►

has the set turned on gets the indulgence by electronic osmosis or something. This led

00:12:57 ►

to a lot of debate in Falken, Dublin. Falken, Dublin has the most argumentative and subtle atheists in the world.

00:13:06 ►

That’s one of the results.

00:13:08 ►

It’s one of the inevitable byproducts of Jesuit education.

00:13:12 ►

The Jesuits educated the Marquis de Sade and Diderot and Voltaire and James Joyce and…

00:13:21 ►

Jerry Brown.

00:13:22 ►

Jerry Brown.

00:13:23 ►

Jerry Brown.

00:13:24 ►

I don’t know about that case

00:13:26 ►

but they are very good at producing intellectually intricate atheists

00:13:30 ►

along with the herd of true believers that they set out to produce

00:13:34 ►

and the atheists in Dublin started writing letters

00:13:37 ►

asking for clarification of the indulgences by television

00:13:40 ►

if you make a videotape, one of them is

00:13:43 ►

and you play it over and over, do you get perpetual indulgence? And I wrote in to suggest that anybody who did that could

00:13:52 ►

come to San Francisco and get honorary membership in the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. But

00:13:57 ►

they didn’t print that, evidently, because nobody in fucking Dublin got that reference.

00:14:01 ►

and fucking Dublin got that reference.

00:14:09 ►

But I decided if they can do indulgences over television,

00:14:13 ►

I can do pontifications over television and radio.

00:14:15 ►

So whenever I’m on a TV or a radio show,

00:14:18 ►

I make the whole audience popes at some point during the show.

00:14:21 ►

So I’ve created over 9 million popes now.

00:14:24 ►

And they’re all equally infallible because all the Scordian popes

00:14:25 ►

are equally infallible

00:14:26 ►

and they all disagree with one another.

00:14:29 ►

I was on a radio show in England

00:14:31 ►

with eight other guests.

00:14:32 ►

It was one of those round-robin talk shows

00:14:34 ►

and there was a Scotsman there

00:14:36 ►

who was a designer of bagpipes

00:14:38 ►

in the traditional style.

00:14:40 ►

I told him my father-in-law

00:14:42 ►

said a bagpipe was something

00:14:43 ►

an Irishman gave a Scotsman

00:14:45 ►

and told him it was a musical instrument.

00:14:49 ►

But he makes really classic bagpipes.

00:14:51 ►

And after he heard about my pan-pontification project,

00:14:57 ►

the effort to make every man, woman, and child on the earth a pope,

00:15:00 ►

he told me I should send a pope card to Ian Paisley right away.

00:15:06 ►

Pope. He told me I should send a Pope card to Ian Paisley right away. Ian Paisley is the leader of the Protestant bigots in Northern Ireland. His slogan is, no Pope in Ulster.

00:15:13 ►

So I made Ian Paisley a Pope. And he hasn’t left Ulster yet. He doesn’t have the simple

00:15:20 ►

honor to skulk away like he should now that he’s a pope. I also sent the pope card to the

00:15:25 ►

anti-pope in southern France, which makes him a pope and an anti-pope at the same time, which

00:15:31 ►

means he can get into Hofstadter’s next book as a living strange loop.

00:15:39 ►

I should explain discordianism to you a little.

00:15:43 ►

I should explain Discordianism to you a little.

00:15:52 ►

Aries is the goddess of chaos, discord, confusion, bureaucracy, and international relations.

00:15:55 ►

And right away you see we’ve got a winner here,

00:15:59 ►

because if you look around the world, what do you see the most of?

00:16:04 ►

Chaos, discord, confusion, bureaucracy, and international relations.

00:16:09 ►

So it’s obvious that Aries is the most powerful divinity at this point in history.

00:16:16 ►

The basic discordian theology is that all of our problems began with the original snub.

00:16:21 ►

They were having a party on Olympus and they didn’t invite Aries,

00:16:26 ►

and so she got so ticked off that she made a beautiful golden apple.

00:16:29 ►

Some say it was metallic gold.

00:16:31 ►

Some say it was Acapulco gold.

00:16:34 ►

Discordian folks all disagree with each other.

00:16:37 ►

But whatever kind of gold it was, she threw it into the party. And she wrote on it, she had written on it,

00:16:39 ►

Kalisti, which is Greek for the prettiest one.

00:16:43 ►

And so all the goddesses started arguing over which one should get the apple, which one was the prettiest one. And so all the goddesses started arguing over which one should get the apple,

00:16:47 ►

which one was the prettiest one,

00:16:49 ►

just like Nancy complaining about Raisa being better dressed than her.

00:16:53 ►

Some things are eternal.

00:16:55 ►

And the goddesses got into such a terrific fight

00:16:58 ►

that the only way to settle it was for Zeus to pick a mortal to make the decisions.

00:17:02 ►

So he picked Paris, and all the goddesses tried to bribe him.

00:17:06 ►

Athena offered him wisdom, and Minerva offered him security or something like that.

00:17:11 ►

And Venus, who was the sharpie in the bunch, she offered him Helen of Troy.

00:17:16 ►

So there was no doubt how he was going to vote.

00:17:20 ►

And that led to the Trojan War, and ever since then we’ve had chaos, discord, confusion, bureaucracy, and international relations.

00:17:29 ►

And it all derives from the original snub.

00:17:32 ►

Now I think that’s as good a theology as you can find anywhere in the hate, and I hope you’re all happy being Discordian popes.

00:17:39 ►

It may seem oversimplified, but we’ve got the symbolic dodge.

00:17:43 ►

We’ve read T.S. Eliot, you see. It’s more like a great poem than like a scientific

00:17:48 ►

statement. That’s what Eliot said about the Anglican church,

00:17:52 ►

so we say it about Discordianism. You don’t have to take it literally.

00:17:56 ►

Ares is just a symbol of the second law of thermodynamics.

00:18:00 ►

However, we do have our own metaphysics. The basic metaphysics of the

00:18:04 ►

Discordian society is

00:18:05 ►

all affirmations are true in some sense,

00:18:09 ►

false in some sense,

00:18:11 ►

meaningless in some sense,

00:18:14 ►

true and false in some sense,

00:18:16 ►

true and meaningless in some sense,

00:18:19 ►

false and meaningless in some sense,

00:18:21 ►

and true and false and meaningless in some sense.

00:18:25 ►

And if you repeat that 666 times,

00:18:29 ►

you will achieve supreme enlightenment.

00:18:34 ►

In some sense.

00:18:42 ►

Actually, Discordianism was inspired by Kirby Hensley

00:18:46 ►

who started out in the 1950s

00:18:48 ►

to make as many clergy entities as possible

00:18:52 ►

you notice I again avoided human chauvinism

00:18:55 ►

I didn’t say clergy persons

00:18:57 ►

and as a matter of fact

00:18:58 ►

Hensley has ordained parrots, chimpanzees

00:19:04 ►

dogs, cats he ordained parrots, chimpanzees, dogs, cats.

00:19:07 ►

He ordained Madeleine Murray O’Hare, the country’s leading atheist.

00:19:12 ►

And he doesn’t charge for it. He’ll ordain anybody.

00:19:15 ►

That’s why he calls it the Universal Life Church.

00:19:17 ►

He believes that every sentient being has the right to be a clergy entity.

00:19:22 ►

And so he’s been sending out these ordinations through the mail since the 50s.

00:19:28 ►

And they’re free.

00:19:30 ►

If you want to get a doctor of divinity, he charges for that.

00:19:33 ►

That’s $20.

00:19:35 ►

If you’re satisfied just being a clergy person, that’s free.

00:19:38 ►

If you want to be a doctor of divinity, it’s $20.

00:19:40 ►

But he’s done more to raise the quality of religion in the United States than anybody

00:19:46 ►

in our time. As soon as you get ordained by him, you have all the rights of clergy and

00:19:50 ►

you can start your own sect, or sex if you prefer the plural. I always prefer sex myself,

00:19:56 ►

but when he decided to make every living being a clergy entity, that’s what inspired the Discordian movement to make every entity a pope.

00:20:09 ►

Hensley has ordained, he ordained me,

00:20:12 ►

he ordained my friend Malek Lips the Younger, the chief Discordian atheologian,

00:20:17 ►

and he ordained the founder of the Reformed Druids of North America.

00:20:23 ►

That’s a group that started at a college in Indiana in the 1950s.

00:20:29 ►

At that college, they still had compulsory church attendance.

00:20:32 ►

You had to go to some church or other.

00:20:34 ►

They didn’t care which, but you had to go to some church once a week.

00:20:37 ►

So a bunch of free thinkers on the campus announced that they were Druids

00:20:40 ►

and started going to the woods every week.

00:20:44 ►

They took along a bottle of Irish mist, which they claimed was their sacrament.

00:20:50 ►

And after a while, they started getting interested in druidism,

00:20:53 ►

and they started doing druid rituals.

00:20:56 ►

And then they found out the chief druid ritual was human sacrifice.

00:20:59 ►

So they quickly changed their name to the Reformed Druids

00:21:03 ►

before anybody would get nasty ideas about them.

00:21:07 ►

They sacrifice a branch off a tree in their rituals.

00:21:11 ►

And then they extended it to the Reform Druids of North America

00:21:14 ►

when they got some converts in Canada.

00:21:16 ►

Now they’ve got groves all over the United States.

00:21:19 ►

There’s one over in Berkeley called the Nut Grove,

00:21:21 ►

which I think is a lovely name for a new religion,

00:21:24 ►

the Nut Grove of the Reform think is a lovely name for a new religion, the Nut Grove of the Reformed Druids of North America.

00:21:27 ►

I got, after getting ordained by Hensley and made a pope by Malaclips,

00:21:33 ►

I got initiated by the Reformed Druids, and I immediately formed a heresy.

00:21:39 ►

The Reformed Non-Aristotelian Druids of North America, or RNA-DNA.

00:21:44 ►

non-Aristotelian druids of North America, or RNA-DNA.

00:21:52 ►

The Reformed druids, in their ceremonies, you have to repeat three times,

00:21:56 ►

nature is good, nature is good, nature is good.

00:22:00 ►

And as a non-Aristotelian disciple of Alfred Korzymski,

00:22:03 ►

I don’t believe in the years of identity.

00:22:05 ►

I believe that’s what we’re projecting outward,

00:22:08 ►

what are internal evaluations in our nervous system.

00:22:12 ►

So I formed the Reformed Non-Aristotelian Druids of North America,

00:22:15 ►

and we say, nature seems good to me.

00:22:18 ►

Nature seems good to me. Nature seems good to me.

00:22:21 ►

And we avoid all that Aristotelian metaphysics of assuming we know the true essence of reality.

00:22:26 ►

The reform of non-Aristotelian druids,

00:22:28 ►

since I founded it, has tripled in membership.

00:22:31 ►

There are three of us now.

00:22:36 ►

But then I met Dr. Horace Naismith,

00:22:41 ►

a good old boy from Texas.

00:22:43 ►

He’s the founder of the Dope and Guns Party, which

00:22:48 ►

should be the most successful political party in the United States, but for some reason

00:22:52 ►

it isn’t. He may not have the right approach in his campaign literature. It’s Dr. Naismith’s

00:22:59 ►

notion that all the gun nuts are terrified the government’s trying to take their guns

00:23:03 ►

away. You know, you’ve seen those bumper stickers,

00:23:05 ►

they’ll take my gun away when they pry my cold, dead fingers from the barrel.

00:23:12 ►

And if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns,

00:23:16 ►

which always makes me think, if nukes are outlawed, only outlaws will have nukes.

00:23:23 ►

Or the great paradox of anarchism, if laws are outlawed, only outlaws will have nukes. Or the great paradox of anarchism, if laws

00:23:26 ►

are outlawed, only outlaws will have laws. And then there’s the other haunting thought,

00:23:39 ►

if marriage is outlawed, only outlaws will have in-laws.

00:23:49 ►

Well, the gun nuts are pretty agitated about the continuous plotting in Washington to take their toys away from them.

00:23:54 ►

And, you know, as John Lennon said, happiness is a warm gun.

00:23:57 ►

And as Mark Chapman said, happiness is John Lennon and your gun sights.

00:24:02 ►

Down in L.A. now,

00:24:05 ►

they’ve taken to shooting each other on the freeways.

00:24:08 ►

If you had a drive in the traffic down there,

00:24:10 ►

you might feel that way too.

00:24:11 ►

There are cars down there that have bumper stickers

00:24:14 ►

that say, don’t shoot, I’ll let you pass.

00:24:17 ►

This is the most gun-happy country in the world.

00:24:19 ►

And yet the damn government is planning

00:24:21 ►

to take away people’s simple pleasures from them.

00:24:24 ►

And so Dr. Naismith, who hails from Texas, where everybody has a gun,

00:24:30 ►

he decided to form the Guns and Dope Party.

00:24:33 ►

He said if you get all the dopers and all the gun people together, you have a majority.

00:24:37 ►

If they can only get over being paranoid about one another,

00:24:40 ►

because most of the dopers don’t like the gun people,

00:24:43 ►

and most of the gun people are afraid of the dopers. But Drmyth was convinced if he could get them together they’d be a majority

00:24:49 ►

and we’d have a libertarian type government again somehow it hasn’t worked out that way

00:24:54 ►

much more successful was dr nasmyth’s new religion the john dillinger died for you society

00:25:01 ►

which uh which i am an assistant treas. That entitles me to collect dues from anybody

00:25:08 ►

dumb enough to think that it’s worth while joining the John Dillinger Died for You Society.

00:25:13 ►

John would have wanted it that way. The John Dillinger Died for You Society is a kind of

00:25:20 ►

splinter off the Libertarian Party with theological connotations.

00:25:25 ►

It’s the basic teaching of the John Dillinger Died for You Society

00:25:29 ►

that St. John the Martyr, as we call him,

00:25:32 ►

he proved that even in hard times, even during a depression,

00:25:36 ►

a real man doesn’t have to go with his hand out to the government

00:25:40 ►

and ask for the dole.

00:25:41 ►

A real man can go out and make money his own way.

00:25:44 ►

Or as John said in his own words, praise John, praise John,

00:25:51 ►

as John said, you can get more with a simple prayer and a Thompson submachine gun

00:25:56 ►

than you can get with a simple prayer alone.

00:26:04 ►

John robbed 23 banks and three police stations.

00:26:10 ►

The banks were his way of dealing with his financial problems in the Depression,

00:26:15 ►

and everybody had financial problems then.

00:26:17 ►

I think robbing the police stations was art for art’s sake,

00:26:21 ►

which is another thing that makes John such an appeal.

00:26:24 ►

That and the legend that

00:26:26 ►

he had a 23-inch penis. I bet even in this generation, a lot of people have still heard

00:26:31 ►

that. That seems to be one of those undying bits of folklore. When I was at Playboy, I

00:26:36 ►

persuaded the editorial director that we should do a feature in the Playboy Advisor on is it true that John Dillinger had a 23-inch penis?

00:26:47 ►

The legend is that it’s preserved at the Smithsonian Institute in an alcohol bottle,

00:26:53 ►

and you have to know high government officials to be allowed to say it.

00:26:57 ►

Now, the women in the Playboy Research Department are a pretty hard-boiled lot.

00:27:04 ►

I mean, working for an outfit like that,

00:27:06 ►

calling the Kinsey Institute constantly for information

00:27:10 ►

about odd sexual practices and whatnot,

00:27:13 ►

it’s not easy to embarrass them.

00:27:15 ►

But the researcher who got this job was really embarrassed.

00:27:18 ►

She thought this was the most ridiculous thing she ever had to do.

00:27:22 ►

And I happened to be, she had an office right next to me,

00:27:24 ►

and I heard her on the phone

00:27:26 ►

at the Smithsonian. She said, I’m a

00:27:28 ►

researcher at Playboy magazine

00:27:29 ►

and I feel like an absolute idiot

00:27:32 ►

about what I’m about to ask you.

00:27:34 ►

And then there was a pause and she said,

00:27:36 ►

how many? And the fellow on the other

00:27:38 ►

end said, you’re going to ask about Dillinger’s

00:27:40 ►

penis? We get 17 calls

00:27:42 ►

about that every week.

00:27:46 ►

No, we do not have it in a jar.

00:27:51 ►

But, of course, that’s what they would say if they’re keeping the relic and showing it only to high government officials.

00:27:53 ►

Who knows, maybe Gorbachev got to see it,

00:27:56 ►

but they don’t like the killer rabbit that attacked Jimmy Carter.

00:28:00 ►

There are some things the government doesn’t want to share with us.

00:28:07 ►

The Dillinger society has its own mantra

00:28:09 ►

which we take from

00:28:12 ►

a wise

00:28:14 ►

bit of advice that John gave

00:28:16 ►

to bank officials

00:28:17 ►

when he was making his unorthodox

00:28:19 ►

withdrawals

00:28:20 ►

lie down on the floor and keep calm

00:28:23 ►

this contains all the wisdom of the Orient.

00:28:28 ►

John was trying to teach them detachment from material concerns,

00:28:32 ►

a tranquil mind, the art of going with the flow.

00:28:37 ►

And, of course, the John Dillinger Diffuse Society is splintered, too.

00:28:43 ►

That’s the way it is with New Age religions.

00:28:46 ►

In 1969, Jay Nash, a Chicago journalist,

00:28:52 ►

came out with a book called Dillinger, Dead or Alive,

00:28:55 ►

in which he tried to prove the FBI shot the wrong guy at the Biograph Theater

00:28:59 ►

and then faked all the records, faked the fingerprints and all the other evidence

00:29:03 ►

so the public wouldn’t find out what assholes they made out of themselves

00:29:07 ►

shooting an innocent man again.

00:29:10 ►

Part of what makes this faintly plausible is that Dillinger had gray eyes,

00:29:15 ►

according to the Navy record, and the corpse at the biograph had brown eyes.

00:29:19 ►

Hmm.

00:29:21 ►

Unless the Navy records were wrong or the coroner was careless.

00:29:25 ►

But that’s one bit of evidence.

00:29:27 ►

Another bit of evidence is the FBI was very embarrassed in the Dillinger matter

00:29:30 ►

because just a month before they had shot four innocent businessmen in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

00:29:36 ►

They got a report that the Dillinger gang was staying at a motel there

00:29:40 ►

and they went racing to the scene and these four businessmen came out the front door as the FBI arrived

00:29:45 ►

and the FBI thought it was the Dillinger gang

00:29:47 ►

making an escape and they shot all four of them.

00:29:50 ►

That made a lot of bad publicity for the Bureau.

00:29:53 ►

People were fair pissed.

00:29:56 ►

And so Nash’s argument was

00:29:57 ►

when they shot another innocent man at the Biograph

00:30:00 ►

they covered up and pretended it really was Dillinger

00:30:02 ►

and Dillinger is alive in Los Angeles, he claimed.

00:30:06 ►

Well, any Midwestern boy who reached sainthood eventually does go to Los Angeles, I think.

00:30:13 ►

That’s sort of heaven to Midwesterners.

00:30:16 ►

And so the Dillinger Society had a split.

00:30:18 ►

Did Dillinger really die for us, or was he alive in Los Angeles?

00:30:23 ►

And we, of course course split into three factions.

00:30:25 ►

The orthodoxy rejects Nash’s

00:30:28 ►

evidence as cuckoo and

00:30:30 ►

unfounded and insubstantial

00:30:32 ►

and mostly hearsay

00:30:33 ►

and insists Dillinger did indeed

00:30:36 ►

die for us at the Biograph

00:30:37 ►

Theater in 1934.

00:30:40 ►

And the reformed

00:30:42 ►

division holds that

00:30:44 ►

Dillinger didn’t die for us literally

00:30:46 ►

but only symbolically by setting an example and then going underground, as it were.

00:30:51 ►

I’m the leader of the liberal wing.

00:30:54 ►

I hold that Dillinger did get shot at the Biograph Theater

00:30:58 ►

and he’s still alive in Los Angeles.

00:31:00 ►

He has risen.

00:31:12 ►

Angeles. He has risen. Then, you see how much fun it is to start your own religion? I don’t know why people keep going around looking for gurus. Be your own guru. Start your own

00:31:16 ►

religion. I’ve been having so many fun for years with my friends inventing new religions,

00:31:20 ►

and we get more and more converts all the time, whom we immediately excommunicate, since we have no ambition of a religious organization. The job of Crucians is allegedly based on

00:31:45 ►

ancient Bolivian teachings.

00:31:50 ►

The basis

00:31:51 ►

of it is the American coffee ceremony,

00:31:55 ►

which is

00:31:55 ►

the polar opposite from the Japanese

00:31:58 ►

tea ceremony, which has to be done

00:32:00 ►

very precisely and slowly

00:32:01 ►

and with care and in that finicky

00:32:03 ►

Japanese way, you know.

00:32:05 ►

The American coffee ceremony is done in the most slapdash way possible.

00:32:10 ►

You get up in the morning.

00:32:12 ►

You turn on the hot water tap.

00:32:14 ►

You find a cup that isn’t too dirty.

00:32:17 ►

You throw in some instant coffee.

00:32:19 ►

You don’t use a spoon.

00:32:20 ►

You just throw it in this way because your eyes aren’t open yet, right?

00:32:23 ►

And the hot water turns it into some kind of muck that vaguely resembles coffee.

00:32:27 ►

And then you turn and face the east and greet the rising sun,

00:32:32 ►

and you say, raw, raw, raw.

00:32:36 ►

And then you drink the coffee,

00:32:38 ►

and you say, God, I needed that.

00:32:42 ►

And you say, God, I needed that.

00:32:50 ►

This is supposed to produce total mental clarity and serenity.

00:32:54 ►

The claim is your brain starts operating right away and keeps on operating right up until the time you arrive at the office

00:32:57 ►

when, of course, you go through brain death like every other person working in an office.

00:33:01 ►

But at least it keeps you going until you get there.

00:33:05 ►

The Discordians have a rival ritual.

00:33:09 ►

Once the Javacrucians split off from the Discordians, we had to find our own Duan ritual, and of

00:33:14 ►

course, Malaclip’s greatest theologian invented it.

00:33:17 ►

It’s the toad elevating moment, which was borrowed from a Monty Python skit.

00:33:27 ►

The idea is, if you get up in the morning and the first thing you do is eat a live toad, nothing worse will happen to you all day.

00:33:36 ►

Well, practically nothing worse. Now, I think all of these things make as much sense as, for instance,

00:33:45 ►

the doctrine that this Jewish girl 2,000 years ago got knocked up by a pigeon

00:33:51 ►

and that anybody with a willy who’s duly ordained

00:33:57 ►

can turn a piece of bread into the body and blood of that guy whose father was a pigeon,

00:34:03 ►

which is taken seriously by millions and millions of people all over the world.

00:34:08 ►

You’ve got to have a willy to do it.

00:34:10 ►

This is one of the hot issues in the Catholic world.

00:34:13 ►

You see, the reason I talk about the Catholic Church so much is I live in Ireland,

00:34:17 ►

so I’m surrounded by Catholic agitation and debate all the time.

00:34:23 ►

There’s a lot of nuns that want to be allowed to say Mass.

00:34:26 ►

They say, why should only males be allowed to be priests?

00:34:31 ►

And the Pope’s answer is that it’s always been that way

00:34:34 ►

and it’s always going to be that way, at least as long as I’m Pope.

00:34:37 ►

And besides, only a man can represent Jesus.

00:34:44 ►

The idea is the most important thing about Jesus was not his sweet character,

00:34:49 ►

as we get it in the New Testament,

00:34:53 ►

his forgiveness, his gentleness, his sublime philosophy.

00:34:57 ►

The really, really important thing about him was that he had a willy.

00:35:02 ►

And you’ve got to have a willy to be like Jesus.

00:35:04 ►

If you don’t have a willy to be like jesus if you don’t

00:35:05 ►

have a willy it doesn’t matter you can be a saint you can be a bodhisattva you can be a

00:35:09 ►

an ascended master but if you don’t have a willy you can’t say mass now this is a really remarkable

00:35:16 ►

doctrine when you stop to think about it it’s based on the idea i think that god also has a

00:35:21 ►

willy you know most christ Christians refer to God as hey.

00:35:27 ►

You hardly ever hear them refer to God as that.

00:35:31 ►

And only a few of the more liberal churches have started referring to God as she.

00:35:36 ►

The first article I ever had published back in 1959 was in The Realist magazine,

00:35:41 ►

and it was on that question, does God have a penis?

00:35:45 ►

I was the first one to raise that question,

00:35:47 ►

and I’m delighted to see that it’s become such a controversial issue

00:35:50 ►

in the last 20 years, because I think it really is important.

00:35:54 ►

Can you imagine if God does have a penis,

00:35:56 ►

what kind of schlong that would be?

00:36:00 ►

Astronomical dimensions, to say the least of it.

00:36:04 ►

And if God did have a schlong like that,

00:36:08 ►

no wonder he had to turn into a dove before he could knock Mary up.

00:36:11 ►

Otherwise it would have been as impossible as King Kong’s love for Fay Wray.

00:36:18 ►

The great pathetic love story of the 20th century.

00:36:24 ►

But then there’s the church

00:36:26 ►

of Fred Merz, Bodhi Zatva.

00:36:28 ►

That was founded

00:36:30 ►

by another discordian named

00:36:31 ►

Ontario Ali,

00:36:34 ►

who comes from Finland.

00:36:36 ►

He’s a great poet,

00:36:38 ►

mime, actor,

00:36:40 ►

psychic reader, tarot reader,

00:36:42 ►

and practical joker.

00:36:44 ►

Lives in Boulder. For all I know, and a practical joker, lives in Boulder.

00:36:46 ►

For all I know, he’s behind the drug-free urine business.

00:36:49 ►

I wouldn’t put it past him now that I think of it.

00:36:54 ►

Antaro Ali invented the church of Fred Merzbode’s Atva

00:36:58 ►

when he was in an altered state of consciousness

00:37:00 ►

attained by some method of Tibetan magic, I assume.

00:37:05 ►

Maybe it was just the latest shipment of sensamia from Humboldt.

00:37:08 ►

I don’t know.

00:37:09 ►

But he suddenly decided, you know, Amida Buddha swore that he would not enter nirvana

00:37:16 ►

until all sentient beings could also enter nirvana.

00:37:20 ►

And so there’s this belief among Amida Buddhists that Amida Buddha keeps reappearing in many forms

00:37:26 ►

to reach every class of sentient being

00:37:29 ►

and of course he’s got to reach even the lice

00:37:32 ►

and the microbes and whatnot

00:37:35 ►

before his work is finished

00:37:36 ►

this is a heavy task to take on

00:37:38 ►

but Buddhists think in different time scales

00:37:42 ►

than the rest of us as you may have noticed

00:37:44 ►

and Antero decided that Amida Buddha was manifesting on television Buddhists think in different time scales than the rest of us, as you may have noticed.

00:37:51 ►

And Antero decided that Amida Buddha was manifesting on television to the lowest of the low,

00:37:52 ►

the people who look at I Love Lucy.

00:37:57 ►

You would think those people could never achieve enlightenment,

00:37:59 ►

wouldn’t have a ghost of a chance.

00:38:03 ►

But Amida Buddha infiltrated himself into the show disguised as Fred Merz.

00:38:09 ►

And if you’re in the proper state of mind, when you look at I Love Lucy,

00:38:13 ►

you’ll see that everything Fred Mertz says is as profound as a Zen co-ed.

00:38:22 ►

There was one Zen master who answered every question, no matter what it was.

00:38:26 ►

What is the Buddha? How does one achieve Buddhahood?

00:38:27 ►

What is the Tao?

00:38:30 ►

No matter what the question was, this one Zen master always answered,

00:38:30 ►

Quats!

00:38:32 ►

That was his whole answer, Quats!

00:38:35 ►

And then there was the one who answered, Moo!

00:38:38 ►

You know, it’s one of the most famous ones.

00:38:40 ►

Does a dog have the Buddha nature?

00:38:40 ►

Moo!

00:38:49 ►

And if you look at I Love Lucy, it’s amazing how many times Fred comes out with the same mystic,

00:38:52 ►

indecipherable monosyllable.

00:38:54 ►

No matter what happens, Fred usually says, Huh?

00:38:58 ►

And if you’re in the proper state of mind,

00:39:01 ►

you can achieve enlightenment from Fred Mertz’s Huh as easily as from quats or moo.

00:39:05 ►

But you’ve got to be in the proper state of mind.

00:39:07 ►

The best way is with Johnny Carson’s own.

00:39:11 ►

Is there any of that available in San Francisco?

00:39:14 ►

It may be a myth.

00:39:16 ►

It probably is.

00:39:17 ►

The dope world is full of myths.

00:39:19 ►

There’s one brand of grass going around that’s supposed to be Johnny Carson’s own,

00:39:24 ►

and the story is it’s grown just for Johnny.

00:39:26 ►

But occasionally they have a bumper crop.

00:39:29 ►

And Johnny, out of the goodness of his heart and his love for his fellow humanity,

00:39:33 ►

he allows a little bit of it to be put on the open market.

00:39:36 ►

And if you get Johnny Carson’s own and look at her, and I love Lucy Rerun,

00:39:40 ►

you will achieve supreme enlightenment as soon as Fred Mertz says,

00:39:43 ►

I don’t understand women at all

00:39:45 ►

sort of a total confession

00:39:48 ►

of the intellectual bankruptcy

00:39:49 ►

of the patriarchy of the last 6,000 years

00:39:52 ►

nobody has ever expressed it

00:39:54 ►

as clearly as Fred

00:39:55 ►

you’d be surprised

00:39:58 ►

the profundities you can find

00:40:00 ►

in Fred when you’re properly attuned

00:40:01 ►

in the right state of mind

00:40:03 ►

the best I think and Fred when you’re properly attuned in the right state of mind.

00:40:08 ►

The best, I think,

00:40:11 ►

of all the New Age religions is the Church of the Subgenius.

00:40:13 ►

Praise Bob.

00:40:15 ►

The Church of the Subgenius

00:40:17 ►

is connected with the Discordian Society

00:40:19 ►

in that they’ve accepted Ares

00:40:21 ►

into their pantheon.

00:40:23 ►

I don’t know whether we should be too flattered

00:40:25 ►

because they also accept Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk

00:40:28 ►

and Jehovah, Space God of Roth,

00:40:31 ►

and Darth Vader and Cthulhu

00:40:35 ►

and the conspiracy of the intergalactic bankers

00:40:39 ►

and I don’t know what all else.

00:40:42 ►

Actually, the Church of the Subgenius was founded in 1957.

00:40:47 ►

That’s 30 years ago.

00:40:50 ►

But the founder, J.R. Bob Dobbs, was a humble, simple aluminum siding salesman until then.

00:40:58 ►

As a matter of fact, some claim he was the model for the traveling salesman in most of the old jokes.

00:41:04 ►

And one day in Palm Beach, he was on an elevator with L. Ron Hubbard.

00:41:09 ►

And he said to L. Ron Hubbard,

00:41:11 ►

Gee, L. Ron, I’ve never met a celebrity before.

00:41:14 ►

Would you tell me the secret of power?

00:41:17 ►

And L. Ron Hubbard was so drunk he gave it away.

00:41:19 ►

He just blurted it out.

00:41:21 ►

And so Bob… blurted it out. So Bob went forth and started his own church

00:41:33 ►

using the secret of power.

00:41:36 ►

And you can learn the secret of power too.

00:41:40 ►

The Church of the Subgenius guarantees.

00:41:43 ►

They offer an absolutely unconditional guarantee.

00:41:46 ►

If you read enough of their literature, send them enough money,

00:41:49 ►

and everything you get from them says on the bottom of it,

00:41:52 ►

send more money, send more money, send more money.

00:41:55 ►

They say that more often than Jerry Falwell.

00:41:59 ►

If you buy enough of their literature and study it profoundly enough

00:42:02 ►

in the proper state of mind, eventually you’ll learn the secret of power but if you study it it really is there it has to do with slack

00:42:10 ►

and most people find it very hard to understand slack uh well you know how sweet and sour works

00:42:17 ►

in chinese restaurants well the yin and the yang are like that the yin is like the sweet and the

00:42:23 ►

yang is the sour but it’s more like the hodge and the podge and the yang are like that. The yin is like the sweet and the yang is the sour. But it’s

00:42:25 ►

more like the hajj and the pajj in the Discordian sacred cow. The hajj is the side of the kama that

00:42:31 ►

has the apple in it. That’s the golden apple of Aries, which represents anarchy, chaos, discord,

00:42:37 ►

and so on. And on the other side, there’s the Pentagon, which represents bureaucracy and

00:42:42 ►

international relations. And they’re known as the Hodge and the Podge.

00:42:46 ►

And you’ll notice the whole universe is divided up between Hodge forces and Podge forces.

00:42:51 ►

And every time Hodge increases, Podge increases.

00:42:54 ►

The more they raise taxes, the more tax rebellions there are.

00:42:57 ►

The more tax rebellions there are, the more cops they hire.

00:43:00 ►

And it’s a perpetual cycle within that system.

00:43:04 ►

And so it’s not really, the universe is not basically sweet and sour or yin and yang.

00:43:08 ►

It’s basically hajj and paaj according to the Discordian revelation.

00:43:12 ►

But according to Bob, it’s even more fundamental than that.

00:43:15 ►

The universe is basically divided into something and nothing.

00:43:20 ►

And if you look closely, you’ll see how obvious that is.

00:43:24 ►

And if you look closely, you’ll see how obvious that is.

00:43:30 ►

Here’s a glass of what the naive among you will think is water.

00:43:36 ►

God, I needed that.

00:43:41 ►

If you look at the glass of water, you see something.

00:43:44 ►

If you look all around it, you see nothing. This is known

00:43:45 ►

as the finger ground relationship in Gestalt psychology, right? You see, I went to college

00:43:51 ►

once. I can even speak English if there’s any demand for it. And no matter where you

00:43:59 ►

look, you look at me. I’m something temporarily, and all around me is nothing. You look at

00:44:04 ►

the microphone, that’s something, and there’s me is nothing you look at the microphone that’s

00:44:05 ►

something and there’s nothing around it you get down to the you get into quantum mechanics you

00:44:09 ►

get down below the atomic level and you find hardly any something you find a great deal of

00:44:14 ►

nothing with an occasional burst of something but no matter where you look there’s always the

00:44:18 ►

something and the nothing slack is the condition in between something and nothing. When you get yourself into perfect balance with the cosmic forces,

00:44:28 ►

you are between something and nothing.

00:44:30 ►

You are in ideal slack, and then you can get something for nothing.

00:44:37 ►

Now, the only religious revelation that has come along to equal that in recent years is Ramtha.

00:44:48 ►

I love Ramtha.

00:44:49 ►

Ramtha is a fascinating demonstration that after 40,000 years,

00:44:55 ►

a boring old man is still a boring old man.

00:44:58 ►

40,000 years, there’s nothing to improve it at all.

00:45:01 ►

Whatsoever, he still sounds like a Reader’s Digest article.

00:45:04 ►

And I think that’s the point at which Rajneesh understood the secret of power.

00:45:08 ►

And he said, I want 93 Rolls Royces.

00:45:11 ►

So they went out and they got him 93 Rolls Royces.

00:45:16 ►

Actually, Rajneesh grew up in India when he was very poor as a little boy.

00:45:21 ►

And Krishnamurti was the first guru

00:45:25 ►

to make it really big in the Western world.

00:45:27 ►

Krishnamurti was the first one to own a Rolls Royce.

00:45:31 ►

And my theory has always been

00:45:32 ►

that every time Rajneesh got a new Rolls Royce,

00:45:35 ►

he would take a picture of it

00:45:36 ►

and write on the back of it,

00:45:38 ►

fuck you, and mail it to Krishnamurti.

00:45:41 ►

By the time he had 93 of them,

00:45:43 ►

Krishnamurti dropped dead.

00:45:44 ►

He couldn’t take it anymore

00:45:46 ►

he only had one fucking Rolls Royce

00:45:48 ►

and Rajneesh had 93 of them

00:45:50 ►

I imagine Krishnamurti pacing around

00:45:53 ►

saying what am I doing wrong

00:45:54 ►

why have I taken out one Rolls Royce

00:45:56 ►

you see Rajneesh understood

00:45:59 ►

the secret of power

00:46:00 ►

maybe I haven’t made this

00:46:02 ►

I haven’t really gotten to the heart

00:46:04 ►

of the issue. The business

00:46:07 ►

about slack may be too metaphysical. Let’s see if I can make it even simpler. You all know, well,

00:46:15 ►

Ronald Reagan is president, so it’s pretty obvious. You all know how dumb the average guy is, right?

00:46:20 ►

Well, mathematically, by definition, half of them are even dumber than that.

00:46:24 ►

Well, mathematically, by definition, half of them are even dumber than that.

00:46:32 ►

Now that you understand why Bob Dobbs is almost as rich as the Pope and getting richer all the time,

00:46:38 ►

I think it’s about time for the break.

00:46:42 ►

And before I go off, I will make it even simpler.

00:46:46 ►

I want to leave you with this mantra so you can really understand the secret of power. And all of you, now that you’re popes,

00:46:48 ►

you can go forth and start your own cults

00:46:50 ►

and rake in the shekels

00:46:52 ►

just like L. Ron Hubbard and

00:46:54 ►

Rajneesh and J.R. Bob

00:46:56 ►

Dobbs and the pope and the ayatollah.

00:46:59 ►

A disciple

00:47:00 ►

is an asshole

00:47:02 ►

looking for a human being to attach

00:47:04 ►

itself to.

00:47:21 ►

You are free to unburden yourselves of all of the thoughts with which you are entertaining yourselves while pretending to listen to me.

00:47:23 ►

which you are entertaining yourselves while pretending to listen to me.

00:47:30 ►

And in accord with the protocol of the universities where I usually appear,

00:47:34 ►

you will pretend to put them in the form of questions.

00:47:38 ►

Okay.

00:47:40 ►

The lighting isn’t very good here.

00:47:45 ►

Could we change the house lighting so I can see who wants to ask a question?

00:47:47 ►

Is that possible?

00:47:49 ►

Ah, that’s better.

00:47:50 ►

At least I…

00:47:51 ►

Okay, you’re first.

00:47:52 ►

What do you think

00:47:53 ►

of Dr. Gene Scott?

00:47:54 ►

Oh, Gene Scott.

00:47:57 ►

He’s my favorite.

00:47:59 ►

He’s the only

00:48:00 ►

Christian fundamentalist

00:48:02 ►

who wears funny hats deliberately.

00:48:05 ►

I find endless hours of entertainment and trying to figure out whether he’s a put-on or a lunatic

00:48:09 ►

or a great satirist or what the hell he’s up to.

00:48:13 ►

But a lot of the things he says I find totally convincing.

00:48:16 ►

As a theologian myself of sorts, I find him absolutely convincing in his demonstration

00:48:23 ►

that IRS is the great beast 666 foretold in the book of Revelation.

00:48:31 ►

If you haven’t seen that show, you should really try to get a video of it.

00:48:35 ►

His biblical scholarship is excellent, and IRS is certainly some kind of beast.

00:48:42 ►

One night he did a great routine. He spent about an hour

00:48:46 ►

going all through the Bible with a concordance,

00:48:48 ►

cross-referenced and everything,

00:48:50 ►

and he showed the word audit does not

00:48:52 ►

appear once in the word of God.

00:48:56 ►

So whose word is it if it’s

00:48:58 ►

not God’s word? It must be the devil’s word.

00:49:02 ►

I like Gene Scott.

00:49:04 ►

I also like those big cigars he smokes. He said on one show

00:49:08 ►

he does it just to annoy the other evangelists on television. Yes. Yes. Two questions. The

00:49:18 ►

first part is kind of simple. What can you tell me what you know about vitamin K?

00:49:26 ►

And the second part is more complicated.

00:49:33 ►

In the Don Juan books, I see references, you know,

00:49:40 ►

like with Western magic as in Alistister Crowley and things like that, but can you just talk about what you feel about those books

00:49:50 ►

and how it relates to the rest of Western history?

00:49:58 ►

You know what I’m saying?

00:50:01 ►

I guess.

00:50:03 ►

I hope.

00:50:02 ►

I guess.

00:50:04 ►

I hope.

00:50:14 ►

The vitamin K, that’s a very thin disguise invented by John Lilly for ketamine.

00:50:20 ►

Ketamine is what Tim Leary would call a circuit eight drug,

00:50:26 ►

which Leary classifies drugs according to which circuit of the nervous system they activate.

00:50:33 ►

And circuit 8 is the quantum circuit or the out-of-body circuit. When consciousness moves to circuit 8, you are totally detached from the body

00:50:39 ►

and body-oriented space-time definitions, body emotions, and body trips in general.

00:50:46 ►

Circuit 8 is generally known as the out-of-body experience in parapsychological literature.

00:50:59 ►

The materialist explanation of ketamine is that it knocks out every part of the brain

00:51:03 ►

except the newest parts of the forebrain.

00:51:06 ►

So you’re not getting any signals

00:51:08 ►

from your body.

00:51:09 ►

So you have been reduced to pure thought

00:51:12 ►

thinking about pure thought.

00:51:15 ►

That’s one way

00:51:16 ►

of looking at it.

00:51:18 ►

I know the first time I tried

00:51:20 ►

vitamin K,

00:51:21 ►

I had an experience unique

00:51:24 ►

in my whole life. I was

00:51:26 ►

absolutely convinced I was God.

00:51:28 ►

I mean, I have had that

00:51:30 ►

suspicion on

00:51:32 ►

occasion, like most mystics.

00:51:34 ►

But this time I was absolutely convinced.

00:51:36 ►

And I spent about 45

00:51:38 ►

minutes arguing with myself.

00:51:39 ►

Now, wait a minute. You know you’re on

00:51:41 ►

a new and experimental drug, and you’re

00:51:44 ►

just imagining you’re God.

00:51:45 ►

And that seemed so damn silly because all the evidence was so clear

00:51:48 ►

that I was running the whole universe.

00:51:50 ►

How could I be running the whole universe on drugs, you know?

00:51:56 ►

I just couldn’t believe I wasn’t God.

00:52:01 ►

Interestingly enough, you can get the same general effect

00:52:06 ►

with a lot of the new brain machines that are around now,

00:52:09 ►

especially the Hemisync designed by Robert Monroe.

00:52:13 ►

With the Hemisync, you get pulses at 404 hertz in one ear

00:52:18 ►

and at 400 hertz in the other ear,

00:52:21 ►

and the brain subtracts one from the other,

00:52:24 ►

and so you’re getting sound waves at 4 hertz.

00:52:28 ►

And for some reason, sound waves at 4 hertz put you into circuit aid

00:52:32 ►

or the out-of-body experience.

00:52:33 ►

At least 70% of the users have had that kind of experience.

00:52:38 ►

I also had it with a machine known as the Pulse Star,

00:52:42 ►

designed by Mike Hercules in Boulder, Colorado. The first time I tried the Pulse Star, designed by Mike Hercules in Boulder, Colorado.

00:52:45 ►

The first time I tried the Pulse Star, Mike said,

00:52:49 ►

let me wire you up to an EEG so we can have a record of what happens.

00:52:55 ►

And so I was wired up to the Pulse Star,

00:52:57 ►

which started moving my brainwaves down through alpha and theta down into delta,

00:53:04 ►

which is where you hit four hertz in the out-of-body experience.

00:53:09 ►

And Mike had me wired up to an EEG

00:53:12 ►

showing that my brain waves were falling right into sync

00:53:15 ►

with the rhythm of the pulse star, just as they’re supposed to,

00:53:18 ►

according to the theory.

00:53:20 ►

And I went out of my body and over the North Pole and back to Ireland

00:53:24 ►

and wandered around the streets of Hoth

00:53:26 ►

which I was familiar with

00:53:28 ►

and then I went back over the North Pole and over the Rockies

00:53:31 ►

and back to Boulder and Mike unwired me

00:53:34 ►

and we looked at the EEG and I had no brain waves at all

00:53:38 ►

according to the EEG I was clinically dead

00:53:41 ►

during that experience

00:53:43 ►

I usually don’t talk about this because there’s enough critics who say that my brain seems to be dead.

00:53:50 ►

I don’t want to give them more evidence, but I got a copy of the chart Mike made a Xerox of,

00:53:55 ►

and every now and then I take this out and look at it,

00:53:57 ►

the period in which I had no brain activity whatsoever,

00:54:01 ►

and yet I was still conscious and sentient.

00:54:06 ►

Very, very remarkable.

00:54:11 ►

I think those machines are fairly safe.

00:54:19 ►

Vitamin K should only be taken under the supervision of a physician in my opinion. I’m sorry to sound square and professorial,

00:54:22 ►

but on vitamin K if the house were to catch fire you would not get up and Professorial. But on vitamin K, if the house were to catch fire,

00:54:25 ►

you would not get up and walk out.

00:54:28 ►

And so it’s best to have somebody supervising you

00:54:30 ►

if you’re going to experiment with vitamin K.

00:54:33 ►

Also, it needs to be injected in urine

00:54:35 ►

into all the problems with needles and so on.

00:54:39 ►

I’m really not about to set up as an exponent, a proponent,

00:54:46 ►

telling people to go around trying vitamin K.

00:54:50 ►

It’s a very interesting experience,

00:54:52 ►

but I think it’s postgraduate work for those who have already been through the more elementary courses.

00:54:59 ►

I don’t recommend it for beginners.

00:55:04 ►

What do you recommend for beginners?

00:55:13 ►

Aspirin.

00:55:17 ►

Is it baby aspirin or full strength?

00:55:19 ►

Start out with baby aspirin.

00:55:21 ►

You don’t want to strain your nervous system too much.

00:55:23 ►

Then you go on to the hard stuff, full adult strength aspirin.

00:55:28 ►

And then if you really want to live dangerously, you buy some Tylenol.

00:55:31 ►

That’s the new form of Russian roulette, you know.

00:55:34 ►

Let’s go out and buy some Tylenol and see if we survive the experience.

00:55:39 ►

I was asked about Carlos Castaneda.

00:55:41 ►

The most interesting thing about Castaneda to me is that he was a pupil of Harold Garfinkel.

00:55:48 ►

And so was George Lucas.

00:55:51 ►

If you wonder why the world is getting weirder every year,

00:55:56 ►

just remember Lucas and Castaneda both studied with Garfinkel.

00:55:59 ►

Garfinkel is a sociologist who invented a new discipline called ethno-methodology,

00:56:06 ►

which involves crisis experiments.

00:56:09 ►

I first heard of Garfinkel when I got a fan letter from a German sociologist

00:56:13 ►

who asked me if my books were influenced by Garfinkel, and they weren’t at that time.

00:56:19 ►

So I went out and read Garfinkel and how my books are influenced by Garfinkel.

00:56:23 ►

So that turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, which I’m sure would delight Garfinkel and how my books are influenced by Garfinkel. So that turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy,

00:56:26 ►

which I’m sure would delight Garfinkel.

00:56:28 ►

Garfinkel tried experiments like having students who were living at home

00:56:33 ►

go home and watch their parents as if they were boarders in a rooming house.

00:56:40 ►

This is an elementary exercise in Buddhist detachment,

00:56:43 ►

but the students found it quite alarming in some cases.

00:56:46 ►

Then he asked the braver students to go home over the weekend and act as if they were boarders.

00:56:51 ►

And in most cases, the parents tried to have them committed to mental hospitals.

00:56:56 ►

Even though nothing rude or impolite was done, they acted like good boarders should have.

00:57:01 ►

They were polite and truth and ruley and so on.

00:57:05 ►

But all sorts of tacit game

00:57:07 ►

rules were being violated, and the fact

00:57:09 ►

that nobody knew what the game rules were

00:57:11 ►

made it even weirder.

00:57:13 ►

Another experiment of Garfinkel’s I like

00:57:15 ►

is he had some students walking

00:57:17 ►

around campus, and they’d approach another student,

00:57:19 ►

start a conversation, and move gradually

00:57:21 ►

closer.

00:57:24 ►

Mexicans like to stand really close.

00:57:26 ►

North Americanos like to

00:57:28 ►

have about a foot and a half between them.

00:57:30 ►

And when you start moving within that

00:57:32 ►

foot and a half, people in our culture get

00:57:34 ►

nervous. And Garfinkel had his

00:57:36 ►

students move in gradually closer and closer

00:57:38 ►

until their noses were touching.

00:57:40 ►

And people

00:57:41 ►

really went ape over that.

00:57:44 ►

Even though there’s no book anywhere, it’s not in Emily Post, it’s not in the Bible,

00:57:48 ►

you can’t find any place that says you shall not touch noses with thy neighbor.

00:57:52 ►

This is an unstated game rule.

00:57:56 ►

Garfinkel’s work is entirely devoted to trying to discover

00:57:59 ►

how many unstated game rules we’re following all the time,

00:58:02 ►

and how do we learn them if they’re never stated?

00:58:04 ►

And why do they control us if we don’t even know that we’re following all the time and how do we learn them if they’re never stated? And why do they control us

00:58:06 ►

if we don’t even know that we’re following

00:58:08 ►

them? And of course

00:58:10 ►

it has a feedback loop and a

00:58:11 ►

strange loop. The question is

00:58:13 ►

how many game rules are sociologists

00:58:15 ►

or anthropologists following when they think

00:58:17 ►

they’re writing an objective description

00:58:20 ►

of another culture?

00:58:21 ►

And that’s what influence Castaneda.

00:58:23 ►

He tried to describe the shaman’s world from inside

00:58:26 ►

instead of trying to put it into the grid

00:58:28 ►

of the way social scientists look at shamans.

00:58:32 ►

And ever since then,

00:58:33 ►

there have been charges that Castaneda must be nuts

00:58:35 ►

or he must be a liar or a fraud or something

00:58:38 ►

because we’re not supposed to look at things

00:58:40 ►

from the shaman’s point of view.

00:58:41 ►

We’re supposed to look at things

00:58:42 ►

from our Western university social science point of view. We’re supposed to look at things from our western university social science

00:58:45 ►

point of view. I think Castaneda

00:58:48 ►

has performed the greatest breaching experiment

00:58:50 ►

of all. Touching noses

00:58:52 ►

is nothing compared to what he’s done to the

00:58:54 ►

social sciences.

00:58:57 ►

Yes?

00:58:59 ►

So your

00:58:59 ►

name is very interesting as far as an acronym

00:59:02 ►

comes from. Red Bull Blaze.

00:59:04 ►

Can you comment on that?

00:59:06 ►

Roar and War.

00:59:10 ►

The only comment I can think of is my first name.

00:59:14 ►

It’s what the Church of the Subgenius is always saying,

00:59:18 ►

God spelled backwards as dog, but Bob spelled backwards as still Bob.

00:59:23 ►

Praise Bob. Praise Bob. Praise Bob.

00:59:29 ►

Yes?

00:59:31 ►

In a few of your books, you mentioned May Brussel.

00:59:35 ►

Do you think her research is valid or a little too far out?

00:59:39 ►

What do you think about her?

00:59:43 ►

May Brussel.

00:59:45 ►

She believes I’m an agent of the Rockefeller conspiracy.

00:59:49 ►

She has made a whole series of charges against me,

00:59:56 ►

but that was the one that I found most amusing.

01:00:00 ►

That was in Conspiracy Digest,

01:00:02 ►

and I wrote a letter in the next issue

01:00:04 ►

saying that she had the goods on me, and I might as well confess.

01:00:08 ►

In fact, my cellar is stacked from floor to ceiling with bars of Rockefeller gold.

01:00:14 ►

And then I added the additionally illuminating comment, woof, woof, woof.

01:00:20 ►

And I’m sure Mae Brussel is still showing that letter around as proof that she got me to confess.

01:00:26 ►

And she has found some extraterrestrial message in that last sentence,

01:00:30 ►

which shows I’m an avant-garde agent of the extraterrestrial invaders from the Dog Star.

01:00:38 ►

What?

01:00:44 ►

I got bank accounts in Ireland and Ohio.

01:00:47 ►

I don’t know why California bankers are so paranoid.

01:00:52 ►

Yes?

01:00:54 ►

What distinction, if any, is there between a wise entity and a scoundrel?

01:01:01 ►

Very little.

01:01:02 ►

Very little. Very little.

01:01:12 ►

The first thing that you discover if you achieve any degree of wisdom at all

01:01:21 ►

is that you’re entirely surrounded by idiots.

01:01:25 ►

achieve any degree of wisdom at all is that you’re entirely surrounded by idiots. And this is apt to produce a sense of arrogance or contempt. And one has to spend, to avoid

01:01:36 ►

becoming a total scoundrel, one has to spend a great deal of time in the Gurdjieff work

01:01:42 ►

in which you discover that you’re an idiot so and then you begin to acquire humility and then you realize the TS

01:01:49 ►

Eliot was right humility is endless the the Gurdjieff teaching is that the

01:01:54 ►

human race consists of two classes objectively hopeless idiots which is the

01:01:59 ►

majority who have no suspicion that they’re idiots at all and subjectively

01:02:04 ►

hopeless idiots which is people like me who know we’re idiots at all, and subjectively hopeless idiots,

01:02:05 ►

which is people like me who know we’re idiots

01:02:07 ►

and are trying to do something about it.

01:02:10 ►

I was at a big Gurdjieff festival a few years ago

01:02:13 ►

where they did the traditional toasting of the idiots,

01:02:16 ►

which is an old Gurdjieff tradition.

01:02:18 ►

Everybody has to take a shot of vodka and propose a toast,

01:02:21 ►

and everybody has to drink their shot of vodka.

01:02:23 ►

And they toast every type of idiot who was at that particular workshop.

01:02:28 ►

And I was on a panel at that workshop with E.J. Gold on the secrets of the Illuminati.

01:02:34 ►

So I proposed a toast to all the idiots who sit on panels discussing the secrets of the Illuminati.

01:02:40 ►

And after you’ve toasted every type of idiot who sat there at the convention,

01:02:44 ►

and after you’ve toasted every type of idiot who sat there at the convention,

01:02:50 ►

almost everybody is under the table and nobody’s able to stand up anymore and offer another toast. This may be Gary Jeff’s most profound contribution to spiritual advancement.

01:02:56 ►

At least it helps you to understand what he means by a subjectively hopeless idiot.

01:03:01 ►

Next question.

01:03:08 ►

What’s your current favorite quantum reality?

01:03:11 ►

what’s my current favorite quantum reality?

01:03:19 ►

I still like the multi-worlds interpretation

01:03:20 ►

according to the multi-worlds interpretation

01:03:23 ►

invented by Everett Wheeler and Graham back at Princeton

01:03:27 ►

the state vector which controls

01:03:33 ►

which way a quantum system is going to go

01:03:36 ►

it never collapses

01:03:37 ►

every quantum system goes every possible way it can go

01:03:42 ►

since we can’t see this

01:03:44 ►

it’s obviously not happening

01:03:45 ►

in this universe, so there’s got to be a multiplicity of universes in which every possible

01:03:50 ►

choice does happen. So there’s a universe in which Adolf Hitler is remembered as a banal

01:03:58 ►

portrait painter who never went into politics. And there’s a universe in which George Washington

01:04:05 ►

wasn’t assassinated and served out his term.

01:04:10 ►

And sometimes people fall through from one universe to another

01:04:14 ►

and they get kind of confused when they find people

01:04:16 ►

talking about things they don’t remember.

01:04:19 ►

This is especially true if they do acid

01:04:21 ►

and come to one of my nightclub acts.

01:04:24 ►

There’s a universe

01:04:26 ►

in which Marilyn Chambers is the president of the United States, and there’s a universe

01:04:34 ►

in which John Kennedy slipped on a banana peel and died that way. My favorite alternative

01:04:41 ►

universe is the one where John listened to Marilyn Monroe’s importunings,

01:04:46 ►

jilted Jackie and ran off with Marilyn to Mexico and married her there and gave up the presidency.

01:04:52 ►

He said, the hell with the presidency, I’d rather ball Marilyn Monroe.

01:04:56 ►

I think that’s a great alternative universe.

01:04:59 ►

I’m going to write a novel set there one of these days.

01:05:03 ►

What do you know about Zen Master Rama?

01:05:07 ►

What do I know about

01:05:08 ►

what? Zen Master Rama.

01:05:12 ►

Don’t know that.

01:05:13 ►

Don’t worry about it.

01:05:19 ►

I’m sorry.

01:05:20 ►

That’s over my head. I don’t know a damn thing

01:05:21 ►

about it.

01:05:23 ►

Yes.

01:05:25 ►

What are you working on in the book department?

01:05:28 ►

What’s going on?

01:05:30 ►

Right now I’m working on a movie called

01:05:32 ►

Reality is What You Can Get Away With.

01:05:38 ►

After the movie, I’m going to go on with my historical series

01:05:42 ►

and do Volume 3, Nature’s God.

01:05:45 ►

Actually, I’ve done parts of Volume 3 already,

01:05:48 ►

but I got more interested in the movie project.

01:05:52 ►

For some reason, they pay more in Hollywood than publishers pay.

01:05:57 ►

That’s why all writers end up in Hollywood eventually.

01:06:01 ►

Yes?

01:06:02 ►

What kind of reaction are you getting from your new book or your latest book

01:06:05 ►

the new inquisition

01:06:08 ►

the new inquisition

01:06:10 ►

so far I haven’t

01:06:14 ►

got much reaction at all

01:06:16 ►

which is odd

01:06:18 ►

but I’ve been traveling a lot this year

01:06:20 ►

maybe the reaction just hasn’t caught up with me

01:06:22 ►

maybe there are all sorts of

01:06:24 ►

furious enunciatory letters circulating around the world trying to find this year. Maybe the reaction just hasn’t caught up with me. Maybe there are all sorts of furious

01:06:25 ►

enunciatory letters circulating around the world trying to find where I am now to catch up with me.

01:06:30 ►

I don’t know. I’ve done more traveling this year than in all the rest of my life put together,

01:06:37 ►

and it’s been exhilarating. And I feel like a rat in one of those enriched environment experiments.

01:06:43 ►

in one of those enriched environment experiments.

01:06:53 ►

I’ve been in Oslo and Amsterdam and Zurich and Basel and Berlin and East Berlin and Boulder and Vancouver and Maui and Dallas and Tallahassee

01:07:00 ►

and all sorts of weird places.

01:07:05 ►

East Berlin was fascinating.

01:07:07 ►

Totalitarianism always looks like a caricature of itself.

01:07:11 ►

They got these guards who come on the train to check for your passport,

01:07:16 ►

and they look like they come from central casting.

01:07:19 ►

They look like all the guys who played Nazis in movies that I saw when I was a kid.

01:07:24 ►

It’s one type of Germanic face.

01:07:27 ►

And they take your passport away and they go mutter with one another at the back of the train.

01:07:32 ►

And you have visions of 30 years in an East German prison on suspicion of being a CIA agent.

01:07:40 ►

You look out the window and you see there’s a guy with a Tommy gun walking up and down the other side of the train

01:07:45 ►

so nobody can sneak off the other side of the train and avoid being checked by these volutes.

01:07:51 ►

The Berlin Wall has got minefields all around the east side and machine gun towers.

01:07:59 ►

That’s to keep us from breaking into the socialist paradise, I think.

01:08:07 ►

That’s their explanation.

01:08:11 ►

When I finally got out of East Germany,

01:08:14 ►

I wanted to do just what that kid does in that movie, Gotcha.

01:08:16 ►

I wanted to turn around and yell,

01:08:16 ►

Fuck you!

01:08:21 ►

I don’t like totalitarianism at all, I’ll tell you.

01:08:23 ►

Oslo is a beautiful place.

01:08:26 ►

Amsterdam, as everybody knows, has the best window shopping in Europe.

01:08:28 ►

The great thing about Amsterdam,

01:08:30 ►

my first night there, I was

01:08:32 ►

in a bar in a hotel

01:08:33 ►

with some friends, and we’re

01:08:36 ►

drinking beer and passing a joint around

01:08:38 ►

the table, and the cop on the beach

01:08:39 ►

comes in and recognizes somebody at the table

01:08:42 ►

and comes over, chats for a while,

01:08:44 ►

takes a toke on the joint passes,

01:08:46 ►

says a cheery goodbye to everybody who’s out.

01:08:49 ►

And that’s when I knew the Dutch are the wisest people in the world.

01:08:52 ►

And Amsterdam is the earthly paradise.

01:08:56 ►

And I want to go back to Amsterdam as often as possible.

01:09:03 ►

Yes?

01:09:03 ►

If you could create the world in your own language, how would you create it? If I could create the world in your own image

01:09:05 ►

how would you create it?

01:09:07 ►

if I could create the world

01:09:08 ►

create the objective

01:09:09 ►

I would

01:09:19 ►

I would try to release

01:09:24 ►

everybody from the masochistic, pessimistic down trips that make them so unhappy

01:09:30 ►

and keep them stoned and happy all the time.

01:09:39 ►

Distribute the food surpluses to the third world where the people are starving,

01:09:46 ►

and hang the Pope.

01:09:52 ►

But I don’t think I’m going to have the opportunity to remake the objective world in my own image, fortunately.

01:09:58 ►

I’d probably make as many mistakes as anybody else who’s tried to do that.

01:10:02 ►

Yes, I said I’ve done more traveling this year than the whole rest of my life.

01:10:06 ►

I intend to go back to L.A. and work on the screenplay

01:10:10 ►

and not do any more traveling until at least February.

01:10:14 ►

I spend most of my time cursing the fact

01:10:16 ►

that Ralph Nader was born a bondage freak.

01:10:19 ►

You’re on a plane, you fly eight hours,

01:10:22 ►

you’re strapped in, you get off,

01:10:24 ►

you get into somebody’s car,

01:10:25 ►

and they say, you’ve got to put your seatbelt on, otherwise I might get fined for letting you ride in my car with us.

01:10:31 ►

So you’ve got to put another strap on.

01:10:33 ►

All because Nader is a bondage freak, but we’re all tied up, those of us who travel.

01:10:38 ►

We spend most of our waking hours tied up like somebody in a bondage film.

01:10:43 ►

And the next thing that bastard is going to do, he’s going to have a law that you’ve got

01:10:47 ►

to be strapped to your chair while you’re working on your word processing.

01:10:51 ►

So even when I’m writing, I won’t have any freedom.

01:10:54 ►

I’ve got to be strapped to my chair so I can’t fall off and hurt myself accidentally.

01:11:01 ►

Yes?

01:11:02 ►

Would you vote for you after any election?

01:11:06 ►

Oh, absolutely.

01:11:08 ►

But I would prefer Paul Newman.

01:11:13 ►

Well, it’s obvious that American politics has become a branch of show business.

01:11:18 ►

I don’t think Sylvester Stallion was on drugs necessarily

01:11:23 ►

when he said he’s the next actor to be president of the United States.

01:11:27 ►

I think he’s got a damn good chance.

01:11:31 ►

Like Bob says, the secret of power,

01:11:36 ►

half of them are even dumber than the average.

01:11:40 ►

So politics has become a branch of show business,

01:11:44 ►

and I keep wondering which actors are going to be running the country in the 90s.

01:11:49 ►

And as far as I can make out, Paul Newman is one of the most intelligent and sensitive people in Hollywood.

01:11:56 ►

And he also is, I understand, enormously sexy and appealing to women.

01:12:02 ►

And so he’ll almost certainly win.

01:12:05 ►

I once quoted a statistic that I invented on the spur of the moment.

01:12:10 ►

I told it was that a sociological survey showed that 99% of the women in America want to ball Paul Newman.

01:12:18 ►

And a woman in the back yelled out, 100%!

01:12:21 ►

So I don’t think anybody can beat Paul Newman.

01:12:20 ►

percent true.

01:12:23 ►

So I don’t think anybody can beat Paul Newman. And if

01:12:25 ►

he takes Barbara Streisand as his

01:12:27 ►

running mate, they get

01:12:29 ►

the Eastern Seaboard intelligentsia

01:12:32 ►

and the feminists, and

01:12:34 ►

if they announce that they’re going

01:12:35 ►

to appoint Lassie Secretary of

01:12:37 ►

Health, Education, and Welfare,

01:12:40 ►

they can stay in

01:12:41 ►

until the year 2000, and we

01:12:43 ►

won’t get stuck with Sylvester Stallion or Clint Eastwood.

01:12:47 ►

Otherwise, I see bad times coming.

01:12:52 ►

Paul Newman is our only salvation, unless George Burns agrees to run.

01:12:57 ►

Half of the country already thinks George Burns is God anyway.

01:13:02 ►

I half believe it myself.

01:13:05 ►

George Burns is sort of like my ego ideal.

01:13:08 ►

He’s what I want to be when I grow up.

01:13:12 ►

I saw his 91st birthday party on television.

01:13:17 ►

They had a big celebration in Hollywood.

01:13:19 ►

George said, I don’t feel a day over 90.

01:13:23 ►

He gave his secret for longevity, which is that he smokes 10 cigars a day,

01:13:28 ►

has Bloody Mary with lunch, three martinis with dinner, and always dances close.

01:13:36 ►

My doctor always objected, but he’s dead now.

01:13:43 ►

So I think George Burns has a good chance of getting elected,

01:13:46 ►

and he’d obviously make a good president.

01:13:48 ►

As for the politicians, I don’t trust any of them.

01:13:53 ►

I mean, as a last resort, if we’re running out of actors,

01:13:56 ►

but just as long as it’s not a politician.

01:14:03 ►

Yes?

01:14:03 ►

just as long as it’s not a politician yes

01:14:03 ►

would you talk a little bit about

01:14:06 ►

life extension and

01:14:08 ►

genetic

01:14:09 ►

approaches to life extension

01:14:12 ►

and beyond

01:14:14 ►

yeah he asked me to talk about

01:14:17 ►

genetic approaches to life extension

01:14:18 ►

the best book on that subject is

01:14:20 ►

The Engines of Creation

01:14:22 ►

by Keith Drexler

01:14:24 ►

Eric Drexler.

01:14:28 ►

Eric Drexler. There goes another synapse.

01:14:36 ►

With current research, they have found ways to create new enzymes and replicators,

01:14:45 ►

molecules that will replicate themselves.

01:14:47 ►

And it seems pretty obvious that we’re on the edge of creating

01:14:51 ►

neoenzymes that can go into every cell in the body

01:14:56 ►

and check out if it’s operating properly.

01:14:59 ►

And if it isn’t, correct what’s wrong with it.

01:15:01 ►

These are sort of mini, mini, mini computers on the organic level.

01:15:06 ►

And I think that research is the, of all the research on longevity that’s going on, I think

01:15:11 ►

that’s the most promising area. It also bids fair to revive those who have been in cryonic

01:15:18 ►

suspension. When you have the proper replicators, you just inject them into somebody who’s in

01:15:23 ►

cryonic suspension and it’ll go all over their body and repair and resell and correct what they died of.

01:15:28 ►

Paul Siegel recently brought a dog back to life after putting it into cryonic suspension.

01:15:36 ►

For how long?

01:15:37 ►

For 45 minutes.

01:15:39 ►

Is he still working there in Berkeley?

01:15:41 ►

Yes, he’s working at UC Berkeley, the last I heard.

01:15:41 ►

Is he still working there in Berkeley?

01:15:44 ►

Yes, he’s working at UC Berkeley, the last I heard.

01:15:51 ►

The important thing about longevity to me is that I’m not interested in going to heaven because I’m not sure it exists.

01:15:53 ►

And I’m not so much excited about reincarnation

01:15:57 ►

because with my bad habits I’d probably be reincarnated as a Gary Hart button

01:16:02 ►

or something like that.

01:16:05 ►

And having

01:16:06 ►

immortality through my children

01:16:08 ►

is not all that exciting.

01:16:10 ►

None of them have shown

01:16:12 ►

any inclination to reproduce so far.

01:16:16 ►

I think the best way to achieve

01:16:18 ►

immortality is by not dying at all.

01:16:24 ►

And so I think that should be the major goal of scientific research. We are

01:16:29 ►

living in a weird world where 50% of the scientists, according to Bucky Fuller in Crunch of Giants,

01:16:36 ►

50% of the scientists now alive are engaged in one field or another connected with weapons research. That means 50% of the most talented technical analytical brains on the planet

01:16:51 ►

are devoting themselves entirely to the project of delivering more and more explosive power

01:16:57 ►

over longer and longer distances in shorter and shorter times to kill more and more people.

01:17:04 ►

Now, as they make the longer and longer distances in shorter and shorter times to kill more and more people. Now, as they make the longer and longer distances

01:17:07 ►

and shorter and shorter times to kill more and more people,

01:17:10 ►

we’ll eventually reach the point where by pressing one button

01:17:12 ►

we can kill everybody.

01:17:14 ►

And it seems to me there should be a better use than that

01:17:17 ►

for human intelligence.

01:17:18 ►

I think the search for immortality would be much more fruitful.

01:17:24 ►

I think the devotion to death in our society should be reversed

01:17:28 ►

and we should instead try to enhance and celebrate life.

01:17:33 ►

I know this is a heretical view, but it should be stated occasionally,

01:17:37 ►

especially for the sake of the cowards around

01:17:40 ►

who don’t particularly look forward to dying.

01:17:44 ►

Riani, yes. around who don’t particularly look forward to dying. Is there a cure for stupidity?

01:17:54 ►

I don’t know if there’s any permanent cure.

01:17:56 ►

I’ve been working on it for many years.

01:18:01 ►

And there are times I get pretty clear-cut evidence

01:18:04 ►

that I’m almost as stupid as I ever was.

01:18:08 ►

But there are alleviations.

01:18:13 ►

Biosurvival stupidity, which is a bad imprint on the first circuit in Leary’s terms,

01:18:19 ►

can be corrected by studying martial arts.

01:18:22 ►

If you get a black belt in karate,

01:18:24 ►

you will have a pretty high level of bio-survival intelligence.

01:18:28 ►

Emotional stupidity, which is so rampant in our society,

01:18:32 ►

can probably be alleviated somewhat

01:18:34 ►

by attending a few intensive encounter groups

01:18:38 ►

at Esalen or elsewhere,

01:18:42 ►

or by practicing pranayama.

01:18:45 ►

That’s a great help.

01:18:48 ►

Pranayama and hatha yoga.

01:18:51 ►

Semantic stupidity.

01:18:53 ►

The only cure I know is to read my books.

01:18:55 ►

I’m sorry.

01:18:56 ►

I haven’t got the energy.

01:18:57 ►

Go buy your books.

01:18:59 ►

There’s two of my latest books for sale right over there.

01:19:04 ►

They will help a great deal, especially the introduction to Wilhelm Reich in Hell.

01:19:11 ►

Sexual stupidity, the best cure is to go to Amsterdam

01:19:16 ►

and then spend six months in Los Angeles.

01:19:21 ►

There’s an old story that St. Peter sent St. Teresa down to hell to report down to earth,

01:19:27 ►

which appears like hell from the heavenly point of view, to report on whether sin was as bad as

01:19:33 ►

it was in her lifetime. And after traveling all over Europe, she called heaven and said,

01:19:38 ►

Peter, let me come back. This state of sin, fornication, evil, it’s worse than ever.

01:19:43 ►

St. Peter said, no, I want a full report.

01:19:45 ►

Go to the United States, check out New York.

01:19:48 ►

And she called back and she said, it’s even worse here.

01:19:50 ►

Let me come back to heaven.

01:19:52 ►

He said, no, I want a full report.

01:19:53 ►

Go to California.

01:19:56 ►

And he waited and waited and waited and she never called.

01:19:59 ►

So finally he got on the celestial switchboard and managed to track her down.

01:20:03 ►

And she picked up the phone and she said,

01:20:05 ►

Pete, darling, how divine, this is Terry.

01:20:15 ►

Neurosomatic stupidity is based on the idea

01:20:17 ►

that the only way to feel high is to have some guru give you darshan.

01:20:22 ►

This is cured by learning the techniques of getting high on your own.

01:20:27 ►

And then you don’t have to be a disciple, an asshole,

01:20:30 ►

in search of a human being to attach itself to you.

01:20:32 ►

You can be your own guru.

01:20:35 ►

Neurogenetic stupidity, the cure involves a prodigious amount of work

01:20:40 ►

in advanced psychology and yoga.

01:20:43 ►

of work in advanced psychology and yoga.

01:20:53 ►

Metaprogramming stupidity involves very arduous and advanced work.

01:21:00 ►

Quantum stupidity, that is the delusion that we’re isolated in one part of space-time and encapsulated by our skin,

01:21:03 ►

that can be greatly alleviated by vitamin K

01:21:07 ►

or by the brain machines I was talking about.

01:21:10 ►

I think as neuroscience advances,

01:21:12 ►

we’ll learn how to greatly alleviate all forms of human stupidity.

01:21:16 ►

But considering myself as an example of somebody

01:21:19 ►

who’s been doing a lot of this research and seeing how stupid I still am,

01:21:23 ►

I don’t expect utopia next Tuesday after lunch.

01:21:26 ►

Yes?

01:21:26 ►

Is there a need for a lot of stupidity along the side of the ship?

01:21:31 ►

Oh, yes, stupidity.

01:21:33 ►

I don’t want to be too hard on stupidity.

01:21:35 ►

It’s been around so long it must have some evolutionary function.

01:21:39 ►

I think the function of stupidity is to force the intelligent to get more intelligent.

01:21:43 ►

The function of stupidity is to force the intelligent to get more intelligent.

01:21:53 ►

In the 1960s, we discovered LSD,

01:21:59 ►

and we discovered how many really stupid programs could be entirely negated by LSD.

01:22:02 ►

They were curing alcoholics at Spring Grove. They were curing schizophrenics.

01:22:05 ►

Leary up in the Boston prison system reversed the recidivism rate.

01:22:11 ►

The average convict is back in prison.

01:22:14 ►

Ninety-five percent of all convicts are back in prison one year after release.

01:22:19 ►

Leary’s convicts were still outside on the streets leading productive lives

01:22:23 ►

ten years after his work with LSD.

01:22:28 ►

And there was tremendous, nobody in the academic world wants to talk about it anymore,

01:22:33 ►

but there was tremendous excitement and enthusiasm in the social sciences.

01:22:36 ►

Everybody felt we finally got a way to reverse robot programs,

01:22:40 ►

release people from their conditioned and imprinted stupidities,

01:22:44 ►

and then the government made it illegal.

01:22:46 ►

I think that’s a classic example of the evolutionary function of stupidity.

01:22:51 ►

What that did was it led all the LSD researchers to go into other fields of research

01:22:55 ►

to see if they could find other ways of creating these changes,

01:22:59 ►

and that’s how we got the Lilly isolation tank.

01:23:01 ►

We got a lot of interesting research on yoga and zen.

01:23:04 ►

We got biofeedback machines. We got got a lot of interesting research on yoga and zen. We’ve got biofeedback machines.

01:23:06 ►

We’ve got the new generation of brain-tuning machines.

01:23:09 ►

We’ve got the graph breathing techniques.

01:23:12 ►

Most of this research wouldn’t have been done

01:23:14 ►

if people had been allowed to go ahead researching acid.

01:23:18 ►

So stupidity always forces the intelligent to become more intelligent.

01:23:21 ►

So it does have an evolutionary function.

01:23:24 ►

Besides, it enriches the organized religion and the advertisers.

01:23:31 ►

Do you think the Russian Missile Treaty is a torch for us?

01:23:36 ►

I think the Missile Treaty is probably the last chance we have

01:23:41 ►

of surviving the 20th century and entering the 21st century,

01:23:46 ►

as long as Nancy doesn’t bitch too much about Mrs. Gorbachev’s Paris frocks.

01:23:53 ►

Have you heard anything about acupuncture and cancer?

01:23:57 ►

Acupuncture, curing cancer?

01:23:59 ►

No, for enhancing intelligence.

01:24:02 ►

Oh, acupuncture enhancing intelligence.

01:24:04 ►

Gee, I haven’t heard anything about that at all.

01:24:07 ►

Have you?

01:24:08 ►

A little bit.

01:24:09 ►

Ah.

01:24:13 ►

Okay, that’s another area that’s worth exploring.

01:24:18 ►

What about UFOs?

01:24:21 ►

Could you talk a little bit about about do you know of any research

01:24:25 ►

that people

01:24:27 ►

do you know anybody I should say

01:24:29 ►

even more specific that has done

01:24:31 ►

research into actual

01:24:33 ►

alternative propulsion

01:24:35 ►

like magnetic

01:24:37 ►

magnetic and electric

01:24:39 ►

no I don’t know anybody

01:24:41 ►

who’s done that kind of research

01:24:43 ►

I’ve met Jacques Vallee several times who’s probably spent,

01:24:48 ►

he’s probably the best scientific mind to have examined the UFO question closely

01:24:54 ►

for a period of well over 20 years, and he finally gave up in disgust.

01:24:59 ►

He decided he’d never figure it out,

01:25:02 ►

and it would be more profitable to put his energy back in his computer frame and become rich.

01:25:08 ►

Vallée started out with the assumption there’s something there, and then he drifted to the thought,

01:25:13 ►

well, it looks more like alien spaceships than anything else,

01:25:17 ►

in spite of the hostility in the scientific community to thinking such an exotic thought.

01:25:23 ►

And then the more he shifted the, sifted the

01:25:26 ►

evidence and especially analyzed it with computers, the more the extraterrestrial explanation

01:25:31 ►

broke down. And he started thinking UFOs really connect more with parapsychology, with the

01:25:37 ►

belief systems of the contactees and witnesses. And towards the end of his 20 years he was beginning to think

01:25:45 ►

maybe there’s a conspiracy

01:25:47 ►

on the part of some intelligence agency

01:25:49 ►

which is manipulating these things

01:25:51 ►

and at that point he decided

01:25:52 ►

his thinking was becoming

01:25:54 ►

maybe a little bit paranoid and extravagant

01:25:57 ►

he got the hell out of ufology

01:25:59 ►

which I’m much more interested in Mayborn

01:26:02 ►

that’s the Mutual Easter Bunny Observation Network

01:26:05 ►

they’re studying anomalous rabbit sightings

01:26:10 ►

they’ve paid a lot of attention to the killer rabbit

01:26:14 ►

that attacked Jimmy Carter

01:26:15 ►

and the puka which is a 6 foot tall white rabbit

01:26:19 ►

that haunts County Kerry in Ireland

01:26:21 ►

and bunny man which is another 6 foot tall rabbit

01:26:24 ►

reported frequently in Cornwall in England.

01:26:27 ►

I think we may get deeper insights out of these rabbit questions than we will get out of the UFOs.

01:26:34 ►

Yes?

01:26:34 ►

Can you talk a little bit about foregone energy and the suppression of that information

01:26:39 ►

and Fahrenheit 451 atmosphere around his writings?

01:26:44 ►

and parent type 451 atmosphere around his writings?

01:26:47 ►

Yeah.

01:26:52 ►

I got interested in Wilhelm Reich when they burned his books.

01:26:55 ►

I hadn’t even heard about Reich.

01:26:56 ►

This was back in 1957.

01:26:58 ►

That was 30 years ago.

01:27:02 ►

That was, by the way, that was the year I first smoked grass.

01:27:05 ►

What you see before you is what happens after 30 years of that.

01:27:09 ►

It’s sad, I know.

01:27:11 ►

You can take that as an endorsement then of good

01:27:13 ►

humboldt.

01:27:18 ►

Sensimia.

01:27:19 ►

Maui. Maui is the stuff, if you can

01:27:21 ►

afford it.

01:27:24 ►

That’s the nice thing about being a celebrity.

01:27:26 ►

You don’t have to afford it.

01:27:27 ►

People keep giving it to you.

01:27:32 ►

I was really furious that they burned Reich’s books.

01:27:38 ►

I am a First Amendment absolutist like the late Justice Blank.

01:27:43 ►

The Constitution says there shall

01:27:45 ►

be no laws abridging freedom of speech or of the press and to me no laws means no laws like justice

01:27:52 ►

black used to say i’m a simple farm boy and when i see the word no laws i think it means no laws

01:27:58 ►

and i don’t understand the ingenious intellectual processes by which the majority of the court has arrived at the opinion

01:28:05 ►

that no laws mean some laws. And that’s the way I feel about it, too. And so I got interested

01:28:11 ►

in Reich, and I went around trying to find people who owned Reich’s books so I could

01:28:16 ►

read them. And it was like living there. It really was like my other book, The New Inquisition.

01:28:21 ►

It really felt like living in the times of the Inquisition when papers of

01:28:25 ►

repressed scientific

01:28:27 ►

reports were passed around from friend

01:28:29 ►

to friend and always worried that the

01:28:31 ►

Inquisition would pounce on you.

01:28:34 ►

And

01:28:34 ►

I’ve been interested

01:28:37 ►

in Reich ever since.

01:28:40 ►

One of the most interesting of his books

01:28:42 ►

is Contact with Space,

01:28:43 ►

which was not only burned by the government,

01:28:46 ►

but since the government has lifted the ban

01:28:48 ►

and allowed publishers to republish Reich’s books,

01:28:52 ►

the Wilhelm Reich Foundation has refused to allow this one to be republished.

01:28:57 ►

They don’t want this one out.

01:28:58 ►

Now it’s the Reichians who are repressing Reich instead of the government.

01:29:02 ►

I got a copy of Contact with Space through subterranean channels,

01:29:07 ►

and it’s the most fascinating book I ever read.

01:29:10 ►

A page that’s like looking at Gene Scott on television.

01:29:13 ►

Page to page, I keep changing my mind about how crazy Reich was at the end of his life.

01:29:20 ►

There’s no doubt he was a little bit off,

01:29:22 ►

but the weirdest things in that book, Contact with Space, the UFO contacts,

01:29:29 ►

are also recounted by Reich’s wife, Ilse Ohlendorf, and her biography of him

01:29:34 ►

and by his son, Peter Reich, in his book, A Book of Dreams.

01:29:38 ►

And the classical explanation of that sort of thing is that some forms of psychosis are contagious,

01:29:44 ►

which I have never believed.

01:29:46 ►

You can dispose of any data that way.

01:29:48 ►

It’s like just before Reich went to prison,

01:29:50 ►

he announced he was going to use the cloudbuster to create a rainstorm in Maine

01:29:58 ►

to prove that the orgone energy worked.

01:30:00 ►

And the rainstorm happened.

01:30:02 ►

And the explanation of orthodoxy is coincidence.

01:30:11 ►

There was a hand up in the back and finally…

01:30:13 ►

Yes, I had a lot of experience with organ boxes back in the 50s.

01:30:23 ►

And I was never involved in any rigid scientific

01:30:26 ►

research with animals, such as Reich did with mice, because that’s the only way, doing research on

01:30:33 ►

rodents and so on, is the only way you can prove that the effects are not entirely placebo effects

01:30:39 ►

due to suggestion. I never was involved in that, so I can’t swear to anything. All I know is that I got

01:30:45 ►

definite defects from the argon accumulator myself, and I found it very hard to believe that was

01:30:51 ►

entirely due to auto-suggestion. I did one experiment with a plant, which seemed, the plant

01:30:58 ►

seemed to grow better than another plant that I wasn’t putting in the argon accumulator, but that’s

01:31:03 ►

one experiment by one amateur

01:31:05 ►

experimenter. I would love to see more of Reich’s critics, instead of just sneering

01:31:10 ►

at him and saying he was an old loony. I’d like to see them publish experiments that

01:31:14 ►

refute Reich. That might get more people interested in doing the experiments for themselves, and

01:31:19 ►

we might get some real hard evidence. Yes? In terms of the way he later read it, you wrote a lot of material,

01:31:26 ►

how much of the UFO material did you rewrite to

01:31:29 ►

sync up with

01:31:30 ►

his later viewpoints as he

01:31:33 ►

slipped or

01:31:35 ►

chose alternate paths?

01:31:37 ►

Well, Contact with Space was the last book he wrote

01:31:40 ►

before he went into prison.

01:31:41 ►

It was written, obviously,

01:31:44 ►

it has the signs of being written in a great hurry

01:31:46 ►

in an attempt to get down all the most astounding things

01:31:50 ►

that happened in the last couple of months before he went to prison.

01:31:54 ►

And among other things,

01:31:55 ►

it includes some really astounding orgone experiments

01:31:58 ►

and pursuit by UFOs wherever he went

01:32:02 ►

and evidence that made him begin to wonder if he might be an extraterrestrial himself,

01:32:09 ►

and a great deal of what looks like paranoid thinking,

01:32:13 ►

and together with a great deal of very interesting reports of experiences

01:32:18 ►

which were apparently seen by other people besides Reich.

01:32:22 ►

The book is a great intelligence test.

01:32:25 ►

If you can read that book without forming a quick

01:32:27 ►

opinion, I mean, if you can read that book

01:32:29 ►

keeping an open mind,

01:32:31 ►

you have reached the level of semantic

01:32:33 ►

intelligence.

01:32:36 ►

Yes?

01:32:36 ►

Are you still in communication with

01:32:38 ►

Timothy Leary? Did you excommunicate each other?

01:32:41 ►

No.

01:32:44 ►

Leary,

01:32:49 ►

as far as I know, has never become a Discordian pope, so we haven’t had to excommunicate each other.

01:32:55 ►

As a matter of fact, we’re talking about collaborating on a computer game, but that’s only talk so far.

01:32:57 ►

Nothing concrete has emerged yet.

01:33:00 ►

Do you know if he’s making appearances in the Bay Area?

01:33:06 ►

He’s making appearances all over the country, and there’s talk about him having a regular television show too there’s even talk about putting it on

01:33:10 ►

opposite Gordon Liddy

01:33:11 ►

I really love the idea of the Gordon Liddy show

01:33:16 ►

it shows the direction television is going

01:33:18 ►

obviously next year we’re going to have the son of Sam hour

01:33:21 ►

and after that I’m the son of Samauer.

01:33:31 ►

And after that, inevitably, springtime for Hitler.

01:33:33 ►

Yes?

01:33:37 ►

You wrote the introduction to Christopher Hyatt’s book.

01:33:39 ►

Would you comment on Christopher Hyatt?

01:33:42 ►

Would I comment on Christopher Hyatt?

01:33:48 ►

Christopher Hyatt is the outer head of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

01:33:59 ►

And he’s also, incidentally, he’s a Reikian psychotherapist with a background in Jungian psychotherapy too.

01:34:03 ►

And he’s a very dynamic individual

01:34:05 ►

and he’s got a great sense of humor.

01:34:09 ►

So that’s…

01:34:10 ►

I don’t know what else to say about him

01:34:12 ►

except it’s a lot of fun being with him.

01:34:15 ►

You were talking about cures for stupidity before.

01:34:17 ►

I have a five-year-old.

01:34:19 ►

I was wondering if there’s any prevention.

01:34:22 ►

How to prevent stupidity?

01:34:25 ►

Try to save

01:34:26 ►

the poor lad from the public school

01:34:28 ►

system.

01:34:33 ►

Get rid of the television

01:34:34 ►

set for a few years.

01:34:37 ►

I think

01:34:38 ►

my kids turned out pretty well

01:34:40 ►

because we lived without a television set

01:34:42 ►

for about four years

01:34:43 ►

and that allowed them to discover there was an external world that was non-electronic

01:34:48 ►

and got them interested in all sorts of things that they never would have discovered

01:34:52 ►

if they spent their time like most American children, just staring at the tube all the time.

01:34:58 ►

A very deep state of hypnosis.

01:35:01 ►

Avoid the public schools and get rid of television for a few years.

01:35:04 ►

That’s the best advice I can think of off the top of my head

01:35:07 ►

try to get smarter yourself

01:35:09 ►

that will help

01:35:10 ►

yes

01:35:11 ►

in about 10 years

01:35:21 ►

I think I will be

01:35:23 ►

living in Amsterdam

01:35:24 ►

I will be living in Amsterdam.

01:35:28 ►

I will… Well, you see, I live in Ireland for sentimental reasons.

01:35:33 ►

They don’t tax writers there, and I’m sentimentally attached to my money.

01:35:38 ►

I just found out that in Holland,

01:35:41 ►

they don’t tax you on money you make from sources outside Holland.

01:35:46 ►

And so I might be moving on to Amsterdam.

01:35:51 ►

And 10 years from now, I imagine I’ll be in my early 40s again,

01:35:59 ►

because I think the rejuvenation technology is advancing at that rate.

01:36:04 ►

20 years from now, I expect to be in my 20s again,

01:36:07 ►

and I’ll have a lot more sense than I had the first time around,

01:36:11 ►

and we’ll make most of the same stupid mistakes.

01:36:13 ►

At least I’ll make new stupid mistakes this time.

01:36:16 ►

Yes?

01:36:17 ►

Okay, the possibilities, the likelihoods, and the results of them.

01:36:23 ►

Thanks for sharing.

01:36:22 ►

and the results of it.

01:36:23 ►

Thanks for sharing.

01:36:30 ►

Yeah, I find it staggering to think that in this vast galaxy,

01:36:35 ►

as Carl Sagan says,

01:36:38 ►

billions and billions of stars

01:36:41 ►

and all the billions and billions of galaxies that coexist with us, I find it

01:36:47 ►

rather staggering to think this is the only place that life has evolved.

01:36:52 ►

And looking around the Earth, I find it far preferable to think that there must be intelligent

01:36:58 ►

life somewhere.

01:37:08 ►

And since many suns are 15 billion years older or even more,

01:37:15 ►

quite a bit older than our suns, evolution in other places is undoubtedly advanced much further than it has here.

01:37:25 ►

And so I’m very much inclined to believe that there are intelligences far superior to Jerry Falwell. There may even be intelligences superior to Einstein and Buckminster Fuller.

01:37:30 ►

And I find that a really humbling and awe-inspiring thought.

01:37:36 ►

I have yet to be convinced of any real evidence that they have contacted humanity.

01:37:42 ►

that they have contacted humanity.

01:37:48 ►

Perhaps they have a hands-off policy like Captain Kirk,

01:37:53 ►

or perhaps they cannot see any point in it any more than most of us have made serious efforts there

01:37:56 ►

to communicate with the Norway rat.

01:38:16 ►

I once had an experience in which I thought I was being contacted by extraterrestrials,

01:38:22 ►

but then a psychic reader told me I was actually channeling an ancient Chinese philosopher,

01:38:26 ►

and another psychic reader told me I was channeling a medieval Irish bard.

01:38:32 ►

And at that point I decided it made more sense to think that the puka from County Kerry was playing games with me than to take any of those metaphors literally.

01:38:37 ►

And when I speak to scientific groups, I say it was a hole in the corpus callosum which allowed a great deal of holistic data

01:38:47 ►

from the right hemisphere to flow into the analytical left hemisphere

01:38:51 ►

and almost overwhelm it for a while.

01:38:54 ►

But my private belief is that it was the puka.

01:38:58 ►

That’s that six-foot-tall white rabbit in County Perry.

01:39:01 ►

Yes?

01:39:02 ►

You mentioned about the Yachty way of knowledge,

01:39:04 ►

that about accessing heart chakra energy, bypassing the brain.

01:39:09 ►

Could you comment on that, particularly about MDMA, ecstasy?

01:39:16 ►

The Yuppie way of knowledge, MDMA.

01:39:22 ►

That’s the most delightful expression I’ve heard since I started this tour back in New York

01:39:29 ►

and somebody described the harmonic convergence as the yuppie rapture.

01:39:38 ►

What I know about MDMA is that I enjoy it very much.

01:39:48 ►

know about MDMA is that I enjoy it very much. Two years ago, when I was touring in the States,

01:39:53 ►

I met a lot of psychiatrists who told me, this is it. This is what we thought LSD was.

01:39:58 ►

This is curing everything. But don’t talk about it too much or the government will make it illegal. And then a year ago, I came back, every psychiatrist I met said, oh shit, the

01:40:03 ►

government’s about to make it illegal.

01:40:06 ►

Since then, there have been some reports that it is dangerous for some people,

01:40:10 ►

and especially if you overdo it.

01:40:11 ►

It is dangerous for people with high blood pressure and so on.

01:40:16 ►

And that’s, meanwhile, I like it.

01:40:19 ►

But, of course, most of what’s called MDMA now is like what’s called LSD now.

01:40:25 ►

You’re dealing with an underworld and a black market,

01:40:28 ►

and God knows what you’re buying,

01:40:29 ►

and you should always be aware of the possibility that you’re buying real shit, man.

01:40:37 ►

Yes?

01:40:38 ►

You’re from the section of the blog,

01:40:40 ►

and you have a saying about DMT.

01:40:44 ►

DMT? DMT.

01:40:52 ►

The one time I took DMT was a mistake.

01:40:54 ►

It was at lunchtime.

01:40:57 ►

It’s called a businessman’s drug, you know,

01:41:00 ►

because you can do it at lunchtime.

01:41:02 ►

Well, it doesn’t always work that way.

01:41:03 ►

This was mixed with grass, which potentiated the effect.

01:41:08 ►

And I went back to the office,

01:41:09 ►

and my boss had a nose about this long like Pinocchio,

01:41:13 ►

and the walls kept moving like jelly.

01:41:15 ►

It was a very difficult afternoon.

01:41:19 ►

I mean, when they called you into an editorial meeting

01:41:22 ►

and all that’s sitting around the table are a bunch of iguanas,

01:41:26 ►

you’re in trouble.

01:41:28 ►

I mean, this happened to me before it ever happened to Uncle Duke.

01:41:33 ►

So I kind of lost interest in DMT after that experience.

01:41:39 ►

Yes?

01:41:39 ►

Can you remark about the mermaids

01:41:43 ►

reporting swimming between the gals of the British Moor and the coast of Moor?

01:41:48 ►

The mermaids?

01:41:50 ►

The mermaids out by the burn?

01:41:56 ►

I don’t have a good story about them, so I’ll tell you a good puka story.

01:41:59 ►

When I first arrived in Ireland, my very first day there, on the radio I heard an interviewer from Dublin interviewing a Kerry farmer.

01:42:10 ►

They’re doing an oral history of Ireland for RTE, Radio Telefiche Iran.

01:42:17 ►

And the farmer is telling all sorts of local anecdotes about people who’ve encountered the puka.

01:42:21 ►

about people who’ve encountered the puka and the puka drags you out of

01:42:24 ►

you come out of the pub at midnight

01:42:26 ►

say and you start home

01:42:28 ►

and the puka jumps out from behind a tree

01:42:30 ►

and says I’ve got your arse mate

01:42:32 ►

and drags you off into

01:42:34 ►

fairyland and you can spend thousands of years

01:42:36 ►

over there encountering King Arthur

01:42:38 ►

and the Holy Grail

01:42:39 ►

and Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker

01:42:42 ►

and

01:42:43 ►

Rose Red and Snow White

01:42:46 ►

and the dwarfs and the trolls and the elves and whatnot

01:42:51 ►

and going through black holes and coming out white holes.

01:42:54 ►

And when the pooper gets tired of playing with you after thousands and thousands of years

01:43:00 ►

and lets you loose, it’s only a few minutes later in ordinary terrestrial time

01:43:05 ►

and you’re on the road staggering home to your farm. There are those who say the probability

01:43:09 ►

of encountering the puka is directly proportional to how many pints of Guinness Stout you’ve

01:43:14 ►

put away that night, but there are skeptics everywhere. Anyway, this interviewer asked

01:43:19 ►

the farmer finally, after collecting a lot of good anecdotes do you believe in the Pooka yourself?

01:43:28 ►

and the Kerry man answered with perfect Kerry logic that I do not and I doubt much that he believes in me either

01:43:32 ►

this is the typical structure of an Irish sentence

01:43:39 ►

just like Bob Geldof’s

01:43:41 ►

I don’t know what the fuck improper language is

01:43:43 ►

let’s see like Bob Yeldorf’s I Don’t Know What the Fuck Improper Language Is.

01:43:46 ►

Let’s see.

01:43:54 ►

I got a letter from somebody asking me to explain

01:43:55 ►

why the hell 23 kept haunting them

01:43:58 ►

after reading my books and they included

01:44:00 ►

a stamped

01:44:01 ►

self-addressed envelope

01:44:03 ►

to sort of blackmail me into answering them, as busy as I am.

01:44:09 ►

So I sat down, I wrote the most intelligent answer I could,

01:44:13 ►

and then I looked up and noticed the TV satellite guide which was on the table next to me

01:44:18 ►

had a football player with the number 23 on his jacket.

01:44:22 ►

And I thought, my God, sometimes I almost believe in it myself.

01:44:27 ►

When I was in St. Louis a couple of years ago,

01:44:30 ►

a guy came up to me and he said,

01:44:32 ►

I figured out how the 23 gimmick works.

01:44:35 ►

You make your readers abnormally conscious of 23s

01:44:38 ►

and they notice them and don’t notice other numbers.

01:44:41 ►

And I said, congratulations, you found the master who makes the grass green.

01:44:46 ►

And then we went out,

01:44:47 ►

then he invited me out with his wife.

01:44:49 ►

We went to a pizza joint,

01:44:51 ►

and they gave us a number

01:44:52 ►

while we waited for our pizza.

01:44:57 ►

And of course it was 23.

01:44:59 ►

He said to me, how do you do it?

01:45:03 ►

And I have gone 20 minutes past the time

01:45:06 ►

that I was supposed to go

01:45:07 ►

01:45:09 ►

it looks very much like

01:45:11 ►

I got one minute to go to make 23

01:45:13 ►

there are some books for sale up here

01:45:16 ►

I suggest you inspect them

01:45:17 ►

applause

01:45:20 ►

applause

01:45:22 ►

applause

01:45:24 ►

applause

01:45:24 ►

applause you’re listening to the Psychedelic Salon,

01:45:29 ►

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

01:45:34 ►

By the way, today is April 20th, 420 day,

01:45:38 ►

and yesterday was Bicycle Day,

01:45:41 ►

being the 76th anniversary of Dr. Hoffman’s famous bicycle ride. On top of that,

01:45:46 ►

tomorrow is Earth Day. So my guess is that you like this trifecta of Bicycle Day, 420 Day,

01:45:52 ►

and Earth Day all in a row as much as I do. Most likely you’ve planned your own form of

01:45:57 ►

celebration for this weekend, whether it’s with acid, cannabis, or honoring the work of Gaia.

01:46:03 ►

And I hope that whatever you do to enjoy

01:46:06 ►

this weekend, that it goes well for you. It certainly has been good for me so far, and once

01:46:11 ►

I get the post-production work done here and this podcast posted, well, it’s going to get even better.

01:46:18 ►

So for now, this is Lorenzo, and I’ll be seeing you soon in cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends. you

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

602 - RAW Theology

Program Notes §

Previous Episode §

Next Episode §

Similar Episodes §

Transcript §

00:00:00 ► §

00:00:19 ► §

00:00:24 ► §

00:00:32 ► §

00:00:40 ► §

00:00:43 ► §

00:00:53 ► §

00:00:57 ► §

00:01:03 ► §

00:01:09 ► §

00:01:13 ► §

00:01:18 ► §

00:01:22 ► §

00:01:26 ► §

00:01:32 ► §

00:01:38 ► §

00:01:45 ► §

00:01:52 ► §

00:01:58 ► §

00:02:03 ► §

00:02:10 ► §

00:02:15 ► §

00:02:22 ► §

00:02:25 ► §

00:02:30 ► §

00:02:34 ► §

00:02:38 ► §

00:02:42 ► §

00:02:45 ► §

00:02:52 ► §

00:03:00 ► §

00:03:03 ► §

00:03:09 ► §

00:03:13 ► §

00:03:15 ► §

00:03:20 ► §

00:03:22 ► §

00:03:26 ► §

00:03:29 ► §

00:03:32 ► §

00:03:35 ► §

00:03:38 ► §

00:03:41 ► §

00:03:44 ► §

00:03:51 ► §

00:04:00 ► §

00:04:05 ► §

00:04:06 ► §

00:04:09 ► §

00:04:12 ► §

00:04:16 ► §

00:04:19 ► §

00:04:22 ► §

00:04:23 ► §

00:04:27 ► §

00:04:32 ► §

00:04:33 ► §

00:04:36 ► §

00:04:43 ► §

00:04:45 ► §

00:04:47 ► §

00:04:49 ► §

00:04:50 ► §

00:04:52 ► §

00:04:55 ► §

00:04:57 ► §

00:04:58 ► §

00:05:01 ► §

00:05:03 ► §

00:05:03 ► §

00:05:05 ► §

00:05:10 ► §

Program Notes

Previous Episode

Next Episode

Similar Episodes

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

00:00:19 ►

00:00:24 ►

00:00:32 ►

00:00:40 ►

00:00:43 ►

00:00:53 ►

00:00:57 ►

00:01:03 ►

00:01:09 ►

00:01:13 ►

00:01:18 ►

00:01:22 ►

00:01:26 ►

00:01:32 ►

00:01:38 ►

00:01:45 ►

00:01:52 ►

00:01:58 ►

00:02:03 ►

00:02:10 ►

00:02:15 ►

00:02:22 ►

00:02:25 ►

00:02:30 ►

00:02:34 ►

00:02:38 ►

00:02:42 ►

00:02:45 ►

00:02:52 ►

00:03:00 ►

00:03:03 ►

00:03:09 ►

00:03:13 ►

00:03:15 ►

00:03:20 ►

00:03:22 ►

00:03:26 ►

00:03:29 ►

00:03:32 ►

00:03:35 ►

00:03:38 ►

00:03:41 ►

00:03:44 ►

00:03:51 ►

00:04:00 ►

00:04:05 ►

00:04:06 ►

00:04:09 ►

00:04:12 ►

00:04:16 ►

00:04:19 ►

00:04:22 ►

00:04:23 ►

00:04:27 ►

00:04:32 ►

00:04:33 ►

00:04:36 ►

00:04:43 ►

00:04:45 ►

00:04:47 ►

00:04:49 ►

00:04:50 ►

00:04:52 ►

00:04:55 ►

00:04:57 ►

00:04:58 ►

00:05:01 ►

00:05:03 ►

00:05:03 ►

00:05:05 ►

00:05:10 ►

00:05:11 ►

00:05:15 ►

00:05:18 ►